The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  He tapped his head modestly and smiled. Then a vengeful light came in his single eye. He related that he was the victim of thousands—yes, millions—of thefts. Every inventor in the world stole ideas from him. “Every planet is guilty. Your Earth inventors are shams. Where did they get their television, their space ships, their interplanetary telephones? Out of my mind!”

  “How?” Smith asked. “Do they come here and read your blueprints?”

  “Nothing so simple,” the inventor sneered. “My inventive mind is so potent its emanations fill all space. I can’t hold the power back—What are you looking at?”

  Smith had sauntered to the edge of a nearby patch of blackness—close enough to see that it was a deep black pit.

  “I was just making a few notes,” said Smith.

  “What for?” came the suspicious bark.

  “A report for the Boosters’ Club annual.”

  “So you’re stealing my secrets too!” the inventor hissed. “You’ve discovered my magic well—the one secret I had left. Now you know. You’ve seen the magic liquid.”

  “Magic?” Smith glanced down at the black slimy water a hundred feet down. “What does it do?”

  “That,” the inventor smiled, “we shall see—as soon as the liquid is within reach. I’m filling the hole up with rocks—with bones—with anything. It was nice of you to come along. I can use you.”

  The tricycle lurched forward, the inventor’s arm struck out. Smith, notebook, and pencil went flying over the edge to plummet down into blackness.

  I jogged back to Professor Kolo, who had sauntered on a few minutes before. “Where’s Smith?” he asked. “What was that deep splash I heard?”

  “Splash?” I grunted. “Gushy conversation, no doubt. Smith and the inventor are getting on famously.”

  The professor mumbled uncomfortably. He was a bit worried over the way everyone had dropped out. Everything had been so strange—every Big Shot had been so bitterly suspicious.

  “Ah, there’s something familiar, anyway,” he said, brightening. We had come back to our starting point on Circle Street and only a few yards beyond was the conspicuous eighty-foot spire where we had first shaken hands with the city greeter.

  In the dim light we saw the little ragged brown old man, now loitering at the base of his throne. The sight of him uncorked the professor’s conversational enthusiasm. Here was a chance, Kolo must have said to himself, to restore his morale from the beating it had taken at the hands of the “God of the Universe.” He would walk over and have another chat with the city greeter.

  At our approach the little old brown man made tracks up the ladder-like ascent. He had picked up two bricks from the ground, and these objects he lugged all the way up with him.

  By the time we made the climb to the summit of his stone spire he was seated securely in his throne, weighing a brick in each hand.

  “Hello, friend,” said Professor Kolo with a broad smile. “Since we saw you last we’ve had quite an eventful dayee.” He was careful to draw out that last word with the precise pronunciation that the greeter had used before.

  “Not dayee,” the ragged little man corrected with great dignity. “The pronunciation is day ah. How many times I’ve had to correct the monarch on that word. The monarch always relied on me. He gave me these tokens—”

  With these words the ragged little man lifted the two bricks high over his head, looking up at them with pride.

  “But that isn’t the’way you told it before!” the professor yelped excitedly. “It was a chunk of marble—and the pronunciation was—”

  At this point I found myself scrambling down the stone peak as fast as I could go. But before I could get out of earshot the sudden flare-up took its inevitable turn, and the result was instantaneous treachery.

  Professor Kolo beat me down. He whizzed past me so close he almost knocked me off. I heard him land—flump!

  I hugged the handholds until the barrage of bricks and stone had shot down on him. Even in that sickening moment I felt the tension though my shoulder muscles completely vanish. I slipped nimbly down the last of the eighty-foot descent, clambered over the professor’s dead form, and went on my way.

  By the time I reached the space ship a message had taken form in my mind. I would have the pilot send it at his earliest opportunity.

  Lights were aglow in the fore end of the ship. By this time a red semidarkness had enveloped the whole landscape—reflected light from the vast heavenly body that hovered across the center of the deep blue.

  I entered by the salon locks. I pencilled a message, “Relay information to STS that all members of the Boosters party have been taken care of.—Mister Eee.” I hung it on the spindle.

  But just as I was starting into the control room to announce my return to the pilot, I heard his voice. Someone else was in there talking with him.

  Who could it be? Someone from this jagged city? Or someone from the outside world?

  Through the porthole in the farther wall I saw the dim outlines of a flivver ship anchored eighty or a hundred yards away. So the pilot’s visitor, whoever he was, had just pulled in from the outside world and had come over to this ship for a talk.

  And yet he was speaking authoritatively on these space regions—and in a voice with a certain unforgetable quality—

  I crept to the partition, peered through a crack at the base of the service window. The visitor was a husky white-coated fellow with bristling black eyebrows.

  “Your instruments haven’t lied,” the white-coat was saying. “You’re not on Jupiter. You’re on one of its moons.”

  “I knew it,” the pilot snapped decisively. “That checks with the figures I’ve been laboring over all day. I was asleep when we landed—”

  “Rather a bad break, landing here,” said the white-coat. “This is the asylum moon where we’ve isolated the insane. What’s worse, you’ve bumped into the most dangerous spot on the whole satellite: the settlement of our worst paranoiacs.”

