by Don Wilcox
Occasionally we swooped down closer, but the impossibility of landing on such a jungle of waste was obvious. At length we came to a clearing beside a lake and the pilot set us down on the mile-long sandbar.
It was obvious, from the low spirits of the whole party, that none of us was too well satisfied with this station. But in the course of the quarter of a circumference we had traversed, this was the most inviting place we had found.
“Don’t be in a hurry to get out,” the captain growled, still stinging over the earlier encounter with the Swampy Satellite’s native life. “Keep all your binoculars busy for the next full hour. As for the rest of you, settle down till I get you lined out. Hi Turner, where are you?”
“At your service,” said Hi, without lifting his eyes from a book.
“Where’s your folder on this big interplanetary competition? Let’s have another once over on the rules and regulations.” The captain began shuffling through his pockets, having decided that said folder was in his own hands when last seen.
But Hi Turner said, “Never mind, Redfife. I can recite them from memory.”
No one was surprised at this, because the captain was always having Hi read them over.
This time, however, we all listened more attentively than ever, owing to the fact that we were right here on our chosen grounds, and what we did about it must be strictly in accordance with the rules.
The competition was open to all space explorers who were duly registered in the Solar Interplanetary Association. All the planets and their satellites—in fact, all regions of space within the bounds of the Solar system—were open for exploration.
The prize was a cool ten million dollars over and above the expenses of the prize-winning explorer’s expedition.
That ten million would be paid to the exploring party whose total discoveries were judged to offer the most valuable new knowledge to solar mankind.
It sounded simple enough. But you’d be surprised how many times we went over the various stipulations to be sure we had all the right interpretations.
Take that phrase, “to offer the most valuable new knowledge to solar mankind.”
Which word would the judges of the competition stress most of all, most, or valuable, or new? How should that word valuable be construed? Most valuable in dollars and cents? Or most beneficial to mankind? Or most promising for the future of the associated travel organizations who were back of this contest?
Dr. Blyman was staunch in his contention that discoveries beneficial to man’s physical and mental wellbeing would outrank anything else in the minds of the judges.
“I think I’m on the track of something,” the doctor said with a mysterious lift of the eyebrow toward Hi Turner. It was a curious fact that whenever Dr. Blyman expressed an opinion he looked to Hi Turner rather than Captain Redfife for a reaction. This was likewise true of some of the others. It was the natural result of Hi’s being more sincerely interested in what they had to say than was the captain, who was always primarily concerned with listening to himself. I’ll have more to say about this later, for the more I watched this man Turner the more I saw that he was a modern Socrates.[2]
Not a very talkative Socrates, I must admit. Maybe a Fighting Socrates would be the more accurate title, considering his skill with the old fashioned rifle and bayonet. His silence, however, was only one of his many techniques for keeping peace with the captain, who was exceedingly jealous of anything Hi Turner said or did.
The wise little financier, Dwight Blackwell, said he had not the slightest doubt about what we should look for if we wanted to win the competition.
“Strike gold,” said Blackwell crisply. “Strike diamonds and precious stones and the judges won’t hesitate.”
“I’d like to amend that,” said Hi Turner, “to include all valuable natural resources. Anything that would attract the industrial world. If the space lines can see permanent trade coming up—”
Captain Redfife interrupted. “Bring us some drinks, Skinny. Where are my cigars, Joe?”
I found cigars, and Skinny brought drinks. Dr. Blyman applied liniment to the captain’s ankle, which had stubbornly refused to swell. By the time we got around to all the trifles that made up his personal comfort he’d gotten off onto a story of a certain Martian brunette.
“The way she went for me would make you guys awful jealous,” he rambled on. “Hi, the next time we go skylarkin’ off on a chase like this, make sure that I send her an invitation to come along. It would do me good to see you lads burn up with jealousy.”
For the next thirty minutes his brunette memories dominated the conference.
And what happened to all our enthusiasm to put over our job of winning an interplanetary prize? It oozed out like wind out of a leaky balloon.
I watched the impatience mount in the faces of the group around the table. Most of them were specialists in some particular line that related to a planetary exploration: a geologist, a photographer, an ethnologist, an astronomer, and so on. They had come together in answer to Captain Redfife’s urgent appeal for trained men. Some of them had signed up at a personal sacrifice.
In this moment you could feel their keen disappointment. They were stuck with a leader who, faced with a challenge to do something worthwhile, could turn deaf ears toward all constructive suggestions, nurse a faked sprained ankle, and grow voluble with braggings about a brunette from Mars.
One of the pilots got up from the table and sauntered off toward the control room.
“Let’s send the captain back to Mars on the lifeboat,” Skinny Davis whispered to me.
“It beats me,” I retorted in an undertone, “that Hi Turner should keep on playing ball with him.”
“There’ll be limits,” said Skinny. The captain had reached that part of one of his well-worn yarns where the brunette had to taxi him home at five in the morning after a hilarious evening at a New York bar. Suddenly we were all jolted to attention by three rings from the pilot room.
