Collected Fiction (1940-1963)

by William P. McGivern

  He glanced up and his eyes narrowed as he saw that the officers of the Gloria were descending from the ship in the small elatube that spiraled up the mooring tower.

  He pulled the stone from his pocket. “All right,” he said, “I’ll be a good fellow and forget the extra two hundred. Take the stone.”

  Puna Walla shoved the thick roll of bills into his hand and the captain tossed him the stone.

  Captain Ebenezer called to Mono, who had watched the transaction glumly, and handed him the wad of bills.

  “Take this to the bank,” he ordered, “and don’t waste no time enroute.”

  MONO shrugged philosophically.

  He said softly, “the reward is five thousand dollars for the stone. Why did you give it back to Puna Walla for twenty eight hundred?”

  The captain looked around cautiously. Puna Walla was lumbering toward the elatube entrance, the Widow Jones at his heels.

  “Mono,” he said, “that stone ain’t worth five dollars at the most. Now get to the bank with that money.” Mono faded away like a shadow in the sun. The captain drifted after Puna Walla and the widow. He concealed himself behind one of the steel supports of the mooring tower.

  The elatube door at the base of the tower opened and the captain of the Gloria, a tall, distinguished, gray-haired man, stepped out of the small car.

  Puna Walla removed his cap. “Pardon, sir,” he said. “I would like to speak to you.”

  The captain of the Gloria looked at him with keen eyes.

  “Yes?” he snapped. “What is it?”

  With a wide grin Puna Walla extended the stone.

  “This has come into my possession, sir. I have understanding that big reward has been offered for its return.” The Gloria’s captain looked sharply at the stone and his blue eyes frosted coldly. A red flush crept into his lean face.

  “What is wrong?” Puna Walla demanded anxiously. “When can I get my reward?”

  “There is no reward,” the Gloria’s captain snapped. “That stone in your hand is a paste imitation. Its loss was a put-up job for publicity purposes. Some actress decided to use my ship and my time to get herself a few lines of space in the planetary journals.” Puna Walla’s dark skin was turning pale green.

  “No!” he shouted. “You are telling me the lie.”

  The captain of the Gloria stiffened. “Watch your tongue, man,” he said, and the words snapped like a cracking whip. “I’ve heard enough of talk about that phony jewel. Get it out of my sight.”

  “B—but,” Puna Walla blubbered, “this is not fair—”

  The officer’s irritation turned to anger.

  “Get out of my sight you clumsy, blundering oaf,” he blazed. “If I see you on this dock I’ll have you jailed for vagrancy.” His glance flicked to the Widow Jones. “And take this crone with you,” he said.

  Captain Ebenezer Scragg beamed happily as Puna Walla and the Widow Jones left the wharf, screaming shrilly at one another. He chuckled softly to himself as he strolled away in a different direction.

  CAPTAIN EBENEZER relaxed contentedly on the glassicade bridge of the Sweet Pea as it put out from the stop-over planetoid. He wouldn’t be back for several months.

  Mono appeared at the door behind him.

  “One question troubles this humble one,” he said softly. “How did my captain know that the stone was worthless?”

  Captain Ebenezer chuckled. “The dang thing chipped when I hurled it to the floor at the Widow Jones’. I noticed it when I examined it later. A real jool don’t chip.”

  Mono sighed in admiration at the captain’s cleverness.

  “You are very smart, if your humble servant may say so,” he said. “With such intelligence the world is yours to command if you only wish it.”

  “That’s hittin’ the nail right on the head,” Captain Scragg agreed. “Just like Napoleon you might say.”

  “And,” he added, thinking darkly of his amorous fiasco with the Widow Jones, “even he had his Josephine.”

  “Or didn’t,” Mono corrected suavely. Captain Ebenezer grinned reluctantly and searched for his quid. He was still chuckling when Mono went below.

  GODDESS OF THE FIFTH PLANE

  First published in the September 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

  Vance Cameron was hurled into a world on another plane when he looked at the mysterious painting . . .

