The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  The one disturbing thing about Branaugh, however, was that he had withheld his brutality at an unexpected moment. All at once he had become strangely conservative in his treatment. For one of his nature, such a turn looked exceedingly treacherous.

  As for Jupe—

  “When I get back to my little blonde,” said Stephens, “I’m going to hate to tell her what I’ll have to tell her. She’ll ask about the Jupiterians. I’ll have to admit that the only one I saw pulled the lowest, most deliberate, most dastardly frame-up, I ever had pulled on me.”

  “If you get back,” Keller amended. “I’ve a hunch this thing’ll chalk us up as casualties.”

  “I’ve got a hunch,” said Peterson, “that that damned captain and his corkscrew native are pulling a hoax all their own. Did the two of them have any dealings on your first visit up here?”

  “Eighteen years ago?” Keller shook his head. “Hell, this Jupe wasn’t morn’n a baby then. I have my doubts if he was even born yet.”

  “Anyway he’s up to something plenty tricky,” said Peterson. “He’s no ignoramus. Notice how he goes for weights and figures.”

  Peterson recalled that soon after Jupe had learned the mathematics of ounces, pounds, and tons, he had playfully lifted each of the three workmen, also the guards, and told them their exact weights.

  “That’s the Jupiter instinct in him,” Keller declared. “Old Captain Heen had lots of respect for the Jupiterians. He mixed with them and made friends—until our crew started trouble.”

  “Meaning Branaugh?”

  “You guessed it. Branaugh’s arrogance cut them like a buzz saw.” Keller conceded it was lucky that all contact with the natives would be avoided on this trip.

  As to the earlier expedition, the unfriendliness engendered by a few young upstarts including Branaugh—then a lieutenant—had led to the tragic failure of the John Heen to take off.

  “Old John Heen was the only person who could navigate his ship. And he had gone and lost himself in the desert, and even his native friends failed to find any trace of him.

  “I remember one beautiful starry-eyed native woman that had been old John Heen’s choice through our two years’ stay. Seems to me they were married by Jupiterian rites. Anyway, after he disappeared she went on searching for days, always coming back to the ship to report. Most of us came to feel plenty sorry for her, seeing that Captain Heen must have meant a good deal to her the same as he did to us.”

  Finally, Keller said, a vast, unfriendly tribe swooped down and threatened to annihilate the party. The precious metal meant nothing to them, it was foreigners they were after.

  A take-off was hazarded, but the ship failed to get off. As everyone knew, it had been overloaded.

  “The best we could do,” Keller said “was lock up, grab our two life boats and take our chances. That’s how Captain Branaugh and I happen to be alive today. You know the rest. The men who were in my life boat had enough air and food to get by on. But only one man came through alive on the other life boat—Captain Branaugh.”

  Keller concluded his account he peered up at the skies. A deep silvery twilight held sway over the bad lands. Most of the light came from one of the big platinum moons.

  The scene was a welcome contrast to the hot blowing sands that had preceded. To Stephens and Peterson, unaccustomed to Jupiter’s moons, it was a weird setting in which anything might happen.

  Even so, they were scarcely prepared for the sight that suddenly passed before their gaze. It was like something out of a phantom world.

  They had been waiting, during their recent conversation, for Jupe to bring more boxes out of the old shadowy hull. Now he appeared, coming down the entrance incline with a human skeleton in his arms.

  Jupe did not bother to notice whether anyone saw him. He paused, turned the armful of bones gently from side to side, to shake off the sand and dust. He turned away from the old ship and marched solemnly, reverently.

  The three men made haste to follow, keeping some fifty yards between them and this apparition-like sight.

  When Jupe stopped, they slipped behind jutting copper-red stones and watched.

  Under the dim light of that Jupiter evening a long-delayed burial service took place. Stephens, Keller, and Peterson, stinging with the violent suspicion this mysterious Jupe had generated in them, looked on in silence, mystified.

  Jupe scooped out a shallow grave, using a flat stone for a shovel. He placed the bones tenderly, his restrained movements were a striking contrast to the heaving of heavy boxes that his muscles seemed made for.