“What’s up?” Hi Turner barked into the telephone. “What? . . . Sinking? . . . Quicksand?!” Hi turned to Redfife. “Landing gear’s settled down in five feet of sand, in case you’re interested.”
“Yeah?” J.J. Redfife jumped to his feet angrily, forgetting his bad ankle. “Sinking, huh? How the hell does that happen?”
Said Skinny Davis, not too discreetly, “The Martian brunette sunk us.”
CHAPTER III
A Head for the Doctor
For the next five hours the whole party of us, with the exception of Captain Redfife, devoted our muscles and perspiration to the job of stopping the vertical descent of our ship.
The engineers knew what they were doing, but they were handicapped by the lack of any solid bases that could be used as hitching posts. They went to work constructing huge platforms—swamp-rafts, as we termed them—which could serve as islands all around the big hull.
These swamp-rafts required an endless amount of timbers. We all pitched in, dragging fallen trees and dead limbs from the edge of the jungle.
By the time darkness came on we had something to show for our efforts. The crude platforms of logs, even though they too were slowly sinking, supported a series of thirty-foot tripods. The tripods, constructed of the longest, straightest logs, each supported a block and tackle. Thus the engineers succeeded in getting a lift with a high mechanical advantage on each of several points of the hull.
They applied a small atomic motor to the task of drawing the ropes. The ship’s sinking was soon checked.
These happy results were only temporary, of course, for ropes had to be continually re-tightened, each in turn, since each of the log swamp-rafts was slowly sinking.
We were assured, however, that the ship could be kept at its present level until daylight returned, at which time new thirty-foot tripods might have to be constructed to provide a new series of hitches.
As for lifting the ship clear of the sandbar and furnishing it with a solid floor suitable for a take-off that woul
d not damage the landing gear, the engineers weren’t too optimistic. The light gravity of this satellite would be an advantage, and they believed the job could be done; but it might require several Swampy Satellite days.
The engineers and pilots stayed on the job all night. You could hear the low roar of the motor and the hard-boiled mutterings of the men.
Some two dozen of us were supposed to be sleeping, but I doubt if anyone slept. There was too much of that lingering apprehension that we might wake up and find ourselves somewhere under the surface of the swamp. Also the fear that if we stayed on the surface, big green men might happen along and drop in for a visit, forgetting to park their clubs by the door.
Once during the night Skinny Davis came jumping down out of his overhead bunk like a monster spider in a night shirt. The blue night light showed his sleepy eyes bulging and his white teeth clenched in fear.
“Did they get you?” I asked.
“They swung at me,” Skinny mumbled. Then he saw where he was and crawled back into his bunk sheepishly. “What’s the light on for?”
“Hi Turner’s reading,” I said, and Hi glanced over at our end of the sleeping room.
“We aren’t the first to have trouble with the swamps here,” said Hi in a low voice. “I’ve been reading that a couple of ships came here nearly a century ago, and one of them went down.”
“That’s it, tell me bedtime stories,” said Skinny Davis.
A moment later, however, Skinny was snoring. So I may have been the only one who heard Hi Turner read of the ill-fated Antlock expedition which was lost somewhere in this corner of the solar system eighty years ago.
“A hundred and twenty men and women—think of it,” said Hi Turner. “Handpicked colonists, too. That’s lots of people to disappear without leaving a trail.”
I must have drifted off while he was still talking, for soon I was dreaming that we were sinking down through the mire to join the Antlock expedition, which turned out to be a shipful of ghastly green skeletons with sashes of copper chains around their middles.
The next morning Dr. Blyman talked the captain into letting him borrow the plane, and I was picked to go with him. So were Hi Turner, a pilot, and a geologist—five of us in all.
We took off from the runway along the top of the Sky Cat and bolted out through the thin Swampy Satellite air at high speed.
Our destination was the spot where the green man had been left unburied.
There was something buzzing in Dr. Blyman’s brain, as I had noted the night before.
Once we’d gained ten thousand in the plane he opened up with his idea.
“That ten million prize,” he said, “was to be awarded to the expedition, not the individuals in it. Am I right, Turner?”
“Right.”
“That’s something we’ve never been too clear on, you know. Are we the expedition, or are we just the employees of J.J. Redfife? Are we the expedition, or is he? Or are we all employees, the captain included, in which case our sponsor, Blackwell’s space ship line, is the true expedition?”
“I checked up on that point, Doctor,” said Hi Turner. “The rules make it plain that so long as there is no mutiny or outbreak of violence to mar the unity within a given party of explorers, all members of that party shall be considered to constitute the expedition.”
“Then we’d all get a share in the prize?” Dr. Blyman asked.
“Exactly. The leader of the winning expedition will be counted as ten men in the apportioning of the prize money. The leader may recommend doubling the shares of some of his more valuable men. But every man who takes part will have a share.”
“Every man,” the doctor repeated. “What about a man who starts but fails to return?”
“The check might be mailed to his heirs,” said Hi Turner. “But if you have reference to deserters or persons dishonorably discharged they wouldn’t be in line for a share, according to the rules. In any event the lost man’s share would depend on the Captain’s recommendation.”