  CHAPTER I

  THE valet entered the bedroom quietly and, after a glance at the young man who lay sleeping there, tip-toed to the window and adjusted the Venetian blinds.

  Slanting bars of afternoon sunlight poured into the room, falling across the face of the sleeper.

  The valet watched hopefully, but as the young man continued to sleep peacefully, he sighed and walked to the side of the bed.

  “It’s five o’clock, sir,” he said, bending over and shaking the young man’s shoulder.

  Vance Cameron opened his eyes sleepily and yawned.

  “Five o’clock, eh?” he muttered. He ran a hand tiredly through his brown, rumpled hair and hoisted himself on one elbow. After a glance at the clock on the night table, he yawned again and swung his legs out of the bed. He grinned up at his valet who was watching him impassively.

  “I haven’t slept this late in years,” he said. “I can hardly believe it. I’ll be completely spoiled when this furlough is over.”

  He stood up and stretched luxuriously.

  “I’ll have a bath and a bite to eat, then maybe I’ll feel like a human being again.”

  “Certainly, sir.” The valet smiled and started for the door.

  Vance removed his pajama top, revealing a pair of wide, heavily muscled shoulders that rose like a wedge from lean, flat hips and stomach. He was tall and proportionately built. His face was lean, tanned and serious, but his gray eyes were sparklingly alive and there was humor in the slight upward twist of his lips.

  At the door the valet paused.

  “I forgot to ask you, sir, what you wished done with the picture?”

  Vance looked at him in slight surprise.

  “What picture?” he asked.

  An expression of doubt appeared on the valet’s face.

  “Why, the picture in the living room, sir. I thought—I assumed that you brought it in with you this morning. It was there when I went in to straighten up.”

  Vance shook his head.

  “Nope, it’s not mine. Maybe it was delivered by mistake.”

  “I don’t think so, sir. That is, I hardly see how it could have been. An expressman would have rung the bell. It isn’t likely that someone would have just walked in and left the picture there. Besides it’s quite a large picture.”

  “Hmmm,” Vance said. “The mystery deepens, doesn’t it? Well, we’ll just have to wait until someone comes around and claims it. In the meantime, I’m more interested in something to eat than I am in a mysterious picture. I’ll have a look at the thing when I’ve had my shower, but you get started on breakfast, or rather supper.”

  “Certainly, sir,” his valet said. He left the room quietly.

  FIFTEEN minutes later, Vance, showered and shaved, and dressed in a casually fitting tweed suit, strolled into the littered living room of his apartment.

  That room reflected his personality more definitely than any other in the apartment. In it were bric-a-brac and curios collected from the odd corners of the world in his travels. Gourds and weapons from the lost civilization of the Incas, tiny, bejeweled daggers from Persia, lamps from China, grotesque voodoo dolls from Haiti—all of these and many more, representing the odd and the strange from almost every nation of the globe, were scattered about the room, creating a cosmopolitan atmosphere of unbelievable weirdness.

  Vance Cameron had trod the highways of the world for ten years, inquisitively poking his head into the darkest corners of every land. And when the vultures from Berlin had swept over London in those dark September days, Vance had begun his greatest adventure—as a pilot in the grimly battling
R.A.F.

  This was his first furlough in more than two years of sky battling. As he stood in the center of his bizarre living room, he thought ironically that he deserved a little peace and quiet and contentment.

  But he obviously wasn’t going to get it. Not, at least, until he had straightened out the mystery of the picture his valet had mentioned.

  The picture had caught and held his eye the moment he entered the room. He was standing now facing it, studying its detail and composition carefully.

  The painting was framed in heavy, gleamingly black wood and was leaning against the wall at a slight angle.

  Vance lit a cigarette and frowned thoughtfully. Although he was no artist, he could appreciate that the painting was a marvelous piece of work, life-like, vivid and captivating.

  The dominant figure on the canvas was a girl. She had been painted life-size, and Vance realized that it would have been an artistic crime to have minimized her dimensions.

