Perilous Planets Part 18

Suddenly he understood what the islands in the River repre-sented. Neither he nor Jill had truly wanted to die, and as a result the allegory which they had jointly brought to life and entered into contained loopholes. There might be a way back after all.

Springing to his feet, he seized the pole and began poling. 'Help me, Jill!' he cried.

'It's our last chance.'

She, too, had seen the island and divined its significance. She joined him, and they poled together. The current was omnipotent now, the rapids furious. The raft lurched, heaved, wallowed. The island loomed larger through the mist. 'Harder, Jill, harder!' he gasped. 'We've got to get back - we've got to!'

He saw then that they weren't going to make it, that despite their combined efforts the current was going to carry them past their last link with life. There was one chance, and only one. He kicked off his shoes. 'Keep poling, Jill!' he shouted, and, after placing the end of the mooring line between his teeth and biting into it, he leaped into the rapids and struck out for the island for all he was worth.

Behind him, the raft lurched wildly, tearing the pole from Jill's grasp and sending her sprawling on the deck. He did not know this, however, till he reached the island and looked over his shoulder. By then, there was just enough slack remaining in the line for him to belay it around a small tree and secure it in place. The tree shuddered when the line went taut, and the raft came to an abrupt stop several feet from the brink of the falls. Jill was on her hands and knees now, trying desperately to keep herself from being thrown from the deck. Gripping the line with both hands, he tried to pull the raft in to the island, but so strong was the current that he would have been equally as successful if he had tried to pull the island in to the raft.

The little tree was being gradually uprooted. Sooner or later it would be torn out of the ground and the raft would plunge over the falls. There was only one thing to do.

'Your apart-ment, Jill!' he shouted across the whiteness of the rapids. 'Where is it?'

Her voice was barely audible. '229 Locust Avenue. Number 301.'

He was stunned. 229 Locust Avenue was the apartment building next to the one where he lived. Probably they had almost run into each other a dozen times. Maybe they had run into each other, and forgotten. In the city, things like that hap-pened every day.

But not on the River.

'Hold on, Jill!' he called. 'I'm going the long way around!'

To travel from the island to the garage required but the merest flick of a thought.

He came to in his car, head throbbing with misted pain. Turning off the ignition, he got out, threw open the garage doors, and staggered out into the shockingly cold winter's night. He remembered belatedly that his hat and coat were in the back of the car.

No matter. He crammed his lungs with fresh air and rubbed snow on his face. Then he ran down the street to the apartment building next door. Would he be in time? he wondered. He could not have been in the garage more than ten minutes at the most, which meant that time on the River moved at an even faster pace than he had thought. Hours, then, had already pa.s.sed since he had left the island, and the raft could very well have gone over the falls.

Or had there really been a raft? A River? A girl with sun-bright hair? Maybe the whole thing had been a dream - a dream that his unconscious had manufactured in order to snap him back to life.

The thought was unendurable, and he banished it from his mind. Reaching the apartment building, he ran inside. The lobby was deserted, and the elevator was in use. He pounded up three flights of stairs and paused before her door. It was locked.

'Jill!' he called, and broke it down.

She was lying on the living-room sofa, her face waxen in the radiance of a nearby floor lamp. She was wearing the yellow dress that he remembered so well, only now it was no longer torn. Nor were her slender slippers bedraggled. Her hair, though, was just the way he remembered it - short, and trying to curl. Her eyes were closed.

He turned off the gas in the fireless circulating heater that stood against the wall, and he threw open all of the windows. He picked her up and carried her over to the largest one and let the sweet-life-giving air embrace her. 'Jill!' he whispered. 'Jill!'

Her eyelids quivered, opened. Blue eyes filled with terror gazed up into his face.

Slowly, the terror faded away, and recognition took its place. He knew then that there would be no more Rivers for either of them.

Before him lay the mesa of the Virgin's face, pale and poignant in the starlight. He was the only Earthman who had ever seen the Virgin as she really was; he had been only twenty at the time. Yet the intervening years were no more than a thin curtain, a curtain he had parted a thousand times.

In the moment of conquest, he forgot what a stoney heart must beat in a...

G.o.dDESS IN GRANITE.

by Robert F. Young When he reached the upper ridge of the forearm, Marten stopped to rest. The climb had not winded him but the chin was still miles away, and he wanted to conserve as much of his strength as possible for the final ascent to the face.

