Collected Tales (Jerry eBooks)

by Leslie F Stone

  The club was heavy, almost too heavy for Mike, but by grasping it with two hands he succeeded in lifting it above his head. The beast watched him dumbly, and Mike took the offensive. With all his might he brought the stick downward in a great circle toward the beast’s glistening eyes, but when the stick landed, the thing wasn’t there. He heard the hum of its wings as it took to the air, then around him grew the sound of a roar, a deep booming noise like thunder coming from its thorax. He wheeled about to see the creature dropping to the ground on the other side of him, and again he struck out with his club.

  This time the club caught one of the creature’s wings, tearing it across so it could never use it again. It started back from him, but changing its mind, charged upon the man. Again Mike raised his heavy club, to bring it down on the beast’s clumsy head. One of the waving horn’s was broken, and the jagged head of the stick cut a furrow through the left eye of the beast, half-blinding it. The roar of the beast grew louder and again it charged and again Mike struck out with his club. A hairy claw racked his back, but it did not touch the skin, merely tearing the cloth of his jeans off his shoulder. He lost count of its charges as he placed his heavy blows with precision, and each blow counted against the beast. One eye was entirely gone, the other had only half its sight, two legs were crippled, the second wing was frayed. It seemed to have lost all sense of direction when another blow tore the other horn away from the top of the beast’s head. Now it no longer roared, and suddenly gave up the battle, crawling hastily away from the enraged man. But Mike, with the lust of battle in his veins, was not through yet. Bringing the club high above his head and as far back as his arms would go, he gave a mighty heave that sent it after the retreating creature. The point entered the hard black body just between the sagging wings, carrying it to the ground. It lay where it fell, legs twitching, a low murmur issuing from its body.

  It was a gruesome sight with red sticky blood oozing from its many wounds, but Mike did not have it in his heart to pity it. He stood off to survey it, wondering what it was, what was so familiar about it.

  “Why! It’s a fly,” he said at last, and after he had spoken the words, he wondered at them. A fly? What was a fly? Why, What? Why should he recognize the creature? Why was he here? What was he doing in this oddly familiar land that after all was unfamiliar?

  One after another the man put these questions to himself, but he was at a loss to answer them. His mind was in a queerly muddled state. Faint, dim memories came to him; he was always on the verge of understanding things, yet on the other hand, his mind refused him the answers, was unable to collect them properly and catalogue them for himself. He was aware of the fact that something untoward had happened to him, that this was not his natural world, that nothing around him was natural. He remembered falling asleep here on this blue plain beside the leaning column; he remembered the ravine he had left behind, but he could not remember what lay there before his awakening on the red plain.

  And here was this fly incident. He seemed to recall that in the past he had killed other flies, many flies, that it was his business to kill flies. He could turn his back on it and leave it to kick away the rest of its life without compunction, but that did not explain what a fly was, why he knew it for what it was.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he turned his back on the pillar, his eyes toward the mountain range dimly visible in the distance. The queer rain from the skies was less now, and rarely a boulder came within touching distance of him and he could see it falling toward him long before it reached the point where he had been. A second coulee opened to him and across it lay a second red plain like the first he had left behind. In his mind he called the plains, squares, but like the fly incident, he could not find the source of his knowledge. He was suddenly thirsty and that desire transcended every other thought.

  Standing on the edge of the ravine, a shout welled to his lips, for in the bottom of the crevice was a shining river. Water! He fairly ran down the side of the ravine, but at the water’s edge he came to an abrupt halt. Certainly he had never seen an odder stream of water. It had no movement, it did not appear to flow, yet it wasn’t stagnant; it was clear. It just lay there in the hollow, inert, and wherever it touched the shore, its edges curled up, hollowed out rather, and it became concave. A large boulder lay in the stream a half a dozen feet from where Mike stood, and the water also seemed to repel it; it was, in fact, indented all around the boulder, forming a hollow depression around it!

  Strange, strange world!

