“Easy, easy, Bill!” Funny Beale’s voice here. “Take it easy like a good fellow. There, a little more now. You’re all right, old man!” Beale . . . good ole Beale . . . don’t know he’s too late . . . don’t know that I’m dead!
“I’m dead . . . a dead man . . . only a man . . . not a God!” Jimson could hear that strange voice at his ear. It took several moments to recognize those hollow tones for his own.
“You’re not dead, though you were darned near it. The others, Bill, what happened?”
“They weren’t Gods . . . they sinned . . . they bathed in the lake . . . their bones . . . dissolved like . . . water.”
“My God! Wendell warned you!”
“I told ’em you were God . . . not us . . .”
“Yes, I know. The fellow Rafel took a pot-shot at me. Lucky I wore my lead mess shirt. The soft tip of the cosmicite blunted . . . and the arrow fell to the ground. They are certain now that I am a God. But what a price to pay. Five men gone in one blow . . . and all of the Corsairs crew but Wendell . . . you almost . . .”
“I’ve got the stuff, Captain. Look . . . sixty pounds of it, and pure . . . pure . . .”
“Yes, Bill, you’re a wealthy man now. You can buy an estate and marry a wife and play at life, but you won’t, you poor fool, you won’t. You’ll go on and on . . . looking for new fortunes, peeping into all the strange corners of the universe . . . and if you’re lucky you’ll see many new things and make many fortunes, but one of these days in some strange jungle like this it’ll get you . . . and you’ll die like the rest of us . . . with . . . with boots on . . . Wealth, fortune, Lady Luck! It’ll get you.
“And the others, men who will come after us to Vulcan. These poor untutored savages will fight to preserve their rights. Thousands will die before they learn their lesson; the rest will become slaves to dig out the ore. Our own men . . . poor devils . . . they’ll sweat and toil in this noisome jungle, under the blistering sun, living on food lozenges . . . on water so filtered that it is dead. Craving baths in the cool inviting lakes, tempted by the growing fruits on the vines. Some will succumb . . . and their bones . . . will rot!
“Riches! Man’s damnable desire to conquer, to nose in where he don’t belong. In the future men will point to you and me. They will say . . . ‘those pioneers . . . they were men!’ Bah! Sheep! That’s what we are . . . pigs for the slaughter . . . pigs for slaughter!” A wild laugh broke upon the jungle.
THE END
[1] Cosmicite seems to have been that rare metal possessing the ability to absorb and reflect practically all rays, no matter what their wavelength. Its use on earth as a heat-insulator would have been revolutionary if sufficient quantities were to be had.
[2] It is difficult to give Earthly equivalent to Vulcanite terms. There were scarcely more than a hundred words in the vocabulary, and many proved obscure to the Tellurians. The term tuco was applied by the fox-men to anyone or thing of high rank. Gods, men and devils were all tuco!
[3] The year of Vulcan is only fifty-four Earth days long, but since Vulcan rotates on its axis once every 19 hours its sidereal year is sixty-eight and a fraction Vulcan days long.
[4] muli . . . captive, applies to both man and animal. The main motive of war between tribes is for the securing of slaves. Rafel’s tribe numbered more than four thousand muli, male and female.
The Man Who Fought a Fly
WHEN you stop to think about it, perspective is exceedingly important in the consideration of the “rightness” of any decision. With a change of perspective or point of view, as it were, conditions must necessarily appear in an altogether different light. Just so is it true in the matter of size. The reactions of some foreign element—human or otherwise, to certain aspects of our environment—have been written about before, but our well-known author gives us something entirely different in this very clever story.
