The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Yes, you darned louse, and you stand there and grin about it.” Keller poured out his words with the bitterness of gall. “What a mess you’ve made. If you had had an ounce of your father’s honor in you, you’d have avenged that murder. We’d have helped you. But, instead, you frame us for mutineers, and the captain plays the whole bunch of us for suckers. As a son, you’re blasphemy on the name of John Heen—”

  “But what I have done—”

  “What you have done!” Keller smeared the words with his sickening disgust.

  “To the ship!” Jupe protested, his smile stiffening into something intense and purposeful. “I have fix the door to break, the boxes to slide and kill, the power to go pwoof!”

  “You’ve—what?”

  Brrwowrrrrrr—BLAMMMM!

  Like an explosion clattering through steel boilers came the thunder of rockets. The space freighter leaped from its sandy bed—leaped and fell.

  It happened almost with the swiftness of gunfire. In the instant of movement it had jumped through a quarter of a mile of space, tearing up a tremendous cloud of silver sand. Now it lay motionless. The sand sifted down like rain.

  Jupe caught Stephens and Peterson by the hands and made strides toward the silent ship, Keller hurrying alongside.

  The closer they came the prouder Jupe grew and the more amazed the other three men became. The rocket carriages, unbolted, had fallen off. A trail of unexploded rocket cartridges had spilled along the quarter-mile stretch.

  When they finally got through the air locks to the central corridor they saw the unhinged red star door. Steel boxes had avalanched the whole corridor and smashed the lower control room.

  Landsliding cargo is no respecter of persons, and mictorite proved to be no exception. There was no breathing left among what, a few minutes before, had been a murderous captain, his accomplicing mate, and two conspiring guards. There were only masses of bones and flesh and soaked clothing, mingled indistinguishably with crushed furniture and control instruments and pistols.

  “Extra upstairs controls are left for us,” Jupe announced, after making a crawling survey of the damages. “We have work to fix. I keep all parts I unfasten. You, Keller, can make ship go?”

  “Right,” said Keller. “If we can get things rearranged, I’ll fly you back to the earth.”

  “You would let me ride too?” Jupe asked, beaming.

  Keller and the others laughed. “I should say we will. In fact, we better make you captain, seeing that the cargo is yours—not to mention the head-work.”

  “The cargo I am glad to share,” said Jupe.

  “I hope,” said Keller, earnestly, “you’ll forget all those things I said. John Heen would be proud—”

  “It is all right,” Jupe laughed. “You earth men not always understand.”

  “I’m still a little dizzy,” said Peterson. “Why did you pull that trick to get us in bad with the captain?”

  Jupe paused, swinging a steel box effortlessly in his arms. “I weighed all the cargo. I learned the ship was too heavy. Someones would be left. So I do tricks to get good men out of way, before I make things go crash.” Jupe turned his laughter on Keller. Then you, Keller, throw fists. Almost nearly make us too late.”

  “Well, there’ll be plenty of time now,” said Keller. “Before that lifeboat of guards comes back to look for us we’ll be on our way—eh, Steve?” Stephens came out of his thoughts with a jerk. “Ugh? I was just thinking—when we take Jupe back to the earth, you suppose I oughta let him see my blonde? Kinda risky, considering she goes for the strong and handsome.”

  “It is all right,” said Jupe with a merry twinkle. “You bring her me for souvenir.”

  [*] This is really the truth. On Jupiter, where gravity is much greater than on Earth, it becomes a factor of tremendous importance in almost every action of its inhabitants. Buildings must be constructed to bear up under greater stress; application of power in any manner which combats gravitational influence must take that influence into greater consideration; the effect of swift movement on the body is greater, and greater dexterity and muscular reaction is necessary. Scientifically, there are hundreds of ways in which gravity plays a physical part in the daily life and work of a Jupiterian. It is only natural that a factor that has become so important results in a natural aptitude for analytic solutions to its problems, and the mathematics involved.

  THE MAN FROM THE FUTURE

  First published in Fantastic Adventures, November 1941

  Would a man from the future like living in our world? The answer is, he wouldn’t! But here he was, from 10,950 A.D.!

