6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

  He landed on Manhattan opposite the little splinter-islet. He tore out the pages on which he’d written his account and pinned them to the bark of the largest nearby tree with a thorn longer than his hand from a nearby bush. Sam would hunt the tree-trunks hereabouts from Earth, looking through his peephole from the equivalent space—it was a park in New York—as early as tomorrow morning. He might even hunt them up tonight. When he saw a message at the arranged place, he would use the doorway Maltby had contrived, and retrieve it. He would obey it as nearly as he could.

  Then Dick took his two boats up the river past all observation. He found a secure hiding-place for both boats on a shore which should have been the Bronx. Then, and only then, he began to free his followers from their shackles. He had delayed that until he could tell them confidently that the means of fighting would soon be on the way.

  It was late, by the time they were well hidden and free. The slaves had among them now two spears and two automatic pistols, besides Dick’s own. These were not arms enough. So Dick commanded them to cut saplings and make substitute spears, sharpening the points with the steel blades of the spears. And if any could make bows or arrows—but that would take time.

  Time was of the essence, of course. And arms were essential. At the moment they were probably safe. There would be no regular patrol of men or ruhks on the mainland, where no slave pen lay. But they could be found, and ultimately would be. If the freed slaves tried flight inland, of course they would be tracked down. That was a function of the ruhks.

  So he asked grim questions of his followers. He began to outline the beginnings of his plans. The men were cowed, and they had been almost spiritless. But they were desperate beyond the desperation of mankind. Their hate was a burning flame. So Dick made plans to utilize their desperation and hate as substitutes for the spirit that had been driven out.

  ~ * ~

  Back on Earth there was the barest beginning of a possibility of change. Sam Todd—still sweating when he thought of his experience in Brooklyn—went to the park which was the Manhattan shore opposite the splinter-island south of Welfare. It was dark when he arrived, but he sat on a bench and put a copper alloy peephole inconspicuously to his eye. He did not at first see the sheets of paper that Dick had pinned to the trunk of a tree for him to find. There was no light but moonlight in the forest where the big tree stood. But even so, Sam made a discovery which was disheartening. In the world of men there had been a fill-in at that spot. The park area had been raised in level by earth piled high, with grass and concrete walkways laid on top. Fifteen feet back from the shoreline of the Other World, the ground-levels in the other world were completely different. Sam discovered, even before he saw the impaled sheets of paper, that any message Dick had left for him would be buried deep beneath publicly maintained park lawn. Actually, the scribbled sheets were stuck to a tree trunk under a drinking fountain on Earth. To get at them would have required an excavation besides an interdimensional door, and it could not be accomplished without either permission or discovery. In short, Sam simply could not pick up Dick’s message at all.

  But he had the twin to the metal peephole. It was a miniature interdimensional door. Maltby had made it to be sure he could. And sitting on the park bench Sam wrote painfully in his turn:

  “There’s an earth-fill covering up your papers. I can’t get to them. But I have been looking around Maltby’s place. Two miles northeast of here there is a pond in the world, you’re in. There is a cart-trail past it. Just beyond the first bend in that trail to northward of the pond, there is an unusually large tree with mottled bark. That tree grows through the space Maltby’s apartment occupies on Earth. Come there. I’ll have something fixed up so you can come back—with Nancy, I hope.—Sam.”

  He fumbled in his pocket. The only suitable container was his wallet. He emptied that and put his message inside it. He put the end of his handkerchief between the zipper teeth and caught the cloth firmly. He rolled up the wallet into a cylinder and managed to squeeze it through the tiny round alloy doorway which corresponded to the alloy eye. Feigning to drink at the drinking fountain, he released the handkerchief by which the wallet dangled in the Other World. Then, through the peephole, he watched. The wallet fell at the foot of the very tree in the Other World to which Dick’s report and demand for arms was fastened. Dick could not fail to find it when he came to make sure his message had been retrieved by Sam. The handkerchief showed up plainly.

