Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  “You didn’t,” she whispered. It was not even an accusation.

  “I don’t care,” Bobby whispered back. “I was tired of that game. I wanted to play something else.” He giggled. “I won, anyhow,” he declared.

  “How? What happened?”

  “The police came, like I knew they would. He never thought of that. So I won.”

  “But how?”

  “Well, it was sort of like The Jungle Book. Shooting tigers, remember? They tied a kid to a stake and, when the tiger comes—bang! Only the kids were all gone to Santa Barbara, and you’d gone too. So I used Granny. I didn’t think she’d mind. She plays games with us a lot. And anyhow, she was the only one left.”

  “But Bobby, a kid doesn’t mean a kid like us. It means a baby goat. And anyhow—”

  “Oh!” Bobby whispered. “Oh—well, anyhow, I thought Granny would be all right. She’s too fat to run fast.” He grinned scornfully. “He’s dumb,” he said. “He should have known the hunters always come when you tie a kid out for the tiger. He doesn’t know anything. When I told him I’d locked Granny in her room and nobody else was around, I thought he might guess.” Bobby looked crafty. “I was smart. I told him through the window. I thought he might think about me being a kid. But he didn’t. He went right upstairs—fast. He even forgot to limp. I guess he was pretty hungry by then.” Bobby glanced toward the swarming porch. “Prob’ly the police have got him now,” he added carelessly. “It was easy as pie. I won.”

  Jane’s mind had not followed these fancies.

  “Is she dead?” she asked, very softly.

  Bobby looked at her. The word had a different meaning for him. It had no meaning, beyond a phase in a game. And, to his knowledge, the tiger had never harmed the tethered kid.

  Mr. Larkin was coming back to the taxi now, walking very slowly and not very straight.

  Jane could not see his face . . .

  It was hushed up, of course, as much as possible. The children, who knew so much more than those who were shielding them, were futilely protected from the knowledge of what had happened. As futilely as they, in their turn, had tried to protect their elders. Except for the two oldest girls, they didn’t particularly care. The game was over. Granny had had to go away on a long, long journey, and she would never be back.

  They understood what that meant well enough.

  The Wrong Uncle, on the other hand, had had to go away too, they were told, to a big hospital where he would be taken care of all his life.

  This puzzled them all a little, for it fell somewhat outside the limits of their experience. Death they understood very imperfectly, but this other thing was completely mystifying. They didn’t greatly care, once their interest faded, though Bobby for some time listened to readings of The Jungle Book with unusual attention, wondering if this time they would take the tiger away instead of killing him on the spot. They never did, of course. Evidently in real life tigers were different . . .

  For a long time afterward, in nightmares, Jane’s perverse imagination dwelt upon and relived the things she would not let it remember when she was awake. She would see Granny’s bedroom as she had seen it last, the starched curtains billowing, the sunshine, the red china shoe, the doll-pincushion. Granny, rubbing cold-cream into her wrinkled hands and looking up more and more nervously from time to time as the long, avid waves of hunger pulsed through the house from the thing in its dreadful hollow place down below.

  It must have been very hungry. The Wrong Uncle, pretending to a wrenched ankle downstairs, must have shifted and turned upon the couch, that hollow man, empty and blind of everything but the need for sustenance, the one red food he could not live without. The empty automaton in the sunporch and the ravenous being in its warp below pulsing with one hunger, ravening for one food . . .

  It had been very wise of Bobby to speak through the window when he delivered his baited message.

  Upstairs in the locked room, Granny must have discovered presently that she could not get out. Her fat, mottled fingers, slippery from cold-creaming, must have tugged vainly at the knob.

  Jane dreamed of the sound of those footsteps many times. The tread she had never heard was louder and more real to her than any which had ever sounded in her ears. She knew very surely how they must have come bounding up the stairs, thump, thump, thump, two steps at a time, so that Granny would look up in alarm, knowing it could not be the Uncle with his wrenched ankle. She would have jumped up then, her heart knocking, thinking wildly of burglars.

