The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Hunzk looked at him. “You might as well have said it, Vincent. I have been thinking it too. Our race vanished. Maybe it was destroyed—by something.” His big fists clenched. “Maybe it was the insect world that destroyed it!”

  Vincent snorted. “Now you are letting your imagination run away with you. The insect world is supposed to be 102,000 A.D. The Cro-Magnons disappeared long before my own time, 1941. Maybe 15,000 or 20,000 years before . . .”

  “Maybe the insect world wasn’t 102,000 years in the future,” pointed out Penzi suddenly. “Xandibaum wasn’t sure, in his book. Maybe he didn’t know for sure. Maybe this world we are in now is the insect world, and maybe it is between our two times, Cro-Magnon and 1941.” Vincent snorted again. But he was disturbed. This little Cro-Magnon miss was as sharp as a razor. Maybe she was wrong, but she wasn’t as uncertain as anyone else in this confounded mess. What if she were right . . .

  “This is dangerous, standing here,” he said abruptly, glancing nervously about. “If this is the world of the trapdoor spider . . .” he shuddered.[3]

  “Perhaps some of the people are still alive,” said Penzi. “Maybe we can find them.”

  “Maybe there are no people,” Vincent reminded. “After all, we don’t know for sure which age we really are in.”

  “If this is an age between ours,” she said stubbornly, “there should at least be pithecanthropus.” Penzi had learned her lessons well. Vincent looked at her with ill-concealed amazement.

  From that time forward, he discovered, Penzi was going to amaze him frequently. None of the things he had taught Hunzk out of the books had gone to Hunzk alone. They had been passed around.

  “We’ll have to look out for wild animals, and avalanches, and poison foods . . . We’ll do well to stay close together until we’re sure of our ground. It’s six months until another equinox,” Vincent advised.

  “We’ll stick together,” said Hunzk, and it was plain that any two people as devoted as he and the beautiful Lindova would not stray far apart.

  “We’ll stick,” repeated Lindova.

  “In union there is strength, as one of your great men said,” Penzi quoted, winning another look from Vincent.

  “And we’ll keep our eyes open for our human ancestors. Sooner or later we’ll find them. Maybe,” Vincent was not too confident, “we can convince them we’ve got a lot in common.”

  It was gratifying to Vincent to see that Lindova and Hunzk were not greatly disappointed over missing their expected trip to the twentieth century. They were, in fact, very much excited over what they found here—and daily there were new, thrilling discoveries. New ruins, the remains of a road built of red stones, and once an encounter with a sabre-toothed tiger.

  “That makes me right!” Penzi had proudly observed after Hunzk had killed it with a poisoned spear. “This is 20,000 B.C.”

  But Hunzk and Lindova were captivated by the thought that the time chain would come back, and they were confident—even more so than Vincent—that there could be endless additional travel into different ages, so long as they didn’t let that time mechanism get out of their grasp.

  “They’ve got an outlook on this time business,” Vincent thought to himself, “that’s ahead of mine. Here I’ve been trying to locate in some age where I can live in comfort. They’ve got a hungering to take a look at life all down through the centuries . . .

  Vincent shuddered a little. He certainly didn’t feel comfortable here.

  And yet look at Lindova and Hunzk, cuddled up in a corner like two turtledoves, browsing through history books, chattering about how some day they’d go and see if those things really happened—if they could get Vincent to go with them.

  “I’ll go, too,” Penzi put in, never taking her eyes off the fire where she was roasting a delicious young hedgehog,” if I get to ride the time chain to 1941 A.D., and live with those future people, I guess I’ll be as modern as anybody.”

  “Has anyone ever said you weren’t modern?” Vincent asked carelessly.

  “No one had to say it,” Penzi answered. She swallowed a blob in her throat and turned her face away from Vincent.

  He sauntered close to the fire where she was working, caught her bare arms, drew her back a little. She tossed her head back and looked up at him, and her soft hair fell against his hands.

