by Don Wilcox
“Even more remarkable, they can extinguish some of these lights and flash on others instantly, so that the star’s points can be made to talk.”
By this time all the class was so eager to know what messages were coming through that the teacher obliged by leading them to the vast laboratories, where a series of photographed messages from the telescope of the green fleas were being relayed upward, via the graduate microbes.
“The message, as it comes through to us, seems rather crudely worded,” the teacher observed, “but it carries an unmistakable message. Our receivers are interpreting it as follows:
“We who dwell on this ball appeal to the great creatures seeking to understand us. Our single wish is to be restored to our own position in our own universe. If this can be done, then we will welcome your messengers from this outside universe. But do not make slaves of us. We are creatures of freedom. Though we are small compared to you, we have the will and the ingenuity to choose our own way of living, and if necessary we will deal severely with intruders who are not wise enough to respect us. And so we repeat our plea. If any of you great creatures have the hearts to appreciate your tiny brothers, please take us back.”
“That is the message,” the teacher concluded.
After a long respectful silence came a question. What was done with the captives that were being taken from the ball?
“It seems that there is much bickering among the green fleas over their claims to these prizes,” the teacher replied. “Already some fleas are doing a profitable business in selling microscopic souvenirs.”
One of the pupils suggested that this was taking unfair advantage. Another mentioned that the captives might be able to make good their threat.
“True,” said the teacher. “A single electron removed from this miniature universe may lead to any explosion of all the power hidden within these scrapings of dust. You are all aware that this pink fuel is exceedingly potent.” The pupils began to back away. “But explosion or not, we are faced with an appeal for mercy in the name of fair play. Now it will be most interesting to see how a little pressure from us will filter down.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
Back!
Back through the electrons shell the prisoners were carefully transported. Flocks of the faithful one-cells—those silent flying creatures of the immense brains and the pointed arms—were kept busy for several days, bringing back what they had obediently borrowed.
Back came Kirk and Diana—Mr. and Mrs. Riley, to be accurate. With them came the proud magistrate and several thousand witnesses, who hailed the bride and groom as the first Earth couple ever to be married outside the solar system.
Probably no such hectic honeymoon would ever befall another couple as long as the Earth turned.
To be married within a huge crystal box amid thousands of fellow prisoners, all reflecting the green of some great monsters’ fingers in their faces; to be hurled through half a continent of space immediately after saying “I do,” and next to find one’s bride and one’s self and all the witnesses floating down through the thick air amid the splinters of the shattered crystal; and then to spend days and days completely lost somewhere outside one’s own universe—this was Kirk’s unique honeymoon adventure.
“We’re glad,” Kirk said to June and Lester Allison in a fervent little speech that he and Diana thought worth remembering, “to be back.”
“If we ever get back, really,” June suggested, “you two will have to take a honeymoon to the moon, now that you’re veteran space flyers.”
“If the moon can be found at this late date,” Allison added.
“But we didn’t miss the moon at all,” Diana declared happily. “We had the most beautiful star. It was six-pointed and it was spread all across the United States. And one point was up in Canada, and another down in Mexico, and we could see the whole thing at once! And the points would wave!”
“Les knows all about that, I’ll bet,” Kirk laughed. “He would be the first one to talk starfish.”
Meanwhile, back toward its own corner of the universe went the Earth, towed by one of Prince Zaywoodie’s fellow fleas, who knew how to get there the shortest way.
THE GREAT BRAIN PANIC
First published in Amazing Stories, July 1943
The mystery of giant brains brought a fearsome problem to Joe Blonder . . .
CHAPTER I
It was kill or be killed, and Hi Turner loved life. His great-great-great-grandfather had used bayonets to advantage on a fiendish breed of animal called Nazis in the Second World War and Hi had brought his own favorite relic—rifle with bayonet—along on this space jaunt for the sake of a family tradition.
