The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  He heard the radio-telephone communication with the S-44, whose excursion would follow close on the heels of the S-37.

  “Strike anywhere,” the S-37 officials advised the other ship. “The American continent is big. Besides, we’re six hours ahead of you. We’ll be out of your way.”

  S-44 inquired where the S-37 would strike.

  “We’ll lay a strip along the Atlantic seaboard,” the S-37 replied.

  There was the daylight factor to be considered, and it was now morning along the Eastern coast. The S-44, following through six hours later, could cut a swath through the interior.

  “We’ll be a little slow getting back to Venus,” said the S-37, “because we’ve got the ambassador from Mercury aboard. But we’ll bring him to time, and then Sasho may as well give the whole fleet the go-ahead signal.”

  If these trial flights were as successful as expected, there would be nothing to stand in the way of Sasho’s complete devastating revenge upon the earth—unless there should be dangerous planetary neighbors, such as the militant millions of Mercury, who couldn’t be brought into line. “But you know Sasho!” an officer chuckled grimly. “He never leaves anything to chance!”

  The eager excited radio-telephone conversation ended abruptly. The time had come for action. A slight cushioning of the ship’s flight forewarned the entrance into the thin edges of the earth’s atmosphere.

  Snap! Zmmmmmmmm!

  Allison knew that one. It was the motors of the tempo-system that combatted friction heat as the ship plunged from the void into air.

  Snap! The usual heavy roar of the rocket motors went silent. Allison wasn’t sure why, but for some reason the ship was to coast through a tangent to the earth’s surface with no rockets firing.

  They plunged on purely from momentum. The curve of the earth flattened out into a horizon. Distant cities rolled into view.

  Snap! That one had Allison guessing. The pilot’s hand drew back from the blue-knobbed lever, his eyes swinging to the mirror that looked through the rear of the ship. Every face, turned toward the rear of the ship, was tense with excitement.

  Then Allison saw. Some unseen exhaust under the tail of the ship shot a stream of thin blue smoke—or was it gas?—down at the earth. Dangerous-looking stuff it was, almost transparent in the sunlight. It thickened as it sifted downward. The sight of it seemed to give everyone a thrill.

  On and on it poured, flowing back in an endless stream, a billion times more luminous than the trail of a sky-writing airplane. It strung out into a hundred-mile rope of seething blue cloud, lost over the rear horizon.

  Now the S-37 skimmed close to the ground, coasting against the stubborn forces of gravity and air resistance. Those manufacturing towns passing beneath were scarcely a quarter of a mile down.

  The ship’s momentum was almost spent. Allison flinched. At this rate they would crash into the approaching mountain range. Then—

  Snap! Brrrwowrmmmmmm!

  The rocket motors zoomed, the very earth leaped back. Out of its downward trajectory the ship shot. Cities, rivers and mountain range blurred into the distance. But the long cloud of gas—

  The blaze of the explosion filled the whole rear vista. The onlookers threw their hands in front of their eyes. The flare pierced Allison’s eyes like white-hot needles. It was as if the sun had splashed fire over the surface of the earth!

  “Perfect!” an officer shouted.

  Yes, the rocket fire had ignited the tail of the gas cloud! To Allison’s horror, the explosion spread in a great fan-shaped inferno. The rocket ship itself was perfectly safe, of course, having leaped out of danger at the initial rocket explosion.

  The pilot swerved the ship through a swift arc so that the passengers could look back and catch sight of the vast river of fire. It flooded over the horizon like a flying comet, eating the blue cloud as it went.

  “Perfect! Perfect!” everyone shouted, and the ship was in an uproar of jubilation.

  “How does the Honorable Allie like that!” the officers taunted.

  As the ship circled back, the long line of black smoke and yellow blaze expanded into a grim picture. At a safe distance, the S-37 wove to and fro to review the extent of the artificial cataclysm. Sickening realization came upon Allison. Those heavier spots where smoke and blaze were the thickest were cities—homes and factories and automobiles and human beings, going up in flames!