  “You’re working too close to the fire, Penzi,” he said softly. “Your cheeks are warm.”

  “From being slapped,” she answered, “three years ago.”

  And then she was in tears—tears that Vincent could only partly understand, being a mere twentieth century man. But he had a general idea what to do about tears from the eyes of a gorgeously beautiful girl. He and Penzi walked out along the mountainside trail they had marked, and he kissed her for the first time—and the second and the third—and time stood still.

  Nobody seemed to mind that the delicious young hedgehog roasted to cinders that evening.

  But everybody minded a few days later when an earth tremor fairly buried them all under a minor landslide and they had to dig their way out from under the protecting cliff and gather up their possessions and make a new camp up on top. They were still on the site of the time chain, and there they would stay at all costs. For they were already making big plans and counting, the days until this six months should pass.

  An upsurge in excitement came when they caught their first sight of some fellow human-beings.

  But they weren’t human beings after all.

  They were apes. And they were very shy. Neither Vincent or Hunzk could get near then, but Hunzk had a peculiar look in his eye.

  “They are much like the apes of the Cro-Magnon age,” he said. “But I heard some of them talking, and I almost swear I could understand a word or two here and there. If only I could get closer . . .”

  “If you could, they’d probably kill you,” said Vincent. “Better keep away. A sabretooth tiger is strong on the ground, but an ape is strong in the trees also. They could pounce down on you before you’d know it. And from what I’ve seen of these fellows, they are crafty. They might lie in wait above your head . . .”

  Hunzk grinned. “Let one of them jump me,” he boasted. “He will find he has landed into the middle of a real fight!” Lindova smiled up at him, but there was a nervous look in her eyes. “You are brave, my husband, but please don’t look for trouble. I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

  “Smart girl,” observed Vincent.

  They saw the apes several times in the following weeks. And Vincent always found Hunzk looking at them with a strange gleam in his eyes. And Hunzk spent a great deal of his time working. He was brewing poison for his spear tips, and making new spears.

  “When you stop to think of it,” Hunzk observed profoundly one day, “this whole business of how fast we develop is the most fascinating puzzle in the world.”

  “Listen!” Lindova said, smiling proudly. “Hunzk is about to give us a lecture.”

  “On modern man,” Penzi put in, never missing a chance to use that word modern within Vincent’s hearing. There was no longer any doubt with Vincent that they were all modem, comparatively speaking, in thoughts as well as physique.

  “Here’s the point,” said Hunzk, and he wasn’t referring to the newly trimmed spear, whose point he was tipping with poison from the fangs of a dead snake. “Those ape creatures out there in the forest are floundering in their struggle. What they do with their time—today, tomorrow, next year—can make all the difference in the world in how far their race gets. Every victory over a tiger or a wolf or a deer puts them ahead. But if they could only start working with tools, they’d go thousands of years ahead in one jump.”

  “That’s easy for us to see,” Vincent smiled, “because we have the advantage of a later viewpoint.”

  “Will future men say things like that about us moderns?” Penzi asked. Vincent watched the firelight bum in her wistful eyes. He wondered how she would look in a twentieth century dress.

  “If we
knew what future men would say about us,” Hunzk went on, “what would we do, Ponpo?”

  “What would we do?” Vincent repeated absent-mindedly. His eyes and his thoughts were on Penzi, and the direct question was disturbing to his romantic reverie . . .

  A few days later Hunzk brought up the same question more pointedly. “If we had future men’s perspective on us, would we see that we were wasting our opportunities, the same as those apes. Are we making the most of our tools—our time chain, for example?”

  The question struck home to Vincent. “We’ve got all the time there is in the world, Hunzk. What do you think you ought to do with it?”

  Hunzk considered. There were lots of immediate things that could be done, as soon as they got back to the Cro-Magnon age. Hunzk’s father needed care. The cave needed to be cleaned and re-provisioned for the winter. There was much that Hunzk owed to the home . . .

