by George Worts
The remote control apparatus, which would free the gasoline and ignite it, had been set up on a platform five hundred feet from the pit.
Guards with machine guns and gasoline torches were stationed fifty feet apart in a line behind the pit, on the inshore side, to discourage attack by the islanders.
The plan was that Bryce should mount the platform and give the signal — the firing of his revolver — to Larry and his men on the beach. At this signal they were to throw water on that section of the fire which blazed between the end of the bait line and the lagoon. Then they were to run to the platform. Well acquainted with the habits of the monster, they knew that it would swarm up onto the beach and follow the trail of fish into the pit.
Everyone but Julie, her mother and Dr. Plank, who was convalescing but still acquiesced when Singapore Sammy had explained that someone was needed to guard the two ships in case the islanders took this opportunity to make a surprise attack.
He said to her: “With luck, we’ll put out of here at the crack o’ dawn. It will be a relief. Old Lucky has gone haywire on me. It’ll take me a month to snap him out of it. And another month to make him forget you. But he’s tough, Lucky is. You won’t know him in a couple of months from now.”
“Where are you two going next — to Singapore?”
“No. Back to Burma. I never told you about my old man, did I? He ran out on my mother and me when I was two — took all her savings and a will of my grandfather’s leaving me almost a million. For going on eight years, I’ve been hunting for that old rat all over the Far East. That’s what I’m doing out here. And some day I’ll find him!”
“What will you do to him, Sammy?”
“Oh,” he said quietly. “I’ll get that will. Then Lucky and I are going to buy up some ships and start a steamship line of our own. It’s an old pipe dream of ours.”
“Are you going to stay here long enough to look for the Dutchman’s pearls?”
Sammy gave her a wan grin. “If they’re in that cave, I’ll have ‘em by morning, baby What are your plans?”
“I haven’t a plan to my name, Sam.”
He went ashore with the next boatload of men. And when they had all gone ashore, Julie went to the bridge with a machine gun, switched on the searchlight, focused the beam on the mangrove point, and watched the line of fire along the beach.
She knew that Bryce would not give the signal until the last detail of his plan had been carried out. She waited for the sound of his pistol — and she watched the line of fire along the beach, waiting for the sudden gap of darkness to appear in it, which would mean that the horrible, ravenous thing in the lagoon was being permitted to writhe and squirm and flounder up onto the beach — and to its hideous doom.
Then she saw a boat leave the beach and start toward the Wanderer. It was the tender. She swung the searchlight beam upon it, and saw that it contained one man — Bryce Robbins. When he was still some distance away he called: “Come on down, Julie. It’s important.”
When she reached the accommodation ladder, he had made the tender fast and was coming up. His face was unusually pale. It reminded her of wax. And his eyes were strange fiery blurs.
“What’s happened?” she cried.
He answered, “Nothing — yet. But we’ve decided to take no chances. We’re going to put water and provisions in the tender, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
He was half-running down the deck. She followed him, demanding an explanation.
In the galley, he hastily filled jugs with water and gunnysacks with food.
“Help me carry this stuff.”
She helped him carry it on deck and stow it in the tender. And when the task was finished, and she started toward the ladder, he said, “Wait! You’re going ashore with me.”
“Sam told me to stand guard aboard.”
“We’ve changed that plan,” the scientist said. “We decided the searchlight would keep them off, and then we thought you ought to be in on the fun. It didn’t seem fair, making you stay aboard.”
Julie thought it was strange, but she had grown accustomed to irrational men.
“Will you take the wheel, Julie?”
She went into the bows and took the wheel, facing forward. She felt the bows settle as Bryce walked toward her, but she did not turn around. She thought he was merely coming to stand beside her, to give orders, perhaps to make love to her in these last few minutes before the great excitement started.
The scientist had a club in his hand. It was wrapped in a piece of gunnysack. He lifted it carefully. He struck her sharply, once, on the side of the head, and he caught her across the arms as she collapsed.
