by Don Wilcox
“Then she grabbed him alive?” the sergeant muttered.
“Exactly,” said the plain-clothes officer, and the others chimed in with their agreement. “That’s it, in a Chestnut shell, just like Ebbtide told it. It’s all clear but two points. First, where is Kiptoller. And second, who’d the Cream Puff have helping him?”
“And third,” said Ebbtide, “how soon is that bloated mummy gonna come to life?”
Another silence with all eyes turned toward the motionless Cream Puff. One of the officers shook his head and stalked out to call the coroner.
Into Ebbtide’s handcuffed fingers slipped the hand of Trixie. She looked up at him wistfully, guiltily.
“Ebbtide,” she whispered, “I’ve just remembered something.”
“She’s just remembered something,” Ebbtide gulped, shifting his eyes toward the sergeant.
“Kiptoller told me to tell you, and I forgot,” said Trixie breathlessly. “He told me, it was, let me see, five days ago—I remember, because it was the day I was so busy getting the new system started—”
“He told you what?”
“That he had fixed the time lock for an extra ten days so he could get away this weekend. He said if he hadn’t heard from you by five this afternoon he was going to jump in his private plane and hop over to that China address I gave him and meet you—” Ebbtide almost snapped a handcuff. But at that instant another policeman sirened in from the street on a motorcycle.
“Sergeant!” the newcomer bellowed as he roared to a stop. “Headquarters just now got a radiogram from Kiptoller. Says he’s out in his plane. Says he just picked up the radio news of his death. Wants to know what’s the gag. Says to postpone the funeral till he gets back.”
“Smart guy!” the sergeant blazed. “Go back and radio him that he was supposed to be dead, but Trixie Jones got her signals mixed. In fact, she’s got everything mixed.” The perspiring sergeant turned to the Junk King. “Ebbtide, did you know what kind of a wife you was marryin’ ?”
“I knew she was a good mixer,” Ebbtide grunted, and his wife blushed and smiled. “Another thing I know.” Ebbtide turned his fierce fighting eyes on Pokey. “You’ve done a sweet job playing dumb, Pokey, lut I must have punched your sound button or something. From a couple of things you’ve said, I figure you’ll talk like a trained seal when you get to the police station. How’d you and your car happen to be in that atom machine?”
Pokey preferred to remain dumb, but the plain-clothes officer supplied the answer. “He got caught in the wrong alley.”
“Right,” said Ebbtide. “He didn’t get his addresses mixed. Nor his news stories either. It was his voice I heard on the wire, calling in the murder that didn’t come off.”
A minute or two later a search of Pokey’s car yielded the tap-in telephone and other juicy bits of evidence. The patrol wagon carted Pokey away.
It took the coroner all of an hour to come to a decision. He wasn’t used to making post mortems on mummies, he said. But at last there was his answer: “Dead. Death from concussion.”
“Gee!” Trixie gasped, clutching Ebb—tide’s handcuffs. “What’ll they do with me? Electrocute me or hang me?”
The perspiring sergeant pushed his cap to the back of his head and laughed for the first time. “Young lady, owin’ to the fact that the Cream Puff was wanted dead or alive, I don’t see how anyone can keep you from gettin’ in on the reward.”
“Whoops!” Trixie did an impromptu dance on the empty mummy case. “Me—a reward! You hear that, Ebb? I’m a hero-ine!”
“Hero-ine!” Ebbtide grunted. “Shush! Snail soup! You’re just lucky. It ain’t once in a whale’s age that a guy as clever and puffed-up with importance as the Cream Puff lets himself get trapped like this.”
“Damned if I can figure it out,” the sergeant mumbled, after the corpse, the coroner and the crowd were gone, and only he and Trixie and Ebbtide were left. “How was it that that big boy you called Pokey came out of the atom crusher-alive and the Cream Puff came out dead?”
“That’s easy,” Ebbtide grinned. “A guy like that egotistical Cream Puff can’t stand to be deflated. Now, how about letting me out of these cuffs?”
