Read Ebook: Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life part 1 by Flaubert Gustave

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Ebook has 2391 lines and 78595 words, and 48 pages

"SHADRACH"

Once, in Bible times, three men were cast into a fiery furnace--and lived! Now, on far-off, frozen Titania, three space-bitten Shadrachs faced the same awful test of godship.

The man at the end of the bar was very drunk. That was not, in itself, unusual. Xuerl's Cosmobar, dangling like a leech on the drab outskirts of Mars Central, did not cater to a select clientele. It was not noted for its culture or gentility; it was famed from one end of the System to another as a place where a hard-fisted, full-pursed spaceman, newly in from the mines or out from Earth, could get a weapon or a wench, a bottle or a battle, any or all with equal celerity. And at an instant's notice.

"A Venusian," he mused, "a greenie, a runt--and an Earthman. Like bugs in a rug...."

"Trink?" piped a thin, reedy voice at Chip's elbow. "Trink, ssor?"

Chip shook his head in reply to the Martian barman's query. Damned chrysanthemum! he thought. Damned squeaking, upright chrysanthemum! He would never, so long as he lived, get used to hearing English speech emanating from the curled petals that served as a Redlander's head. Martians tried to look like Earthlings. They braced their soft, pallid bodies in steel uprights, they underwent serious and probably painful operations to give themselves a humanoid appearance, but they still looked--and always would to Chip--like ungainly flowers of madness.

"No," he said. "Not just now, thanks. Later." He returned his gaze to the group at the end of the bar. A new member had joined the quartet. Another Earthman. Warren's eyes became more speculative as the newcomer drew the Jovian aside, queried him briefly, then moved to the drunken man's shoulder.

"Trink?" piped the persistent voice of the barman.

The gasp broke unbidden from his lips. In the din and confusion of Xuerl's Cosmobar it went unnoticed, even as had gone unnoticed by everyone else the momentary byplay he had glimpsed.

Four figures reacted immediately, violently, eagerly. The Venusian, the Uranian, the Jovian--like four minds with but a single thought they formed a wall of flesh around the drunken one. The other Earthman's hand leaped out greedily to catch the bouncing blob on the rebound. But in vain. The drunk had retrieved the object, shoved it into a pocket.

But Chip Warren knew what the object was. It was a ball of ekalastron!

Ekalastron! Most recently discovered, rarest, and most precious of all metals known to man! A metal so unique that up to the time of its discovery there had been no place for it in man's supposedly "complete" periodic table.

A metal that, defying man's previous deliberations on the habits of metals, supplied man with the most valuable servant he had ever known. A metal so light that a child could carry enough in one hand to coat the entire hull of a space-cruiser--yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect the impact of a meteoride or the battering crush of a rotor-gun shell! A metal strong enough to grind diamonds to powder--but so resilient that, when molded and properly treated, it would bounce like a rubber ball!

In all the wide universe, hungry mankind had found less than two tons of this vitally precious new metal. An ounce was worth a prince's ransom; so jealously was each gram weighed, guarded and distributed that the U.S.C.--Universal Science Council--could account for every known ounce of it. Yet here, in the noisy bar of Mars' most infamous refuge for scoundrels, a drunken miner toyed with a chunk the size of a billiard ball!

If Chip Warren's attention had previously been attracted by the oddly-assorted quintet, it was riveted now. Fierce curiosity hunched him forward. Abandoning all shame at eavesdropping, he strained eyes and ears upon the group.

But Chip was watching. And moving on raw instinct, without a thought for the consequences, he surged forward. His arm brushed the surprised Uranian aside, his hand thrust just in time to sweep the doped drink from the miner's lips. Glass shattered on the floor, singing a shrill song. Chip's challenging voice echoed its brittle crispness.

"Hold course a minute, buckoes!" he ordered. "What in space goes on around here?"

Chip thought afterward that never in his life had he ever looked upon such stark, forbidding coldness as that which, in the next moment, flamed upon him from the eyes of the newly arrived Earthman.

Everything about the man was cold, bitter and bleak as the hostile depths of space. His eyes were glacier-gray, his lips thin and bloodless as hoarfrost; the hand he shoved forward to grip Chip's wrist in steely grasp was like ice.

The coldness of death was in his voice, although he spoke with infinite quietude.

Chip shook the man's hand from his wrist. His eyes parried with hot defiance the stranger's frigid calm.

"A moment, sailor!" The man's voice was like a low note struck in warning. "Before you tell what you saw, you might like to know who I am. My name is Blaze Amborg."

"I don't give a portside blast," snarled Chip, "if your name is Lucifer himself. I saw--"

"You haven't been out here long, have you, sailor? Well--that's your misfortune, I fear. Torth!"

He inclined his head gently toward the giant Venusian. The big man rolled forward. His hamlike paws reached for Chip. But fast as he moved, Chip moved faster still; in the split of a second his hand had found his belt. The dull lights of the Cosmobar glinted sallowly on metal that prodded Amborg's middle.

