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Read Ebook: Earth's Maginot Line by Paetzke Roy
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Ebook has 65 lines and 2479 words, and 2 pages
THE HILLS OF HOME
by Alfred Coppel
It wasn't the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched the gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and had vanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry of shore birds.
From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of victims borne into this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.
The sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. "Oh, three hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes."
Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn't been asleep. It would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had been remembering. "All right, Sergeant," he said. "Coming up."
He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he hadn't had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured taste of the cigaret on his tongue.
Oddly enough, he wasn't tired. He wasn't excited, either. And that was much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So long a road, he thought, from then to now.
Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn't been an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their Rorschach blots.
"Too much imagination could be bad for this job."
How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?
Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.
The radium pistol's weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it tightly, knowing that he could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.
For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let it be the color of an emerald.
Kimmy's eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river. That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns--spreading his arms to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had brought to this cursed valley.
Kimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.
They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of applicants--because there are always applicants for a sure-death job--and all the qualified pilots, why this one?
The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed release as though these civilians couldn't be trusted to get the sparse information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and without expression.
On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking: They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I'm not being fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.
The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.
Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What have I to do with you now, he thought?
Outside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of ferroconcrete.
As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.
"We haven't gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?" Steinhart observed in a quiet voice.
Kimball thought: He's pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he reminds me of? Shouldn't there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled vaguely into the rumbling night. That's what it was. Odd that he should have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on Burroughs' books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on their forehead?
"We've done as well as could be expected," he said.
Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught the movement and half-smiled.
"I didn't try to kill the assignment for you, Kim," the psych said.
"It doesn't matter now."
"No, I suppose not."
"You just didn't think I was the man for the job."
Kimball said: "I talked too much."
"You had to."
"You wouldn't think my secret life was so dangerous, would you," the Colonel said smiling.
"You were married, Kim. What happened?"
"More therapy?"
"I'd like to know. This is for me."
Kimball shrugged. "It didn't work. She was a fine girl--but she finally told me it was no go. 'You don't live here' was the way she put it."
"That isn't what she meant. You know that."
"Yes," the psych said slowly. "I know that."
They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky. Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched them wheel across the clear, deep night.
"I wish you luck, Kim," Steinhart said. "I mean that."
"Thanks." Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening gulf.
"What will you do?"
"You know the answers as well as I," the Colonel said impatiently. "Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it comes."
"In two years."
"In two years," the plastic figure said. Didn't he know that it didn't matter?
He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.
"Kim," Steinhart said slowly. "There's something you should know about. Something you really should be prepared for."
"Yes?" Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up already?
The analyst flushed. "No."
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