  Puzzled, Mike bent down toward the water, determined to taste it, to learn if it were truly water. But no—as he bent toward it, it moved, came forward to meet him! He drew back, frightened and suddenly remembered the antics of the sphere in the bottom of the first canyon. In his mind he was able to associate the two, but he could not explain them. A sigh escaped him. Was there no succor for him in this hard land where all natural laws seemed topsy-turvy? Just how long was he going to be able to exist without drink or food?

  And how was he to bridge this unique river? Could he throw enough debris to form a bridge to cross on? Stopping, he picked up a small boulder close at hand. The river received it without a splash, but the thing did not sink immediately. It was a slow process before the water-stuff sucked it below the surface. He shook his head wearily, realizing it would take hours to fill in a causeway at that rate. Instead, he decided to walk on and discover if he could not find a bridge already prepared.

  Ten minutes of walking brought him to a place where the river came to an end. Although the canyon floor was no higher, the river simply ended abruptly. He concluded it was a lake instead of a river. The climb up the other side of the ravine was difficult, for here was a heavy mass of sky-debris that impeded his progress, but at last he climbed to the surface of the second red plain. He lost all count of time as he headed for the mountain range. His body appeared to be a number of individuals all crying for attention. There was his thirst, together with hunger and the lame leg all clamouring for service. He stumbled on and on until the red plain suddenly came to an end. He was ready to stop there and lie down to die, but on lifting his head his blurred eyes showed him that this was the last ravine before he should reach the foot of the mountains. He thought he could descry something green a few hundred feet above him, on the side of the mountain. In that bit of green, he saw promise of food and maybe of drink.

  Only, God! What was this thing hurrying down the ravine toward him! So might a dinosaur have appeared to primitive man. He saw a long yellowish green serpentine body, several times his own length, topped by a massive, hideously ugly head, while set along the length of the body were small upright bunches of bristles at intervals. Although the beast walked the bottom of the coulee, the bristles showed above the edge of the gulch.

  Mike started back, frightened almost out of his wits, as the Thing suddenly turned toward his side of the ravine and started up the side! Its head was on the level with his own, before he could control his shaking knees, but before he could take a step backward, the beast switched from his path and passed the frightened man without a second glance his way. Mike smelt the heavy, earthly odor the beast exuded as it passed him by.

  “Lord! It’s a caterpillar!” he found himself ejaculating and he was recalling that caterpillars after all were harmless creatures, herbivorous. He scurried down the bank of the depression and up the other side.

  On, on he trudged over the rough terrain of the plain, his head sunk between sagging shoulders, only occasionally lifting his head to see how much of the distance toward the mountain he had covered. He glanced back only once, but found he could no longer see the leaning pillar that had been his first goal. Distances were strangely deceptive in this weird land, possibly due to the quality of the light, but he was beyond questioning anything. He could only think of that patch of green, far up on the mountain side, which he could make out more plainly now, but he eyed the mountain itself in fear. It seemed a great perpendicular cliff, rising straight up to the heav
ens, impossible for a man to climb. The plain appeared to end abruptly at the cliff’s foot, as if the mountain was not part and parcel of the land, but had been placed there at some later period than placing of the plains, but as he drew nearer and stood at the mountain foot, he realized it was not as unscalable as it had appeared at first. The surface was fibrous and pitted with irregularities, where boulders and soil had taken footing, and he could make out a number of long crevices mounting upward. There were innumerable hand and foot holds in which he could find easy purchase. He wondered at the queer structure of the cliff itself. It was certainly different from any mountain he had ever known; at places it was soft to the touch, giving under hand or foot, breaking under him sometimes and sending flakes of tissue falling behind him.

  Thirst and hunger were forgotten as he began to make his way upward, but every few feet he had to take time to rest. Then, after an indeterminable passage of time, he reached the green verdure that had beckoned to him from afar. It was a small plot of moss and lichen clinging to the mountain wall. A small, green bush, covered with red and yellow berries, had taken root in the moss. Food!

