The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

Allison’s fighting temperature jumped. His words clogged. Smitt answered with a blank stare. So far as Smitt knew, she was with Jo-jo-kak’s widow.

  “Find her for me, Smitt!” Kilhide snapped. “With prices skyrocketing, she ought to be back in circulation.”

  Smitt saluted and he and Kilhide went their separate ways. Allison glanced dully at the package of food.

  Half an hour later Smitt returned to the barred opening, and worry showed on his face.

  “She’s gone, Les. What do you suppose—”

  “What did Jo-jo-kak’s widow say?”

  “She’s gone, too.”

  “Where?”

  “I couldn’t find out.”

  “Didn’t any of the Dazzalox women see her go?”

  “Les, you’ll think I’m blind and deaf and cockeyed. But by George, I couldn’t find any Dazzalox women—not a one!”

  Allison’s eyes shot across to the crowd of Dazzalox men. Apparently most of the male population had turned out to swarm about the slave mart. He glanced up and down the main thoroughfares, toward the rock-walled vestibules and shadowy side streets where a few hours earlier groups of women had been conferring in hushed tones.

  “Something’s cracked, Smitt,” Allison said with a snap of his fingers. “I’ll swear I haven’t seen a female Dazzalox since these new girls came in.”

  The package of food caught Allison’s eye. He shuffled its contents and there he found the answer—a penciled note from June.

  Dear Lester,

  This is to tell you that the Dazzalox women are going to migrate. Jo-jo-kak’s widow has confided this to me. You can guess how desperate they are about their broken traditions when I tell you that they debated whether they should run away or commit wholesale murder upon all the males. They seem to feel that the sooner their race comes to an end, the better. It is the only answer, they say, to their outraged traditions.

  “They’re the damnedest lot!” Smitt hissed. “I never could understand them and their traditions.”

  Allison read on.

  They talked of escaping these caverns through some ascending passages. I do not know whether they can.

  “They run the risk of death from the sea,” Smitt muttered. “And if they find their way to the top, they’ll be scorched to cinders, from what Kilhide says.”

  Allison read feverishly now. For appearances’ sake I must go with Jo-jo-kak’s widow. But I can’t give up believing that you may yet escape, Lester. You must. I shall try to break away from the women before they leave the caverns, and wait for you. But if you do not come—I will tell myself to the last that somehow you must have escaped them and flown back to the earth. I shall always love you. June.

  Lester Allison leaped to his feet and shook the bars like a wild man.

  “Get me out of here, Smitt! I’ve got to get out!”

  Smitt’s hand shot through the bars and flattened over Allison’s mouth.

  “Quiet! You’ll have Kilhide on your neck!”

  “But June—”

  “I’ll go after her,” Smitt said, and for once he wasn’t grinning. “If Naf comes looking for me, tell him—nothing.”

  Allison stalked the prison cave hungrily. All the food June had sent him that day had been devoured, and the closely eaten rinds of the fruits had washed away with the gushing rivulet that pounded incessantly down a jagged wall of his cave and chased through a barred opening to deeper ravines beyond.

  He was scarcely conscious of his hunger. He was keenly conscious, however, that it had been hours and hours since

  Smitt set out to bring June back. And during those hours—what a terrific hullabaloo! The Dazzalox men had discovered what had happened, and they had forthwith exploded into an enraged brand of pursuers.

  A thousand or so pairs of hard yellow feet had thudded through the dusty caverns, leaving only the echoes of angry shouting and clouds of purple dust in their wake. What had followed when they finally overtook their rebellious runaways several miles up the canyons, Allison could only imagine.

  But evidently the males had administered some sort of persuasive argument, either by force or threats, for the women had at last begun to dribble back.

  “That ends that,” thought Allison, as he watched group after group straggle homeward. “Or is it only the beginning?”

