Koontz, Dean - Soft come the Dragons Read online

  Sixty-seven.

  "Sixty-seven!" the Secretary shrilled.

  "Impossible!" Marshall shouted.

  "Menchen. Menchen isn't here."

  "Who has that corridor?"

  "I, sir."

  "Anamaxender. Why the hell didn't you notice he was missing?"

  "Sorry, sir."

  "You'll be damned sorry before this is over." Marshall turned to the other faces. "Who saw him last."

  "I believe just about everyone was asleep, commander," Dante said quietly. Marshall opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. He turned to Twain. "You know corridor F?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Every man was required to have a memorized floor plan of the installation buried deep in the emergency vaults of his mind. It was a ridiculous question.

  "Go after Menchen. Go to his room and see if he needs help. At any cost, get back here."

  "But the dragons," someone said.

  "They won't be out yet, and it will be another half hour before they gain access to the upper floors."

  Twain was strapping on a radio set, fastening a blaster to his belt. He crossed to Dante and handed him a sheaf of eight papers. He smiled and was gone.

  At the head of the stairs, there was a sucking of a door unsealing, then a second whine as it sealed again—behind Holden Twain.

  Mare Dante had nothing to do. He could have sat and worried, but the commander had been right. Dragons would not break into the upper corridors for a while yet. Until things really started getting bad above, there was no reason to worry.

  He sat down and opened the folded sheets of yellow papers.

  Hath a man not eyes?

  Can he feel not pain?

  Does the grass grow greener?

  Is Gods blood rain?

  And so it goes,

  And so it is.

  Is there a soul?

  And if there is,

  Where is it?

  M.A. Dante was jealous. Jealousy? When he translated that and deducted the source, he realized that Twain's poetry had taken a change for the better. It was no longer what Dante called "tree and flower poetry." There was something of a philosophical note in those last three lines. At least, there was pessimism.

  Pessimism, he strongly believed, was merely realism.

  Suddenly, he was very worried about the boy—the man —upstairs.

  He stood and approached Marshall. "Commander, I—"

  Marshall turned, his eyes gleaming, immediately on the defensive. Between clenched teeth: "Dante. What is it now? Would you like to take over command of the operation? Would you like to—"

  "Oh, shut up!" He turned up the volume on the receiver that would carry Twain's words back to them. "I am not an enemy of yours. I disagree with your methods and procedure. I do not lower myself to personal vendetta."

  "Listen—"

  The radio crackled, interrupting the building rage within Marshall. "Twain here. Menchen is in his room. Ill. I'm going to trundle him back."

  "What about the dragons?" Marshall snapped into the mike.

  "I can hear them bumping softly against the window shields, trying to get in. Like big moths. Creepy."

  "None in the halls?"

  "No, Starting back. Out."

  The dragons that killed with their eyes. Beautiful dragons so the automatic cameras showed. But dragons that no man could look upon.

  Somehow, men must be able to see, he thought. The photos—Dante's mind seemed dangling on the ravine of inspiration.

  When Twain returned, he was quite relieved, forgot about Marshall, and lived the moments of good poetry the younger man had composed, commenting and discussing.

  "Why do you write?"

  Twain thought a moment. "To detail Truth."

  "With a capital T?"

  "Yes."

  "There isn't such a thing. Don't interrupt. There is no such thing as Truth, no purity with a tag. It is a shade of gray somewhere between black and white. It is one thing to a slave, another to a monarch, and yet another to the monk who kneels alone in cloistered walls of towering granite, fingering beads. It is for no man to delineate, and for no man to criticize another's understanding of it. Truth, old son, is relative. And more than relative, it is nonexistent as a pure entity."

  "But in the literature classes in college, they said we were to search for the truth. The textbooks on poetry say we should write to discover truth."

  The sixty plus men muttered among themselves. Marshall followed his scopes, his dials, his unfailing measuring devices that justified the way of things to man.