  She was tall and slender with a glorious halo of blonde hair that waved back from her pale, high forehead and fell ripplingly to her shoulders. Her eyes were great and wide and strangely troubled. The clothes that partly concealed her slim body were barbaric and strange, but they only enhanced her glorious, strangely compelling beauty.

  Her hand was resting lightly on the golden mane of a great beast that resembled a lion, except for the blunt, curling horns that sprang from its magnificent head.

  THERE was a quality of noble grandeur about the beast. Great liquid eyes stared solemnly, almost questioningly at Vance, and the majestic head was proudly raised, as if responding to the light touch of the girl’s hand.

  Vance stared long and thoughtfully at the painting. There was a feeling, a quality, a reality to the picture that disturbed him strangely.

  He was still standing before the barbaric painting when his valet entered.

  “Your supper is ready, sir,” he said.

  Vance didn’t answer and the valet cleared his throat.

  “Supper, sir.”

  Vance started slightly. He turned, looked at his valet as if he were seeing him for the first time.

  “Oh, yes,” he said vaguely. He shook his head as if trying to shake off a reluctant memory. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. The painting was so beautiful and so strange that he must have lost himself in contemplation.

  He ate supper, paying little attention to what he was putting in his mouth. There was a peculiar excitement running through his veins. He wanted to study the mysterious picture, examine it carefully and thoroughly, but somehow he felt as if he shouldn’t.

  He was able to smile a little at himself for that idea. He felt curiously excited and unsettled. The sensation was not exactly a novel one, for it had always come to him when he’d seen Messerschmitts diving at him out of the blinding sun, or when he was on perilous reconnaissance flights over Berlin. It was not fear, but rather a quickening of his perceptions, an expectation and invitation to danger.

  But why such a sensation should come to him now was a question he was unable to answer.

  He finished his supper and returned to the living room. It was almost dark now, and leaping shadows danced in the corners of the room. Vance turned on a few soft lights.

  In the pale illumination the bizarrely furnished room was indescribably beautiful, but the most compelling of all the objects was the life-size painting of the girl and the mighty golden beast that stood at her side like a devoted dog.

  Vance walked slowly toward the picture and stopped within a few feet of it. For several minutes he regarded it steadily, but found it impossible to view the picture as a whole, for his gaze swung inevitably to the girl and her great, smouldering, troubled eyes.

  He looked steadily into her eyes, marveling at the swirling smoky lights that danced in their depths, their swiftly changing colors too delicately shaded to define.

  FOR several minutes Vance studied the painting. In the semi-darkness of the room there was something unnatural about it, as if its colors glowed more deeply and flashed more brightly in the darkness.

  To him now, the picture seemed to be the only object in the room. It dominated every other object by its magnificent reality. Vance frowned and shook his head. He wasn’t the type to lose himself in contemplation. He had seen the great artistic masterpieces of the world during his travels, but they had never impressed him as did this picture.

  The tall slender girl in the painting was the most ethereally beautiful creature he had ever seen, but it was the haunting, troubled look in her great eyes that lent her the air of mystery and seductive glamor.

  And the great beast at her side was an unparalleled work of art. Every stroke of the artist’s brush had caught the nobility, the grandeur, the fierceness of the mighty beast; and at the same time its humble devotion to the tall viking-blonde girl was evident in every line of the great, heavily-thewed body.

  Vance was unaware of the passage of time. His valet entered the room to announce that he was going out for the night, and Vance waved him away with an abstracted hand.

  Vaguely he heard a door slam, and he realized he was alone in the darkened apartment. But still he stood in the center of the dark living-room, gazing at the painting.

  The city noises that drifted faintly to his ears, seemed to fade gradually away, to lose themselves in the blackness of the night.

  Vance moved closer to the picture. His eyes met those of the girl in the painting and he stared steadily, intently and longingly into them.

  Then he noticed something that sent a shiver down his spine, and felt the perspiration standing out on his brow.

