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[Dean Koontz – Soft Come the Dragons]
[Released as “Ace double” with Dean Koontz – Dark of the Woods]
[Scanned by BuddyDk – May 22 2003]
[Original typos hasn’t been corrected]
[Use your word-processor to put in a suitable first line indent]
Dean Koontz is in league with the future.
Follow him as he leads you down the gnarled paths of night descending into the ever-present and terror-filled tomorrow. Come trod the byways to hell and to hope when you journey with:
•
Mutilated, mutant by-products of America's "Artificial Wombs" created by attempts at producing human weapons. . .
•
An American team of doctors sent to China to combat the runaway ultimate in biological warfare . . .
•
The genetically mutated daughter of LSD users, hiding her powers in order to survive society . . .
•
And Gabe, the vital, young man mistakenly locked in an antiseptic old-age ward . . .
Turn this book over for
second complete novel
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 5
SOFT COME THE DRAGONS 8
A THIRD HAND 21
A DARKNESS IN MY SOUL 51
THE TWELFTH BED 73
A SEASON FOR FREEDOM 85
THE PSYCHEDELIC CHILDREN 98
DRAGON IN THE LAND 113
TO BEHOLD THE SUN 130
DEAN R.KOONTZ
SOFT
COME
THE
DRAGONS
ACE BOOKS
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N. Y. 10036
SOFT COME THE DRAGONS
Copyright ©, 1970, by Dean R. Koontz
Individual stories copyright ©, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970,
by Mercury Press, Inc.; 1969, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.;
1968, by Ultimate Publications, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Jack Gaughan,
DEDICATION:
For DON WOLLHEIM, who has been there at the
start of so many careers . . .
DARK OF THE WOODS
Copyright ©, 1970, by Dean R. Koontz
Printed in U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
A Hotplate, a Chair, and a Bed . . .
Only a few months past twenty-one, I received my college diploma and rushed forth to conquer the world. The world turned out to be larger, more complex and sillier than I had imagined; I decided to settle for conquering just a little section of it all for myself. At that tender age, I had worked as a stock boy, a grocery store clerk, a state park forest ranger, a drummer in a rock band, a guitarist in a rock band, and in the politics of the civil rights movement. I had somehow managed to win three creative writing awards, two from the Atlantic Monthly, and had sold a few of my paintings to people who obviously had no conception of good art. The only problem was that I was broke, busted, flat, penniless.
Of course I got married immediately. Dear Reader, she was intelligent, creative, warm, sexy, had quiet, darting dark eyes that took everything in like universal magnets. What else could I do?
I had been trained as a teacher of English, and my first job was in a small Pennsylvania coal mining town which fell into the fabled Appalachian Poverty Belt (because all the coal was gone, but the miners were not). I worked under the Federal Poverty Program for damned little money. The only house available to rent in this metropolis of a thousand citizens was a seven room monstrosity which consumed a week's pay in rent and another week's pay in fuel oil. We moved in with just a bed (which was a used studio couch, really), a chair for each of us (second hand kitchen chairs), and a hotplate. Hugh Hefner wouldn't have called it luxurious, but it was home to us.
For nearly three months, those items sat in our seven rooms. Thanks to repeated "wedding gifts" from my parents who could ill afford to give them, we began to buy used furniture. And thanks to my discovery that I could do some carpentry and a good deal of upholstering (which amazed everyone who knew me as a clumsy muddle-fingers), and thanks to Gerda's nimble sewing fingers, we had a semblance of civilization in four of the seven rooms by the fourth month we lived there.
But there were always bills, and there was hardly ever money to meet them. I had been mailing stories to Ed Ferman at Fantasy and Science Fiction for some months, hoping to pick up more fuel oil money (I wonder if Hemingway ever wrote for fuel oil money?). One day a check arrived for $120.00 for a short story.
My life has never been the same since then.
There is nothing in this world which can hook you like creative writing. To see the words appear out of the typewriter which has sucked them from your brain via your fingertips is close to tripping on Owlsley Purple. No matter how hard you work on a story, the check you receive always seems like a gift, for writing the story was so much fun it was almost pay enough in itself. And then there is the ego-blast of seeing your name and story in print . . . and hearing from fans who like it (and even hearing from those who hate it, because that shows they at least care) . . . and that Big Dream in the background of your mind that someday it is also going to pay you well. . . .
So they should have narcs who go around checking on creative writers to see if they are getting hooked on their fantasy worlds, because fashioning a science fiction story-future can be like flying on any plastic fantastic chemical. . . .
