The MOON that VANISHED
a novelet by
LEIGH BRACKETT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories October 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
Down to the Darkling Sea
The stranger was talking about him—the tall stranger who was a longway from his native uplands, who wore plain leather and did not belongin this swamp-coast village. He was asking questions, talking, watching.
David Heath knew that, in the same detached way in which he realizedthat he was in Kalruna's dingy Palace of All Possible Delights, thathe was very drunk but not nearly drunk enough, that he would never bedrunk enough and that presently, when he passed out, he would be tossedover the back railing into the mud, where he might drown or sleep itoff as he pleased.
Heath did not care. The dead and the mad do not care. He lay withoutmoving on the native hide-frame cot, the leather mask covering thelower part of his face, and breathed the warm golden vapour thatbubbled in a narghil-like bowl beside him. Breathed, and tried tosleep, and could not. He did not close his eyes. Only when he becameunconscious would he do that.
There would be a moment he could not avoid, just before his druggedbrain slipped over the edge into oblivion, when he would no longer beable to see anything but the haunted darkness of his own mind, and thatmoment would seem like all eternity. But afterward, for a few hours, hewould find peace.
Until then he would watch, from his dark corner, the life that went onin the Palace of All Possible Delights.
Heath rolled his head slightly. By his shoulder, clinging with itshooked claws to the cot frame, a little bright-scaled dragon crouchedand met his glance with jewel-red eyes in which there were peculiarsympathy and intelligence. Heath smiled and settled back. A nervousspasm shook him but the drug had relaxed him so that it was not severeand passed off quickly.
No one came near him except the emerald-skinned girl from the deepswamps who replenished his bowl. She was not human and therefore didnot mind that he was David Heath. It was as though there were a wallaround him beyond which no man stepped or looked.
Except, of course, the stranger.
Heath let his gaze wander. Past the long low bar where the commonseamen lay on cushions of moss and skins, drinking the cheap fierythul. Past the tables, where the captains and the mates sat,playing their endless and complicated dice games. Past the Nahali girlwho danced naked in the torchlight, her body glimmering with tinyscales and as sinuous and silent in motion as the body of a snake.
The single huge room was open on three sides to the steaming night. Itwas there that Heath's gaze went at last. Outside, to the darkness andthe sea, because they had been his life and he loved them.
Darkness on Venus is not like the darkness of Earth or Mars. The planetis hungry for light and will not let it go. The face of Venus neversees the sun but even at night the hope and the memory of it are there,trapped in the eternal clouds.
The air is the colour of indigo and it carries its own pale glow. Heathlay watching how the slow hot wind made drifts of li