by Don Wilcox
He was about to close the door when he heard footsteps on the stairs.
Swish-swish-swish.
The slow, heavy steps of a tired man or woman—barefooted? A moment later, accompanied by much puffing and panting, an old man came into view, rounding the last curve of the spiral glass stairs.
Stupe started to shrink back out of sight, though this was quite impossible, for his only retreat was around the transparent wall of the cylindrical projection.
The old man spied him and gave a squawk of alarm.
“Yeezak! Yeezak!”
Swish-swish-swish!—the quickened footsteps beat a hard retreat down into the spiral passage, and Stupe was left to his guesses as to what it all meant.
“Now, what bit him?” Stupe said aloud. “Did I scare him out of his forenoon dip? Or was he coming up for a sunbath? I wonder who he is? The Princess’ grandfather, maybe? No family resemblance. I’ll bet he’s the undersea janitor.”
Stupe tried to remember how the old fellow was dressed. Ornamented brown and green trunks and a pair of jeweled wristbands was all that he recalled. The brevity of the costume argued that the old fellow had intended to swim or sunbathe.
“Why should he have been scared of me, I wonder . . . Or was he?” A fearful thought dawned upon Stupe. “No, not scared. He saw me as an opportunity. His nation needs a prisoner. They need someone to kill . . . Hm-m. If that’s it, he’ll be back shortly—he or his grandsons.”
It was a logical line of reasoning, Stupe decided a few moments later. For suddenly a host of footsteps could be heard pattering up the spiral ascent, and they sounded as if they meant business.
CHAPTER XIX
“Watch it, there, Madam Stevens!” Dick Bracket said for the twenty-fifth time.
The plane had covered the required mileage but was wasting some motion trying to pick an opening among the clouds for a view of the Venus soil beneath.
“I’ll get you down, Brother Bracket,” Thelma retorted. “Just keep your Sunday shirt on.”
“There, to your left,” Hefty said. “See those wide open spaces?”
It was too foggy to be sure that open spaces weren’t mountains in disguise.
“Have the thirteen fingers been crossed?” Dick Bracket asked.
“Just keep your own fingers crossed,” said Thelma. “That’s all the crossing you have to do.”
Hefty suppressed a chuckle. Dick’s suspicious eye hadn’t relaxed. He hadn’t slept. All his pep talks hadn’t given him any real confidence in his three companions. He must have known that if he had turned his back Hefty would start a campaign of his own.
The Fiddle brothers, however, had cooperated like a pair of trained seals, taking on a glow of big-shot importance.
Now through a break in the clouds they looked down a patch of yellow beach land dotted with many giant snails.
“If that’s the shoulder,” one of the Fiddle brothers commented, “it’s broken out with a rash.”
“Measles,” said his brother.
It was their first view of the two-ton snails and from overhead they supposed them to be some immense flowers or plants.
“All I know is, they weren’t here before,” said Jake Fiddle. “I figure we’ve misread the map.”
“This is the shoulder,” said Dick.
“Things happen fast in Venus,” said Jake.
“They’re going to happen faster,” said Dick. He had his own meaning. This land, in his mind, was already being dotted with buildings bearing the name of J.J. Wellington, and he knew that he would occupy the palatial headquarters. He hoped there would be a pink marble entrance and balcony with a gold rail.
They threaded their way down through the dispersing clouds, curious to know whether they could pick a landing spot among those strange lumps of gleaming red. Touching the surface, they cut a perilous path, barely dodging three snails and finally riding over a fourth with sad results. It was like plowing into a pile of glue. The plane skidded on its nose and stopped with its tail in the air. A mass of red snail flesh was clinging to its underbelly.
“Of all the stupid piloting,” Dick barked. “Did you have to do that?”
“I picked a clear path,” Thelma retorted. “That darned thing moved.”
“It moved after you hit it,” Dick growled, “in all directions.”
