The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  On the island was the only vegetation within the crater; and there was enough of it to hide whatever else of interest there might be in that vicinity.

  One object, however, struck his curiosity. Perhaps it was the black tip of a spire or a tower; perhaps it was only the top of a dead tree trunk a few feet taller than the other trees.

  But his eyes were blurry from weariness; and his field glasses, like his gun and his map, had been removed from him before he had been set free.

  He gazed downward. His eyes rested idly on a dead hawk that lay on a projecting rock halfway down the crater wall.

  He couldn’t get Ilando out of his mind. Perhaps he would never know his friend’s fate. He tried to tell himself that the girl’s love might have had a grain of sincerity, otherwise Ilando couldn’t have been fool enough to—

  It was no use. Big black letters loomed before his dizzy eyes—letters that spelled COWARD and TRAITOR and DESERTER—black letters that were; formed out of black uniforms—uniforms that contained men—men with white faces—men that leaped and danced before the firing squad—leaped and danced in their black uniforms that made black letters that spelled DESERTER! And every man was Ilando Ken . . .

  Theban lapsed into troubled sleep.

  Once he was half awakened by a roar in the sky. But he was almost too deep in the stupor of fatigue to come to his senses.

  He forced his eyes open only to find himself lost in the darkness of night. A cool mountain breeze swept over him. He looked up into the black sky toward the roar that had disturbed him.

  He saw the rocket ship. It circled about as if to land. Where was the insignia—the White Comet? There was none. But that was not a White Comet ship; it was the wrong design. Why should he care what happened to it?

  Suddenly it swooped down. Its headlights and rocket fire were swallowed up in the island. Everything was still. He could sleep again. His senses turned off; he slept.

  He awoke with a start. The new punto’s light was dawning. It was hot on the back of his neck.

  He sprang up. His restored muscles responded instantly. His vibrant body thrilled with new life from his long rest.

  Then a surge of horror leaped through him. He had seen a space ship in the night! The purgiers were due to attack this spot sometime soon. How soon? What punto was this? Had he dreamed this ship?

  No, it couldn’t have been a dream. His memory of it was too vivid. The picture clung in his mind like a photograph. He remembered the very angle at which the counter motors had fired.

  Then he gave a relieved sigh—that memory reassured him. It had not been a White Comet ship! Fully awake now, he was sure of that fact. No, those long tilting blades of light from the counter motors were proof—it had been a Draz-Kang ship, stealing back to home base under the cover of darkness.

  His subconscious mind must have known that to let him sleep on. If it had been a White Comet ship—another load of purgiers—what mysterious fate might have struck them down?

  Theban’s flexed body hovered over the brink of the crater wall. Suddenly the dead hawk hanging on the bit of ledge fifty feet below him took on a new and terrifying significance.

  And so did that dead rabbit a little farther below! There was still another carcass beyond—the decaying skeleton of a mountain wolf.

  Somewhere between Theban and those gruesome relics of past life there must hover an invisible death.

  Where was it? What was it? Theban scrambled into his tattered boots and ran along the circling edge of the cliff tops.

  It came back to him now that throughout his long mountain hike he had scared up rabbits—tens of thousands of them. Now he saw literally hundreds of them lying dead and in all states of decay, lined along the bottom of the crater cliff. Yes, there must be a widespreading layer of some death-dealing force—perhaps a vast invisible wheel of death that fitted within the circular crater like a lid.

  He stopped, crouched. A Bronze-mountain buzzard swooped down toward the carcass of a rabbit. Would it reach its goal? Or would it foul up against some lurking poisonous gas? Or some invisible ray? Theban held his breath.

  The buzzard coasted down—all the way—to the foot of the crater wall two hundred feet below.

  It feasted; it winged upward—unharmed.

  Then down it sailed again toward the same carcass—

  Instantly, not fifty feet below Theban, the swooping buzzard went limp, plummeted to the ground, fell in a formless heap—dead!

