The Valley of the Flame, Henry Kuttner [ready player one ebook .TXT] 📗

was beyond speech. The other, a slender, bearded man, rather startlingly graceful even in this extremity, lurched toward the door.

“Senhor, senhor,” he murmured, in a soft voice.

Craddock came out to help. He stopped dead still on the threshold, though crowding bodies hid the two arrivals from sight. Raft saw a look of absolute panic come over the Welshman’s face. Then Craddock turned and retreated, and there was the nervous clinking of a bottle.

Bill Merriday’s stolid, intent features were comfortingly normal by contrast. But as Merriday, bending over the aviator, was stripping off the man’s shirt, he suddenly paused.

“I’ll be hanged,” he said. “I know this chap, Brian. Thomas, wait a minute. I’ll have it. Da something… da Fonseca, that’s it! I told you about that mapping expedition that flew in a couple of months ago, when you were in the jungle. Da Fonseca was piloting.”

“Crack-up,” Raft said. “What about the other man?”

Merriday glanced over his shoulder.

“I never saw him before.”

The thermometer read eighty-six, far below normal.

“Shock and exhaustion,” Raft surmised. “We’ll run a stat C.B.C., just in case. Look at his eyes.” He pulled back a lid. The pupils were pin-points.

“I’ll take a look at the other man,” Merriday said, turning. Raft scowled down at da Fonseca, a little uncomfortable, though he could not have said exactly why. Something seemed to have entered the room with the two men, and it was nothing that could be felt tangibly. But it could be sensed.

Frowning, Raft watched Luiz milk a specimen from the patient’s finger. The overhead light fell yellow and unsteady on da Fonseca, upon a glitter of sudden brilliance from something that hung on a chain about his neck. Raft had thought it a religious medal, but now he saw that it was a tiny mirror, no larger than a half-dollar. He picked it up.

The glass was convex, lenticular, and made of a dark, bluish material less like glass than plastic. Raft glimpsed the cloudy, shapeless motion of shadows beneath its surface.

A little shock went through him. The mirror did not reflect his face, though he was staring directly into it. Instead he saw turbulent motion, though there was no such motion in the room. He thought of storm-clouds boiling and driving before a gale. He had the curious, inexplicable feeling of something familiar, an impression, an inchoate mental pattern.

Thomas da Fonseca. He caught the extraordinary impression, for a flashing, brilliant moment, that he was looking into da Fonseca’s eyes. The—the personality of the man was there, suddenly. It was as though the two men were briefly en rapport.

Yet all Raft saw was the driving, cloudy motion in the mirror.

Then the storm-swirl rifted and was driven apart. From the tiny lens in his hand a vibration ran up the nerves of his arm, striking into his brain. He stared down.

Now that the clouds had cleared away, it was not a mirror, but a portrait. A portrait? Then a living portrait, for the face within it moved….

A mirror, after all, then. But no—for that was certainly not his own face that looked back at him out of the small oval.

It was a girl’s face, seen against a background of incredible richness and strangeness that vanished as he looked, because she leaned forward as if into the very mirror itself, her herd blotting out the remarkable background. And it was no painted picture. She moved, she saw—Raft. He drew his breath in sharply.

There was never such a face before. He had no time to see her very clearly, for the whole unbelievable glimpse was gone in an instant. But he would have known her out of a thousand faces if they ever met again.

The look of delicate gayety and wickedness in the small, prim curve of her mouth, the enormous translucent eyes, colored like aquamarines, that looked, for a moment, into his very solemnly above the sweet, malicious, smiling mouth.

There could be no other face like it in the world.

Then the mists rolled between them as they stared. Raft remembered later that he shook the lens passionately in a childish attempt to call her back, shook it as if his own hands could part those clouds again and let him see that brilliantly alive little face, so gay and solemn, so wicked and so sweet.

But she was gone. It had all happened almost between one breath and the next, and he was left standing there staring down at the lens and remembering the tantalizing—oddness—of that face.

An oddness seen too briefly to understand except as something curiously wrong about the girl who had looked into his eyes for one fraction of a second. Her hair had been—odd.

The eyes themselves were almost round, but subtly slanted at the corners, and with a blackness ringing them that was not wholly the black of thick lashes, for a prolonged dark streak had run up from their outer comers a little way, accentuating their slant, and giving a faint Egyptian exoticism to the round, soft, dainty face with its rounded chin. So soft—he remembered that impression clearly. Incredibly soft, she had looked, and fastidious.

And wrong. Racially wrong.

The mirror was blank again, and filled with the trembling fogs. But, very briefly, it had opened upon another world.

CHAPTER II. DRUMBEAT OF DEATH

LUIZ WAS staring at Raft in surprise.

“S’nhor?” Luiz said.

“What?” Raft answered.

“Did you speak?”

“No.” Raft let the lens fall back on da Fonseca’s bare chest.

Merriday was at his side. “The other man won’t let me look at him,” he said worriedly. “He’s stubborn.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Raft said. He went out, trying not to think about that lens, that lovely, impossible face. Subjective, of course, not objective. Hallucination—or self-hypnosis, with the light reflecting in the mirror as a focal point. But he didn’t believe that really.

The bearded man was in Raft’s office, examining a row of bottles on a shelf—fetal specimens. He turned and bowed, a faint mockery in his eyes. Raft was impressed; this was no ordinary backwoods wanderer. There was a courtliness about him, and a smooth-knit, muscular grace that gave the impression of fine breeding in both manners and lineage. He had also an air of hardly concealed excitement and a certain hauteur in his poise which Raft did not like.