  He knew it was food, for here were two bright green creatures hardly four feet in length, ugly, but harmless as they proved, feeding on the berries. They scurried away at his approach and immediately he appropriated their dinner. The berries were sweet, juicy and filling. Practically all the berries were gone before he filled his stomach. They gave him new life, they quenched his thirst. Almost regretfully he deserted them, but the mountain was calling him upward.

  He was more than three-quarters of the way up the mountain, when he glanced backward. Now he saw the regular pattern of the red and blue plains he had left behind with their geometrically straight crevices, crossing and recrossing as far as eye could see. Dimly he could discern great shapes in the greater distances, but he was at a loss to name them; yet, again he felt their familiarity, felt that he had known them in his past. He felt a yearning to be back in the life he could not recall, a yearning for his own kind, for life as he had once known it.

  But now he was tired’, weary, too weary to go on. He needed sleep more than he needed anything else. He looked about seeking a safe spot where he might stow himself, while renewing his life’s forces. A shelf a dozen feet or so above his head jutted a few feet over the cliff’s edge. It offered haven. Hand over hand he pulled himself toward it head down as he picked out safe holds for hands and feet. Thus he was unaware of the creature emerging from a cave that opened upon the ledge he sought. The creature, however, saw him!

  And what a creature. More than six feet high it stood, reddish brown in color, with an abnormally long body separated into three segments—head, thorax and abdomen, the thorax and abdomen being separated by an incredibly narrow waist. It was six-legged and it had a pair of multi-faceted eyes that had the power of seeing in practically every direction, but it depended more upon the finer selectivity of the pair of antennas sticking out from the head just over the eyes that waved constantly in the air. Its mouth was a most savage one, great heavy mandibles that looked as if they might bite the climbing man in two at one stroke. It stood perfectly still in the cave mouth, eyeing the unwarned climbing man. And although not a sound issued from its throat, it was suddenly joined by a fellow creature, who came likewise from the cave and now stood beside the first peering over its shoulder at the on-coming prey.

  Poor Mike! It was an unfair fight from the first. Tired and weary, he did not raise his eyes until he had climbed over the abutment. Then it was too late and though he gave a good account of himself, the pair of ants had the advantage as they rushed from two sides at once. The first ant lost one of its antenna horns in the struggle, the second lost one of its middle legs. Then Mike felt the first ant plunge its mandibles into his shoulder and as soon as the sting bit into his flesh, all fight departed. He was a prisoner.

  Although the first of the two red ants was larger than its fellow, it was the second creature who picked up Mike’s suddenly limp form and tossed him over its shoulder. Mike knew nothing of the journey through the dark tunnels of the Hill. It was the bump that occurred when his captor dropped him on a hard packed floor, that shook him back into consciousness. But consciousness did not bring movement in its train and Mike found his body numb, paralyzed from the bite of the insect that left only his mind awake.

  After a while he could make out indefinite shapes in the darkness around him and realized that he lay on some soft decaying stuff that hurt his nostrils with its fetid odors. He felt rather than saw the comings and goings of his captors through the chamber in which he lay. Something dropped across the small of his back and lay there heavily, adding its heavy smell to the others that nauseated him. Lying there, he tried to piece together the events that had brought him here, but the poison the beasts had injected into his blood seemed to dull the edge of his brain.

  He was unaware of the fact that now he was “cold storage” in the warehouse of the red ants—“preserved” against the time when he should become “provisions” in the ant vernacular (if they had such a thing). Nature has a number of tricks up her sleeve, and, lacking proper refrigerant methods as devised by Man, she nevertheless has provided her pets, the ants, with a means of their own to preserve food against the time when it is needed. This is a mild poison injected into the body of the victims, which paralyzes the nerve centers so that whereas they are still alive, they are incapable of crawling away again, and must simply await the hour of their doom.

