Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Science fiction
"Make sure! How sure do you have to be? Now listen. You stay by your
blaster and keep your eyes and your ears open. I'm coming over to see
if I can locate the 'copter. If I do locate it I'll throw a flare under
it, and if they try to rise, you burn them. If they don't try to
rise and we can take them alive, so much the better. I'd like to see
a real live ghoul. But otherwise, you burn them! If we lose another
car-corpse, we'll all be out on our ears."
"All right," Kester said. The screen went blank.
Descending the tower ladder, I wondered what kind of a guard detail I
had. Last night, Betz's negligence had cost me a Cadillac. Tonight,
Kester's negligence had very nearly cost me another--and might yet, if
I wasn't careful.
I couldn't understand it. They were both newly-married men (Kester
had applied for a wife the same day Betz had) and, since women were
forbidden to work after marrying, both of them certainly needed the
better wages Cadillac paid. Why should they deliberately jeopardize
their status?
Maybe Betz really hadn't seen or heard anything until it was too late.
Maybe Kester really hadn't been sure that the sound he was hearing was
the turning of a borer.
But I was sure, and the closer I got to Tower 11, the surer I became. I
timed my approach with the swath of the searchlight, made certain there
was plenty of concealment available whenever it passed my way. That
wasn't hard to do, with all the lombardies, the arborvitae, the hills,
dales and gardens that infested the place. But for once the ancient
automakers' passion for landscaping was benefitting me instead of the
ghouls.
Tower 11 was a tripodal skeleton stabbing into the cadaverous face of
the rising moon. It loomed higher and higher above me as I neared the
source of the sound. I swore silently at Kester. He was either stone
deaf and blind as a bat, or a deliberate traitor to the Cadillac cause.
The exhuming was taking place practically under his nose.
I crept beneath the hem of a lombardy curtain and lay in the deep
shadows. I could see the cargo 'copter clearly now. It squatted over a
grave mound less than twenty feet from my hiding place, its rotating
borer protruding from its open belly like an enormous stinger. The
grave mound was already perforated with a score of holes, spaced so
that when the car-casket was drawn upward, the hard-packed earth would
crumble and fall apart.
The borer was now probing for the eye of the casket. Even as I watched
I heard the grind of steel against gun metal, saw the borer reverse its
spiral and rise swiftly into the hold of the 'copter. A bright light
stabbed down into the new hole, was quickly extinguished. I thought
I heard the sound of a breath being expelled in relief, but I wasn't
sure. Shortly thereafter, I heard the almost inaudible hum of a winch
motor, saw the hook dangling on the end of the steel cable just before
it disappeared into the hole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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