The Last Place on Earth | Page 8

be romantic. Back to Lindbergh-to-Paris. Tell me, Collins, how would you like to be the first man to travel faster than light?"
Collins knew there was no way out.
"All right," he said.
Smith-Boerke wiped a hand across his dry mouth.
"Project Silver has to come off. My whole career depends on it. You don't have anything to do. Everything's cybernetic. Just ride along and prove a human being can survive. Nothing to it. No hyperdrives, none of that kind of stuff. We had an engine that could go half lightspeed and now we've made it twice as efficient and more. No superstitions about Einstein, I hope? No? Good."
"I'll go," Collins said. "But what if I had said 'no'."
Smith-Boerke put the gun away in a desk drawer.
"Then you could have walked out of here, straight into the MP's."
"Why didn't they come in here after me?"
"They don't have security clearance for this building."
"Don't leave me alone," Nancy said urgently. "I don't understand what's happening. I feel so helpless. I need help."
"You're asking the wrong man," Collins said briefly.
* * * * *
Collins felt safe when the airlock kissed shut its metal lips.
It was not like the house, but yet he felt safe, surrounded by all the complicated, expensive electronic equipment. It was big, solid, sterilely gleaming.
Another thing--he had reason to believe that Doc Candle's power could not reach him through metal.
"But I'm not outside," Doc Candle said, "I'm in here, with you."
Collins yelled and cursed, he tried to pull off the acceleration webbing and claw through the airlock. Nobody paid any attention to him. Count downs had been automated. Smith-Boerke was handling this one himself, and he cut off the Audio-In switch from the spaceship. Doc Candle said nothing else for a moment, and the spaceship, almost an entity itself, went on with its work.
The faster-than-light spaceship took off.
At first it was like any other rocket takeoff.
The glow of its exhaust spread over the field of the spaceport, then over the hills and valleys, and then the town of Waraxe, spreading illumination even as far as Sam Collins' silent house.
After a time of being sick, Collins lay back and accepted this too.
"That's right, that's it," Doc Candle said. "Take it and die with it. That's the ticket."
Collins' eyes settled on a gauge. Three quarters lightspeed. Climbing.
Nothing strange, nothing untoward happened when you reached lightspeed. It was only an arbitrary number. All else was superstition. Forget it, forget it, forget it.
Something was telling him that. At first he thought it was Doc Candle but then he knew it was the ship.
Collins sat back and took it, and what he was taking was death. It was creeping over him, seeping into his feet, filling him like liquid does a sponge.
Not will, but curiosity, caused him to turn his head.
He saw Doc Candle.
The old body was dying. He was in the emergency seat, broken, a ribbon of blood lacing his chin. But 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.