  The more closely he observed, the more he wondered. The thing he particularly noticed was that the groups of females who trudged past within his hearing were not speaking to the males who followed them. The husbands might growl and shout threats and dictate demands, but the women only huddled closer together and said nothing. Were they refusing to squander their energies on a verbal quarrel, Allison wondered.

  “Violence ahead!” he muttered to himself.

  Whenever the women passed near the large violet flare, he could catch a certain glint of desperation in their yellow eyes. And suddenly he discerned in that blazing desperation a glint of hope for himself!

  If—if—if—if—

  If only these mad Dazzalox women would unleash their fury soon enough, he might escape the Floating Chop!

  And if Smitt was right about some of the slaves; if they were ripe to risk Kilhide’s guns; and if they could storm the upper secret chambers of Kilhide’s lab, where the controls to the robot ship were thought to be hidden—

  If—But these were runaway dreams, with less chance to succeed than the runaway Dazzalox women. Allison’s dizzy thoughts boiled down to one single, immediate, vital if. If Smitt didn’t come back soon with the news that June O’Neil was safe, Allison would go crazy.

  June came to him hours later, tired and dirty but still beautiful. Allison kissed her passionately through the bars of his prison, and she smiled while he brushed the rock dust from her cheek and her shoulder.

  “Thanks—thanks more than I can tell,” said Allison to Smitt, who stood by, grinning. Then Smitt was off on business of his own, and Allison and the girl were sitting side by side with only the black vertical bars between them.

  Food and drink passed through the bars. June made believe they were dining in luxury; and as her dark eyes flashed smiles at him and her hair fell against his shoulder, the luxury became genuine for Allison.

  “You must go get some rest,” she said, after he had listened to her story of the women’s ill-fated venture. “I’ll be safe for a time, surely. The Dazzalox will probably turn in for one of their three-day sleeps after all this turmoil.”

  The girl’s smile quickly vanished. “No, there are other plans.” She spoke with tense restraint. “Desperate plans. I—I can’t—I mustn’t talk of them.”

  She was pale, and Allison felt the blood leave his own face.

  “Tell me.”

  June shook her head. “All the way back I heard them talking. The men boasted, and the women whispered.” She hesitated. “I didn’t hear all the details. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t.” She choked. “Then men were talking about—”

  “A circus in the big arena?”

  The girl nodded. Allison felt the cold surge through his spine. So at last the Floating Chop was at hand!

  “They’ve got to have an orgy of cruelty at once,” said June. “It’s their savage way of forgetting the slap the women have just given them. As soon as they had turned the migration back, they began to clamor for a celebration—and the first thing they thought of was Jo-jo-kak—and you.”

  “And the Dazzalox women?” Allison asked. “What do they have up their sleeves?”

  “Wholesale murder,” June answered. “How soon?” Those eager ifs were jumping through Allison’s mind again. “How soon?”

  June gave him a quick frightened look. “Almost too soon,” she said. “Perhaps as soon as they can pick up enough knives—as soon as the signal comes. Then they’ll all strike at once.”

  “Don’t tremble so,” said Allison softly. “There’s still a chance for us. I’ve got a scheme—”

  A shrill brassy gong sounded from somewhere down the torch-lit street.
It clanged out three inharmonious notes in rapid succession. Then it came again, and again. Ominous triple clangs.

  At once Dazzalox men and women hurried down the distant stairways. Dazzalox potentates led their elaborately adorned female slaves down the streets. Two-stripers and Mercurian natives paraded together in hastily arranged formations—t o w a r d the Grand March.

  Friendly slaves slipped past Allison’s prison to give him a sign of farewell or a word of tasteless hope. Hope that snatched at straws.

  “Your strategy?” June asked for the third time. She too, was snatching for straws in these last minutes. She knew that no condemned creature had ever lived through the Floating Chop.

  A slender Dazzalox in a gaudy green athletic suit bounded past, swinging a gleaming black ax. A crowd chased after him, cheering him. Some of them stopped to hoot at Allison for a moment. They raced on toward the stadium.

  “Your strategy?” June repeated in a tight voice. Her lips trembled.