The doctor did some figuring. There were thirty-one of us. If we should win the prize (and I thought he was being wildly optimistic to talk in this vein, considering our record of bad luck) we’d all have a share.
“Captain Redfife would count as ten men,” the doctor continued, “so the prize would be split into forty parts, and he’d get ten of them. One-fortieth of ten million dollars is a quarter of a million—for each of us.”
“Right.”
“And for Redfife—two and a half million.”
“Precisely.”
Those were nice fat figures, anyway you looked at them, as far as I was concerned. I gazed down at the passing blue-gray jungle, keeping a sharp watch for men but seeing none.
“Here’s what it amounts to,” said the doctor a bit testily. “If our captain turns out to be such a Milky Way drip that half his men desert, his own share of the prize would increase.
“But the fewer he has in his party, the less chance he has of capturing a lot of valuable discoveries.”
Dr. Blyman stiffened defensively and I saw that he was entirely out of agreement with this simple view of things.
“Look here, Turner. Most of us are specialists. Here’s Ben Weismuller, a geologist. He alone may make a discovery that will win the day. Suppose he does it. Suppose he uncovers some new rich natural blessing on this satellite? Where’s the justice in his sharing on equal terms with those bonehead pilots who dropped our ship in the swamp?”
Hi Turner tried to shake the doctor off his topic. “Let’s don’t cross so many bridges in such a hurry. None of us has discovered anything, so far, but a mess of tangled woods and swamp.”
“An. important discovery may be nearer than you think,” said the doctor with a mysterious overconfidence.
The pilot circled over the spot where we had first landed on the previous day, and we looked in vain for signs of enemies hidden among the olive-colored brush.
“You haven’t forgot,” said Hi Turner, turning his sharp eyes toward the doctor, “that there’s to be an individual prize to the one outstanding man of each expedition?”
“Half a million?”
“Correct.”
The green body was still down there, lying exactly where we had left it. The bestial denizens of these wild jungles didn’t even bother to bury their dead.
“Land as close to it as possible,” the doctor instructed the pilot. “Coming out to help me, gentlemen?”
“With pleasure,” said Ben Weismuller.
“With our weapons,” said Hi Turner, picking up his rifle and bayonet. “I’m dubious. They might have left it there to bait us.”
In the next ten minutes we succeeded in severing the big greenish-yellow hairless head from the massive body and placing it in a jar of alcohol for pickling.
“That head,” said the doctor, gloating with satisfaction, “will be worth looking into.”
CHAPTER IV
Swamp Casualties
We were ready to take off. We called to Ben Weismuller, who had strayed off about forty yards to the left to pick up a sample of glittering rock from an outcropping.
“Coming,” said Ben, picking up his tools.
Then it happened, like lightning out of a clear sky. A club and a head came up out of a crevice in the rock. The head was of a deep bluish cast. The club was a silvery cleated weapon. It swung without warning.
I hate to tell you what that club did to Ben Weismuller. It all happened so quick that we were stunned. A split second after it came down with a deadly crunching blow, the big muddy blue hand reached up out of hidden waters and dragged the murdered body down.
I shot twice. Hi Turner’s gun was blazing, too, and one bullet brought a spurt of blood from the disappearing arm.
But almost instantly the attacker and his dead victim were out of sight. Nothing could be seen but the low ledge of rock and a scarcely noticeable pool of swamp water under the dead tree limbs just beyond.
For the next hour we searched
like mad men. But the blue swamp man was gone.
We flew back feeling too low to talk. The pilot was noticeably nervous. You could feel it in his wobbly control of the plane.
Hi Turner was quiet and thoughtful and mad, though he wasn’t taking it out on anyone, like the captain would have. He turned to me three or four times and said, “Blonder, this was a bad one.” Sometimes he added, “We’ve traded a live man for the head of a dead one.”
As for Dr. Blyman, I assumed he felt pretty much like the rest of us. He didn’t say a dozen words all the way back. He just sat there gazing down at his trophy in the pickle jar.
We made a bouncy landing on the runway atop the space ship. Somehow it was comforting to know there was still a space ship to land on, albeit a slowly sinking one.
Yes, the Sky Cat had lost ground during our absence, and to my astonishment only four or five men were working on it.
CHAPTER V
Trails Beneath the Jungle
Things had happened during our absence. Most of the party had gone off to try to rescue my pal Skinny Davis and another chap, who had bumped into hard luck.
Originally, Skinny and two others had started out to get some photographs. They had discovered a vast, deep hole hidden somewhere under the wilderness of fallen trees.
The three of them had tried to climb down with their cameras, but had found it tough going. One of the trio had given up and climbed back to the top to wait. Soon he had grown terrified, having lost sight of the other two. Finally he had reported back to the ship.
“He claimed that he heard some voices echoing up from way down deep.”
This from the engineer who was giving us the story; for the captain had been unwilling to tell us anything, being preoccupied with defeating Dwight Blackwell in a checker game.
“It wasn’t Skinny’s voice, or Lexington’s, but other human voices. So this fellow La Rue raced back to tell us. It sounded bad. The whole party picked up and went back with him, armed with guns and all the ropes we could spare.”