He throttled down the engine to its slowest point. Methodically, clumsily, the one-armed man lashed her hands behind her with rope. He lashed her feet together. He stripped off one of her silk stockings and bound it into her mouth as a gag.
Chapter 26: Fiery Furnace
SAM, Mr. Barling and Lucky were waiting for him at the platform, all three impatient and irritable.
The buccaneer snarled, “Where the hell have you been?”
And Bryce coolly answered, “I was anxious about Julie. I went out to see that everything was all right.”
The four men climbed to the platform. Bryce Robbins looked carefully about him with the faint smile of a general reviewing his forces before a battle, and finding the status to his liking. Off to the right, torches glared where men with machine guns had been posted to frustrate any hostile move on the part of the savages. Bevan McTavish and Jim Axelrod were in charge of that detachment.
Off to the left the line of fire burned along the edge of the beach. On this side of it men were silhouetted blackly as they ran about piling on brush. Beyond the fire line was darkness.
Bryce ran his eyes along the trail of dead fish, placed a foot apart, leading in the straightest possible line from beach to pit.
He could see into the pit. It looked as if it were half full of fish. He said, “A banquet for the condemned.” He smiled. He chuckled softly. He removed his automatic pistol from the holster and fired it twice.
Instantly, men on the beach leaped into action. He saw silver blobs of water leave buckets. He saw a fifteen-foot line of fire die and become black. He saw men running toward the platform. They gathered about and tensely watched.
Sam Shay was suddenly aware of a sense of emptiness, having nothing to do with the giant amoeba. The drums had stopped!
A greasy gray tentacle appeared on the beach, at first no thicker than six inches. Swiftly it thickened. Tentacles leaped ahead like striking snakes. A fish vanished into that amazing slime. Another.
Bryce shouted: “Come on, damn you! Get your banquet!”
An avid tentacle a foot in diameter went darting ahead, pounding on the row of fish, gobbling them up, snatching them in to assuage that monstrous, never satisfied appetite.
The advancing tentacle reached the edge of the pit. Not hesitating for the fraction of a second, it leaped down into the pit, into the very center of the great layer of dead fish, and these fish began swiftly to vanish, as if they were being removed by a terrific suction.
The main body of the repulsive mass ravenously followed that tentacle. It wriggled and writhed, and floundered to the trap, sending out countless tentacles to drag itself along faster.
All but a few laggard tentacles were in the pit now. And swiftly these were drawn in. The pit was half full of the slime, a writhing, pulsing mass.
“”Now!” Mr. Barling breathed. “Now!”
“Not yet,” Bryce said. “Let it eat. Let it have its last meal. For countless hundreds of centuries it has gorged that rapacious hunger. Let it gorge itself for the last time!”
His hand hovered over the switch which would release six hundred and more gallons of gasoline, which would transform that pit of slime into a blazing inferno.
And suddenly Bevan McTavish shouted: “These woods are full of savages — here they —”
&
nbsp; His warning was interrupted by the snarling uproar of a half-dozen submachine guns cutting loose at once.
Sam Shay saw them coming — a wave of black men, with white and red and blue painted faces, with shields against their chests, with spears clutched in their hands.
He shouted: “Throw that switch!”
Bryce Robbins dropped his hand to the switch. For a moment its closing seemed to bring no result Then there was a soft puff of sound, a faint subterranean trembling. The mass of slime in the pit underwent a sudden convulsion.
A mass of flame and dense black smoke gushed from the pit. It leaped into the air, a solid, writhing red column, shot spurts of black.
It should have died instantly and horribly in that hellish fire. Yet Bryce Robbins, who was a scientist, should have been prepared for any contingency.
All about that fiery heat, tentacles large and small darted and sprang and leaped through the air. In a frenzy of desperation beyond the grasp of human mind, the broiling monster fought for its existence.
The air was spangled and electrified and interwoven with a great webwork of these flashing, darting, plunging tentacles. They madly laid upon great palm trees, uprooted them, and with a strange perversity, dragged them into the pit. Tentacles withered, blackened, dropped off. Others flashed up out of that bubbling, roasting mass of protoplasm.