He looked back the way he had come - down the slope of the tapered forearm ridge to the mile-wide slab of the hand; down to the granite giantess-fingers protruding like sculptured promontories into the water. He saw his rented inboard bob-bing in the blue bay between forefinger and thumb, and, be-yond the bay, the s.h.i.+mmering waste of the southern sea.

He shrugged his pack into a more comfortable position and checked the climbing equipment attached to his web belt - his piton pistol in its self-locking holster, his extra clips of piton cartridges, the airtight packet that contained his oxygen tab-lets, his canteen. Satisfied, he drank sparingly from the can-teen and replaced it in its refrigerated case. Then he lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the morning sky.

The sky was a deep, cloudless blue, and Alpha Virginis beat brightly down from the blueness, shedding its warmth and brilliance on the gynecomorphous mountain range known as the Virgin.

She lay upon her back, her blue lakes of eyes gazing eternally upward. From his vantage point on her forearm, Marten had a good view of the mountains of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He looked at them contemplatively. They towered perhaps 8,000 feet above the chest-plateau, but, since the plateau itself was a good 10,000 feet above sea level, their true height exceeded 18,000 feet. However, Marten wasn't discouraged. It wasn't the mountains that he wanted.

Presently he dropped his eyes from their snow-capped crests and resumed his trek.

The granite ridge rose for a while, then slanted downward, widening gradually into the rounded reaches of the upper arm. He had an excellent view of the Virgin's head now, though he wasn't high enough to see her profile. The 11,000-foot cliff of her cheek was awesome at this range, and her hair was revealed for what it really was - a vast forest spilling riotously down to the lowlands, spreading out around her ma.s.sive shoulders almost to the sea. It was green now. In autumn it would be brown, then gold; in winter, black.

Centuries of rainfall and wind had not perturbed the grace-ful contours of the upper arm. It was like walking along a lofty promenade. Marten made good time.

Still, it was nearly noon before he reached the shoulder-slope, and he realized that he had badly underestimated the Virgin's vastness.

The elements had been less kind to the shoulder-slope, and he had to go slower, picking his way between shallow gullies, avoiding cracks and crevices. In places the granite gave way to other varieties of igneous rock, but the over-all color of the Virgin's body remained the same - a grayish-white, permeated with pink, startlingly suggestive of the hue of human skin..

Marten found himself thinking of her sculptors, and for the thousandth time he speculated as to why they had sculptured her. In many ways, the problem resembled such Earth enig-mas as the Egyptian, pyramids, the Sacsahuaman Fortress, and the Baalbek Temple of the Sun. For one thing, it was just as irresolvable, and probably always would be, for the ancient race that had once inhabited Alpha Virginis IX had either died out centuries ago, or had migrated to the stars. In either case, they had left no written records behind them .

Basically, however, the two enigmas were different. When you contemplated the pyramids, the Fortress, and the Temple of the Sun, you did not wonder why they had been built - you wondered how they had been built. With the Virgin, the oppo-site held true. She had begun as a natural phenomenon - an enormous geological upheaval - and actually all her sculptors had done, Herculean though their labor had undoubtedly been, was to add the finis.h.i.+ng touches and install the automatic sub-terranean pumping system that, for centuries, had supplied her artificial lakes of eyes with water from the sea.

And perhaps therein lay the answer, Marten thought. Per-haps their only motivation had been a desire to improve upon nature. There certainly wasn't any factual basis for the theosophical, sociological and psychological motivations postulated by half a hundred Earth anthropologists (none of whom had ever really seen her) in half a hundred technical volumes. Per-haps the answer was as simple as that...

The southern reaches of the shoulder-slope were less eroded than the central and northern reaches, and Marten edged closer and closer to the south rim. He had a splendid view of the Virgin's left side, and he stared, fascinated, at the magnificent purple-shadowed escarpment stretching away to the horizon. Five miles from its juncture with the shoulder-slope it dwindled abruptly to form her waist; three miles farther on it burgeoned out to form her left hip; then, just before it faded into the lav-ender distances, it blended into the gigantic curve of her thigh.

The shoulder was not particularly steep, yet his chest was tight, his lips dry, when he reached its summit. He decided to rest for a while, and he removed his pack and sat down and propped his back against it. He raised his canteen to his lips and took a long cool draught. He lit another cigarette.