At the time of this writing, three years have passed since that first story. I taught a year and a half in a suburban school in the meantime, was accused of teaching dirty books when my class read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Heller's Catch-22, and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. None of these were dirty books, of course, but the accusing administrators did not seem to have time to read what they were putting down. They preferred to judge by cover paintings and a local fanatic's opinion. Because of this (and the migraine headaches it was causing me) I quit and began writing full time. And now, after twenty-eight stories and fourteen books, the Big Dream is coming true.
And here, if I were accepting an Oscar, I would name all those without whom I would not be where I am, as happy as I am in a world where happiness is fast becoming a scarce commodity. I will not depart from tradition. Those Without Whom I Could Not are: my mother, from whom I learned gentleness; my father, whose genes gave me my traits of a dreamer; my high school English teacher, Miss Garbrick, who was that rarest of all things—a good teacher; Jeff, whose own sharp intellect made me first question the world around me; Harry, who was a companion through dark hours; Andy, who stayed up nights and was all together and married well; Jack, for the Night of the Empty Bottles and for looking for the world's fulcrum; Bob, for being Bob and therefore unique; Don Wollheim for buying the first three books and having faith; Ed Ferman for things mentioned later; Bob Hoskins for teaching me much; and especially to Gerda for the aforementioned intellect, warmth, and creativity—and for growing sexier every year. . . .
Harrisburg, Penna.
February, 1970
SOFT COME THE DRAGONS
This was my first published story in the field of science fiction, the one that changed my life. Ed Ferman had rejected several stories with encouraging notes instead of form rejection slips. When I mailed "Soft Come the Dragons" to Fantasy and Science Fiction, I told Ed that I had a Druid friend who was going to cast a spell upon him and the entire staff of the magazine so that they would start buying my work. With the check for the story, Ed enclosed a note beginning "I had thought Druid spells were long ago impotent, but . . ."
"AND what will you do when the soft breezes come and the dragons drift in to spread death?"
Marshall wriggled in his seat, reached for another sugar packet to empty into his mug of coffee.
"I'll tell you what you'll do. You'll get up when the alarms sound and dress in your uniform and go down in the cellar complex like a red-eyed mole in flight from his own fear. You'll get up when the alarms sound and monitor everything as usual, hiding until the dragons float out and are gone."
"What am I supposed to do?" Marshall asked. "Maybe I should pet them and pour out milk?"
"You wouldn't pet, you'd club. The milk would have cyanide in it"
Marshall slammed his fist into the table. "You forget, Dante, that I am commander here and you are only third line officer."
Mario Alexander Dante snorted, picked up his folio, and walked out of the rec room. Mounting the twisting stairs, he climbed two floors, stepped out into a dark, narrow haE-way, and ambled to the glass observation lounge that hung like a third story patio over the beach.
It was low tide. The sea stretched away across the horizon like poured glass, glittering like a queen's jewels or like a shattered church window. Only small waves lapped at the shore, depositing minute quantities of sand, etching out microscopic gullies in the orange beach as they dragged away a corresponding amount of other grains.
It seemed to Mare Dante that the ocean was the same on any world. It was the womb, the all-encompassing mother where men migrated at least once in their lives—like lemmings. He had walked to the edge of it on some nights, hoping to see a face. . . .
Just above the horizon floated the twin moons; their reflections stretched long across the ocean, cresting every wavelet with a tint of golden dew.
The trouble with Marshall, Dante reflected, was that he lacked imagination. He accepted everything at face value-tempered only by what his instruments told him. Being truthful with himself, he understood that he saw the old Mario Dante in the commander, and that this was why he disliked the man. The old Mario Dante, before the car crash that took Ellen and broke her body and tossed it into the ocean, before he lay in a hospital piecing together his shattered mind for seven months, the old Mario Dante had been lacking in sensitivity, in imagination. In unlocking his mental block so that he could accept the death of Ellen, the psychiatrist removed other things in passing, and opened a whole new portion of his mind.
But still, he disliked Marshall. And he was certain that the commander's Achilles' heel would be struck by an arrow from the quiver of the dragons. The dragons that came daily with the tidal winds.
The dragons of emerald and vermilion and yellow and white of virgin bridal gown and devil black and jack-of-lantern orange.
The butterfly dragons that were twenty yards wide and seventy yards long—but weighed only two or three hundred pounds. The flimsy, gossamer dragons.
The dragons of beauty.
The dragons that killed with their eyes.
He sighed, turned from the windowside, and sat down in one of the black leather easy chairs, snapping on the small, high-intensity reading lamp in the arm. Lighting a cigarette, he looked over his newer poems.
The first three he tossed in the wastebasket without reviewing. The fourth he read, reread, then read aloud for full effect.
"Discovery Upon Death"
"dear mankind:
am writing you from purgatory
to say that i
have made a discovery
that i wish you
would spread around up there,
god, now listen mankind,
god is a computer
and someone misprogrammed him . . ."