TAXI TO JUPITER
First published in Amazing Stories, August 1941
This ship was the only one in existence that could travel faster than light, yet another ship overtook them, and it meant unexpected escape for the outlaws. It wasn’t right.
I was scared silly. Any eighteen-year-old girl would have been—even with a big brother like Charlie at the controls. I was too scared to scream.
It all flashed on my eyes so quickly—the three shadowy figures slipping out from behind the rear bunk, advancing, flourishing guns—that I was frozen speechless.
Or almost speechless. I did manage to bluster, “Bandits!” just at the takeoff. And that wasn’t what I meant to say. But with the take-off knocking the wind out of me I didn’t have time to yell, “Stowaways!” much less, “Interplanetary anarchists!”
I gave out a blustery “Bandits!” smearing it into one syllable, and the front man of the three made a quick crouch and went “Hssssh!” and by that time my brother Charlie must have jammed on the throttle, because we swooped off so fast that everything went black.
You know that sickening take-off feeling, if you’re used to riding the spaceway s. Charlie and I were wearing Harlot’s Perfect Pressure space suits, latest model, patented October, 2323. The perfect space suit, you think? Ordinarily, yes. But not for the speed boats of the future, such as Charlie’s Nebula Spinner I.
You’ve heard of it, of course. And you’ve heard all the arguments about how much faster than light the Nebula Spinner I can actually go, and all the mathematical proofs and disproofs that the science reporters have got themselves mired down in, trying to explain Charlie’s invention to the public.
Well, I wouldn’t try for a minute to clear up this muddle, because I flunked my course in Einstein, and my final exam probably made the poor fellow turn over in his grave—if he’s still in it after four centuries. No, I won’t try to tell you how the Spinner could go so much faster than light; I’ll simply tell you what happened on the maiden voyage, and you can see for yourself what it did.
As I was saying, we took off from the Earth so fast that the acceleration made us swoon, in spite of space suits.
Yes, all five of us—my brother and me, and the three uninvited guests, whoever they were.
“Girl!” I heard a voice growl, as I was struggling to come back to my senses.
“Damn good looker,” said another voice. “She’d be good company on Jupiter.”
Then things were quiet for awhile, except for the rising hum of motors. I kept trying to get my eyes to open, but I was still dizzy. The Perfect Pressure Marlot was sending little electric thrills through me; it was making a valiant, if automatic, struggle to restore my normal blood circulation.
But my eyes remained closed, my head lopped against my shoulder, I lay frightened and helpless on the gravitized floor where I had fallen.
Pictures raced through my hazy mind—wisps of the recent days of excitement over my brother’s triumph.
I could see Charlie just as he had emerged, one early morning less than a week ago, from the air locks of the Giant Vacuum Laboratories, tired but glowing.
“I’ve done it!” he had shouted to me as he caught me in his arms. “It’ll be a revolution in space travel! A revolution!”
That was the triumph he and his inventor friends had been working toward for years, and at last he had put his ship through the test. To all intents and purposes his solo test flights within the Giant Vacuum Laboratories were identical to flight through space itself. And on that morning he had completed his one-hundredth sun[*] of test flying.
The pictures in my mind shifted to the assemblage of scientists a few days later. Again I was listening to the secretary drone through a report of business proceedings that I didn’t understand. Again I was hearing t
he representative of the Interplanetary Patrol barking crisp jubilant words over the successful drive against the ubiquitous Frobanna anarchists.
“The space pilots have cooperated so well,” the uniformed man had shouted, pounding the speaker’s table, “that the Frobanna crowd has been driven underground. Once the Frobannas threatened to split interplanetary government wide open. But now, though it has cost us many a good ship and many a courageous pilot, we have practically purged the spaceways of the anarchists. Frobanna himself hasn’t shown his face in months. Heaven pity any pilot who takes him aboard!”
It had been a strong emotional speech and had brought down a ringing applause. Then the assemblage had grown respectfully—almost reverently—quiet, for the president of the Interplanetary Travel Federation had risen to bestow a special honor.
