The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Lester turned to Kirk.

  “Get the Red Wing ready. And get out of that monkey suit. You are spinning with me to Canada right away.”

  “Huh? What the devil—?”

  “No time to waste. We will be off in ten minutes.”

  “You say it weighs five tons and they are pickling it in alcohol? Come on, Allison, give me a hint.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Allison casually. “It’s a five-ton brain.”

  CHAPTER II

  A Mountainside of Protoplasm

  The truck wound around the mountain road at a slow speed. Professor Harley Haycox kept mumbling to himself, or if his voice became distinct occasionally, it was to order the driver to look out for that rock or slow down for that bump or take that corner easy. Or honk for that approaching car.

  “Pull into the side there, driver. There’s not room for us to pass. We will park and let the other fellow swing around us.”

  “He’s stopping, too,” the driver growled. “He’s coming over.”

  Professor Haycox leaned out through the door and lifted his spectacles. Sure enough, two figures were approaching on foot, and one of them waved a greeting. But Professor Haycox was so nervous about his cargo that he imagined these men might be dangerous highwaymen.

  “They are stopping us,” he whispered hoarsely to the driver. “They might be men from Ubruff’s Laboratories. Do you have a gun?”

  “Take it easy,” said the driver. “They look friendly. Can’t you see the grin spread all over that little fellow’s face?”

  Professor Haycox breathed a little easier and readjusted his spectacles.

  “They are little fellows, are they? That’s good. If they are from Ubruff’s we can handle them. We have got to get back to the Institute with this truck load. It’s a million-dollar specimen.”

  “You’ve told me that six times already,” said the driver.

  The taller of the two men called out, “Hello, there, Professor Haycox! I was afraid we had missed you. Where are you going with this big truck?”

  “Oh, it’s Allison. I didn’t suppose you would come out into these mountains.”

  Professor Haycox ambled down the road to meet the veteran space man.

  “It is most remarkable—most remarkable. The world has never seen anything like it. I will tell you the whole story.”

  “This is my friend, Kirk Riley,” Lester interrupted. “I had to bring him along. If there is a mystery involved, Kirk will be sure to give you all the wrong answers.”

  The Professor acknowledged the introduction and went on with his account. “The call came last Saturday, and everyone in the Institute was sure it must be a fake,” said the Professor, and his eyes shone with pride. “But I was determined to investigate. I maintained that it is these unusual and, I might say, unclassifiable phenomena that add the most momentum to our scientific progress. And so I gathered a small expedition of brawny man power—truck drivers, stevedores, and the like, and we set out to the scene of the accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “There was a mangled body across the mountain-side. An old French hermit was an eyewitness to its fall.”

  “From where?”

  “Right out of the skies,” he said. “He guessed it to be a twister, it came down in such a cloud of smoke. Then—splash—splash. And there it was. A major catastrophe. With gray colored blood flooding down into the ravines.”

  “Can we go back to it?” Lester Allison was scowling with skepticism.

  Kirk was tugging at his sleeve and nodding eagerly like a schoolboy. But he was disturbed by Lester’s apparent refusal to take the story at face value.

  “You are doubting it,” said the professor. “You are just like all the rest of the Institute. But I have the figures, and I have already arranged for a complete salvaging of the skeletal remains. And if you think it’s a fake—”

  “If it is a fake,” said Allison, “it’s the most stupendous thing I ever heard of. Have the reporters got hold of it yet?”

  Professor Haycox shook his head. “Everything’s under my hat. There’s too much rivalry among these scientific laboratories for me to give anything away. Especially between us and the Ubruff’s. They have literally stolen discoveries from us. Once they actually resorted to gunfire to beat us out of an anthropological treasure. But we have this brain, pickled, as you say, right in our truck, and by tomorrow I hope to have it under our microscopes.”

  “Very well,” said Lester, “we will go back with you.”

  “Ah, heck!” said Kirk Riley. “I wanted to see that mountainside where the thing crashed.”

