Jerome Bixby

“ Ben and Buck were about twenty feet apart now, and Ben stopped.
His voice was tired when he said, "Any time, Buck."
"You're a hell of a sheriff," Buck sneered. "You're a no-good bastard."
"Cuss me out," Ben said. "Don't hurt me none. I'll be ready when you start talking with guns."
"I'm ready now, beanpole," Buck grinned. "You draw first, huh?"
"Think of his gun!" the professor said in a fierce whisper. "Try to grab it with your mind—break his aim—pull it away from him—you know it can be done! Think, think—"
Ben Randolph had never in anyone's knowledge drawn first against a man. ”

“ He looked warily about him like a young wolf, head down, eyes up. His name was Steven—but he'd forgotten that. His face was a sunburned, bitter, filthy eleven-year-old face—tight lips, lean cheeks, sharp blue eyes with startlingly clear whites. His clothes were rags—a pair of corduroy trousers without any knees; a man's white shirt, far too big for him, full of holes, stained, reeking with sweat; a pair of dirty brown sneakers.
He lay, knife in hand, and waited to see if anyone had seen him coming over the wall or heard his almost soundless landing on the weedgrown dirt. ”

“ Out in the yard the outhouse stood, a battleground of good and evil. Its coat of white paint gleamed in the sun, which still stood high as a result of timelessness. Its red roof was a challenge. To the young man, staring moodily, the crescent in the door seemed a mocking, lopsided smile.
On the roof stood a new and larger mounting, containing a new and larger cowbell, from which hung a new and heavier chain.
Once the young man looked upward, as if for guidance.
Once he sighed and shook his head, as if discouraged.
"One of us must win," he said finally.
"Always," the man in black nodded. ”

“ Grg and Yrl gasped as one of the God's double-tentacles buckled, crumpled, with a glinting of shiny-hard material. The flames stopped.
The God, unable to remain erect with its injury, slowly toppled. Its body thudded silently, stirring pumice dust. It was motionless.
Grg and Yrl stared at each other.
Was the God fatally injured? Dying? Dead? (For a broken tentacle meant that fluids would seep out, and soon the dry-death would occur.) ”

“ The crowd around us kept growing as more Martians emerged from the dome buildings to see what was going on. Down the winding ramps of the buildings on our side of the wide, sandy street they came—and from the buildings on the other side of the street, plodding through the sand, blinking brown eyes at us, not making a sound.
Allenby pointed at the third orbit and thumped his chest. The chief squeaked and thumped his own chest and pointed at the copperish band around his head. Then he pointed at Allenby. ”

“ Humans could often pick up random thoughts from these men, while animals reacted easily to their will.
Thus it was that "Sergeant" Atoms placed his paws on the dummy firing button; a temporarily selfless extension of Rhiannon's physical and psychical form.
Together, they wiped out the Rebel fleet in a matter of seconds.
Rhiannon was exploring Polaris when a hand fell lightly upon his shoulder. He whirled up and around snarling. A Rebel spy on his boat: he'd kill the son—
Karrin ducked, his face seeming to sag pallid from the front of his skull. "Whoa, now, Rhiannon, it's Karrin—it's Karrin!" ”

“ Jim Liddel yelled, and from the checker table came Windy Harris's encouraging, "You tell 'em who got that plane, Jim!"
Ben Bates scraped an inch of ash off his cigar against the table-edge, sighed and got up. He looked down at the glowering pair and said, "Well, come the next plane, if there is one, we'll shove a rifle in your hand, Jim, and see how good your eye is. You too, Tom. Till that time, reckon this is no place for a reasoning man."
"Sit down, Ben Bates," old Jim snarled. "If you're a reasoning man, sit down. Be glad to talk to one, after Tom here goes away." ”

“ Machines lay broken, tilted, flickering, whining, wheezing, like the bodies of the wounded. Delicate instruments were smashed to bits. The involuted field that Pud had flung through the vortex had evidently burst, as he had feared—for the vortex had vanished. So, probably, had the universe the field had burst in. The two fields that had interlocked were ruined, each having contaminated the other beyond use. Other energy-fields, having absorbed an excess of energy from the tharn, were bloated monstrosities or burned-out husks. ”

“ Randolph grinned. "Yes."
"No, you wouldn't—not until you'd given it a going over."
"They're not sick in a killing way," Burke grunted, "but they seem to feel that their colonizations act as cathartic to wayward worlds. Just look at them, and you know that's sick."
"The people," said Barnes, "at the bottom of any movement—a pun, gentlemen—are always fed on dream-stuff. Soldiers always are. Truth is, maybe the big boys at home think they can find enough use for us to warrant keeping us alive. As laborers, as subjects for experimentation, as pets." ”

“ The dogs were coming up Central Park West. Their racket bounced off the broken buildings lining the street, and came down into the park, and even the squirrels and birds were quieter, as if not wanting to attract attention.
Steven froze by the bole of a tree, ready to climb if the dogs came over the wall at him. He'd done that once before. You climbed up and waited while the dogs danced red-eyed beneath you, until they heard or smelled someone else, and then they were off, bounding hungrily after the new quarry. They'd learned that men in trees just didn't come down. ”