Again through my mind’s eye that glorious moment surged. The president’s lips formed the words, “Charles V. Donaldson.” My brother walked to the platform to receive the cup. And then, a few minutes later, we were riding away from the crowd in a taxi—Charlie and I and the cup!
“Now you’ll have to forgive me, Esther,” he had said laughingly, “for taking up inventing instead of law. I’d never have won a cup at law.”
“You’re fully forgiven,” I replied, “on condition that you let me go with you on your first real flight in the new ship.”
“It’s a deal!”
Charlie’s face hadn’t betrayed even a flick of emotion with those words, and yet I knew that back of his quick decision to take me along there were hidden feelings, a host of them, deep and tragic. For my brother Charlie had once taken his sweetheart along on the maiden space voyage of one of his earlier experimental speed boats. His sweetheart had come back a corpse. Charlie, too, had seemed on the verge of death when they bore him out of the returned ship, but miraculously he had lived—lived knowing more painfully and bitterly than anyone else in the world the dangers of faster-than-light travel.
“It’s a deal,” I had returned to Charlie; and so with masks of confidence that denied the existence of invisible perils, we had entered the good ship Nebula Spinner I for the swiftest plunge into the void in the history of Solar man.
Now my hazy reverie grew thin, and the chill of fear sharpened. That harsh growl I had heard before jerked me back to the present.
“Which way you going, buddy?”
My eyes snapped open. I saw the three space-suited strangers. They, too, had evidently fallen to the floor at the take-off. They were back of me in the narrow passage that extended twelve or fifteen feet toward the rear of the ship. Two of them were trying to draw themselves up from the gravitized floor. The third lay in the farthest corner, his arms folded over the face of his transparent headgear.
The two larger men eyed me sharply as they rose. I could tell from their motions that they were not wholly unused to the tug of gravitized floors upon space suits. Perhaps they were seasoned space travelers.
Now they looked past me, toward the fore end of the passage where my brother groped at the controls.
“Which way you going, buddy?” one of them repeated.
My brother didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn. I wondered for an instant whether the auditory instruments in his helmet weren’t working. Perhaps he hadn’t even seen these intruders yet.
“Donaldson!” the man shouted. His big teeth and pointed nose reminded me of a rat.
“I’m busy!” my brother snapped back without turning.
“Where you taking us?”
“On a test flight.”
“Take us to Jupiter!”
My brother was watching them through a small mirror, but he kept his attention on the instrument board. We were still accelerating. Every low hum would slowly rise to a higher and higher pitch like a distant siren whose notes all went up the scale, never down. And before a singing tone would squeak away inaudible, another low hum would start up the range.
The two big men brushed past me. They moved toward Charlie, holding guns on him, staggering dangerously. They gripped the handrails that ran the length of the narrow passage, struggling against terrific acceleration.
“Jupiter, Donaldson!” the rat-faced fellow growled, and his snarly voice took an up-scale whine on the words as if the motor tones were getting into his system.
“Can’t make it Jupiter,” Charlie answered squarely. He turned to face the men for the first time. He looked at their eyes and tried to ignore their guns. They wouldn’t let him. Rat-face tapped the barrel of his weapon against the face of Charlie’s helmet.
“Jupiter!” Rat-face repeated.
“Jupiter!” echoed the other big man. I hadn’t had a good look at him before, but now, under the small ceiling lights I got the impression of a muscular form with a small close-cropped head and tiny ears. His neck was so big and puffy with muscles that he reminded me of a cobra. Moreover, there was something snaky about the way he moved.
Between Cobra and Rat-face, my brother was in as tight a spot as you can imagine. As far as I could see there was nothing to do but say, “Okay, gentlemen, we’ll head for Jupiter.”
But at the same time I was all icicles for fear he wouldn’t say it. I’ve known Charlie to get rash and let his fists fly at people who threaten him.
Charlie glanced from Rat-face to Cobra and then back toward the rear of the passage where the little fellow was peeking from between his folded arms.
“Put your guns away,” Charlie said in an easy tone. “I can count to three: I’m smart enough to know when I’m outnumbered.”
