by Don Wilcox
All night the game went on, and it reminded me of something I had once read about every man’s actions toward his fellow men. All of a man’s social relations, according to this writer, were made up of two kinds of action: a tendency to approach and a tendency to retreat. In our night’s escapade Hi Turner promoted most of the approaches and I ballyhooed for the retreats.
Once along an upper trail we came in view of some more patches of starry sky, and wondered if our lost sheep had found their way out.
Once on a lower trail we glimpsed a cavernous valley of glowing coals more than a mile below us, and wondered if our lost ones had found their way in.
By daylight, after approximately seven and a half hours of night[3] we were back at the rope station staring up at the purplish-white sky, hoping for the promised sunrise visit from our pilot.
He didn’t come.
We sat there, silent and moody. Hi smoked two pipefuls and began talking about faraway things, such as development of man, and why the human race is what it is and whether it could be called a rigid form of life, or whether it isn’t comparatively flexible.
He kept looking at the hillside all the time he talked, and I guessed he was thinking in several directions at once.
He swerved over into the realm of physical creation, talking about how the planets must have looked when they were young, before they cooled down and were glossed over with trees and grass.
He rose and sauntered off while talking to me, and of course I followed. I was puzzled to know what he was driving at, but I assumed that his main purpose was to divert our minds from what looked to be a desperate situation.
We climbed the hill. We threaded our way from one clearing to another, keeping our revolvers ready; but no trouble sprang out at us.
The trouble was what we saw when we got to the hilltop: the space ship. It had lost ground. As nearly as we could judge, the lower fourth of it was submerged in the sandy swamp.
That is to say, the whole central section of the hull was bogged down to a depth of twelve or thirteen feet.
“Well, they’re at least on the job,” said Hi. “I’d begun to think they might have flown off and left us.” About half of the men appeared to be working furiously. The rest of them, a dozen or more, were drifting around helplessly as if waiting for orders.
Hi set a lively pace as we jogged down the hill.
“We’ll go back and join them,” he said abruptly. “They’ve forgotten about us.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because I counted them. There were at least twenty-three. I couldn’t make out who was who, but it’s simple mathematics. If Redfife and Blackwell and the doctor are inside, most of our original twenty-one are present or accounted for, not forgetting ourselves and one casualty.”
“The hell.” I suddenly saw daylight. “Some of the gang we’re searching for are already home!”
“Obviously.”
I felt a heat wave on the back of my neck. “Why didn’t the captain send us word?”
Hi tossed his head and gave a little laugh. “We’ll gather up our things and go, Blonder . . . Or will we?” His tone suddenly changed. “By George, if we weren’t out of food we’d take another run down into that big man’s wonder-world. Would you be game?” Before I could answer, an immense shadow raced past us. We whirled to see it zipping across the hillside—the huge cigar-shaped shadow of a flying ship.
The next moment we were chasing up the hill again, trying to keep the flying monster in view.
It was a smart blue space boat of unfamiliar design, about half as large as our Sky Cat. It was cruising at air-flight speed, spiralling for a landing. It made no sound, and when I grabbed a flying glance at our own ship in the distance, I was satisfied that our men had failed to see this newcomer.
The blue boat swept downward, nosing toward the shaded side of the hills, out of sight of the lake beach where the Sky Cat lay.
It steadied down for a landing.
I couldn’t see any spot that looked safe for a landing. But the blue boat seemed to know where it was going. It eased into a mass of thick trees and slid down under the jungle and out of sight.
“What do you make of that, Hi? Natives or visitors?”
“Natives,” said Hi. “The Sky Cat had better sweep its floors and get ready for company. It might turn out to be the Swampy landlord. Maybe he’ll only want to collect the rent. Or maybe he’ll wave a No Trespassing sign. And again it’s barely possible that he’ll invite the Sky Catters to stay for dinner.”
“In any event,” I said, “we’d better get home and get our boat lifted.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Hi. “It occurs to me that I’m no engineer, and it gives me a pain in the back to lift.” I knew he was being facetious. I was surprised to see him slip into such a mood in the face of all that was happening. Was it devised to bolster his own morale, I wondered, or did he have some plan of action.
“Considering the mathematics of the situation,” he went on, “I can’t possibly argue myself into saving the ship. If the best that two dozen men can do is sink it to twelve feet, two more of us would put it down to thirteen, and that would be unlucky.”
So there was a plan of action up Hi Turner’s sleeve; his blithe manner proved it.
“All right,” I said. “We don’t go back. Where do we go?”
“Down the hill to see if Skinny Davis brought us any food.”
Sure enough, there was Skinny Davis waiting down by the rope station, waving at us to come down, grinning as if all was right with the world. His grin was typical of his optimistic delusions, for things were far from right.
Nevertheless it was good to know that nothing had happened to Skinny Davis.
CHAPTER VIII
An Infra-Red Photo
“Don’t tell us the worst till you feed us,” said Hi as we pounded down the last of the descent.
Skinny Davis took a knapsack off his shoulder. “I figured you’d be hungry. I came prepared. And I brought you something else you might wanta see. This darned wilderness has had inhabitants.”
