To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer

Impossibility piled on impossibility! But it was taken at a time and at a place when he knew for certain that no camera had fixed upon him and preserved his image. His mustachios had been removed but the re-toucher had not bothered to opaque the background nor his clothing. There he was, caught miraculously from the waist up and imprisoned in a flat piece of some material. Flat! When he turned the square, he saw his profile come into view. If he held it almost at right angles to the eye, he could get a three-quarters profile-view of himself.

“In 1848,” he muttered to himself. “When I was a twenty-seven-year old subaltern in the East Indian Army. And those are the Blue Mountains of Goa. This must have been taken when I was convalescing there. But, my God, how? By whom? And how would the Ethicals manage to have it in their possession now?”

Agneau had evidently carried this photo as a mnemonic in his quest for Burton. Probably every one of the hunters had one just like it, concealed in his towel. Up and down The River They were looking for him; there might be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Them. Who knew how many agents They had available or how desperately They wanted him or why They wanted him? After replacing the photo in the towel, he turned to go back to the hut. And at that moment, his gaze turned toward the top of the mountains – those unscalable heights that bounded The Rivervalley on both sides.

He saw something flicker against a bright sheet of cosmic gas. It appeared for only the blink of an eyelid, then was gone.

A few seconds later, it came out of nothing, was revealed as a dark hemispherical object, and then disappeared again.

A second flying craft showed itself briefly, reappeared at a lower elevation, and then was gone like the first.

The Ethicals would take him away, and the people of Sevieria would wonder what had made them fall asleep for an hour or so.

He did not have time to return to the but and wake up the others. If he waited a moment longer, he would be trapped.

He turned and ran into The River and began swimming toward the other shore, a mile and a half away. But he had gone no more than forty yards when he felt the presence of some huge bulk above. He turned on his back to stare upward. There was only the soft glare of the stars above. Then, out of the air, fifty feet above him, a disk with a diameter of about sixty feet cut out a section of the sky. It disappeared almost immediately, came into sight again only twenty feet above him.

So They had some means of seeing at a distance in the night and had spotted him in his flight.

“You jackals!” he shouted at them. “You’ll not get me anyway! ” He upended and dived and swam straight downward. The water became colder, and his eardrums began to hurt. Although his eyes were open, he could see nothing. Suddenly, he was pushed by a wall of water, and he knew that the pressure came from displacement by a large object.

The craft had plunged down after him.

There was only one way out. They would have his dead body, but that would be all. He could escape Them again, be alive somewhere on The River to outwit Them again and strike back at Them.

He opened his mouth and breathed in deeply through both his nose and his mouth.

The water choked him. Only by a strong effort of will did he keep from closing his lips and trying to fight back against the death around him. He knew with his mind that he would live again, but the cells of his body did not know it. They were striving for life at this very moment, not in the rationalized future. And they forced from his water-choked throat a cry of despair.

22

“Yaaaaaaaah!” The cry raised him off the grass as if he had bounced up off a trampoline. Unlike the first time he had been resurrected, he was not weak and bewildered. He knew what to expect. He would wake on the grassy banks of The River near a grailstone. But he was not prepared for these giants battling around him.