When he could see straight again, he called for Tom, and there was no answer. At last he saw something out in the water, and plunged in after it. The splash of cold salt water on his left hand he hardly felt, for the numbness of shock had set in. He grabbed at Tom’s shirt with his good hand, and then the ground seemed to pull itself out from under his feet. That was it, then — a deep hole right off the beach. The Seven had run right to the edge of it, had kept Tom there out of his depth and—
He flailed wildly, struck out for the beach, so near and so hard to get to. He gulped a stinging lungful of brine, and only the lovely shock of his knee striking solid beach kept him from giving up to the luxury of choking to death. Sobbing with effort, he dragged Tom’s dead weight inshore and clear of the surf. It was then that he became conscious of a child’s shrill weeping; for a mad moment he thought it was he himself, and then he looked and saw that it was Al Knowles. He left Tom and went over to the broken creature.
“Get up, you,” he snarled. The weeping only got louder. Kelly rolled him over on his back — he was quite unresisting — and belted him back and forth across the mouth until Al began to choke. Then he hauled him to his feet and led him over to Tom.
“Kneel down, scum. Put one of your knees between his knees.” Al stood still. Kelly hit him again and he did as he was told.
“Put your hands on his lower ribs. There. O.K. Lean, you rat. Now sit back.” He sat down, holding his left wrist in his right hand, letting the blood drop from the ruined hand. “Lean. Hold it — sit back. Lean. Sit. Lean. Sit.”
Soon Tom sighed and began to vomit weakly, and after that he was all right.
This is the story of Daisy Etta, the bulldozer that went mad and had a life of its own, and not the story of the missile test that they don’t talk about except to refer to it as the missile test that they don’t talk about. But you may have heard about it for all that — rumors, anyway. The rumor has it that an early IRBM tested out a radically new controls system by proving conclusively that it did not work. It was a big bird and contained much juice, and flew far, far afield. Rumor goes on to assert that (a) it alighted somewhere in the unmapped rain forests of South America and that (b) there were no casualties. What they really don’t talk about is the closely guarded report asserting that both (a) and (b) are false. There are only two people (aside from yourself, now) who know for sure that though (a) is certainly false, (b) is strangely true, and there were indeed no casualties.
Al Knowles may well know it too, but he doesn’t count.
It happened two days after the death of Daisy Etta, as Tom and Kelly sat in (of all places) the cool of the ruined temple. They were poring over paper and pencil, trying to complete the impossible task of making a written statement of what had happened on the island, and why they and their company had failed to complete their contract. They had found Chub and Harris, and had buried them next to the other three. Al Knowles was back in the shadows, tied up, because they had heard him raving in his sleep, and it seemed he could not believe Daisy was dead and he still wanted to go around killing operators for her. They knew that there must be an investigation, and they knew just how far their story would go; and having escaped a monster like Daisy Etta, they found life too sweet to want any part of it spent under observation or in jail.
The warhead of the missile struck near the edge of their camp, just between the pyramid of fuel drums and the dynamite stores. The second stage alighted a moment later two miles away, in the vicinity of the five graves. Kelly and Tom stumbled out to the rim of the mesa, and for a long while watched the jetsam fall and the flotsam rise. It was Kelly who guessed what must have happened, and “Bless their clumsy little hearts,” he said happily. And he took the scribbled papers from Tom and tore them across.
But Tom shook his head, and thumbed back at the mound. “He’ll talk.”
“Him?” said Kelly, with such profound eloquence in his tone that he clearly evoked the image of Al Knowles, with his mumbling voice and his drooling mouth and his wide glazed eyes. “Let him,” Kelly said, and tore the papers again.
So they let him.
NO WOMAN BORN
C.L. Moore
She had been the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was once her manager, remembered doggedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent elevator toward the room where Deirdre sat waiting for him.
Since the theater fire that had destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let himself remember her beauty clearly, except when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a maudlin memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had to remember.
The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind that he had to go on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had not allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabulous grace that had poured through her wonderful dancer’s body, remembering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had fascinated the audiences of the whole world.
There had never been anyone so beautiful.
In times before her, other actresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before Deirdre’s day had the entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart. So few outside the capitals had ever seen Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their audiences to those who could reach the theaters. But Deirdre’s image had once moved glowingly across the television screens of every home in the civilized world. And in many outside the bounds of civilization. Her soft, husky songs had sounded in the depths of jungles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its patterns of rhythm in desert tents and polar huts. The whole world knew every smooth motion of her body and every cadence of her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on behind her features when she smiled.
And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the theater fire.
Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting him in the room ahead. He kept remembering the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also lovely and beloved and unforgotten after two thousand years.
That wasn’t quite true, of course — there had been one. Or maybe, after all, this Deirdre who died only a year ago had not been beautiful in the sense of perfection. He thought the other one might not have been either, for there are always women with perfection of feature in the world, and they are not the ones that legend remembers. It was the light within, shining through her charming, imperfect features, that had made this Deirdre’s face so lovely. No one else he had ever seen had anything like the magic of the lost Deirdre.