The result was hopeless and horrible and fantastic. Singapore Sammy saw a telescoping of events as if he were watching the effect of a runaway projection machine on a cinema screen.
He saw individual men, helpless with horror, plucked in amazing jerks and dispatched into the flames, as if they were shot through the air by the snapping of giant rubber bands He saw Jim Axelrod and Ah Fong hurtle by, moving as if by magic, standing on their heads, their legs wildly waving and kicking. He saw a great loop of slime go sailing through the space and settle about the neck of a deckhand at least four hundred feet from the pit.
Sam looked frantically about for Lucky Jones — saw him running toward the lagoon. A spear whizzed past Sam’s head as he dashed after Lucky. Then Lucky disappeared. And Singapore plunged on toward the lagoon.
Larry McGurk had been standing beside the platform when the natives attacked and the pit burst into flames. He escaped a looping tentacle — and saw a spear which had hissed past his head plunge into a man’s chest. In the confusion he did not first identify the victim. Then he saw it was Hector Barling.
The patent medicine king had been standing not a yard away from him, babbling with terror. The spear had struck him in the center of the chest. The long, cruelly-barbed head had plunged into Hector Barling a few inches above the solar plexus. The long black handle, smooth as a rod of glass, projected grotesquely.
He saw Bryce Robbins lashed to a palm tree by transparent gray ropes of the stuff. He saw Lucky Jones appear from the direction of the Dutchman’s cabin, waving a cutlass, saw him stare wildly about in the glare, and faintly heard his shout: “Sam! Sam!”
Then Lucky saw his enemy roped to the palm tree. He ran to the tree and began slashing away at the imprisoning tentacles. Other tentacles came splitting through the air like giant loops of saliva. They bound Lucky against the scientist. They suddenly solidified into one great rod of gray. The tree swayed. It was uprooted. The tree and the two men went into the pit!
The islanders were in retreat now. But they threw spears as they backed away. And one of the last to be thrown found Larry McGurk. It struck his left arm below the elbow with the glancing slash of a razor-sharp cleaver. Blood spurted from a severed artery.
The arm to his shoulder instantly went numb. The redly-glaring world began to spin and reel. Acting Captain McTavish had him by the other arm. But before this illusion visited him, he and the little handful of men saw the death of the giant amoeba. The furious heat of the gasoline was too much, at last, for that life-loving ageless, ravenous monster.
The monster of the lagoon was dead!
In the instant before faintness overtook him, Larry realized this. Then acting Captain McTavish had him by the uninjured arm and was shouting, “Clear out!”
He helped Larry to the beach where the boats were. He bound a tourniquet above the gash and stopped the gush of blood. Then the acting captain of the Wanderer sat down in the wet sand close to the ocean and began to sob.
Chapter 27: Larry Learns
JULIE had recovered consciousness soon after Bryce Robbins left the tender. She lay helpless on the bottom of the boat. She heard Bryce fire the shots which signaled the beginning of the excitement. She heard the yelling of the natives as they charged. And, lying there, with her eyes staring at the stars, in such terror as she had never known, she had heard the ensuing bedlam, the soft smooth roar of the fired pit, the shouts and yells and shrieks of men snatched into the very trap they had set.
She knew, without knowing just what was happening, that that elaborate plan had gone astray. At the height of it she fainted. And when she came again to her senses, she heard the sobbing of a man close at hand. Because of the gag, she could not cry out.
A moment later the survivors of the latest Little Nicobar massacre came tumbling into the tender. She saw Larry silhouetted against the crimson stain of the night, and the next moment he was kneeling beside her.
He removed the gags and the ropes at her hands and feet. When she saw the deep, ugly gash in his arm, she screamed. Then she gave way helplessly to hysteria. She sobbed questions. Where was Sam? Where was Lucky? Where was Hector? Bryce? Where were the rest of them?