  "That's what they tell you, Mr. Twain. That is also what I will tell you. Write to delineate truth. Yet I warn you there is no such thing. Yet I tell you never to stop looking, never to forsake the search. Yet do I tell ye that ye shall never end the quest. Do you have guts enough to keep looking, Holden Twain?"

  Twain looked at him, and silently without needing to explain, he walked off and sat in a corner, staring intently at the wall where it joined the ceiling.

  The rest of the day he spent tramping in and out of Abner's clinic, checking on Menchen's progress.

  The blue walls of the med room made him feel as if he were hanging, dangling precariously from the center of the sky. The thin silver instruments on the table, the stark functional furniture, the university degrees on the walls, the anatomical chart above the operating table as if the surgeon followed a paint-by-number method in removing an appendix—all seemed like flotsam and jetsam swirling around in the crystal sky, remnants of mankind's achievements hurled into the stratosphere after a violent swipe of a disgusted God's powerful hand.

  "What does he have?"

  Abner stared at the diagnostic machine's readings. "Could be a tumor."

  "Could be?"

  "Could be half a dozen other things. It's hidden in the maze of tissues in his bowels. Maybe I found it. Maybe not.

  "What can you do?"

  "Nothing."

  "He'll die?"

  "We don't have the most modern hospital devised by mankind at our disposal."

  "I'm not blaming you, Abe."

  "I am."

  "He will die, then?"

  "Yes. And because I don't understand. I don't understand."

  At night, while Dante slept, Menchen died. But the poet didn't know. No one would know until the morning. And it would disturb no one's sleep. A thousand sparrows could fall at once . . .

  A thousand sparrows, a million sparrows fell from the sky, between the snowflakes. They crashed silently into the pavement. They tangled in the telephone wires—looking like notes in a staff of copper, separated by pole-bars into economical musical measures. But there was no music.

  After they fell, he stood, the collar of his coat turned up to ward off the cold, and looked at their bodies, broken and bleeding. And he did not understand.

  Looking up into the gray sky from whence came the snow swirling like a thousand dandelion puffs blown on by children, he searched hopefully for the source of the coldness.

  Far away, tires screeching . . .

  Metal shredding . . .

  Ghostly screams in the night, a woman in agony . . .

  Perhaps, he thought, if I could look with a mirror, I could see and know. Perhaps, seeing everything backwards, the world makes sense. Maybe, if we change our perspective . . .

  "Yes," said a voice.

  He turned and looked at the snakes in her head, and he could not keep his eyes from dropping to hers. And slowly, forever and for always, he turned to stone, crying: "From another perspective you might be love and not hatred."

  "Yes," she said, smiling.

  Waking, sweating, he knew the answer. It was just crazy enough to work. But he could not say anything. Marshall would see his effort as an attempt to gain power. It would, of necessity, be a secret project.

  He turned on the bed lamp, forced himself totally awake, and set to dismantling his dressing mirror.

  He was the last down the stairway
at the dragon warning.

  "Did you hear?" Twain asked.

  "Hear what?"

  "Menchen died during the night."

  "Now there might be your only truth. Death."

  "What?"

  "It is indisputable, inevitable, and impossible of misinterpretation."

  He walked away from Twain and secreted himself in a, corner hoping to blend into oblivion. It was a corner near a stairwell. Roll was called, and all were found to be present. An hour into the warning, he rose, meandered through a clot of men to the edge of the stairs. Suddenly, like a tired apparition, he was gone.

  At the head of the stairs, he unsealed the door, stepped into the corridor, closed the porfal behind. Carefully, he removed the delicate, makeshift spectacles from his pocket. They were diamond-like, circus-prop spectacles of glittering looking glass and golden wire. They worked roughly like a periscope so that the wearer saw a mirror reflection of what was in front of him.

  Sucking in his breath, he swung open the outside door and stepped onto the black soil.

  The humming of giant wings sung above him.

  Slowly, he turned his head to the skies.

  The far-darting beams of the spirit, the un'loos'd dreams, he thought.

  They were spirits and fairies above him. They were orange and magenta and coffee brown and crayon brown and pecan brown. They were white and chrome yellow and peach yellow and pear yellow.

