Read Ebook: Never Come Midnight by Gold H L Horace Leonard Dillon Diane Illustrator Dillon Leo Illustrator

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Ebook has 250 lines and 14794 words, and 5 pages

Dyall was holding back a smile, not too well. "I didn't know a human and a Morethan could--ah--breed together."

And, obviously, he didn't believe it. There was no way Hubbard could prove it, unless he asked Emrys to produce his birth certificate again. "It isn't generally known that the two species can reproduce together," he finally said, "nor should it be."

"Can't say I have," Dyall chuckled. "He seems an agreeable enough young fellow."

"He's sixty-five years old."

"Really? I should have taken him to be younger. But youth lasts longer these days. And there's--" Dyall gave a little laugh--"no crime in being old, or you and I would be in prison, wouldn't we?"

Hubbard would not let himself be distracted. "He looked less than forty when he came to Earth, and he hasn't, I understand, changed in the past ten years."

"Ten years is not so long." Dyall's swarthy hands began playing with the ornaments on his desk. Clearly, he was impatient to be rid of his tedious caller, and Hubbard struggled with the instinctive good breeding that told him to get up and leave. This was not a social call, so it did not matter that he was boring his host, however.

Instead of showing shock or anger or even thought, Dyall merely gave him a tolerant smile. "You're an old man, Mr. Hubbard. We're both old men," he amended graciously, "so we're apt to--jump at shadows."

"There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the young man," Dyall continued, "or not-so-young man, if you prefer. He appears to be very fond of Megan, and if he should choose to marry her, it would ease my mind considerably. I've exceeded my life span myself, you know."

Since Peter Hubbard had done the same, and his span was considerably shorter, he had no sympathy. "You'd--let the strain continue?"

"Perhaps it's a good strain. I understand the Morethans are said to be immortal. If so, the genes might be a desirable addition to our own."

"Won't you stay and dine with us tonight, Mr. Hubbard?" Dyall asked.

"No--no, thank you," Hubbard said, feeling no necessity for making an excuse. The offer had represented only the barest kind of courtesy.

Dyall got up. "Perhaps another night then?"

"Of course not, if you wish."

But Hubbard knew Dyall would not keep the stranger's visit from his friend. Odd that Dyall and young Shortmire should be friends. Not so odd either, though; young Shortmire had no reason to love his father. Besides, although Jan Shortmire had hated Nicholas Dyall, that did not mean Nicholas Dyall had hated Jan Shortmire, or even knew of the other man's animosity.

As he was riding back to his hotel, Hubbard let his tired old body indulge the aches and pains that were its rightful heritage. As his body relaxed, his mind relaxed, and he began to think more clearly. Perhaps Dyall would not listen to him--perhaps Dyall had some reason for not listening--but the government might.

What young Shortmire might have done as a human, they would consider a matter for local law--but the fact that human and Morethan had begotten offspring would interest them. The fact that the Morethans might have managed at last to get a spy on Earth would interest them. If Emrys would not surrender his birth certificate, they could get another from Clergal. Only, would the government's representative believe Hubbard enough to get that birth certificate? Or would they, like Dyall, dismiss him as a doddering old fool?

The private humiliation had been hard enough; he hated to risk a public one. But it was his duty to tell officialdom of his suspicions, he knew miserably. Never again could he think with pride of himself as a worthy citizen if he didn't at least make the attempt. Never again could he let himself feel a justifiable jealousy of those with endowments superior to his, if he did not prove himself worthy of what he had.

Well, there was no hurry; he would sleep on it. He was mistaken. In the morning, before he had even started to decide upon any course of action, the front desk called to announce that a Mr. Shortmire wished to see him.

A short while later, there was a rap on the door. "Come in," Hubbard called.

The door slid open. A man entered, a tawny golden youth with eyes like burnished metal. "Do you know who I am, Peter?"

"Of course," Hubbard said, faintly disgusted, since he considered melodrama vulgar. "You're Emrys Shortmire."

"You're wrong," the man said. "I'm Jan Shortmire."

Emrys Shortmire had gone home the night Dyall had shown him the portrait of his long-dead wife, and Emrys had dreamed, not of Megan Dyall, but of Alissa Embel, Megan's great-great-grandmother, whom he had wanted a hundred years before, and who had married Nicholas Dyall. Consciously, he had forgotten her, but at the back of his mind, she had, for over a century, walked hand in hand with his hatred.

That night he understood what he had not realized then. He had completed the engines with which he had been tinkering for years with a real vengeance. He had taken the first starship out into space himself--when no one had faith in his engines, least of all himself--merely "to show her" what a great man he was, even if he died in the showing. In his spite, he had opened up the stars for mankind.

And when he returned, years later, he found that Dyall, too, had stopped tinkering and had changed the pattern of his gadgets to one more acceptable to the public taste. Before, they had operated quite satisfyingly, but they had not been salable in the shape he had given them, and no manufacturer had been interested in leasing the patents. Now that he had yielded, manufacturers were falling all over themselves to get the right to produce his machines.

