Never Come Midnight by H. L. Gold (phonics reading books TXT) đź“•
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- Author: H. L. Gold
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Well, there was no hurry; he would sleep on it. He was mistaken. In the morning, before he had even started to decide upon any course of action, the front desk called to announce that a Mr. Shortmire wished to see him.
"Very well," the old lawyer said wearily into the machine, to the machine, for it was the Dyall itself speaking. "Send him up."
A short while later, there was a rap on the door. "Come in," Hubbard called.
The door slid open. A man entered, a tawny golden youth with eyes like burnished metal. "Do you know who I am, Peter?"
"Of course," Hubbard said, faintly disgusted, since he considered melodrama vulgar. "You're Emrys Shortmire."
"You're wrong," the man said. "I'm Jan Shortmire."
V
Emrys Shortmire had gone home the night Dyall had shown him the portrait of his long-dead wife, and Emrys had dreamed, not of Megan Dyall, but of Alissa Embel, Megan's great-great-grandmother, whom he had wanted a hundred years before, and who had married Nicholas Dyall. Consciously, he had forgotten her, but at the back of his mind, she had, for over a century, walked hand in hand with his hatred.
That night he understood what he had not realized then. He had completed the engines with which he had been tinkering for years with a real vengeance. He had taken the first starship out into space himself—when no one had faith in his engines, least of all himself—merely "to show her" what a great man he was, even if he died in the showing. In his spite, he had opened up the stars for mankind.
And when he returned, years later, he found that Dyall, too, had stopped tinkering and had changed the pattern of his gadgets to one more acceptable to the public taste. Before, they had operated quite satisfyingly, but they had not been salable in the shape he had given them, and no manufacturer had been interested in leasing the patents. Now that he had yielded, manufacturers were falling all over themselves to get the right to produce his machines.
Dyall's was not as soul-stirring a success as Shortmire's—he did not inspire cheering crowds and parades—but a more enduringly popular one. The Shortmire engines carried humanity to the stars, but it was the Dyall machines that cooked humanity's dinners and kept its houses clean. So humanity respected Jan Shortmire and took Nicholas Dyall to its collective heart.
Emrys awakened, remembering all this and rigid with loathing for Nicholas Dyall, and for the world which had allowed Nicholas Dyall to take from him something he had wanted. Something which had, as soon as he'd known for sure he'd lost it forever, become what he wanted most. And also he hated the world which had given Alissa Embel to Dyall and had then proceeded to heap on him in addition every honor Jan Shortmire himself had won in an effort to make up for what he'd lost. Jan Shortmire had risked his life in space; Nicholas Dyall had sat comfortably in his chair—and both were equally honored.
Then Emrys—as Emrys—caught hold of himself. It was true that originally there had been injustice. But it had been righted and so there was no more reason to hate Dyall. I have a second chance, but he will have none. I will live out another full lifetime, and I will have Megan, too, and he'll die in a few years. And as for the world, I have already revenged myself on it in advance.
He got up and pulled a spun-metal robe about him, amethyst and sable—a gift from Morethis. There was always a costly gift on his birthday, either out of kindness or cruelty, together with a vial of the golden capsules.
What a pity, he thought, as he went downstairs, that Dyall and the world both would never know the truth: that Jan Shortmire had no son, that Emrys and Jan Shortmire were one.
The Morethans first came to Jan Shortmire when, approaching his natural old age, he had traveled as a visitor to their planet—largely because old men did not go to Morethis—and they had made him their offer. He had laughed in their dark and exquisite faces.
"My own government will give me fifty years more of life," he said, for he had heard, during the voyage out, that he would be on the next honors list. "What need do I have of you?"
"We can give you far more than fifty years," they'd told him. "And youth, besides."
At that, he had stopped laughing, but still he had not accepted their offer, for many reasons ... doubt and fear, perhaps some shreds of honor, and certainly, since he was a man of science, skepticism.
Then, when Shortmire was nearing the end of those fifty extra years which had, indeed, been granted him by a grateful Earth government—together with a plaque, suitably inscribed—he had received a gift. It was one of those great crystalline prisms from Morethis that were so fashionable on Earth as lighting fixtures, not because they saved fuel—for one such prism would cost ten lifetimes of fuel—but because they gave a light no Earthborn device could give, making the old look young, the stupid wise, and, most important of all, the ugly beautiful.
Shortmire looked into the lambent depths, wondering who had sent him so costly and so useless a gift. Suddenly the flame vitrified into a face that flashed up at him from the crystal—a face that was beautiful in its horror, and horrible in its beauty. He closed his eyes, but when he opened them, the iridescent eyes were still there, mocking him for his cowardice.
"I am Uvrei," a deep voice of tingling sweetness said, "god among gods and man among men. I bring you greetings from Morethis, Jan Shortmire."