THERE was no reminder of the medieval alchemist with his dust-laden tomes, his belching forge, his stuffed crocodile and empty skulls, in the bright, pleasant chamber that housed Professor Duncan Trent’s laboratory. It was a converted conservatory in the old home he maintained as Iris residence and workshop. Three sides were of glass, the roof a skylight pouring sunlight down upon the healthy flowering plants set in boxes in a ring around the floor under the windows or on stands. Even when the sun was not shining it was a pleasant room. Only the low tables with their clear glass receptacles of every size and shape, the chest of shelves along the back wall, with its rows of bottles tagged with strange scientific names and an occasional strange pungent odor told one that this was a room devoted to science.
It was the duty of Mike Turey to keep his laboratory neat and clean. Each day he swabbed the red and blue tile floor with sudsy water, ran his duster over tables and machines, and washed out the glasses the professor ordered to be ready for his ministrations. Then carefully he watered the potted plants, brought in cut-flowers from the garden to set in the many vases and bowls about, weeded and trimmed the flower boxes. Mike was also the some-time assistant to the professor, helping the scientist when a second hand was needed at some delicate task. A crippled war veteran, he had found congenial surroundings in the professor’s pleasant employ for himself and his wife. Trent liked him and often discussed his latest discoveries or failures with the ex-service man.
Today everything was finished in the laboratory except for the watering of the plants. Mike was a little late with the watering because he had taken time out to wash the flower vases and bowls. Now he came stumping into the laboratory weighted down with his watering cans, his limp just barely noticeable. It was a darkish, cloudy day in April, and on such days his leg ached a bit more than usual.
“Mary!” A crash, the gurgling splash of water on the tiles as the watering cans dropped from nerveless hands and Mike, the efficient, stood rooted to the ground just within the French window of the laboratory, staring agape at his wife settled in one of his master’s chintz-covered chairs, hands folded in her lap, her head and body bathed in the golden glow of a light from a lamp over her head.
That the lamp was not an ordinary one was evident at first glance. Its shade was a bowl-shaped affair of shiny metal on a tall stand, and the golden light issuing from it seemed to have a malevolent gleam in its depths. It cut the grayness of the room like a knife.
“Mary!” Mike’s second cry was a shriek, for it is not given every man to see his plump wife shrinking into a child again, which was exactly what was happening. From a big-bosomed, comfortable sort of a woman of five feet four inches tall, she had already shrunk to a woman four feet five inches when her husband first caught sight of her, and from his first to second cry, she had shrunk even more. Nor did she stir at his calls and Mike saw her eyes were closed; her breathing spasmodic.
His second cry aroused Mike from the apathy of his first fright and the next instant he was a hurtling body that crossed the intervening space between himself and his wife in an astounding shortness of time. But the lamp-cord was his undoing. It caught his bad foot and sent him crashing forward, the momentum of his body overturning his wife’s chair and the lamp in one blow, cracking his head upon the tile floor with such force that he lost consciousness for several minutes.
The cataclysm that had carried the lamp and chair to the floor with Mike, had acted as a catapult upon the woman’s diminishing form, flinging her across the nearest flower box. And there she hung, her head upon the box’s edge, her feet dropping over the side, only, as she continued to shrink in size, it could be seen that the box would soon be large enough to contain all of her. And the spreading fan of the golden ray from the lamp still shone upon her, as it now shone upon the prone body of lies’ husband huddled close to the flower box!
SOME minutes later, Mike raised his aching head, but that was not the only part of him that ached; every bone, every muscle ached as if he had indulged in some new sort of bodily exercise that brought every muscle in his body into play, more than he knew he possessed. A groan pushe
d its way up his throat, then another; he found he enjoyed groaning. For several minutes he practiced this until he found the groans cost him unnecessary effort and he desisted. Instead, he tried sitting up and was surprised to find he could do it. But what strange place was this?
All around him, for what seemed miles, was a red plain, a deep red, a plain that might have been called flat, though of exceeding roughness. He could not call them hills; they were more like rough pits, crater pits such as he had known in the war, only his mind was too stunned now to associate such ideas. He could only think of his immediate present, and try to place it in his memory. The plain seemed to have a glossy finish at one time, but now it was dulled, roughened, only the high points of the craters retained a reminiscent polish from the past. A sort of diffused gray light hung over him, and by placing a hand above his eyes and squinting, he could see strange, undefinable shapes in the far distances.