  It can’t have lasted long. The steps would have taken scarcely the length of a heartbeat to come down the hall. And by now the house would be shaking and pulsing with one triumphant roar of hunger almost appeased. The thumping steps would beat in rhythm to it, the long quick strides coming with dreadful purposefulness down the hall. And then the key clicking in the lock. And then—

  Usually then Jane awoke.

  A little boy isn’t responsible. Jane told herself that many times, then and later. She didn’t see Bobby again very often, and when she did he had forgotten a great deal; new experiences had crowded out the old. He got a puppy for Christmas, and he started to school. When he heard that the Wrong Uncle had died in the asylum he had had to think hard to remember who they meant, for to the younger children the Wrong Uncle had never been a member of the family, only a part in a game they had played and won.

  Gradually the nameless distress which had once pervaded the household laded and ceased. It was strongest, most desperate, in the days just after Granny’s death, but everyone attributed that to shock. When it died away they were sure.

  By sheer accident Bobby’s cold, limited logic had been correct. Ruggedo would not have been playing fair if he had brought still another Wrong Uncle into the game, and Bobby had trusted him to observe the rules. He did observe them, for they were a law he could not break.

  Ruggedo and the Wrong Uncle were parts of a whole, indissolubly bound into their cycle. Not until the cycle had been successfully completed could the Wrong Uncle extension be retracted or the cord broken. So, in the end, Ruggedo was helpless.

  In the asylum, the Wrong Uncle slowly starved. lie would not touch what they offered. He knew what he wanted, but they would not give him that. The head and the body died together, and the house that had been Grandmother Keaton’s was peaceful once more.

  If Bobby ever remembered, no one knew it. He had acted with perfect logic, limited only by his experience. If you do something sufficiently bad, the policeman will come and get you. And he was tired of the game. Only his competitive instinct kept him from simply quitting it and playing something else.

  As it was, he wanted to win—and he had won.

  No adult would have done what Bobby did—but a child is of a different species. By adult standards, a child is not wholly sane. Because of the way his mind worked, then—because of what he did, and what he wanted—

  Call him demon.

  Clark Ashton Smith (1893- ) is a Californian widely known for his short stories, his verse, and his sculptures. The author of such collections of poetry as The Star-Trader, Odes and Sonnets, Ebony and Crystal, and Sandal-Wood, Mr. Smith has under preparation his Selected Poems for Arkham House publication. He has contributed to The London Mercury, Poetry, The Yale Review, Munsey’s, Smart Set, Weird Tales, and many other magazines. The best of his short stories have been published in three volumes—Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), and Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948), all published by Arkham House.

  MASTER OF THE ASTEROID

  Clark Ashton Smith

  MAN’S CONQUEST OF THE INERPLANETARY GULFS has been fraught with many tragedies. Vessel after vessel, like a venturous mote, disappeared in the infinite—and has not returned. Inevitably, for the most part, the lost explorers have left no record of their fate. Their ships have flared as unknown meteors through the atmosphere of the further planets, to fall like shapeless metal cinders on a never-visited terrain; or have become the dead, frozen satellit
es of other worlds or moons. A few, perhaps, among the unreturning fliers, have succeeded in landing somewhere, and their crews have perished immediately, or survived for a little while amid the inconceivably hostile environment of a cosmos not designed for men.

  In later years, with the progress of exploration, more than one of the early derelicts has been descried, following a solitary orbit; and the wrecks of others have been found on ultra-terrene shores. Occasionally—not often—it has been possible to reconstruct the details of the lone, remote disaster. Sometimes, in a fused and twisted hull, a log or record has been preserved intact. Among others, there is the case of the Selenite, the first known rocket ship to dare the zone of the asteroids.

  At the time of its disappearance, fifty years ago, in 1980, a dozen voyages had been made to Mars, and a rocket base had been established in Syrtis Major, with a small permanent colony of terrestrials, all of whom were trained scientists as well as men of uncommon hardihood and physical stamina.