  Stephens whispered, “An earth man’s skeleton, isn’t it?”

  Keller answered that he had never compared Earth and Jupiterian skeletons. Stripped of their muscles he doubted whether their differences would be so noticeable.

  If Keller had any guess beyond that, he kept it to himself . . .

  By the ship’s clock it was the lunch hour. Everyone was in the dining room. As usual, Jupe was first to finish his meal. He always ate at his own private table—a trunk up-ended in one corner. Now Captain Branaugh strode over to him, ordered him to get back into the hold and get the boxes arranged.

  Stephens exchanged glances with his two confidantes. They too were watching every interplay between Jupe and the captain.

  Branaugh turned to the guards and announced, “We’ll shove off in a few hours.”

  Jupe spoke up. “I ask to go back to your planet with you.” So saying, he smiled and strode out to return to work.

  His exit was followed by a scattering of guffaws.

  “Nuts,” said the captain.

  “Who does he think he is?” the mate said. “There’s no profit in loading a ship with dead weight. For every Jupe we could haul a couple million—”

  “Shut up!” the captain exploded, adding harshly, “all of you.”

  The mate’s break, Stephens later observed to Keller, had evidently caught the captain in the gizzard.

  Now everyone was ordered to sort through his own belongings and throw out every ounce he could spare. The last-minute rush was near at hand.

  Branaugh and his guards tried out the lifeboats and the weather at the same time. With this load—and no one except the captain knew just how near to a capacity load it was (excepting Jupe, perhaps, with his uncanny mathematical memory)—it would be essential to take off in windless air. The two lifeboat parties set out to hop over these regions far enough to gauge the coming air currents.

  During their absence Stephens noticed that Jupe was nowhere to be seen. There was no time to wonder where he was or what he might be up to. The job before Messrs. Stephens, Peterson, and Keller was to bring over one last box—without any Jupiterian aid.

  By the time they heaved the steel chest into the wide central corridor of the ship they were near exhaustion. They had come over the channel under a hot bright sun, and for a moment, before their eyes adjusted to the darkness of the ship, they literally did not know whether they were coming or going.

  “Slide your cargo to the other end, you fools,” the mate shouted from the control room as they were about to roll it in upon his premises.

  At the opposite end of the corridor they left it for Jupe’s final loading. The captain had assigned all of that to his ready muscles. He was both stevedore and skilled executor of this loading job.

  Loading a cargo, as every space man knew, was no trifle. The high velocity acceleration and retarding of a ship, combined with faulty loading of its contents, had accounted for many of the space tragedies of earlier days.

  But the hold of the good ship Hanover was replete with modern safety devices. The “red star door,” as it was called, would provide a barrier of steel between the freight-filled room, aft, and the corridor that led fore to the control room.

  As to the arrangement of the steel boxes, Captain Branaugh had pasted a chart on the red star door to designate the exact location of each, thus specifying the added precaution of breaking joints between alternate rows.


  Now the three workmen stood gazing at that chart, noting that the Jupiterian stevedore had intelligently checked the spaces off, one by one, in simple obedience to the captain’s orders. The cargo formed an almost solid wall within the open door. There was room for only one more box at the top.

  At this moment the lost Jupe suddenly reappeared from a most unexpected source. An upper level box slid forward without warning, hands reached out from behind it to swing it gently down into the doorway, the hands were followed by muscular arms, then a nearly naked muscular body slithered out of the closely packed wall of cargo.

  “Hello to you,” said Jupe with an immense smile. “I got lost to take a nap.”

  He dropped to the floor. He picked up the last of the boxes and filled the remaining space. He checked off the last space on the chart, and walked away.

  “Am I seeing things or is he a Houdini?” Stephens muttered.

  “Something’s screwy,” said Peterson, scratching his head.

  “I think I know,” said Keller in an undertone. “He’s left a hole among those boxes so he can stow away.”

