SHANNACH—THE LAST
By LEIGH BRACKETT
Even in this grip of alien horror a man could not
throw away his lifetime goal ... not stand idly by as
endless rows of alabaster shapes, seated in their
chairs of stone, thought-ruled this gargoyle planet
from the dead blackness of deep Mercurian caverns.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories November 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It was dark in the caves under Mercury. It was hot, and there was nosound in them but the slow plodding of Trevor's heavy boots.
Trevor had been wandering for a long time, lost in this labyrinth whereno human being had ever gone before. And Trevor was an angry man.Through no fault or will of his own he was about to die, and he wasnot ready to die. Moreover, it seemed a wicked thing to come to hisfinal moment here in the stifling dark, buried under alien mountainshigh as Everest.
He wished now that he had stayed in the valley. Hunger and thirst wouldhave done for him just the same, but at least he would have died inthe open like a man, and not like a rat trapped in a drain.
Yet there was not really much to choose between them as a decent placeto die. A barren little hell-hole the valley had been, even before thequake, with nothing to draw a man there except the hope of findingsun-stones, one or two of which could transform a prospector into aplutocrat.
Trevor had found no sun-stones. The quake had brought down a wholemountain wall on his ship, leaving him with a pocket torch, a handfulof food tablets, a canteen of water, and the scant clothing he stood in.
He had looked at the naked rocks, and the little river frothing greenwith chemical poisons, and he had gone away into the tunnels, theancient blowholes of a cooling planet, gambling that he might find away out of the valleys.
Mercury's Twilight Belt is cut into thousands of cliff-locked pockets,as a honeycomb is cut into cells. There is no way over the mountains,for the atmosphere is shallow, and the jagged peaks stand up intoairless space. Trevor knew that only one more such pocket lay betweenhim and the open plains. If he could get to and through that lastpocket, he had thought....
But he knew now that he was not going to make it.
He was stripped to the skin already, in the terrible heat. When theweight of his miner's boots became too much to drag, he shed them,padding on over the rough rock with bare feet. He had nothing left nowbut the torch. When the light went, his last hope went with it.
After a while it went.
The utter blackness of the grave shut down. Trevor stood still,listening to the pulse of his own blood in the silence, looking at thatwhich no man needs a light to see. Then he flung the torch away andstumbled on, driven to fight still by the terror which was greater thanhis weakness.
Twice he struck against the twisting walls, and fell, and struggled upagain. The third time he remained on hands and knees, and crawled.
He crept on, a tiny creature entombed in the bowels of a planet. Thebore grew smaller and smaller, tightening around him. From time totime he lost consciousness, and it became increasingly painful tostruggle back to an awareness of the heat and the silence and thepressing rock.
After one of these periods of oblivion he began to hear a dull, steadythunder. He could no longer crawl. The bore had shrunk to a mere crack,barely large enough for him to pass through wormlike on his