Never Come Midnight by H. L. Gold (libby ebook reader txt) 📖

then, you'd automatically have assumed there were two." He looked down at the floor. "And I wanted you to hate me. We couldn't be friends; otherwise, knowing me better than anyone else alive, you might have guessed...."

"I doubt it," Hubbard said wearily. "Almost anything else would have seemed more likely." Presently he asked, "Weren't you afraid I might investigate?"

Emrys smiled. "What could you find out? After all, I hadn't killed Jan Shortmire."

The smile became a little fixed. "I wouldn't have cared even if you had told someone your suspicions then," Emrys went on doggedly, "because I knew no one would believe you. But now—" he colored—"well, I don't want you to tell Megan Dyall anything ... bad about me. You see, I ... love her."

"I gathered that impression," Hubbard said.

But why does he sound so unhappy about it? Emrys thought angrily. What's wrong with me? Because he was in love, he could not appreciate the irony of that thought.

VI

Peter Hubbard looked at his old friend with the young face and the young body and the eyes that were unhuman—but less so than before. This was a frightful thing that had been done, and by and by he would feel the full horror of it. Right now he was too numb to care. He felt, as Emrys Shortmire must have felt on coming back to Earth, detached and without interest. But I've felt this way before, he thought; it's because I'm old.

"Were you really satisfied with your bargain, Jan?" he asked, almost casually.

"Not at first," the boy admitted, sinking down on the couch and clasping his hands around his knees. So young, so graceful, and so ... unnatural. "It seemed to me then that the Morethans had given me youth and taken away humanity. Because, once I found I was physically capable, I found I didn't really want the things I had craved so much before."

"So they did trick you?" When all was said and done, Hubbard thought, you could never trust an alien life-form, a foreigner.

"No, no! You still don't understand. The way I see it is that ... certain elements in us may not mean anything to them. They don't know they're there, so they wouldn't realize that anything got lost in ... the process."

"Do you think, Jan," Hubbard asked slowly, "that the way you felt—or didn't feel—might not have anything to do with the Morethans at all? That, for all your young body, you are an old man and feel like an old man?"

"Nonsense! I know what it is to feel like an old man, and I know what it is to feel like a young man, and I—I felt like neither."

"When a man has lived a certain number of years," Hubbard said, knowing that envy gave the truth relish, "he is an old man. Age is in the mind and heart, not only in the body."

"That's a lie!" Then Emrys said, more calmly, "If that's so, why did everything change when I met Megan? Because I found then that my emotions had not been lost! I had a feeling for her that I'd never had for another woman—not even for Alissa, I think. I hadn't imagined there could be a woman like Megan in the world, so sweet and amiable and completely feminine." He looked angrily at Hubbard. "You think I'm sentimental, don't you?"

Hubbard tried to smile. "There's nothing wrong with sentiment." But sentimentality was characteristic of an old man's love.

Emrys laughed and hugged his knees. He was overdoing the ingenuousness. Of course he deliberately played the part of a boy young enough to be his own great-great-grandson, because he was wooing a woman young enough to be his own great-great-granddaughter. And Hubbard remembered how he himself had attempted to move briskly before Nicholas Dyall. Emrys Shortmire would not have the physical aches that he'd had as a result, but could there be psychical aches? Could an old man ever actually be young?

Emrys' face grew sober. "I've never touched her, Peter—really touched her, I mean. She's not like other women, you know."

"I know," Hubbard said, remembering back to the time when he, too, had been in love. Only the memory was not tender in him, because he had married the girl and lived with her for nearly seventy years.

"Peter, you aren't listening!"

"I'm sorry," the old man said, waking from his reverie. "What were you saying?"

"I said, do you think Megan would be willing to marry me, if she knew I was older than her great-great-grandfather?"

But there was a more important question that Hubbard could no longer refuse to face. "Jan, what did you give the Morethans in return for what they gave you?"

"You haven't answered my question."

"I can't answer it, because I don't know the girl. But you can answer mine, because you know what you gave the Morethans."

Emrys was silent for a moment; then he laughed. "I gave them my soul," he said lightly. "Like that fellow in the opera."

"I know that. What I'm afraid of is that it wasn't enough. In what form did you give it to them, Jan?"

"You have no right to catechize me like that."

The old man's voice was soft. "I think I have."

Emrys was a long time in answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and dead. "All right, I gave them the blueprints for the space-warp engines. What else did I have to give them in exchange?"

Hubbard expelled a long breath. He had answered this question for himself many minutes before. Still, the shock of confirmation was too great. All hope was gone now. "Perhaps you had a right to sell your own soul, Jan, but you had no right to sell humanity's." His good breeding held up all the way. This man had betrayed the whole of mankind, and so he, Peter Hubbard, reproached him gently for it. Though, come to think of it, what good would savage recrimination—or anything—do?

"But you don't have to worry about it, Peter!" Emrys cried. "Listen, the Morethan technology is so alien, so different from ours, because it's based on mental rather than physical forces, that it'll take centuries before they can acquire the techniques they'll need to build the engines. And they'll have trouble getting the materials. We'll both have been long in our graves by the time they'll reach Earth."

"And that makes it all right? It doesn't matter to you what happens to your own home planet once you are dead?"

