by Jerry
Severe groaning as of someone in terrible pain—the noise of someone thrashing around in agony—was coming from behind the closed door of the stranger’s apartment. The janitor had listened, then run for help.
When we got there the place was silent. A faint light shone from under the doorway. The policeman knocked; there was no answer. He put his ear to the door and so did I.
We heard a faint rustling—a continuous slow rustling as of a breeze blowing paper. The cop knocked again but there was still no response.
Then, together, we threw our weight at the door. Two hard blows and the rotten old lock gave way. We burst in.
The room was filthy, the floor covered with scraps of torn paper, bits of detritus and garbage. The room was unfurnished, which I thought was odd.
In one corner there stood a metal box, about four feet square. A tight box, held together with screws and ropes. It had a lid, opening at the top, which was down and fastened with a sort of wax seal.
The stranger of the black cloak lay in the middle of the floor—dead.
He was still wearing the cloak. The big slouch hat was lying on the floor some distance away. From the inside of the box the faint rustling was coming.
We turned over the stranger, took the cloak off. For several instants we saw nothing amiss—
At first we saw a man, dressed in a somber, featureless black suit. He had a coat and skintight pants.
His hair was short and curly brown. It stood straight up in its inch-long length. His eyes were open and staring. I noticed first that he had no eyebrows, only a curious dark line in the flesh over each eye.
It was then that I realized that he had no nose. But no one had ever noticed that before. His skin was oddly mottled. Where the nose should have been there were dark shadowings that made the appearance of a nose, if you only just glanced at him. Like the work of a skillful artist in a painting.
His mouth was as it should be, and slightly open—but he had no teeth.
His head perched upon a thin neck.
The suit was—not a suit. It was part of him. It was his body.
What we thought was a coat was a huge black wing sheath, like a beetle has. He had a thorax like an insect, only the wing sheath covered it and you couldn’t notice it when he wore the cloak. The body bulged out below, tapering off into the two long, thin hind legs. His arms came out from under the top of the “coat.” He had a tiny secondary pair of arms folded tightly across his chest. There was a sharp round hole newly pierced in his chest just above these arms still oozing a watery liquid.
The janitor fled gibbering. The officer was pale but standing by his duty. I heard him muttering under his breath an endless stream of Hail Marys.
The lower thorax—the “abdomen”—was very long and insectlike. It was crumpled up now like the wreck of an airplane fuselage.
I recalled the appearance of a female wasp that had just laid eggs—her thorax had had that empty appearance.
The sight was a shock such as leaves one in full control. The mind rejects it, and it is only in afterthought that one can feel the dim shudder of horror.
The rustling was still coming from the box. I motioned the white-faced cop and we went over and stood before it. He took his nightstick and knocked away the waxen seal.
Then we heaved and pulled the lid open.
A wave of noxious vapor assailed us. We staggered back as suddenly a stream of flying things shot out of the huge iron container. The window was open, and straight out into the first glow of dawn they flew.
There must have been dozens of them. They were about two or three inches long and they flew on wide gauzy beetle wings. They looked like little men, strangely terrifying as they flew—clad in their black suits, with expressionless faces and their dots of watery blue eyes. And they flew out on transparent wings that came from under their black beetle coats.
I ran to the window, fascinated, almost hypnotized. The horror of it had not reached my mind at once. Afterward I have had spasms of numbing terror as my mind tries to put the things together. The whole business was so utterly unexpected.
We knew of army ants and their imitators, yet it never occurred to us that we too were army ants of a sort. We knew of stick insects and it never occurred to us that there might be others that disguise themselves to fool, not other animals, but the supreme animal himself—man.
We found some bones in the bottom of that iron case afterward. But we couldn’t identify them.
Perhaps we did not try hard. They might have been human—
I suppose the stranger of the black cloak did not fear women so much as it distrusted them. Women notice men, perhaps, more closely than other men do. Women might become suspicious sooner of the inhumanity, the deception. And then there might perhaps have been some touch of instinctive feminine jealousy. The stranger was disguised as a man, but its sex was surely female. The things in the iron box were its young.
But it is the other thing I saw when I ran to the window that had shaken me most. The policeman did not see it. Nobody else saw it but me, and I only for an instant.
Nature practises deceptions in every angle. Evolution will create a being for any niche, no matter how unlikely.
When I went to the window, I saw the small cloud of flying things rising up into the sky and sailing away into the purple distance. The dawn was breaking and the first rays of the sun were just striking over the housetops.
Shaken, I looked away from that fourth-floor tenement room over the roofs of the lower buildings. Chimneys and walls and empty clotheslines made the scenery over which the tiny mass of horror passed.
And then I saw a chimney, not thirty feet away on the next roof. It was squat and red brick and had two black pipe ends flush with its top. I saw it suddenly vibrate, oddly. And its red brick surface seem to peel away, and the black pipe openings turn suddenly white.
I saw two big eyes staring up into the sky.
A great, flat-winged thing detached itself silently from the surface of the real chimney and darted hungrily after the cloud of flying things.
I watched until all had lost themselves in the sky.