  “I’m going to fight for time,” Allison answered. “If the women are on the verge of a slaughter that nothing can stop—well, I may as well take advantage of it. Probably they plan to spring their knives as soon as the men are intent upon my execution ceremony.”

  “Yes.” June was staring off into the gloomy distance.

  “Then if I can only stave off death until the women strike,” there was a maniacal hope in Allison’s eyes, “then my party will be forgotten—at least, there’s a speck of a chance. If I can work that break, I’ll bolt for the narrow stairway at the lower end of the stadium. You know—to the left of the striped door.”

  “Stairway,” the girl echoed dazedly.

  “So that’s my strategy—to hold on to dear life till the women give their signal and hell breaks loose.”

  A group of armed Dazzalox officers rounded a corner and came toward the prison.

  “If I only knew what signal the women will wait for,” came Allison’s final whisper. And then he kissed the girl. The officers opened the barred door and led him away.

  “ ‘Signal’ !” June moaned and she sank to the floor in a paroxysm of sobbing. She had not had the heart to tell him that the signal the Dazzalox women had agreed upon was the death blow at the Ancient Rite of the Floating Chop.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Floating Chop

  The chains on Lester Allison’s wrists led him back and forth before the stadium crowd. He was royally hooted. All the Dazzalox words for “killer” and “criminal” and “monster” were hurled at him. He had learned the Dazzalox tongue only to be mocked by it.

  The four uniformed Dazzalox who marched him around kept the two long chains stretched tight so that they themselves were never close to him. They were not only playing safe, keeping out of his reach; they were shunning him.

  “Let them delay all they want with their damned preliminaries,” Allison thought to himself. He clung to his one false hope tenaciously.

  Such a sinking feeling assailed him as he had never known before. As if death were already leading him by the hand. As if he had already departed from everyone in the world.

  Even the one-stripers and two-stripers he glimpsed here and there among the assemblage of glittering Dazzalox were completely apart from him now. Their bondage was nothing compared to his. But their fates would come in time—and what would they be? Allison wondered. The chain whipped and jerked at his left wrist, a signal to turn back.

  His blood chilled each time they led him past the pool in the center of the arena. A circular section of the flooring had been removed from over the hidden river. That circular pool was to be the scene of his execution.

  Allison’s eyes followed the three floating discs, each ten or twelve feet across and apparently made of tightly compressed faggots from some subterranean timber or root, that circulated within the pool. They were like three huge doughnuts in a kettle of grease, except that the grease was green water and the doughnuts were like round meat-cutters’ tables, hacked and scarred from ceremonies immemorial. The chains led Allison on.

  Glancing upward, he saw that there were a number of female slaves here and there in the crowd. Some of them were in gold and blue slave costumes, others still wore their American clothes; but all were richly adorned with bold Dazzalox jewelry and medals and trinkets. They sat near wealthy potentates. Probably they were too baffled, Allison thought, to know what was going on.

  And yet it was their innocent presence that was figuratively to bring the universe crashing down upon the Dazzalox race. At this very moment, how silently the Dazzalox women sat at the sides of their unsuspecting males, like charges of electric death awaiting the flip of a switch.

  Back toward the pool the chains pulled Allison.

  Now his eyes widened in horror as he counted off three Dazzalox, lithe and well muscled. Each of them wielded a black metal double-edged ax, and all three were now enthusiastically engaged in warming up.

  They pranced around the open arena in their athletic uniforms, glittering with polished medallions. Attendants tossed fruits in the air for them, which they deftly sliced with their flying axes. Up in one piece, down in eight—and the crowds hailed the feat with lusty cheers.

  At last Allison was released into the circular pen—a fence of vertical iron bars that enclosed the pool. His wrists were free again, his mantle was removed. He wore only his slave trunks. Bars clanged after him.

  So this was the arena for his execution! Without hesitation, Allison plunged into the pool.