  The paralysis of his nerves had caused Mike to lose all sense of time, and he did not know how long he had lain in his quiescent state. He slept intermittently, awaking every now and then to the ugly odor of the nest and decaying life around him, but at last he believed he could feel a loosening up of his muscles. He could move a finger, then a hand, then his head. Possibly, the fact that he came of a more highly developed genus than the ordinary victim of the ants was the reason why the paralysis was deserting him. He flexed the muscles of one arm, then of the other and tried to sit up, but the weight lying across his hips held him down. It took a number of squirms to release him, but at last he was. free.

  Stretching his body, he took several deep breaths, only to be nauseated anew by the thick odors surrounding him. He wondered heavily how he was to get out of this noxious place. Something told him he must be away before the next returning forage came with its burden. Dimly he made out the faintly illuminated circle that was the doorway from this chamber. Cautiously he crawled toward it, hoping to escape from his prison.

  There seemed to be some sort of faint light filtering down the tunnel that Opened to him, so he could see the passage walls losing themselves somewhere ahead. If only he had a weapon of some sort, he thought; but he was unarmed. Moving forward about a hundred feet in the tunnel, he heard a noise coming his way. There was a dry scratching, as of feet upon the hard packed floor, and of something being dragged along. A new odor came to his nostrils. It was an ant bringing part of a butterfly wing. Mike backed up slowly away from the approaching sound and so he stumbled and fell heavily. Something hard lay under him, and he felt for it with his hands. It was a fragment of rock that he had tripped over. He wrapped his fingers around it, hefted it and felt better because of it. A darker blot in the darkness of the tunnel told him the on-coming ant was almost abreast of where he crouched against the wall.

  The thing stopped. There was an almost illusionary gleam of light where its eyes were, and he heard a slithering sound as the ant dropped its burden. Mike heaved his rock where the eye had been. He heard its scrunch against something brittle, then panic seized him. It gave momentum to his feet carrying him swiftly up the tunnel in the direction from which the ant had came. And he was in the midst of a half a dozen beasts before he knew it. Two tunnels crossed each other at this juncture, the party was herding a number of aphides (ant-cows) back to their stables, but when the creatures found a new being in their midst, the combined thought was to recapture him. This time Mike used
hands and feet to full advantage. A hairy leg snapped under one hand, and it in turn became a bludgeon against his enemies. For several moments he crouched under the abdomen of an ant, and here it proved difficult for the others to reach him, until the ant itself managed to twist its body about so as to make his strategy of no avail. Fighting with flaying arms and feet he managed to reach the nearest wall. The tunnel seemed to overflow with ants, and the herd of cows increased the melee, so that the beasts became so jammed they found it impossible to move one way or the other as more and more came piling in from all directions.

  It was almost a noiseless battle with only the scraping and grating of dry feet on the soil or of chiton-covered bodies rubbing against each other, and the deep, panting breath of the man fighting for life and freedom.

  Mike’s greatest care was to keep the mandibles of the beasts from any part of his body, to prevent a second injection of the formic acid into his system, but though mandibles snapped around him, they were poorly aimed, so closely packed were their wielders. Only those ants on the edge of the pack against the wall of the tunnel could reach the man who was creeping as close to the floor as the forest of legs would permit.

  As he battled, he crept forward, an inch at a time, leaving a trail of broken legs, “twisted antenna and maimed bodies behind him. His clothing hung to him in tatters, his face and hands were scratched and torn, blood flowed from a wound on one temple, getting into his eyes, and there were several long scratches on back and chest. His breath wheezed as it came through his clenched teeth, blood trickled from one distended nostril, and his blows were growing weaker. It was only a question of minutes now before the very weight of numbers would pull him down. He hardly knew what happened when the wall crumbled behind him and he fell headlong into the narrow opening thus revealed. A pair of mandibles snapped harmlessly over his head as he fell, and there was a scraping of rough feet as the beast tried to widen the mouth of the hole into which Mike had fallen.