by Earl
He slipped his whistle from his belt, tooted it several times. “See, buddy?” he wheedled. “Isn’t it cute? Wouldn’t you rather have this shiny whistle than that nasty old gun?”
“Cute buddy,” said the man-being, promptly taking the tendered object and returning the pistol. In perfect mimicry of Boswell’s elaborate pantomime, it put the whistle to its lips and blew gustily.
Winton screwed up his face sourly. “Let’s go. Hello! Look! Some of his friends coming. Archie, I don’t like this!”
Apparently attracted by the shrill whistling, a dozen other pseudo-men emerged from the forest and came up at a run. And pseudo-women. Some of them gave their irresistible laughter as they arrived. Thereafter, one or the other was always releasing its inane chuckles. The mirthful sounds deluged the earthmen.
And laughter, even without cause, is one of the hardest things to resist.
Boswell sank bonelessly to the ground in twisted Spasms of giggling. Winton tittered through clenched teeth, face purple with strain. A moment later he was in an uproarious state on the grass beside his friend. They writhed there, caught in a nervous storm more debilitating than any other human emotion.
“This is infernal—ha! ha!” shouted Winton as best he could in Boswell’s ear.
“Horrible—ho! ho!” roared Boswell. “I’m weak as a—wet rag—and getting weaker. I couldn’t lick—a mouse—right now.”
“Got to—stop this!” chortled Winton. “But I can’t—haw! haw!”
“Can’t stop,” said one of the creatures, reaching a hand down and plucking Winton’s whistle from his belt. Taking the cue, the others crowded around and began grasping whatever they could get their hands on. The earthmen were physically unable to resist, though they feebly tried.
“Hang onto your gun—ha! ha!—if you can!” Winton had put both his hands around his pistol, hanging on for dear life. Boswell managed to do the same while he squirmed in laughter that was now painful and hysterical. The pseudo-humans took everything else—knives, gas helmets, bandoliers, bullets, and torn pieces of clothing till little but rags were left.
It had something of the air of seemingly mild, friendly beings who had suddenly turned threatening and would punish these audacious, unwelcome two from another world.
“Can’t stand much more of this!” laughed Boswell.
“It will drive us insane!” chuckled Winton.
“This must be the menace—the laughing menace—two other expeditions—gets you by surprise—” guffawed Boswell.
“A half mile to the ship. We’ll never make it!” cackled Winton.
“Can’t even get up!”
“Irony of it! Enough ammunition in ship to blow up half the planet. And here we are—helpless!”
They spoke only at the cost of terrific effort as constant peals of hilarious laughter racked their bodies. They were barely able to see, through tear-blurred eyes, that dozens of other pseudo-humans had come up. They milled around the two helplessly contorted earthmen, filling the air with their empty trills. Key-sounds that titillated human risibilities beyond the point of endurance.
“Must do something—” Winton gripped his reeling senses with superhuman will-power. “Archie, hit me! Hit me in the face as hard as you can.”
Boswell whipped his balled fist around, but the blow landed limply. Winton only laughed the harder.
“Fight each other,” commanded Winton. “Anger drive out fit.”
They tried it for a while, kicking, striking, hammering at one another, raising bruises whose pain they could not feel. But the ghastly laughter that came from their lacerated throats continued unabated. They stopped their physical exertions, completely exhausted.
“Our guns!” Boswell gasped. “Last resort. Must kill them. Hate to but it’s them or us.”
He raised his pistol, taking aim for the nearest prancing man-being, displaying a stolen belt to a woman-being proudly.
“No.” Winton knocked his arm down. “Too many. Shoot in air. Maybe the noise—”
Winton fired upward. With startling suddenness the paean of garbed laughter died out. The beings had all leaped away like wild horses. The rush of their bare feet receded.
THE two Earthmen reeled to their feet, and staggered in the direction of their ship. The creatures congregated in a group a few hundred yards away, watching.
“What a relief!” Boswell gasped. “My face muscles will never be the same. Wade, that was diabolical. Momus, the terrible God of Laughter, rules here.” He hurled several choice inprecations over his shoulder. “I’d rather face dragons than those critters.”
