“Well, I guess these hobgoblins read the same book,” he growled, and almost as soon as he finished speaking the big man was snoring heavily. I realized how utterly worn out I was. Every muscle, every bone ached, not only from the toil I had performed, but also because of the dragging force of this giant world. Not only my body ached, but my skin as well from the prickings it had received all day. I knew I was a sorry looking sort of man, and then I began to plan my escape anew. On that I fell asleep.
l A yowling in my ear woke me from my dreams, and I opened my eyes to see that Small lay half out of the cave, holding his face with both hands. It was he who made those moaning sounds that awakened me. And in the bright glow from the overhead clouds I could see that our guards stood with arrows fitted in their bows staring menacingly at us both.
“What’s happened?” I wanted to know.
Voicing some choice words from his vocabulary Small took his hands from his face and I saw that chin, lips, cheeks and forehead were filled with dozens of thorn-like slivers. He had tried to crawl out of our cave and for his trouble had received a shower of poisoned arrows. “God, they sting and burn . . .” he was moaning.
I leaned on one elbow so I could pluck the almost microscopic arrows from his face. Each arrow left a red spot that later turned brown and never left him, and he wanted to claw and scratch. I advised him not to in the advent they were really poisoned, hoping the poison would not seep into his blood.
I felt around my clothes to find if I had my emergency medicine kit on me, but it was missing. Nor did Small have his, and the guards before the cave made no move to relieve him in any way. All we could do was lie down and wait for the morning, trusting that the poison would do Small no real harm. I could not sleep anymore with him groaning beside me, but shortly thereafter I saw that the sky was growing brighter. A new day had come.
The sound of approaching green men came to our ears that told of our returning masters. I recognized a number of faces. Then The Boss came to order me out of the cave while the archers stood to one side covering me with the full menace of their arrows. Small’s face was horribly swollen, splotchy with red and brown sores. Hi^ monitor motioned him to hold still while a dozen little fellows climbed on each other’s shoulders to reach the different parts of his face so as to rub some sort of unguent on each of his wounds. Whatever the salve was it soothed and for the first time since his arrival on Jupiter I saw a smile on Small’s face. The salve took away the burning, but not the colored spots.
We were led to the valley where food awaited us, then with my steel sheet I was ordered to the quarry for more pebbles. I wanted a cord so that I could drag my improvised sledge. After a few moments delay I made The Boss understand what I needed. He called to his fellows on the ground and two little men rolled a coil of wire toward me. I tried the strength of a piece, and figured that six or eight pieces wound together would do the trick. I measured off six feet, and doubled the rest of the wire back and forth until I had a strong enough tow line. I fastened one end to a broken twist of metal and felt almost proud of my accomplishment when it was done. So were the little people proud, jumping up and down as they viewed what was to them, a monster sledge.
Next came the task of filling it and dragging it carefully over valley and hillock. At one point along my road there was a rise of ground more precipitous than elsewhere and I had to pick up one end of the sledge to keep from losing my entire load. Wild cheers from the workers in the valley greeted us when I arrived without losing a single pebble.
Small came along at this point with pockets bulging and fresh blood trickling from wounds on his hands and face. He wore a heavy snarl, and sneered when he saw my handiwork. “Hand in glove with your slave-masters, already, ain’t you?” he commented. “Why, soon you’ll be eating out of their hands and doing tricks for ’em.”
I grinned. “There’re a smart lot at that, Jim. They know how helpless we are and they’re smart enough to profit by it . . .”
“Well, the blankety-blank pin-stickers won’t get me to drag sledges around for ’em,” was Small’s bitter rejoinder.
But the green men were of a different mind. A yell broke from Small’s lips at a particularly vicious sally from his enemy. He raised a hand to slap down the nearest knife wielder only to receive a second attack from the rear. Again and again he sought to reach his tormentors, but they were altogether too quick for his slow-moving hands, and each of his actions brought him retaliation in the form of hair-pulling and more furious attack. As I turned back toward the quarry I saw that he was headed toward the wreck of the Comet, apparently to get material for a sledge for himself. I yelled after him. “See if you can get that regulator! It’s beyond the skeleton hand!”
I carried three more loads to the valley and on the next trip saw Small carefully balancing his sledge which was several feet larger than my own. “Any luck with the regulator?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Naw, they took me to the other side of the wreck. Anyway, it wasn’t a regulator.”
I wondered if he had lied. But for what? After all the top of the portable gravity regulator does look a lot like a mintal valve head, and I may Rave been mistaken. I said no more about it. What was the use? I knew the Lilliputians were not going to give us a chance to get hold of anything that would help us throw off their yoke. They seemed to know that we had double reason for our desire to get back to our own ship, but slyly they were not going to give us that chance.
For two more days the same program persisted. Small and I trundled sledge after sledge of stone to the growing piles in the valley while the wall, in turn, was growing rapidly as hundreds of little men, many of whom had been relieved at the stone quarries by us, worked continuously. That they even toiled at night was proved by the fact that the wall was higher each new day than the night before.
