Bug-Eyed Monsters

by Bill Pronzini

  Exactly, thought Mudge, also trembling.

  He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. At that moment, Feridur twittered. Ulrica stopped in mid-career and faced around. Feridur put the monocle in his eye and repeated the question. Captain Zalakun said something in a protesting tone of voice. Feridur made a sweet reply at which the captain shuddered and backed away. Ulrica turned quite pale.

  Mudge listened intently. He heard Feridur ask, with painful distinctness: “Uluka’s kuruta yaldazir itoban urnalik?”

  “Yalgesh, Zirvan” said Ulrica, in a small subdued voice and a Swedish accent. “Obunadun haladur erkedivir”

  The saw-toothed blade rasped from Feridur’s sheath. He giggled. “Yagatun!”

  Ulrica clenched her fists. Then, suddenly, she spat at the Harakuni’s feet. The color flamed back in her cheeks. “Yagatun zoltada, Yaldazir Feridur!” she snapped.

  “Eep!” said Feridur, horrified at such manners. Captain Zalakun sought to remedy the breach, but got nowhere. The sailors burrowed in the sand, trying to make themselves inconspicuous. Finally Zalakun himself went off in giant kangaroo leaps toward the tents.

  “What is this?” whispered Mudge.

  Ulrica said in a harsh tone: “Feridur wanted to know if you can locate the Earth base, since I can’t. When I admitted you had only been playing games, he said he would fight me. I have explained that the vitamin pills are necessary for our life, so he knows we would soon die in any case when he turns homeward. He wants to take my skull in combat instead, for his collection.”

  “What?” squeaked Mudge. The island revolved around him. He stumbled, feeling blackness in his head. Ulrica caught him.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said in the same metallic voice. “You are not worth fighting—no glory in taking your head. They will keep you for a pet, I suppose . . . and you will have my pills . . . and it is barely possible, in that extra time a search party will chance upon you.”

  “But this is ghastly!” stammered Mudge. “I mean, it isn’t done!”

  “It seems to be.” Ulrica managed a bleak grin. “Maybe I can take Feridur’s head. Then I inherit his titles, properties, and skull collection, and can sail the ship where I will. Not that we have much chance anyway, without a bearing.” She sighed. “This may be the better way to die.”

  “But listen—” wailed Mudge.

  Zalakun returned with a sword, shouldered past him and said something to the girl. She nodded. Mudge tried to get a word in edgewise. “Shut up,” said Ulrica. Zalakun finished by handing her the weapon.

  “In case you are interested,” said Ulrica, “he was explaining the rules. In effect, there aren’t any. Either party can use tricks, assistants—”

  Zalakun flickered a glance at Feridur, who was polishing his monocle several meters off. The captain leaned over and whispered something to the girl. She smiled a suddenly gentle smile and gave his scaly back a furtive pat. “What is it?” gibbered Mudge. “What did he say?”

  “He said no one will help Feridur,” she answered curtly. “They don’t like him. Of course, they are too afraid of him to take my side either. He’s the leading phrenologist in Harakun.”

  “But . . . I can . . . I mean, that is, I have to tell you—”

  “Oh, be quiet,” she said. “What use would you be? Stand aside out of my way, that is all you can do.”

  “But you don’t have to fight this barbaric thing!” yelped Mudge. “It isn’t necessary! If you would only listen to me for five minutes, I can explain—”

  “Shut up,” she cut him off. He tried to continue. She whirred her blade past his nose. He jumped backward, choking. She laughed with a real, if deplorably coarse mirth, and said more kindly: “It is too late anyhow. I insulted him on purpose. Whatever I said now, he would insist on disposing of me.”

  Zalakun wrung her hand and scuttled off to the sidelines as Feridur turned around. The aristocrat screwed his eyeglass in more firmly, hefted his sword, and minced across the sand. Ulrica crouched, waiting. The wind fluttered her kilt and the one loose lock of hair.

  Mudge put his back against the tree bole and tried to think. But that was like trying to run through glue. This was the U.S.P. Standard adventure-story situation, a beautiful girl threatened by a bulging-eyed monster, and he was a man, and it was up to him to save her, but—Feridur’s blade whipped up and then down. It hit Ulrica’s with a clang that hurt Mudge’s eardrums. The blow would have gone halfway through him.