  “If you want to hoof it, go ahead,” Allison suggested. “But I will return with the Professor.”

  “Go ahead. See you later,” said Kirk.

  He stood by the cliff’s side and watched the car roll away, followed by Professor Haycox’s mammoth truck. His curiosity was jumping off on many a tangent, and he wished, among other things, that he were on top of that truck looking down into the big steel tank. However, somewhere down the canyon the scene of the catastrophe waited. He trudged along, and soon gave up the hope of thumbing a ride. This road was little traveled. Perhaps that was the reason Professor Haycox had chosen it. There had been talk of trouble from a rival laboratory, Ubruff’s.

  Deeper in the canyon he observed the first signs of “the fallen body.” No one had said what kind of body it was. From the broken tops of trees, he might have guessed it an astronomical body. But those torn branches appeared to have been sprayed with some sort of gray liquid.

  Now he could hear the voices of workmen and see the tops of derricks that were at work hoisting huge objects out of the maze of rocks. These were Professor Haycox’s workmen. It was their responsibility to salvage all parts of this mysterious specimen. He approached them cautiously, and for a long time looked on the scene without being observed.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up sharply. He had supposed himself well hidden with these jagged rocks.

  “Hello, pal. Quite a sight, eh?”

  Kirk nodded, studying the newcomer suspiciously. The face was too friendly, the eyes quick and nervous. Perhaps this was only a stray farmer. He was dressed in overalls and a slouch jacket. His shoes belonged in an office—not on a mountain trail.

  “Musta been some little job, pickin’ up all that mess of jelly,” the stranger observed, grinning.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Well, I was a little late comin’ on the scene. They hauled the chief remnant away before I pulled in.”

  “What was that?” Kirk asked, more suspicious than ever.

  “Hell, I don’t know what you would call it. It was a big, globe-like affair, seven or eight feet across. It didn’t come out of a skull, exactly. Jest a ball of cartilage. Of all the freak animals—”

  “It’s a freak, all right,” Kirk admitted. “It must have been some sort of a flying whale or sea monster.”

  “No, I don’t reckon it was. There weren’t no bones to speak of. It was mostly a mass of jelly.”

  “How much do you think it weighed?” Kirk asked.

  The stranger allowed his eyes to run over the scene. The rocks for fifty yards around showed signs of being sprayed with the jelly-like gray substance.

  “Hard to guess,” the man drawled, “but thirty-five or forty ton wouldn’t miss it too far.”

  The two of them watched in silence for several minutes. It was interesting to see what care the workmen were using salvaging each particle, classifying according to size and structure.

  Kirk began to picture in his mind an imaginary creature that was all nerves and flesh—a gigantic jelly fish—that had somehow lived, not only without benefit of bone, but even without any tough covering of skin.

  “Whatever it was,” said Kirk, “it could not have lived in this world.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It fell, didn’t it? Well, then, it came from some other planet. Don’t ask me why or how. But y
ou can see for yourself that a creature of that kind could not have bumped up against the tough elements in our world.”

  Kirk was so well satisfied with his observation that he rose and started off. He would go to Lester Allison, tell him of these things.

  The tall, overalled stranger tagged after him. “Goin’ down the trail, buddy?”

  “Up the trail,” Kirk retorted. “See you again.”

  “I’m goin’ up the trail, too. My name’s Kite—Bill Kite.”

  Privately, Kirk wished that Kite would fly on his own way, for as the two of them climbed up the mountainside together, Kite’s coat would fall open just enough to reveal a letter in the inside pocket—a letter which bore the letterhead of Ubruff’s Laboratories.

  “What do you think,” Bill Kite asked, continuing his not-too-natural drawl, “that those fellows are going to do with the brain they salvaged?”

  “Grind it up for chicken feed,” said Kirk. “Lovely day, ain’t it? Do you have long summers in this part of Canada?”

