"No, not at once. This is just a first attempt…"
"But it could eventually and that means—"
Sam thought that the young man had suddenly become sick. His face, just inches away, became shades lighter as the blood drained from it. His eyes were staring in horror as he slowly dropped back and down into his seat. Before Sam could ask him what was the matter a grating voice bellowed through the room.
"Anyone here seen a boy by name of Charlie Wright? C'mon now, speak up. Ain't no one gonna get hurt for tellin' me the truth."
"Holy Jesus…" Charlie whispered, sinking deeper in the seat. Brinkley stamped into the bar, hand resting on his gun butt, squinting around in the darkness. No one answered him.
"Anybody try to hide him gonna be in trouble!" he shouted angrily. "I'm gonna find that black granny dodger!"
He started towards the rear of the room, and Charlie, with his airline bag in one hand, vaulted the back of the booth and crashed against the rear door.
"Come back here, you son of a bitch!"
The table rocked when Charlie's flying heel caught it, and the cigar box slid to the floor. Heavy boots thundered. The door squealed open and Charlie pushed out through it. Sam bent over to retrieve the box.
"I'll kill yuh, so help me!"
The circuit hadn't been damaged. Sam sighed in relief and stood, the tinny music between his fingers.
He may have heard the first shot, but he could not have heard the second because the.38 slug caught him in the back of the head and killed him instantly. He crumpled to the floor.
Patrolman Marger ran in from the patrol car outside, his gun ready, and saw Brinkley come back into the room through the door in the rear.
"He got away, damn it, got clear away."
"What happened here?" Marger asked, slipping his gun back into the holster and looking down at the slight, crumpled body at his feet.
"I dunno. He must have jumped up in the way when I let fly at the other one what was running away. Must be another one of them Commonists anyway; he was sittin' at the same table."
"There's gonna be trouble about this…"
"Why trouble?" Brinkley asked indignantly. "It's just anutha ol' dead nigger…"
One of his boots was on the cigar box, and it crumpled and fractured when he turned away.
An Artist's Life
A busman's holiday. A real busman's holiday. I stay on the moon for a year, I paint pictures there for three hundred and sixty-five days— then the first thing I do back on Earth is go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at more paintings. Brent smiled to himself. It had better be worthwhile.
He looked up the immense stretch of granite steps. They shimmered slightly in the intense August sun. He took a deep breath and shifted the cane to his right hand. Slowly he dragged himself up the steps. . they seemed to stretch away into the ovenlike infinity.
He was almost there… a few more steps would do it. The cane caught between two of the steps, shifting his balancejand he was suddenly falling.
The woman standing in the shade at the top of the steps screamed. She had watched since he first climbed out of the cab. Brent Dalgreen, the famous painter, everyone recognized the tanned young face under bristly hair burned silver white by the raw radiation of space. The papers had told how his stay on the moon had weakened his muscles from low gravity. He had climbed painfully up the steps and now he was rolling hopelessly down them. She screamed again and again.
They carried him into the first-aid room. "Gravity weakness.” he told the nurse. "I'll be all right."
She tested him for broken bones and frowned when her hand touched his skin. She took his temperature, her eyes widened and she glanced at him with a frightened look.
"I know," he said. "It's much higher than normal. Don't let it worry you though, the fever isn't due to the fall; in fact, it's probably the other way around."
"I'll have to enter it in my report, just in case there's any trouble."
"I wish you wouldn't. I don't want the fact to leak out that I'm not as well as I should be. If you'll call Dr. Grayber in the Medical Arts Building you'll find that this condition is not new. The museum will have no worry about their responsibility as to my health."
It would make wonderful copy for the scandal sheets: MOON PAINTER DYING. . GIVES LIFE FOR ART. It wasn't at all like that. He had known there was danger from radiation sickness; in the beginning he had been very careful to be out in his spacesuit only the prescribed length of time. That was before he ran into the trouble.
There had been a feeling about the moon that he just couldn't capture. He had almost succeeded in one painting — then lost it again forever. It was the feeling of the haunted empty places, the stark extremes of the plains and boulders. It was an alien sensation that had killed him before he could imprison it in oil.
The critics had thought his paintings were unique, wonderful, just what they had always thought the moon would be like. That was exactly his trouble. The airless satellite wasn't at all like that. It was different — so different that he could never capture the difference. Now he was going to die, a failure in the only thing he had really wanted to do.
The radiation fever was in him, eating away at his blood and bones. In a few months it would destroy him. He had been too reckless those last months, fighting against time. He had tried and failed… it was as simple as that.
The nurse put the phone down, frowning.
"I've checked and what you say is true, Mr. Dalgreen. I won't put it in my report if that's what you want." She helped him up.
The moon was out of his thoughts later as one canvas after another swam into his vision. He bathed his senses in the collected art of the ages. This was his life, and he was enjoying it to the utmost, trying to make up for his year's absence from the world. The Greek marbles soothed his mind and the Rembrandt portraits wakened his interest once again. He marveled at the fact that after all the years he could still wander through these halls and have his interest recaptured. But he also wanted to see what the moderns were doing. The elevator took him to the Contemporary Wing.
Almost at once, his quiet enjoyment was broken by the painting. It was an autumn landscape, a representative example of the Classic-modern school that had been so popular for the last few years. However, it had something else: an undefinable strangeness about it.
His legs were beginning to tremble again, — he knew that he had better rest for a few minutes.
Brent sat on the wide lounge on the main staircase, cracking his knuckles, his mind whirling in circles as he rapidly introspected himself into a headache. There was no one thing in that painting that he could put his mental finger on, but it had upset him. It was disturbing him emotionally; something about the picture didn't quite ring true. He knew there was a logical evaluation of a painting, just as there Was a logical evaluation of any material object, but that wasn't the trouble, he was sure.
Equally, there was an emotional evaluation — more of a sensation or feeling; and this was where the trouble lay. Everyone has felt pleasure or interest at one time or another when looking at any form of visual ajrt. A magazine photo, drawing or even a well-designed building could generate an emotional pattern. Brent was attempting to analyze such a sensation now, a next-to-impossible job. The only coherent thought he could muster on the subject was: "There is something subtly wrong with that picture.”