“We’re not out of danger yet,” Winton ground out wryly. “Look, here they come again. We’ll have to conserve bullets. Half a mile to go. I’ll use mine first. One each time they start their infernal whinnying.”
The creatures gamboled up before they had gone a hundred yards. For a while they frisked silently around the drunkenly loping earthmen, like friendly dogs. Then suddenly one of their number gave a tentative snicker that swept the ranks like a prairie fire. The two humans trembled as though a mighty wind had buffeted them. Biting their lips till blood came, they plunged on. But within them a bubbling, gushing tidal wave of laughter flooded up inexorably.
“Damn you all seven times over!” Boswell cursed, already folding up like a straw-man as a hysterically hearty gust of laughter shook him.
Chuckling like an idiot, legs turning to rubber, Winton flung his hand up at the last possible second and fired. He struggled up from his knees, jerked Boswell’s arm, and stumbled toward the ship. The beings had whisked away at the shattering report, but this time they did not run so far, nor display so much fear.
“Remember that expression, Wade?” Boswell panted. “ ‘They laughed him off the face of the earth?’ I can appreciate that now! And can’t you just picture one of these jolly fellows pulling you aside to tell you a droll story and saying, ‘This’ll kill you!’ ”
He stared wearily ahead at their gleaming ship, whose haven alone would protect them from the laughing menace. ‘How did we get so thunderation far from our space buggy?”
“We were looking for radium that doesn’t exist, like a couple of champion chumps,” reminded Winton in dreary tones. “Like I said before, this whole set-up is screwier than a sardine nightmare. An earth-temperatured moon without radium, inhabited by laughing maniacs who speak English pronto without a lesson, and overhead a moon’s moon—” He groaned dismally. “But here come our jovial hosts again!”
“Like wolves to the kill!”
They had another minute’s grace before the creatures began their chorus of laughter. Then the typhoon of mirth caught them, tossing them toward the heights of insane laughter. The firing of Winton’s pistol pulled them back from the brink. The beings retreated, but with less startlement, and each succeeding time the interval between firing was shortened. The creatures were fast becoming conditioned to the sharp noise.
“Chinese knew their stuff,” Boswell remarked bitterly. “An old trick of theirs—torturing victims to death by tickling them into laughing fits.”
“My gun’s empty,” Winton rasped. “Use yours the next time.”
“Hundred yards to go!” gasped Boswell when his last bullet was gone.
His red-rimmed eyes hung on the looming ship with the look of a pilgrim at a saint’s shrine. “We’ve got to make it, Wade. Think of all the sad things you can before they get back. Funerals, invalids, hospitals, shattered love. Life is a vale of tears. All things are rotten at the core.
There is nothing but misery, suffering, despair. Oh, how sad, sad, sad it all is—sad, sad—” He choked. “Sad—haw! haw!—sad—ho! ho!—”
The beings were all around them again, whinnying blithely, and the two earthmen were already writhing in the paroxysms of mirthless laughter. They staggered forward desperately on legs that were turning to paper.
“Never make it!” Winton pointed his gun grimly at his friend’s head. His painfully twisted face, be
hind its mask of pseudo-mirth, was that of a weeping man. “Saved a bullet—for you, Archie old man—no need for both of us—to die this way—”
Winton fired.
The bullet missed, aimed by a trembling hand, blurred eyes. It struck the ship whose metal sides rang out like a gigantic bell. At this new noise, stentorian in volume, the beings pranced away in confusion.
Winton and Boswell were able to reel within a hundred feet of the ship’s lock. Then the creatures were back. Winton flung his gun at the ship, to make a noise. During this interval they reduced the distance by one-third. Boswell flung his finally.
But twenty feet from the lock they were caught again, writhing on the grass, as far from safety as though they were in the middle of a desert. Only a dim hope kept them from screaming insanity.
Winton tried stopping his ears with his fingers, but the fuse-sound of laughter leaked through. He tore up a tuft of grass and stuffed this into his ears savagely. Boswell followed suit. It was enough of a success to enable them to crawl forward inch by inch, foot by foot, between spasms of laughter that turned their muscles to water.