  But there was his own and Lindova’s needs to consider. It seemed to Hunzk a larger purpose, as far as his tribe was concerned, for him to provide a cave for Lindova where she could have babies.

  “And yet there may be still more important courses of action,” Hunzk reflected gravely. “If there is some danger approaching all of my people . . .”

  For the first time Vincent and Hunzk talked this matter over frankly. Lindova and Penzi joined them. They talked of traveling over the Cro-Magnon valleys to hunt for hidden perils. They would visit the hostile Cro-Magnon tribes to the south. They would scour the country, and if they could foresee what threatened, they would prophesy—

  Again Vincent felt the shock of futility. If the scientists of the twentieth century knew that something did erase great numbers of Cro-Magnons—

  “Then let us leap to the hundred-and-twentieth century” Hunzk suggested. “Perhaps they will know what erased us, and we can take measures—”

  “But if it did happen,” Vincent protested. It was an if that brought back the silence of futility. The four of them gazed into their campfire for a time, and when the talk picked up it was of things near at hand—the calendar that promised the return of the time chain, Hunzk’s supply of poison-tipped spears, Lindova’s souvenirs of this lost age that she wished to take back, and Penzi’s new dress.

  The new dress was Penzi’s spare-time activity. Vincent had taken the materials from his saxophone outfit and made a gift of them to her. He had stripped every square inch of the blue velvet lining of the case, adding to it the wide blue velvet scarf in which he wrapped the instrument. Saxophone springs had been easily converted into needles; pads and keys were available for ornaments.

  It was a handsome gift—a twentieth century dress for a very modem girl. Vincent wished he could have told Maestro Galancho to what good use his sax and case had been put.

  With that gift went a new understanding—and a promise from Penzi to Vincent. When they got back to the Cro-Magnon age they would be married . . .

  Hunzk was keeping watch for the time chain through the night when the answer to his problem burned through like a light. The others were sleeping, or trying to. But with Hunzk pacing about and talking to himself, they waked up to see what it was all about.

  “It about making the most of our time,” Hunzk was pounding his fists together. “I think I’ve got it.”

  Vincent sat up and stared blankly. He saw that Penzi and Lindova were instantly alert. This matter might be abstract to a twentieth century man with comfortable living dumped in his lap, but to these Cro-Magnons, facing extinction—

  “Perhaps we are a lost cause!” said Hunzk grimly. “What these book writers of Ponpo’s age know seems to prove it. But after all, is that the biggest problem?”

  “What is the biggest problem?” Vincent asked groggily.

  “The extinction that comes later—to all men—when the insects grow big and take command!” Hunzk paused, knowing that Vincent was likely to snort at this. Hunzk wasn’t in the least disturbed by those snorts. “You don’t think there will be any changes after twentieth century, Ponpo. Why don’t you have the same faith in Xandibaum’s spider book that I have in your skyscrapers and airplanes and radios?”

  “I have seen airplanes and radios,” Vincent answered stubbornly.

  “I have not—but they sound logical after I have studied all the magic changes. But no more logical than the huge spiders and grasshoppers which Xandibaum’s book describes.”

  “It’s different,” Vincent retorted. “That spider stuff was published in the twentieth century. It’s bound to be guesswork. If I thought there was a grain of truth in it, of course we’d load up with weapons and get on the time chain and see—”

  And so the punch in Hunzk’s big wonderful idea—and with it the hope of making their time count for the utmost—seemed lost. And none of them would think of trying the long jump into the future against Vincent’s better judgment. Vincent’s judgment was their law.

  And at any rate they would take the next six months or year in the age of the Cro-Magnon—in the interests of married life.

  Vincent’s judgment was their law, and it was usually good. But the very next day his dogmatic verdict that the monster spiders of the future were just so much nonsense got knocked topsy-turvy. And the whole argument that Hunzk had been advancing took on new light.

