The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  And what would he tell them then?

  Would he dare tell the truth?[2]

  Already Fangler was disturbed over what little he had heard of Vincent’s talk. But if Vincent should reveal that, according to his advanced knowledge, the Cro-Magnon race had an unseen tragedy ahead of it—what would Fangler and his fellow patriarchs say? They would probably tear up the earth.

  “Why are you so troubled?” Hunzk would ask.

  “I’m not troubled,” Vincent would answer. “Or if I am, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  And that was, in Vincent’s mind, the greatest trouble of all. If the scientists of the twentieth century were correct—if most of the Cro-Magnon race somehow lost out, leaving only a few minor traces of what had once been the supreme race of Europe—then, obviously, the tragedy did happen. Whatever the mysterious factor was that cleaned house across these valleys, the twentieth century fact that it did happen argued that it was futile for Vincent or anyone else to try to do anything about it here and now.

  But here again, thought Vincent, was that new allegiance of his cropping out. The very desire on his part to do something for these people was proof of his wish to cast his lot with them.

  He had almost ceased to keep regular watch for the time chain, as he had previously done.

  But one night the time chain came down, and Hunzk, who had been advised many times to keep on the lookout for it, was coming home from a hunt in time to see it.

  Hunzk raced into the cave, crying the news at the top of his big bellowing voice.

  “Ponpo! Ponpo! The time stars have come down! Quick! They’re out there on the ground by the river!”

  Vincent shook out of his heavy sleep like something explosive. He leaped down out of his sleeping shelf in the wall, started to tear out of the cave.

  He dodged back to grab his saxophone case, then darted out through the entrance and raced down the path to the river.

  Before he had gone far he cut his pace. The time chain was there, all right, but it was already several feet above the ground and it was floating upward with the slow, even speed of a perfectly controlled machine. He was almost too late.

  He gazed at it in awe. It had been a full half year since he had seen it, and its first appearance was still a dizzying unreality in his mind.

  But here it was again—just as before, except that as it shone against the black sky its fading rays seemed to extend deep into a vast unfathomable distance.

  Here was his chance! Now he could return to 1941. He could return to Aunt Minnie—oh, oh, that library fine would be terrific now! and he could return Maestro Galancho’s Symphony of Time. He could . . .

  He stepped toward the time chain and stretched out his hand. Then he halted, his fingers tantalizingly inches from their goal. Did he really want to go back? There flashed into his mind, a bit vexingly, the impish face of little Penzi. He grew thoughtful. There was a lot to this world—and besides the time chain would come back again. He didn’t want to go just yet . . .

  Abruptly he found his hesitation had decided for him. Now the time chain was several yards over his head. He couldn’t reach it. He was too late—if he wanted to return!

  Vincent breathed heavily, watching and wondering long after its little pearls of light had been swallowed up in a ceiling of cloud.

  “I’m sorry, Ponpo,” Hunzk breathed almost reverently at Vincent’s ear. “I know you wanted to go. You should have gone.”

  “It’ll come back,” Vincent replied abstractly, still looking into the skies, “and the next time I’ll be ready.”

  CHAPTER V

  Shades of Xandibaum

  Vincent Harrison kept his pledge to build a shelter for himself by the river bank. He moved out of the Fangler cave and resumed life in the makeshift camp that he had built with his own hands.

  It was the first time in his life that he had ever actually been on his own resources. But he felt not the slightest desperation on that score, for he had learned a lot about hunting; moreover, Hunzk and other members of the Fangler family were only too anxious to share their bounties with him.

  Once out of range of Fangler’s ugly thrusts, Vincent again revived an old debate with himself. Did he actually wish to leave this life in favor of a return to the twentieth century?

  If he were an intruder and a thorn in

  Fangler’s flesh—yes.

  But if he were an independent man, providing for himself, becoming an authority on the planting of seeds and the building of shelters and tools—maybe no.

  There was certainly something more tangible about living in the Cro-Magnon age. Your enemies were things you could see and feel—like cold and hunger and snarling wolves and creeping snakes and hostile men.