Fingers, elbows and knees scratched and bleeding, they reached the lock. Winton arose with agonizing effort on legs he knew didn’t exist, to reach the combination dial for the lock.
20-83-3.
He remembered the numbers, thank God. He dialed the final figure after an age-long hell of racking laughter, then fell. Boswell rose to jerk the lever and swing the door. They crawled into the lock-chamber through effort measured only in mental horsepower.
Once in, Boswell made a feeble kick at a vapid face and tugged the door shut. He finally had to slide the handle under his arm-pit and let the weight of his body do what his nerveless hands could not.
The seal closed, shutting off the sounds from outside. The two earthmen lay quivering like jellyfish, closer to their last ounce of strength and last shred of sanity than ever before in their not-too-tranquil lives of adventure and danger.
“This,” Boswell grunted weakly, “is heaven. Hell’s outside. I’ll never laugh again for the rest of my life.”
“Nor will I,” Winton agreed. “My ribs are so sore that they must be scraping raw meat at the edges. The word ‘laugh’ is stricken from my vocabulary. Hereafter, when someone tells me a joke that is funny, I’ll show my appreciation by writing ‘ha, ha’ on a piece of paper.”
But suddenly Winton did start laughing. However it was real laughter, without hysteria. Boswell joined him.
“We did put it over on them, at that,” he gloated.
“You fool, I’m not laughing about that. I’ve just figured out where our radium is. About a year from now, when I get up enough energy to move, I’ll show you.”
AS their ship retreated from the Neptunian system, Boswell ogled the little moon of the moon they had just visited. He gave it a fond glance, for it was almost solid radium. Financially, their expedition was a thundering success.
“Everything dovetails,” expostulated Winton in high good humor.
“When you told me you had your electroscope shielded so that only above or below could lie the radium, I should have suspected immediately that it was the second-hand moon above! Naturally I couldn’t expect your lame brain to figure it out.
“For countless ages this grandchild moon has been revolving about Neptune’s moon, shedding down its flood of energy from the radium. Result—warmed and habitable moon. Propitious environment. Life, evolution. A strange kind of evolution that has produced creatures with an overdeveloped sense of humor. Those other two expeditions were laughed to death! The next had better be composed of deaf-mutes.”
He shuddered. “Laughing—laughing—with nothing to laugh at!”
Boswell grinned crookedly. “Not in my case, Wade boy. During the time I was laughing and knew I couldn’t stop, I thought of all the good jokes I’d heard, enjoying them again. Only they got kind of stale on the fifth round or so.”
He looked at Winton in sudden triumph. “Ha, my superior friend, how do you explain those beings? The laughing mechanism is a perfect natural defense—but only of intelligent beings. You can’t deny that, not to mention repeating and using English words according to meaning, which means telepathy. You were the one, Wade, who said there’d be no slightest sign of intelligence out here—”
Winton shook his head. “They aren’t intelligent. They are in the class of genius.”
“Well?” snorted Boswell.
“A genius is not intelligent,” stated Winton calmly. “He is abnormally brilliant in one sole direction, subnormal in all else. Take his average and he’s mediocre. Often, in a manner of speaking, he’s insane.” He eyed Boswell meaningly. “You aren’t brilliant in any way, are you, Archie?”
“Oh, no, not at all!” Boswell assured him hastily.
VIA INTELLIGENCE
Stranded, the Expedition Must Buy Its Way Off the Furnace Planet, at the Price of Death if They Win—and Death if They Lose!
HELLO, Earth, Mars and Venus! Mercury Expedition Number One resuming contact after three months, two-hundred-forty-second day of our stay. Gillway at the keys.
All ten of us are still alive and well! We are rather proud of this. We have now been on Mercury twice the length of time we originally intended—longer than our air, water and food supplies were estimated to last. How we have done it is a long story.
But we don’t care to stay any longer. We’re determined to make a crossing at this conjunction of Mercury and Earth. The question is, how? Our rear rocket system is still useless for sustained space flight. We only have eighteen days to solve our problem.
We know there is a way, if only Omega would tell us. Omega is one of the vegetable intelligences. To explain about him, I’ll have to recapitulate.