Small still rebelled at his captors, but now I seldom felt a knife-prick. The brown spots left by the poison arrows on his face did not go away, and his face and wrists as well as any bit of exposed flesh throughout his body showed dozens of fresh wounds together with old and newly healed ones. That together with his matted hair and growing beard did not make Small a handsome spectacle. Nor, for that matter, was I a very neat-looking person. My beard was growing and I found it impossible to keep my hair combed with my fingers, while my ripped uniform was dirt-stained and filthy.
But for the remnants of our uniforms it would have been difficult to identify us as members of the Jovian Patrol.
CHAPTER V
War!
l By the noon of the fourth day of our enslavement the little people realized there were more than enough piles of pebbles in the valley for their purpose. Small and I were then put to work on the wall itself. With our aid the work went faster. We piled the stones in place while the green men poured in a kind of greenish cement. The wall was practically four feet in height, and seemed near completion. More and more I wondered at its purpose, but it wasn’t until the following day that I had an inkling of what was coming.
As I worked, I had noticed occasionally one or two green men go beyond the wall, sometimes not reappearing for many hours. I began to guess that they were scouts sent out to spy on some enemy so that the wall-builders should not be taken unawares.
The valley in which we toiled was about thirty feet long, from eight to seventeen feet in width, tapering toward a narrow pass at its further end, while the entrance from the direction of the quarries was about eight feet wide. Toward the pass the hills rose preceptibly higher, frowning down upon the narrow twisting canyon that was scarcely three feet wide at its greatest breadth; and a series of forbidding, overhanging cliffs made footing precarious on either side. From that direction it was impossible to enter the valley except through the defile.
I was at work on the wall’s top when I saw one of the scouts suddenly appear around the bend of the canyon. As soon as he hit the valley he turned to the left to climb the mountain so as to circumvent the wall. It was a difficult cli
mb for him, and about an hour later he came around the wall thoroughly exhausted, flopping at the feet of a green man that I had noticed earlier as some sort of superintendent, doing nothing more than direct his fellows at work, often calling out to a foreman to hurry this crew or that.
At the runner’s message this little fellow grew excited, calling a half a dozen men around him. They in turn were excited, and their agitation spread throughout the entire valley. Several of them were dispatched in the direction of their village that lay beyond the stone quarries, and I was ordered to lift several handfuls of tiny pebbles to the wall’s top. With these, workers began to build tiny round towers, while others were filling in a parapet along the outside edge of the wall, work too delicate for my awkward fingers.
The villages must have been awaiting the call of the messengers, for shortly after I grew aware of the fact that reinforcements were pouring into the valley by the hundreds, then the thousands. I was astounded by their number, having had no idea so many of the little creatures existed. Surely the two villages Small and I had sighted from above could not have held so many; there must have been dozens of villages sprinkled among the low hills.
They came in orderly file, rank after rank, in companies, in battalions, led by their chiefs, thousands of them, filling the valley, mounting the hills on either side; swarms of them. They fairly bristled with armament, spears, arrows, bows, knives. War! What else?
Now I could comprehend this wall-building feat. Somewhere in this country beyond the mountain-pass were other villages, other Lilliputians; and they had declared war upon each other. Men they were, for all their diminutive size; men that coveted and hated and fought for the glory of their nation!
Who could help but admire the strategy of this tiny people that put giants to work building the wall they had engineered. Small, savages though they were, they had genius!
Nor was there any jostling in their ranks, no excitement as company after company took position inside the wall. Rude ladders had been run up to the wall’s top, and dozens of little creatures climbed them, taking station behind parapet and tower even before the last pebbles had been set in place. Other companies took positions in the hills on either side of the wall, behind the natural barriers of rock and trees, deploying sharp-shooters here and there along the valley rim.
As for Small and myself, our monitors did not desert us, even though they had no immediate use for us in the forthcoming battle. We were hurried-out of the valley, toward the stone quarries, but not too far away. We were merely ordered to positions at the mouth of the valley, out of the way, but commanding a full view of the entire battlefield. Either our riders merely wished to watch what was to come from the vantage point of our shoulders, else we were being held in readiness as a sort of reserve force. As things turned out I believe their intention was the latter. One thing was clear; they did not want us within range of the poisoned arrows of the enemy.
Nor was it long before the enemy showed up. They came, as they were expected to, from the pass at the end of the valley in columns of eight with the copperish light from the clouds glistening on their spear and arrow heads. In stature and size they were like the green men, only the color of their skins was different, for instead of green bodies they were copper colored!
There was nothing to tell the difference between the men and their chieftains except by the fact that the latter led the others. At the head of that first company were two leaders and when they saw the great wall of the green man facing them, cutting the valley in half they halted, mouths agape at the spectacle. But they quickly overcame the shock that the green men’s master-stroke gave them. I could see them issuing orders to the regiments ranged behind. Now they came from the defile, company after company of copper-colored men glittering with armament, one company to the right, one to the left ascending the rough sides of the mountains to meet the armies they knew must be waiting them beside the great wall.
