Fields, hills and forest were all in proportion to the size of the Lilliputians. What had appeared from the flyer to be a landscape miles long were really little plots of ground but four and five feet square. Rivers were threads, and a nearby lake was pocket-handkerchief size. Large though Jupiter is it had fostered a miniature life. Cooling slowly its crust is actually only a few miles thick. Life here has developed in miniature proportion. Possibly that accounted for the almost tropical temperature, and for the shield of clouds less than four hundred feet above the surface.
We appeared to have landed in the foothills of a mountain range. To Small and myself these mountains were hardly more than hillocks, the highest of which we could see in the distance, was all of twenty-five feet in height, but to the little creatures of this world they were great barriers, and because of their roughness practically unscalable. To the right of us were the cultivated fields, but it was not in that direction we were led. Our captors directed us to the wild upland where straggling verdure found footage among the rocks. At each step tiny trees snapped under my dragging feet, whole woods were squashed as Small and I lumbered on under the impelling pricking of our masters.
What seemed hours was in reality only minutes, and when my guide held up a tiny hand that indicated a halt, I found we were facing a stone quarry. At my feet swarmed hundreds of little people in a pocket in the side of a hill where they toiled. Here was a rubble heap of hundreds of stones, pebbles for the most part, though here and there were scattered large boulders that the midget workers had not succeeded in cracking up as yet with their tiny picks and mallets. On little wooden sledges, five or six inches long, the little people had been piling the broken stone.
However, at our coming, all work had stopped in the quarry. With elaborate gestures The Boss pointed to the ground. They wanted me to fill the commodious pockets of my tunic with their pebbles! It took several minutes before I grasped what they actually wanted, my brain processes seemed as slow as my body. The green man, impatient at my sluggishness, probed me the while, and it was not until I began to pluck stones between my clumsy fingers that they desisted. Glancing sideways I saw Small at some distance away bending over a second stone quarry.
At best, it was a back-breaking job, picking tiny pebbles from the ground. To fill one hand and raise it to my tunic pocket was a job that needed all my concentration, and the little demons gave me no rest. More than once I thought of rebellion, but the flesh was weak and I cringed at the thought of a renewed attack by the green men. I was not yet in condition to steel myself against their onslaught, I was still too dazed to take my bearings.
That Small and I eventually won free of the Lilliputians was not due so much to will power as it was a berserker rage when we suddenly lost our heads . . . but there, I’m getting ahead of my story. For the present there was nothing to do but obey the promptings of my captors as a safeguard to my skin. My toil, on the other hand, was accomplished to the accompaniment of tiny pipings as the little people applauded my labor, laughing and dancing up and down in glee when I plucked an unusually “big” stone to add to my growing store.
At last my pockets bulged with stone. The Boss signified I was to “dump” my load elsewhere, and under the guidance of his pointing finger I went shuffling along, stumbling over a low hill or catching a foot in a tiny coullee. Had I refused to go I knew the “mosquitoes” would be at me again. To one side of my path I saw the road by which the Lilliputians trundled their sledges to their destination, a six-inch wide path along a water course, too narrow and twisting for my heavy feet. And now we came to the end of the road and stepped into a wide valley set between two forbidding mountains rising six to eight feet on either side.
Here again were hundreds of little people at work. Their business appeared to be that of building a wall of stones across the valley floor from mountain to mountain, a width of about seventeen feet. The wall was already as high as a Jovian man, and about eight inches thick. There were several classes of workers. Those who carried the pebbles from the heaps where they had been dumped to the wall; those who were laying the pebbles in the wall, and those who followed with a cement-like mixture to pour between the spaces of the uneven stones.
I was directed where to empty my pockets. Those in the vicinity of the dumps backed away to clear the path for me, although those on the growing walls did not leave their positions as they stared at me curiously for a few moments. Their foreman, however, drove them back to work, and I had the impression that this wall-building was an important factor in their lives, and that not a precious moment was to be lost.
Just as I emptied my pockets Small came in with his load. Blood trickled from innumerable little wounds on his neck, hands, chest and back where his tunic was torn away to, expose the flesh to the knives and cruel hook-spears of his monitors. He was cursing vehemently with every step he took.
When he saw me he shouted, “Well, wha’d’you think of yourself now, Mr. Patrolman? Wouldn’t take life easy with Capan in the Saturn hideouts, would you? And how’s your Miss March? By God, I hope she’s getting hers like we’re getting ours . . .”
“Fortune of the chase, Jim. But listen I’ve got a plan, if we could only get back to the ship . . .”
“With these bees all over you?”
I was about to say more but the green men did not care for our dialogue. Both of us were attacked simultaneously all over our anatomy. Small tried to catch some of his tormentors, but as usual they were too quick for him. He was unloading stones from his pockets as I departed for the stone-quarry again. When I seemed too slow I was goaded to greater haste, and after each salvo I tried to do my work as neatly as the gravity of Jupiter would permit, while in my heart my rebellion grew. When I passed Small on the way to the wall he gave me a teasing laugh, but I was more interested then in watching where to place my heavy feet.