  Theban recoiled. Instinctively he glanced at the sky. Some punto soon—how soon he did not know, for he had lost all track of time—a White Comet space ship would swoop down to explore this region—to search for the fate of an earlier expedition—perhaps to share it!

  But there was something inconsistent here, and that something pounded back and forth with the terror that beat through Theban’s brain.

  Sometimes the death was there, sometimes it was gone.

  Did it come and go like the tides? Did it coincide with the breathing of some impossible monster—or the rhythmic explosions of some unseen fountain of gas? Or did it whirl past like the light of a revolving beacon?

  A revolving beacon! Theban’s eyes shot across to the little verdant island three or four miles within the floor of blotched yellow soil. His gaze rested on the dot of black that reared like a giant head above the tree tops. That tower top, if such it was, appeared to be at about the same level, at which the buzzard had met the mysterious instantaneous death. Still, at that distance he could not judge; he was only conjecturing. He wished he had his field glasses.

  But there was no time for wishing. Theban went to work.

  He snared three live rabbits, brought them back to the crater’s edge, tied them to a bush.

  He gathered some long grass, wove a stout lithe rope.

  He tied a kicking rabbit to the end of the rope, let it down over the crater’s edge slowly. Fifty feet down it kicked its last.

  Again he fed out rope and the second rabbit descended over the overhanging ledge. This time death missed on the descent; but as he pulled the rabbit upward it went limp with death—at approximately the same level—some fifty feet below him.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered aloud. “Sometimes death strikes, sometimes it misses.”

  “It don’t miss for long,” a pleasant voice from behind him drawled.

  Theban Hyko’s grass rope slipped from his hands. He turned, faced a long lanky stranger dressed in the bright quaint garb of the Bronze mountain peasant. The stranger puffed at a long stemmed pipe; he studied Theban out of gentle deep-set eyes, he was evidently trying to make sense out of such a high-ranking White Comet uniform in such dusty tattered condition—being worn by an unshaven weatherbeaten man with an ugly bump on the side of his head.

  “I figured I’d find you dead,” the mountaineer drawled. “I seen you hike over the horizon yester-punto—I rang a bell for you as loud as I could for a deci or two, but you was too far away to hear. So—” the mountaineer glanced into the yellow-floored crater—“I figured I’d find you dead.”

  Theban nodded. “I was too exhausted to climb down those crags or maybe I would have been dead. But now I’m too curious to take a chance just yet. Do you understand this death business?”

  The mountaineer grunted. Obviously he didn’t. He smoked up three pipefuls explaining that there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it. He’d been studying it for many a season and all he could say was, keep away from it, the farther the better. But it all began, he said, when the Draz-Kang space ships first began to weave back and forth from that little mound of green out in the middle of what he called the death patch.

  “Now and again I’ve rounded up droves of rabbits,” the mountaineer monologued, “and chased them down over an incline. Sometimes the death bolt is a little bit slow to catch them and I’ll think it must be turned off. But directly it will sweep across—always clockwise, I’ve noticed—you can tell by the way it mows them down. It’s like a machine gun turning past them
.”

  Theban snapped his fingers with sudden inspiration. “You rounded up droves of rabbits?”

  “Hundreds of them—sometimes thousands.”

  “I could use a hundred or so rabbits,” Theban said with a sudden tinge of eagerness. “I’ve got a notion—Do you think you could round some up right away?”

  The mountaineer gave the weatherbeaten purgier a curious look. “Sure thing. Proud to be of service to an officer.”

  The mountaineer put his pipe in his pocket, gave an awkward but well-meant salute, and struck out.

  “You’ll find me a little farther down the line,” Theban yelled after him.

  The mountaineer turned back and shook a warning finger. “Look out for them crevices and valleys. You’ve got to keep well up. I had a herd of goats one time that got to grazing down a ravine and they—”

  “I’ll be careful. Don’t fail me on those rabbits.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The mountaineer ambled away.