  “Another feather in Sasho’s hat!” one of the youngesters cried. That was typical of the outlaws’ hilarious spirit of achievement. With their inbred love of cruelty, the servants of Sasho boasted in glowing terms of wider applications of this method of attack. They visualized the glorious Sasho revenge that was near at hand. When Sasho loosed his whole fleet upon the earth in attacks like these, no known force could stop them.

  Allison, listening to these hideous forecasts, knew that they were no exaggeration. The earth was helpless. Mars, according to what he had learned, had been talked into a defenseless position. And certainly Mercury, with a population of ten Earth folk, could offer no threat.

  And yet it was the possibility of resistance from the imagined millions of Mercury that remained a thorn in Sasho’s flesh.

  The officers on the S-37 grew more confident every minute that they were gaining ground with Allison. The alliance was in the bag, they told each other. And in boastful tones within Allison’s hearing, they considered what a simple matter it would be for their ships to spin down to Mercury’s underground world, fill the caverns with explosive gas, and touch off a rocket. Very simple! One quick blast and the militant denizens of Mercury would cease to worry anybody!

  The alliance was in the bag, all right. But just to make sure, the Honorable Allie must see more.

  Moreover, the servants of Sasho had well-whetted appetites to view their achievements in detail.

  The space ship eased down toward a burning city. Thin streams of people who had miraculously escaped death from the initial explosions raced in all directions, frantic to save themselves or others from spreading flames and collapsing walls.

  The pilot of the S-37 sought out a perfect landing place, hidden from the turmoil—a long valley-like rock quarry at the city’s edge. It was cluttered with stones and hoists and narrow-gauge tracks, but it was satisfactorily secluded. Sasho’s crusaders preferred not to be seen.

  “Keep your eyes wide open, Honorable Allie!”

  Allison didn’t need the command. His sharp eyes missed nothing. He steeled himself to the prospect of going forth to view the horrible shambles.

  “Leave the airlocks open as long as smoke doesn’t blow this way,” an officer barked to the three or four men who were to stand guard.

  Already the oxygen pumps were at work to bring the supply back to capacity. Unmasked and unencumbered by space suit units, the party marched forth.

  The roar and crackle of flames, the stench of burning buildings and bodies leaped out to meet them. The invaders picked their paths warily.

  They were undaunted by the screaming and screeching. Rather they were elated over it. This excitement was the emotion they lived for, and they drank it in to the full.

  “Look at those dead bodies, Allie!

  Nicely blackened, don’t you think?”

  Involuntarily Allison jerked back in revulsion. The two guards to whom he was handcuffed allowed him to stop. Here was what they wanted.

  In front of Allison was a small boy, sobbing his heart out. He had just crept out from under his overturned tin wagon. Miraculously it had spared him from death.

  The boy was crying for his mother. Obviously she was the woman lying in front of him, clutching the handle of the wagon. But he didn’t recognize her. And little wonder, for she was simply a mass of blackened, scorched flesh, her hair and eyebrows and clothes completely burned away.

  The boy’s eyes turned to a scrawny dying little animal that had been a kitten. He looked at it in horrified bewilderment. Its fur was gone, it was mewing pitifully. He couldn’t under
stand what or why—

  “Move back!” Allison’s guards jerked at his wrists. The party edged back to safety. A wall was about to give way—

  “But the boy!” Allison cried, tears of rage in his eyes.

  The Sasho party laughed like demons out of hell.

  “The boy!” an officer jeered. “He’s an Earth boy, ain’t he?”

  The burning wall bulged and crashed, the boy and his kitten were buried alive under the fiery heap.

  For the next five hours and more the party plodded among the fast-growing ruins, feeding emotionally upon this holocaust, its horror forever graven upon Allison’s mind. Allison saw it all, but the picture that sank into his brain most deeply was the satanic gleam of the perpetrators’ greenish faces, lighted by the leaping mountains of red flame. Then the fates blew a mischievous breath that descended upon every member of the party. It happened as the group wended its way back toward the deserted quarry that held their space ship.