“Saludades, s’nhor,” he said, his too-bright eyes dazzling in the light. Fever, perhaps, behind that brilliant stare. His voice was deep, and he spoke with an odd, plaintive undertone that held a distant familiarity. “I am in your debt.”

His Portuguese was faulty, but one didn’t notice that. Raft had a feeling of gaucherie, entirely new to him.

“You can pay it right now,” he said brusquely. “We don’t want the station contaminated, and you may have caught something up-river. Take off your shirt and let’s have a look at you.”

“I am not ill,_ doutor.“_

“You recover fast, then. You were ready to pass out when you came into the hospital.”

The black eyes flashed wickedly. Then the man shrugged

and slipped out of the ragged shirt. Raft was a little startled at the smooth power in his sleek body, the muscles rippling under a skin like brown satin, but rippling very smoothly, so that until he moved you hardly realized they were there.

“I am Paulo da Costa Pereira,” said the man. He seemed faintly amused. “I am a garimpeiro.”

“A diamond-hunter, eh?” Raft slipped a thermometer between Pereira’s lips. “Didn’t know they had diamonds around here. I should think you’d be in the Rio Francisco country.”

There was no response. Raft used his stethoscope, shook his head and tried again. He checked his findings by Pereira’s pulse, but that didn’t help much. The man’s heart wasn’t beating, nor did he apparently have a pulse.

“What the devil!” Raft said, staring. He took out the thermometer and licked dry lips. Da Fonseca’s temperature had been below normal but Pereira’s was so far above normal that the mercury pushed the glass above 108��, the highest the glass tube could register.

Pereira was wiping his mouth delicately. “I am hungry,_ s’nhor”_ he said. “Could you give me some food?”

“I’ll give you a glucose injection,” Raft said, hesitating a little. “Or—I’m not sure. Your metabolism’s haywire. At the rate you’re burning up body-fuel, you’ll be ill.”

“I have always been this way. I am healthy enough.”

“Not if your heart isn’t beating,” Raft said grimly. “I suppose you know that you’re—you’re impossible? I mean, by rights you shouldn’t be alive.”

Pereira smiled.

“Perhaps you don’t hear my heartbeat. I assure you that it’s beating.”

“If it’s that faint, it can’t be pumping any blood down your aorta,” Raft said. “Something’s plenty wrong with you. Lie down on that couch. We’ll need ice-packs to bring your temperature down.”

Pereira shrugged and obeyed. “I am hungry.”

“We’ll take care of that. I’ll need some of your blood, too.”

“No.”

Raft swore, his temper and nerves flaring, “You’re sick. Or don’t you know it?”

“Very well,” Pereira murmured. “But be quick. I dislike being—handled.”

With an effort, Raft restrained an angry retort. He drew the necessary blood into a test-tube and capped it.

“Dan!” he called. There was no answer.

Where the devil was Craddock?

He summoned Luiz and handed him the test-tube. “Give this to_ Doutor_ Craddock. I want a stat C.B.C.” He turned back to Pereira. “What’s the matter with you? Lie back.”

But the diamond-hunter was sitting up, his face alive and alight with a wild, excited elation. The jet eyes were enormous. For a second Raft watched that stare. Then the glow went out of Pereira’s eyes and he lay back, smiling to himself.

Raft busied himself with ice-bags. “What happened up-river?”

“I don’t know,” Pereira said, still smiling. “Da Fonseca blundered into my camp one night. I suppose his plane crashed. He couldn’t talk much.”

“Were you alone?”

“Yes, I was alone.”

That was odd, but Raft let it pass. He had other things on his mind—the insane impossibility of a living man whose heart did not beat. Ice-cubes clinked.

“You a Brazilian? You don’t talk the lingo too well.”

The feverishly brilliant eyes narrowed.

“I have been in the jungle a long time,” the man said. “Speaking other tongues. When you do not use a language, you lose it.” He nodded toward the bottles on the wall. “Yours, doctor?”

“Yes. Fetal specimens. Embryonic studies. Interested?”

“I know too little to be interested. The jungle is my—my province. Though the sources of life—”

He paused.

Raft waited, but he did not go on. The strange eyes closed.

Raft found that his fingers were shaking as he screwed the tops on the ice-bags.

“That thing da Fonseca wears around his neck,” he said, quite softly. “What is it?”

“I had not noticed,” Pereira murmured. “I have had a difficult day. If I might rest, it would be nice.”

Raft grimaced. He stared down at that cryptic, inhuman figure, remembering the odd malformation of the clavicle he had felt during his examination, remembering other things. Some impulse made him say, “One last question. What’s your race? Your ancestors weren’t Portuguese?”

Pereira opened his eyes and showed his teeth in an impatient smile that was near to a snarl.

“Ancestors!” he said irritably. “Forget my ancestors for tonight, doutor. I have come a long way through the jungle, if you must know it. A long, long way, past many interesting sights. Wild beasts, and ruins, and wild men, and the drums were beating all the way.” His voice lowered. “I passed your ancestors chattering and scratching themselves in the trees,” he said in a purring murmur. “And I passed my ancestors, too.” The voice trailed off in an indescribably complacent sound. After a moment of deep silence, he said, “I would like to sleep. May I be alone?”

Raft