by Jerry
“Wouldn’t Teddy R. like to be with us now? This is real ‘big game’ hunting.”
“I’m glad you feel light-hearted about it, Don. I don’t,” I said seriously.
He grinned broadly.
“I did feel frightened and awed at first,” he admitted, “I was prepared for most anything from that hellish solution of yours, professor. I was afraid it had gotten too big to be killed by this time. Now it will be sport to hunt the thing.”
“Don’t be careless, Don,” I cautioned, “there never was a leopard as quick as that spider is.”
I then related how swiftly it had leaped at me two days before.
HIS gray eyes sobered again. “It would be hell on you, professor, if it got away and killed somebody. I don’t believe you’d ever get over it. We’ve just got to find the thing and now’s a pretty good time to start.”
We hunted all that afternoon without results. We ate no lunch and talked little, saving our breath for the climbs. About twilight we came back to the house without having found a trace of the spider. Don took some raw steak which he had brought out for me and put it where I had staked the goat.
We were both very excited. I was apprehensive but Don was eager. He was like a boy on a lark, and very determined, as a matter of pride to get that spider.
I ate no supper, but Don munched some cakes and drank several cups of black coffee to keep him awake. I knew I should never sleep until that spider was destroyed.
Don had not finished his cakes when we heard the thing land upon the house. He leaped from his chair, swallowing a mouthful of cake, and grabbed his rifle. There was an air of conquest about him as he leaped towards the door, which he flung open and was out into the night before I could stop him.
“Wait Don!” I cried, “Don’t go out there!”
I had been sitting at the far corner of the room trying to read in order to hide my uneasiness from the boy. He got outside the door before I could get to my feet.
Almost immediately I heard him shout: “Help, help!” Then bravely as though striving for control: “No. Don’t come. Oh! Oh!” His shriek ended in a low moan.
I grabbed a straight chair as a weapon and picked up my flashlight as I passed the table. I flung the door open. Don had slammed it shut behind him.
Outside everything was silent. A four or five day old moon hung its pale crescent close down against the high rim of the opposite canyon, and cast a sickly glow over the white limestone cliffs above. As my eyes searched alertly for the terror I knew was lurking near, I saw a long white rope swinging down from the cliffs. It curved gracefully over toward the house like a white telephone cable and under the beam of my flashlight it glistened with the peculiar sheen of raw silk. Of course, it was the web by which the spider had descended to the house, and for a moment my eyes followed that silk cord as it swayed back and forth in the night breeze, for I knew that at the lower end of it was the monster.
Out of the shadows of the house, at my very feet, reached a hooked tentacle and crept across the doorsill. Another repulsive claw felt its way up beside the first and caught the yellow glow of the lamp back inside the room. I leaped back and struck out with my chair. Then I poked the beam of my flashlight into the dark shadows of the cliff where the thing crouched. There it was, big as a burro, and under it was Don with its hooked falces buried in him and its proboscis seeking about for the best spot to drain the blood from him. Its eight big eyes glared at me balefully, while its eight long, two-hooked, seven-jointed legs flexed themselves and began dragging Don out of the light.
THE Winchester was lying near the door where Don had dropped it when the spider clutched him. With a bravery born of terror I ran and grabbed the gun. Raising my weapon I poked the beam of my light around the house. The thing was gone!
I made a quick search about the premises with the long blade of my light, playing it over the barn, upon the demolished rat cages, and then upon the chalk-white cliff. There it was, I saw with a gasp, almost a hundred feet above the house, climbing its silver ladder and carrying Don up to its lair. Every one of its eight large tentacles was silhouetted against the white cliff and at their center was the dark circular mass of its body. Below it dangled Don’s arms and legs as the spider climbed the silky rope.
I dared not fire. The drop alone would be enough to kill Don. There was only one thing to do, infuriate the thing, dare it to attack me. I ran to the long flow of the rope and shook it with great jerks and heaves. The thing merely raised long tentacles at me and rasped heavily. I shook again, and like a boat going down the chutes, it slid toward me. Evidently Don was not badly hurt, for he hung above to the web and followed very slowly. But I had no time to watch Don, for the monster was now far enough below for me to risk a shot.
I raised the rifle and fired, not even trying to locate the gun sights in the dim light but aiming instinctively. I missed. The spider seemed to fall from its hanging position, but as it neared the ground it swung itself from the cliff and leaped toward me.
The sight of it paralyzed me as some terrible unreal nightmare, I felt every moment I should wake up grateful to find it was all a dream. With a last effort of my will, I shook from myself the hypnotic fear of the terror above me and marked a spot as near as I could at the center of the glittering malicious eyes. Those eyes were as large as hen eggs. But my shot told and the thing fell short of its leap for me and writhed a moment where it had fallen.
It had dropped between me and the house and as it crouched ready for another leap, I ran for the protection of the barn, and dodged behind it. The thing faced me not twenty feet from my refuge. Hate, rather than hunger, now burned in its terrible eyes. My two bullets had torn away one eye and three of its tentacles, which gave it a lopsided gait as it crawled toward me. The thing was mutilated but it was not frightened. It seemed anxious to attack, and stalked me, feeling out with its five unharmed hooked tentacles, feeling out to seize me, as it advanced. Its eyes were those of a devil, and every one of them focused upon me as though the diabolical brain back of them had no fear and wished to turn upon me the great strength I had given it. I was almost paralyzed with fear.