  Of course there were hostile men in the twentieth century, too. But here among the Cro-Magnon you knew who was hostile and who wasn’t. And your enemies weren’t disguised into forms you couldn’t fight back at. None of your troubles here were so elusive as unjust taxes or technological unemployment or political privilege or class prejudice. No, they were chiefly troubles that you could make some impression upon with a stone ax or a bow and arrow or a reasonable amount of hard work.

  And so, although Vincent had moved down to the river bank to be ready for the time chain if it should come back again some day, still he was not altogether certain what he would do about it when the time came.

  The more he thought about that string of lights, the more he yearned to know whether a definite control of the thing might be developed.

  “Probably that was what Xandibaum wondered too,” he once told Hunzk, recounting his original knowledge of the scientist. Hunzk listened intently, especially when Vincent related having struck a series of the lights and found himself temporarily sinking in midocean.

  Vincent reminisced, “I’ll never have a narrower escape than that as long as I live. If I hadn’t touched those lights back to red, I’d have gone down for good.”

  “Probably that is what happened to your scientist, Sandi—”

  “Xandibaum. Yes, I think you’re right. He was no doubt trying to learn to control the device and it sank him on number twelve—or whatever the case was . . . I’ve got a theory that every one of those little lights shoots you forward or backward so many thousand years to the very minute—and whatever spot on the earth happens to come up at that minute is the spot where you land.”

  And from that point Vincent found himself involved in a discourse on the turning of the earth. Hunzk and his three young brothers and their adopted sister were all ears.

  It was against Fangler’s command that the members Of his family came down to listen to Vincent’s dangerous discourses. But as often as the old man hobbled away to visit a neighbor, they came. Every page Vincent read from his books whetted their appetite for more.

  One day Hunzk and Penzi brought a stranger with them to see Vincent’s wonderful books. The stranger was a tall, graceful eighteen-year-old girl.

  “Her name is Lindova,” said Hunzk, and the girl and Vincent gazed at each other. “We have told her about you—how you came through the sky from another time and are waiting to go back. She was afraid to come and see you, but we have brought her.”

  With characteristic twentieth century modesty, Vincent felt somewhat awkward to be wearing such ragged clothes in the presence of company. His original suit and topcoat had worn away during the past months, until now they were only a patchwork of remnants crudely sewn into a single garment. He felt like a half-naked savager—in the presence of a beautiful native princess.

  “I have heard of you, Lindova,” said Vincent, smiling. She blushed and shrank back a little closer to Hunzk, who took her hand. Vincent added, “Our friend Hunzk never returns from a hunting trip through the West Valley but what he comes home talking of you. Now that I have seen you, I understand. It is no wonder that Hunzk likes to go hunting in the West Valley.”

  Hunzk and Lindova smiled at each other and the girl blushed deeply. What a contr
ast she was, Vincent thought, to that little tom-boy of a Penzi. This girl was ripening into womanhood. Penzi was still a child of fourteen, careless of her hair and dress, as untamed as a squirrel. Penzi usually had a dirty face, and her large hands and feet were always marked with scratches and stone bruises.

  The puzzle to Vincent was that Penzi exhibited such a fondness for him. After all, they did belong to two different ages. While Vincent might linger here for a few years, he wasn’t going to let himself fall for any of these Cro-Magnon girls. A definite barrier would prevent that; namely, the fact that in his highest scale of values all Cro-Magnons were twenty-five thousand years behind the times.

  “We have brought Lindova to see your books,” said Hunzk as they all settled down in the warm sand in front of Vincent’s shelter. Penzi had already slipped into “Ponpo’s treasure-box,” the saxophone case, and got them.

  “Let me show Lindova the funny spiders,” said Penzi excitedly.

  “All right, the spiders,” Vincent snorted. It was curious what an impression that “spider book” had made upon these simple-minded primitives. To them it ranked right along beside the books that traced the history of the human race and described the wonders of the twentieth century cities.

