FROM AN UNSEEN CENSOR

By ROSEL GEORGE BROWN

Illustrated by DILLON

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine September 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

You can't beat my Uncle Isadore—he's dead but he's quick—yet that is just what he was daring me to try and do!

Uncle Isadore's ship wasn't in bad shape, at first glance. But a second look showed the combustion chamber was crumpled to pieces and the jets were fused into the rocks, making a smooth depression.

The ship had tilted into a horizontal position, nestling in the hollow its last blasts had made. Dust had sifted in around it, piling over the almost invisible seam of the port and filming the whole ship.

We circled around the ship. It was all closed and sealed, blind as a bullet.

"Okay," Rene said. "He's dead. My regrets." He coughed the word out as though it were something he had swallowed by accident.

"But how do you know?" I asked. "He might be in there."

"That port hasn't been opened for months. Maybe years. I told you the converter wouldn't last more than a month in dock. He couldn't live locked up in there without air and water. Let's go." My guide had no further interest in the ship. He hadn't even looked to see what the planet was like.

I stood shivering in my warm clothes. The ship seemed to radiate a chill. I looked around at the lumpy, unimaginative landscape of Alvarla. There was nothing in sight but a scraggly, dun heather sprouting here and there in the rocks and dust, and making hirsute patches on the low hills.

I had some wild idea, I think, that Uncle Izzy might come sauntering nonchalantly over the hills, one hand in the pocket of a grilch-down jacket and the other holding a Martian cigarene. And he would have on his face that look which makes everything he says seem cynical and slightly clever even if it isn't.

"The scenery is dull," he might say, "but it makes a nice back-drop for you." Something like that, leaving the impression he'd illuminated a side of your character for you to figure out later on.

Nothing of the kind happened, of course. I just got colder standing there.

"All right," Rene said. "We've had a moment of silence. Now let's go."

"I—there's something wrong," I told him. "Let's go in and see the—the body."

"We can't go in. That ship's sealed from the inside. You think they make those things so any painted alien can open the door and shoot in poisoned arrows? Believe me, he has to be inside if those outside ports are sealed. And he has to be dead because that port hasn't been opened in months. Look at the dust! It's a fourth of the way up the port."

Rene lumbered over to it and blew away some of the lighter dust higher up.

"See that?" he asked.

"No."

He groaned. "Well, you'll have to take my word for it. It's a raindrop. Almost four months old. A very light rain. You could see the faint, crusted outline of the drop if you knew how to look."

"I believe you," I said. "I hired you because you know which side of the trees the moss grows on and things like that. Still...."

Rene was beginning to stomp around impatiently. "Still what?"

"It just isn't like Uncle Isadore." I was trying to search out, myself, what it was that struck me as incongruous. "It's out of character."

"It's out of character for anybody to die," Rene said. "But I've seen a lot of them dead."

"I mean at least he would have died outside."

"Oh, for Pete's sake! Why outside? You think he took rat poison?"

I went around to the other side of the spaceship, mostly to get away from Rene for a moment. I'm only a studs and neck clasp man and Rene had twenty years' experience on alien planets. So he was right, of course, about the evidence. There was no getting around it. Still....

I circled back around to where Rene was smoking his first cigarette since we left Earth. His face was a mask of sunbaked wrinkles pointing down to the cigarette smack in the middle of his mouth.