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Title: Morgue Ship
Author: Ray Bradbury
Illustrator: Joseph Doolin
Release date: August 25, 2020 [eBook #63041]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORGUE SHIP ***
Morgue Ship
By RAY BRADBURY
This was Burnett's last trip. Three more
shelves to fill with space-slain warriors--and
he would be among the living again.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws
groping into space, and then the star-port closed.
There was another dead man aboard the _Constellation_.
Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and
quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;
machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see
anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of
the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,
keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.
Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical
gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all
tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.
Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor
warrior's body out of the void.
He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and
forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back
full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,
who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a
decent burial.
"Number ninety-eight." Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice
from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.
"Number ninety-eight," Burnett repeated. "Working on ninety-five,
ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight
surgery." Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded
deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.
Rice said:
"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day
drunk!"
Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them
into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and
shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one
another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,
salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.
Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred
other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.
Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots
inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the
husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved
for action.
This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!
"Sam!"
Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative
lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator
shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to
life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.
"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!"
Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was
worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred
thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood
cooling in it.
* * * * *
Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed
up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed
without making any noise on the rungs.
He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.
_You never catch up with the war._
All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across
stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the
titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited
glory are always a million miles ahead.
He bit his teeth together.
_You never catch up with the war._
You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped
trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the
dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of
its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see
it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your
ribs.
You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by
grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over
feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space
suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred
billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you
extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.
That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering
silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up
all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.
You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.
After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing
your job with mechanical hands.
But even a machine breaks down....
* * * * *
"Sam!" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.
Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy
official. "Take a look at this!"
Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong
with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it
was.
Maybe it was because the body looked a little _too_ dead.
Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,
stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as
delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly
blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed
close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a
cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed
completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.
Burnett rubbed his jaw. "Well?"
Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and
black. "Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?"
Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.
"It's Lethla!" Rice retorted.
Burnett said, "Lethla?" And then: "Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That
right?"
"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in
space, then Kriere's not far away from him!"
Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.
What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone
else.
Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. "Snap out of it, Sam. Think!
Kriere--The All-Mighty--in our territory. His right hand man dead. That
means Kriere was in an accident, too!"
Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.
"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the
Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the
day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick
of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling
through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good
green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.
"As for Kriere--if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution
is taken to protect that one."
"But Lethla! His body must mean something!"
"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a
battle-cuiser to go against him?"
"We'll radio for help?"
"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred
thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has
swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice."
Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw
hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His
fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,
"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!"
Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's
barrel-chest. "Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and
days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads
bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who
start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone--"
Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.
He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,
hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own
heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.
"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't
care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here--what's his name?
Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine
beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!"
Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.
Lethla was alive.
He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.
He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the
necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what
language it would use if it had to.
Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he
knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a
pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it
like a dead cold star.
Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From
the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,
biting lines into his sharp face.
Rice got it out, finally. "How'd you do it?" he demanded, bitterly.
"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!"
A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head. _You
never catch up with the war!_
But what if the war catches up with you?
What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?
* * * * *
Lethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the
chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick
fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the
halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off
of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been
inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.
He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. "That's how I did it,
Earthman."
"Glassite!" said Rice. "A face-moulded mask of glassite!"
Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. "Very marvelously pared to
an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the
head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed
as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible
at all."
Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and
the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and
quick.
Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. "First time in years a man ever came
aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change."
Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. "I thought it might be. Where's
your radio?"
"Go find it!" snapped Rice, hotly.
"I will." One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.
"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock
is safe. Don't move." Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the
ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and
coils. The radio.
Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his
feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by
the new bitterness in it.
Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.
He smiled. "That's better. Now. We can talk--"
Rice said it, slow:
"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead
men belong here."
Lethla's gun grip tightened. "More talk of that nature, and only dead
men there will be." He blinked. "But first--we must rescue Kriere...."
"Kriere!" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.
Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes
lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.
Lethla's voice came next:
"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus
at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these
air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked
unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the
life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing
their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the
Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.
"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.
We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture
was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a
small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our
chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to
trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too
late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for
brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later."
Rice's voice was sullen. "A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the
protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe
to Venus."
Lethla bowed slightly. "Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing
safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?"
"Precious is the word for you, brother!" said Rice.
"Enough!" Lethla moved his gun several inches.
"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be
picked up--_now!_"
* * * * *
Rice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time
in years. "Sure," said Sam, smiling. "We'll pick him up."
"No tricks," said Lethla.
Burnett scowled and smiled together. "No tricks. You'll have Kriere on
board the _Constellation_ in half an hour or I'm no coroner."
"Follow me up the ladder."
Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. "Come on."
Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.
Rice grumbled and cursed after him.
On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like
a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never
knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number
ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.
There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And
what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he
chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo
wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you
never knew who it would be.
He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over
the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that
was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.
Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a
slow pace.
Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?
See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be
hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out
alive; if they cooperated.
But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves
in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were
stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.
_You may never catch up with the war again._
The last trip!
Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what
ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?
Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his
body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,
wet thin lips.
"Now, where do you want this crate?" he asked Lethla easily.
Lethla exhaled softly. "Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman."
"Very," said Burnett.
He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies
being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of
hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it
would all be over.
Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like
fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,
he squinted.
"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good
trick."
"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!"
* * * * *
Burnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,
eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.
"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up." Burnett turned to
Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last
time anybody would ever board the _Constellation_ alive. His stomach
went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.
If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end
of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind
searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that--
Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like
a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,
water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy
jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be
eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored
because of his gun.
Kriere would make odds impossible.
Something had to be done before Kriere came in.
Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,
fooled--somehow. But--how?
Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade
where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,
artery--heart.
There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and
this would be the last trip.
Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.
"Steady, Rice," he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there
was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in
the center of that silence. "Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the
star-port."
Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.
Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back
kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet
sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,
why--
Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of
stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the
_Constellation_. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about
to be rescued.
Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he
was about to end a ten-years' war.
There was only _one_ way of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be
fast.
Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as
it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a
good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered
directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies
from space.
Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,
too.
The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its
slowness.
It reached Kriere.
Burnett inhaled a deep breath.
The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.
Lethla watched.
He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: "You
know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the
_Constellation_. I believe it."
* * * * *
And the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all
around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There
was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the
head, which was carefully preserved for identification.
That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.
Burnett spun about and leaped.
The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.
Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot
ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back
like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.
Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and
screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the
room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and
started laughing.
He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever
claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.
Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's
young face over him. Burnett groaned.
Rice said, "Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam."
"To hell with it." Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.
Something wet and sticky covered his chest. "I said this was my last
trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!"
"This is the hard way--"
"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never
have to come aboard the _Constellation_, though, Rice." His voice
trailed off. "You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll
be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago--"
Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his
mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of
them out:
"Rice?"
"Yeah, Sam?"
"We haven't got a full cargo, boy."
"Full enough for me, sir."
"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling
the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there--number ninety-eight is
Lethla--number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling
this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who
want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back
any way--but--the way--we used to--"
His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen
warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and
Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a
million miles.
"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?"
Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to
dissolve.
Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.
He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing
out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,
thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf
at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.
And then he said softly:
"_One hundred._"
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORGUE SHIP ***
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