  Don’t get me wrong. This guy didn’t lift the street-car by himself. A dozen other fellows were heaving, and the truck that had bumped the thing off its tracks a couple of minutes before was tugging at a taut log-chain.

  But it was this big innocent tancheeked fellow in the soft gray topcoat and hat that really muscled the car back on its tracks. Then he backed into the crowd modestly and pulled out a silk handkerchief to brush the dust off his pink hands.

  Then and there opportunity knocked, and yours truly, Ham-and-Eggs Brown, jumped to answer. I sprang for the articles that spilled out of this guy’s handkerchief pocket. My chance to get next to him. Something told me there was money in them biceps.

  “Your notebook and money, mister—” I drew up out of the shuffle of feet to hand the fellow the silver coin and the little gray memo book—But he was gone—practically. I saw him, half a head above the crowd, making for the sidewalk. I darted after him. The congestion caught me. I charged around two fat men and took a shortcut under a news-camera. By that time the fellow was out of sight.

  I looked at the stuff in my hands. The coin went to my pocket automatically. The notebook hung disturbingly in my fingers.

  I drifted into the first restaurant, turned the pages of the notebook over a plate of spagetti. The notes were shorthand of some sort. Might as well try to read my spagetti.

  But here was a patch of neat long-hand.

  Must brush up on archaic writing. The final entry was in the same legible hand:

  Underwent the test. No ill effects. The time-transfer was instantaneous. Arrived at the ancient year of 1950—a 9000 year jump. Fine sunny day, but noise and smoke are terrible. Otherwise, so far so good. Must get busy at once.

  I pushed my spagetti aside, gulped my ice-water, mopped my brow. The date of that entry was May 10, 10,950!

  Reaching into my pocket for aspirins I found the coin. It was screwy too. Dated 10,945. And worn. The letters said, Twenty-five Cents. America.

  Not U. S. A. Just America. I looked around to see if some gagster was watching over my shoulder. Hell, if this thing was on the level the guy that heaved that street-car was no mere Hercules, he was a gold mine! He needed a promoter. Ham-and-Eggs Brown to the rescue! Bundle this fellow off to Hollywood—

  But where would I find him? A chill hit me. Darned if I hadn’t let him slide right through my lunch-hooks and lose himself among four million—

  A shadow crossed my unfinished spagetti and I looked up to see the well filled gray topcoat and hat crossing in front of me. I almost leaped.

  “Steady, Ham!” I said to myself. “He might be delicate. Don’t scare him off. Don’t—ah!”

  The fellow had forgotten his check. I picked it up, started after him, at the same time glancing in his notebook for his name.

  “Mr. Destinoval.”

  The fellow whirled and a passing waiter jumped to avoid a spill.

  “Your check, Mr. Destinoval.” I gave him my suavest smile. “Also the things you spilled by the street-car.”

  As his hand closed over the articles I got a good look at his face. Aside from being contorted with bewilderment it was a good face, one to compare with your favorite movie hero. A trifle less heavy on the jaw, a bit bulgier on forehead. Something sensitive in his features like a well-bred racehorse. At the sound of his name his ears pinkened, his crisp eyelashes flickered.

 
Then he managed a smile and uttered some words too fast for me to understand, which I took to mean thank you.

  “My name is Ham Brown, Mr. Destinoval—”

  The introduction was lost. He was off. He strode past the cashier, never stopping to pay.

  The cashier shouted and a little dried apple of a manager and two husky waiters caught their cue and bounded outdoors after him. I slapped my money down and gave chase, overtaking them approximately two pie-throws down the street.

  The argument was painfully onesided. The little dried apple waved his fists and cursed the air blue. Destinoval looked scared to death—obviously up to his ears in trouble. So I plunged.

  “I’ll pay it.”

  The glares turned on me. But as quick as J. D. Destinoval saw he was supposed to fork over his check, I put some cash with it and the matter was settled. Dried apple and bodyguard trooped off grumbling contentedly.

  This time I grabbed my protégé by the sleeve and hung on.