From his new eminence he had a much better view of the Virgin's head, and he gazed at it spellbound. The mesa of her face was still hidden from him, of course - except for the lofty tip of her granite nose; but the details of her cheek and chin stood out clearly. Her cheekbone was represented by a rounded spur, and the spur blended almost imperceptibly with the chamfered rim of her cheek. Her proud chin was a cliff in its own right, falling sheerly - much too sheerly, Marten thought -to the graceful ridge of her neck.

Yet, despite her sculptors' meticulous attention to details, the Virgin, viewed from so close a range, fell far short of the beauty and perfection they had intended. That was because you could see only part of her at a time: her cheek, her hair, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the distant contour of her thigh. But when you viewed her from the right alt.i.tude, the effect was altogether different. Even from a height of ten miles, her beauty was per-ceptible; at 75,000 feet, it was undeniable. But you had to go higher yet - had to find the exact level, in fact - before you could see her as her sculptors had meant her to be seen.

To Marten's knowledge, he was the only Earthman who had ever found that level, who had ever seen the Virgin as she really was; seen her emerge into a reality uniquely her own - an unforgettable reality, the equal of which he had never before encountered.

Perhaps being the only one had had something to do with her effect on him; that, plus the fact that he had been only 20 at the time - 20, he thought wonderingly. He was 32 now. Yet the intervening years were no more than a thin curtain, a cur-tain he had parted a thousand times.

He parted it again.

After his mother's third marriage he had made up his mind to become a s.p.a.ceman, and he had quit college and obtained a berth as cabin boy on the stars.h.i.+p Ulysses.

The Ulysses' desti-nation was Alpha Virginis IX; the purpose of its voyage was to chart potential ore deposits.

Marten had heard about the Virgin, of course. She was one of the seven hundred wonders of the galaxy. But he had never given her a second thought - till he saw her in the main view-port of the orbiting Ulysses. Afterward, he gave her consider-able thought and, several days .after planetfall, he 'borrowed' one of the s.h.i.+p's life-rafts and went exploring. The exploit had netted him a week in the brig upon his return, but he hadn't minded. The Virgin had been worth it.

The altimeter of the life-raft had registered 55,000 feet when he first sighted her, and he approached her at that level. Presently he saw the splendid ridges of her calves and thighs creep by beneath him, the white desert of her stomach, the delicate cream of her navel. He was above the twin mountains of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, within sight of the mesa of her face, before it occurred to him that, by lifting the raft, he might gain a much better perspective.

He canceled his horizontal momentum and depressed the alt.i.tude b.u.t.ton. The raft climbed swiftly - 60,000 feet . . . 65,000... 70,000. It was like focusing a telescreen - 80,000... His heart was pounding now - 90,000 . . . The oxygen dial indicated normal pressure, but he could hardly breathe.

100,000, 101,000 . . . Not quite high enough. 102,300 . . . Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, Comely as Jerusalem, Terrible as an army with banners . . . 103,211 . . . The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman... 103,288 ...

He jammed the alt.i.tude b.u.t.ton hard, locking the focus. He could not breathe at all now - at least not for the first, ecstatic moment. He had never seen anyone quite like her. It was early spring, and her hair was black; her eyes were a springtime blue.

And it seemed to him that the mesa of her face abounded in compa.s.sion, that the red rimrock of her mouth was curved in a gentle smile.

She lay there immobile by the sea, a Brobdingnagian beauty come out of the water to bask forever in the sun. The barren lowlands were a summer beach; the glittering ruins of a nearby city were an earring dropped from her ear; and the sea was a summer lake, the life-raft a metallic gull hovering high above the littoral.

And in the transparent belly of the gull sat an infinitesimal man who would never be the same again...

Marten closed the curtain, but it was some time before the after-image of the memory faded away. When it finally did so, he found that he was staring with a rather frightening fixity toward the distant cliff of the Virgin's chin.

Roughly, he estimated its height. Its point, or summit, was on an approximate level with the crest of the cheek. That gave him 11,000 feet. To obtain the distance he had to climb to reach the face-mesa, all he had to do was to deduct the height of the neck-ridge. He figured the neck-ridge at about 8,000 feet; 8,000 from 11,000 gave him 3,000 - 3,000 feet!