  Across the sky it came. They did not hear it. Before the sound could reach them, the thing would strike death.

  To their eyes, it was simply a slim black streak shooting in a horizontal line a half mile or so above their heads. In its wake was a widening tail of blue cloud that spread and boiled downward.

  “The S-44! It was to follow us in six hours. God, we’ve stayed here too long!”

  “Run for the ship!”

  “We can’t make it!”

  The swiftest runner in the world couldn’t have escaped.

  CHAPTER VI

  Lonely Vigil

  The gloom that had descended into the rocky-red caverns of Mercury might have hung on endlessly, had it not been for June O’Neil’s resilience. She came back at the tragic facts with almost superhuman courage.

  They made her the leader. That was Smitt’s and Mary’s strategy. The responsibility was a stimulant, and June O’Neil assumed it with such a zeal that her eight followers would have been ashamed to admit their fears.

  The first point upon which June insisted was that the postponed weddings must go through at once. No matter if it couldn’t be a five-couple wedding. Her loss must not stand in the way of their personal happiness.

  Not long after she had administered the marriage vows, June called the four young couples together.

  “Our robot ship is dead,” she said, her eyes turned toward the space ship runway. “But Lester isn’t dead. I can’t believe that they have killed him. They could have killed him here if they had wanted to.”

  All this had been talked over many times before. The conclusion had always been the same; Allison was a captive in some capital on Venus; but for what purpose, no one could say. Many hours equivalent to several Earth days had passed, but no hints of further attacks from the Venusian pirates—if pirates they were—had come.

  June looked at her circle of comrades with steady eyes. “Can we build a ship that will get to Venus?”

  The eyes turned toward the young boyish-faced Laughlin, who responded by drawing a bundle of diagrams from his pocket. The other men looked on proudly. Reams and reams of paper had been sketched upon during these recent days. June O’Neil’s vision had been anticipated.

  They all worked. The automatic Mercurian machines were cunning, the metals were marvelously responsive. Laughlin, in charge of the construction, was kept rushed to supply everyone with jobs they could do.

  But Laughlin had a notion up his sleeve: It would be almost as easy to turn out every part in duplicate. Two space boats could be made almost as easily as one. The work went forward.

  June stayed with the work almost beyond her strength. When it was time to rest and the others slept, she could not sleep. She would slip away from the laboratory living quarters, carrying her little three-stringed zither that Allison had once made for her, to play simple little tunes that brought her solace.

  Always at such times she would watch the space ship runway, hoping—waiting—praying—

  Out of the electrically lighted laboratories and into the torchlighted runways, two red metal hulls were rolled one day that looked like massive streamlined bullets.

  One of the ships was done! It was ready for a tryout. The other was almost completed. Their makers breathed with pride.

  Those reams of designs had done something startling. Not so large as the robot ship, much smaller than the silvery-nosed pirate ship from Venus, these two boats were built for speed and solidity.

  Laughlin believed that they were unlike any models ever seen before. The fine metals in their solid noses, together with their high speed, should provide them with a punch and a resistance to bullets that was almost beyond calculation.

  An Earth-made tungsten pile-driver, Laughlin said, would have been cotton in comparison.

  Smitt gave the two ships the name of battering rams. Turn him loose with one of these boats, he said, was all he’d ask. He’d batter those pirates into pancake batter.

  One mishap occurred on the trial flight of the first ship; it happened before the ship got out of the runway. It was gliding along the pathway when Smitt inadvertently snapped on the rocket motor.

  Instantly he snapped it off—but in that moment the boat leaped, struck into the rocky wall obliquely, gouged out a thirty-foot cavern of living stone, and came to a stop with its nose buried. Smitt stepped forth with one eye black and the other gleaming with enthusiasm. If that wall had only been pirates!