  And yet this spider book was, in Vincent’s opinion, only a fanciful pseudo-scientific treatise upon future evolution, written by some imaginative scientist, probably cracked, for the purpose of scaring the daylights out of such readers as Aunt Minnie.

  “See, the spiders are as big as men,” Penzi pointed out gleefully. “That’s what will happen in a time many, many, many years to come.”

  “By that time,” Hunzk chimed in, “these great spiders will have become the masters, and the men will be prisoners and slaves.” Lindova looked into Hunzk’s eyes seriously. “You would never be the slave of a spider, Hunzk!”

  “I would not!” Hunzk’s muscles tensed and his great brown chest filled defiantly. “I would fight!”

  Vincent smiled. It amused him to see how seriously they took this book. INSECTS, THE FUTURE CONQUERORS OF MAN, by none other than his old friend R. O. Xandibaum! The title suddenly gave Vincent a start. Up to now he had regarded Xandibaum’s book as fiction, but now . . .

  He had to admit that there was a certain logic about it. It was remotely conceivable that the future wars would drive men underground. It was barely possible, he grudgingly admitted, that the deadly gases used as weapons, in conjunction with other counteracting gases, might have a somewhat stimulating effect upon certain types of insect life.

  But if he admitted that much to himself, he found it hard to draw the line anywhere in this strange, uncanny argument of the inevitable R. 0. Xandibaum, published in 1940.

  Through countless generations, so the argument ran, the insects thrived. They grew larger. Their life habits, particularly those of the trapdoor spider, were adaptable to man’s underground habitat. The conditions were far more ideal for them than for man.

  Simultaneously, the native cunning of the spider, his highly developed instinct for imitation, and his superior treachery—these qualities underwent an even greater evolution than his physique. In the course of thousand of years he became man’s most formidable potential enemy.

  But the monster trapdoor spider, so the story ran, was clever enough to bide his time. Vincent wondered about that. Why trapdoor spiders? Because Xandibaum knew, had seen them?

  No great intelligence was required on the spider’s part to discover mankind’s greatest weakness. It lay in man’s traditions that caused men to fight among themselves—not from an instinctive urge to kill each other, but from a vicious circle of social pressures that gathered more momentum with every generation.

  The monster spiders bided their time, Xandibaum’s book predicted. They took advantage of man’s wars. And eventually, within a hundred thousand years, they emerged as man’s conquerors and exterminators, cleansing the whole earth of the human race. Xandibaum said the future, but his book betrayed a certain vagueness. He wasn’t sure. Maybe it had been the past. It was this factor that now struck Vincent as pointed indication the book might not be pure fiction.

  “Don’t take it all to heart,” Vincent warned, noticing how intently the three handsome Cro-Magnon heads were bent over the illustrations. “It’s nothing to worry about. It won’t happen for a hundred and twenty-five thousand years—maybe.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Hunzk. “The more I think of it, the more I get mad. Why won’t these future men fight? I would fight!”

  “Of course you would, Hunzk,” said Vincent, looking thoughtfully far across the valley of cave dwellers. Again the overhanging tragedy became a cloud over his thoughts. Would he ever dare reveal to this proud, strong Hunzk what the twentieth-century scientists knew of Cro-Magnon’s fate?—that the bulk of the Cro-Magnons were somehow vanquished or lost in the not-far-distant times.

  For many minutes the dark-eyed, beautiful Lindova looked at the books without uttering a single comment. At last she said, “My father once had some of these.”

  “What?” Vincent looked up sharply. “Your father had books?”

  “Not books—bugs.” She pointed to the little black letters on a printed page. “He once had a strange bright stone with these little funny-shaped bugs on it.”

  “You don’t understand,” Hunzk put in, proud of his superior knowledge. “These little funny-shaped black things are not bugs; they are words. Your father couldn’t have them on a stone. They only come from Ponpo’s land. They don’t grow like leaves on trees.”

  “They were bugs like these,” said Lindova stubbornly. “They were cut on the strange stone he found.”