It was impossible. Even with the piton pistol, it was im-possible. The pitch was vertical all the way, and from where he sat he couldn't discern the faintest indication of a crack or a ledge on the granite surface.

He could never do it, he told himself. Never. It would be absurd for him even to try.

It might cost him his life. And even if he could do it, even if he could climb that polished precipice all the way of the face-mesa, could he get back down again? True, his piton pistol would make the descent relatively easy, but would he have enough strength left? The atmosphere on Alpha Virginis IX thinned rapidly after 10,000 feet, and while oxygen tablets helped, they could keep you going only for a limited period of time. After that- But the arguments were old ones. He had used them on himself a hundred, a thousand times . . . He stood up re-signedly. He shrugged his pack into place. He took a final look down the nine-mile slope of the arm to the giantess-fingers jutting into the sea, then he turned and started across the table-land of the upper chest toward the beginning of the neck-ridge.

The sun had long since pa.s.sed its meridian when he came opposite the gentle col between the mountains. A cold wind breathed down the slopes, drifting across the tableland. The wind was sweet, and he knew there must be flowers on the mountains - crocuses, perhaps, or their equivalent, growing high on the snow-soft peaks.

He wondered why he did not want to climb the mountains, why it had to be the mesa. The mountains presented the greater difficulties and therefore the greater challenge. Why, then, did he neglect them for the mesa?

He thought he knew. The beauty of the mountains was shallow, lacked the deeper meaning of the beauty of the mesa. They could never give him what he wanted if he climbed them a thousand times. It was the mesa - with its blue and lovely lakes - or nothing.

He turned his eyes away from the mountains and concen-trated on the long slope that led to the neck-ridge. The pitch was gentle but treacherous. He moved slowly. A slip could send him rolling, and there was nothing he could grasp to stop himself. He noticed the shortness of his breath and wondered at it, till he remembered the alt.i.tude. But he did not break into his oxygen tablets yet; he would have a much more poignant need for them later.

By the time he reached the ridge, the sun had half completed its afternoon journey.

But he wasn't dismayed. He had already given up the idea of a.s.saulting the chin- cliff today. He had been presumptuous in the first place to have imagined himself capable of conquering the Virgin in a single day.

It was going to take at least two.

The ridge was over a mile wide, its curvature barely per-ceptible. Marten made good time. All the while he advanced he was conscious of the chin-cliff looming higher and higher above him, but he did not look at it; he was afraid to look at it till it loomed so close that it occulted half the sky, and then he had to look at it, had to raise his eyes from the granite swell of the throat and focus them on the appalling wall that now con-st.i.tuted his future.

His future was bleak. It contained no hand- or footholds; no ledges, no cracks, no projections. In a way he was relieved, for if no means existed for him to climb the chin-cliff, then he couldn't climb it. But in another way he was overwhelmingly disappointed. Gaining the face-mesa was more than a mere ambition; it was an obsession, and the physical effort that the task involved, the danger, the obstacles - all were an integral part of the obsession.

He could return the way he had come, down the arm to his inboard and back to the isolated colony; and he could rent a flier from the hard-bitten, taciturn natives just as easily as he had rented the inboard. In less than an hour after takeoff, he could land on the face-mesa.

But he would be cheating, and he knew it. Not cheating the Virgin, but cheating himself.

There was one other way, but he rejected it now for the same reason he had rejected it before. The top of the Virgin's head was an unknown quant.i.ty, and, while the trees of her hair might make climbing easier, the distance to be climbed was still over three times the height of the chin-cliff, and the pitch was probably just as precipitous.

No, it was the chin-cliff or nothing. The ways things looked now, it was nothing. But he consoled himself with the fact that he had examined only a relatively small section of the cliff. Perhaps the outlying sections would be less forbidding.

Perhaps- He shook his head. Wishful thinking would get him no-where. It would be time to hope after he found a means of ascent, not before. He started along the base of the cliff, then paused. While he had stood there, staring at the stupendous wall; Alpha Virginis had descended un.o.btrusively into the molten sea. The first star was already visible in the east, and the hue of the Virgin's b.r.e.a.s.t.s had trans.m.u.ted from gold to purple.

Reluctantly, Marten decided to postpone his investigation till tomorrow. The decision proved to be a sensible one. Dark-ness was upon him before he had his sleeping bag spread out, and with it came the penetrating cold for which the planet was notorious throughout the galaxy."