“Has had!” I snorted. “What do you call those big green and blue guys with the clubs?”
“I call ’em monsters,” said Skinny, passing out the food to us. “What I’m gettin’ at is, these black chasms that have roofed over with vines and things used to be full of civilization. Honest, there used to be people living down there.”
“So you heard the voices too,” said Hi.
“Oh, that. Well, that’s something else again. I’ve figured out that was pretty much our imaginations. Especially La Rue’s. All I ever heard coulda been the echoes of stones that got kicked over the edge. The trail we followed took us right out on the lake side of the hill, and we didn’t bump into any ghosts.”
“Then what gave you the notion,” said Hi, appearing to be primarily concerned with demolishing sandwiches, “that there might have been people in these depths once upon a time.”
“Because there’s a big carved statue down there,” said Skinny. “Wanta see a photo of it? We took a couple infrared shots down over the edge. We figured it might show something besides blackness—such as maybe a lot of fallen rocks or an invisible river. But what we got was pure luck. I’ll show you.”
Skinny took an envelope from his pocket, and produced a pair of photographs.
“Luck,” he repeated.
Both of the pictures showed a man, or a statue of a man, as Skinny believed it to be. The figure appeared to be sleeping on a platform in the bed of the valley. The severe vertical walls that rose around him were of natural rock. Obviously there was considerable warmth wafting over this rocky enclosure, for the infra-red radiations of heat gave everything a soft grayish glow.
“Now I know we’re going down again,” Hi Turner said. “But that’s no statue.”
“I knew he’d say that,” Skinny said to me. “Okay, Hi, what is it? Not a living person, surely?”
“Why not?”
&
nbsp; “Look at the steps built up to the stone platform where he’s resting his head. Yes, they’re steps. They’ve got to be, because right there along the edge you can see a railing.”
The steps and the bandraittng were there, and all around on the platform where the head was resting were lines of little dark tracks that could have been made by tiny muddy feet. “Where did you take it, Skinny?”
Skinny described a certain chasm that we were able to identify. We went into a discussion of measurements, guessing on the distance across from one vertical wall to another. We also surmised the probable dimensions of the platform steps. The more we figured the more I shook my head.
“Hell, by that count this creature would be all of two or three hundred feet tall,” I said.
“Nearer five hundred,” said Hi. “That’s what I’d figured,” said Skinny. “That’s why I concluded he must be a statue—or else we’re off the track on our dimensions.”
“We’re off, of course,” said Hi confidently. Then he told Skinny what he and I had encountered during the past night in the way of shadowy figures and voices.
Skinny Davis’ eyes began to bug wide, the way they used to do in the sports pictures when he was clearing the jump bar. It was a half-scared face that seemed to say, “Gee, did I get by by the skin of my teeth!”
What he did say was, “So you men are goin’ back down? We—I think I better get back to the ship and write some letters.”
“There’s no outgoing mail. Stay with us,” I said. “But don’t take any stock in five-hundred foot giants. Your picture caught something close, like this figure that passed Hi and me, while taking his midnight stroll. He was on a shelf only a few feet down. That’s the kind of place it is in this picture—a close-up—with a lot of decorations around the platform that make it look like steps.”
Hi Turner snapped his fingers three or four times and paced around a couple circles and sat down and lit his pipe.
“Right away we’ll go down again, the three of us,” Hi said. “Meantime we’d better do some topflight thinking. There’s a freakish physiological principle at work on this satellite that some of us are going to have trouble understanding. I don’t know what it’s all about. But I’m getting an inkling.”
“What’s an inkling?” said Skinny. “Something you can put in writing?”
“Not yet, Skinny. But there’s one man in our party who should be able to tie it down to fact. That’s Dr. Blyman.”
“He’s got a lead on something,” said Skinny. He’s been so busy in his lab room that he don’t even know the ship’s sinking.”
“Still working on that head?” I asked. “I figured he wanted to pick up a sample of that green pigment.”
“No,” said Hi. “The colors of pigments wouldn’t interest him half so much as something else. Remember those hundreds of men we saw creeping up out of the swamp? What was the most startling thing about them?”
“Their size,” said Skinny. “All the way from midgets to giants. I never saw anything like it.”
“You’re hitting the nail on the head,” said Hi. “Now I know why the captain can sit back and play checkers while we lose ourselves in the swamp. He thinks the prize money is won.”
“How so?”
“Through Dr. Blyman’s science. Let the doctor dig into these heads and see what makes the pituitary gland click. Let him find out wherein it’s different from ours. Possibly there’s a mutation that can filter into the whole of human heredity eventually—that is, if scientists discover it to be good, not bad.”
Skinny made a wry face. “Those swamp devils were big, I don’t deny, but who’d want one for a grandfather?”
Skinny and I summoned our nerve and followed Hi Turner down the rope into the chasm. This act was the beginning of a three-way partnership that was due to last as long as we should live.
“We’ll follow toward the south,” said Hi. “The big man—or statue—can sleep on. We’ll get back to him later if we can. But first we’ll try to crash this underworld by the front door.”