  “No, Lindova,” Hunzk insisted. “The weather makes curious marks on stones, but these marks have a meaning—”

  “They were the same as these, Hunzk.” The positive note in Lindova’s tone was not wasted on Vincent. He rose abruptly. “Lindova, will you take me to your father?”

  The four of them hiked across the hills and up the shallow canyon that was Lindova’s home. They found her father, an alert, pompous old man, sitting out in the sunshine in front of his cave making arrows. “I’ve brought you company, Vorsto,” said Lindova.

  He looked up at Lindova and Penzi with a sly twinkle. “Why must you girls have no-good men always at your heels?”

  “They have come to see you,” said Penzi, scruffing old Vorsto’s long tangled whiskers. “This one is Ponpo, who has come to us from another land.”

  “A-a-awf! A stripling with a lily heart. I know all about him, from the day that he washed up out of the river. Begone, you young ones! I must make arrows and hunt before the summer is gone.”

  “Father,” said Lindova, firmly taking the arrow out of his hand, “Ponpo wishes to see the strange stone you found—the stone with all the little marks—”

  The old man pulled aside his long bushy beard and pointed to the string of copper beads that hung from his neck. “There is part of it . . . And here is some more.” He displayed anklets and bracelets made of smooth little beads that had evidently been cut from a plate of copper. “Had you forgotten, Lindova?”

  At once Lindova remembered. Of course, Vorsto had carved one end of the “stone” into ornaments. And the rest he had traded to a traveler from one of the tribes far to the south. She turned to Vincent regretfully. “It is all gone.”

  Much talk followed. Now that Vincent’s curiosity was aroused, he would give anything to know what that “stone” looked like before it was carved into ornaments. He would even be willing to make a journey to the southern tribes if there was a chance that the piece of copper had not yet been damaged.

  But this seemed unlikely. Moreover, Hunzk at once warned that a journey southward would be dangerous. This, aside to Vincent.

  “Why?” asked Vincent.

  “Because,” Hunzk glanced toward the cave to make sure that Penzi and the others were out of earshot, “Penzi was stolen from a southern tribe. She would not dare go back or they
would take her. She bears certain marks—”

  “She—what has she got to do with it? I am the one who would go. No one else would make the journey.”

  “You do not understand, Ponpo,” said Hunzk. “Penzi has chosen you, and she will go with you wherever you go. Later, by the tribal custom, you will ask her to marry you.”

  Vincent turned his face toward the breeze and fought off the perspiration. The rush of heat through his chest and face was like anger, but Vincent knew that now was not the time to give way to impulsive talk.

  “I must warn Penzi that I may not be here long,” he said, looking at Hunzk squarely. “When did Penzi make this—er—official announcement?”

  “She has not made it yet, and when she does you will hear Fangler’s roar all over the valley. But she has told me, for I am a brother to her. She will not change her mind—”

  A shrill call from Penzi brought their conversation to a halt. Both the girls and the old men were beckoning to them to come.

  “I have them for you!” Vorsto barked.

  “I no longer have the stone but if it is only the bugs you want—”

  Vincent was conducted into the dark cave. Lindova got a torch. Vorsto worked at a shelf until he succeeded in sliding a slab of dry, hard clay onto a flat piece of wood. He carried it out into the sunshine. It was somewhat cracked and crumbled, but Vincent saw at once what it was: the offset which the old man had made from the copper plate upon a piece of clay. He had saved it as a record of his strange experience.

  The letters of the impression were in reverse and a few of them were missing, but Vincent quickly pieced the inscription together:

  “This place has been visited by R.O. Xandibaum, scientist, 20th century A.D., by means of the time-transfer power of nature, controlled by a device of his own invention. Approximate date of this visit: 25,000 B.C.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Time in His Hands

  It was several days before Vincent and old Vorsto became well enough acquainted to share confidences. But at last the pompous old Cro-Magnon loosened up and gave Ponpo the facts—facts that he had never told anyone before. He had been too skeptical of his own eyes, and he did not care to be made the laughing stock of the valley.