“ He shook his head again. Once a pilot, he thought, not necessarily always a pilot. Space did rotten things to men who got careless with their radiation screens. It blotched their minds, tossed up fences around memory and intelligence.
A most brilliant crystal—that's what Rhiannon had once been.
Sixty feet away and four stories above the concrete floor of Bed 52, a man stood by the curving window of Karrin's office and watched Rhiannon descend in the lift. He was a small, padded man with the sly look of the lower Mars suburbs about him. ”

“ Ben said, and pressed her head against his shoulder again, "I go. If I want to relax with the men, I do it. If I want to just walk and breathe deep, I do it—keeping to the trees, o' course. If I want to just be with you, I do it. It's quiet. It's real quiet in our rag town. It's a world for old people. It's just the way we want it, to live like we want to live. ”

“ Burton, standing by the boulder I'd first seen, flashed his flashlight into the hole. Randolph, clear on the other side of the jumbled nest, eye to hole, saw it.
Straight as a string!
The ground sloped away on the far side of the nest—no holes were visible in that direction—just miles of desert. So, after we'd stared at the holes for a while and they didn't go away, we headed back for the canal.
"Is there any possibility," asked Janus, as we walked, "that it could be a natural phenomenon?"
"There are no straight lines in nature," Randolph said, a little shortly. ”

“ There are so many stars in an asteroid sky that they look like clouds; like massive, heaped-up silver clouds floating slowly around the inner surface of the vast ebony sphere that surrounds you and your tiny foothold. They are near enough to touch, and you want to touch them, but they are so frighteningly far away ... and so beautiful: there's nothing in creation half so beautiful as an asteroid sky. ”

“ But when Buck Tarrant drew on me, right now in the Pass, I didn't see any motion atall. He just crouched, and then his gun was on me. Must have done it in a millionth of a second, if a second has millionths.
It was the fastest draw I'd ever seen. It was, I reckoned, the fastest draw anybody's ever seen. It was an impossibly fast draw—a man's hand just couldn't move to his holster that fast, and grab and drag a heavy Peacemaker up in a two foot arc that fast. ”

“ Always they say that of us; they, who feed off the burned flesh of living creatures.”
IT WAS the face of his father, stern and reproving, that Craig always saw before him during those long nights in the lifeboat. His father, who had been a Baptist minister. When the lifeboat drifted on a sea that was like glass, reflecting the stars with such clarity that the boat might have been suspended in a vast star-filled sphere, and Craig felt the warm, moist lips of the vampire at his throat—then conscience arose in the form of his father. ”

“ Knife in hand, its point aimed at his belly, she stared back.
She was dressed in a man's trousers, torn off at the ankles, and a yellow blouse that might have belonged to her mother, and new-looking shoes she must have found, or killed for, only a week or so ago. Her face was as sunburned and dirty as his.
A squirrel chittered over their heads as they stared at each other.
Steven noted expertly that she seemed to be carrying no food and had no gun. No one with a gun would carry a drawn knife. ”

“ Farrel looked at the two stubborn faces: Mary's, pleasant and pretty, but set as steel; Ralph's, uncomfortable, thoughtful, but mirroring his definite willingness to follow his wife's lead.
Farrel cleared his throat. "You know how important it is that this colony be established? You know that, don't you? In twenty years or so the ships will start arriving. Hundreds of them. Because we sent a message back to Earth saying we'd found a habitable planet. Thousands of people from Earth, coming here to the new world we're supposed to get busy and carve out for them. ”

“ We made our families, and watched 'em fit into the town and the valley, like the valley fits into the world, and we watched 'em go on doing what we done before them: building and working and planting and raising families—going on, like people got to go on. That's the way it was. That's what we had. Until they dropped the bomb and killed it—killed all we done that made us men." Tears were squeezing out of the skull sockets, and Ben Bates caught Tom Pace's eye and looked away, out the window, at the green walls of the valley that was a coffin. ”

“ He held back that particular beast from the lot. When the others had been tossed through, he hauled back his tentacle, wound up, and pegged the offending beast with all his might. It streaked through the doorway like a projectile, legs and eyestalks rigid.
Pud plucked a machine from the two-foot claws of the very last beast, and tossed the beast through. Then he examined the machine—it was beyond repair. He slammed that through the doorway too.
In ten seconds, the two Vegan Scientists had slapped and mauled all their rioting experiments into inaction. ”

“ But now I feel that dying would be easy and pleasant. Better, maybe, than going back to the world.”
“The world is evil, yes; but the will to live in it drives all of us.”
Craig lay motionless and wondered, with a clarity of mind he had not experienced in many, many days, whether he dreaded going back to the world because the world was evil, or whether it was because he felt that he himself was tainted, unfit to mix with human beings again.
. . . And Hofmanstahal might be a problem. Should he be reported to the authorities? No, for then they would know about Craig. ”

