The Complete Saga of Don Hargreaves

by Festus Pragnell

  “Attaboy!” murmured Vans, getting busy.

  Very soon I was sharing Vans’ view of what the dummy saw relayed by its radio television eyes. In a few moments the thing was swimming ashore near Usulor’s royal palace. People saw it, shouted, “Don, the outlaw!” Nerve-stopping deathrays were aimed at it, but naturally the dummy was unharmed. It went on. Guards rushed at it, but it leaped over their heads and still went on. Up the wall of the palace it climbed as a squirrel runs up the trunk of a tree. It reached the Princess’ apartment.

  “Princess Wimpolo!” it called. “Princess Wimpolo! I can explain everything.”

  Wimpolo came through a doorway, just as the dummy got through the window.

  “Don!” she cried. “Take care! My father—”

  Just then a guard who had hidden himself behind some curtains jumped out and swung a heavy sword. Vans was a fraction of an instant too slow in seeing it. The sword, like a great ax, crashed through the head of the dummy, putting it out of action forever.

  The guard thought he was saving the Princess from a second attempt at assassination.

  “Seems we get no luck, Vans,” I said gloomily.

  “Wuff! Wuff!” barked the sea-lion.

  “Be quiet,” I said.

  Vans was watching in the television. “Don,” he said, “your sea-lion wants to talk to you.”

  “Wuff! Wuff!” barked the sea-lion, nodding harder than ever. “Wuff! Wuff! Wuff! Wuff!”

  “Don!” cried Vans, dancing with excitement. “It’s answering you! It’s telling you it can help! Oh, give it a trial!”

  “Wuff!” said the sea-lion, pleadingly.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Come.”

  I didn’t like the idea of trusting that creature. So I said to it, “Now, see, I’m taking your evolution ray machine with me. Rescue us, and I’ll change you back into a man again. Fail us, and you stay a sea-lion forever. Get me?”

  He nodded.

  The sea-lion led the way to the airtight traffic sphere. In no time at all we had shot across the plain, sea-lion steering, and shot down into the other cavern. The sea-lion drove with sickening recklessness. In a few minutes we were beside the still sea. The sea-lion slithered over the rocks and dived, as such creatures do, like a stone.

  A MINUTE passed, two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes. At last it returned with Vans in its mouth. Vans was almost unconscious despite his Martian swimming powers, but needed nothing but a rest to regain his full strength.

  “Now,” I said to the sea-lion, “I’ll keep my promise. I’ll turn you back into a man again.”

  Not that I felt too sure of myself. Bommelsmeth back again might be a problem. But I had promised. I put the indicator into reverse, set the machine going.

  The sea-lion shuffled hastily out of the way, wuffing. I turned the machine round. Again it shuffled out of the way.

  “It doesn’t want to be turned back,” Vans cried.

  Then I understood. There was no certainty that the changeback would be successful. Bommelsmeth knew what strong medicine his ray was, and the wild results it was likely to produce. Safer to remain a sea-lion.

  “As you like it,” I said. And he is still my pet sea-lion.

  We drove to the palace. Vans got out. I remained inside, out of sight.

  “Vans,” shouted the guards in delight. “Enter! High honor awaits you for saving the Princess!”

  “What is this?” asked Vans pointing to a notice offering the huge reward for my body, dead or alive.

  “Oh, forget that!” said the Captain of the Guard. “That’s cancelled. It wasn’t Don that attacked the Princess. It was an animated dummy. That same dummy came back and had another try, but one of the guards caught it. The Princess thought she had seen Don killed before her eyes until all the wires and wheels and valves fell out. Don is pardoned, and all the Earthlings are free.”

  At that I jumped out of the sphere. A great shout went up. People poured out of the palace.

  “Vans,” I whispered, “take care of the evolution ray and get it well out of sight. It’s not safe to leave it about and these people will keep me busy.”

  VANS picked up the box and went off. He raced for his own home. As he rushed into the front garden another figure might have been seen slipping out the back in a hurry.

  Vans looked eagerly around. His eyes sought out the slim figure of Olla his wife.