  As an emergency way to explain to Dick why his message hadn’t been removed, and to arrange a better means of communication, it was an excellent idea. But it did not take into account certain facts.

  The ruhks were slave guards. The slaves were cowed. But sometimes pure horror made them cunning. So the shoreline of Manhattan Island was trotted over, at least once in twenty-four hours, by a keen-nosed ruhk with the intelligence of a man. Being beasts with undiminished feral instincts, they made those rounds with all the satisfaction of hunting animals. They savored the smells of the jungle. Sometimes they snapped up an unwary wild thing and devoured it. But discovery of the scent of man on the shoreline was the purpose of the patrol.

  Two hours after Sam dropped his message for Dick to find, a ruhk came padding through the darkness on that particular errand. He picked up instantly the scent of Dick’s footprints where he had landed and selected a tree to hold his message. Slavering a little—because unaccompanied humans on unlawful errands were the lawful prey of ruhks—the beast followed the human trail. He did not find Dick. He did find two messages. One was impaled on a thorn on a tree-trunk. One was the wallet on the ground.

  The ruhk made sure that Dick had returned to the water. Then he picked up the wallet and set off at full speed to find the nearest overseer. The conversational noises of the ruhk were quite equal to an exact account of what he had found, so that an overseer and ruhks soon retrieved the other message. Both were sent across the river in a double-banked galley, specially summoned by light-signals from the shore.

  The master of all the slaves and ruhks of these parts, and the lord of all local overseers, had already had two frights that day. One was the unprecedented appearance of an armed free man in the Other World, a matter of great gravity. The other alarming event had been the appearance of a between-worlds peephole in his very palace, as if enemies capable of interdimensional travel spied upon him for purposes of their own.

  He had the notes translated, because he had never bothered to learn any language but the language of his ancestors. He puzzled over the interpretation of the two. He was annoyed, and he was frightened. He gave orders for the finding of the place where—according to Sam Todd—a doorway for passage between worlds was to be opened by those who were not of his race and hence were enemies to him and all his kind. He gave explicit commands about that. Then he ordered an adequate ambush prepared about the place where the messages had been left.

  Then the master of the villa relaxed again, as bustling preparations began for the execution of his commands. But he could not relax completely. He wondered if the disappearance of six ruhks with no explanation whatever —some three days before this most upsetting day—had any connection with today’s events.

  He was not aware that just before the six ruhks disappeared, Nancy Holt had vanished from the sidewalk where she waited for a taxicab. Nor was he aware that as she vanished Sam Todd had stared helplessly at a dwindling pool of quicksilver. But the master, in his palace on the Brooklyn shore, wouldn’t have thought that matter significant even if he’d known about it.

  ~ * ~

  Sam Todd was in the parkway beside the East River Drive at sunrise. He was unreasonably uneasy. He had been unable to sleep. He sat on a dew-wet park bench shivering a little with the morning chill. As the dawn-light strengthened, he put the peephole to his eye.

  The sun came slowly up over the eastern edge of the Other World. Splendid sunrise colorings silhouetted the green forests of the Brooklyn hills, almost solid at the upper surface save where giant t
rees of a species unknown on earth threw up lacy fountains of foliage like spray. The surface of the East River was oily smooth, and reflected the reds and golds and violets of the fading night sky so that it looked like rainbows going into solution. Mists hung here and there over the tree-tops, and seeped out from the jungle’s edge to make the shoreline mysterious.

  Dick Blair’s small squadron crept along the shore, barely out from the beaches. The rowers strove to be silent. Often they were hidden in the mists, and sometimes they were only vaguely visible, like ghosts. But now and again the sun’s red rays smote fully on them. Then the crimson light made their bodies the color of blood.

