To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer Read Free Book Online Page A

lead in the defense.
    Instead, he said, "Open it yourself," and turned away. The others hesitated. They had seen sad smelled the food. Kazz was drooling. But Burton said, "Look at that mob. There'll be a fight here in a minute. I say, let them fight over their morsels. Not that I'm avoiding a battle, you understand," he added, looking fiercely at them. "But I'm certain that we'll all have our own cylinders full of food by supper, time. These cylinders, call them grails, if you please, just need to be left on the rock to be filled. That is obvious, that's why this grail was placed here." He walked to the edge of the stone near the water and got off, by then the top was jammed with people and more were trying to get on. The large man had seized a steak and bitten into it, but someone had tried to snatch it away from him. He yelled with fury and, suddenly, rammed through those between him and the river. He went over the edge and into the water, emerging a moment later. In the meantime, men and women were screaming and striking each other over the rest of the food and goods in the cylinder.
    The man who had jumped into the river floated off on his back while he ate the rest of the steak. Burton watched him closely, half expecting him to be seized by fish. But he drifted on down the stream undisturbed.
    The rocks to the north and south, on both sides of the river, were crowded with struggling humans.
    Burton walked until he was free of the crowd and sat down. His group squatted by him or stood up and watched the writhing and noisy mass. The grailstone looked like a toadstool engulfed in pale maggots. Very noisy maggots. Some of them were now also red, because blood had been spilled.
    The most depressing aspect of the scene was the reaction of the children. The younger ones had stayed back from the rock, but they knew that there was food in the grail. They were crying from hunger and from terror caused by the screaming and fighting of the adults on the stone. The little girl with Burton was dry-eyed, but she was shaking. She stood by Burton and put her arms around his neck. He patted her on the back and murmured encouraging words, which she could not understand, but the tone of which helped to quiet her.
    The sun was on its descent. Within about two hours it would be hidden by the towering western mountain, though a genuine dusk presumably would not happen for many hours. There was no way to determine how long the day was here. The temperature had gone up, but sitting in the sun was not by any means unbearable, and the steady breeze helped cool them off.
    Kazz made signs indicating that he would like a fire and also pointed at the tip of a bamboo spear. No doubt he wanted to fire-harden the tip.
    Burton had inspected the metal object taken from the grail. It was of a hard silvery metal, rectangular, fiat, about two inches long and three-tenths across. It had a small hole in one end and a slide on the other. Burton put his thumbnail against the projection at the end of the slide and pushed. The slide moved downward about two-sixteenths of an inch, and a wire about one-tenth of an inch in diameter and a half-inch long slid out of the hole in the end. Even in the bright sunlight, it glowed whitely. He touched the tip of the wire to a blade of grass; the blade shriveled up at once. Applied to the tip of the bamboo spear, it burned a tiny hole. Burton pushed the slide back into its original position, and the wire withdrew, like the hot head of a brazen turtle, into the silvery shell.
    Both Frigate and Roach wondered aloud at the power contained in the tiny pack. To make the wire rest hot required much voltage. How many charges would the battery or the radioactive pile that must be in it give? How could the lighter's power pack be renewed? There were many questions that could not be immediately answered or, perhaps, never. The greatest was how they could have been brought back to life in rejuvenated bodies. Whoever had done it possessed a