  “Olla,” he roared, thundering toward her. “I’ve come back! Your Vans is back!”

  Then he stopped short. She stood glaring up at him.

  “What have you got to say for yourself?” she demanded furiously.

  He gaped.

  “You nearly left me a widow,” she stormed, “just to save her. You think more of her than you do me!”

  “But, Olla, love, I—”

  A stinging slap on the cheek stopped him. She couldn’t hurt the strongest man in Mars physically, but she did hurt his feelings.

  “Olla!” he protested.

  “Leave me,” she ordered. Then he saw the big box he had been carrying. “What’s that?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but you mustn’t touch it. It’s dangerous.”

  Olla snorted. The big bear trying to order her about! She went straight to the box and fiddled with the knobs.

  “Olla! Don’t! It’s dangerous.”

  “Stuff,” she said. “It’s a new television set. Stop your squawks and tell me how to work it.”

  Vans was in distress. He couldn’t manhandle Olla.

  “Don,” he called, rushing out. “Come! I need you.”

  When I got there a large red and yellow bird, something like a flamingo, stood full in the glare of the evolution ray, making strange noises and flapping its wings in puzzlement. All at once it flew up in the air clumsily and vanished in the distance.

  “Olla!” moaned Vans.

  He rushed off.

  Five minutes later a small airplane roared over my head at a considerable speed. Vans Holors had gone to find his wife.

  Up to the moment of writing he has not been heard from.—Don Hargreaves.

  [1] While one “hand” explored the shape of the head the other was producing a duplicate of it in plastic material which would afterwards be colored with an equally exact imitation of the original. These Martian statues were often uncannily realistic.

  [2] Bommelsmeth, with fiendish genius, had discovered the natural radiation that, beating ever on Earth and Mars out of space, produces evolution. The men of Mars, living in their deep caverns, had been shielded from this radiation for long ages, and their evolution had stopped.

  Bommelsmeth could produce evolution at will, or reverse it. The ray turned living men into apes, the apes into monkeys, the monkeys into reptiles, the reptiles into fish, the fish into marine worms and the worms finally into a primitive protoplasmic slime that could not be seen.

  [3] The height to which I could jump and the speed at which I could run have always been amazing to the slow, lumbering Martians. My running, climbing and jumping powers are miraculous. How I could open the eyes of my old friends at sport now! Whether my smaller brain is more intelligent than the old I cannot say. I have not noticed much difference. But it seems to work more quickly than the old one. Time is altered, for me. The hands of Winterton’s watch, for instance, seem now to take far longer to go round than they did. All living creatures seem to me to have become much bigger and to move far more slowly than once they did.

  [4] Bommelsmeth did not, of course, refer to an Earthling cricket, but to a small rodent that is roughly its Martian equivalent.

  IN the end I got back to Usulor’s court, bringing Bommelsmeth’s Evolution Machine and Bommelsmeth himself, turned into an imitation sea-lion, with me. I don’t mean that Bommelsmeth really was turned into a sea-lion. X mean he was more like a sea-lion than any other animal I ever saw. He followed me like a dog. He had to. He still had the mind of a man. He could not live like a sea-lion among
sea-lions. He didn’t know how to. He was reduced to a condition of complete helplessness.

  And so I arrived back in Usulor’s court, Vans Holors, wrestling champion of Mars and a really good fellow, even though he is rather dumb, carrying the Evolution Machine. Before I could tell my story we had an accident with the machine. In spite of warnings Vans’ wife blundered into the ray and got turned into a sort of flamingo. In view of the way that female had been behaving it seemed to me that trusting, honest Vans had not lost much, but he was very upset about it. She flew off, and he went after her in an airplane.

  Then, as I said, the whole of Mars was very soon in a ferment of excitement. Not because Bommelsmeth was captured and helpless. But because here was a machine that could turn a living human being into a weird animal. Come to think of it, I suppose, a machine like that would cause a lot of fuss at home on Earth. Here, plain for everybody to see, was a lea-lion unlike any sea-lion ever seen before, and which understood what was said to it. And the wrestling champion of Mars presently came flying back with a captive bird something like a flamingo which he said, sobbing, was his unfaithful, self-willed but very repentent wife.