He set the thermostat on the sleeping bag, then he undressed and crawled into the warm interior. He munched a supper biscuit and allotted himself two swallows of water from his canteen. Suddenly he remembered that he had missed his mid-day meal - and had not even known the difference.

There was a parallel there somewhere, an element of deja vu. But the connection was so tenuous that he could not pin the other moment down. It would occur to him later, he knew, but such was the nature of the human mind that it would occur seemingly as the result of another chain of a.s.sociations, and he would not remember the original connection at all.

He lay there, staring at the stars. The dark ma.s.s of the Virgin's chin rose up beside him, hiding half the sky. He should have felt forlorn, frightened even. But he did not. He felt safe, secure. For the first time in many years he knew con-tentment.

There was an unusual constellation almost directly overhead. More than anything else, it made him think of a man astride a horse. The man carried an elongated object on his shoulder, and the object could have been any one of a number of things, depending on .the way you looked at the stars that comprised it - a rifle, perhaps, or a staff; maybe even a fis.h.i.+ng pole.

To Marten, it looked like a scythe...

He turned on his side, luxuriating in his tiny oasis of warmth. The Virgin's chin was soft with starlight now, and the night slept in soft and silent splendor ... That was one of his own lines, he thought drowsily - a part of that fantastic hodgepodge of words and phrases he had put together eleven years ago under the t.i.tle of Rise Up, My Love! A part of the book that had brought him fame and fortune - and Lelia.

Lelia... She seemed so long ago, and in a way she was. And yet, in another way, a strange, poignant way, she was yesterday.

The first time he saw her she was standing in one of those little antique bars so popular then in Old York. Standing there all alone, tall, dark-haired, Junoesque, sipping her mid-afternoon drink as though women like herself were the most com-mon phenomena in the galaxy.

He had been positive, even before she turned her head, that her eyes were blue, and blue they proved to be; blue with the blueness of mountain lakes in spring, blue with the beauty of a woman waiting to be loved. Boldly, he walked over and stood beside her, knowing it was now or never, and asked if he might buy her a drink.

To his astonishment, she accepted. She did not tell him till later that she had recognized him. He was so naive at the time that he did not even know that he was a celebrity in Old York, though he should have known. His book certainly had been successful enough.

He had knocked it off the preceding summer - the summer the Ulysses returned from Alpha Virginis IX; the summer he quit his berth as cabin boy, forever cured of his ambition to be a s.p.a.ceman. During the interim consumed by the voyage, his mother had remarried again; and when he found out, he rented a summer cottage in Connecticut as far away from her as he could get. Then, driven by forces beyond his ken, he sat down and began to write.

Rise Up, My Love! had dealt with the stellar odyssey of a young adventurer in search of a subst.i.tute for G.o.d and with his ultimate discovery of that subst.i.tute in a woman. The re-viewers shouted 'Epic!' and the Freudian psychologists who, after four centuries of adversity, still hadn't given up psycho-a.n.a.lyzing writers shouted 'Death-wis.h.!.+' The diverse appraisals combined happily to stir up interest in the limited literary world and to pave the way for a second printing and then a third.

Overnight, Marten had become that most incomprehensible of all literary phenomena - a famous first-novelist.

But he hadn't realized, till now, that his fame involved physical recognition. 'I read your book, Mr. Marten,' the dark-haired girl standing beside him said. 'I didn't like it.'

'What's your name?' he asked. Then: 'Why?'

'Lelia Vaughn... Because your heroine is impossible.'

'I don't think she's impossible,' Marten said.

'You'll be telling me next that she has a prototype.' '

'Maybe I will." The bartender served them, and Marten picked up his gla.s.s and sipped the cool blueness of his Martian julep. 'Why is she impossible?'

'Because she's not a woman,' Lelia said. 'She's a symbol.'

'A symbol of what?'

'I - I don't know. Anyway, she's not human. She's too beautiful, too perfect. She's a criterion, really.'

'You look just like her,' Marten said.

She dropped her eyes then, and for a while she was silent. Presently: 'There's an ancient cliche that bears mentioning at this point,' she said: "I'll bet you tell that to all the girls-" But somehow I don't think you do.'

'You're right,' Marten said. 'I don't.' Then: 'It's so close in here, can't we go walking somewhere?'