His idea was to move toward the entrance that had swallowed up the blue space ship.
In the two hours that followed we traversed many a subterranean trail. It gave you a weird feeling, to be slipping along through patches of dark and light under ragged clusters of overhanging deadwood like giant birds’ nests.
Voices would come up to us from the blackness, way down deep. Or sometimes from near at hand; but these voices would go silent suddenly, and the silence would hang heavy, and our nerves would tighten with the knowledge that we were being watched.
At Hi’s suggestion we left our revolvers in our pockets. To go creeping above this unseen city with weapons ready would look bad. Our coming was doubtless being grapevined ahead of us.
A wide patch of sunlight glared in on us from a short distance ahead and we saw the smooth descending track of the hidden space ship runway that had swallowed up the blue ship.
“They know we’re coming, all right,” Hi whispered.
We stopped to listen. The voices were close and full of jumbled excitement, like the back stage chatter of actors before the curtain goes up.
We couldn’t see these actors, though they could probably see us, looking up from the lower ledges. We tiptoed along softly.
“They don’t have callers every day,” I whispered.
“‘Wish I could get the drift of that jabber,” said Skinny. “I’ll bet they’re getting a cannibal stew pot ready.”
“You’re safe, Skinny,” said Hi. “They’d never bother to cook anything as meatless as you.”
They met us at a hairpin turn down along the slope of the space ship runway.
They were a spectacular bunch, from the first glimpse. The morning sun, filling the spacious incline, threw pointed blue shadows at their big padded white feet. And Hi was right, they were ready for us.
CHAPTER IX
Jumping Dominoes
There were eleven of them, and they might have been a troupe of acrobats out of a circus.
They formed perfect stair-steps.
The little man at the lower end was not more than two feet tall. The little lady next to him was three feet. The man beside her, four—and so they ran, in one-foot steps. The final statue-like man at the upper end of the line was all of twelve feet tall.
It was this tall one who clicked a metal cricket to give the signal. Then all eleven of them bowed deeply, in perfect unison.
The twelve-footer gave another click and took two steps forward. The little fellow on the end advanced simultaneously—a matter of ten or twelve steps for his short legs—so that the two of them stood side by side in front of the line. Then there was another click and everybody bowed again.
Hi had the presence of mind to return the bow.
That was only the beginning. Before these elaborate waist-reducing exercises were over, Skinny and I were doing them too.
“We’re in luck,” Skinny whispered. “They’re civilized.”
“Don’t forget,” I warned, “that civilized men are the most deadly.”
Yes, I was scared in spite of all this friendly fol-de-rol.
“Or, if they’re cannibals,” Skinny continued, “they’re polite about it. By Jupiter, there’s some not bad looking females among them. That five-footer reminds me of the Follies—”
“Sssh,” Hi warned. “Watch your cues.”
The eleven stair-steps motioned us in unison, and without a spoken word from them we fell into the middle of their single-file procession and traipsed down the long winding ramp.
They were a handsome bunch, all with glossy black hair and healthy tanned complexions. Their bare arms and legs were trim and muscular.
“They must take a lot of sun baths,” Skinny whispered. “Do you suppose they loll around in those swamps up on top?”
“They look too clean for that,” Hi said. “They must be a different breed from those savages we encountered.”
I was puzzled at first by their o
dd clothing. The shoes, as I have mentioned, were white and very large. The big man’s were like suitcases, and the little two-footer’s were like loaves of bread dough.
Bread dough is a fairly accurate description, not only for the white shoes but also for the soft elastic garments of varied colors which they wore around their bodies. The material, as I later learned, was dug from the earth and kneaded like dough until it could be cut, and shaped and worn like thin pliable leather.’
The warmth of these chasms, as I had previously discovered, was a pleasing, fragrant warmth, with none of the dankness one would expect of such deep places. Thus the thin, cool clothing of this elastic white clay was as suitable as fine linen, and evidently much more in fashion.
After we crossed mud puddles these bulky shoes would scatter a host of oval tracks of all sizes for a short distance. But soon the mud would wear off, and the shoes would make no tracks, and almost no sounds.
Noticing this, Hi reminded us that during our earlier jaunt through his region we may have been shadowed continually.
Now we began to see numerous animated dominoes ahead of us—and colored garments running around against a background of dark wall. It made you see spots in front of your eyes.
“I’m dizzy,” said Skinny. “It reminds me of the time I fell on my head in the Jupiter Olympics.”
“Those shoes are luminous,” Hi noted. “These sub-swampers carry their headlights on their feet.”
As we found are way into the lower regions, the scene took on some aspects of a city. We passed the rear end of the big slick blue space ship, and the two dozen various sized men who were servicing it stopped and gazed at us. Skinny started to bow to them, but Hi nudged him and we all marched on.
The glow of light was soft and pleasing at this depth.
It came from the veins of luminous cream colored earth that streaked the golden brown walls and floors.
White shoes became less conspicuous, but the brightly colored garments took on an added sheen. Everywhere there were people, big and little, going about their work. Some were cooking food over open fires—though where they found their raw materials was more than I could see.