  CHAPTER III

  A Hardboiled Brain Expert

  When Kirk parted company with the mysterious Bill Kite he took the trouble to check up. Kite had been left at a filling station on the edge of a mountain village. Kirk had gone over to the general store, and then had ducked back to see what Kite was up to. The latter was telephoning.

  “Ubruff’s Laboratories? I want to talk to Ubruff himself . . . But this is urgent! . . . I don’t care where he is—get him on . . . Hello, Ubruff. That rumor was on the level . . . Yes, there was enough of a specimen that they have got a whole crew on the job . . . The brain? Yes, I got there in time for a glimpse. They trucked it away . . . But I couldn’t. I’m no one-man army. Besides, I was on foot . . . Where? At the laboratory, I suppose . . . Sure . . . Tell them to meet me here—at Benton Ridge. And bring plenty of firearms.”

  Kirk Riley felt his pulse give a quick jump. He was not sure what he was going to do—he would not be sure until he had done it. That was Kirk’s way—act first and figure it out afterward.

  Ten minutes later, along a little path that led down to a mountain spring, Kirk finished knotting the ropes around Kite’s wrists and ankles.

  “Lucky I bumped into you again,” Kirk said dryly. “Better get a piece of beefsteak over that black eye. And don’t worry if you have to spend the night right here. The summers are warm in this part of Canada.”

  “I’ll get you for this, you and your devilish tribe. I’ll—”

  “Don’t forget your mountaineer accent,” Kirk advised. “See you later.”

  With good fortune Kirk walked only two miles before he got a ride that sailed him right into the laboratory of Professor Haycox.

  The echoes of his footsteps over the cool concrete floor resounded. The two figures on the elevated platform above the vat turned to give him a casual glance.

  “Come on,” Lester agreed, and he reassured the professor. “It’s only my good man Friday.”

  Kirk mounted the ladder, and for the next hour he watched, over the shoulders of these two scientists, listening to their strange discussion of the mysteries underneath their telescopes. Much of the talk went over his head—speculations over rates of metabolisms, compositions of various types of living cells, physiological systems of feeding, and elimination of waste. In every respect the mass of grayish white protoplasm was mystifying. To be sure, there was a resemblance between this five-ton object and the brain of a man. It was a similarity of form. The convolutions were present over the surface, looking like a maze of valleys. The brain was clearly divided into two lobes, well balanced as to markings.

  The nerve structure was the matter which fascinated Professor Haycock, and he was debating with himself as to whether he should break into the brain surface. Lester Allison tried to counsel with him to call in a host of authorities from all over the world.

  “This is an opportunity that may never strike again,” Allison said. “While I appreciate your interest in exalting the name of your own laboratory, I believe this is the time to forget professional jealousies. The world of science would never forgive you if you made less than the most of this find.”

  Professor Haycox did not deny this. Verbally he was in agreement. But there was an inarticulate fear within him—almost an instinctive leaping of emotions that frightened him from this course of action.

  “Yes,” he would say, “I could name a hundred scientists who might have something to offer in analyzing this brain. I wish that they were here. I wish I could get them without allowing an iota of publicity to reach the papers.”

  “You are sure to get publicity sooner or later,” said Allison.

  “If I may interrupt,” Kirk Riley began. “I’ve got a strong hunch.”

  “You had better keep out of this,” Allison said.

  “But if you are anxious to avoid letting the cat out of the bag—”

  Kirk’s intrusion was silenced by a chilling frown from Professor Haycox. “This is no cat and there’s no bag, and I hate slang. If you have anything to offer on the subject, put it in technical writing and mail it to me.”

  Lester Allison gave the professor a consoling tap on the shoulder. “Kirk didn’t mean any harm. You mustn’t mind.”

  “Make him go away,” said the professor. “I am trying to concentrate.”

  Kirk blurted, “You’ve got to listen to me I They already know. I heard one of Ubruff’s men calling in for a confab with the big cheese himself. The next thing you know they will be sandbagging you.”