Dyall's was not as soul-stirring a success as Shortmire's--he did not inspire cheering crowds and parades--but a more enduringly popular one. The Shortmire engines carried humanity to the stars, but it was the Dyall machines that cooked humanity's dinners and kept its houses clean. So humanity respected Jan Shortmire and took Nicholas Dyall to its collective heart.

Emrys awakened, remembering all this and rigid with loathing for Nicholas Dyall, and for the world which had allowed Nicholas Dyall to take from him something he had wanted. Something which had, as soon as he'd known for sure he'd lost it forever, become what he wanted most. And also he hated the world which had given Alissa Embel to Dyall and had then proceeded to heap on him in addition every honor Jan Shortmire himself had won in an effort to make up for what he'd lost. Jan Shortmire had risked his life in space; Nicholas Dyall had sat comfortably in his chair--and both were equally honored.

He got up and pulled a spun-metal robe about him, amethyst and sable--a gift from Morethis. There was always a costly gift on his birthday, either out of kindness or cruelty, together with a vial of the golden capsules.

What a pity, he thought, as he went downstairs, that Dyall and the world both would never know the truth: that Jan Shortmire had no son, that Emrys and Jan Shortmire were one.

The Morethans first came to Jan Shortmire when, approaching his natural old age, he had traveled as a visitor to their planet--largely because old men did not go to Morethis--and they had made him their offer. He had laughed in their dark and exquisite faces.

"My own government will give me fifty years more of life," he said, for he had heard, during the voyage out, that he would be on the next honors list. "What need do I have of you?"

"We can give you far more than fifty years," they'd told him. "And youth, besides."

At that, he had stopped laughing, but still he had not accepted their offer, for many reasons ... doubt and fear, perhaps some shreds of honor, and certainly, since he was a man of science, skepticism.

Then, when Shortmire was nearing the end of those fifty extra years which had, indeed, been granted him by a grateful Earth government--together with a plaque, suitably inscribed--he had received a gift. It was one of those great crystalline prisms from Morethis that were so fashionable on Earth as lighting fixtures, not because they saved fuel--for one such prism would cost ten lifetimes of fuel--but because they gave a light no Earthborn device could give, making the old look young, the stupid wise, and, most important of all, the ugly beautiful.

Shortmire looked into the lambent depths, wondering who had sent him so costly and so useless a gift. Suddenly the flame vitrified into a face that flashed up at him from the crystal--a face that was beautiful in its horror, and horrible in its beauty. He closed his eyes, but when he opened them, the iridescent eyes were still there, mocking him for his cowardice.

"I am Uvrei," a deep voice of tingling sweetness said, "god among gods and man among men. I bring you greetings from Morethis, Jan Shortmire."

Shortmire knew well enough what Uvrei must want, for the Morethans' long-ago offer had risen of late to the top of his thoughts. They could not do what they claimed, he had tried to reassure himself, whenever the memory returned; it was a trick which he had been clever enough not to fall for. But part of his mind did not believe this, and that part was glad to see Uvrei.

"What do you want of me?" he demanded.

The Morethan smiled, and each glittering tooth was a fiery brilliant. "The same as before, on the same terms," he said, offering no enticements. The man who would accept such an offer would provide his own.

If they were capable of doing this ... thing with the crystal, then they might also have other powers. So Shortmire could no longer pretend that what they offered him was impossible. On the other hand, what they required of him in return was truly terrible. Could they really do what they said?

Pity to think of Alissa as having grown old. Even more of a pity to think of himself as having grown old, for he could see that in every mirror he passed.

"You're sure you can give me youth as well as life?" he asked.

"Not only youth, but perpetual youth," Uvrei assured him. "Youth such as you did not know even when you were young."

But Shortmire was still suspicious. Even if the Morethans could do what they said, how did he know they would? An alien concept of honor might have no reference to the terrestrial one. "How do I know I can trust your word?"

Uvrei's face grew black, literally black, and the crystal shivered until, Emrys thought, it would split. And he shivered, too, knowing in the fine nerves and little muscles of his body what would happen to him at the final shivering. A fear filled him then that he had never known before, not even when he faced space for the first time, and in the midst of that fear came the thought that, if he truly hated Earth, this was the most artistically nasty revenge he could take.

The crystal trembled to stillness as Uvrei's face paled to composure. "If you were not an Earthman, Jan Shortmire," he said, "we would not have needed you, nor you us. And an Earthman could not be expected to know that the words you have just spoken are the insult that, on Morethis, is deadlier than death; for the word of an immortal--no matter to whom or what he gives it--is as sacred and enduring as he himself."

"I apologize," Shortmire said quickly, "for my ignorance."

Not having been too honorable a man in his own hundred and fifty-five years, Jan Shortmire still could not believe that the Morethans would act in all honor. However, even the remote possibility that they would play fair was strong temptation for an ardent man pushing death. So he had agreed. He had wound up his affairs and made his will in favor of "his son." Then he had left Earth to go to Morethis, to die as Jan Shortmire and he resurrected as Emrys Shortmire.

The Morethans had kept their word, though there were times when he wished they had not. For no phoenix casting itself into the fire to burn alive in agony, so that it might rise again, young and strong and purified, from the ashes of its own dead self, could have suffered the excruciating torment of both mind and body that he suffered as, little by little, he was made young again.

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