by Don Wilcox
Krueger ordered everyone to remain on the ship until some further communication could be established. From all indications the radio of Captain Meetz was no longer functioning.
“What do you think happened, Sam?” Mae asked. “Where do you think they were radioing from in the first place?”
Sam Krueger shook his head. “Keep your eye on those winged fellows. Let me know if you see any signs of weapons.”
Mae strained her eyes to catch every detail of the surrounding landscape. She believed that the wingmen must have come up unexpectedly and that the whole Meetz party had hidden for safety.
“They’re either in their plane or in one of those caves,” she said.
“If they were in the plane they would show their faces at the windows. If they were in the caves—well, they might be in the caves,” Sam conceded. “We’ll taxi over and see.”
They rolled the ship a few yards westward, moving carefully through the line of winged humans. This caused a flurry of wings and a lot of exciting squawking. The wingmen, tall, bronzed, fierce-looking, with hair and eyebrows of coarse black string-like hair, were angry and half terrorized over this latest intrusion upon their affairs. Neither Mae nor Sam guessed the seriousness of this seemingly harmless drive into their ranks. Mae would never have believed that a tribal religion had sanctioned their vigil. Tribal gods would be angered.
The wingmen, their prides injured deeply, were realizing as never before the peril of earth man’s encroachments. Little by little their vast free lands were being invaded. Though such winged people as Panno and his wife Latee might try to minimize the cruel intent of the unwinged, nevertheless here was another event that would refresh the memories of, their tragedies . . . Once a wingman had been shot on the street in the Venusian capital, and later his skeleton had been given to the Ambassador as a memento of their bitterness . . . Within recent days the strange murder of Gunawoo had occurred before their very eyes. Could these cruelties ever be explained or justified?
The clusters of winged men who fled the cave entrances and gathered along the crest of the mountain had begun to see themselves as creatures doomed.
“That ship of the sky,” one of them said, “could spit fire at us and kill us all. We are staring at a man-made monster which may bring an end to our days.”
“We are more numerous than they.” Panno, the father of the lost boy, had learned patience. He did his best to snatch at a few straws of optimism.
“They are powerful because of their weapons.”
“We are more powerful because we have wings.”
“They have no wings, but they have machines that can out-fly us. Unless we have weapons, they can search out our hiding places and rain death upon us.”
“Peace!” Panno shouted. “We have no reason to be so frightened. Look, they have seen us but they are not shooting at us. They are walking slowly toward the caves—”
“With weapons ready.”
“But not for us. Only for unseen dangers that may lurk within the caves.”
Panno’s voice was strained, but he had succeeded in making his point. The conflict was not one of earth men against wingmen at this hour. It was one of earth men against their own fears. This was something worth knowing—that earth men should fear the unknown. Perhaps it meant that they were not so different from wingmen, after all.
Panno had scored a moral victory with his tribe by his argument against fear and panic.
As good fortune would have it, the gain was clinched for him within a few minutes.
A little winged boy flew in from over the waves and as he approached, Latee gave a glad cry.
“Gooyay! My little lost Gooyay! He is coming back to us!”
Five minutes later the errant lad, his tired face bright with smiles, was telling his rapt audience all about the friendliness of Aunt Gypsy Brown and her earth companions.
CHAPTER XLIX
Of the several earth men who were pursuing their destinies in or around the Southeast Ocean of Venus, none was more ambitious than the hot-headed young gunman, Dick Bracket.
This land of wide open spaces might, in the future, become the home of many an outlaw before civilization should take root. In his recent hours of dare-devil glory it occurred to Dick that he might set the pace for a coming era of gunmen.
Several times in recent days he had added notches to his gun, figuratively speaking. With each escapade he had grown bolder. Now a daring scheme burned in his mind.
“Captain Meetz is afraid of me,” he said to himself over and over. He had been saying it ever since that day in the hospital when he had talked to the sick captain.
That incident had resulted in the captain’s leaving his sick bed too soon, coming out to the open lands to try to recover command of his scattered expedition.
After flying southeast across the continent, with Bull Fiddle at the controls, the three of them had hidden themselves and their plane in a hillside camp a safe distance from the beach. Through field glasses they had watched the strange activities of the flocks of wingmen.
They had not yet solved the mystery of that curious assemblage when the first radio messages of the second Wellington expedition began to come through.
“Now what are we up against?” Bull Fiddle had grumbled.
“Competition,” said Dick Bracket.
Captain Meetz had smiled confidently. “Don’t worry, boys. This is according to plan. Wellington arranged for a second party. I’ll have command.”
Dick had nodded without commenting.
Together they had gone to work at the radio. There was only one logical place along this coast for a large space ship to land.
At first the captain was reluctant to send the new party into a hotbed of winged trouble.
“Let them worry about that,” Dick had said. “What we want to know is, will their captain take orders?”
The captain had agreed, partly because he didn’t care to start a quarrel with Dick. He radioed instructions. Krueger came back at him with replies that were evasive and sometimes sarcastic. Captain Meetz lost his patience.
“We’ll have to tame those boys before we can do business together for Wellington.”