"So that's the way it is, eh?" gritted Chip. "Your bullies do your fighting for you? Well, maybe you're right. I haven't been out here long. But where I come from, men do their own scrapping. Now--tell these scum of yours to keep their distance, or by the Seven Sacred Stars, I'll let ether through you!"

A man could not tell by studying Amborg's features if his lips were white with fear or what. But the ice in his eyes was deeper, more shadowy. And he said, "Back, Torth!"

"That's better!" approved Chip. "And now--come out of it, you!" The drunken man had finally slipped out of the picture. Blissfully unaware of what was going on about him, his head had slumped to the bar. He was asleep, lips loosely agape, breath coming in sodden grunts. Chip grasped the nape of his neck, shook him roughly. "Pull yourself together!" he commanded. "We're getting out of here!"

The man came to with a start, stared at Chip Warren blearily. "W-whuzzup? Whuzzmatter? Don' shake me like that, ole boy. All pals t'gether. All good ole pals...."

His head dropped forward again, and Chip sighed. It was like kicking a pup, he thought, but it had to be done. His rousing slap jarred the drunk to grieved awareness.

That did it. The warning drove its way through the miner's stupor. His head jerked up, his eyes widened, and a hand clawed at his pocket.

For a moment, Chip's guard relaxed. He twisted his head to survey a new and potent danger. And as he did so, a sharp cry burst from Amborg's lips. "Raat 'Aran! Torth!"

Chip whirled back to face immediate trouble. Shapes were plunging down upon him. He wheeled, slipped, tumbled to one side even as the scorching burst of a needle gun seared a hissing path past his shoulder. Someone behind screamed a high, thin scream that died in a choked gurgle....

Then all was madness! The magic word "ekalastron" had wakened the riches-lust of the mob; now the presence of death had roused its blood-lust. In the space of a moment's time, a score of guns were drawn and wildly flaming as the throng charged the bar.

Chip only lived in that moment because he lay helplessly asprawl upon the floor. The hobnailed boots of miners kicked and trampled him, thick bodies struggled, cursed and groaned above him. Once as he tried to scramble to his feet his hand slipped nauseatingly in a pool of freshly spilled and steaming blood.

He was aware that somewhere in the howling mob that fought, not knowing why, and fighting died, the glacier-eyed Amborg strained for sight of him. But the tide of conflict, sweeping over and about them, separated them.

There came a reedy cry in the voice of the Martian barman; the lights went out suddenly, and the room was alive and spiteful with the flames of criss-crossing fire-needles. A questing hand found Chip's throat in the darkness, fingers tightened. But in a flash of fire, Chip saw the figure atop him suddenly crumple, steel clattered aimlessly beside him as his assailant choked and died. Thus close to him walked mad, unreasoning Death.

But he was on his feet again, now, and armed! Chip forced his way toward that spot at the bar where last he had glimpsed the drunken miner. No figure stood there, but his feet stumbled against a yielding body. He stooped--then he blinked as the lights suddenly flared on again.

He looked upon a frightful scene of carnage. Where men had fought, a dozen bodies lay upon the floor like broken things; elsewhere about the room a dozen struggling piles of life, human and humanoid, white, coral and green, Earthborn and spawn of a dozen globes, still fought their purposeless battle. And at the far side of the room--

Amborg!

But Amborg had seen him first. Even as he raised his needle-gun, Chip realized the dousing of the lights, the sudden return of them, had been a trick of Amborg's to gain advantage. The other man had the drop on him ... even now his hand was tightening on the press.

And then, miraculously--

"Hold!" cried a thunderous voice. "'Stay now thine hand from the sword, yea, loose not thine arrow from the bow--else by My might shall I crush thee to the dust, truly My lightnings shall wither thee with fire!' Thus saith my Lord God which is Jehovah!"

A vast, awed silence fell suddenly upon the room, a paralysis seized all forms and held them motionless. Amborg stayed his finger. All eyes sought the doorway. And there, covering the whole of the Cosmobar with the ugliest but most efficient looking piece of private ordnance Chip had seen in his life, stood a man. A tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black; a lean-jawed, hawk-eyed man with tumbling locks of silver and blazing eyes.

A whisper arose from men's lips. A whisper at once respectful and--fearful.

"It's Salvation! Salvation Smith!"

For a long, dramatic moment the ol man stood there in the doorway; then, satisfied that all motion had stopped, he stepped forward into the room. Chip knew, now, who--and whnes, and he smiled with a cunning little air.

P?cuchet could not keep from saying, "One would rather take him for your father!"

"He is my godfather," replied Bouvard carelessly, adding that his baptismal name was Fran?ois-Denys-Bartholem?e.

P?cuchet's baptismal name was Juste-Romain-Cyrille, and their ages were identical--forty-seven years. This coincidence caused them satisfaction, but surprised them, each having thought the other much older. They next vented their admiration for Providence, whose combinations are sometimes marvellous.

"For, in fact, if we had not gone out a while ago to take a walk we might have died before knowing each other."

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