He could sec Olliver standing there, heater in hand, just where the spaceship had been, peering into the darkness, trying to see where to shoot them. But he could sec Olliver and Olliver, on the day side, couldn’t see him.
He’d rather have had his metal hand to throw-he was used to using that and could hit a man’s head at twenty or thirty feet. But the heater-gun would serve now; Olliver wasn’t even ten feet away and he couldn’t miss.
He didn’t miss. The missile shattered Olliver’s helmet.
Crag walked forward into the light, keeping between Evadne and Olliver so she wouldn’t have to see. A man whose helmet has been shattered in space isn’t a pleasant sight.
He reached down and got the disintegrator out of Olliver’s pocket. He used it.
Evadne came up and took his arm as he stood there, looking upward, seeing a distant gleam of sunlight on an object that was still moving away from them. He wished now he hadn’t thrown the spaceship so hard; had he tossed it lightly it might conceivably have returned before the air in his and Evadne’s spacesuits ran out. But he couldn’t have been sure he could get Olliver before Olliver, who had a loaded heater, could get him. And when the asteroid got small enough, the night side would no longer have been a protection. You can hide on the night side of a world-but not when it gets as small as a basketball.
Evadne said, “Thanks, Crag. You were-Is wonderful too hackneyed a word?”
Crag grinned at her. He said, “It’s a wonderful word.” He put his arms around her.
And then laughed. Here he was with two hundred thousand credits-a fortune-in his pocket and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And her arms were around him too and-you can’t even kiss a woman in a spacesuit! Any more than you can spend a fortune on an asteroid without even a single tavern on it.
An asteroid that was now less than ten yards in diameter.
Evadne laughed too, and he was glad, very glad of that.
It was funny-if you saw it that way-and it made things easier in this last moment that she could see it that way too.
He saw she was breathing with difficulty. She said, “Crag-my dear-this suit must not have had its tank fully charged with oxygen. I’m afraid I can’t-stay with you much longer.”
He held her tighter. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
She said, “But we stopped him, Crag. Someday humanity will get itself out of the mess it’s in now. And when it does, there’ll still-be an Earth-for it to live on.”
“Was he right, Evadne? I mean, about your being a member of some secret organization?”
“No. He either made that up or imagined it. I was just his wife, Crag. But I’d stopped loving him months ago. I knew, though, he planned to buy or steal that gadget of Eisen’s-he’d have got it somehow, even if we hadn’t helped him. And I suspected, but didn’t know, that he was planning something-bad. I stayed with him so I’d have a chance to try to stop him if-I was right.”
She was breathing harder. Her arms tightened around him. She said, “Crag, I want that gadget. I’ll use it on myself; I won’t ask you to. But it will be sudden and painless, not like this.” She was fighting for every breath now, but she laughed again. “Guess I’m lying, Crag. I’m not afraid to die either way. But I’ve seen people who died this way and they’re-well-I don’t want you to see me-like that. I’d-rather-“
He pressed it into her hand. He tightened his arms one last time and then stepped quickly back because he could hear and see how much pain she was in now, how every breath was becoming agony for her. He looked away, as he knew she wanted him to.
And when he looked back, after a little while, there was nothing there to see; nothing at all.
Except the disintegrator itself, lying there on a sphere now only six feet across. He picked it up. There was still one thing to do. Someone, sometime, might find this collapsed asteroid, attracted to it by the fact that his detector showed a mass greater than the bulk shown in a visiplate. If he found the gadget clinging there beside it—
He was tempted to use it instead, to take the quicker way instead of the slower, more painful one. But he took it apart, throwing each tiny piece as far out into space as he could. Maybe some of them would form orbits out there and maybe others would fall hack. But no one would ever gather all the pieces and manage to put them together again.
He finished, and the world he lived on was less than a yard in diameter now and it was still shrinking. He disconnected his gravplates because there wasn’t any use trying to stand on it. But it was as heavy as it had ever been; there was still enough gravitational pull to keep him bumping gently against it. Of course he could push himself away from it now and go sailing off into space. But he didn’t. Somehow, it was companionship.
A small world, he thought, and getting smaller.
The size of an orange now. He laughed as he put it into his pocket.
Mouse
BILL WHEELER was, as it happened, looking out of the window of his bachelor apartment on the fifth floor on the corner of 83rd Street and Central Park West when the spaceship from Somewhere landed.
It floated gently down out of the sky and came to rest in Central Park on the open grass between the Simon Bolivar Monument and the walk, barely a hundred yards from Bill Wheeler’s window.
Bill Wheeler’s hand paused in stroking the soft fur of the Siamese cat lying on the windowsill and he said wonderingly, “What’s s that, Beautiful?” but the Siamese cat didn’t answer. She stopped purring, though, when Bill stopped stroking her. She must have felt something different in Bill— possibly from the sudden rigidness in his fingers or possibly because cats are prescient and feel changes of mood. Anyway she rolled over on her back and said, “Miaouw,” quite plaintively. But Bill, for once, didn’t answer her. He was too engrossed in the incredible thing across the street in the park.
It was cigar-shaped, about seven feet long and two feet in diameter at the thickest point. As far as size was concerned, it might have been a large toy model dirigible, but it never occurred to Bill—even at his first glimpse of it when it was about fifty feet in the air, just opposite his window—that it might be a toy or a model.
There was something about it, even at the most casual look, that said alien. You couldn’t put your finger on what it was.
Anyway, alien or terrestrial, it had no visible means of support. No wings, propellers, rocket tubes or anything else—and it was made, of metal and obviously heavier than air. But it floated down like a feather to a point just about a foot above the grass. If stopped there and suddenly, out of one end of it (both ends were so nearly alike that you couldn’t say it was the front or back) came a flash of fire that was almost blinding. There was a hissing sound with the flash and the cat under Bill Wheeler’s hand-turned over and was on her feet in a single lithe movement, looking out of the window. She spat once, softly, and the hairs on her back and the back of her neck stood straight up, as did her tail, which was now a full two inches thick.
Bill didn’t touch her; if you know cats you don’t when they’re like that. But he said, “Quiet, Beautiful. It’s all right. It’s only a spaceship from Mars, to conquer Earth. It isn’t a mouse.”