  A dozen easy strokes took him across and he climbed up on the narrow walk that bordered the pool. The walk, like the ten-inch discs in the water, was chipped and hacked. Allison sat with his back against the bars of the fence and let his feet rest in the cool water. His arms involuntarily jerked and trembled.

  “Stall for time,” he kept saying to himself in a voiceless whisper. “Just keep stalling for time.”

  One of the floating discs brushed past his feet. He kicked at it, then leaped onto it. It was as buoyant as cork. He crossed to the other two discs—the flow of the river through the pool kept them in constant circulation—and jumped back to the narrow walk.

  Now, amid a loud ovation, the three muscular choppers entered the pen and the gate was fastened behind them. They stood together ceremoniously, with their long-handled axes uplifted, while an official on the outside made a presentation speech.

  The crowd listened breathlessly. Between the announcer’s sentences Allison could hear the bubbling of the river as it seeped along under the stadium floor, into the eddying pool, and out again through its underfloor passage. Perhaps—

  No, the very words of the announcer extinguished a sporadic hope that flashed through Allison’s mind—the hope of an underfloor escape. In substance the announcer said:

  “. . . and he has been condemned to die by the Floating Chop. There is no escape from the Floating Chop. The surrounding fence is made of strong bars with spears at the top. Beneath the water there are walls of metal bars and of stone which narrow to a point. The culprit must either meet his death by the ax—or drown.

  “The choppers have a sporting chance to kill him. If they succeed before drowning overtakes him, they shall win the Ancient Award of the Floating Chop. If they fail, all three will lose their titles of Floating Choppers. A salute to their success!”

  The choppers, standing in a line across the pool from Allison, swung their axes in circles and called out some unintelligible response in unison. They came to attention again while the announcer finished.

  “Remember that the rules cannot be violated,” he said, in effect. “The culprit’s members must be severed in a precise order: first, the two feet, then the two hands, finally the head. You are now ready. Begin!”

  The subterranean canyons rocked with yelping cheers of the male Dazzalox.

  Eagerly the three choppers tightened their grips on their axes. The one dressed in green started around the circular walk in one direction, the orange axman took the other. The yellow
one stood where he was. Allison dived for the center of the pool.

  He came up to see a yellow-clad form floating toward him on a disc. He caught his breath and looked for an open corner. There wasn’t any such thing. Not as long as the two choppers were running around on the narrow circular walk.

  Allison swam for a disc, climbed up onto it. The advantage of Mercury’s slightly lighter gravity kept surprising him as he accustomed himself to the water. But other less pleasant surprises soon flooded in upon him too swiftly for him to collect his thoughts—surprises in the form of leaping choppers and spinning axes.

  He sprang backward from the disc barely in time to escape the black streak that whizzed past his feet. He plunged for the center of the pool and stayed there, treading water, studying the vicious yellow eyes, trying to gauge where the next attack would come from.

  The yellow chopper floated near him on a disc. The axman’s double eyebrows were squinted menacingly toward the water, his wicked blade was poised. He was trying to sight Allison’s submerged feet. He floated past without doing any damage, and the crowd clamored for action.

  The green chopper was dancing about on the next disc, swinging the flat of his ax against the waves to slap water into Allison’s face in order both to enrage and confuse him.

  Suddenly the orange man plunged from the side, ax and all. He swam underwater, but the waves showed where he was coming. Allison surface-dived and cut well under him.

  Another dive sounded, and Allison looked up from a depth of several feet to see a chopper coming straight down toward him. With a swift twist Allison plunged deeper. He realized by now that the advantage of vision was with whoever was underneath, for all the light came from above the pool.

  But suddenly it dawned on him, as he scraped against a narrowing wall, that the cone itself was a treacherous trap. The deeper he went-, the easier it would be for three axmen to close in on him. He switched back, barely passing a third diver as he shot upward. A hard hand clutched at his ankle. He kicked out of it and bobbed up to the surface like a jumping fish. An instant later he was up on the ragged walk, panting furiously.