Rat-face threw a look at me as if to say, No use wasting any fears on that scared kitten of a girl! Then he and Cobra relaxed their gun hands.
“That’s better,” said Charlie. “Now what’s this all about? Who are you? What do you want?”
“Never mind who we are,” said Ratface. “We need some new scenery and we need it in a hurry. From what we’ve heard of the Charles Donaldson speed boats, you’re the lad that can give us the kind of taxi service we crave.”
“There’s some fine scenery on Venus,” said Charlie.
“We’ve seen Venus. We’ve seen Mercury. We’ve seen Mars. We’ve seen the Earth. We’re all fed up—”
“Go ahead and tell him who we are, why don’t you?” the snaky fellow said.
“In short,” Rat-face continued, “we crave to look upon the hills of Jupiter.”
“Jupiter, gentlemen,” said Charlie with stubborn tension in his voice, “is out of Earth man’s range.”
“It isn’t out of your range!” Cobra snarled.
“It’s outside Earth man’s legal cruising limits,” said Charlie, tightening his lips.
“That’s the point,” Rat-face grated. “Now get down to business and taxi us to Jupiter!”
Charlie’s hands continued to work at the instruments. The invisible sirens of acceleration continued to ascend the musical scales. The two men watched him critically. They cast their eyes over the dials, they glanced at each other. Obviously they were disturbed. There were enough dials on that instrument board to disturb a veteran space pilot.
“Which way is Jupiter?” Cobra blustered impatiently.
“Straight ahead,” said Charlie.
My anxiety eased a little to hear these words. I was certain in my own mind that these three men were nothing less than Frobanna anarchists, the sort who would be shot on sight if we dumped them at any port within our legal cruising limits. Moreover, I knew that Charlie, in spite of his innocence, would find himself deep in trouble if it were known that he transported them from one planet to another.
The fact that they had slipped into our ship without our knowledge would not exempt us from a legal tangle. It’s a crime to transport stowaways, as everyone knows. The usual procedure, of course, is for the ship’s officers to lock up the stowaways and transfer them to a patrol ship before landing at the next port. But how are you going to work that if your ship’s officers and crew consist of one pilot and his scaredy-cat of an e
ighteen-year-old sister—faced by three stowaways with guns!
No, as I saw it, we were sunk unless we could shoot straight through to Jupiter and dump these men. If we could do that, and keep mum about it for the rest of our lives—
“You should be in Jupiter within a few minutes, if you’ve got any of that light-speed your reporters boast about,” Rat-face said, prodding Charlie indirectly for more information.
“We’ll be there soon—as close as we can get.”
“How soon?”
“In time for lunch,” Charlie answered dryly.
“How fast are we going?”
“Almost at the speed of light.” Charlie’s answers seemed to content the two big men, but not the little man at the end of the passage. For the first time since our take-off he spoke.
“If we’re traveling at the speed of light we should have reached Jupiter two minutes ago.”
The small man’s voice sent chills through my spine. It was a voice unlike anything I had ever heard except possibly from a stage—it was as heavy as lumps of tungsten and at the same time as crisp and sharp as tungsten-edged razor blades.
I saw a tinge of uneasiness jump through Charlie’s face as he answered: “Your calculations are correct for straight-line travel. We happen to be traveling in spirals. It’s safer.”
“Why?” As he spoke, the little man slipped his watch into his pocket and looked up to challenge Charlie’s eyes. For the first time I saw his face—the wizened, bushy-browed, sharp blackeyed face of the arch-anarchist—Frobanna himself!
I wished I could have gone through the floor. The pictures of Frobanna in the papers had always been enough to make me pale around the gills, especially when there was some fresh story about his stabbings or bombings or assassination plots in the air.
“Why?” Frobanna repeated, drawing himself up by the rail to his full height of perhaps five-foot-four.
I think my eyes were glassy from fright; still, my vision was working. I remember seeing the slight quiver in Charlie’s fingers as he removed his hands from the instruments to turn, as far as he could comfortably turn in his strapped-in pilot’s seat, to face the most feared and hated man in the Solar system.
