Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

“No, Doctor, it is not insubordination. You are not my military superior. You are a civilian of whom I am in charge. And, Doctor, you are trying my patience, as well as delaying me in the performance of my assigned mission.”

“You and that arrogant West Point bastard, Corbett, must be in this together. I know how you all seem to be in awe of the pig, worship him almost. That’s why you’re so willing to murder me; because you know that would make him happy. Isn’t that right, Cabell?” White patches of foam had formed at the comers of the scientist’s mouth and flecks of spittle flew with his excited words.

Toe in stirrup, Cabell swung up on his mount, settled in his saddle, then reined about to face the furious Braun again. There was an edge of anger in his voice as he answered this latest calumny.

“No, again, Dr. Braun. If the major wanted you dead, I am convinced that he is man enough to make you dead with no help from me or any other Broomtown man, trooper or noncom. I have served with the major for most of my life and I have seen him kill many men, but only in combat or in mercy. He is not a murderer.”

The emphasis was not lost on Braun. “ He is not? Meaning that I am? Is that what you mean? Is that what that damned, lying bastard Corbett told you?”

Cabell shook his head and said, blandly, “No, dear Doctor, that is what you told me, told me and everyone else in the column, over and over again. You told us all how and why and when you murdered Dr. Arenstein.”

“Well, you won’t be able to hold that story over my head, too, damn you!” With the speed of a striking viper, Braun had unsnapped his belt holster, drawn his pistol and palmed back the side. Before Cabell could do more than open his mouth, Braun had leveled the big weapon and fired at point-blank range.

Cabell had been on his left side. Old Johnny was on his right. As the scientist turned toward the Ganik, bringing the smoking pistol back down to the horizontal, wise old Johnny moved every bit as fast as had Braun a second earlier. At the same moment he ducked low in his saddle, he whipped out one of his wickedly barbed darts from the quiver at his pommel and cast it underhanded. Although his aim was spoiled by an unexpected movement of his horse, the sharp-pointed missile struck the berserk scientist high in the thigh of his good leg. It sank deep, grating on bone, and the excruciating agony of it not only caused Braun’s next shot to fly wide of his intended victim but caused the heavy recoil of the weapon to tear it from his hand.

Homer, returning with the runaway, heard the shots, let go the lead rope and spurred around the turn of the track to see Sergeant Cabell stretched on the track in a posture possible only to the dead, Braun reeling in his saddle with the thick haft of a Ganik dart wobbling out from his thigh, and old Johnny, the supposedly tamed wild man, in the very act of pulling another of those darts from his quiver.

Drawing a completely logical but completely erroneous conclusion from the testimony of his eyes, Horner jerked his rifle out of the scabbard and had just released the safety catch when Johnny regretfully buried a dart point in the trooper’s chest. The shot that Homer’s finger squeezed off took the tip off the near ear of Braun’s mule, and that beast immediately decided that it would be healthier farther away from this place. He headed south along the track at a full, jarring gallop, with Braun jouncing and screaming in the saddle to which he was securely tied.

That had been the last that old Johnny Skinhead Kilgore had seen of the mad scientist.

When the Ganik had collected the weapons, gear and effects of Cabell and Horner—as he had seen Corbett and Gumpner do—rounded up the mounts and the spares and calmed them somewhat, he had headed back up the track toward the camp.

When Johnny had finished his tale, Corbett shook his head slowly and sadly. “It’s my fault, much of it. I should never have told Cabell to rearm that murdering bastard. Hell, if I had just let him die here, instead of two days farther south, Cabell and Horner would still be alive.”

“Stop it, sir,” said Gumpner. “.You did what you thought was right, was the best course. Besides old Johnny here says you were already so sick that morning they set out you couldn’t stand up. Like I’ve heard you say many times before, you can’t hold any mistakes against a man or an officer who made those mistakes when he has badly hurt… or sick, and you sure were, sir—we all were, that day.”

With Johnny hunting and foraging for them until they were well enough to do such things themselves, Corbett kept the unit in the camp for almost a month longer. But when he was certain that all of the men were back in top physical form, he put them back in their saddles and, after crossing back over the ridges to the track, set their faces south, toward Broomtown.

The march was uneventful until they reached the spot where the murder of Cabell had occurred. Although the scavengers had left no trace of any body, Corbett still had them put up a hand-carved wooden marker for Cabell and Homer. Then he warned them all to keep a sharp eye out for Braun’s body or any other trace of him, but such was not found, and they did not discover exactly why until they had at last reached Broomtown base.

” Jay ? Jay Corbett, is that really you?” Dr. David Sternheimer’s voice crackled over the transceiver in the commo center at Broomtown base. “But how can it be? Harry Braun swore you were dead, killed in a landslide or rockfall or something like that, away up north somewhere. What the hell is going on, Jay?”

“Doctor… David,” said the officer cautiously, not knowing just who else might be in the commo room at the Center, “I think that you should fly up here at once. We need to talk, you and I, privately.”

“Jay, I’m very busy just now, and—”

Corbett interrupted the director. “How much of what really went on up north has Braun told you, David? Not much, I’d be willing to bet. Has he told you, for instance, that although we lost the pack train—most of it—we still may be able to reclaim most of the devices and metals and maybe even the books?”

Center Director David Sternheimer arrived by copter some two and a half hours later. But he had to introduce himself to the waiting officer, for he was in a new and quite young body—no more than twenty years old, blond, blue-eyed, tall and rather handsome in a beefy way.

When they two were at last alone in Corbett’s Broomtown office, the director said, “Okay, Jay, what happened up there? Harry was brought in here more dead than alive by a bunch of friendlies from up northwest of here. They said they’d found him tied to the saddle of a dying mule, recognized his gear and the mule’s brand as being Broomtown, and dragged him in on a travois. He was too bad off when he first arrived to say much of anything—with one leg gangrenous to up well above the knee and the other eaten up with infection its whole length from a peculiar barbed iron spearpoint in his thigh.

“Since he transferred to a new body and returned to the Center, he’s been amazingly close-mouthed and uncommunicative, for a person like him, anyway. You know how garrulous a gascon he has always been. He has given me, however, with much prodding, three different versions of the same story.

“What it all boils down to is this: You botched the setting of the charges so that the eruption, when it came, was days late and far more violent than anyone had expected. As a result of this, the pack train and most of the men were lost beyond any hope of recovery, and you died with them.

“He says that Erica then took charge, since his leg was broken at that time, reorganized the survivors and headed back down here. But he says that she was killed—or captured, depending upon which version he’s telling—by a tribe of savages who killed most of the other survivors at that time—or at a later time, or at an earlier time, here again dependent on which of his versions we’re using. He says that they are the ones who speared his right thigh and that they pursued him almost to the place where he was found by those friendlies.