by Don Wilcox
These may be the last words I’ll get to write. Nazi bombers have circled over.
Gaston has not returned.
Madeline, so far as I know, still hasn’t learned her father’s awful secret. Until a few minutes ago she was lying on the bed weeping. She thinks her father must have murdered the four Heffles. He denied it, of course, but his face has been white and stony, and he has loaded a pistol, knowing that the governor is sure to discover—
I’ve tried several times to write brief messages to Madeline, but so far I’ve had no luck—
The bombers are coming—
Madeline and Dujardin are carrying valuables down into the tunnel . . .
I return to my journal, hoping to complete another brief entry.
The ruin was almost complete. The governor got more than he bargained for. Besides bombing of these laboratories the Nazis decided to turn the whole island into a grave-yard. They landed in boats, set fire to houses, demolished the governor’s mansion, marched up the hillsides killing every living thing in their path.
Both Gaston and the governor arrived here just as the shambles began. Gaston helped Madeline and her father pack things into the tunnel—and he gave them the big news—that there were two Raymond Quintons—the real one, and me, a double.
The governor raved like a mad man, until little Gaston had to knock his teeth in to shut him up. The governor knew now that we, the butterflies, had killed his henchmen.
And Dujardin, for once, minced no words and dodged no issues. He had turned ten men into butterflies, and he was all set to add a few more specimens to his collection. Wherever the bombs dropped, they’d never reach the amber lantern or the synthetic butterfly hatchery, he said.
Most surprising to me was the way Madeline stood up under it all. The faith that she had in her father was something I’ll never forget. She wasn’t flinching from bombs, and she wasn’t unnerved to hear the blunt truth about the game of murder-and-butterfly.
“Did you already know?” Her father turned the question on her sharply.
“I’ve been reading all about it,” she said, “in a journal written by a butterfly.” She looked over her shoulder to see me fluttering through the tunnel entrance after her. She nodded with a quick smile. “Quinton—or whatever your name is, I know you now. Stay with us—”
Blasts drowned her voice. The bombs were going to catch us on this round. And they did.
Then there was a lull, and I found my way out into the open. The ground forces were coming up fast. I saw Gaston ride across the narrows to the Portugal side. Dujardin had invited him to share the tunnel, but Gaston had refused, having seen too much of the Nazi tactics back on the continent. He was sure the tunnel would be as thoroughly blitzkrieged as the rest of the island.
I saw Governor Revel try to follow Gaston for a steel cable escape. The governor’s terror was pitiful to see. He had brought this death on himself, but he still thought he could escape it. When he found the pulley gone, he ran back to the laboratory, tried to break into the tunnel entrance. It stood solid against his blows. Fire was crackling from the front of the mansion. Light tanks were crushing the zig-zagging chain of laboratories.
The governor raced back to the steel cable. I flew along to a sheltered spot on the bank to watch him. He tried to cross, hand over hand. It was slow going. Well out over the water he struggled to hang on. Then a plane zoomed down spraying machine-gun bullets and riddled him. He dropped to the water, a mass of shreds . . .
All has been quiet for many days. Eventually there will be more activity, for the armed force that spared no life—except for a few insects—will soon come in greater numbers. They will turn what was once a laboratory for life into a fortress of death.
There was so little left of the white-brick mansion that I had to search many hours before finding the ink and the book that make up this journal.
But where life has been wiped out, there life will begin again.
Today two new creatures emerged from a slab of porous pink colored rock that always reminds me of a huge piece of taffy candy.
They were damp, helpless creatures until their wings had had time to stiffen. But their little bodies, like my own, were human in form.
The larger of the two was a little man with a round though slightly wrinkled face, sharp eyes that were courageous, however tiny. He flew at once to inspect the ruins of the building, and when he came back there was an interesting glint of good cheer in his funny little face. The amber windows that we would need someday, he told us in his piping voice, were still standing.
Then the wings of the other little creature began to spread proudly. She was a lovely yellow butterfly, but her round little face was framed in the luxurious spun-gold hair, and her body was a perfect little female figure, as graceful as her glorious yellow wings.
“Now we’re even,” she said to me in a funny little voice. “Really, it won’t be so bad, being butterflies for awhile. And father thinks—and I do too—that sometime, after the danger is over—”
I’m not just certain just what she was going to say, for at that moment the four other synthetic butterflies came out of hiding to join the reunion.
Which reminds me, the thing I dislike most about being a human butterfly is the lack of privacy. These butterfly instincts—I must hide. Some people are coming to look over these ruins.
THE MAN WHO TURNED TO SMOKE
First published in Fantastic Adventures, June 1942
Jap bombs fell on Chungking and a strange thing happened to cameraman Virgil Lamstead.
Bombs were dropping over Chungking. They were blasting yellow rocks up in fountains of death.
I, Virgil Lamstead, an American cameraman, stood near the entrance of a public bomb shelter. I saw the stream of explosions coming straight toward me. If I kept on taking pictures I would be blown to bits. I grabbed my camera and the package of chemicals I had brought to leave at a laboratory. I ran down the shelter steps.