  “Why’d you do it, pal? Don’t you know no better?”

  What he answered buzzed off his tongue fast enough to put a tobacco auctioneer to shame. I didn’t get a word of it.

  “Come again,” I said, “or ain’t you hep to English?”

  He gave me the same scared eye he’d wasted on the restaurant manager and tried to pull away. I bulldogged his coatsleeve all the way to the stoplight. Then I let go. Two cops and a plainclothes on the other side of the street were looking our way hungrily.

  We backed into a doorway and my protégé talked on.

  “Hold it!” I said. “Is that the way you talk where you come from?”

  He nodded eagerly. He rattled on, pointing first to me and then to the gray memo book. His eyes brightened as we came to an understanding.

  “Yes, I read a little of it.” I admitted. “That’s where I got your name. If you’re on the level about coming back from 10,950—”

  He almost hugged me, he was so excited. He shook both my hands at once. Out of the wild rattle of his words I caught exactly nothing. I broke in:

  “Listen, partner, you need a friend and I’m it. I’m your general manager, see?” I flashed a card at him. “Promoter, that’s my business. We’ll draw up a contract. But first you’ve got to slow down that sixteen cylinder jabber—Quiet! We can’t both talk at once . . . What’s that . . . Say it again . . . Slow! . . . Slower!”

  Gradually I throttled him down and his smooth rich voice made sense.

  “I’m at sea, my dear atom-smasher.” He was addressing me with a term of endearment, as I later learned. “Why can’t we both talk at once?”

  “It’s bad manners.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when one guy’s talking the other oughta listen.”

  “That’s absurd,” he said. “Can’t you talk and listen at the same time?”

  “Maybe you can,” I said skeptically. “Of course. It’s perfectly good etiquette as long as not more than six talk at once. It takes five or six to round out a conversation, in my times, and nobody misses a word.”

  “You’re back in the twentieth century now, brother,” I advised. “A word to the wise. And another thing—this business of walking out on your bills—” Anxiety flickered through his face. This was a matter he’d tried to ask about, he said, but no one had understood him. I questioned him and saw there was a trouble cloud gathering.

  You see, he carried a head full of dangerous notions. They might be good for 10,950 but they were screwball for 1950.

  “I supposed food was free,” he said. “Now in my times—”

  “These ain’t your times,” I snapped. He squinted an eye at me.

  “Do you pay to walk on the sidewalks? To sit in the parks?”

  “Of course not. That’s public. Everybody uses the streets and parks—

  “My point exactly,” he said. “In my times everybody uses food and beds. The public pays the bill from our taxes. If a man needs a room at a hotel—”

  “Great guns! Don’t tell me you’ve walked out on a hotel bill!”

  My answer came in action stronger than words. The cops and the plainclothes man had crossed the street toward us. The plainclothes, who happened to be the house dick at the Ingerbond Hotel, thrust a thumb at my friend and muttered,

  “That’s him. Professional deadbeat, most likely.”

  “We’ll let the judge look into it,” said a cop.

  As they led him to a wagon he looked back with a hint of scare in his movie-star face and called, “Don’t forget, you’re my manager.”

  I grabbed a car for the police station.

  Then remembering I was short on ready cash I back-tracked, through a time-costly traffic jam, to the Daily Beacon. I brushed past the city editor and hove up at the desk labeled: VELMA MACK, SOCIETY.

  “She’s not in,” growled Split-Infinitive, the rewrite man.

  “Give her my love,” I said. “Tell her bluebirds are singing. She’ll get that vacation to Atlantic City. I’m taking her myself.”

  Split looked me up and down. “When’d your rich uncle die?”

  “None of that. I’ve just made the discovery of the year—a man with uncanny talents—hell, he’s colossal! I’m giving him six months on vaudeville—I’ve got an in, you know—then Hollywood.”

  Split lit a cigarette.

  “What’s his name?”

  “J.D. Dest—” I considered. This man from the future needed a name that would look well in the headlines. Ah—“John Doe Destiny.”