  He huddled next to the comforting bulk of good old Ardabadur, and prayed that the beautiful girl would save him from the bug-eyed monster.

  “Yava’s!” cried Feridur.

  He bounced back from Ulrica’s attack. She knew fencing, but had no skill with these awkward weapons. She closed in, though, a rush and a sweep. Somehow it got past Feridur’s guard, and steel teeth rattled across his scales. They did no harm. His own blade moved with a combination of thrust and stroke. Ulrica retreated, fending him off by mere fury of blows. He grinned and stalked around her, so that she must keep turning to face him. His reach was not much greater than hers, but he had every advantage of height, stride, and strength.

  All at once, like a snake, his weapon darted in, slid past Ulrica’s and touched her thigh. She got away in time, with only a thin red slash, but Mudge felt sick. “Son of an improper union,” she muttered, and cut loose again. “You want to saw me up alive, huh? We’ll see!”

  She leaped in, hewing low. Feridur hissed as she opened a gash on his left shin. Her metal was already up to block his answering cut. He brought his edge down, chopping at her ankles. She jumped high, the sword whined beneath her feet, she came down on it and it was torn from Feridur’s grasp.

  “Now, you miserable alligator!” she exclaimed, and assaulted his head. A small sailor emitted a very small cheer, then covered his mouth and looked around in terror of having been overheard.

  Feridur whirled about, raised his tail, and struck Ulrica amidships. The wind whoofed from her. She rolled three meters and climbed dizzily to her feet. Feridur picked up his sword and advanced with deliberation. The watching sauroids looked distressed, Captain Zalakun twisted his hands together, but all seemed nailed to the spot.

  “Look out!” screamed Mudge. Impulsively, he darted forward.

  Ulrica waved him back. She still clutched her sword. The free hand dabbed at a bruised cheek. “No,” she said. “One is enough.”

  “But you are a woman!” he cried. “Give me that! I’ll fight for you!”

  She managed a ghost of a laugh. “Dear little Didymus,” she whispered. “I am an Ormstad of Clan Swenson. Get out of my way.”

  Feridur closed in for the kill as Mudge staggered back to Ardabadur’s side. The Harakuni noble paused to readjust his monocle. He tittered.

  Then Ulrica exploded into motion. Her sword became a blur, yelled in the air, banged on Feridur’s iron, knocked down his guard and slashed him across the shoulder. He hissed and jumped back. Ulrica followed, shouting.

  She’s splendid! thought Mudge wildly. They don’t make girls like that in Boston! He blushed and corrected himself: I mean, there aren’t any girls like that in Boston.

  Feridur rallied and beat off the attack. Ulrica retreated. Through wind and surf, above the steady belling of steel, Mudge could hear how she clawed for breath. And once she stumbled from exhaustion. Feridur would kill her in minutes.

  “I should go out and die with her.” Mudge licked dry lips. “Really, I should, if I can’t do anything else. I feel so useless.”

  “Akrazun kulakisir,” said Ardabadur comfortingly.

  “It wouldn’t be against the rules,” chattered Mudge. “She told me anything goes. I could help. Only . . . only . . . to be absolutely honest, as my mother always told me to be, I’m scared.”

  Feridur drew blood again: a flesh wound, no more, but Ulrica’s sword was now slow and heavy in her fingers.

  “Of course, later I can explain, and maybe they will take me to Lonesome Landing after all,�
�� babbled Mudge. “But no, I haven’t her training, I could not possibly learn the language before my vitamins ran out. I am done for, too. You had all this work for nothing, Ardabadur. Now you will never know why you made—”

  The thought came to him. It was not exactly a blinding flash of intuition. Or perhaps it was. He didn’t notice. By the time he was fully conscious of having an idea, it was already in execution.

  “Ulrica!” he shouted. “Miss Ormstad! Major Ormstad! Get him . . . maneuver him onto . . . that cleared, wet space in the sand . . . under that tree . . . keep him there . . . and look out!”

  Meanwhile he snatched a knife from Ardabadur’s belt and went up the ladder. The carpenter whistled alarm and started after him. Frantically, Mudge kicked him on the crest, while sawing at the cord and yelling at Ulrica.

