The Last Place on Earth | Page 9

Doc Candle continued to laugh
triumphantly in Collins' head.

"Why? Why do you have to kill me?" Collins asked.
"Because I am evil."
"How do you know you're evil?"
"They told me so!" Candle shouted back in the thundering silence of
Death's approach. "They were always saying I was bad."
They.
* * * * *
Collins got a picture of something incredibly old and incredibly wise,
but long unused to the young, clumsy gods. Something that could mar
the molding of a godling and make it mortal.
"But I'm not really so very bad," Doc Candle went on. "I had to destroy,
but I picked someone who really didn't care if he were destroyed or not.
An almost absolutely passive human being, Sam. You."
Collins nodded.
"And even then," said the superhuman alien from outer space, "I could
not just destroy. I have created a work of art."
"Work of art?"
"Yes. I have taken your life and turned it into a horror story, Sam! A
chilling, demonic, black-hearted horror!"
Collins nodded again.
LIGHTSPEED.
There was finally something human within Sam Collins that he could
not deny. He wanted to live. It wasn't true. He did care what happened.
You do? said somebody.

He does? asked somebody else, surprised, and suddenly he again got
the image of wiser, older creatures, a little ashamed because of what
they had done to the creature named Doc Candle.
He does, chorused several voices, and Sam Collins cried aloud: "I do! I
want to live!" They were just touching lightspeed; he felt it.
This time it was not just a biological response. He really wanted help.
He wanted to stay alive.
From the older, wiser voices he got help, though he never knew how;
he felt the ship move slipwise under him, and then a crash.
And Doc Candle got help too, the only help even the older, wiser ones
could give him.
* * * * *
They pulled him out of the combined wreckage of the spaceship and his
house. Both were demolished.
It was strange how the spaceship Sam Collins was on crashed right into
his house. Ed Michaels recalled a time in a tornado when Sy Baxter's
car was picked up, lifted across town and dropped into his living room.
When the men from the spaceport lifted away tons of rubble, they
found him and said, "He's dead."
No, I'm not, Collins thought. I'm alive.
And then they saw that he really was alive, that he had come through it
alive somehow, and nobody remembered anything like it since the
airliner crash in '59.
A while later, after they found Doc Candle's body and court-martialed
Smith-Boerke, who took drugs, Nancy was nuzzling him on his
hospital bed. It was nice, but he wasn't paying much attention.
I'm free, Collins thought as the girl hugged him. Free! He kissed her.

Well, he thought while she was kissing him back, as free as I want to
be, anyway.
END
[Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed.]

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