They climbed out and surveyed their mess. It looked like jelly, Hefty thought. He tasted it and smacked his lips. “Yummy. Must be a synthetic food factory somewhere around.”
He took another bite. Dick watched him enviously. The Fiddle brothers and Thelma had begun to scrape the mess away from the landing gear. They were watching the other blobs of red gelatin dotted around the sand. The things were moving.
“They’re some kind of animals,” Thelma declared.
By this time Dick had tried a mouthful of the deep flavored go. He looked around in alarm.
“Animals?” The idea of eating raw flesh didn’t appeal to him. He walked around the plane, holding his stomach. A little privacy would have been greatly appreciated just then. But he was at once aware that the nearest shining mass of red was edging toward him, creeping without feet, moving slowly under its biscuit-like shell.
“Animals!” he murmured weakly.
Three more of the strange snail-like creatures were seen to be moving. Dick imagined they were all coming toward him.
“Animals! Ooops!” His early breakfast departed from him, much to his relief. The momentary panic over being surrounded by moving creatures had shaken him. He tried to get a grip on himself. If he were to lead this expedition successfully, he had better not let this party know anything about his private shudders.
“Let’s get that plane righted and taxi over to the cliff where we’ll have some protection.”
The Fiddle brothers gave him an interested look.
“You make it sound awful easy,” said Jake. “Looks to me like we’re hung up right here for a half a day.”
They walked around their tail-up crate several times, muttering gloomily. Thelma was taking no blame for what had happened. She mounted a wing to survey the surrounding meadows and beach, through the low clouds, and she counted no less than a hundred and twenty snails.
“The wonder is,” she said, “that I didn’t smash into a dozen of them.”
Hefty consoled her. “Nobody’s complaining. Not even the snails.”
Obviously the dumb creatures bore no grudges. They continued to ooze along on their crisscross paths. When one of them moved too close to the plane Dick assigned Hefty the job of beating it off.
Hefty was eager to look for Stupe.
“We left him hiding in that hillside. Shall I go up and find him?”
“He isn’t there,” said Dick.
“How do you know?”
“If he was he’d have come out as soon as he heard us land.”
“He’s got to be somewhere. He might have left a message in his cave.” Hefty argued his point stoutly. “That’s the way he and I operated in the Andes.”
Dick Bracket didn’t want to see Stupe Smith, that was plain. His authority over the present party of three was shaky enough without the interference of the man who was certain to obstruct his plan.
“We’re gonna need all the help we can get, settin’ this plane to rights,” Jake Fiddle said. “We’d better find Stupe.”
“Get busy, men,” was Dick’s retort.
“I’ll beat the snails back,” Hefty said, and he went to work.
Whish! Whish! Whish!
Handfuls of sand and gravel were all the weapon he needed to bluff the soggy dumb blobs of protoplasm. He would throw at them. After being struck two or three times they would stop and slowly fold into their shells. Then for several minutes they would remain crouched and motionless.
Hefty worked his way away from the plane with his own purpose. He moved toward the hillside, less than a mile away, where he hoped to find Stupe. When Dick Bracket called him to come back, he pretended not to hear.
>
Zing! Hefty jumped.
A bullet? It had glanced off the gravel, crossing a patch of wet sand to jump within two yards of his feet. He whirled. Dick Bracket was shooting.
“Come back here!” Dick yelled.
The fool! Just because he had two husky Fiddle boys on his side did he think he was entitled to kill anyone that crossed him up?
Hefty started back. He was seeing red.
Just let him get his hands on that young murderer.
But the Fiddle brothers were already ahead of him. There was a swift play of fists. Hefty heard Dick cry out sharply, and saw him crouch and sink to his knees. Hefty ran to get in on the fight. He heard Bull Fiddle roar.
“We’ve had enough of this careless shootin!—d’ya understand?”
“Get some rope, Thelma,” Jake Fiddle said.
The young fellow squealed like a pig under a fence. He would report this outrage to the captain. The captain would take care of them.
