by Don Wilcox
And she would smile and say that if anyone looks for a Utopia long enough and hopes for it strong enough, he’s sure to find it. That, she said, was how most of the newcomers came. Though it wasn’t generally known, the Swampy Satellite was engaged in regular commerce with the Efde-Aurus trade centers; and now and then new persons would filter in.
“They come by The Bridge” said Dorothy.
“What’s the bridge?” Skinny asked.
“The space ship. It’s the bridge between the old life and the new.”
“Like it here?” said Skinny.
“More than you can realize,” she said. “If you knew how my life used to be—all sham and pretense. My father tried to make me a super-super. But here I am just what I am.”
“What do you mean?” said Skinny blankly. “What are you?”
“A five-footer. Can’t you see? I’m not full of knowledge and understanding, like that big seventy-five footer you’ve been talking with. And so I don’t try to be what I’m not.”
“Heck, you’re lucky to be just like you are,” said Skinny. “You think I’d fall for you like a ton of bricks if you were seventy-five feet high? Not me. I was kinda crazy about your smile the minute I laid eyes on you. But if that smile had been six feet wide I’d’a been scared outa my shoes.”
Suddenly we discovered that the gargantuan cylinder on our right was a man’s ankle, and the big tower we had just passed—I had carelessly taken it to be a stone cliff—was nothing more than a gigantic foot.
In fact we were now walking along the platform that Skinny had caught in his infra-red photos. How many thousands of yards of cloth it must have taken to provide him with his clothes.
I don’t know how to describe the feeling we got, walking along the length of that platform. If you’re thinking how unbelievable it was when you were a kid seeing an elephant for the first time, you’re not even warm. Though you’re a little closer if you felt a sort of awesome reverence for that elephant, saying to yourself, “This is sure as heck the mostest wonderfulest thing that will ever happen, ever, ever.”
I can say to you that the admiration we felt was as deep and full as any emotion you can name. Hi Turner’s head kept turning and his eyes kept getting wider and he said, “I’ll remember this day when I’ve forgotten everything else.”
When we reached the upper end we took several semicircular walks around the mighty head. What we could see in these sixty yard tours was a series of rare candid camera shots that needed piecing together before they could mean anything. The camera view from high overhead had been greatly superior.
However, Dorothy put us aboard a small elevator, which lifted us to a level a few yards above the great, wide, young-looking eyes. From here we had our opportunity for a face-to-face talk.
CHAPTER XII
“It’s In the Bag”
The Sleeper’s massive eyelashes flicked at us. The action caused a stir of wind making a slight ripple in the network of ropes that hung protectively about him.
When his great lips parted we clung to the rail with a half-conscious fear. Suppose he should give his head a forward nod: We might be bumped out of the elevator car. It was awesome to consider what physical power he must hold, even though his great bulk had made him partially helpless.
But there were my old habits at work again, being overconscious of this man’s physical vastness and forgetting momenarily the tremendous intellectual reality that I was viewing. Here was a sage—a great mind.
Maybe you’ve been told that a sage is always an old man with white hair and a bald spot, a wrinkled fellow whose eyes bug out at you through thick glasses and who never talks except in five-syllable words. Well, that myth was completely banished.
The Sleeper was surprisingly youthful for one who was past middle age. His face was smooth, his lips full, his heavy head of hair was crisp and wavy. I wondered if he groomed himself, but I guessed from the network of ropes, the elevator, and the portable platforms which surrounded him that the smaller persons served him. Later I learned that this service was a high privilege much sought-for by the two- and three-footers and even by the larger persons.
I must say a word about his eyes. To me they were highly fascinating, not because they were young and clear and so immense, but because in their normal thought funess they were more than a little sad. I couldn’t help feeling that the whole languid aspect of his appearance was due to his being filled with the sorrows and troubles of all his people—this rather than the helplessness from his great physical bulk.
Now Dorothy spoke to the mighty man, telling him that guests were here from other planets. His eyes passed over us briefly and a. movement of his eyebrows acknowledged our presence.
He spoke with such softness it was like the whisper of faraway thunder filtering into a closed room.
“If you have come in peace, you are welcome . . . Do not be awed at the sight of me . . . It has been my good fortune to absorb much, but I never forget that bigness is never self-made . . . I contain knowledge given me by each person who passes this way. And so do not think of me as one person who has grown wise in a state of isolation. Know that I am the combination of hundreds of persons. Everyone who holds me in respect thereby leaves me a gift—something of himself.”
Skinny and I looked to Hi Turner, wondering whether he would dare to answer this modest, soft-spoken speech.
“Your words are very kind,” Hi said, “but I’m afraid that out of our slight learning there wouldn’t be an ounce of knowledge that you haven’t already taken in from some other source.”
“If you are thinking in terms of formal education perhaps you are right.”
The mountainous creature gazed up dreamily through the endless vertical walls. There was something of an ancient castle in the majesty of his upward view. The tiny chips of light a half mile or more above us were a mosaic of roof-windows close against the purple skies.