1943
THE HALFLING
Leigh Brackett
Fugitive from one world, prey of another, she had planned her dark mission well—to lead her lost people back to freedom—and die!
CHAPTER ONE
“Primitive Venus”
I WAS watching the sunset. It was something pretty special in the line of California sunsets, and it made me feel swell, being the first one I’d seen in about nine years. The pitch was in the flatlands between Culver City and Venice, and I could smell the sea. I was born in a little dump at Venice, Cal., and I’ve never found any smell like the clean cold salt of the Pacific—not anywhere in the Solar System.
I was standing alone, off to one side of the grounds. The usual noises of a carnival around feeding time were being made behind me, and the hammer gang was pinning the last of the tents down tight. But I wasn’t thinking about Jade Greene’s Interplanetary Carnival, The Wonders of the Seven Worlds Alive Before Your Eyes.
I was remembering John Damien Greene running barefoot on a wet beach, fishing for perch off the end of a jetty, and dreaming big dreams. I was wondering where John Damien Greene had gone, taking his dreams with him, because now I could hardly remember what they were.
Somebody said softly from behind me, “Mr. Greene?”
I quit thinking about John Damien Greene. It was that kind of a voice—sweet, silky, guaranteed to make you forget your own name. I turned around.
She matched her voice, all right. She stood about five-three on her bronze heels, and her eyes were more purple than the hills of Malibu. She had a funny little button of a nose and a pink mouth, smiling just enough to show her even white teeth. The bronze metal-cloth dress she wore hugged a chassis with no flaws in it anywhere. I tried to find some.
She dropped her head, so I could see the way the last of the sunlight tangled in her g
old-brown hair.
“They said you were Mr. Greene. If I’ve made a mistake . . .”
She had an accent, just enough to be fascinating.
I said, “I’m Greene. Something I can do for you?” I still couldn’t find anything wrong with her, but I kept looking just the same. My blood pressure had gone up to about three hundred.
It’s hard to describe a girl like that. You can say she’s five-three and beautiful, but you can’t pass on the odd little tilt of her eyes and the way her mouth looks, or the something that just comes out of her like light out of a lamp, and hooks into you so you know you’ll never be rid of it, not if you live to be a thousand.
She said, “Yes. You can give me a job. I’m a dancer.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, miss. I got a dancer.”
Her face had a look of steel down under the soft kittenish roundness. “I’m not just talking,” she said. “I need a job so I can eat. I’m a good dancer. I’m the best dancer you ever saw anywhere. Look me over.”
That’s all I had been doing. I guess I was staring by then. You don’t expect fluffy dolls like that to have so much iron in them. She wasn’t bragging. She was just telling me.
“I still have a dancer,” I told her, “a green-eyed Martian babe who is plenty good, and who would tear my head off, and yours too, if I hired you.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I thought you bossed this carnival.” She let me think about that, and then grinned. “Let me show you.”
She was close enough so I could smell the faint, spicy perfume she wore. But she’d stopped me from being just a guy chinning with a pretty girl. Right then I was Jade Greene, the carny boss-man, with scars on my knuckles and an ugly puss, and a show to keep running.
Strictly Siwash, that show, but my baby—mine to feed and paint and fuel. If this kid had something Sindi didn’t have, something to drag in the cash customers—well, Sindi would have to take it and like it. Besides, Sindi was getting so she thought she owned me.
The girl was watching my face. She didn’t say anything more, or even move. I scowled at her.
“You’d have to sign up for the whole tour. I’m blasting off next Monday for Venus, and then Mars, and maybe into the Asteroids.”
“I don’t care. Anything to be able to eat. Anything to—”
She stopped right there and bent her head again, and suddenly I could see tears on her thick brown lashes.
I said, “Okay. Come over to the cooch tent and we’ll have a look.”
Me, I was tempted to sign her for what was wrapped up in that bronze cloth—hut business is business. I couldn’t take on any left-footed ponies.
She said shakily, “You don’t soften, up very easily, do you?” We started across the lot toward the main gate. The night was coming down cool and fresh. Off to the left, clear back to the curving deep-purple barrier of the hills, the slim white spires of Culver, Westwood, Beverly Hills and Hollywood were beginning to show a rainbow splash of color under their floodlights.
Everything was clean, new and graceful. Only the thin fog and the smell of the sea were old.
We were close to the gate, stumbling a. little in the dusk of the afterglow. Suddenly a shadow came tearing out from between the tents.
It went erratically in lithe, noiseless bounds, and it was somehow not human even though it went on two feet. The girl caught her breath and shrank in against me. The shadow went around us three times like a crazy thing, and then stopped.
There was something eerie about that sudden stillness. The hair crawled on the back of my neck. I opened my mouth angrily.
The shadow stretched itself toward the darkening sky and let go a wail like Lucifer falling from Heaven.
I cursed. The carny lights came on, slamming a circle of blue-white glare against the night.
“Laska, come here!” I yelled.
The girl screamed.
I PUT my arm around her. “It’s all right,” I said, and then, “Come here, you misbegotten Thing! You’re on a sleighride again.”
There were more things I wanted to say, but the girl cramped my style. Laska slunk in towards us. I didn’t blame her for yelping. Laska wasn’t pretty.