They came by the hundreds, the thousands, two serpentine armies mounting toward the wall, and although the green army was large I guessed the enemy far out-numbered them; that that was part of the reason for this stupendous feat of wall-building.
l The copper men were first to taste death. The sharpshooters stationed in the trees and behind the rocks of the mountains began to pick them off one by one, then dropped showers of tiny poisoned arrows into the packed ranks of the climbing soldiery. Thoroughly undaunted, the first companies reached within a few feet of the wall ends, but they were bested before the battle began. From the wall top the green men had opened fire, and having the advantage of the higher position it was evident the invaders could not long stand against them. Yet, they fought like devils incarnate, new men rushing to the places of the fallen while they themselves planted telling shots.
The battle was terrific, and more than once I felt called upon to applaud the bravery of the enemy, which though it outnumbered the wall-builders by a possible two to one, was at a distinct disadvantage. But for the strategem of the smaller force it would have eventually won by the plurality of its numbers. It was a losing fight from the first and after eight or ten minutes of scathing fire and unfair hand-to-hand bouts the enemy was retreating; slowly, defiantly, only because retreat was the better part of valor.
Realizing this, the victors made no attempt to follow, for to do so would lose for them the benefit they had already gained. Dead and dying lay strewn all over the valley floor as well as on the hill sides, friend and foe alike, but during the lull in which the enemy backed out of firing range no attempt was made to succor them. So deadly was the poison of the Jovians few of the wounded that still lived could hope to escape the death already creeping through their veins. There was no quarter given in this titanic struggle of the Lilliputians, no prisoners taken. It was war to the death!
I wondered what would be the next move of the enemy. Surely the mountains were too impassable for more than a few men to traverse at a time; but soon I realized they had no such intention of so exposing themselves. The barrier in the valley was their objective. It was through here they must come or not at all. Then I had to rub my eyes at the vision coming toward me. I saw them long before they entered the mountain pass; their heads topped the mountains, four men like myself, no, five of them—lumbering, gravity-laden men, ponderously putting one foot before the other while dozens of little red creatures on their shoulders goaded them forward with spear thrusts!
So! The capture of giants from the inner planets was not original with the green men. They only imitated their kind in taking as prisoners Small and myself. And at the sight of men like myself my heart lifted. I nudged Small who had all the while taken little interest in what was going on in the valley. He had simply slumped to the ground, back to the battle.
“Look, LOOK, Jim! Men, men like ourselves! The kidnappers! And look, Jim, one is a woman! It’s Miss March!”
Small, however, was unexcited. His grouch was deep. He was for the moment beyond caring for anything but himself. “Yeah? The dame that got us into this mess? What about it? Do we cheer now—with these blankety-blank beasts sticking us all the time? The nerve of the little . . .”
As he spoke I saw him moving one hand surreptitiously forward, slowly, slowly, and I forgot my own elation as I watched him. I expected every second to see his masters discover that hand of Nemesis inching upon them, but the little fiends were too interested in the movements of their kind. My own monitors were turned likewise toward the battle-field, their vigilance relaxed, forgetful that there were enemies in their midst. But now that ponderously moving hand struck, Small’s hand had fallen on three little green men who with backs to him were perched on his thigh, watching what was coming through the Pass.
A chill crept through me as their unearthly shrieks filled the air just before death came, smearing them out. Small had had a part revenge, but the murder of the three seemed to mean little as the rest of the crew ensconced upon his elephantine bulk went mad, plunging their spears deep into his neck, hands an
d head. But I had not realized to what depths Small had sunk. Pain meant nothing to him as he suddenly went berserk. The color of the thick blood of the three he had murdered was in his eyes. He was no longer Man. He was a brute bent upon destruction, revenge!
Rearing himself upright ponderously he no longer seemed to feel the prickings of the tiny green things upon him as one by one his slow-moving hands chased those within his vision. It was as if by terrific effort he actually overcame the gravity pull of the planet, else the little men were too terrified to save themselves as he plucked them off, crushed them, laughing when their blood oozed over his thick fingers. Several Lilliputians he dashed to the ground with all his might, two he pulled apart between his hands.
Then with an awkward, downward sweep of his hands he swept those still clinging to his shoulders and chest from him, and they went down clawing, slipping along the smooth cloth of his tunic, missing one hand-hold after another; then twisting, turning, they fell free.
This wild debacle lasted but a few moments. From the valley were racing a small horde of green men, anxious to revenge their kind. In a moment they would be swarming over Small and me. And now I realized that after the first stunned moment following Small’s attack, my own slave-drivers were upon me, stabbing deeply into my flesh in an effort to retain their hold upon me, to drive me back, away from my berserk companion. But Small’s mastery of the situation, and the fact that just beyond the wall were others of my kind made me forget my own hurt. I found myself repeating Small’s attack on my own tormentors. Lifting a hand to my shoulders I tore away the wires that were the little beast’s safe guards. Then a heavy hand went creeping over my head, feeling for the monsters who were my chief tormentors, and I swept them screaming with fear to the ground.
l I heard the treble of their voices as the frightened creatures scurried out of reach. They had no desire to receive the same punishment as those who had belabored Small all these days, but went scrambling down my body, deserting their posts as one man. And suddenly I realized I was free, free!
Collected Tales (Jerry eBooks) Page 67