Death was coming at us. It was lucky for the party that Hi knew his weapon and didn’t have to stop and argue with himself before using it.
Now that was my trouble. I, Joe Blonder, was the journalist of this party. I didn’t like to mess up my elation over a successful space hop with the grimy business of defending my life against the attack of a misguided native. To me, that huge giant of a man with the pale green hairless skin and the clanking garb of copper chains around his middle might have just been born ugly, ferocious looking—yes, and a trifle murderous. But I didn’t feel like plunging into a fight. I hadn’t had ten minutes to stretch my legs and get my bearings.
We’d come here in search of the wonders of the universe, not trouble. But all at once, before we’d hiked a half mile from our space ship, this human fiend had reared up out of the brush right in front of us.
I saw him advancing on us with a big silver club, just as Hi Turner and the rest of the party saw, but in spite of this being an off-the-beaten trail satellite, I was ready to reach out my hand and say, “Howdy, pal. Let’s be friends.”
That’ll be my failing till the day I die, no doubt; and it all came from someone’s well-intended teachings during my childhood. Buried deep within my soft-boiled nature is the conviction that each and every living creature once had a mother, and therefore should have a spark of goodness, if not a soul, somewhere within the protoplasm, however crusty on the surface.
This yellowish-green beast of a man may have had a soul. If he did, Hi Turner meant to release it for adventures all its own. He met the huge fellow, running squarely under the swinging club. That club was every bit as large as the lamp-post on your corner, and it was polished metal, with little rows of cleats up and down it that weren’t put there for ornaments.
When I say that Hi Turner ran under the club, don’t get the impression that it was being held high over this giant pea-pod’s brassy egg-bald head. No, he was holding it down on the level with his barrel-stave ribs. Hi Turner ran under it, upright, and that gives you a notion just how tall this green gent was.
Hi Turner’s bayonet plunged with a metallic crunch!—a mixed sound—steel and bone and cartilage—though somehow I expected clanking chains rather than sure-nuff human blood and organs to come busting out of the big boy’s insides.
The big green hands let go the club, which came bouncing over at the rest of us, and J.J. Redfife got almost smacked on the ankle.
Notice that I say almost. I saw it happen, and I know the club missed. But Redfife grabbed his ankle and fell into a heap.
No one paid any attention to Redfife’s howl, even though he was supposed to be the captain of the expedition; because just at the moment we were all backing away from the fight, watching the emerald rage fill up in the big green guy’s face.
Hi Turner and the bayonet stayed with him, and the big boy bent forward with an awful groan. He swayed back and forth like a steel tower that’s about to collapse. He fell forward.
Hi Turner rolled out at the last possible moment and there was nothing but the gun and bayonet to break the fellow’s heavy fall. When he finally got quiet, the tip of the bayonet had found its way through his back, peeping out just under the left shoulder blade.
“Hope his heart was in the right place,” Hi Turner said, dusting off his hands.
“Let’s get off this planet. It smells.” This from my pal Skinny Davis, once known as the state champion high-jumper from my own hometown back in the United States, Earth.
“You coulda been a little more reckless about it, Turner,” J.J. Redfife growled sarcastically. He was still sitting on the ground, rubbing his ankle. “There’s such a thing as orders, you know. You didn’t have to plunge in like a fool. We’re armed. We could have shot him.”
Hi Turner gave a restrained smile and held his tongue.
“Gee, wouldn’t the sound of a shot be dangerous?” Skinny Davis broke in. Obviously Skinny was right, and that was probably the very reason Hi Turner had jumped the gun—to make sure the captain wouldn’t have time to make a bad break.
“Maybe I have my own reasons for risking the sound of a gun,” said J.J. Redfife, trying to justify himself with a reference to something mysterious.
“I’m sorry if I upset your plans, Captain Redfife,” said Hi Turner with his usual quiet modesty. “But can’t you go ahead and shoot him even though he’s dead?”
