“It was no mistake,” said West. “I did it on purpose.”
“Take it easy, Mr. West,” said Cartwright. “Don’t do anything that might make me pull the trigger. Because I have a gun on you. Dead center on you, West, and I never miss.”
“I’ll give you odds,” said West, “that I can get you before you can pull the trigger.”
“Now, Mr. West,” said Cartwright, “let’s not get hotheaded about this. Sure, you pulled a fast one on us. You tried to muscle in and you almost sold us, although eventually we would have tripped you up. And I admire your guts. Maybe we can work it out so no one will get killed.”
“Start talking,” West told him.
“It was too bad about Rosie,” said Cartwright, “and I really hold that against you, West, for we could have used Rosie to good advantage. But after all, the work is started on the other planets and we still have Stella. Our students are well grounded … they can get along without instructions for a little while and maybe by the time we need to get in contact with them again we can find another one to replace our Rosie.”
“Quit wandering around,” said West. “Let’s hear what you have in mind.”
“Well,” said Cartwright, “we’re getting awfully short-handed. Belden’s dead and Darling’s dead and if Robertson isn’t dead by now he will be very shortly. For after he took Stella to Earth, he tried to desert, tried to run away. And that would never do, of course. He might tell folks about us and we can’t let anyone do that. For we are dead, you see. …”
He chuckled, the chuckle rolling through the darkness.
“It was a masterpiece, West, that broadcast. I was the last man alive and I told them what had happened. I told them the spacetime continuum had ruptured and things were coming through. And I gurgled … I gurgled just before I died.”
“You didn’t really die, of course,” West said, innocently.
“Hell, no. But they think I did. And they still wake up screaming, thinking how I must have died.”
Ham, thought West. Pure, unadulterated ham. A jokester who would maroon a man to die on a lonely moon. A man who held a gun in his fist while he bragged about the things he’d done … about how he had outwitted Earth.
“You see,” said Cartwright, “I had to make them believe that it really happened. I had to make it so horrible that the government would never make it public, so horrible they’d close the planet with an iron-tight ban.”
“You had to be alone,” said West.
“That’s right, West. We had to be alone.”
“Well,” said West. “You’ve almost got it now. There’s only two of you alive.”
“The two of us,” Cartwright said, “and you.”
“You forget, Cartwright,” said West. “You’re going to kill me. You’ve got a gun pointed at me and you’re all set to pull the trigger.”
“Not necessarily,” said Cartwright. “We might make a deal.”
I’ve got him now, thought West. I know exactly where he is. I can’t see him, but I know where he is. And the payoff is in a minute. It’ll be one of us or the other.
“You aren’t much use to us,” said Cartwright, “but we might need you later. You remember Langdon?”
“The one that got lost,” said West.
Cartwright chuckled. “That’s it, West. But he wasn’t lost. We gave him away. You see there was a—a—well, something, that could use him for a pet and so we made it a present of Langdon.”
He chuckled again. “Langdon didn’t like the idea too well, but what were we to do?”
“Cartwright,” West said, evenly, “I’m going for my gun.”
“What’s that—” said Cartwright, but the other words were blotted out by the hissing of his gun, firing even as he talked.
The beam hissed into the wall at the foot of the staircase, a spot that had been covered only a split second before by West’s head.
But West had dropped to a crouch almost as he spoke and now his own gun was in his fist, tilting up, solid in his hand. His thumb pressed the activator and then slid off.
Something dragged itself with heavy thumps across the floor and in the stillness between the bumps, West heard the rasp of heavy breaths.
“Damn you, West,” said Cartwright. “Damn you. …”
“It’s an old trick, Cartwright,” said West, “that business of talking to a man just before you kill him. Throwing him off guard, practically ambushing him.”
Came a sound of cloth dragging over cloth, the whistling of painful breath, the thump of knees and elbows on the floor.
Then there was silence.
And a moment later something in some far corner squeaked and ran on pattering, rat-sounding feet. Then the silence again.
The rat-feet were still, but there was another sound, a faint shout as if someone far away were shouting … from somewhere outside the building, from somewhere outside … from outside.
West crouched close against the floor, huddling there, the muzzle of the gun resting on the carpet.
Outside … outside … outside. …
The words hammered in his head.
Outside of what, he asked, but he knew the answer now. He knew where he had seen the picture of the thing that had slept in the chair and the other thing that squatted on the bedpost. And he knew the sound of chirping and of chittering and of running feet.
Outside … outside … outside. …
Outside this world, of course.
He raised his head and looked at the painting, and the tree still glowed softly with its inner light, and from within it came a sound, a faint thudding sound, the sound of running feet.
The shout came again and the man was running down the path inside the painting. A man who ran and waved his arms and shouted.
The man was Nevin.
Nevin was in the painting, running down the path, his padding feet raising little puffs of dust along the pebbled path.
West raised the pistol and his hand was trembling so that the muzzle weaved back and forth and then described a circle.
“Buck fever,” said