"Not bad," said a voice from the darkness. Abner stepped into the small circle of light around the chair. "But don't tell me the Pioneer Poet has doubts about life?"
"Please, the name is Mare."
Pioneer Poet. It was a name Life had coined when his first volume had been published and had won critical acclaim. He admitted it all seemed romantic: a space force surveyor drafted for three years, writing poetry on some alien world in some alien star system. But, Pioneer Poet?
"Heard about your fight with Marshall."
"It wasn't a fight."
"It was the way I heard it. What bothers you about him, Mare?"
"He doesn't understand things."
"Neither do any of us."
"Suffice it to say he might be a mirror in which I can see myself. And the reflection isn't a nice one."
They sat in silence a moment.
"You plan to sit up all night?" Abner asked.
"No, Pioneer Physician, I do not."
Abner grinned. "Dragon warnings should go up in six hours. You'll need your rest."
He folded his poems and rose, flicked off the light, and said: "Fine, but let us just look at the ocean a minute, huh?"
The snakes growing from her scalp hissed and bared fangs.
His hand burned with the dribbling of his own blood where their sharp teeth raked him.
Slowly, she turned, and the beauty was there in the face— and the horror was there.
In the eyes.
And his muscles, slowly but doubtlessly and without pause, began turning to granite.
"No!" he screamed. "I think I'm just beginning to see—"
His hair became individual strands of rock. Each cell of his face froze into eternity and became a part of something that could never die—that could only be eroded by wind and rain.
And finally his eyes, staring into hers, slipped into cataract, then to stone.
And he woke to the sound of screams in his ears.
Before opening his eyes, he could see her, pinned behind the wheel, mouth twisted in agony.
The flames licking at her face as he was tossed free, the tumbling, burning car, plunging over the cliff and away.
But when the waking dream was over, he still heard the screams. He fumbled for his bed light, and the flood of yellow fire made him squint. He looked at the clock. Five o'clock in the morning Translated Earth Time.
The dragon warning was in effect. They were not screams, but the wails of mechanical voices. "Beware and Run," they seemed to say.
Bewareandrun, bewareandrun, bewareandrun . . .
He had been sleeping in his duty suit, a uniform of shimmering purple synthe-fabric. The United Earth emblem graced his right arm: a dove sitting on a green globe. That was one symbol that always repulsed him. He pictured the dove loosening its bowels.
Stumbling across the room, he palmed open the door and stepped into the corridor, blinking away the remainders of sleep from his eyes.
Holden Twain was running down the 'hall, strapping his nylon belt around his waist. "I have some poetry for you to look at while we're in the shelter," he said breathlessly, coming to a halt at Dante's side.
Mario liked the kid. He was five years the poet's junior, but his innocence seemed to add to his immaturity—and charm. He had not met Hemingway's Discovery of Evil. He never understood "The Killers" when he read it. Dante made him plunge through it every few weeks, searching for that glint of understanding that would mean he saw it all.
"Fine," Mario said. "That'll help pass the hours in that dreadful hole."
They set out at a steady trot down the hall, past the large windows that peered out upon the alien landscape.
At the stairwell, Mario ushered the younger man down and waited at the head for the others from that corridor. He was captain of the block and was to be the last into the shelter from that partic
ular accessway.
He glanced out of the nearest window. There was sure to be wind. The spindly pine-palms were swaying erratically, some bent nearly to the snapping point in the gale. This was only the front of the tidal winds, he knew, and the soft breezes and the dragons would follow.
The dragons that looked so beautiful in pictures but which killed any man who looked directly into their eyes.
The dragons that seemed to live constantly in the air— without eating.
The dragons that killed with their eyes . . . '
He had a vision of the first victims, their eyes crystallized, shrunken within the blackened sockets, the brain wilted within the skull. He shuddered.
Still, it did not seem right to hide when they came.
Though the specially designed lenses failed, though dozens of scientists died trying to prove that they wouldn't, that men's eyes could be protected from the deadly dragons, it did not seem right to hide.
Though gunnery officers could not shoot them down (because only a shot in the eye seemed to kill the beasts, and aiming at those misty, pupilless orbs was impossible), it did not seem right to squirrel away in the earth.
The last man in the corridor pounded down the stairs. Dante swung the door shut, sealed it, then flicked the shutters that would partially protect the windows.
The shelter was filled with men. The city's compliment numbered sixty-eight. They were sixty-eight prepared to wait out another three hours of dragons and silence in the cellar.
Dante decided the entire affair got more ridiculous each time. It hardly seemed as if the planet were worth all the trouble. But then he knew it was. There were the Bakium deposits, and the planet itself was central to this galaxy. Someday, it would be built nearly as heavily as Earth. A grand population.
Certainly more than sixty-eight.