  “Miss Ormstad! Work him onto that level damp patch! Quickly! Hold him . . . just a minute . . . please! I beg of you!”

  Ulrica, fighting for another second of existence, heard his thin screech and croaked out of pain and despair: “Let me die by myself, Earthling.”

  Somehow, without planning to, scarcely aware of it, Didymus Mudge inflated his lungs and roared in a heroic tenor, so that even Zalakun jumped: “Profanity dash blasphemy blue and green, green starred et cetera! Do what I blank unprintable tell you before I commit unspeakable violence upon your defamity person!”

  Whether the memory of drill sergeants ten years ago came back and possessed her, or whether she was suddenly given hope—or for whatever reason—Ulrica sprang away from Feridur and ran. He bounded after, jeering at her. Ulrica crossed the wet sand, twirled about, and met his charge. Saw teeth locked together as the blades met. Feridur began to shove hers aside. She threw her last strength into resisting him, though she felt it drain from muscle and bone.

  Didymus Mudge cut the cord on his Foucault sphere.

  Loaded with hundreds of kilos of sand, it swung across the beach, gathering velocity all the way. Mudge fell off the ladder, onto Ardabadur. They went down in a tangle of arms, legs, and tail. By the time he had picked himself up, it was all over, and the Harakuni were howling as one jubilant mob around LJlrica.

  Mudge limped toward her. He wanted to see, if he could, how much of an arc his pendulum was describing. Yes . . . there was definitely an elliptical path, but a narrow one. That tendency should be quite obviated when he made the official experiment tomorrow. He would burn the rope then, rather than cut it, to liberate the bob without transverse forces . . . He ducked as it whistled past. So huge a thing had not lost much energy when it hit Feridur.

  Mudge saw what had happened to Feridur. For a while he was not a well man.

  Captain Zalakun released Ulrica’s hand, which he had been pumping in a most Earthlike fashion, and regarded the mess. Finally he shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Dear me, Zivar Orumastat,” he said. “You really must chastise your slave. No doubt he meant well, but he has completely ruined what would have been a very fine eggshaped skull.”

  A while afterward, when they sat in the captain’s cabin, eating the Epsteinian food—which humans found dreary—and drinking the Epsteinian wine—which was forty proof and not bad at all—Zalakun asked Ulrica: “Arvadur zilka itoban urnalik?”

  The girl blinked beautiful, though slightly blurred, green eyes above her goblet, in Mudge’s direction. “He wants to know if you can indeed navigate us, Didymus,” she said.

  Mudge blushed. “Well, not exactly,” he admitted. “Until we reach base and get a radio network receiver, I mean. But then he will be able to navigate himself. Ahem!” He burped and reached for his own cup. “I can, however, tell him to a fair approximation how far away Lonesome Landing is, and in what direction. That should suffice, since he has good compasses and is independent of the wind. Rather, I will be able to tell him this tomorrow, when I have all the data and finish the calculations.”

  “But how?” She leaned forward. “How, Didymus?” she repeated softly.

  “Well,” he said after catching his breath, “the data book gives the location of base, so if I know our present coordinates, it becomes a simple problem in spherical trigonometry, for which the book supplies tables, to determine—”

  “Yes, yes,” she said in a slightly less worshipful tone. “But how do you locate us?”

  “It is a problem of finding latitude and longitude,” he said. He took another swig of wine. It buzzed in his head, but helped steady his voice. Once he got going, the lecture habits of a decade took over and he talked automatically. “Ahem! We had the data book and a watch, but the watch had been running awry since the moment of the crash, so that I no longer knew within several hours what time it was. Now if I could only observe something which took a precisely known time, such as ten seconds, I could compare the watch, see by what factor it was fast or slow, and apply the correction.

  “I looked up the standard value of Epsteinian gravity, one thousand twelve centimeters per second squared. Local variations would not make any significant difference. A pendulum describing short arcs has a period which is a function only of length and gravity. The carpenter made me a good small pendulum and I clocked it.”

  “Yes, but,” said Ulrica. She paused. “But,” she repeated muzzily. Wine had hidden her own weariness from her, but it made the wine all the more effective. “But you don’t know the length of the pendulum. Not with, urp, precision.”