Shortmire knew well enough what Uvrei must want, for the Morethans' long-ago offer had risen of late to the top of his thoughts. They could not do what they claimed, he had tried to reassure himself, whenever the memory returned; it was a trick which he had been clever enough not to fall for. But part of his mind did not believe this, and that part was glad to see Uvrei.
"What do you want of me?" he demanded.
The Morethan smiled, and each glittering tooth was a fiery brilliant. "The same as before, on the same terms," he said, offering no enticements. The man who would accept such an offer would provide his own.
If they were capable of doing this ... thing with the crystal, then they might also have other powers. So Shortmire could no longer pretend that what they offered him was impossible. On the other hand, what they required of him in return was truly terrible. Could they really do what they said?
After all, my world has not done overmuch for me. Others, like Nicholas Dyall, have wealth and power and.... He would not let himself think of Alissa Dyall, since she must long be dead, of old age, if nothing else. The last he had heard of her was when she and Dyall had announced their wedding date. Then he had taken the ship fitted out with the engines everyone said would not work, and he had fled into space. When he had come back, no one had spoken of her, and gradually, in his new-found importance, he had to some degree forgotten her, though he never forgot Dyall.
Pity to think of Alissa as having grown old. Even more of a pity to think of himself as having grown old, for he could see that in every mirror he passed.
"You're sure you can give me youth as well as life?" he asked.
"Not only youth, but perpetual youth," Uvrei assured him. "Youth such as you did not know even when you were young."
But Shortmire was still suspicious. Even if the Morethans could do what they said, how did he know they would? An alien concept of honor might have no reference to the terrestrial one. "How do I know I can trust your word?"
Uvrei's face grew black, literally black, and the crystal shivered until, Emrys thought, it would split. And he shivered, too, knowing in the fine nerves and little muscles of his body what would happen to him at the final shivering. A fear filled him then that he had never known before, not even when he faced space for the first time, and in the midst of that fear came the thought that, if he truly hated Earth, this was the most artistically nasty revenge he could take.
The crystal trembled to stillness as Uvrei's face paled to composure. "If you were not an Earthman, Jan Shortmire," he said, "we would not have needed you, nor you us. And an Earthman could not be expected to know that the words you have just spoken are the insult that, on Morethis, is deadlier than death; for the word of an immortal—no matter to whom or what he gives it—is as sacred and enduring as he himself."
"I apologize," Shortmire said quickly, "for my ignorance."
"And I forgive you," Uvrei declared, as grandly as if he were a god, "because of that ignorance. Moreover, since you cannot help your racial deficiencies, I will make this bargain with you. Come to Morethis. There we will give you the life and youth we promised. Then, when you are satisfied that we have given you what you desire, you will give us what we desire."
Not having been too honorable a man in his own hundred and fifty-five years, Jan Shortmire still could not believe that the Morethans would act in all honor. However, even the remote possibility that they would play fair was strong temptation for an ardent man pushing death. So he had agreed. He had wound up his affairs and made his will in favor of "his son." Then he had left Earth to go to Morethis, to die as Jan Shortmire and he resurrected as Emrys Shortmire.
The Morethans had kept their word, though there were times when he wished they had not. For no phoenix casting itself into the fire to burn alive in agony, so that it might rise again, young and strong and purified, from the ashes of its own dead self, could have suffered the excruciating torment of both mind and body that he suffered as, little by little, he was made young again.
Uvrei had warned him that this would happen. "To become one of us, you must be capable of all-endurance." So, for three years, he had lived on the miasmic planet, suffering unending, unbearable pain—not only his, but of the others whose lives went to make his new life. Slowly, agonizingly, these were stirred into the shrieking cauldrons of his body, until they blended and melted and coalesced to become his new shape.
Then Uvrei had led him ceremoniously to a reflecting glass and shown him Emrys Shortmire—a boy far more handsome than the boy Jan Shortmire had been, though, at the same time, his twin. The only thing not quite human about Emrys Shortmire was his eyes, and how could they be human after what they had seen? But he would forget all that once he was back on Earth, forget the payment that had been exacted—and prepare to live his new life to the full.
All this Emrys Shortmire told Peter Hubbard in the quiet of the expensive hotel room. It was pleasant to be able to unburden himself at last. For the past eleven years, there had been a secret side of him that must always walk apart, even from Megan. Now there was someone who could know the whole of him, and he was grateful to Hubbard for having come back to Earth.
But Hubbard sat there staring with so fixed a gaze that, for a moment, Emrys thought he was dead. Then he realized that it was only shock; all this had been too much for so old a man. Selfishly, he had heaped his burden upon another, without asking whether that other was willing, or able, to share it.
"Peter," he began, "I'm sorry...." not quite sure for what he was apologizing. He could not have trusted the old man at the beginning, just as he had to trust him now. But of course he was apologizing to Peter Hubbard, as the representative of humanity, for what he himself had done to Earth.
He began to give unasked-for explanations. "I deliberately made you suspect I killed my father, because if you suspected one of us had done away with the other, why,
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