It was curious to watch the interplay between Redfife and Hi Turner, because the latter was so careful to keep the captain’s authority intact. It had been that way from the moment we took off in the Sky Cat. As Redfife’s secretary, Hi Turner was his staunchest support. It made the rest of us continually wonder whether this beetle-browed, baldish, florid-faced captain of the skyways had something on the ball that wasn’t too apparent in his talk and actions. Something that made Hi Turner turn credit toward him at every opportunity. Frankly, I found Redfife pretty thin—a Milky-Way drip, as the space boys say.
He had a distinguishing name, Captain J.J. Redfife, that was forever catching your eyes in the interplanetary newspapers. But whether his nice line of publicity was the result of any unusual merit as a space man or the result of an alert eye for publicity on the part of his secretary, Hi Turner, I could not say.
“Help me up,” Redfife grunted. “I can’t walk. We’ll have to go back to the Sky Cat and revise our plans.”
We helped him back, and he did a perfect imitation of helplessness. I decided to keep mum about knowing he wasn’t hurt, to see what would come of it.
We all kept a sharp lookout as we retraced our steps. In the twenty minutes that we had been here on what was popularly called the Swampy Satellite[1] we had learned just one thing. Monstrous men could rise up out of the brush without warning and advance with huge metal clubs. They could, because one had done it, peace be to his soul, and thanks be to Hi Turner.
It was all that Skinny Davis and I could do to lug the metal club back. Some of the others traded off with us before we got back to the airlocks. Skinny was built along the lines of a flag-pole. I couldn’t help thinking he’d have been less than a straw if the club had swung at him.
“I’d have jumped it,” said Skinny Davis, grinning. He looked cool, but that was Skinny Davis’ natural deception. He was as scared as any of us. If we stayed on this satellite we were in for trouble.
We gathered in the space ship dining room, all except those of the party whom Redfife ordered to the controls or the guns. We knew it might be expedient to lift into space at any moment. Even in the dining room our wealthy compatriot, Dwight Blackwell, kept a pair of binoculars busy sweeping across the ragged terrain, doubtless expecting fifty heads to pop up at once. Though one, patterned after the first, would have been enough to freshen the panic in most of us.
“Listen to me, men,” Redfife was saying, tapping his black beetly eyebrow with a pencil. “I’m laid up. Damned carelessness, our letting that wild, naked savage son of an elephant throw his trunk at my ankle. But my man Turner admits it was his fault.”
“Begging your pardon?” Hi Turner spoke up, cool as if he were asking for the salt.
“Your nerve’s good, Turner, I’m not denying it,” said the captain. “But this little accident is gonna cost us. I’ll not walk a step for a week. I’ll have to stay right here with the ship. I’ll have to—what are you grinnin’ about, Skinny?”
“Nothin’.”
“You think I want to stay here, don’t you? You think—”
“Huh-uh.” Skinny gulped, shaking his head like a tortured schoolboy just before the whipping. “I was smilin’ to think how that big green guy went ‘Waaauk’—just like our bathtub back home.”
“Cut it out. Where was I? Turner, where was I?”
“Staying right here, sir.”
“That’s right. I’ll command the party from here,” said Redfife. “You know what we’ve come to do. You know we haven’t much time to do it in. The devil of it is that I can’t watch over every one of you while you see the job through. Now get yourselves armed and strike out. But this time you’d better start the other direction. What’s the matter, Blackwell?”
“Should I say something?” The wealthy little man in the immaculate white suit was superbly poised in his every word and gesture.
“Er—I thought you looked like you had an idea.”
“Yes, now that you mention it,” said Dwight Blackwell, putting his binoculars away. “I thought I might do well to join your little army.”