“If I was you, I wouldn’t want to see the captain again,” Jake Fiddle said. “All your big talk about startin’ a new empire!”
“You’ll see!” Dick vowed through his clenched teeth. “I’ll make you eat dirt for this.”
He began to curse, until Jake snapped a couple of warnings and finally boxed him across the mouth.
“What are you going to do with him, boys?” Thelma asked.
They bound him securely and would have tied him to a tree if there had been any trees. They preferred to place him far enough from the plane that he wouldn’t hear their conversation. They couldn’t leave him on the ground. A snail might glide over him and smother him.
“We could put him on top of a snail,” Hefty suggested. “Those half dozen fellows haven’t budged since I sandblasted them.”
“Good idea,” Thelma agreed. “We’ll keep an eye on him.”
Accordingly, they carried their erstwhile leader over to the nearest snail, which now appeared frozen within its cream-colored shell.
“He looks like a June bug on a biscuit,” said Hefty, standing back to appraise the effect. “Dicky boy, the captain should see you now.”
“Shut up,” said Dick.
The Fiddle brothers looped the rope around the scallops of the shell, so that their prisoner wouldn’t drop off in case the snail should decide to move.
“If he starts to take you a ride, holler,” said Jake. “Are your wrists plenty tight? All right, don’t do any more careless shootin’.”
By noon they had succeeded in putting the plane to rights, and they taxied it across to the abrupt hillside that formed the west boundary of the flat shoulder.
“What about Dick?” Thelma asked.
“It’s sure been a pleasure to work without him,” Hefty said, “but we’d better not leave him.”
The snail to which Dick was tied had begun to move again. Fortunately, it was creeping in the right direction.
“Free delivery service,” Hefty observed. “When Wellington sets up his empire here, I wonder if I can’t get the concession to organize these snails for trucking purposes.”
Thelma laughed. “The Snail Pace Express. Phone in your orders early. Delivery next month—if it rains.”
The Fiddle brothers joined the fun, wondering how many bottles of beer it would take to break a snail’s back.
“Order your wine by Snail Express,” Thelma said, imagining her words on an immense billboard. “Your bottled goods will be aged by the time it reaches you.”
“The wingmen would most likely set up a line of their own and run us snail drivers out of business,” said Hefty.
“I wouldn’t trust a wingman to deliver any of my goods, bottled or otherwise,” Jake said.
“I wouldn’t trust a wingman, period,” said Bull.
“Who knows,” said Thelma, “The snails might learn some tricks too. How long before we’d find them folding up over their shells and eating the cargo off their own backs?”
Everyone looked back at the snail upon which Dick was tied, half expecting to see the boy being consumed. But nothing of the kind was taking place. The snail was creeping along toward them, so that within another half hour it might be expected to deliver its load to the cave door.
They stepped out of the plane and climbed the hillside to the little stone promontory which Hefty remembered.
“It’s ten to one he’s left a note,” said Hefty, “even if he didn’t expect anyone for a couple of days.”
The cave was quite empty. They had expected to find at least a few items, such as food supplies.
“He must have moved, bag and baggage,” Thelma said. “Maybe this turned out to be an unsafe spot.”
Jake picked a feather off the floor. “Wingmen?”
The suggestion dealt a knockout blow to their conversation. They circled through the room again, combing the walls with a flashlight. Near the entrance they found evidence that something might have been hung over the doorway. But the something had been removed.
“Don’t worry, Hefty,” Thelma said.
“I ain’t worrin’,” Hefty lied. “Why should I worry? That guy knows how to take care of himself. He’ll show up about dinner time. If he don’t, it’s cause we didn’t bring Gypsy Brown along.”
The four of them sat down in the cool shadowed room and discussed their plight.
“I wish we had brought Gypsy,” Bull Fiddle said. “A good home cooked meal is just what I need.”