He and Dick watched the ship cruise, hover and float away into the eastern sky. The captain muttered profanities. Bull Fiddle looked on uncomfortably. Dick was strangely silent.
At sunset they saw the ship return for a landing.
“There’s going to be some shooting,” said Captain Meetz. “They’ll start wrong. Watch, now.”
“Why don’t we radio to them and tell them. It’s a crime to attack wingmen,” Bull Fiddle asked.
“Let them make their own mistakes,” said the captain, gazing through his field glasses.
A little later he said, “Where did Dick go?”
“I dunno,” said Bull Fiddle. “Up on the hill for a better view, I reckon.”
The sun was sinking, and the animated wings along the crest of the mountain were darkening into silhouettes in the twilight.
“Where’d Dick go?” the captain asked again.
But Bull Fiddle, absorbed in the scene before him, didn’t answer. It was an interesting drama down there on the beach. The newcomers, emerging from their ships, had evidently bluffed the wingmen out. There hadn’t been any shooting after all—just an easy retreat on the part of the wings. The new party was apparently enjoying the thrills of exploring a new land. They had seen the wingmen, they had discovered the mountainside caves, they were now turning their attention to ten or twelve giant snails that were moving slowly along the beach.
“We should go over and watch the show,” said Bull Fiddle.
“I’ll go,” said Captain Meetz. “You stay here and guard the camp.”
“Can’t I come along? Dick’ll be coming back.”
“I don’t know,” said the captain in a low voice. “He’s had something on his mind the last hour or so. We’ll do well to keep an eye on him—if he comes back.”
Dick was
at that moment riding on the back of one of the giant snails.
“This way,” he said half aloud, giving the snail a light jab to encourage it in the right course. He had ridden a snail once before under less comfortable conditions. Whatever that earlier ride may have cost him in hurt pride or actual physical suffering, he had learned something about snail management.
This ride was both more comfortable and less conspicuous. A chance observer wouldn’t have known that the apparently undirected mass of red protoplasm was weighed down by anything other than its own shell.
But Dick Bracket had found, earlier, an old empty shell of a larger snail, dried and bleached under the sun; and he had set it aside for emergency purposes.
Now the false shell rested above the real one, and Dick, lying between the two, rode in comparative comfort. He drilled a hole through the outer one for vision. He thus was able to guide his slow-paced taxi toward the newly arrived ship.
A light dash of rain a few hours earlier had caused several snails to move along this path beside the sea. Dick watched as the foremost snail attracted the attention of the new party.
“What is it?” a red-haired girl cried, watching nervously as the creature lumbered past at a safe distance. She called to her husband, who in turn called to someone else to watch out for her; he was busy at one of the caves I trying to read the clues left by recent visitors.
Dick Bracket was playing in luck. The newcomers were properly curious about the snails, as well as the wingmen, but, finding them harmless, showed no inclination to open fire on them.
Dick was passing the space ship now. The entrance to the air locks was only twenty feet away.
“Would you look at that?” he heard someone say. The two men who had stayed to guard the ship were referring to his crustacean taxi. “Let’s see what goes on here.”
They came out, toward him cautiously, like a pair of boys examining a live rattlesnake. They saw, however, that the others of the party had found the passing snails harmless enough, so they grew bolder. They came close enough to tap the shell that Dick was hiding under.
For an instant he hesitated. What had they tapped him with? A gun, perhaps?
“We ought to cut a chip out of that shell for a souvenir,” one of the guards said.
“Here, lend me your pocketknife and I’ll—”
Dick leaped up, and the false shell toppled over backward. His pistol was ready. He caught a glimpse of two surprised faces; a knife dropped, two pairs of hands went up.
“Don’t squawk or I’ll blow your heart out,” Dick snapped.
He might have saved his words. The two men were speechless. They must have had visions of the whole flock of snails being inhabited by invading gunmen.
“Into the ship! Quick!” he commanded. “Never mind the others. We’ll pick them up later.”
The guards scarcely flicked their eyes toward the rest of the party. They turned obediently and rushed into the entrance, with Dick on their heels.
“Which one of you runs this boat? Get on the controls, one of you.”
“The pilot’s in there,” one of them managed to say.
Dick found himself in command of four willing slaves, a moment later—the two guards, the pilot and the man at the radio.
His action had not been smooth enough to escape the attention of the rest of the party. Near the caves, Captain Krueger, having seen this unaccountable development, had called his party into a huddle. They expended several pistol shots on the passing snails, thinking that other shells might flop off to reveal concealed passengers. Dick saw, then, that Krueger was hurrying over to the ship shouting and gesticulating, expecting to force a personal show-down with someone he had never been introduced to.
“Move out!” Dick ordered the ship’s pilot. “One false move and I’ll toss your corpse to one side . . . That’s right, straight ahead . . . Now, circle to the right. We’ll land in the little valley to the north. There’s a couple more passengers to pick up.”
The ship skimmed over the Thirteenth Finger, and a flock of wingmen scattered. Inside the ship one of the alert guards made an unwise pass with his right hand. He came up with a pistol, but not fast enough. Dick shot him twice, and he fell forward with both hands over his heart.
The three remaining men were silently obedient.