  It affected my reputation, too. The ordinary people of Mars had called me, first, “The Earthing” and then “Usulor’s pup” or “Wimp’s pet” and when the Princess announced her intention of marrying me they referred to me, partly in envy, as “King Don.” Now I was always called “Hargreaves,” and the machine was called “The Hargreaves Machine.” As though I had invented it. There was more fuss over that toy than there was over the Sommalu or Bommelsmeth wars or my rescue of the Princess from kidnaping or Vans saving her from assassination.[*]

  And blow me down if old man Usulor himself did not take up Bommelsmeth’s experiments where Bommelsmeth had left off. Criminals from Martian jails were subjected to the ray. I did not like it, but I could do nothing. To object to anything that excitable but on the whole well-meaning old Usulor had set his mind on was dangerous even for me, who could always count on the protection of Wimpolo, who, gigantic and unbeautiful Martian woman though she was, was still a most affectionate and lovable girl. I know you think it odd that I should love a Martian who weighs half a ton and can carry me about in one hand, but if you knew Wimpolo you would understand.

  And now, to roars of kingly laughter, Martian criminals were turned into freaks with the heads of donkeys and the bodies of crocodiles, the heads of bears, legs of tigers and bodies of birds, mixed crabs, fish, dogs, horses, octopi, anything. I found it sickening. But when Princess Wimpolo the only person on Mars who dared to risk angering her father, said so, he became serious. He was studying the ray, he said. He was trying to find out why it produced such different results in different cases. Already his scientists had analyzed the ray into several different components, some violent and uncontrollable some more beneficial. Presently he would be able to end the evolutionary stagnation of Mars. He would “improve the stock.”

  As though his subjects were cattle. Martians would not be forever “confined to the interior of a small and shrinking planet.”

  IN the middle of all this excitement I was married to Princess Wimpolo, and you can imagine all the processions, ceremonies, television broadcasts and general hullabaloo that went with the marriage of the first lady in all Mars to a visitor from another world. You can imagine the discontented mutterings, too, but neither Usulor nor his daughter were likely to take much notice of that. Martian scientists backed us up. They said that the Martian race was a “tired” race, biologically speaking, and needed the virility that interbreeding with another race would bring. Marrying Earthlings became quite fashionable among high Martian circles, and I fear will be followed later by a spate of divorces.

  “And what about our honeymoon?” Wimpolo demanded.

  “Certainly,” said old Usulor, beaming. “I have arranged a triumphal tour of Mars, sight-seeing, hunting of wild snakes . . .”

  “Huh!” snorted Wimpolo, disgustedly. “What’s the use of that? I’ve seen it all before, dozens of times.”

  I’ve never seen a smile vanish off a man’s face quicker than old Usulor’s did then.

  “Well, what else would you suggest?”

  “I want a space-voyage.”

  Honest, Festus, I’ve seen old Usulor explode with rage many times, but the performance he put up then beat anything I’d ever seen before. Usulor’s rages are majestic sights, quite interesting if you don’t happen to be the object of them. He stamps, he thrashes the air with his arms, he gnashes his teeth, he emits uncouth bellowing noises and he roars order after order at his servants, only usually to countermand them afterwards. And little seven-stone me has to jump around pretty lively to avoid being injured by the flying bits of the crockery that he hurls on the floor with all the strength of his seventeen hundredweight.

  Wimpolo just put on that obstinate expression of hers and waited for him to get out of breath.

  Presently he began to realize that all this expenditure of energy and crockery wasn’t getting him anywhere. He stopped dancing suddenly.

  “Will you never get over this madcap craziness of yours?” he hissed. “Will you never realize what is fitting for the first lady in Mars? Will you always rush into all the trouble you can find? When I was at war with Sommalu you actually went spying in his country unattended.”

  He can never forget that particular piece of rashness.

  “My little Don looks after me remarkably well,” she countered, tossing her head.

  “That’s not the point. One day you’ll get killed, and what will your poor old dad do then?”