But what was this? Out of the heavens was falling a strange rain. Fie called it rain for want of a better word, but he could not remember such a rain as this, for from all sides was a continuous falling of strange particles, boulders of every size and shape from the size of a baseball to several times the size of his head—sticks, long and short, of every color, every hue dropping around him on all sides, obscuring the landscape partly, making it necessary to dodge their blows. He could hear them falling to the ground, click, crash, boom. One hit his shoulder, another fell across his extended legs. Luckily they were not heavy and did not hurt him, but he knew the large boulder coming down through the air toward him would hurt unless he dodged it. He rolled to one side under it and got to his feet. The mass plopped into the spot where he had been sitting, lightly, as if gravity did not matter much here. He looked at it carefully. It was cube-shaped and had the appearance of iron. It was smooth to his touch and cold.
The air cleared a moment of the falling debris and he gazed around him. Far to his right was the dark line of a crevice in the plain, grayish in color, a ravine of shallow depth. On its opposite side lay a second plain, blue in color, a dull grayish blue. Looking to the left, he could discern a second ravine more distant than the one on his right, and beyond it lay a second plain of blue. Before him the red plain was wide and he could just make out the crack that enclosed it. But turning on his heel, he saw that less than forty yards from where he stood was a fourth crevice and a fourth blue plain. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to him that he should be standing on a red plain cut by four straight dikes with blue plains on their other sides. He tried to recall where he had seen that pattern before, but so strange seemed his awakening, he could not quite recall the past beyond the point of his awakening here on the red plain. It was an effort to try to think. He could feel a bump on the side of his head and he attributed his loss of memory to it.
With the idea of orientating himself still further, he studied the landscape beyond the four coulees. All the blue plains seemed identical, as far as he could see, but for the fourth, where he discerned in the middle distance a great thick column sloping upward from the ground at about a thirty degree angle, rising so high into the air that he was unable to see its end; it seemed to go right up into the indistinguishable blue of the heavens themselves. And beyond that he could just make out, in the hazy distance, what was apparently a high wall, but that did not interest him yet. It was the column set alone in all the vastness of this great pattern that attracted him; it was his whole future for the present.
Amid the falling things from the air he started to pick his way toward the column, half-consciously dodging the debris that piled itself up on the ground in a hotch-potch, varying the natural color of the red plain with their own shades. They seemed for the most part fragments of animal, vegetable and mineral matter. They blocked his path making it necessary to circle them where it was impossible to climb over them. They were unstable, rolling under his feet, and what with jumping out of the way of those still falling, it was enough to drive a man out of his senses, but Mike was unusually phlegmatic, able to take everything as a matter of course, at the same time realizing how unnatural this new place was.
The ground under foot did not seem like a soil, but a vitrified substance from which the original life had been decarbonized. Perhaps that accounted for the remaining gloss that clung to the pitted surfaces. But at last he was able to leave the red plain behind, as he stood on the edge of his first canyon, the dividing line between red and blue plain. Carefully he made his way down the side of the ravine which seemed sanded, altogether different from the surface of the plain he had just left behind, and it was different in color. In the bottom of the depression, he saw half a dozen odd structures, each a great round globe many times his own size. They seemed balls of some transparent matter, held in a state of balance; bright things in which light seemed at play, changing into all the colors of the rainbow as he stared at them. He dared reach out to touch the side of the nearest sphere. It was elastic; it dented at his touch. Fie pushed hard upon it with the full force of his hand, and to his horror the sphere bulged outward and became a round sticky mouth that sucked him to the sphere’s surface. In the next instant he found himself dragged over the surface, spun around in a miniature whirlpool! One foot and hand remained free of the stuff, but for the rest of him he was caught like a fly on a sticky paper, unable to move, unable to grasp anything by which to pull himself free.