“Let me in!” I shouted in my best Chinese. Then I screamed it. “Let me in!”
An iron clank sounded against the din of bombs. The door was closed, locked. I was on the outside.
Then it happened, and there was no escape. The bomb explosion blew me high into the air.
“So this is death!”
It would have been, under ordinary circumstances. But once in ten million—or maybe ten billion—times, the forces of nature conspire to do strange things. I turned into living smoke.
At first I couldn’t believe it. I was shooting up through a smudgy cloud of smoke, dirt, and debris. Broken rocks were flying past my body. My camera had been knocked out of my hands.
The package of chemicals was gone too. In fact, the chemicals and I had gone together. They had saved me—or changed me—or was this death?
It was not. It was some new amazing form of life. I was endowed with a completely altered body. I had the most curious sensations of fluffiness and weightlessness.
Yes, I had turned into living smoke. I wasn’t exactly breathing. I was just rolling and swelling in the air. The big smoke cloud from the bomb explosion pressed against me as lightly as a baby’s kiss.
I was still rising.
The smoke thinned around me and began spreading in all directions. I began to spread too.
Horrors! My arms and legs—if such they were—were trailing after me like pipe smoke.
As I floated over the Yangtze River I looked down and saw my gray reflection in the muddy waters. That puffy blotch of cloud was me.
Then I saw something else. Another squadron of bombers was coming over. Soon bombs rained down. I squirmed to get out of their path. Yes, I could move!
Though I climbed around rather sluggishly, I gradually succeeded in drawing what I called my arms and legs closer together. Soon I was such a compact wad of smoke that I felt crowded. I was no bigger than a ricksha.
Then a bomb dropped through me, squarely through what should have been my stomach.
“This end
s me!” I thought.
Far from it. The bomb made my smoky body spread out and I felt better, actually. What strange sensations of breeziness.
In a few minutes I learned. When the winds spread me too thin I could easily draw myself together. By growing smaller I changed my specific gravity. Then by taking advantage of the air currents I could move anywhere I desired.
By this time the raid was over, and people were filtering out of the hundreds of bombshelters, bringing back their valuables and office supplies and shopping bags, to resume their day.
In many places over the city the fire fighters were working like Trojans to get the blazes under control. The helmeted firemen were still tearing through the streets aboard motors cars, and everywhere were volunteer bands of coolies. I floated over to see how they were doing.
I sifted down between some buildings to watch.
A Chinese boy who was on fire guard duty saw me. He jumped over a pile of rubbish and streaked down the hillside. I couldn’t think what was wrong with him until I heard him whooping a fire alarm.
Some civilian firefighters heard him and came racing up the hillside carrying buckets of water. They manned a hand pump and turned a hose on me.
The cool water felt wonderful while it lasted, and I mentioned to myself then and there that I was going to spend my idle hours right down on the surface of the Yangtze to take advantage of those cool soothing sensations.
But now—well, I couldn’t stand to see those people work so hard for nothing. I rose into the air and spread myself thin. The fire fighters muttered with grim satisfaction that they had made short work of that one. They ran on the other blazes.
Now I felt very despondent.
Anyone would feel the same way if he found himself in my plight. For as matters appeared, I was doomed to a lonely life. If I’d try to mix with people I’d be sure to cause a fire alarm.
For awhile I was very blue smoke.
I watched the other smoke clouds melting into the sky. I did some heavy thinking. Was there anything in the world I could do besides making a nuisance of myself? Did I have any chance to be useful?
I remembered what George Leahman had said after the first Chungking bombing we took in together. “Where there’s smoke, there’s waste.”
I turned that over in my thoughts and grew bluer. “But at least I’m alive,” I said to myself. “Not even a bomb could kill me now.”
I was sure of that much, because one had gone through me. What a state to be in. Half dead, you might say. In fact, to all the people I had known I would be dead and gone. And still, I might be doomed to live forever, since bullets couldn’t—
I heard the cry of a girl beside a wrecked and burning building.
I knew that cry. It was the little nineteen-year-old Chinese girl that George Leahman and I had called Chestnut Eyes. She was an errand girl for the medical supplies department. I swooped down to her.
In that moment I felt new powers. You will doubtless smile that I should mention a sensation of new powers at this particular juncture. But you can scarcely conceive of the extreme helplessness and clumsiness that had at first possessed me upon my transformation to smoke. And now, for the first time, I had a purpose looming vaguely before me, urging me to try my new capacities to the limit.
Yes, gradually I was gaining a much stronger control of my faculties of twisting and squirming and combating air currents.
Coming closer, I saw the dangerous situation that surrounded Chestnut Eyes. The sight made me turn into little whirling eddies of smoke. She had been wounded. She lay near the burning house, sobbing with pain.
I swept down as swiftly as I could. The breeze I created only fanned the flames. That would never do.
I crowded close to the girl trying to blanket her with protection. Her clothes had been partially torn from her body, her left foot was losing blood from an ugly gash. Her eyes were nearly closed. Obviously she did not know the danger she was in.