  They were thin, and in spots, through their silken wings, he glimpsed the sun. "Daedalus, your labyrinth was no more mystifying than a single wing of these creatures. And Icarus, turn from beside the sun, beauty is not up there. Look down and see."

  They were dragons of the wind.

  And with his lenses, their eyes did not burn him.

  He walked forth, his mouth gaping. Other lines from Whitman's "Passage to India" entered his mind.

  I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance . . .

  Truly, there was something about the alien landscape that seemed fresh. In the sunlight filtered through gossamer wings, he seemed to see more detail. The strange way the chlorophyll was formed as a crystalline substance within the yellow-green leaves; the patterns in the sand that he had once considered only chance happenings. He looked around. There were patterns to everything. The sky was delicately shaded in a soft-hued, artistic effect. There was a tasteful blending of all nature—something he had never seen before.

  He could almost see the rays of sun like individual golden rivers, beaming into everything, showering back when reflected, soaking in and disappearing when refracted. The world was more real . . .

  The gigantic dredging machines ...

  He saw the mining shafts and cranes, recognizing them as dredgers that sucked the scum of a planet, sent the base ores in gross tanker ships to run large, smoky factories on an over-populated Earth where some lived in poverty and some in plenty. And they were no longer just mining fools . . .

  I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world . . .

  From the air, vibrating the molecules of his body so that he heard with his eyes and ears and mouth and nose. So that he tasted the notes, 'the pitched wailings of melancholy and joy. So that joy was sweet and melancholy bittersweet. The dragons flocked above him and sang.

  The music was soundless and all sound. It was the trumpets of the marching dead and the flutes of the living angels. They were strange songs.

  Crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold the enchanting mirages of waters and meadows . . .

  He stumbled over the sand, heedless of destination. Everything was new to him. A thousand times before had he looked at it. Never had he seen it.

  The dragons sang of it, the why of it. The why.

  Careening drunkenly to the mirages, he dipped his hands in cool water and there was no mirage. The meadows smelled fresh and grassy. They were real.

  A spark within his mind was relighted; his search had ended.

  Stumbling, laughing, seeing and hearing the gossamer butterfly-formed dragons, he reached the complex, went inside, and started for the shelter door.

  They were all standing there looking when he came down the stairs. He threw the glasses at their feet and laughed loudly.

  "He's insane," someone said.

  "No!" Mare Dante shouted. "You're insane. All of you. Crackier than a box of saltines. You hide while all of life waits for you out there with the Gods."

  "The dragons?"

  "The dragons, the Gods. I'm not sure yet."

  "Someone grab him," Marshall shouted, working his way up front.

  "And you," Mare said. "You are phony to the bottom of your being. You don't even want to be captain. You're afraid of the position. But you have to prove yourself; you're impotent—"

  "Shut up!" Marshall screamed, his face white.

  "Impotent because once when you were eight, your aunt—"

  "Shut up!"

  "I can't. It's in your eyes. God, can't the rest of you see it in his eyes?"

  "How did you look at the dragons?" someone asked.

  "Through a mirror."

  "But other men had their eyes burned out."

  "Because they could not face what they saw in the liquid eyes of the dragons. They were not killed by strange, burning rays. They simply folded and lost their souls. But it's beautiful. If you have always searched for it, you will find it in their eyes."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" Abe asked.

  "The dragons are not constituted of matter."

  Abe stepped closer. "Talk sense, Mare. For God's sake, you'll be committed."

  "When Menchen died, Abe, you told me you couldn't understand. You can understand if you will only let yourself. Your weight estimates on the dragons are incorrect. The dragons are weightless, for they are not formed of matter. The life forms on this planet are composed of what we call abstract ideas. The dragons are truth— Truth. Truth personified. Through them, you can understand why."

  "He's insane."

  "And there are other life forms here we haven't seen. The dragons were the only ones trying to contact us, to break down our shelter. There is an opposite life form living in the ground. We thought those desert holes were caves, but they are not. There are worms that burrow miles beneath us and fester. The worms are Hate. Hate personified."