  “No,” said Mudge. “However, the distance covered by a falling body is a function only of gravity and time. Air resistance can be disregarded for low speeds. I repeated Galileo’s experiment, dropping a weight through a fixed height. Actually, I rolled it down an inclined plane—so did he—to get a greater length and thus a smaller percentage of error. Though I did not know the effective height in absolute units, I took care to see that it was an integral multiple of the pendulum length; and I measured the time for a ball to roll down in terms of pendulum oscillations. I therefore have two equations in two unknowns, easy to solve. When I have computed all my data, taking the average of many observations, I will know the length of the pendulum in centimeters and, what I really wanted, the length of its period in seconds. From this I can correct the time shown by my watch.”

  Ulrica smiled, stretched out on the floor and laid her head on Mudge’s lap.

  “Goodness gracious!” Mudge gasped. “What are you doing, Miss Ormstad?”

  “You were speaking about falling bodies,” she murmured.

  “But . . . I mean . . . Major Ormstad!”

  “Ulrica is my name,” she whispered.

  Zalakun’s leathery face assumed an avuncular expression. He said something which Mudge was afraid meant, “Bless you, my children.”

  “Well,” gulped Mudge. “Well, if you’re tired, Miss . . . er . . . Major . . . I can find a pillow.”

  “I’m quite comfy,” said the girl. She reached up and patted his cheek. “I’m sorry for losing my temper. I wouldn’t have if I had known you better, Didymus. Know what? You’re cute.”

  Mudge ran a finger beneath his collar and plunged terror-stricken onward: “Since this planet has only solar tides, I was spared one complication. To be sure, tidal patterns are not simple; but a wave crossing the almost empty Northeast Ocean will not be much delayed either. To further help me, the data book has tide tables not only for Lonesome Landing, but for selected spots elsewhere. This will assist interpolation. In short, when my watch has been corrected, I will be able to identify any local tide as one which passed Lonesome Landing so-and-so many hours ago. Knowing the speed at which it travels, I thereby know how far westward it has come in that interval—hence, our longitude.”

  Ulrica frowned, with a finger laid to her chin. “No,” she said, “ ‘cute’ is the wrong word. I mean, you are cute, but you are also very much of a manfolk. When you shouted at me to do what you wanted, it was poetic. Like a saga.”

  “I forgot myself,” said Mudge wretchedly.

  “I’ll help you forget some more,” beamed Ulrica.
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  “Ugvan urunta,” said Zalakun.

  Mudge interpreted this as a request to continue his discourse. “Latitude is a simpler problem, solvable with greater accuracy,” he said very fast. “I know the angular velocity of this planet’s rotation, three hundred sixty degrees in forty-six hours. Knowing the date, I could calculate latitude from length of daylight, except for the clouds. A Foucault pendulum affords a much better method. It would not turn at all at the equator; it would turn with maximum speed at either pole; in between, the rate is a sine function of latitude. I can use geometrical constructions to mark off a precise angle such as ninety degrees, clock the time the pendulum needs to sweep through this angle, and thence compute our latitude. And, and, and that’s all,” he finished. “I should have the information for you by nightfall tomorrow, and we can start out next day. To be sure, accumulated uncertainties will doubtless cause us to miss the island, but not by much. We can find it in time if we scout about. Though I suppose we need only come within a few hundred kilometers to be spotted by an aircraft—”

  Ulrica chuckled. “And so we will arrive as great heroes,” she said, “very romantic, and perhaps we had better not disappoint people about the romantic side of it, no? Kare lille Didymus. This is going to be so pleasant a sea voyage.”

  Mudge swallowed hard and wondered how to escape.

  “Istvaz tuli,” said Zalakun with a fatuous smirk.

  Mudge threw him a look of wild appeal, as if somehow the bug-eyed monster could save the man from the girl.

  “Nature is strange” the narrator of this chilling little tale tells us. “There are all sorts of things that look like dangerous animals. Animals that are the killers and superior fighters of. their groups have no enemies. The army ants and the wasps, the sharks, the hawk, and the felines. So there are a host of weak things that try to hide among them—to mimic them. And man is the greatest killer, the greatest hunter of them all . . . Should man then be treated by nature differently from the other dominants, the army ants and the wasps?”