  “Paranoiacs?”

  “They’re a treacherous lot,” said the white-coat, “unless you know exactly how to handle them . . .”

  With every word I overheard I shrank backward, toward the salon locks.

  “They’re the most highly self-inflated, most terribly persecuted creatures in the world,” said the white-coat. “That is, they think they’re persecuted. That’s why they’re dynamite. Woe unto anyone who crosses their path, or laughs at them, or meddles with their private worlds. You see, each paranoid lives within his own highly organized delusions. In his own mind he is a great conqueror—or a millionaire—or a messiah—”

  “You say they’re dangerous?” the pilot’s voice was a choked gulp.

  “They’ll murder without warning. Outsiders will blunder innocently into their dream worlds—and suddenly, rather than let their dream worlds be smashed, the paranoiacs will smash the intruders. Zip!—they’ll let go with an ax murder—or something fancier along the same lines—”

  “My God!” The pilot’s fearful gasp made the door between us shudder. “What will happen to—”

  “Whats the matter, man?”

  “There’s been a hellova mistake!” the pilot cried. He flung the control room door open just as I was starting out through the salon locks. I froze.

  “Oh, there you are—thank goodness,” the pilot looked relieved.

  “Just coming in,” I replied blithely, sauntering over to him. His white-coated visitor stood in the control-room doorway gazing at me steadily. I ignored him, directed my words to the pilot. “I’ve left the Boosters back in the Capital City—”

  “This isn’t the Capital City!” the pilot exploded. “It isn’t even Jupiter—”

  “Mister Eee!” The visitor’s dark eyebrows shot up in surprised recognition. “What are you doing in this ship?”

  “I’m a guide for STS, sir,” I said. “I tour the world’s Big Shots around to see the sights.”

  “Oh?” The white-coat gave a slight nudge a
nd a meaningful eye to the pilot, who was too bewildered by this meeting to know what it was all about. Then the visitor came down to me with a friendly outstretched hand. “You remember me, Mr. Eee. I’m one of the doctors from Jupiter. I’m your friend. I’ve been looking for you all over the Solar system.”

  “For me?” I said.

  “So you’ve come back,” said the white-coat, smiling gently. “That’s a good fellow. You haven’t been into any mischief, I hope? Come along, now.” The pilot followed us through the locks. The white-coat motioned me to walk ahead, and he turned back to have a word with the pilot at the side of the ship.

  “Speaking of curious cases, this Mr. Eee has a very complex record, but his most persistent delusion is that someone is going to stab him in the back.”

  In the dim light I could see the pilot’s eyes bug wide. “You mean he—”

  The white-coat whispered something I couldn’t hear. He added, “Then again he may not . . . So far as the local staff knows, he’s never been guilty of any violence—not since he’s been confined here.”

  The white-coat led me back to Circle Street.

  Sometime after big red Jupiter had slipped down under the horizon, the pilot and his ship charged off into space. The echoes of the rocket motors thundered among the buildings and peaks of purple stone.

  The white-coated doctor’s ship would leave later. He and the local staff were quite busy, for the present, making their extended rounds of Circle Street.

  Which meant that I would soon have callers. So I strolled around the premises of my house and made sure that everything was shipshape for company. Yes, the string of green lights that hung along the cornices of my house were all burning.

  RAINBOW OF DEATH

  First published in Amazing Stories, January 1942

  This was a pleasure resort, but that mist out on the lake wasn’t pleasant. Something mysterious went on in it—something deadly . . .

  CHAPTER I

  Deep in the lavender mists that fill the caverns within the earth, the nine hundred and ninety-nine Servants of Death are laboring, even as they have labored through all of the earth’s past and will continue to labor for an eternity of future time to come.

  Each stroke of their phantom hands erases a name.

  Through the subterranean lavender forests, where names of the earth’s living creatures appear like foliations in the bark of living trees, these Servants of Death move to and fro, performing their services. At this hour, this minute, and this second, they are distributing their death strokes. With infinite care they choose. They work according to their own esoteric formulas that have been in operation since human life began.

  Death, indeed, is their service to mankind.

  Perhaps man, in his thoughtlessness or lack of understanding, often fails to appreciate the work of his nine hundred and ninety-nine Servants of Death. But whether they be praised or censured, they continue to walk the misty paths of their hidden world, performing their indispensable function.

  The process of choosing is so very intricate that man can only speak of it as Fate, something blind, devoid of logic. Sometimes even the Servants of Death themselves have momentary confusions over a choice, so that nine of them must take counsel over a name before it can be erased.

  It is not for man to understand the ways of this hidden world.

  The myriad trunks and branches of the lavender forest lift high through the opaque lavender mists, up toward the earth’s crusts. These subterranean treelike columns are, in fact, the deepest roots of the earth’s life and death. They are not things of wood, nor of stone, but of some unknown materials as strong, as plastic, as organically responsive to stimulations as the most wonderful protoplasm that civilized man’s microscope has ever seen.

  Let the earth’s crust tremble with the thunder of man’s hatreds, his loves, his laughter. The vibrations filter down to these dynamic roots of life and death, to register man’s ultimate fate.