It leaped again and I felt the falces bury into my shoulders and thighs with a deep numbing pain as it pulled me down, knocking the gun from my hand. Even caught in the terror of such a death, I remember thinking anxiously of what a menace the monster would become to the ranchers and townsfolk for a hundred miles around. I made a last desperate effort to wrench free and another hooked tentacle clawed into my arm and I felt the sharp point of the proboscis raking about my throat, feeling or scenting for the veins.
There came a report and then another and another and the big pulpy mass wilted and covered me. I choked and fought and felt the claw joints of the falces slip from my flesh. When I was able to crawl from under the mass of short-furred flesh, Don was standing weakly beside me. He had found the gun under the light of the moon and had finished the monster.
“Don?” I cried, “You are all right?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Only clawed a little. Can you get to the house?”
“I believe I can,” I answered and limped toward the open door with the hurt of my wounds beginning to sting and burn.
When we were inside the house and had washed and bound each other’s wounds, I limped over to the bottle of solution I had last prepared. The horror of the thing to which I had given so much strength was still upon me, I grasped the big bottle and dashed it to the concrete floor. Then I took my log book and ripped from it the pages of my complex formulae and struck a match.
“No, professor!” Don cried and leaped from his chair.
“No! professor,” Don repeated, “Age is too cautious. Merely trying to save what is, rather than creating something more perfect. The best is yet to be; let me have your secret. I will carry on. I am not afraid. Daring has always gained more than it has lost!”
I was impressed. I did not strike another match, but locked the sheets of the formulae in a st
eel safe. And that is where they now are. I have not given the secret to Don, neither have I destroyed it. Don may be right. There would be much benefit to mankind, should Don or I find some way to stop the cell multiplication after it is started. But, there is the chance that no way to stop the dangerous growth might be found, and much harm might be done to mankind by an unscrupulous fiend, or foolish scientist, should my formulae fall into his hands.
It impressed me that the monster spider and the fight we had with it, should be a lesson of caution, a warning that I might have been encroaching upon the Great Keeper’s grounds.
And yet—what shall I do? What is right, and what is best?
I do not know.
So I am writing down the whole history of my discovery and of its menace, and asking all of you, who are so wise, and you who are so foolish, to dare an answer; you may be either benefited or destroyed—you who were my first thought at the time of my investigations, and who are now my only concern. What shall I do?
THE END.
[1] The study of cells and their activities.
[2] A family of swift-running spiders with a peculiar eye arrangement.
[3] A family of leaping spiders with a somewhat similar eye arrangement.
[4] Appendages, one at each side of a spider’s mouth.
[5] The combined mouth parts of a blood-sucking organism.
THE SYNTHETIC MEN
Ed Earl Repp
For Generations They Labored to Create Man in His Image—But the Revolt Came!
THERE is no greater secret that our scientists would like to learn than how life was formed. In that secret may well lie the clue to the entire nature of the universe. We can guess that at some remote age, something happened to a bit of lifeless material—thru some strange circumstances that we have never seen duplicated—that gave this material life. That something happened millions of years ago and the thing it gave life to became no more than a one-celled animal. We are its descendants, with our millions of cells, in specialized groups, complicated beyond belief.
What if a scientist by trial error, and experiment after experiment, should finally hit upon the secret and be able to make life synthetically—would it be a blessing or a curse? Mr. Repp has his own answer to this question in the present story of thrills and chills.
GHOSTLY and weird was the laboratory in which Dr. Pontius labored from early morning until late at night on the delicate subject of life and all its intriguing mysteries. It would have been an excellent place for an exponent of black art or sorcery, and at this time the shadows of night had stolen into the room making it even more spectral. But the blackness was somewhat relieved by a single, frosted electric lamp that cast a pale, phosphorescent glow over a paper-littered desk in a dismal corner.
Hanging along the wall on the right was a row of four human skeletons, complete and erect. On a massive shelf over these stood rows of colored bottles, each bearing a label identifying its contents. The shelf ran the entire distance around the room except where a lone door created a four-foot gap. Directly opposite the grisly human relics, and flanking Pontius’ desk, rested two monster test-tubes of thick glass, large enough to accommodate the body of a full-sized man.
Due to the murky gloom of the place, it would have been hard to determine, at a first glance, just what the tubes contained, because they were half-hidden in the enveloping shadows. But a close observer would have been appalled to behold that each tube contained the nude body of a man, seemingly at rest, in the thick-jelly-like fluid that the tube contained. And if one had turned on one of the green-looking globes that hung suspended above each tube he would have been amazed to see the man’s body become transparent, so transparent and seemingly delicate that the internal organs could be seen functioning with the steady precision of a watch!
Through the arteries of the bodies he would see coursing a peculiar pea-green fluid, that seemed to glow like liquid emeralds. In one body it flowed in a steady stream, but in the other it was sluggish and thick, gushing through the veins in quick, spasmodic jerks with each throb of a green heart that was located far up on the right side.