  Professor Haycox readjusted his spectacles nervously and almost stepped off the platform.

  “I demand that you cease speaking in this inelegant language. ‘Cheese!’ ‘Sandbags’ ! Are you trying to turn this laboratory into an abattoir?”

  Lester Allison shook the professor to silence. “Don’t you understand? He’s telling us that Ubruff’s have our secret. They are going to make trouble. Now you had better call your experts in while there is still a chance.”

  Then a new voice broke in upon the discussion.

  “So you want an expert, do you? Very well, I have come just in time.”

  Kirk and the others turned to see a stocky, well-dressed man sauntering across the floor toward them, levelling a huge pistol.

  “Who is he?” Allison whispered. Kirk had no answer, and the professor was too scared to answer.

  “Come down,” said the gunman in a low voice. “You first, Professor Haycox. Take it easy, old man. We are going to need you later on. All right, you next, Allison. No, not so fast. Take your station right there at the far corner of the platform where I can keep my eyes on you. All right, Scrub, your turn, and no monkey business.”

  Kirk found himself lined up with the other two at the far side of the tank. Now the gunman mounted the ladder himself. On top of the elevated platform he assumed a very casual and friendly manner, waving the gun idly.

  “Sorry I had to bring in a little artillery for a calling card,” he said, and his sarcasm showed in a sinister twist to his lips. “But you never know what kind of people you are going to bump into these days. Now, you take my pal, Bill Kite—that’s one of his names—he had a little encounter with a fellow who was so handy with his fists that I don’t suppose Bill will go out nights any more. He’s nursing a black eye all right, and scared? He’s so scared he can hardly wait until he gets his hands on some puppy of a stooge from this biscuit bakery that calls itself a laboratory.”

  Whenever the man stopped talking, Kirk thought he could hear a slight hum from the gun. It was large, as pistols go, and it might have concealed something besides bullets. Perhaps a ray mechanism. Kirk wondered. All the while the instrument of death kept waving back and forth in the gunman’s hand. Kirk took comfort in the fact that it was not pointing toward him or either of his friends. If it had been a garden hose it would have sprayed the brain from one end to the other, time and again, the way the man was waving it. Now Kirk guessed that the hum was something the gunman meant to cont
rol by his incessant talk.

  “Do you reckon he’s sweeping that brain with a death ray?” Kirk tried to whisper.

  “Shut up, you,” the man shouted, “I will do the talking.”

  And he did, for another ten minutes. Then, suddenly, he ran dry.

  “Thank you, gentlemen, for a very interesting evening,” he said, and climbed down the ladder and strolled across to the exit.

  Lester Allison started toward him. The man flourished the gun in a desperate manner. “Better stay where you are, friend Allison. You are a good space pilot, and the world would hate to lose you.”

  Lester did not stop. He plunged ahead, like a football player bent on a touchdown.

  “Don’t aggravate him,” the professor squealed. “He will disintegrate you.”

  Kirk was thinking the same thing, only in words of fewer syllables.

  But the gun didn’t shoot, and Lester Allison stormed straight at the man who, for some strange reason, decided to drop his weapon in favor of his fists. Those fists were no match for Allison’s. The gunman ducked two blows, then an uppercut got him on the jaw, and he went sprawling against the wall. It was a clean knockout, and the fellow’s eyes went closed.

  “Get some rope, Kirk. Tie him up until we can find a suitable room to lock him in. What’s the matter, Professor? Nervous?”

  The professor was edging around the gun as if it were a charge of dynamite with the fuse lighted.

  “Do you think it will blow up?”

  “Certainly not,” said Lester. “It’s no gun—it’s a movie camera. This thug came to capture our brain on film.”

  “This is only the beginning,” said Kirk. “That Ubruff gang is gathering up for an attack—with firearms. I heard the whole thing in a telephone conversation.”

  CHAPTER IV

  Flying Starfish