After his first fright was over, he ceased struggling long enough to consider what this strange ball might be. He noticed that whereas the stuff was sticky, elastic, it did not seem to wet him at all; there appeared to be some sort of skin over the surface of the globe that held its contents together, protected it against contact with him, while it held him prisoner. Minutes, hours seemed to pass, and then he noticed how cold he was. It was the sphere that was cold; however, it seemed to be losing some of its original size. At the same time, it was animated with a strange interior force that lifted and stretched it with terrific power. Then the man felt himself falling. There was a violent shock, as if an explosion had taken place quite near him and he found himself on the ground. The ball had disappeared.
Without a minute’s pause Mike picked himself up and ran wildly up the slope of the gulch to the blue plain regardless of the bruises he had sustained from his fall. He stopped, breathless, on its edge to look backward at the transparent spheres below. Not one was left. All were gone, exploded!
The surface of the blue plain hardly differed from that of the red plain. It also looked as if it were ossified, and there were the irregular piles of debris fallen from the sky, mounting as more came down. His crippled leg began to pain him as he pushed on and on toward the strange tilted pillar set over in one corner of the blue plain, and after what had seemed an indeterminable length of time he reached it. He was tired, weary and hungry, but there was nothing edible to be found hereabouts, nothing in this wild dreary land, nothing in the pockets of his blue working jeans. He stood gazing at the column for a while, trying to peer upward to its end. It was several times his own girth, its surface of no material he could place. It seemed fibrous, filled with hundreds of little cracks, rough, pitted. He decided the pillar must be very ancient.
It was, however, he concluded, hardly worth the bother of coming to see. He turned his back upon it and gazed off in the distance to the high precipice etched across the far sky. It seemed a great unbroken wall of a mighty mountain range, rising several thousand feet into the air, stretching further than eye could see in both directions. Mountains suggested trees, verdure, water, food perhaps. It suggested something else beside. For on his trek across the plains a single word had seemed to crop persistently into his mind. “Mary, Mary,” his sluggish brain had repeated. Now something was suggesting that Mary was to be found on the mountain top, though for the life of him he could not tell where that odd thought came from, and exactly who Mary was!
He decided to start off immediately, but then he realized how tired and worn out he was. First he must sleep, must
rest his weary bones, his crippled leg. He noticed suddenly that the rain of particles from the sky was less heavy on the opposite side of the leaning pillar from that which he had come. At its foot, practically no debris fell at all. He would lie there, huddled against the pillar’s foot and sleep awhile.
Mike never knew exactly what had awakened him, but suddenly he was wide awake and frightened. He felt eyes upon him; the hair on the nape of his neck was rising. He gasped when he saw the thing facing him, a great black creature with six hairy legs and two eyes that were divided and sub-divided into a thousand different parts, each part carrying a reflection of himself. And never had he seen an uglier or more gruesome face. Between the eyes the face was flat but below them it bulged out into a most fearsome mouth with heavy jaws that seemed more like tusks. In size it was as big as an elephant, while on its back was a pair of gorgeous, transparent wings, half-open now as if the thing was prepared for flight at a moment’s notice. It exuded a strong penetrating odor that reminded Mike of decaying flesh, putrefaction.
How long the creature had been surveying him he did not know. A scream rose to his throat as it took a step toward him. A step backward brought Mike’s back against the great leaning column. Its solidity felt good there behind him. It was safety of a sort, and he took another step backward, pressed against the pillar away from the creature. The beast, in consequence, took a step toward him, trying to outstare him with its many eyes while two long horns that Mike had not noticed before waved in front of its face. His own eyes darted this way and that in search of a weapon of some sort, and he saw a long rough stick that could serve him as a club lying close by. It meant, however, taking a step toward the elephantine animal, and in his extremity, Mike even dared this. He was surprised to see the beast take a step backward as he moved forward. Ah, the thing was cowardly.
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