“ Charley said slowly. "I always did sort of think it leveled you off, though."
The young man eyed them soberly.
"In late afternoon," he said, "in the confines of the rustic outhouse, settled happily, hearing the quaint and natural sounds of the insects in the field, the flutterings of birds from branch to branch ... do you know that in this day it is the only waking place where one may flee for the inner life?"
The old men looked down guiltily.
"It is ever a reminder of one's mortality," the young man said.
"It is Man in his true aristocratic state," he said. ”

“ Then he heard me coming, and whirled away from the tree, his gun holstered, his hand held out in front of him like he must have imagined Hickock or somebody held it when he was ready to draw.
I stopped my horse about ten feet away and just stared at him. He looked real funny in his baggy old levis and dirty checkered shirt and that big gun low on his hip, and me knowing he couldn't handle it worth a damn.
"Who you trying to scare, Buck?" I said. I looked him up and down and snickered. "You look about as dangerous as a sheepherder's wife."
"And you're a son of a bitch," he said. ”

“ Each Martian, upon reaching the center of the street, glanced at his feet—just for a moment—without even breaking stride. And then came on.
"What can they be looking at?" Gonzales wondered.
"The chief did it too," Burton mused. "Remember when he first came toward us?"
We all stared intently at the middle of the street. We saw absolutely nothing but sand.
The Martians milled around us and watched Allenby and his orbits. A Martian child appeared from between two buildings across the street. On six-inch legs, it started across, got halfway, glanced downward—and came on. ”

“ And eventually one of the beasts, attracted by all the flickering and flashing and frantic scrabbling visible through the doorway, abandoned the fun of the fight and leaped, like a ten-ton gopher, through the opening.
The others followed, naturally. They always chased and tore apart the first one to cut and run.
Gop had just set Helen Gorman on the ground, and Johnny Gorman, seeing her apparently materialize from thin air and float downward, had just started to stagger toward her, when the ten-ton gopher began to vivisect one of Pud's tails. ”

“ Karrin walked over to the front port and watched for Janus to become visible on the near length of the line. Watched, too, Rhiannon's reflection in the glass. The big man was gaping at the nebula and twitching the thick muscles of his neck in ecstasy. Karrin felt an urge to snicker.
"Good to get back, eh?" he asked.
Rhiannon pointed. "There's your friend, sir."
Janus was bobbing, hand over hand, toward the unmarked Rebel boat. His faceplate gleamed once as it caught the fire of the nebula. ”

“ Ben said.
"And when my time comes, I'll be up and out o' this chair. Man oughta fall and make a noise when he dies."
"Sure, Jim," Ben said. "But that's a long ways off, ain't it?"
Jim closed his eyes, and his face looked like a skull. "You squirts always think a man lives forever."
From outside came the late morning sounds: the murmuring of Smoky Creek at the edge of town, under its cool tunnel of willows; the twittering of a flock of robins circling above; the constant soft rustle of the trees that crowded the green hills around. ”

“ Grg was a Fsgh, which is the equivalent of High Priest, Yrl was a Ffssgghh, or Much Higher Priest. The best wishes of their people had gone with them on their tremendous mission.
Now, at the place, they trembled in every tentacle as they peered upward. The rust-red orb of Mars rode the black horizon.
Mars was, as Grg and Yrl had learned from their Elders and now taught their Youngers, the stern Seeing-All Eye of It Who Was the Universe. ”

“ Hale remembered Green Spot. It was a bloody, terrible memory. Green Spot had been one of the earliest and largest farm-settlements on Mars. One night, for some other-worldly reason that the Colonial Authority was still puzzling about, the Martian workers had slit two hundred Terrestrial throats and vanished into the red desert. The Lhrai priests had conveyed regrets, assuring the Authority at the same time that there had been adequate provocation for the act. ”

“ I told her that the Zen had been, all evidence indicated, the toughest, hardest, longest-lived creatures God had ever cooked up: practically independent of their environment, no special ecological niche; just raw, stubborn, tenacious life, developed to a fantastic extreme—a greater force of life than any other known, one that could exist almost anywhere under practically any conditions—even floating in midspace, which, asteroid or no, this Zen was doing right now.
The Zens breathed, all right, but it was nothing they'd had to do in order to live. ”

“ And when he passed below the tree, Steven was waiting on the low branch that overhung the path—waiting with his face taut and his eyes staring and his knife ready. One stab at the base of the skull, and the guns would be his. ”

“ I'll call them the slizzers, because they sliz people. Lord only knows how long they've been on Earth, and how many of them there are....
They're all around us, living with us. We are hardly ever aware of their existence, because they can make themselves look like us, and do most of the time; and if they can look like us, there's really no need for them to think like us, is there? People think and behave in so many cockeyed ways, anyhow. Whenever a slizzer fumbles a little in his impersonation of a human being, and comes up with a puzzling response, I suppose we just shrug and think. ”