  “Uugh! And the mate said his weight’s worth a couple million in mictorite,” Stephens gasped. “By law we’re supposed to tell—”

  “We’re in no position to tell Captain

  Branaugh anything,” Keller snapped. “We’re the captain’s favorite scum of the earth—thanks to Jupe.”

  “Hell, we’re everybody’s goat,” Stephens groaned, pacing the floor. “Damned if I wouldn’t like to blow a lid off and see what’s boiling.”

  “Sit tight,” said Keller.

  “And be glad your blonde cutie can’t see you now,” Peterson added.

  The thin whine of light rocket motors announced the return of the two lifeboats. In a moment the captain and his six guards were rushing hither and thither through the chambers of the Hanovermaking a final check-up for the take-off.

  “Set your dials,” Branaugh shouted to the mate. “In precisely twenty minutes we bang off. No time to lose. We’ll get the jump on the weather.”

  Four of the guards grabbed the last of their luggage, checked out, took one of the lifeboats and rocketed off.

  The other lifeboat was attached to the ship for the remainder of the party—two guards, captain, mate, three workmen, and possibly a stowaway. Stephens took in the situation and blew a fuse.

  “Listen, Cap. What’s the big idea? Is this ship so heavy you’ve got to shake a lifeboat and four guards to lift it?”

  For an answer the captain slammed the young workman against the wall and strode on. Stephens leaped after him, grabbed him by the arm.

  “So heavy we can’t even get off in a wind? Why the hell don’t you dump a box?”

  Flaming anger shot through the captain’s face, but he swallowed it in favor of a rasping laugh.

  “Outa my way, fool,” he barked. “It’s fifteen minutes till take-off. Get your surplus junk overboard. We’ve got to lighten up.”

  Stephens caught a nod from Keller and knew he’d better obey. Jupe’s purple eyes smiled at him mysteriously from across the corridor. An undertone conversation passed between the two guards. What was it all about? Did anyone know whether the ship was loaded to rip to pieces in mid-space? Sure as hell somebody ought to know.

  Had Stephens heard the bit of conversation that passed between the guards, it wouldn’t have clarified his confusion in the slightest.

  “Still keepin’ it under your hat?” said one of the guards.

  The other nodded. “Lucky we didn’t pull the other four in on it. We can put it over easier ourselves, an’ the swag’ll stretch a hellova lot farther.”

  “You all set?”

  His companion gave an affirmative wink. “Remember, let the captain clean house first, then we take over.” The mate now scurried through the rooms with a tray of coffee, handed a cup to Stephens, who drank it at a gulp. Peterson drank his; Keller dubiously, poured his cup down the waste chute.

  Keller returned to Stephens disgusted. “Watch ’em or they’ll throw out your gold teeth. Those copper rocks you picked up for souvenirs for your blonde—”

  “What about ’em?” Stephens blustered.

  “Someone’s tossed them down the waste chute.”

  “I’ll run down to the crags and get some more,” Stephens snapped. “I promised her—”

  “If I were you I wouldn’t set a foot off this ship,” said Keller in a low warning voice.

  “Hell, if it’s a matter of ounces, I’d toss out my boots—”

  The captain thrust his head in at the door. “Okay, lad. If you want to trade your boots for rocks, go ahead. You’ve got ten minutes.”

  Stephens went into action on impulse. He raced out of the ship as fast as heavy gravity would permit. But by the time he reached the nearest copper-red outcropping of rocks a strange sleepiness seized him.

  Peterson was watching from the porthole, and suddenly he began to mumble incoherent words. He wasn’t aware that he yawned, or that his face was a mixture of drowsiness and fright. All he knew was that Stephens, fifty or sixty yards beyond the shadow of the ship, had taken off one boot, lain down, and apparently fallen asleep.

  “I’m going to bring him back,” Peterson snapped.

  Keller caught Peterson by the shoulders, shook him. “Are you sure they didn’t get you with those knockouts?”

  “I’m okay,” Peterson snorted. “Lemme go.”

  “Make it fast!”

  Then Keller was watching Peterson race away; but the farther the fellow went the more his race became an unsteady tottering. He reached Stephens, started to pick him up, couldn’t.