Three months ago, after draining the mercury metal lake and finding our reserve fuel, we took off. Trouble developed immediately. Mercury vapors had amalgamated with our exposed rocket tubes, weakening them. Rocket tubes have to be supremely sturdy, as everyone knows. They are made of platinum-iridium alloy. They have to withstand high fuel temperatures, and the cold of space. The slightest weakening makes them useless. The mercury vapors of the lake had made a soft amalgam of ours.
When a rear bank of jets blew out, Captain Atwell ordered a landing on Mercury’s little moon, for investigation.
Phaeton, as Markers had named it, is small, only ten miles in diameter. It’s a solid mass of alloyed metals, completely airless, waterless, lifeless. It rotates on its own axis at the furious rate of once an hour. Each hour the heavens wheeled about us as though geared to a whirling wheel.
It actually made us dizzy. We had the feeling that we would slide off and catapult away, hurled by centrifugal force like a stone from a sling. It was a unique sensation. Von Zell, for instance, threw himself flat when he stepped from the ship, and grabbed a rock as if to hold on. In the almost negligible gravitation of the little satellite, the big boulder came up in his arms like a hydrogen-filled balloon. It was no more of an anchor than a feather.
WE all had to laugh, despite our dilemma. While Tarnay and Karsen were going over the rockets, the rest of us amused ourselves. We pitched metal lumps and watched them travel through space, never to come back. The escape-velocity was unbelievably low, something like thirty feet a second, easily achieved by our arm-muscles in throwing.
In a way, it gave us a thrill to realize we could throw objects into the Sun, though they wouldn’t arrive for years. We threw some down toward Mercury, thereby starting man-made meteorites that would pepper the planet.
Robertson exuberantly tested his jumping powers. He flew up, in his seal-suit, like a cannon shot. He gave us a fright, for he went up and up, from the initial impetus, dwindling till he was lost among the stars! Then he reappeared, floating down like a dust mote. He landed and clutched at us, pale and gasping.
“Lord!” he blurted. “I thought for a minute I had jumped clear off the place.”
A man might easily do it,
too, with a running leap.
But most of all, we just stood and looked up, watching the firmament wheel majestically about us. A half-hour of daylight, a half-hour of night—over and over. The Sun plunged from horizon to horizon like a great comet. The stars streaked around so fast that, to our unaccustomed eyes, they left a faint trail. It was like a film run at super-speed, an unforgettable sensation. We’re not sorry we saw it.
It’s strange to think of our delight in these phenomena, when all the while our chances of getting back to Earth hung in the unknown. But it’s good that men can laugh and look curiously at the bared teeth of adversity. I speak for the entire human race, not just us.
Tarnay and Karsen, after their careful examination, gave their report. We could not go on. The rocket tubes wouldn’t stand up for sustained acceleration, nor could we stay on the planetoid.
“Back to Mercury, men,” Captain Atwell announced. “We’re faced with three months additional stay. Somehow, we must last it out.”
TWO Hundred Forty-Third Day.
Five hours later, we maneuvered down over the Twilight Zone. Our ship threw up a spray of mercury metal as it landed on the lake that had drained into the valley. While we floated there, Captain Atwell ordered a complete inventory of supplies.
“Reserves above the minimum amount needed for the space flight are low,” Ling announced. “Food, enough for three weeks. Water, about ten days. Oxygen, a week.”
We stared at each other, dismayed. A week’s supply of breath for our lungs, little more of food and water, and our rocket engine nearly useless! The inhospitable terrain of Mercury seemed to mock us. Von Zell laughed a little hysterically.
“We’re not losing A life, men. We’re all staying together. All ten of us—here!”
Captain Atwell slapped Von Zell’s face stingingly, before he could say more. But the slap was really delivered to all of us. Von Zell just happened to express himself.
“Get hold of yourselves,” Captain Atwell snapped. “It’s not as bad as it seems. There’s liquid air on the Night Side, which we can tank. There’s pure ice frozen out there, too. We’ll go for air first, then water. One thing at a time. As for food and the rocket engine, we’ll see.”