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

science that was godlike. But speculation about it, though it would give them something to talk about, would solve nothing.
    After a while, the crowd dispersed. The cylinder was left on its side on top of the grailstone. Several bodies were sprawled there, and a number of men and women who got off the rock were hurt. Burton went through the crowd. One woman's face had been clawed, especially around her right eye: She was sobbing with no one to pay attention to her. Another man was sitting on the ground and holding his groin, which had been raked with sharp fingernails.
    Of the four lying on top of the stone, three were unconscious. These recovered with water dashed into their faces from the river. The fourth, a short slender man, was dead. Someone had twisted his head until his neck had broken.
    Burton looked up at the sun again and said, "I don't know exactly when suppertime will occur. I suggest we return not too long after the sun goes down behind the mountain. We will set our grails, or glory buckets, or lunchpails, or whatever you wish to call them, in these depressions. And then we'll wait. In the meantime. .
    He could have tossed this body into the river, too, but he had thought of a use, perhaps uses, for it. He told the others what he wanted, and they got the corpse down off the stone and started to carry it across the plain. Frigate and Galeazzi, a farmer importer of Trieste, took the first turn. Frigate had evidently not cared for the job, but when Burton asked him if he would, he nodded. He picked up the man's feet and led with Galeazzi holding the dead man under the armpits. Alice walked behind Burton with the child's hand in hers. Some in the crowd looked curiously or called out commits or questions, but Burton ignored them. After half a mile, Kazz and Monat took over the corpse. The child did not seem to disturbed by the dead man. She had been curious about the first corpse, instead of being horrified by its burned appearance.
    "If she really is an ancient Gaul," Frigate said, "she may be used to seeing charred bodies. If I remember correctly, the Gauls burned sacrifices alive in big wicker baskets at religious ceremonies. I don't remember what god or goddess the ceremonies were is honor of. I wish I had a library to refer to. Do you think we'll ever have one here? I think I would go nuts if I didn't have books to read."
    "That remains to be seen," Burton said. "If we're not provided with a library, we'll make our own. If it's possible to do so." He thought that Frigate's question was a silly one, but then not everybody, was quite in their right minds at this time.
    At the foothills, two men, Rocco and Brontich, succeeded Kazz and Monat. Burton led them past the trees through the waist-high grass. The saw-edged grass scraped their legs. Burton cut off a stalk with his knife and tested the stalk for toughness and flexibility. Frigate kept close to his elbow and seemed unable to stop chattering. Probably, Burton thought, he talked to keep from thinking about the two deaths.
    "If every one who has ever lived has been resurrected here, think of the research to be done! Think of the historical mysteries and questions you could clear up! You could talk to John Wilkes Booth and find out if Secretary of War Stanton really was behind the Lincoln assassination. You might ferret out the identity of Jack the Ripper. Find out if Joan of Arc actually did belong to a witch cult. Talk to Napoleon's Marshal Ney; see if he did escape the firing squad and become a schoolteacher is America. Get the true story on Pearl Harbor. See the face of the Man in the Iron Mask, if there ever was such a person. Interview Lucrezia Borgia and those who knew her and determine if she was the poisoning bitch most people think she was. Learn the identity of the assassin of the two little princes in the Tower. Maybe Richard III did kill them.'
    "And you, Richard Francis Burton, there are many questions about your own life that your biographers would