“You mean you’d go out there?” Redfife was aghast. “You don’t have to do that, Blackwell. It’s gonna be doubly dangerous now. You’re here as my guest. You own a hunk of the space lines that lent us this ship and interested us in the big competition. You—”
“You’re the commander, Captain Redfife, and if you want me to stay aboard I will,” said Blackwell with a respectful nod. “But the fact is that after what has happened I’m not too enthusiastic, about staying in a parked ship. Not with that dead monster lying out there in plain sight. I saw what happened—”
“I’ll send a detail out to bury him,” said J.J. Redfife.
“Sooner or later they’ll come looking for him. When they do—”
“We’ll be somewhere else,” said Captain Redfife. “We’d just as well start our explorations on another side of this satellite. Don’t you agree?”
“Indeed, most heartily.” Dwight Blackwell resumed looking out the window with the binoculars.
There was a pause in the conversation. We were wondering whom the captain would send out to do the dirty work, but he seemed to be uncertain of his next decision, and he was disturbed by Blackwell’s comment that a parked ship might not be the safest place in the world after what had happened. He began rubbing his ankle. He grunted something about feeling a little better, between liniment and the bandage that Dr. Blyman, the ship’s physician, had applied.
“It’s remarkable that it didn’t swell up like a balloon if that thing hit it,” said Dr. Blyman, looking at the big cleated metal club for the first time.
“I’m hard as nails,” said the captain, looking around at the circle of us to gather in our admiration. “But don’t get the idea I’m not in pain.”
Blackwell brought us back to the problem at hand. “Here we are stalled, Captain Redfife. I know how you feel. This one encounter isn’t going to bluff you out, but you’ve got to be cautious. If this place is infested with natives three times our size, and they’re all savage killers, we may be all wet hitching our wagon to this star. But in the limited time the big interplanetary competition allows, it was our only chance.”
“Well stay with it,” Redfife decided suddenly, as if anyone had doubted it. “But we’ll move on around a quarter of a circumference. Slowly. We’ll survey the land as we go. That’s what we should have done in the first place.”
“I quite agree with you, Captain,” Blackwell said. “But I suppose your explorers were impatient to set their feet on the ground.”
“Exactly.” Captain Redfife shot a glance at Hi Turner. The truth was that Turner had suggested such a survey before the landing, but Redfife had yielded to his own impetuosity and ignored it.
Now Hi Turner sat smoking a pipe and thumbing through a book, apparently oblivious of all the conversation about him. This occasional mannerism, which might be mistaken fo
r absent-mindedness, was annoying to the captain.
“Did you hear my decision to move on?” Redfife snapped.
Without taking his eyes off the book, Hi Turner picked up the wall phone and communicated the captain’s order to the pilot’s room.
We took off at low air-cruising speed.
Skinny and I gazed down on the enormous pea-green corpse a thousand feet beneath us. As our ship ascended, we saw other figures not far beyond the huge dead man. Live ones. Dozens of them. Moving up toward it.
CHAPTER II
Human Mice and Mountains
Dozens, did I say? The dozens turned to hundreds—all shapes and colors and sizes.
In a moment our whole party joined us at the floor windows, and we took in what appeared to be two or three thousand of the most variegated human beings I ever hope to see. Most of them were armed, some with crude guns, others with knives. Before our take-off they had been moving toward us, for they were facing us as we lifted.
It was plain that they were well organized; and that they were a dangerous lot out looking for trouble goes without saying. It was significant that they gave no signs of being scared out of their wits by a space ship. A few of them took pot shots in our direction. But the startling thing about this heterogeneous half-naked army was the variations in their sizes. The biggest of them were fully fifty times as large as the little fellows. And yet the human mice and the human mountains were all stalking the brush-covered land together, as if they had something in common.
Maybe that something was us.
Within a few minutes all these creatures were lost in the receding landscape and during the hours of survey that followed we saw no more of them.
What we did see was an endless wilderness of scraggly forest and brush lands and great patches of tangled fallen trees—or perhaps they were roots. From our moving point of observation, approximately five thousand feet up, these patches of tangled wood appeared through the binoculars to be so much mangrove swamp.