  The effects of the Martian climate, and the utter alienation from familiar conditions, as might have been expected, were extremely trying and even disastrous. There was an unremitting struggle with deadly or pestiferous bacteria new to science, a perpetual assailment by dangerous radiations of soil and air and sun. The lessened gravity played its part also, in contributing to curious and profound disturbances of metabolism. The worst effects were nervous and mental. Queer, irrational animosities, manias or phobias never classified by alienists, began to develop among the personnel at the rock base.

  Violent quarrels broke out between men who were normally controlled and urbane. The party, numbering fifteen in all, soon divided into several cliques, one against the others; and this morbid antagonism led at times to actual fighting and even bloodshed.

  One of the cliques consisted of three men, Roger Colt, Phil Gershom and Edmond Beverly. These three, through banding together in a curious fashion, became intolerably antisocial toward all the others. It would seem that they must have gone close to the borderline of insanity, and were subject to actual delusions. At any rate, they conceived the idea that Mars, with its fifteen Earthmen, was entirely too crowded. Voicing this idea in a most offensive and belligerent manner, they also began to hint their intention of faring even further afield in space.

  Their hints were not taken seriously by the others, since a crew of three was insufficient for the proper manning of even the lightest rocket vessel used at that time. Colt, Gershom and Beverly had no difficulty at all in stealing the Selenite, the smaller of the two ships then reposing at the Syrtis Major base. Their fellow-colonists were aroused one night by the cannon-like roar of the discharging tubes, and emerged from their huts of sheet-iron in time to see the vessel departing in a fiery streak toward Jupiter.

  No attempt was made to follow it; but the incident helped to sober the remaining twelve and to calm their unnatural animosities. It was believed, from certain remarks that the malcontents had let drop, that their particular objective was Ganymede or Europa, both of which were thought to possess an atmosphere suitable for human respiration.

  It seemed very doubtful, however, that they could pass the perilous belt of the asteroids. Apart from the difficulty of steering a course amid these innumerable far-strewn bodies, the Selenite was not fueled or provisioned for a voyage of such length. Gershom, Colt and Beverly, in their mad haste to quit the company of the others, had forgotten to calculate the actual necessities of their proposed voyage, and had wholly overlooked its dangers.

  After that departing flash on the Martian skies, the Selenite was not seen again; and its fate remained a mystery for thirty years. Then, on tiny, remote Phocea, its dented wreck was found by the Holdane expedition to the asteroids.

  Phocea, at the time of the expedition’s visit, was in aphelion. Like others of the planetoids, it was discovered to possess a rare atmosphere, too thin for human breathing. Both hemispheres were covered with thin snow; and lying amid this snow, the Selenite was sighted by the explorers as they circled about the little world.

  Much interest prevailed, for the shape of the partially bare mound was plainly recognizable and not to be confused with the surrounding: rocks. Holdane ordered a landing, and several men in space suits proceeded to examine the wreck. They soon identified it as the long-missing Selenite.

  Peering in through one of the thick, unbreakable neocrystal ports, they met the eyeless gaze of a human skeleton, which had fallen forward against the slanting, overhanging wall. It seemed to grin a sardonic welcome. The vessel’s hull was partly buried in the stony soil, and had been crumpled and even slightly fused, though not broken, by its plunge. The manhole lid was so thoroughly jammed and soldered that it was impossible to effect an entrance without the use of a cutting-torch.

  Enormous, withered, cryptogamous plants with the habit of vines, that crumbled at a touch, were clinging to the hull and the adjacent rocks. In the light snow beneath the skeleton-guarded port, a number of sharded bodies were lying, which proved to be those of tall insect forms, like giant phasmidae.

  From the posture and arrangement of their lank, pipy members, longer than those of a man, it seemed that they had walked erect. They were unimaginably grotesque, and their composition, due to the almost non-existent gravity, was fantastically porous and unsubstantial. Many other bodies, of a similar type, were afterwards found on other portions of the planetoid; but no living tiling was discovered. All life, it was plain, had perished in the trans-arctic winter of Phocea’s aphelion.