  Keller’s heart sank as he watched from the porthole. He saw Stephens shake his head groggily. Then both men lay relaxed on the ground as if nothing in the world mattered except sleep.

  Keller sprang out of his room, leaped to the fore end of the corridor, through the arched opening into the control room.

  “Hold that take-off, Branaugh!”

  “Take it easy, fellow,” came the captain’s reply, suave as a nutmeg grater. Captain, mate, two guards, and a potential Jupiterian stowaway were all huddled near the window watching the two men who had gone outside.

  “In the name of God, Branaugh,” Keller shouted. “Those men will die if you leave them there. It’s miles to a water hole—”

  “Then they’ll die. This freighter kicks off in five minutes, ten seconds. Everything’s ready—almost

  The “almost” was too obvious to need any explanation, but Captain Branaugh didn’t mind being specific.

  “You’re overloading me, Keller!” he snapped, his face white with brutal determination. “Get out!”

  Keller ducked under the captain’s out thrust arm, flung himself at the instrument board, groped for something he could jerk or turn or smash—anything to throw a monkey-wrench in the takeoff. But the captain flew at him, slammed him back against the wall, struck a thudding blow at his head.

  Keller came up with his eyes flashing, delivered a jarring uppercut, dodged a return blow, then tore loose with a dozen champion punches.

  Now they were fighting down the corridor, guards, mate, and Jupe following in their wake.

  “Three minutes, thirty seconds, captain!” the mate shouted. “Shall I switch it off or let it go?”

  The captain, staggering backward, ignored the question. “Guns, you damned guards!”

  The pistols came up, Keller froze before them. He was stopped, all right, but he could still talk.

  “Okay, you’ve got me, Branaugh. But I’ve got you, too. You murdered old John Heen. I’m damned sure of it. I’ve seen the skeleton—and now I’ve seen you.”

  The captain gave a brutal laugh, answered through his puffing breath. “Accident. I pushed a box over. He happened to be under it. What a wallop

  I got outa you boys searching the desert for him. You birds and that native woman would have spent a year at it if we hadn’t been chased off in our lifeboats.”
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br />   “Your boatload died,” said Keller accusingly.

  “Your load has all died since—I’ve seen to that. They’re all dead but you. I’ll let the desert take care of you, Keller. Save splashing my ship with blood.”

  The mate called, “Three minutes.” The captain swabbed his face and began barking orders furiously.

  “Jupe, get that red star door rolled shut—tight—that’s it. Now down with the bars. Okay. Now—”

  Jupe’s voice broke in. “I ride with you? Yes?”

  “We’re loaded,” Branaugh growled, “but we’ll make room. Throw this man out and well let you ride. Make it quick. Be back in sixty seconds. We’ll wait.”

  Jupe came at Keller grinning. His huge steel arms locked over the workman’s chest, almost cutting off the hard breathing.

  They whirled out through the locks together. Then instead of releasing Keller and chasing back to the ship, Jupe carried him on toward the two sleeping men several yards beyond. Mentally Keller was trying to count off those last minutes. They must be nearly gone—

  Peterson was mumbling, “. . . leaving us here to die . . .”

  “I know,” Stephens answered groggily. “Damn, what’ll that little blonde think? I promised her I’d—”

  “You go back with her!”

  The strange outburst came from Jupe. The two men roused up sleepily. Keller stood beside them, gazing at the hand that clamped, vise-like, on his wrist. Particularly he gazed at the engraved gold ring that adorned the little finger of that hand.

  “Jupe!” Keller exploded. “What does this mean?”

  The Jupiterian pointed to the engraving. “It say Heen. Just like me.” He lifted his left elbow and revealed some small blue letters tattooed on the inner side of his arm. “Heen—my father’s name. My name too. My mother you call Jupiter, she tell me before she die.

  “You’re John Heen’s son?”

  Jupe nodded, his husky face fairly bursting with smiles. “I find your Captain Branaugh is man who kills my father, steals his goods—”