Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/9

Rh erable wine after all, so a good bit of it came up. Then I did the same by Gibbs. I walked them around a bit then, first one and then the other. After a while, both of them came to. I sank down just where I was and lay still for so long I thought maybe it would be for ever; but after another while, the three of us helped each other back to what I may call camp. We told our story, too, just as I am writing it down. Gibbs and Lisa supplied what I didn't know about.

It was not a suicide pact. They had had an unusually bitter quarrel—and had each felt that nothing but murder would make them feel better. We are all so overwrought, here, and they the worst of us. Gibbs then had cut Lisa's wrist, because he wanted to hurt her more. But he went to sleep himself about the time he started, and had only scratched the surface.

They are doing very nicely today.

And I—to think I have saved them—for God knows what fate! At best, another death. Perhaps it was well done. I, Michael Sydney, scientific explorer, delver into hidden secrets and hidden places—I am up against ultimate values which are beyond my judging.

I want, for some reason, to find Valerie Dorn, whom I cannot see from where I am sitting.

I dislike Valerie. I should like to know why I dislike her so much. We are highly antagonistic, and I should like to analyze that

But—another writing will do for that. I want to know where she is, to talk to her. I want, I suppose, before both of us are gone for ever from this earth, to change her. I don't know why it should matter, but it does. There is something about Valerie Dorn that I want to break and shatter—as Gibbs wanted to cut Lisa's wrist before he died. But I dislike Valerie, and everything about her, and the thing between us is a purely mental thing.

Valerie!

I meant to call her, not to write her name. The sun is near the horizon, and the swift red and black of the tropic sunset-fading-into-night is upon us. Before the lurid darkness descends, I want her with the others—safe and where I can see her.

N PERUSING diaries of the desperate class I have always thought it the height of idiocy to read the calendar headings: "August, 1940."

For us, for the present, Time is dead. As a matter of fact, I know it is still August. It must be—but that other August in which we sailed the south seas and expected our voyage to follow a certain set and expected course is millennia ago. Einstein's space-time curve has thrown us off. Of course I mean this figuratively; we have had such dizzying events in the last hours that all of us have strange feelings—a sort of mental wandering that had heretofore spared us, has dizzied our minds.

But I want to make this a straight narration.

Last evening, then, as the hour of sunset swooped down out of the sky, I went in search of Valerie. I found her soon enough, seated in a lonely place she frequents behind a sort of pinnacle of rock, where she has what privacy the rock affords.

Valerie is needlessly conceited. I, for instance, have done what few could dream of; Valerie has never done anything noteworthy that I know of. She is unusual, and her thoughts are unusual; but neither she nor her thoughts are worth much. That is why I do not like her.

I invaded her sacred privacy.

"Come back to the others. The rock gets lonely—desolately lonely, when the daylight fades," I told her.

She turned her strange eyes upon me.