  They excavated carefully, and the powerful hull emerged undented! A battering ram it was, indeed![2] Its makers were confident that whatever adventures the rescue of Allison might entail their two boats would prove sky-worthy.

  The test flights of both battering rams were successful, the tryouts being made within the space of four or five hours. Each of the men tried his hand at piloting. The radio-telephones were found satisfactory for keeping the two ships in touch during flight.

  Last-minute preparations were made. As June O’Neil had insisted, all of them should go. They would lock the laboratories and camouflage the entrances, so that if there should be visitors they would find nothing.

  June’s plan was adopted only after much discussion. It would be a dangerous adventure at best, and the men felt that their brides might be safer to stay. Then they recalled the silvery-nosed S-20 and the arrogant, orange-sashed Venusian crew, and thought otherwise. Whatever the cost, they must hold their remaining group together. Even if they should lose their foothold in Mercury to chance invaders . . .

  But June O’Neil did not decide for herself as easily as for the others. Secretly she planned to stay—by herself!

  In the final hours of sleep before the momentous take-off, June acted upon her rash decision. She left this note:

  Lester might come while you are gone. I believe he would want me to stay here to keep watch over our stronghold. That is what I have decided to do. It is my choice to stay alone, and my wish that the rest of you go as you have planned to do.

  When you read this note, you may want to find me, hoping to persuade me to change my mind. You mustn’t. I shall hide where you can’t find me, so please don’t delay. I know that you will come back. I pray that you may bring Lester.

  —June.

  June stole forth, carrying with her the little zither Lester Allison had made for her. In the lonely hours to come, music would be a solace. She departed from the well-beaten paths, she left the torchlights and murmuring rivulets and adventured back into the endless depths, where the caverns were dark and silent.

  The silence and the darkness were a little terrifying. She suddenly felt the loss of Lester Allison more than ever before. She listened for the distant roar of the space boats taking off. But she could hear nothing—nothing but the little hollow echoes of her own breathing or the slight touch of her arm against the strings of her zither.

  Suppose something dreadful befell her companions! Suppose they should never come back!

  All at once the awfulness of being left here alone indefinitely bore down upon the girl. How many stor
ies she had heard of persons going insane from the unbearable lonesomeness, the horror of being trapped in empty caverns! Suppose Lester should not come back for years. Suppose—

  Never before had June listened to inner voices or taken stock in hunches. With a strong flare for common sense, she discredited such things as silly superstitions. But now—

  “Today I’m riding toward Death, June. I’m riding toward flames of Death . . .”

  Again and again it came—Lester’s words, his voice. No, it was all in her mind! It was Fear. Fear was melting her strong resolve. Fear!

  She clambered over the dark rocks swiftly. Dim glints of light were in the distance. She would go back. She would still catch them before they took off. She must hurry. If she had only brought a torch—

  Clack! Zinnng! The zither slipped from her hands. An instant’s hesitation—one of those instants which can turn the fates of lives—

  She groped to pick it up, lost her footing. Zither and girl fell together into an unseen pitfall that might have been made to order for a medieval dungeon. But June O’Neil had no thought of that. She was unconscious.

  CHAPTER VII

  Conqueror’s Boast

  Smitt and Mary stood at the entrances of one of the battering rams, reading June O’Neil’s note for the third time. If it had been a bomb, it would have shocked no more.

  As for the others, Redman and his wife came, bristling with enthusiasm for the take-off; they stopped, read the note, stood speechless. Then from the other ship came the other two couples, Laughlin and his wife, and Bob and Betty Wakefield.

  The ships did not start on schedule. Smitt and Mary invented excuses for an hour’s delay. No one needed to comment on June’s rash action. All of them knew that her heartbreak was too much for one person to endure. Still, it seemed dreadful to leave her.

  But everyone of them respected June O’Neil. And if this was the way she wanted it, then they would comply. A last lingering look down the avenues of torches was fruitless. Motors had been roaring gently for several minutes. If June O’Neil had thought better of her decision, she surely would have appeared before this.