He wasn’t much taller than the girl, and looked shorter because he was drooping. He wore a pair of tight dark trunks and nothing else except the cross-shaped mane of fine blue-gray fur that went across his shoulders and down his back, from the peak between his eyes to his long tail. He was dragging the tail, and the tip of it was twitching. There was more of the soft fur on his chest and forearms, and a fringe of it down his lank belly.
I grabbed him by the scruff and shook him. “I ought to boot your ribs in! We got a show in less than two hours.”
He looked up at me. The pupils of his yellow-green eyes were closed to thin hairlines, but they were flat and cold with hatred. The glaring lights showed me the wet whiteness of his pointed teeth and the raspy pinkness of his tongue.
“Let me go. Let me go, you human!” His voice was hoarse and accented.
“I’ll let you go.” I cuffed him across the face. “I’ll let you go to the immigration authorities. You wouldn’t like that, would you? You wouldn’t even have coffee to hop up on when you died.”
The sharp claws came out of his fingers and toes, flexed hungrily and went back in again.
I dropped him.
“Go on back inside. Find the croaker and tell him to straighten you out. I don’t give a damn what you do on your own time, but you miss out on one more show and I’ll take your job and call the I-men. Get it?”
“I get it,” said Laska sullenly, and curled his red tongue over his teeth. He shot his flat, cold glance at the girl and went away, not making any sound at all.
The girl shivered and drew away from me. “What was—that?”
“Cat-man from Callisto. My prize performer. They’re pretty rare.”
“I—I’ve heard of them. They evolved from a cat-ancestor instead of an ape, like we did.”
“That’s putting it crudely, but it’s close enough. I’ve got a carload of critters like that, geeks from all over the System. They ain’t human, and they don’t fit with animals either. Moth-men, lizard-men, guys with wings and guys with six arms and antennae. They all followed evolutionary tracks peculiar to their particular hunks of planet, only they stopped before they got where they were going. The Callistan kitties are the aristocrats of the bunch. They’ve got an I. Q. higher than a lot of humans, and wouldn’t spit on the other halflings.”
“Poor things,” she said softly. “You didn’t have to be so cruel to him.”
I laughed. “That What’s-it would as soon claw my insides out as soon as look at me—or any other human, including you—just on general principles. That’s why Immigration hates to let ’em in even on a work permit. And when he’s hopped up on coffee . . .”
“Coffee? I thought I must have heard wrong.”
“Nope. The caffeine in Earthly coffee berries works just like coke or hashish for ’em. Venusian coffee hits ’em so hard they go nuts and then die, but our own kind just keeps ’em going. It’s only the hoppy ones you ever find in a show like this. They get started on coffee and they have to have it no matter what they have to do to get it.”
She shuddered a little. “You said something about dying.”
“Yeah. If he’s ever deported back to Callisto his people will tear him apart. They’re a clannish bunch. I guess the first humans on Callisto weren’t very tactful, or else they just hate us because we’re something they’re not and never can be. Anyway, their tribal law forbids them to have anything to do with us except killing. Nobody knows much about ’em, but I hear they have a nice friendly religion, something like the old-time Thugs and their Kali worship.”
I paused, and then said uncomfortably, “Sorry I had to rough him up in front of you. But he’s got to be kept in line.”
She nodded. We didn’t say anything after that. We went in past the main box and along between the burglars readyin
g-up their layouts—Martian getak, Venusian shaltl and the game the Mercurian hillmen play with human skulls. Crooked? Sure—but suckers like to be fooled, and a guy has to make a living.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl. I thought, if she dances the way she walks . . .
She didn’t look much at the big three-dimensional natural-color pictures advertising the geek show. We went by the brute top, and suddenly all hell broke loose inside of it. I’ve got a fair assortment of animals from all over. They make pretty funny noises when they get started, and they were started now.
They were nervous, unhappy noises. I heard prisoners yammering in the Lunar cell-blocks once, and that was the way this sounded—strong, living things shut up in cages and tearing their hearts out with it—hate, fear and longing like you never thought about. It turned you cold.
The girl looked scared. I put my arm around her again, not minding it at all. Just then Tiny came out of the brute top.
Tiny is a Venusian deep-jungle man, about two sizes smaller than the Empire State Building, and the best zooman I ever had, drunk or sober. Right now he was mad.
“I tell that Laska stay ’way from here,” he yelled. “My kids smell him. You listen!”
I didn’t have to listen. His “kids” could have been heard halfway to New York. Laska had been expressly forbidden to go near the brute top because the smell of him set the beasts crazy. Whether they were calling to him as one animal to another, or scared of him as something unnatural, we didn’t know. The other halflings were pretty good about it, but Laska liked to start trouble just for the hell of it.
I said, “Laska’s hopped again. I sent him to the croaker. You get the kids quiet again, and then send one of the punks over to the crumb castle and tell the cook I said if he ever gives Laska a teaspoonful of coffee again without my say-so I’ll fry him in his own grease.”
Tiny nodded his huge pale head and vanished, cursing. I said to the girl, “Still want to be a carny?”