  Presently, the two oared boats checked their motion. One turned in toward the land. Its bow touched, and Dick Blair stepped ashore. All was stillness and silence. Somewhere a fish leaped, and the “plop” of its splash was somehow shocking. The rowers seemed not to breathe. Dick looked, and listened, and then in the fathomless hush of morning his nostrils wrinkled suddenly. He smelled something. The hair rose by instinct at the back of his neck. He smelled beasts.

  He stood still on the beach. He spoke in a low tone to the men behind him. They had been tense. Their bodies grew tenser still.

  He stepped into the underbrush.

  The silence held, save that somewhere in the forest far away a staccato bellowing noise set up and almost instantly thereafter ceased. Something stepped delicately into view on the shore of the island out in the river, spread long, angular wings, and suddenly soared out over the water barely two yards above it. A tiny twittering noise came from a tree-top. One of the men in the boats shifted his position suddenly, and his oar splashed.

  As if that small sound had been a signal, all hell broke loose where Dick had disappeared. There was the startling, thunderous crash of an explosion, which echoed and reechoed among the trees. A beast screamed. A second shot and a third, and then an automatic pistol roared itself empty and another took up the unholy task—and then there was a ghastly uproar of snarlings and screams and men shouting and more shots. Then the deeper bellowing of a sawed-off shotgun.

  Dick came plunging from the brushwood, grinning savagely. Leaping forms came after him. He halted to fire twice, plunged on again, and splashed into the water and the bow of the beached boat.

  The naked men shoved off in panic. He stepped along to the stern and sat down, saying composedly, “Don’t get too far away! We’ve got a chance to kill some ruhks, now.”

  He began to reload his weapons. The brush erupted snarling forms. They howled their fury. Dick said: “Act confused and scared. Make it convincing!” The rowers of his own boat splashed and fumbled. Some of their awkwardness was confusion in reality, but not all. Neither cutter was more than ten yards from the shore, and both looked as if their crews were helpless from pure terror. Men bellowed from the brush, and the ruhks plunged into the water. Dick said hungrily:

  “Out a little farther! Lure ‘em! We’ll kill ‘em if we can get ‘em swimming!”

  The two cutters, splashing and clumsy and in seeming hysteria, went erratically out from the shore into the brightening dawn. Snarling beasts, intelligence forgotten in the instinct to kill, swam after them.

  “Now!” roared Dick.

  There were only two spears and two pistols besides his own weapons in the boats. But the men suddenly turned upon their pursuers. The ruhks could not yet believe that slaves would defy them. The slaves themselves almost failed of belief. One man in Dick’s own boat screamed and fled blindly from the bow, trampling on his fellows, and in glassy-eyed fear went on over the stern. But there was an aching blood-lust in the others. As the beasts swam snarling closer, they yelled in triumph when they found their oar-blades and sharpened saplings would reach. A man shrieked with joy when a sharp-pointed pole sank in a ruhk’s furry body and the beast uttered raging cries and snapped at the thing which impaled it. Another man howled with glee as his flailing oar broke a ruhk’s back and the thing screamed.

  There were almost no shots. Dick held his own weapons in reserve. Once a ruhk got its paws over a gunwale and he raised a pistol, but a clubbed oar literally cracked its skull open. He almost relaxed, then. The other boat was close, and one ruhk did get on board it before three sharpened stakes impaled it simultaneously. No other came so near to close combat.

  But the ruhks were intelligent. Devilishly, viciously intelligent. They had attacked in over confidence, urged on by blood-lust and the shouts of men on shore. Overseers, those men would be. But Dick’s own boat had killed six ruhks in a bare two minutes of tumultuous slaughter. A seventh paddled weakly toward shore. The other boat had done almost as well. The remaining beasts snarled horribly, but one among them yelped and growled meaningfully, and the rest obeyed. They did not retreat, but they did draw off, just beyond the reach of spears or oar-blades. There they swam, raging.