  When the Selenite had been entered, the party learned, from a sort of log or notebook found on the floor, that the skeleton was all that remained of Edmond Beverly. There was no trace of his two companions; but the log, on examination, proved to contain a record of their fate as well as the subsequent adventures of Beverly almost to the very moment of his own death from a doubtful, unexplained cause.

  The tale was a strange and tragic one. Beverly, it would seem, had written it day by day, after the departure from Syrtis Major, in an effort to retain a semblance of morale and mental coherence amid the black alienation and disorientation of infinitude. I transcribe it herewith, omitting only the earlier passages, which were full of unimportant details and personal animadversions. The first entries were all dated, and Beverly had made an heroic attempt to measure and mark off the seasonless night of the void in terms of earthly time. But after the disastrous landing on Phocea, he had abandoned this; and the actual length of time covered by his entries can only be conjectured.

  Sept. 1oth. Mars is only a pale-red star through our rear ports; and according to my calculations we will soon approach the orbit of the nearer asteroids. Jupiter and its system of moons are seemingly as far off as ever, like beacons on the unattainable shore of immensity. More even than at first, I feel that dreadful suffocating illusion, which accompanies ether-travel, of being perfectly stationary in a static void.

  Gershom, however, complains of a disturbance of equilibrium, with much vertigo and a frequent sense of falling, as if the vessel were sinking beneath him through bottomless space at a headlong speed. The causation of such symptoms is rather obscure, since the artificial gravity regulators are in good working order. Colt and I have not suffered from any similar disturbance. It seems to me that the sense of falling would be almost a relief from this illusion of nightmare immobility; but Gershom appears to be greatly distressed by it, and says that his hallucination is growing stronger, with fewer and briefer intervals of normality. He fears that it will become continuous.

  Sept. 11th. Colt has made an estimate of our fuel and provisions and thinks that with careful husbandry we will be able to reach Europa. I have been checking up on his calculations, and find that he is altogether too sanguine, According to my estimate, the fuel will give out while we are still midway in the belt of asteroids; though the food, water and compressed air would possibly take us most of the way to Europa.

  This discovery I must conceal from the others. It is too late to turn back. I wonder i
f we have all been mad, to start out on this errant voyage into cosmical immensity with no real preparation or thought of consequences. Colt, it would seem, has even lost the power of mathematical calculation: his figures are full of the most egregious errors.

  Gershom has been unable to sleep, and is not even fit to take his turn at the watch. The hallucination of falling obsesses him perpetually, and he cries out in terror, thinking that the vessel is about to crash on some dark, unknown planet to which it is being drawn by an irresistible gravitation. Eating, drinking and locomotion are very difficult for him, and he complains that he cannot even draw a full breath—that the air is snatched away from him in his precipitate descent. His condition is indeed painful and pitiable.

  Sept. 12th. Gershom is worse—bromide of potassium and even a heavy dose of morphine from the Selenite’s medicine lockers, have not relieved him or enabled him to sleep. He has the look of a drowning man and seems to be on the point of strangulation. It is hard for him to speak.

  Colt has become very morose and sullen, and snarls at me when I address him. I think that Gershom’s plight has preyed sorely upon his nerves—as it has on mine. But my burden is heavier than Colt’s: for I know the inevitable doom of our insane and ill-starred expedition. Sometimes I wish it were all over . . . The hells of the human mind are vaster than space, darker than the night between the worlds and all three of us have spent several eternities in hell. Our attempt to flee has only plunged us into a black and shoreless limbo, through which we are fated to carry still our own private perdition.

  I, too, like Gershom, have been unable to sleep. But, unlike him, I am tormented by the illusion of eternal immobility. In spite of the daily calculations that assure me of our progress through the gulf, I cannot convince myself that we have moved at all. It seems to me that we hang suspended like Mohammed’s coffin, remote from earth and equally remote from the stars, in an incommensurable vastness without bourn or direction. I cannot describe the awfulness of the feeling.