  Theban skipped along the rugged crater’s edge, over the pock-marked bronze-colored rocks. His eye automatically measured the pits and crevices over which he leaped.

  He stopped abruptly.

  Here in the surface of a crag that overhung the crater’s vertical wall was a small natural pit of the sort he was looking for. It was deep enough that his long arm could reach to the bottom of it; deep enough and straight enough, he judged, that it would serve as a prison for his promised supply of rabbits. From this point, then, he would make his tests.

  Next, Theban bounded toward the nearest grassy valley; but with calculated caution he stayed to the upper edges. He snapped off the long tough stalks of grass, wove strands of rope.

  His hands worked swiftly. His eyes continually sought the skies in the hope of seeing nothing. Rather, his vision seemed to push at the skies, to press back that ship that he feared would soon swoop down out of the spaceways.

  From time to time he glanced at his watch—always with a twinge of disappointment, for it no longer registered the correct punto.

  It was a splendid instrument, that silver encased timepiece, as fine a piece of scientific equipment as could be made. From the day the head purgier had presented it to him (in recognition of personal valor) the watch had never been re-set; nor had it ever missed a tick of time. It had been accurate to the very milli-millipunto.

  But during his recent unconsciousness it had run down. He had set it by guess; his guess had been based on the only evidence of passed time that he had: the fact that the ugly gash which Vida had struck in the side of his head had knitted and was healing.

  However, he still had his watch, and that was something. It was the only piece of scientific equipment that he did have. Otherwise he was dependent upon the materials that Nature afforded, together with his own ingenuity.

  Theban returned to the crag with a supply of ropes.

  He lay on the rock and looked down over the edge—down almost two hundred feet. If he were only already down there—!

  Automatically his eye traversed the wide floor of yellow soil. Dozens of half-formed plans banged through his mind. He felt certain that if he could only once drop safely through the mysterious screen of death, he could skip a few miles across that broad yellow floor and find entrance to the hidden underground headquarters of the Draz-Kangs.

  And if he could gain entrance, perhaps he could find Ilando. Perhaps Ilando would yet come to his senses—A shadow floated across the crag. Theban came up with a start. It was only a cloud. His eyes searched the skies; he saw no ship.

  Gradually the clouds spread over skies; it was futile to keep watch any longer. Still, every distant mutter of thunder caused Theban’s fingers to go tense against the crags for an instant. Then the chills would dissipate themselves through his nerves, and he would breathe easier.

  If he were only down two hundred feet below, perhaps he could write some kind of warning that could be read from the skies. He now noticed that the large stones which he had pushed over the cliff farther up the line were gradually sinking into the yellow soil. That floor of yellow soil, then, was simply a tough spongy swamp.

  Gradually, as the stones sank, the depressions they formed filled with inky black liquid.

  From back of Theban came footsteps and a hearty voice.

  “Here’s a few to start on,” the mountaineer grinned. He had twenty-five or thirty of the kicking little beasts tied to a rope and slung over his back. “I’ve got plenty more waiting in a trap.”

  “Good work,” Theban commented. “Just drop them in the supply room.” He motioned to the small pit.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” said the mountaineer with ill-suppressed curiosity.

  “I’m going to make some tests. I want to find out when they die and when they don’t.”

  “You want ’em to kick?”

  “The more the better, so I can tell precisely when they die.”

  “Here,” said the mountaineer, producing some wire from his pocket. “If you’ll use this and take a stitch through the slack hide on the tops of their backs, they’ll kick like they was frying.”

  The mountaineer went back after more rabbits. Theban broke the wire into short segments, tightened his teeth at the prospect of inflicting suffering upon innocent animals, reached for a rabbit, hooked it to the end of a rope, let it down.

  The rabbit kicked all the way down through the danger level; but on the way up it went limp with death.