  This sudden change of attitude shook her, but I’m afraid he has spoiled her too thoroughly to get the better of her that way.

  “Why should I be shut up in the caverns of Mars all my life?”

  “But I’ve been shut up in them all my life. So has everybody else in Mars.”

  “But there’s no need to stay shut up in them any longer. We’ve got over the krypton difficulty, haven’t we? And there are plenty of space-ships.” That startled me.

  “Where?” snapped Usulor.

  “In the museums.”

  “Those things!” screamed Usulor. “You’d risk your life in one of those? Why, they haven’t been used for umpteen thousand years!”

  “All they want is cleaning up and re-stocking.”

  He looked at me with a sort of despairing groan.

  “You don’t know what you’ve taken on, Don my boy,” he said. “If you can tame this daughter of mine, you’ll do something I never could. Look here, Wimp. Let me show you over some of these space-ships. I guarantee I’ll soon show you that they are the most uncomfortable, dangerous things to travel in that ever were. No place for a gently-bred lady.”

  She snorted in a most unladylike manner.

  “Gently-bred lady! Why, when I was carried off by the man-apes of Bommelsmeth . . .”

  She referred to a particularly horrible experience of hers. She could have been excused had she died of fright after it. Yet it didn’t seem to have done her the slightest harm. They breed them tough in the caverns of Mars, where tons of rock may fall on your head at any moment, or a man-eating snake slither out of a small cavern, or the ground give way under your feet as a new cave-in enlarges a cavern beneath you.

  CHAPTER II

  Launched!

  NEEDLESS to say, Wimpolo had talked her father round to a grudging assent to her point of view in an hour or so. She was pretending to be very much on her dignity now, annoyed with him for his names, “Madcap,” “Wild girl,” “Uncontrollable” and the rest of it.

  “Well, perhaps I didn’t really mean it,” he muttered uncomfortably, as he stumped off in advance of us. Wimpolo followed in offended silence. But she gave me a playful pinch in the side behind her dad’s back, and I knew that she was very pleased with herself. Incidentally, she nearly broke three of my ribs.

  “If only you’d be reasonable,” Usulor rumbled on. “Then I wouldn’t need to say
such things.”

  We passed the bathing-pool. The sea-lion broke surface, swimming vigorously, and clambered awkwardly over the rocks to us, leaving a trail of water and weed. The palace sea-lion is, of course, Bommelsmeth, once Usulor’s bitterest enemy and now reduced to complete helplessness and dependence by his own Evolution Machine. He follows me like a dog.

  “Wuff! Wuff! Wuff!” he barked, excitedly. He knew we were off on some journey and wanted to come too.

  “We don’t want him,” snapped Usulor. “Here, you there! Give this animal a whipping and throw it back in the water.”

  The sea-lion, who, of course, understood what he said, looked very upset. Palace attendants ran up to carry out the King’s orders.

  Wimpolo tossed her head.

  “If I can’t have my pets,” she snorted.

  “Oh, all right, all right!” Usulor broke out. “Let the creature alone. Let it come with us. Let her have two zoos and three aquariums if she wants to.”

  His resistance was worn down. The palace servants, quite accustomed to this sort of thing, were not in the least surprised. Maybe I am a bit rash myself in keeping Bommelsmeth around me, even in his changed form. After all, he had not been exactly a nice character. Still, what I feel is that when I’ve got him under my eyes then I know that he is not up to any mischief. And, as Usulor says, if he were dead one of his sons would step into his shoes as leader of all the discontented elements in Mars. Alive, he is a sort of hostage.

  Then a gigantic Martian came running up. It was Vans Holors, wrestling champion of the planet and one of the best of Martians.

  “Where are you going?”

  I told him.

  “Let me get Olla,” he said. “We’ll come.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to take them too?” Usulor asked of his daughter, resignedly.

  “If I can’t take my friends, and Don’s friends!”

  “Hrrrmph!”

  SO Vans came, bringing the flamingolike bird who was his erring and unfortunate wife. As the royal traffic-sphere stopped for us to get in Vans humped in a huge box.