The Skull Read Online Free PDF Page A

the present,
where the Speaker waited? He could escape, of course—
    Escape?
    He turned toward the skull. There it was, his skull, yellow with age.
Escape? Escape, when he had held it in his own hands?
    What did it matter if he put it off a month, a year, ten years, even
fifty? Time was nothing. He had sipped chocolate with a girl born a
hundred and fifty years before his time. Escape? For a little while,
perhaps.
    But he could not
really
escape, no more so than anyone else had ever
escaped, or ever would.
    Only, he had held it in his hands, his own bones, his own death's-head.
    They
had not.
    He went out the door and across the field, empty handed. There were a
lot of them standing around, gathered together, waiting. They expected a
good fight; they knew he had something. They had heard about the
incident at the fountain.
    And there were plenty of police—police with guns and tear gas, creeping
across the hills and ridges, between the trees, closer and closer. It
was an old story, in this century.
    One of the men tossed something at him. It fell in the snow by his
feet, and he looked down. It was a rock. He smiled.
    "Come on!" one of them called. "Don't you have any bombs?"
    "Throw a bomb! You with the beard! Throw a bomb!"
    "Let 'em have it!"
    "Toss a few A Bombs!"
*
    They began to laugh. He smiled. He put his hands to his hips. They
suddenly turned silent, seeing that he was going to speak.
    "I'm sorry," he said simply. "I don't have any bombs. You're mistaken."
    There was a flurry of murmuring.
    "I have a gun," he went on. "A very good one. Made by science even more
advanced than your own. But I'm not going to use that, either."
    They were puzzled.
    "Why not?" someone called. At the edge of the group an older woman was
watching. He felt a sudden shock. He had seen her before. Where?
    He remembered. The day at the library. As he had turned the corner he
had seen her. She had noticed him and been astounded. At the time, he
did not understand why.
    Conger grinned. So he
would
escape death, the man who right now was
voluntarily accepting it. They were laughing, laughing at a man who had
a gun but didn't use it. But by a strange twist of science he would
appear again, a few months later, after his bones had been buried under
the floor of a jail.
    And so, in a fashion, he would escape death. He would die, but then,
after a period of months, he would live again, briefly, for an
afternoon.
    An afternoon. Yet long enough for them to see him, to understand that he
was still alive. To know that somehow he had returned to life.
    And then, finally, he would appear once more, after two hundred years
had passed. Two centuries later.
    He would be born again, born, as a matter of fact, in a small trading
village on Mars. He would grow up, learning to hunt and trade—
    A police car came on the edge of the field and stopped. The people
retreated a little. Conger raised his hands.
    "I have an odd paradox for you," he said. "Those who take lives will
lose their own. Those who kill, will die. But he who gives his own life
away will live again!"
    They laughed, faintly, nervously. The police were coming out, walking
toward him. He smiled. He had said everything he intended to say. It was
a good little paradox he had coined. They would puzzle over it, remember
it.
    Smiling, Conger awaited a death foreordained.
* * *