I Fight for Mars by E. C. Tubb

Author:E. C. Tubb [Tubb, E. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575107328
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-04-30T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was dark and he was floating on a cloud, a cloud of unutterable softness and unbearably cool. Voices murmured from a tremendous distance, a low flurry of voices, half-heard, half-recognised, yet cool and aloof, like angels discussing the merits of a devil.

“Will he live?”

“I think so, he’s injured of course, badly injured, but I think he will live.”

“Scarred?”

“Maybe.” The voice sounded like a shrug. “Hard to tell with radiation burns.”

“Blind?”

“No. Luckily we’ve saved his eyes; his skin had to go, of course; we’ve put him in saline-hormone and will give him a plastic dressing later when his skin begins to heal.”

“Any other injuries?” The voice sounded worried. “He looked pretty bad when we brought him in; his hands?”

John stirred a little, somehow violently interested.

His hands? His hands!

Desperately he strained his ears, threshed a little and felt the stab of incipient torment. Something touched him, something else sent sharp pain lancing through him, then the voices seemed to go very far away, and pictures painted themselves in living colour against the pressing blackness.

Two hands, seared and burnt, twisted and numb, devoid of skin and with little gobbets of flesh clinging to the white, blood-streaked bone.

Hands which grasped the heavy butts of blasters, skeleton fingers which squeezed the triggers, fleshless claws like the appendages of a thing better dead.

His hands.

Fear surged upwards through the darkness, a light-limned fear, bringing swift pain and mental torment. It rose, met the walls of pressing darkness, struggled in a desperate intensity of life, then slowly, quickly, died.

He forgot the hands.

Voices again, a soft, gentle voice with a haunting familiarity, and a deeper, rougher voice, yet one just as familiar.

“How long?”

“Anytime now. Is he your friend?”

“Yes.” The deep voice paused. “How is he?”

“Fine,” the voice sounded enthusiastic. “Who is he?”

“A friend I brought from Earth, a very good friend.” The voice came nearer, seemed to hover just above him.

“I would be sorry if he died.”

“Died?” The second voice, the higher, softer voice, laughed. “He won’t die. Look at him, why he’ll be up and working before you know it.”

The soft voice came nearer, seemed to come very close, and something like a butterfly touched his eyelid.

He opened his eyes.

He lay, like a thing of wood, like a man struck suddenly by some swift paralysis, like a man who sees something he cannot believe. He stared upwards with hungry eyes, and even as one part of his mind argued with cold logic that what he saw was-impossible, his heart warmed with the knowledge that such things could be.

“Madge,” he whispered. “Madge.”

She stared at him with the same wide brown eyes, the same small piquant features, the soft curve of chin and brow, the same full freshness of lips touched with the colour of roses. Her hair was short, close-cut and clustered at the nape of her neck in tight curls. Her skin was tanned a golden brown, flecked with tiny spots of trapped sunlight, and around her hovered a clean sweetness, wonderful to see and feel.

She smiled, and his heart tightened with remembrance.

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