The flames licked the air within a few inches of her head.
Now I drew part of my smoky body over her face. I cut off her breathing. She fought for air. I hovered as tightly as I could between her and the fire. And then success began to reward my efforts. She turned instinctively away from the blaze.
I followed. I forced her to keep turning for air. Soon she was well away from the flames, breathing easily.
In a few moments the firemen came running up. The sight of smoke near her—for in my sympathy, I had lingered near her—had attracted them. They called for a stretcher. And so as I thinned into the upper air I knew she was being cared for, I had found one way, at least, of being useful.
Darkness came over Chungking.
Most of the fires had been soaked into smoldering heaps. The job of searching the wreckage for salvage and dead bodies would go on all night. I drifted back to the bomb shelter where I had been blown to smoke.
George Leahman was there. So was Bill Washmore. And several coolies were there looking for me.
Now I felt more helpless than at any time since the change.
“Don’t be troubled about me!” I shouted it—but my shout was nothing they could hear. My efforts at speech didn’t carry to them in the slightest. I wasted my smoky breath.
“Here’s some scraps of his camera,” Washmore said.
“I don’t think so,” said George. “He wouldn’t run off from his camera.”
“He might get blown off. Look.”
“You’re right, Bill. That was his camera. He’s been blown to hell.”
They kicked around over the stones and rubbish. They decided I might be under it. They got shovels and started digging. I tried to stop them. I coiled around them and threatened their eyes and nostrils with smoke.
“Can you imagine it? There’s fire under this rock,” George said. “What could it be?”
“We won’t find Lam alive,” said Bill. “But we’ll keep looking. Anyway I’ve got nothing better to do. If it takes all day tomorrow what’s the difference?”
“We’ll find him,” said George.
The way they said it tore my spirit to shreds. It’s an awful thing to have to see a fellow’s friends fighting for him that way, digging and sweating all the night through, even when they know he can’t possibly be alive. I couldn’t endure it. I drifted away.
The raids on Chunking came and went, and the millions of people that were threatened everytime the planes hummed high, higher and higher over the city established themselves in the routine. It took a lot of courage to defy those savage air-birds.
Take Chestnut Eyes, for instance. She was a regular little dynamo of courtage. When she wasn’t busy on errands she would get groups of children together and teach them patriotic songs.
She made up a little catchy melody about the whistles that blew after the air-raid alarms were over. The tune began to spread, and soon thousands of people were singing it.
“Whooo—OOO—ooo—we’re still fighting!”
That was the way it started, opening like the after-raid whistle. And when raids were over you would hear it all up and down the streets. Children would sing it, and so would the shopkeepers and merchants trudging back from their shelters, and the civilian street menders as they went to work clearing debris.
But Chestnut Eyes’ most urgent job was to keep the medical supplies moving to all the branch stations. Before her foot had healed she was back at work, sometimes using children to help her, but more often accepting the good-natured assistance of George Leahman and Bill Washmore. The three of them were often together after George and Bill had finished their news reports for the day.
Then came a fatal night when everything changed. Bill and George were to be transferred. They packed their goods, they said their farewells to Chestnut Eyes. And the three of them talked of me.
I had thought I was best forgotten; but now, as I listened, I knew my supposed tragedy had always been close to the surface.
“Virgil Lamstead left a few things,” George said to
Chestnut Eyes. “They’re still in that shaky old stone laboratory, and now—they’re yours—if you want them.”
“He was a bit goofy about you, you know,” Bill added.
The two newsmen got away safely, but that evening the bombings came. And Chestnut Eyes, who had gone straight to the old stone laboratory building, fell into a trap.
Or to be more accurate, the trap fell upon her. For she had failed to heed the warnings of a coming air raid. When a,shower of bombs began dropping in that vicinity the jolt loosened the seams of the building and shook its walls and ceilings like an earthquake.
A window frame caught her, and a ton of debris rolled down to fasten her under it.
I tried to blow the dust away so she could breathe. It was awful to see her there trapped. What could I do? Nothing—not unless I could somehow attract some rescue workers.
She put up a valiant struggle until she succeeded In freeing herself, all except her ankle. But there she was caught in an unbreakable vise.
At that moment the fuller peril became evident. The wall hung above her like a tower of blocks. With every distant bomb-jolt it swayed. She saw, and then her eyes closed. Her lips were tight together and her fingers crushed into her cheeks.
The blasts were coming closer again. Inch by inch that shuddering wall was bending over. The countless tons of stone were actually swaying at the slightest pressure of the wind. Death was a certainty now, for I saw that this section of the city was completely deserted, and the vibrations of bombs were striding toward us.
Yes, death was a certainty. But there was something in the room where Chestnut Eyes was trapped that jolted me to attention. My laboratory properties—that package of chemicals—that was it. It was my only chance.
For I remembered that these chemicals were the same as the ones I had had on that fatal day—
I rushed like a hurricane, hurled myself down the street toward a burning house. Here were flaming timbers and paper, caught by the first bombs of the evening. I hurled myself in a gust of wind against the burning papers.
