Skeleton Crew

It was a large brown hand, wavery, made of sand. It simply reached up, in defiance of the wind, and smothered the momentary glitter of the dart. Then the sand fell back with a heavy thrrrrap. No hand. Impossible to believe there had been. But they had all seen it.

"Giddy-hump," the captain said in an almost conversational voice.

Excellent Montoya fell on his knees. "Aidy-May-for-Cry, bit-gat come! Saw-hoh got belly-gat-for-Cry!—" Numbly, Shapiro realized Montoya was saying a rosary in pidgin.

Up on the dune, Rand was jumping up and down, shaking his fists at the sky, screeching thinly in triumph.

A hand. It was a HAND. He's right; it's alive, alive, alive—

"Indie!" the captain said sharply to Montoya. "Cannit! Gat!" Montoya shut up. His eyes touched on the capering figure of Rand and then he looked away. His face was full of superstitious horror nearly medieval in quality.

"Okay," the captain said. "I've had enough. I quit. We're going." He shoved two buttons on his dashboard. The motor that should have swiveled him neatly around so he faced up the gangplank again did not hum; it squealed and grated. The captain cursed. The burn shifted again.

"Captain!" Gomez. In a panic.

The captain slammed in another button and the treads began to move backward up the gangplank.

"Guide me," the captain said to Shapiro. "I got no fucking rearview mirror. It was a hand, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"I want to get out of here," the captain said. "It's been fourteen years since I had a cock, but right now I feel like I'm pissing myself." Thrrap! A dune suddenly collapsed over the gangway. Only it wasn't a dune; it was an arm.

"Fuck, oh fuck," the captain said.

On his dune, Rand capered and screeched.

Now the threads of the captain's lower half began to grind. The mini-tank of which the captain's head and shoulders were the turret now began to judder backward.

"What—" The treads locked. Sand splurted out from between them.

"Pick me up!" the captain bawled to the two remaining androids. ' 'Now! RIGHT NOW!" Their tentacles curled around the tread sprockets as they picked him up—he looked ridiculously like a faculty member about to be tossed in a blanket by a bunch of roughhousing fraternity boys. He was thumbing the communicator.

"Gomez! Final firing sequence! Now! Now!" The dune at the foot of the gangplank shifted. Became a hand. A large brown hand that began to scrabble up the incline.

Shrieking, Shapiro bolted from that hand.

Cursing, the captain was carried away from it.

The gangplank was pulled up. The hand fell off and became sand again. The hatchway rise closed. The engines howled. No time for a couch; no time for anything like that. Shapiro dropped into a crash-fold position on the bulkhead and was promptly smashed flat by the acceleration. Before unconsciousness washed over him, it seemed he could feel sand grasping at the trader with muscular brown arms, straining to hold them down—Then they were up and away.

Rand watched them go. He was sitting down. When the track of the trader's jets was at last gone from the sky, he turned his eyes out to the placid endlessness of the dunes.

"We got a '34 wagon and we call it a woody," he croaked to the empty, moving sand. "It ain't very cherry; it's an oldy but a goody." Slowly, reflectively, he began to cram handful after handful of sand into his mouth. He swallowed... swallowed... swallowed. Soon his belly was a swollen barrel and sand began to drift over his legs.

 

 

The Reaper's Image

 

"We moved it last year, and quite an operation it was, too," Carlin said as they mounted the stairs. "Had to move it by hand, of course. No other way. We insured it against accident with Lloyd's before we even took it out of the case in the drawing room. Only firm that would insure for the sum we had in mind." Spangler said nothing. The man was a fool. Johnson Spangler had learned a long time ago that the only way to talk to a fool was to ignore him.

"Insured it for a quarter of a million dollars," Carlin resumed when they reached the second-floor landing. His mouth quirked in a half-bitter, half-humorous line. "And a pretty penny it cost, too." He was a little man, not quite fat, with rimless glasses and a tanned baldhead that shone like a varnished volleyball. A suit of armor, guarding the mahogany shadows of the second-floor corridor, stared at them impassively.