“Do you see my stores of books?” the Sleeper asked, looking up at one of the lower ledges. “My helpers are unpacking new works of literature they acquired on a recent space voyage. They read everything to me, and much of it I remember—because I like it. If I didn’t relish such things, they would doubtless escape my memory. Don’t you find it so?”
Hi and I acknowledged that it was, and the Sleeper talked on.
“But there is much, my friends, that books cannot encompass—that only our lives can surround. No two lives are the same. Each has its own peculiar greatness.”
Skinny whispered to me, and there was an earnest excitement in his manner. “Does he mean you and I are great, Blonder?”
“Ask him,” I said.
Skinny did it—with the most interesting results. Before we knew it here was my own pal Skinny Davis all absorbed in telling about the up-and-down of high-jumping. It was almost funny.
And the significant part of it was, the five-hundred and fifty foot sage was interested. I mean really. By George, he was enjoying it. Now you know darned well that he had no intention of getting up on his feet and starting a high-jumping career. But here was a little corner of life that he was rounding out for the first time, and it did you good to see what a vicarious thrill he got out of it.
It made you stop and wonder, does a person like that have to be big to have room for all that appreciation of the other guy—or is it that habit of appreciation that fills him out to bigness?
Hi and I had our turns, too, and all in all it filled us up with new feelings toward ourselves and toward the world in general.
But on top of all this healthy uplift some old troubles soon came bouncing back.
I had almost forgotten our big red-shirted Seventy-five, our original host. When last seen he had volunteered to secure a few more men from our ship to join us in this visit to the Sleeper. Now we heard some familiar voices.
We turned and saw five of our own men descending a trail in the company of the stair-steps.
The five fellows were eyeing the Sleeper, gawking back and fo
rth like parachute junipers scanning a forty-acre field for a safe place to land.
They were gasping, and I knew they were thinking about the big interplanetary competition.
One of them said, “Oh boy, oh boy, it’s in the bag.”
Before the day was over all of us went to work—all but Hi Turner. The red-shirted Seventy-five had bent down to whisper some offside information in Hi’s ear and soon the two of them went off into a corner for a private conference.
But the rest of us went to work with cameras and yardsticks and calipers and microscopes and flashlights—in fact with every fact-finding instrument we could get our hands on—to record everything we could about what might well be the strangest discovery in our universe.
The five-hundred and fifty foot sage submitted to it and watched us with interest for awhile—perhaps until he had assimilated all he cared for of contest mongers on a wonder hunt—and then he dropped off to sleep.
CHAPTER XIII
Rough House on a Chest
It was a stinking shame.
It happened without warning, and Skinny and I and the five others who had joined us felt as guilty as hell over the deal.
We didn’t do it. Not one of the seven of us—or Hi, the eighth—could have dreamed of such insulting action. But we eight knew the guilty ones. We’d come in the same Sky Cat with them. We had a moral obligation for their actions, and that’s why we got ourselves immersed in guilt.
They came uninvited, a rip-snorting squad of them, as soon as they had got wind of the big sleeping giant.
By the time they hit the lower trails and could see the vast mountainous creature under the glow of the chasm radiations, they began shouting and yelping like savages on the warpath. This was their prize. This was the ten million dollar find!
Without one respectful how-do-you-do to the Sleeper they jumped aboard his great body and began racing back and forth, slicing off patches of his clothing for souvenirs, jabbing his flesh for samples of his blood, pulling his hair and bouncing stones at his eyes to get movies of his face in action.
It was cruel, barbaric, ignorant.
Captain Redfife strutted up and down over the big chest, carrying a staff and having his picture taken in the guise of a mountain climber.
Hi was still off the scene on business of his own, and I was sure it must be something grave, for he had asked Dorothy, our hostess, to excuse him and he would return to us soon.
Now night had come on and yet neither he nor his big friend Seventy-five had reappeared.
Dorothy, poor kid, was all torn up over the sudden stampede. She had tried to put things to rights, instantly, calling to the Sleeper that these were not the same men as the ones who had talked with him. He closed his eyes.
Dorothy saw there was nothing for her to do but return to her place among the Stair-steps. Those eleven handsome Sub-Swampers were not at all pleased with these goings on. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the males among them had waded into the fracas. That twelve-footer—who, I had learned, was no other than Greekel of the previous night’s shadows and voices—might have tossed our discourteous anarchists off as efficiently as any professional bouncer.
But no, the eleven Stair-steps stood back in their soft shoes and softer manners and kept their hands clean of this ugly business.
Meanwhile Skinny and I rolled up our sleeves and went to work. So did the five others who had partaken of the Sleeper’s friendship.
The seven of us put up all kinds of scrap—first verbal, then fistic. We ran roughshod over all taboos relating to insubordination.
We were seven against fifteen. Two of them to every one of us, and one over—that one being Captain Redfife himself.
In the end the seven of us took a whipping. But I got in a solid lick at the captain before the ordeal was over. He was trying to play big shot and make himself a military conqueror. He’d raced high up on the chest to get out of the fighting belt, and there he’d stopped, fascinated by a large ornamental wooden button on the Sleeper’s shirt.
He was trying to tear it off when I came at him.
“Damn it, why don’t you order the rats off?” I yelled. “Haven’t you any sense of decency? This man wants to be our friend. But not if we murder him.”