  The light grew momently stronger. The men in the boats now snarled and jeered in their turn at the animals they had feared so terribly. The ruhks made bloodcurdling sounds, their eyes blazing, just out of reach. One of them snapped at an oar-blade. The men shouted and paddled fiercely to come to grips again. It was full dawn, now, and though the sunshine was yet a deep orange there was brightness everywhere. The dew-wet trees looked golden-green and stark, sharp shadows played as the naked men derided the ruhks and strove with burning eyes to lure them within spear-stroke or to overtake them.

  But it was not right. The ruhks were brainy and they knew what they did. Dick realized it with a start. The overseers were not even shooting from the shore, and they had pistols and the range would not be much over fifty yards. There must be something else—

  Dick jerked his head about and saw the answer. Around the southern tip of Welfare Island a large boat sped. It was a galley of two banks of oars, converted from a coasting-schooner with clean, sharp lines. Its masts had been cut away, its deck removed and its bulwarks cut down. It floated lightly on the water. It was open to the sun save for decking at its bow and stern and a railed walkway in between, over the heads of the slaves at the oars. Overseers ran up and down that walkway, now, their whips cracking mercilessly, and the long and clumsy oars bent as the slaves pulled the galley on. Sixty men pulled the oars— lash-scarred, chained, maniacs in despair. There were half a dozen robed men at the stern, besides one who handled a wholly modern small ship’s wheel. There were others, with ruhks, at the galley’s bow. A dozen men with firearms to four pistols and a shotgun—and one of the pistols was empty and another had only three bullets left. But the larger galley had no need to fight. It could merely ride down the smaller craft and spill their crews.

  That was evidently its intention. When Dick shouted his discovery, tumult broke out, alike on the shore and from the swimming beasts. The ruhks on the larger galley howled an answer. Dick leaped to his feet and shouted, and the two cutters struck out in flight.

  But there was no escape. They might beach, to be sure. But on the Manhattan shore there were ruhks and overseers. In jungle-fighting, the beasts would have it all their own way. If the boats beached on the long narrow East River island, the ruhks would even more surely have them in the end. They would be ferried there in monstrous numbers, and they had the grisly cunning of werewolves.

  The sun shone brightly, now. It was day, and the two small fleeing craft and the larger, vengeful one in pursuit made a strange picture against the shores which showed only jungle. And of all insane preoccupations, Dick Blair at this moment tore leaves out of his notebook and shredded them to confetti, and tossed them in the air.

  Then Dick gave orders to his own crew. The other cutter drew nearer at his hail. Without slacking their straining effort to keep ahead, the cutters raced along with their oar-tips almost touching, as if for mutual comfort. Then, when the bigger craft was barely fifty yards behind, they turned together for the farther Manhattan shore. The galley swung triumphantly. Closer. Forty yards. Thirty. Twenty. Ten. It would ride them down-

  Dick flung the second of his tear-gas bomb
s. It was a perfect target and a perfect throw. The bomb landed on the bow-deck of the galley, in the very thick of the men who waited so zestfully to do murder. It exploded with a totally inadequate “plop!” and dense white vapor spouted out. And Dick’s tossing of paper fragments bore its fruit: for by it he had gauged the faint breeze exactly. The tear-gas cloud hung almost stationary. The galley rode through it. The mist rolled all along the length of the bigger boat, blinding overseer and slave and ruhk. When the galley came out of the quite inconsiderable cloud, its oars beat erratically and out of rhythm, its overseers’ whips no longer flailed, it lost way and veered crazily. And then the two cutters plunged to its sides and the slaves swarmed over the low gunwale.

  What followed was not pretty. The former slaves, armed with sharpened poles and two spears and clubbed oars, raged the length of the galley, killing. Ruhks, unable to see, died fighting blindly. Overseers fought hopelessly with no eyesight. The men with whips, who from the walk over the rowers’ benches had lashed on the slaves to work, were so helpless in their blindness that the men of the cutters laughed at them, stripped their whips and weapons from them, and flung them down to their still-chained fellows. The eyes of the rowers streamed copiously, but with howls of joy they tore their tyrants to pieces.