  Someone reached forward to grab him. He struggled and fell.

  Miles below the sands, a long, caterpillar thing glowed momentarily and turned over.

  The floor shook. Almost gleefully, the mob descended and covered Mario Dante until black swallowed and consumed him as he muttered lastly—"Ellen."

  Upstairs, the pair of discarded spectacles clamped to his head, Holden Twain stepped forward into the outside world, a blaster on his hip, determined to seek out every cave, every wormhole. . . .

  A THIRD HAND

  There seem to be two factions within the science fiction firmament these days, one which argues that the "traditional" sf story is the best that a writer can produce, the other saying the "traditional" form is a waste and that we must all advance into the avante-garde areas which "mainstream" fiction adopted years ago. It is an interesting battle to watch among science fiction fans, but for someone who sits on the fence post (like me) it is exasperating. Those who would condemn all advancement of style in the field are unrealistic—as are those who refuse to acknowledge the very fine storytelling qualities of "traditional" sf. Most often, I attempt to mix the two, and I think "A Third Hand" is a prime example of this. The hero, Ti, is a "new wave" hero as far as we can type a "new wave" hero. He is not a strong, brave, galaxy-cruising, square-jawed WASP, but a crippled, hung-up little guy with problems outside of his plot. But the story follows traditional patterns, a linear form. Except, perhaps, for the very end. Read the last sentence twice. Think about Timothy, and see what the story becomes for you. . . .

  TIMOTHY was not human. Not wholly. If one included arms and legs in a def
inition of the human body, then Timothy did not pass the criteria necessary for admission to the club. If one counted two eyes in that definition, Timothy was also ruled out, for he had but one eye, after all, and even that was placed in an unusual position: somewhat closer to his left ear than a human eye should be and definitely an inch lower in his overlarge skull than was the norm. Then there was his nose. It totally lacked cartilage. The only evidence of its presence was two holes, the ragged nostrils, punctuating the relative center of his bony, misshapen head. There was his skin: waxy yellow like some artificial fruit and coarse with large, irregular pores that showed like dark pinpricks bottomed with dried blood. There were his ears: very flat against his head and somewhat pointed like the ears of a wolf. There were other things that would show up on a closer, more intimate examination, things like his hair (which was of an altogether different texture than any racial variant among the normal human strains), his nipples (which were ever so slightly concave instead of convex), and his genitals (which were male, but which were contained in a pouch just below his navel and not between his truncated limbs). There was only one way in which Timothy was remotely human, and that was his brain. But even here, he was not entirely normal, for his IQ was slightly above 250.

  He had been a product of the Artificial Wombs, a strictly military project which intended to produce beings usable as weapons of war, beings with psionic abilities that could bring the Chinese to their knees. But when such gnarled results as Timothy rolled from the Wombs, the scientists and generals connected with the project threw up their hands and resigned themselves to more public condemnation.

  Timothy was placed in a special home for subhuman productions of the Wombs where he was expected to die within five years. But it was in his third year there that they came to realize that Timothy (he was the "T" birth in the fifth alphabetical series, thus his name) was more than a mindless vegetable. Much more. It happened at feeding time. The nurse had been dutifully spooning predigested pablum into his mouth, cleaning his lips and chin as he dribbled, when one of the other "children" in the ward entered its death throes. She hurried off to assist the doctor who was injecting some sedative into the mutant hulk, leaving Timothy hungry. Due to the training of a new staff nurse that afternoon, he had inadvertently been skipped in the previous feeding. As a result, he was ravenous. But the nurse did not return in response to his caterwauling. He tossed and pitched on his foam mattress, but legless and armless as he was, there was nothing he could do to reach the bowl of food that rested on the table next to his crib, painfully within sight of his one, misplaced eye. He blinked that eye, squinted it, and lifted the spoon without touching it! He levitated the instrument to his mouth, licked the pablum from it, and sent it back to the bowl for more. It was during his sixth spoonful that the nurse returned, saw what was happening and fainted dead away.