But everyone remembered why Gypsy hadn’t come along. This unofficial excursion had been organized at the point of Dick Bracket’s pistol.
“Dick! Where is he? We left him joyriding on the back of a snail. We’d better—”
“Take it easy, Thelma,” said Jake, peering out through the cave opening. “I can still see him, and he’s still on his way over. Don’t worry, we’ll hear him squawk if anything goes wrong.”
Perhaps it was the well-known principle of “meaningful forgetting” that accounted for what happened in the two hours that followed. Not that Hefty or any of his companions knew anything about the subtleties of human psychology. But if it is true that our memories like to slip on things we have found disagreeable, Dick Bracket stood a strong chance of being forgotten. In fact, the party felt such relief over having shelved him, after his ugly talk and rash violence, that they were quite happy to banish him temporarily from their thoughts.
A few minutes later the four of them were climbing the mountainside. After an hour’s hike, they reached the crest of the thirteenth finger. They looked in all directions, hoping to see a column of campfire smoke in some direction.
All they saw were a few flocks of wingmen and a valley dotted with red snails.
Only as they descended to their plane did they remember that they had left Dick Bracket in somewhat perilous circumstances.
“Where is he? I don’t see him.”
Thelma stopped to rest her gaze upon the meadow. In the afternoon sunlight the crisscross snail trails could be discerned as thin brown ribbons.
“There’s something going on over to the left.” Hefty pointed to the deeper green of the gentle slope. “It looks like a bunch of men.”
“If you had my sharp eyes,” said Thelma, “you would see that it’s a flock of wingmen. They’re eating.”
Some one had heard that wingmen habitually fed upon snail flesh, so this sight was not, in itself, so surprising.
The disturbing thing was that, as the party hiked down the steep grade, they saw not a single snail that contained a human being tied to its back.
“What’s went with Dick?” Bull Fiddle growled.
“That’s what we’re all tryin’ to make out, Dope,” said his brother. “Looks to me like there’s just one good answer.” He gestured to the group of eight or ten wingmen feeding upon a gelatinous victim.
“I don’t get it,” said Bull.
“The wingmen were hungry,” said Jake. “They’ve had themselves a feed.”
CHAPTER XX
On the platform far
out in the waves Stupe Smith was literally jumping out of his clothes. The footsteps from the mysterious depths were sounding louder.
It was a race against time.
In a matter of seconds Stupe had stripped down to his trunks, hung his clothes on the little raft and lowered it with all of his impediments, into the sea. He plunged in, caught the rope, and began swimming away as fast as his loaded raft would follow.
He listened for voices and a moment later they reached his ear. But they were not the angry voices he expected. Something had intervened—a very unexpected something—within the last few seconds, which put an entirely different outlook on everything.
It began when Stupe felt a sharp kick or thump against his ankle from some unseen force under the water.
Instantly it rose up into view—the white stallion bearing the glamorous princess of the sea. It couldn’t have been an accident, Stupe knew. Not only was it timed perfectly. It was spaced perfectly. Horse and rider obscured him just before the voices sounded from the platform.
“Keep hidden,” the princess said.
The stallion was half out of the water, casting a shadow over Stupe and his tiny raft.
“Thanks, friend,” Stupe whispered, though the splash of waters around him may have swallowed his words.
The voices from the platform reminded him of the contented and polite chatterings of a cage full of birds enjoying a good meal. They may have hurried up the stairs to the surface expecting to find a foreigner—himself—awaiting capture. Instead, they found her—their princess.
Stupe began to understand, for there was a sprinkling of English In their talk.
“It is you . . . most noble . . . we were misled . . . Old Man must be crazy . . .”
The princess lifted an arm for silence.
“What an outburst! Control yourselves. Now tell me quietly. Why have you come to the top of the world? Do you not see enough of Marble Boy when I parade through the Plaza?”
“We ascended the stairs because the Old Man called us,” one of them answered. “He said we would find one of his lost brothers.”