  For the expression in the girl’s eyes had suddenly seemed to change. Instead of the troubled, haunted gaze, there was, it seemed, a strange transformed light of anticipation, and of voiceless hope that lighted flames of dancing light in her glorious eyes.

  OBEYING a compulsion that was beyond definition Vance moved slowly toward the picture, his thoughts confused and whirling. He seemed caught in a force, a will stronger than his own. Had he been hypnotized, his actions could not have been more automatic, more rigidly directed.

  But he was not alarmed; rather, he was enormously excited. The face of the girl was blazing radiantly now, as if reflecting the glow of an inner fire.

  Vance stood as if poised on the brink of a steep cliff. Behind him was darkness and oblivion, but before him, in the face of the girl, in the voiceless hope that gleamed in her eyes, in the tremulous smile that seemed ready to break on her lips, he saw life and hope and beauty and danger.

  He advanced another step toward the picture, and the light in the girl’s eyes grew warmer. The radiance of her face was like the sun at noon-day.

  Entranced, mesmerized, Vance stumbled forward, covering the last few steps in a rush. There were swirling lights before his eyes, and his heart was hammering like a trip-hammer against his ribs. The girl’s face, her entire figure, was transfigured with the smile that seemed to break over her face like the sun rising on a gray dawn.

  Vance felt himself falling forward. He seemed to be losing consciousness. A wall of blackness was closing on him from all sides, and there was nothing but the slender figure of the girl, as beautiful and dramatic as a slim bright flame, between his falling body and that darkness.

  Then the picture came to life!

  EVEN in his numbed state Vance recognized the sudden expression of terror that spread over the girl’s face, destroying her smiling beauty. She shrank back, but underlying her terror there was a fearlessness and a courage that was as bright as a gleaming sword.

  Vance heard a snarling, deep chested roar, and with his last conscious glance, saw the great beast at the girl’s side crouching to spring. The muscles of the mighty animal bunched under its tawny hide and its eyes gleamed with rage.

  But at a touch of the girl’s hand, the beast backed away and then the two incredible figures, the glorious girl and the golden lion, wheeled and disappeared.

  At that moment Van
ce fell forward into the illimitable blackness of a depthless, timeless, ageless abyss.

  CHAPTER II

  A Strange World

  VANCE CAMERON awoke slowly. For several moments he seemed suspended in a hazy, flickering limbo, but slowly and gradually the mists cleared from his eyes and he saw a vast distant red sky above his head, in which two mighty green suns burned brilliantly.

  He realized that he was lying on his back. He shut his eyes against the searing green light of the dual suns and tried to collect his wildly scattered thoughts.

  All he could remember, all he could bring into focus was that moment when the eyes of the girl in the painting had suddenly come alive, glowing with warm, encouraging light, and he had moved toward her like a sun-blighted traveler toward an oasis.

  Then he recalled what had happened. She had cringed and a look of terror had spread over her beautiful features; the mighty beast at her side had snarled in rage.

  Vance shook his head dazedly. He felt as if he were poised on the precipice of sanity, but that at any instant his mind might plunge into the black and unplumbed depths of sheer madness.

  In his mind’s eye he could see the girl and beast, magnificent and noble, their courage and spirit standing forth in every line of the painting.

  But was it all some mad dream?

  With an effort he raised himself on one elbow and opened his eyes. The scene that met his eyes was one of rugged magnificence, of incomparably wild grandeur. A mighty forest of towering trees stretched away to his left, but they were like no trees that he had seen before in his life. Their boles were incredibly thick and their majestically spreading tops seemed to merge with the blazing red sky. They were purple and green in color but the shades ran together, mingling and merging in a bewildering, eye-dazzling pattern.

  Shafts of green light from the great emerald suns slanted through their towering tops, criss-crossing in geometric squares and angles. Where the slanting shafts of light intersected they fused into blazing spots of color and these luminous ball of light winked against the darkness of the forest like Christmas tree ornaments.