CHAPTER IV
The Men in the Cave
l I did have the nucleus of a plan of escape in my mind, but it centered on the 354 and the gravity regulators, of course. And it was a matter of how I was going to manage to get my captors to permit me entry into the ship. If I could in some way convince them that the flyer held something that would be to their advantage if fetched, I could possibly induce them to take me back there, but how was I to do it? Then it came to me.
The little men had realized that Small and I could haul more stone in one trip than six of them with sledges could in two or three trips. Why not show them that if I had a sledge or cart many times larger than their sledges that I could haul almost enough stone in one trip for the building of the whole wall? But how was I to tell them that? I knew that the trees of this world were too small for such a purpose, and in the 354 there were sheets of metal that would have done the job well. Somehow I must convey that thought to The Boss.
Perhaps with such a subterfuge I could actually get back to the ship. I respected the intelligence of the little people, for though they had progressed but a little way from the savage state, apparently, they proved they had engineering capabilities. The wall building meant something momentous in their scheme of things, and I had to admire their ingenuity in enlisting the services of men ten times larger than themselves to complete it. Could I fool them, however, into letting me return to the 354?
The next time I put my hand in my pocket to remove the pebbles I managed to bring out my handkerchief at the same time. Holding up a finger I angled for The Boss’s attention. The little green man proved his intelligence by lifting his questioning eyes to my face. Thereupon, I pointed to a six-inch sledge that had been deserted by some workers, and spread my kerchief beside it, seeking to convey the fact that I wanted stauncher material with which to build a sledge as large as the piece of cloth, if not larger. And The Boss caught on.
Cupping his little hands he yelled something in his piping voice to his fellow men on the ground, and they cleared a way for my cumbersome feet, only it was in the wrong direction—toward the mountain on the left. My heart sank. I
demurred, refusing to go forward, trying instead, with gestures, to make it understood that only from my ship could I get what I needed. Either he did not understand, or understood too well, for now there came a dozen stings to probe me toward the mountain.
I made the air about me blue with my cussing, but in the end I shoved one foot after another toward the “mountain.” The incline was rather steep, but by using both hands and feet I managed to pull myself heavily to its top. I heard excited cries from the creatures astride me as they were jostled about; the fellows on my head clutched wildly at handfuls of hair to prevent their falling, but all managed to stay on.
Around me stretched a broken landscape, a jumble of hilltops divided by narrow ravines, overhung by frowning cliffs and overgrown with a mat of gnarled trees and other herbage. As I moved on laboriously I slipped and slithered, managing to keep my balance somehow. It was a rising country, each hill higher than the last, but in time we got to the topmost and I saw why I had been brought here. It was a space ship, wrecked as ours had been wrecked, the one that had attracted our attention from the skies, but whereas we had taken it for a ten-man flyer it was only a two-man bulldog.
It lay flattened out on a long low plateau in the midst of the broken mountains, and had dug itself deep into the ruffled surface, for part of it was completely buried. It must have hit the ground with an awful whack, for all the land around was badly furrowed and torn. There was scarcely a whole piece of metal left of the wreck.
On a twisted sheet of rusted metal I made out the name Comet, and knew this to be the remains of the first scientific expedition that had come to Jupiter, eight months ago. Vaguely, I wondered what had become of the two men who were its crew, both scientists of some renown in the Federation. A few feet from where I stood was part of my answer, for sticking out of the debris I saw the bones of a human hand!
I would have given a great deal to know what had happened to the other man of this ill-fated voyage, but The Boss had other things on his mind when I sought to question him with gestures. He was motioning that I was to hurry and make my sledge. And to hasten me there came the prick of a dozen knives in a dozen different parts of my body. Crying out in pain I fumbled among the mass until I found a piece of steel the size I needed, roughly four feet square, pitted and scratched, but whole. It was fastened to the wreck by shreds of twisted metal.
Nearby lay the burnt end of a girder, and by using this in lieu of a sledge hammer I managed after much effort to free the single sheet, twisting it around and around to break free the last shred that held it to the whole. What I saw when I lifted it made me sorry I had been so hasty in choosing this particular sheet for my needs; for lying, just out of reach, under a jumble of odds and ends was what looked like the head of a gravity-regulator case. Trying not to show my joy I made a move toward the case, but as if they had read my mind every little beast astride me was alert. Not only did they plunge their knives hilt deep into my flesh, but I felt the cruel pinch of dozens of hooked spears.
But with that regulator in sight I was not ready to give in. Steeling myself against the pain I took another step toward my objective, but my haste was my undoing, for I had not looked at the spot where I had placed my foot. Something gave under me, and with a yell I went down, breaking through the welter of twisted girders and rotted steel, and I fell to my knees. I fell forward, cutting my hands badly and ripping my clothes more severely than the Lilliputians had done, but the worst of the fall was the fact that I had fallen the wrong way, away from the object of my desire.
l The fall had stunned me, and all the air seemed beaten out of my lungs. Two of the green men had died in my fall, one was crushed under one knee, the other was almost torn in half when my fall scraped him against a ragged piece of steel. The others, however, took advantage of my fall, punishing me cruelly for my disobedience to their rule, forcing me to my feet and away from the wreck while I was still in a dazed condition.