  Penzi, having ventued a short distance out of the forest, came screaming back. “A spider! A giant spider! And it’s coming this way!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  “Once This as a City”

  R.O. Xandibaum laid down his paint brush at the sound of the buzzer. He stole a hasty glance at his watch. Nine a.m. The Trapdoor Monsters were right on the dot again this morning. In his eight years of captivity he had never known them to vary as much as five seconds in their Monday morning roll call.

  Xandibaum hurriedly jumped into his shell, strapped it on snugly, switched on the silent motors. He applied pressure to the rheostat switches by moving his knees apart. The spider legs of his mechanized shell went into action. He swiftly ascended to the top of his cylindrical home. Hard against the closed lid, which always reminded him of a solid locomotive drive-wheel fitted into the top of a cistern, he waited.

  The buzzer sounded.

  Xandibaum touched the switch that elevated the trapdoor. It swung up with a hard jerk and held there. He pushed his shell-clad body halfway outdoors.

  Simultaneously five thousand other trapdoors flew open and five thousand Trapdoor Monsters swung halfway into view.

  The five thousand monster spiders that occupied this open plaza and similar groups living in other plazas were the most precise and orderly society of animals that ever lived, in Xandibaum’s opinion. He knew exactly what to expect from them from day to day.

  As long as he could continue in his disguise, and could fulfil! the simple responsibilities that fell to him, he might live on indefinitely.

  The instant he should fail in any way, and they should discover him, death would be certain—and probably quick. Only a few of the most highly developed of the monsters had allowed themselves the luxury of playing with their human victims, during these recent final years of man, before killing them and adding them to the food storage rooms.

  Now, from the arched doorway which was all that remained of a once stately building, one of these more high developed Trapdoor Monsters stood viewing the vast semicircle of open trapdoors. That arched doorway had been built by man, to man’s dimensions. The monster fitted into it neatly, his legs resting against the sidewalls, two of them up in the curve of the arch.

  A picture of ruins! After eight years of imprisonment here, following his years of study that had given the twentieth century a book on this tragic era, Xandibaum still felt the same pang when he looked out across the five thousand half-open trapdoors, coated with debris, to the monstrous form that occupied one of man’s last doorways.

  True, there was one building, half a mile beyond, that was still standing in all the stately elegance of its advanced Cro-Magnon architecture. It was beautiful
and inviting—and sure death.

  There was that much left in each of the new, young, Cro-Magnon cities. One inviting building! That had been the monsters’ cunning scheme for bringing in every last human being.

  An amplified voice from Six-six-six, the monster spider that occupied the commanding position within the battered doorway, sputtered and clacked and chirped.

  Xandibaum listened tensely. The language was an elusive thing. As far as numerical expressions were concerned, Xandibaum was sure of himself. He knew his own number—the number he had assumed after he had succeeded in killing his predecessor.

  He also understood, from the speaker’s mood and the listeners’ responses, whether work, or food, or orders for the domesticated monster grasshoppers, or training of the young in the arts of treachery and cunning were being talked about.

  But after all these years he still could not actually identify words that he could translate as such. So much of their communication was based upon their highly evolved instincts—which could be awakened in them by tones of voice and vibrations of legs and bodies—that he missed the subtleties.

  Fortunately for Xandibaum, the Trapdoor Monsters had clung to their instinct to live separately, later to be passed on to their descendants, the trapdoor spiders. Xandibaum’s cylindrical hole in the earth, together with all the chambers and connecting tunnels he had added for his own scientific and clandestine needs, was his own domain.

  Only at moments like these, when all the community was called up for the regular roll-call, was he in danger of being scrutinized too closely by his next door neighbors.

  Or, considerably more perilous, if he was thrown into the society of some of the monsters on a work shift, and lacked the motor controls of his fake shell to get by their critical inspection, he was sometimes forced to resort to emergency measures. In a few such instances he had managed to commit instantaneous, silent murders of the monsters who otherwise would have reported their suspicions.