It was easy to see that this latter creature was on the verge of death. But the first, his rather cruel, sharp features appearing peaceful and calm, seemed as normal as a man asleep on his feet. Both bodies erect, supported by the heavy-fluid, faced the laboratory in a way that Dr. Pontius could glance at either of them from his desk.
He was the son of the famous Edward Pontius, who in 1934 had startled the world with his discovery of the Q-Ray that he said was the wavelength of energy fundamental to the continuance of life. He had been besieged by the press, the government, and scientific societies to divulge his secret more fully, to tell from where this ray emanated and how it was produced. It was known that he had made some astounding experiments of the effect of Q-Rays on animals.
But Pontius refused to release his secret saying, “It is not ready for the world.” And when he had passed on, his mantle was naturally worn by his son and scientific heir, the present Clifford Pontius.
Close associates knew that young Clifford had been trained from earliest youth on the mysterious experiments of his father; and when old Edward had died, Clifford, then twenty-six, had hidden himself from the world to “carry on”, as he called it. Now Clifford, at the age of seventy, was about to reap the fruits of sixty-five years of unremitting labor between father and son.
A LITTLE less crusty than his father, he believed that the time had now come for the world, which had meanwhile forgotten him, to learn the result of his discoveries. As he now sat at his desk, wearily slumped in his chair from an all-night siege at his complete report, he awaited the arrival of a reporter whom his old friend Amesbury, editor of the Globe, was sending for the story. Pontius had chosen the Globe as his medium for the release of the secret to the world, because he knew he could trust the way Amesbury would handle it. There would be no sensationalism—just a simple recounting of the fact that with the continual experimenting of sixty-five years, he had been able to produce two mature, living, thinking, synthetic men!
Pontius looked up from his desk quickly at the sound of a muffled bell. He pressed a button on his desk, and a picture flashed on a little screen in front of him—showing a young man on the doorstep, hat in hand.
“Who is it?” asked Pontius into a little tube near his face.
The young man looked around startled. “Why—why, I’m Douglass of the Globe, wherever you are,” he answered.
Pontius pressed another button that controlled an automatic electric lock on the outer door and waited. Presently, he heard scraping feet in the hall outside the laboratory and went to the door.
“Come right in, Douglass,” he invited, peering through thick, octagon-shaped glasses at the rather tall but effeminate-looking young man who stood in the hall-way. “I have been waiting for you.”
“Thanks, Dr. Pontius,” the reporter responded cheerily as he entered. “I’d have been on time but a traffic jam delayed me.”
Dr. Pontius grunted and slid into his swivel chair at the desk. Douglas sat down near him and glanced around the room. He was lean with dreamy eyes, but despite his effeminate appearance he seemed well able to take care of himself. Yet at the sight of the grinning skeletons and the synthetic men he gave a perceptible start. The scientist eyed him with a contemplating glance.
“Don’t like them, do you, young man?”, he asked seriously.
Douglass shuddered. “I always feel strange in the presence of human skeletons, Dr. Pontius; and these things,” he added pointing to one of the creatures.
“Quite natural,” said the scientist. “Every living thing has some horror for skeletons of its kind. Even a dog will avoid its dead. But you don’t feel that way about my children,” he smiled nodding toward the figures in the test tubes.
“They don’t appear to annoy or bother you,” the reporter commented. “Where did you get them—the skeletons?”
Dr. Pontius settled back in
his chair and filled his pipe with the same deliberate coolness that he performed the other act.
“The first one is all that remains of ‘Killer’ Garth who was executed at Sing Sing five months ago,” Pontius remarked casually.
Douglass’s eyes flashed and he squirmed uneasily in his chair as he regarded the designated skeleton. Pontius continued: “Number two was an unidentified laborer who was drowned six months ago at Camden, New Jersey.
Note the curvature of the vertebrae at the neck—”
“No thanks, Dr. Pontius,” said Douglass, turning his head. “I’ve had enough.
But why all the skeletons?”
Pontius realized that Douglass was purposely avoiding the subject of the meeting—his two synthetic men. He snapped a tiny lighter into flame and ignited his pipe, contemplated the reporter silently for a moment and then blew out a cloud of smoke. With a nod he drew the young man’s attention to the test tubes.
“I am using them to obtain in the surrounding jelly a substance which I need for the making of my synthetic man.” There, he had shot his bolt. He regarded Douglass’ awe-struck face as he continued. “In other words, the skeletons will dissolve into my fluid until they are all gone. The fluid will be enriched by a substance necessary to the production of life.”
Douglass almost jumped out of his chair when he comprehended what the two teat tubes in the shadow contained. He stared at them for fully five minutes before it dawned upon him that the contents were really living men. His handsome face went strangely pale and took on a ghostly appearance under the glow of the feeble lamp that scarcely touched the gloom enshrouding the tubes. So this was the mysterious story Ainesbury had sent him for!
But could it be true? He felt a shiver steal up his spine as he contemplated the grotesque creatures and turned quickly to see the scientist studying him intently.