I was bleeding in innumerable places, and I felt as though I had been through a meat chopper. And when I realized they were forcing me away from the wreck and tried to turn back again, every beast astride me fell upon me more viciously than ever with knife and hooked spear. So furious was the attack on my head, I felt that shortly my skull was sure to crash in while my eyes were blurred with tears of pain. Under that rain of punishment I was only too glad to go the way they wanted me, back toward the valley. I was unaware of the fact that I was not carrying my entire allotment of tormentors until a few minutes later I was appraised of the fact that five little green men were dragging after us the sheet of steel I had loosed from the wreck. Now I was ordered to pick it up to add to my burden. Beaten in body and soul I was driven back across the hills.
I realized that my only chance for escape was to pretend an utter docility, so that in time my inhuman masters would forget to be so vigilant. Then as a sort of salve to my conscience I told myself that after all that regulator from the Comet could no longer be of much value since the life of its thurla battery[3] is but six thousand hours while it had been almost eight months since the Giloe expedition had left Io.
Thus I tried to make excuses for myself, telling myself that, after all, the struggle I had put up was not worth the game, condoning my own lack of courage to sustain the pain the Lilliputians had inflicted upon me. Of course, had I been a story-book hero I would have gritted my teeth, closed my brain to the pain and gotten that regulator regardless of anything, but being a mere patrolman I was not so heroic, and so I continued as a slave to the six-inch high green men of Jupiter.
Arriving in the valley where the wall was slowly growing I found it was meal-time. The little green people were dining upon the little brown pellets which appeared to be their staff of life. On the ground I found a fairsized pile that had been dumped for me, and I was allowed to lower myself beside it. Food was handed to my riders, then came tiny skins filled with their abominable liquor. About a half a dozen of these were brought for me, and it was with difficulty that I unwound the wires that stoppered the mouths.
When I had finished eating, I noticed that the sky was growing pale. Night was coming on. The Lilliputians had noticed it too, for I saw they were making ready for sleep. Tiny fires had been built in the valley behind the wall, and the weary workers were composing themselves to sleep on the hard ground, but evidently it was not meant that I should sleep here. I was goaded to my feet and The Boss was pointing out a new way for me to take. We left the valley but went in a direction opposite to that of the quarries. Soon I discovered how the little people intended to keep me safe for the night.
Running through a rather high hill (about eighteen feet in height) was the open mouth of a cave. Fifty Jovians could have stood abreast the opening, but I had to stoop to climb within. I was ordered to lie facing the opening and I found there was more than enough room for my feet. Most of my riders had already slid down the wires dangling from my shoulders and belt, and now the remainder, including The Boss, got off. But I was not to be left alone after all. About thirty strange green men bearing things resembling quivers of arrows on their backs and bows in their hands took their position in front of the cave mouth, facing me.
All during the hours I had toiled hauling stones I had been aware of other life than the green people moving at my feet; small animals, tiny flying things had scurried out of the way of my heavy feet, beat the air before me, things so small I sensed rather than saw them. Now as the Lilliputian archers stood before the cave, a tiny deerlike creature showed a head between blades of some tall grass beside the cave mouth. In a twinkling of an eye one of the archers fitted an arrow to his bow, which was somewhat like the cross-bow of the middle ages. The arrow did not hit the deer in a vital spot; it simply pierced its rump as the animal turned to flee, but that single prick was enough to halt its flight. It fell, rolling over and over, and lay still. The arrow had carried a minute drop of some virulent poison on its tip.
I guessed the meaning of that gesture. I was being warned that an at
tempt to escape during the night would bring a shower of poisoned arrows upon my head!
Shortly thereafter, I heard a shuffling coming toward my cave. It sounded like a herd of pachyderms, but it was only Small, led by his captors. He was ordered into the cave beside me. He swore as was his habit now, but he obeyed. He watched warily while the little men climbed from him, leaving him faced by a handful of guards with tiny arrows. I read his thoughts and told him of the demonstration of the arrows and the deer whose carcass, as a gentle reminder, was left where it lay.
Small grunted. “Poison, eh? How much harm do they think a minute drop of poison will do us? If I weren’t so gosh-darned tired, I’d show ’em how much I’m afraid of their poisons . . .”
To change the subject I told him of my own adventures at the wreck of the Comet. He was interested in the regulator I thought I had seen, but he made no comment over the fact I had failed to retrieve it. “Well,” he said, one regulator won’t do us much good . . .”
“The other one ought to be found unless only one man was killed when the ship fell, and the other man got away with it.”
“Yah, that’s right. And if I ever get my hands on that regulator it would be just too bad for these half-foot high beasts. Who’d ever thought that things so little could be so savage? I’d a thought though, that men of Jupiter woulda been giants, not midgets . . .”
“I remember reading somewhere that the larger a world the smaller its creatures to offset the gravity or something like that. Ever read a book called ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ Jim? It’s a classic of . . .”
“Naw, I never was much for reading.”
“It told of a man who found himself among a bunch of little people, just like these. Lilliputians, he called them . . .”
Collected Tales (Jerry eBooks) Page 66