Redfife snapped back at me.
“Blonder, find me a knife. I’ve got just the souvenir for my Martian brunette—Joe Blonder, don’t you dare—”
Biff!
I smacked him square on the kisser and he flipflopped down on the mountainous chest. Up he came with a bounce and a rush, fiery mad, and we fought like a pair of demons until a couple of men pulled me off.
As soon as Redfife could take time off from cursing me; he began snorting some more about the button souvenir. Some of his loyal troopers went to help him. The seven of us got together, and made a center rush to storm them in a body—on a body.
Just then came a powerful sneeze that went “Whoooof!” and blew the whole bunch of us off the Sleeper’s body. As we were getting up, the low heavy thunder of the giant’s laughter vibrated the platform and several of us fell and froze tight to the floor.
The big voice spoke soft words that rumbled around the place and shook it to silence.
“Greekel, will you ask the gentlemen—the gentlemen—to assemble on the elevators so I may speak with them?”
We accepted the invitation sheepishly. Everyone’s feelings suffered guilt-pangs, I’m sure, with the possible exception of the captain. We all pulled ourselves together so quickly that the fight might have been forgotten except for the Sleeper’s mussed clothing. And the captain’s persistent braggings.
“I’ll get that souvenir yet, you just see,” said Redfife as the eleven Stairsteps herded us into the elevators. “And when I tell my Martian brunette how many men I had to whip to get it—”
At that instant a blast of righteous indignation exploded from a most unexpected source. The cute little five-footer whirled to face the captain.
“Are you referring to me?”
“Dotty! It’s you—my Martian—” But the captain broke off with a gurgle and grabbed his cap and made a gesture of ducking a blow as the girl whirled at him with the fire of her fury.
“You’ve no right to call me your Martian brunette, or your anything else,” she stormed. “I’ve told you before, that one date was a phony trick someone played on me. You and I aren’t even friends.”
“Hell, Dotty, don’t get all hostile. I didn’t know you were here. Honest, I didn’t follow you—”
“You’d better not. You’d better make yourself scarce . . .”
The verbal lashing he took from Dorothy was just as satisfying to Skinny and me and some of the others as the sock I’d given him with a fist.
Dorothy concluded her tirade by walking out of the elevator and hurrying away; so that while we were ascending, our dear sweet captain was free to say, “She’s a scream, ain’t she? You fellows might think she’s mad but she ain’t. She’s wild about me. She likes to have me call her my Martian—”
But no one was listening, for the Sleeper had begun to speak.
CHAPTER XIV
Consider the Pituitary
The Sleeper had a way about him.
He knew he was trying to tame a wild bunch. It isn’t an easy job to try to talk in a sympathetic, heart-to-heart manner with any group of strangers. But especially an uncivil bunch like us explorers. We were rapidly turning into a disorganized lot of anarchists, owing to our lack of leadership.
That’s why things went so much better as soon as Hi came back and joined us. I saw at once that he was in a tough mood about something. But he pitched in and helped the Sleeper out with some straight-to-the-point answers.
When the Sleeper asked whether we had decided what we would try to take back as our discovery, it gave the captain a chance to brace up and represent us, as a captain should.
But by George at that very moment Skinny nudged me and pointed to the nearby ledge. Captain Redfife had crawled ac
ross and was scurrying away.
“I’m gonna follow him,” Skinny whispered. “I don’t like the way he talked about Dorothy.”
So Skinny slipped away, and I didn’t blame him.
And now Hi Turner jumped into the breech and became our spokesman. He assured the Sleeper that if we could learn the secret of this strange relation between mental development and physical height, that would be our prize finding.
“Have you noticed the radiant dust in the air?” the Sleeper asked. “That is the peculiar characteristic of the soil on this satellite. Whether a man lives above, amid the swamps, or down here in the caves and ravines where the undampened radiant dust glows, it is sure to find its way. into his system. Everyone absorbs quantities of it through his food.”
Hi Turner followed him with questions, for the Sleeper insisted that he was willing to give all of these “gentlemen” the benefit of his knowledge.
As nearly as I could grasp the explanation, this particular radiant material—which remained nameless to me because of my inability to grasp the chemical symbols involved—would invariably make contact with the pituitary gland.[4]
Beyond this contact, the Sleeper explained, there was much conjecture as to just how and why the activity of the brain should exert such a perfect control over the radiations in the neighborhood of the pituitary, and the consequent stimulations of that gland.
I could see that Hi Turner was getting it. Probably he’d be able to carry the very words back to Dr. Blyman, I thought, if he chose to do so.
“In spite of some unsolved mysteries,” the Sleeper said dreamily, “our doctors have proved that here on the Swamp Satellite it happens: The brain comes to act as a governor upon the pituitary or growth gland—through the medium of this radiant material which has centered in this region of the brain.”
“But how,” Hi asked, “can the hardened bones manage such a phenomenal growth?”
“Here, again, is a mystery of our radiant dust. Its magic properties, applied to the human body, result in a rapid growth of cells. We enjoy a great flexibility of bone structure. To you the swiftness of this growth would seem unbelievable.”