  Never is there a shortage of activity in this unknown realm. For new names continually appear upon the lavender columns. The lists are always long, no matter how swiftly the phantom hands may work.

  It is natural that the Servants of Death should speak the tongues of modern man; they also sometimes employ languages from past ages. Their forms of writing, too, are a strange mingling of modern and archaic.

  But these are only a few of the observations that any living man, if privileged to visit this mysterious underground region, would find intriguing. Undoubtedly such a visitor would be fascinated by the discussions of those nine Servants counselling over a debatable name . . .

  The name Londotte is still waiting for a decision.”

  “We shelved it before because it was interlocked with two others—a granddaughter and her friend.”

  “Shall we take all three? Londotte is well past his time.”

  “The other two are quite young. They aren’t at all ready.”

  “Most people aren’t.”

  “This is a case of a close attachment between a girl and her grandfather. Unfortunately, some action must be taken.”

  “Yes, his body is past serving him.”

  “Suppose we take both—what of the third?”

  “The third is a young man—the girl’s friend. It wouldn’t be easy to separate him from the others.”

  “Perhaps the young man could save the girl from the grandfather’s fate.”

  “He hasn’t the strength to draw her away. Only the strength to follow along.”

  “He’s very talented. His talent depends upon an audience.”

  “The hosts of death would furnish him an audience.”

  “Then shall we take all three?”

  The nine Servants were interrupted in their discussion by a communication that filtered down through the lavender columns. Someone was seeking admission at the door, miles above them, where one of the misty caverns made contact with the earth’s surface.

  “I’ll go up,” said one of the Servants of Death. “The caller is probably some innocent, looking for employment. Our agents on the surface are trying to secure a few more living workers who will make an effort to understand our policy.”

  “We had best postpone our decision on these three names,” said another. “I suggest we delay action for a fortnight.”

  CHAPTER II

  All along the decks of the pleasure cruiser Sunny Wave there were couples like Barbara and her boy friend, chasing, laughing, singing, spooning, watching the waves. The travel circulars had boasted that this was the merriest holiday excursion in the world, and the boast was justified.

  Even old Judge Londotte, Barbara’s pompous, aged grandfather, had forgotten most of his pet grouches for the moment. He had hired a boy to push him around the decks in a wheel chair, and the boy responded to his growl so obediently that the aged man was almost happy. He was never completely happy except when Barbara was pampering him.

  Just now she was off with her boy friend, probably listening to music. Her boy friend was a music addict. That was one of Judge Londotte’s pet grouches.

  This afternoon the dance orchestra aboard the Sunny Wave was holding a free-for-all for the amateur musicians aboard. So Larry LeBrac—Barbara’s Larry—was right up on the stage vocalizing. It gave the girl such a thrill, the way Larry’s voice magnetized the listeners, that she hurried down the deck to find her grandfather. He must hear, too.

  She rounded a corner and bumped squarely into someone—she was too breathless to notice whom—until he helped her to her feet and said, with an amused smile, “Not so fast, there, young lady.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If there isn’t a speed limit on these decks I’ll speak to the captain. And I’ll have him rig up a special stop light for you.”

  “Excuse me, I—” Barbara was slightly embarrassed. She had knocked a small, brightly bound booklet out of the young man’s hands. She started to pick it up. He bent down at the same time and their hands touched it simultaneously. It
was an elaborately engraved little volume, bound in purple leather.

  “Allow me,” said the young man, grinning broadly. “This book is very private—”

  “What lovely lettering!” The book was in Barbara’s hands, and she was at once fascinated. “Those little gold characters are Sumerian, aren’t they?”

  “Why, I—I don’t know.”

  “But of course they are. I’ve studied all about it. Sumerian is one of the oldest written languages. This book must be very valuable—”

  “Not quite so close to the rail, please, Miss—

  “Londotte—Barbara Londotte.”

  “I’m Wayne Early.”

  Barbara acknowledged the introduction with a half-interested, “How-do-you-do, Mr. Early,” and returned her attentions to the esoteric reading matter on the purple cover.

  “I can’t understand,” she said, “why you should be carrying a book with Sumerian characters on it if you don’t know how to read them.”

  “Well, it’s a long story. If you care to have dinner with me—”

  “I couldn’t think of it, thank you, Mr.—Mr.—”

  “Early is the name. I’m usually greeted by some wisecrack about being the early bird that gets the worm. But you’ve spared me. At least you’re different.”

  “I can’t think what you’d want with a worm,” said Barbara, appraising the young man’s neat appearance casually. Even with his hair blowing raggedly in the stiff breeze, he had the well-groomed look of the English post-war college student. But his speech was clearly American.

  “My book, Miss Londotte,” said Wayne Early, breaking her momentary gaze.

  “Is it all in Sumerian? . . . Why, the inside is English. That’s strange.”

  “Just a list of names—”

  “Judge Henry R. Londotte! That’s my grandfather. And here’s my name, too. And Larry LeBrac. You’ve got question marks after Larry and me. What’s this all about, Mr. Early? Are you working some kind of racket?”