The young-looking face was flushed. "Why should it? Does Earth care what happens to me? During the plague, they cursed my name because I invented the star-engines. That's the only time Earth remembered me."

"During the plague, men were insane, Jan," Hubbard said, knowing his own sweet reasonableness was ludicrous under the circumstances, "not responsible for what they said. They don't curse your name any more."

"No, they've forgotten it." Emrys looked at Hubbard with blazing, unhuman eyes. "Why should you expect me to put their welfare before my own?"

"You must, if the race is to survive."

Hubbard expected Emrys to say, "Why should it survive?" but apparently there was a grain of emotion left here. "It will survive. The Morethans are not—" the word seemed to stick in Emrys' throat—"monsters."

"Jan," Hubbard said in a monotone, "eleven years ago, after you came to Earth for your inheritance, I became interested in Morethis—naturally enough, I suppose. I started scanning everything I could lay my hands on, and I learned a great deal about it—as much, I believe, as anyone off Morethis knows. Except, of course, you."

Emrys rose and began to pace the floor. "Nobody really knows anything about Morethis. Most of what has been written is a—a pack of lies. One liar copied from another, and so they perpetuate the lie. Scandal has always sold better than truth!"

Hubbard said, "There is a legend that the Morethans once had limited space travel, though no way of warping space to bring the distant stars closer, since they did not use engines. But there were many stars close to them, and they traveled from system to system, sucking each one dry. Then there were no living planets left in their sector of space, and their engineless ships could not bridge the gap to the next cluster, so they found themselves trapped on a dying planet that revolved around a dying star, and they, as a race, began to die themselves."

Emrys tried to laugh. "Looks like a fine case of poetic justice, but—"

"Wait. I haven't finished. The race did not die completely; it decayed. Certain among the people stayed alive through sucking the lives of the others; certain among them still kept some vestiges of the old traditions and knowledge; certain among them waited."

"Is that the end of your story?"

Hubbard nodded. Emrys' face was ashen. "Well, it's an old wives' tale," he sputtered. "All the Morethans want is to be able to compete on an equal basis with Earth. They don't want to be exploited, nor do they intend to...." As his eyes caught Hubbard's, his voice trailed off. "Anyhow, I'll be dead," he said. "I don't give a damn what happens after I'm dead."

Hubbard didn't believe it. He couldn't. There is no man who has not some love for his own kind, be it ever so little, merely because they look like him.

"You won't tell anybody who I really am?" Emrys asked childishly. "You're still my friend, aren't you?"

Hubbard sighed. Was he still this creature's friend? He didn't know. "Who would believe me?" he finally asked. "And even if they did, what's the use? Nothing can be done. The only thing that's ever protected us from the Morethans is distance. When they reach Earth, they will have already conquered us. Mental powers are always stronger than physical powers at close range."

"That's right." Emrys seemed to be relieved at the idea that the question was out of his hands. "Too late now to do anything about it."

Hubbard nodded. There was no way out that he could see.

"But you do promise not to tell old Dyall that I'm my father instead of me?" Emrys asked anxiously.

"Even if he believed me, he wouldn't care. All he wants is a good match for that great-great-granddaughter of his."

But was that all? As far as money went, Nicholas Dyall was reputed to be the richest man alive. And if he was truly fond of the girl, would he not at least have investigated the young man?

"You're hard!" Emrys complained, but without rancor.

"I have a suspicious nature," Hubbard said thoughtfully. "Perhaps it's the legal mind. At any rate, I don't care for Nicholas Dyall."

"Well, I don't either, but I don't really give a hang what kind of a great-great-grandfather-in-law I'm getting. All I care about is Megan. Do you think it's wrong for me to ask her to marry me?"

"Can't you understand that, at this stage, the girl doesn't matter?"

"No," Emrys said simply. "I cannot imagine her not mattering."

After he had gone, Hubbard still found himself thinking about Nicholas Dyall. In his whole lifetime, the old lawyer had personally known only two men whom society had deemed worthy of its highest honor, the longevity treatment. And these were more than most men had met, for the longevity treatment was given to very few. Both of the two, Dyall and Shortmire, had some defect in their personalities that warped them—all but completely, in Shortmire's case—away from the human virtues.

Was that defect a part of the creative talent that had earned the individual his right to the treatment? Or did it arise as an effect of the treatment itself? Because, if that was the case, then Earth's longevity treatment might be nothing more than a primitive form of the Morethan "process."

Since only straws remained to be grasped at, no one thing Hubbard did would be more futile than any other. And since he had nothing better to do, he might just as well investigate this new avenue. Jan Shortmire had hated Nicholas Dyall. Had Nicholas Dyall hated Jan Shortmire with equal venom? And, if so, had he done anything about it?

VII

A Gong sounded and a mechanical voice announced, "Mr. Peter Hubbard to see Mr. Dyall and Mr. Shortmire."

"Do you mean to say he has the gall to come see us, after the accusations he made against you, Emrys?" Dyall demanded incredulously. "I still can't understand why you sent him an invitation to the wedding, but that he should make a casual social call...!"

"We've come to terms." Emrys smiled. "After all, at his age, he can't be held accountable for everything he says."

"I'm at least fifty years older than he is!" the old engineer almost spat. "And you—do you mean that I am not responsible for what I say?"

Knowing that he was the other man's senior by some twenty years himself, Emrys was malevolently