  Theban repeated the experiment time after time. Sometimes it was death. Sometimes life. Death. Death. Again, death. Then life.

  He sped up the experiment by hooking four rabbits on the rope, strung out at intervals of four or five feet. He let them down rapidly.

  Death. Death. Death. Life! Rabbit number four kept kicking.

  He drew the rope up rapidly. Number four was still alive!

  Down went the rope. Number four went limp.

  Soon Theban knew at exactly what elevation death struck—ij it struck at once on the way down. He continued the elevation tests, checking his results with trials from other points along the crater’s edge. He sent the mountaineer to a point five miles farther around the circumference to make tests from there. The conclusion was always the same.

  “It’s like I told you,” the mountaineer said on returning, “You can’t get past it. The whole crater’s full of it.”

  “But it isn’t on the crater floor,” said Theban. “We’ve let plenty of live rabbits get through, and they were still kicking until they struck the floor. And some that weren’t killed from the fall went crippling away.”

  “That’s why I say there’s no sense to it.”

  “But there is,” Theban insisted. “We’re trimming it down to something that makes sense. We’ve got the elevation. We know there’s a span of about forty feet that the death passes through. It’s invariably on that level. The hundred feet below are always safe. And so are the fifty or sixty feet above.”

  The mountaineer nodded slowly. “That death level is like a gigantic wheel,” Theban continued. “It’s a wheel made out of spokes that are invisible shafts of death.”

  Again the mountaineer nodded. This was as he had visualized the thing. “The spokes keep turning like hands of a clock—”

  “Only much faster—”

  “Like a machine-gun spraying across a target. Only we don’t hear any bullets—”

  “Or see any fire. The only thing we see—” Theban straightened up to his full height and peered at the distant clump of verdure in the center of the soil-filled crater, “is that little black nob peeking out over the tops of the trees.”

  “That’s the hub of the wheel?”

  “It must be.”

  Theban got down on his knees and sketched a diagram in the bronze rock-dust. He drew a circle. That was the crater. He heaped some dirt in the center of it. That was the islandlike formation. He pierced a wire down into the heap and drew it out. That was the Draz-Kang entrance to their un
derground nest, big enough for their space ships to enter.

  Then Theban planted a tiny twig near the make-believe entrance. That was the tower from which the invisible rays of death shot forth like beacons.

  “Looks to me like you’ve got it all doped out,” the mountaineer commented.

  “I’ll need more rabbits,” said Theban. “We still don’t know the most important thing.”

  The mountaineer blinked curiously. Theban drew several spokes from the twig out to the center of the ring. He left one sizeable gap.

  “A couple spokes missing?” the mountaineer asked.

  “Maybe three or four,” said Theban. “That’s what we’ve got to find out.”

  “But what makes you think—”

  “Once I held a rabbit in the death band for more than twenty centi-milli-puntos. I had my watch against my ear and I counted off twenty-three ticks before the rabbit suddenly went dead.” The mountaineer scratched his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “They’ve left a gate,” said Theban. “The death spokes are close enough together that no space ship or plane or person is likely to get through. But they’ve left a few spokes out, and they’ve evidently got the system timed so that they can cruise back and forth without danger.”

  A faint light of understanding came into the mountaineer’s eyes. He lit his pipe and puffed silently, still studying the diagram.

  “I’ll need a lot more rabbits,” Theban repeated. “I’ve got to find out exactly when and how often that invisible gate swings by before I go down.”

  The pipe dropped from the mountaineer’s teeth. “Before you what?”

  “Before I climb down into the crater.”

  The mountaineer’s fingers spread nervously. “You figure you know enough about this thing to whip it?”

  “I’m soon going to, if you’ll get me some more rabbits.”

  The mountaineer’s gaunt hands clutched Theban by the shoulders. “Don’t do it. I’ve seen too many things die—”

  “I’ll be perfectly safe, as soon as I get this thing timed.”

  “After all the rabbits you’ve seen go dead—”