  I sat down at Velma Mack’s desk to write her a note. A cigar was burning in her ash tray and the aroma caught me.

  “Beau Tassel’s been here.”

  Split nodded.

  “His Detroit fights were called off.”

  “I don’t like the way he comes borrowing money from Velma.”

  “He didn’t. Just came to say he’d take her on her Atlantic City vacation—”

  “He’d take her!” I bounced up from the chair. “Hell, that won’t do. Anyway he can’t swing it—”

  “He was dressed up like a million.” I writhed. If Beau was sporting a new outfit, he’d dipped into our prize money again—that three hundred dollar radio contest award that had brought him and Velma and me together in an off-the-record corporation.

  “Beau claimed he’d sighted a bonanza.” Split opened the noon edition to a picture of the derailed street-car. It showed the dozen men heaving and the center one was John Doe Destiny. The staff artist had drawn a question mark on Destiny’s back. The story started off.

  Who is he?

  Who is the mysterious Hercules that swung the street-car back on its tracks and disappeared in the crowd before the reporters could . . .

  The thing caught me in the ribs.

  “Is that all Beau Tassel had to go on?”

  “He said he’d round up this he-man and make a heavyweight champ out of him. If you ask me, Velma went along to throw a monkey-wrench.”

  “Went where? They’ll never find him. I’m the only one who knows—”

  “Don’t kid yourself. One reporter over at the police station called in twenty minutes ago to say the guy they’d dumped in cell seventeen was—” I leaped from the desk and caught up my hat on the run. Outside the door I hailed a taxi and was off.

  The cop dozing in the tilted chair inside the rear door of the station opened one eye at me. I flashed my card at him and he let the eye fall closed. I strode back to seventeen. John Doe Destiny was there. And no one else, thank goodness. I assumed that Velma and Beau hadn’t come yet. I extended my friendliest hand through the bars.

  “Ah my friend—”

  The man from the future ignored the hand. He blew his nose into his silk handerchief, rolled his watery eyes like a prize bull at a livestock show suffering with nostalgia. I threw in a load of good cheer.

  “I’ll have you out right away, old man. I’ve got big plans for you—no, don’t thank me now. Wait till we’ve cleaned up—”

  “I’
m sick!” John Doe Destiny moaned. “I’ve been back in this bygone age only twenty-four hours and I’ve already contracted one of your deadly diseases.”

  I gulped.

  “What the hell?

  “I’ve got a cold.”

  “In twenty-four hours? Must have had it coming on when you left home.”

  “We don’t have colds back home,” he blubbered. “I think I’ll go back.”

  “Oh, no. You couldn’t. You just got here. I’ve got to make Atlantic—er—you’ve got a career to think of, my boy. Come, brace up!”

  “I’ll probably die. I’ve no resistance.” He took time out for sniffles. He really had ’em.

  “Take it easy. Anybody in the pink like you—” I paused and turned the subject. “What kind of athlete were you back home? How’d you come to be so strong?”

  “I’m just average,” he said; but after I prodded him a little he opened up on his past, nine thousand years in the future. Everybody was in fine health there, he said. You had to be, or pay a fine for your negligence. He believed that scientific diet and exercise must have improved the race considerably, judging from what he had seen of us poor denizens of 1950.

  While he talked I jotted a contract on an envelope. I’d get an exclusive on this mint.

  “You haven’t told anyone about yourself but me, have you?” I asked.

  “At first I tried to tell everyone,” he said, “but nobody understood. I never knew I was talking too fast till you told me.”[*]

  “I’m your doctor, J. D. Put your trust in me. Your whirlwind talk and street-car lifting and ability to hear six conversations will make you a top-notch attraction. Six months of footlights, then klieg. Sign here, Desty, and we’ll transpose it onto sheepskin later.”

  He reached through the bars but didn’t take the pen. He patted me on the shoulder.

  “Brown, you’re a real atom-buster. Tonight when I flash back through time I’ll remember you as my best friend from these ancient days.”

  I was touched. The fellow was both sick and homesick. The bitter truth was, he’d got his stomach full of twentieth century in twenty-four hours.