The men talked all at once. But through this confusion, through the sobs shaking her, she glimpsed a picture of the horror they had been through.
When the tender reached the yacht, she had herself somewhat under control. She fought back sobs and the impulse to scream. She ran up the ladder, herded the shocked men into the bar and gave them whisky.
She said what Singapore Sammy would have said under the circumstances: “Drink all you can! Get drunk!”
Then, still holding her nerves together by sheer will, she took Larry down to Dr. Plank.
Hector Barling’s personal physician had heard the uproar ashore and interpreted it, as Julie had, correctly. He knew that the elaborate and dangerous plan had miscarried somehow. But when he heard from Larry and Julie, the full extent of the horrors, he collapsed.
White from loss of blood, Larry McGurk sat in a chair, drank excellent Bourbon and tried not to faint.
Not until he pitched out of the chair was Dr. Plank brought to a realization of the young man’s urgent need.
Dr. Plank gave him a hypo, which brought him around. But he was still weak. His danger, however, succeeded in clearing the air of emotion somewhat. Julie knelt beside him and kissed his blood-blackened hand.
Larry said bitterly, “It’s — it’s ironical, isn’t it? Nine of us — nine healthy men — all but me. But Pegleg went, then Senga — then Pete — and now Oangi, Lucky, Bryce, Ah Fong, Sammy — all gone!”
Dr. Plank said, almost savagely, “What’s so ironical about it?”
“Because I’m the man who’s doomed to die. I’m the man who’s doomed to die — and the man who can’t be killed!”
“I’d say,” Dr. Plank said curtly, “that you’ve suddenly become fairly vulnerable. You almost got it this time. I don’t think you bear a charmed life any more, young man.”
“What good am I to anybody? A walking dead man!”
Dr. Plank, working at the slash in the blond man’s forearm, said impatiently: “What’s all this talk of a walking dead man? You don’t look like a walking dead man to me. If I were as healthy as you are, I’d consider myself singularly fortunate.”
Julie cried, “But you don’t understand, doctor. He has this growth in his head.”
Dr. Plank was bandaging the sewed-up slash. He looked sharply into Larry’s face.
“Sarcoma?” he snapped.
“A glooma,” Larry corrected him.
“Do you happen to mean a glioma?”
&nb
sp; “That’s it! A glioma!”
“Have you a glioma?”
“I have.”
“Who said so?”
“The best doctor in Chicago! Six months ago — almost. It’s growing around a little skull that protects a gland in the back of my head.”
The doctor nodded impatiently. “You mean the pituitary. But have you violent headaches?”
“I did.”
“Do you vomit?”
“I used to.”
“What was your occupation?”
“I was the first mate on a Great Lakes ore carrier.”
“Were you getting much exercise?”
“No. What difference does that make?”
“Were you, by any chance, using your eyes in a bad light?”
“Yes. I was studying to go up to get the limit taken off my license, and taking a correspondence course in business, because I had a chance to go into the office.”
“Did you ever have your eyes examined?”
“No.”
Dr. Plank said, almost genially. “Well, I’m glad I can save one life out of this horrible shambles. You haven’t a glioma. You had eyestrain — a bad case of it. And that wonderful Chicago doctor gave you a wonderfully bad diagnosis. If I had as good chances of living to be a hundred as you have —”
Larry McGurk struggled out of the chair. “You mean,” he said huskily, “If — I’m not going to kick off?”
Dr. Plank shouted: “You haven’t got a glioma! You are not going to die!”
Larry continued to look at him dazedly. He shifted his dazzled blue eyes to Julie. He stared at her with the look of a man confused, bewildered, stunned.
He turned and started for the door. He walked unsteadily. He said nothing. He opened the door and went out.
Julie said faintly: “Doctor, are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. A man in his condition couldn’t possibly have had a glioma six months ago — couldn’t possibly have one at this minute. He’s a perfectly healthy specimen. Am I sure? Of course I’m sure!”