The Legion Of Lazarus
By Edmond Hamilton
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination April 1956.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyrighton this publication was renewed.]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
It isn't the dying itself. It's what comes before. The waiting, alonein a room without windows, trying to think. The opening of the door, thevoices of the men who are going with you but not all the way, the walkdown the corridor to the airlock room, the faces of the men, closed andimpersonal. They do not enjoy this. Neither do they shrink from it. It'stheir job.
This is the room. It is small and it has a window. Outside there is nofriendly sky, no clouds. There is space, and there is the huge redcircle of Mars filling the sky, looking down like an enormous eye uponthis tiny moon. But you do not look up. You look out.
There are men out there. They are quite naked. They sleep upon thebarren plain, drowsing in a timeless ocean. Their bodies are white asivory and their hair is loose across their faces. Some of them seem tosmile. They lie, and sleep, and the great red eye looks at them foreveras they are borne around it.
"It isn't so bad," says one of the men who are with you inside thisultimate room. "Fifty years from now, the rest of us will all be old, ordead."
It is small comfort.
The one garment you have worn is taken from you and the lock dooropens, and the fear that cannot possibly become greater does becomegreater, and then suddenly that terrible crescendo is past. There is nolonger any hope, and you learn that without hope there is little to beafraid of. You want now only to get it over with.
You step forward into the lock.
The door behind you shuts. You sense that the one before you isopening, but there is not much time. The burst of air carries youforward. Perhaps you scream, but you are now beyond sound, beyond sight,beyond everything. You do not even feel that it is cold.
CHAPTER I
There is a time for sleep, and a time for waking. But Hyrst had sleptheavily, and the waking was hard. He had slept long, and the waking wasslow. Fifty years, said the dim voice of remembrance. But another partof his mind said, No, it is only tomorrow morning.
Another part of his mind. That was strange. There seemed to be moreparts to his mind than he remembered having had before, but they wereall confused and hidden behin