“Here’s the place. Bring her down easy . . . All right, open the doors and wait.”
Captain Meetz and Bull Fiddle had started back to camp as soon as they had seen the ship glide into the air. Now they edged cautiously through the twilight, for the space monster was coming toward them. They gained camp, however, and began radioing messages to the ship, even though it was coming to rest only a few yards away.
“Dick must have sent them this way,” Meetz reasoned, “or they wouldn’t have known anyone was here.”
Within a few minutes Dick’s relayed messages convinced Meetz.
“So they’re telling me to come aboard,” said the captain, red with anger. This was a crude way to establish working relations with the incoming party.
“Shall we go?” asked Bull dubiously.
“I’d just as well set the new captain straight now as later.”
They entered the airlocks. They heard Dick’s rasping voice.
“Right in here, Meetz. I’ve just explained to these three men who’s boss. The dead one wasn’t in a mood to listen.”
Captain Meetz felt weak. He had overexerted during the past hour; he was not yet a well man.
“Dick! You’ve jumped the gun again. There was no need to hurry. I’ve told you before—”
“Save your breath, Meetz,” said Dick.
Captain Meetz noticed that he was no longer being addressed as captain. Dick’s surly tone sounded dangerous. “I’ve told you before, Dick, that Wellington fixed this set-up. The new captain knows that I’m in charge.”
“That who’s in charge?” Dick’s eyes blazed. “You’ve just been promoted to the kindergarten, pal. If you want to string along with me, okay. If you don’t, now’s the time to say so.”
Captain Meetz looked from the startled face of big Bull Fiddle to the dead form on the floor and back to the maniacal glare of Dick Bracket. The pilot, the radio operator and the remaining guard might have been statues oblivious to the drama going on around them.
“All right, Captain Bracket,” said Meetz slowly. “Where do we go from here?”
CHAPTER L
It was pitch-dark over most of the Southeast Ocean, but one particular spot not far from the Tenth Finger was aglow, as usual, with concentric circles of red, orange, and yellow light.
The small platform appeared like a bright slab of silver a few feet above the black water. The huge ship, with counter motors humming quietly, settled down beside it as lightly as a balloon.
“Throw a bridge out to the platform,” Dick said to the guard. “Now, listen, the rest of you. We’re fixing to take a little surprise back to J.J. Wellington. In a few minutes we’ll be on our way back to the earth. We’re stopping here just long enough to pick up a couple of passengers—a gal and her horse.”
Somewhere in New York J.J. Wellington glowered over his drink, rereading the newspaper account of one mysterious little Mr. Vest.
“The London Society of Scientists has adopted a resolution,” the account read, “to expend a few thousand dollars to investigate the Venusian phenomena which Mr. Vest the interplanetary traveler, described in his recent lecture . . .”
Wellington tossed the paper aside, grumbling to himself. “Damn Vest anyhow! His imagination . . . Even the scientists are going for it . . . Damn it all, if there is anything to it, why didn’t Vest convince me?”
On his way back to his study he pondered his next communication to Ambassador Jewell on Venus. The Ambassador was near the end of his patience, evidently. The original motive for the Wellington expeditions had worn thin. Had the second party been able to reinforce the hoax by this time? Or had Krueger, with his dynamic and impetuous ways, ridden roug
hshod over the authorities?
“No further communication from Venus, sir, I’m sorry,” his secretary said the moment he entered his study.
“Clip that story on Mr. Vest from the daily paper and send it to Ambassador Jewell,” said Wellington. “We’ll show that numbskull!”
“I hope you’re not going to get into trouble on this deal, Mr. Wellington.”
“How can I? I heard a story and I acted on it. The London scientists heard the same story and they’re acting on it. Where’s the trouble?”
“Some government Investigators have been here asking questions, sir. I think they’ll come back tomorrow to see you.”
Beneath the massive rings of light in the Southeast Ocean the Inspector made his hurried round of the six-pointed city.
“You are not as fat as you used to be,” one of the citizens taunted. “Are you working overtime or worrying too much?”
“Both,” said the Inspector, and hurried on.
Some of the eggs he would find to be occupied. Scared families who had lost their faith in the power of the Old Man to patch the wall were gathering together a few days’ supply of food and moving into their spherical lifeboats to be ready. The flood was inevitable, they believed.
“No faith,” the Inspector would mutter. But he was not immune to their fears. Each time he passed his own house he would walk into the egg and out again to make sure that he wasn’t too fat to enter.
Clouds of steam filled the upper levels of air above the city. The workmen were busy reconstructing the patch on the vast stone glass wall. The patch, no longer transparent like most of the wall, had become an opaque grayish-brown blotch. Fifteen ribbons of water slid through it and glided silently to the wide pool that was accumulating over the city’s floor. One of the six points of the plaza was obscured by a foot of water, The Inspector would slosh along through it in his bare feet.
Stupe Smith sat facing the six committeemen. He knew that his time was short. Things were closing in on him. His relationship with this undersea world was like a cyclone full of question marks. The committeemen were shooting questions at him thick and fast. Did they still believe that he was the Old Man, or had they seen through his hoax?