by Don Wilcox
“We don’t like you,” the twelve-footer said quietly. “We’ll just stay home.”
Dr. Blyman’s ten-foot brain had thought of several things, and among them was orange juice. Whatever he had put in it was at last beginning to take effect. Greekel came at him again, but the attack was only a staggering gesture, and Greekel’s eyes rolled dizzily.
“Get moving.” Dr. Blyman grabbed a metal club from off a shelf. It was the four foot handle we had once cut from a green swamper’s club.
I tore into the doctor, then. The best I can say for my next few minutes is that I fought in a blind fury, the same as anyone would have done under the circumstances.
I’m glad there were no cleats on the handle end of that club. It sliced against my head twice, starting a stream of blood. I knew then that Blyman meant to kill me. He would do as much for anyone who stood in his way. I fought accordingly.
I lacked the reach and the strength to make my fists count. After I threw three or four solid punches at his midsection, the club smashed down on my arm, which dropped like a limber rope and hung helpless from my shoulder socket.
I hurled myself with every ounce I could muster. I struck him at the knees, but failed to knock him off his feet. That’s when the club cut down across my ankles and threw me into a heap on the floor.
“You blue devil!” I yelled as he went out. It’s a wonder he didn’t come back and brain me. I couldn’t have stopped him. I was off my feet, completely helpless.
But the doctor had his big hands full of Greekel and the little fellow, driving them to the space boat, clubbing them all the way. I thought he would surely kill them. They were groggy from their drugged drinks, in no state to offer resistance. But their stupor hadn’t made them insensitive to the pain, anyone could see that.
After he’d herded them in and locked the door on them, he started back across the sandy clearing.
“This time he’ll finish me!” I thought as I lay there, a mass of blood and pain and hatred. “But he is a blue devil. And I mean blue. Along with his Brain Hop something drastic has sure as hell happened to his pigment. In that makeshift costume he looks just like one of those swampy human bea—”
Wham!
One of the ship’s guns barked, and a ton of stuff jumped into the air, said stuff consisting of sand and gravel and the blue Dr. Blyman. What came down could very easily have passed through a sieve.
CHAPTER XXIII
Wind-Up
I couldn’t see what the gunfire was doing, or how Hi and his bayonet and his faithful fighters were progressing. I was busy fighting the pains, trying to hold onto consciousness.
Finally I succeeded in applying a crude first aid bandage to my bleeding head and dragged myself up onto a table where I could again see the action on all sides.
Hi Turner had turned into a handsome giant of a figure, in spite of slime and mud. He was more than a mile away, still working like a demon, mowing the brush piles with his bayonet. His band of helpers were dwarfed in comparison, for by this time he had reached his full height of seventy-five feet.
From the ship’s gun turret came echoes of high praise for our swamp veterans. The gunfire began to tame down. The blue swamp devils must have been pretty badly demoralized.
Once I heard some low surprised gasping from the turret, and mumbled remarks about Captain Redfife.
“He looks small,” someone said.
“That’s ’cause you’ve been looking at Hi,” someone else answered.
I turned to view the space lifeboat. At eighty or a hundred yards it was difficult to tell whether the captain had actually shrunk, especially after gazing at the gigantic figure of Hi. I’ll admit I had a wishful guess that the captain would shrink. That was the way I had sized up his brain power.
He was a pitiful sight, though, all apart from his size. You could tell by his tense attitude, as he looked out through the lifeboat window, that he was watching Hi Turner. He was watching and burning up with jealousy. His words of insane envy roared in my ears. Hi Turner didn’t dare outgrow him. For he was the captain.
The door of the lifeboat opened and he appeared in it, still watching far across the swamp. The pitiful fellow was figuratively burning to a cinder. He couldn’t take it.
Now he came out of the lifeboat. He slipped across the clearing with the quick, agitated motions of a nervous little man.
As he came closer I knew that he was still shrinking.
He was waddling like a fierce little bald beetle-browed clown. Again, he reminded me of a stunted fire-plug.
He must have seen me lying almost helpless on the dining room table when he came in, but he may have taken me to be unconscious or even dead. My broken ankles and arm, and my torn skull had temporarily knocked all the life out of me. He waddled in and slipped past me. His silent shudder was probably a fear of being seen.
Like a mouse on an errand of thievery he moved into the laboratory, pulled a chair up to the bench, climbed on it.
He could barely reach the red shoebox that contained the cream-colored powders.
I think he was not very much more than a foot tall—a sort of human nail keg.
He dipped his fingers in the powders and licked them. This was the treat that the doctor had promised him in case of an unfortunate turn of events. The confidence had passed between the two of them, and Skinny and I had overheard it.
What the powders consisted of, I do not know. Not in terms of chemical formulas. But I had seen a few grains of that powder act upon the little Stairstep and I knew it was potent.
In a general way, too, I knew the principle upon which it worked; for we had heard the doctor talk of drug stimulants which would act directly upon the pituitary, without the intervention of a governing effect from the brain—a drug which would release the terrific potentialities for flexible growth provided by the dust radiations with which any human body on this satellite became saturated.
The little keg of a captain took the box with his back to the lifeboat. He entered, leaving the door open. Soon his envious countenance was again watching at the open window.
It occurred to me that this was his chance to take off. The doctor’s equipment and the two living exhibits were aboard.
But of course the captain was determined to wait for Dorothy, who had promised she would come back from the chasms before the hour of the take-off.
Taking his Martian brunette with him was so firmly fixed in the captain’s one and a half foot brain, I thought to myself that here he was passing up his opportunity to be climbing through space.
Or was he determined to stay until he could somehow prove himself master over Hi Turner?
What could he do about Hi? Was it an invariable rule that a man in power must take a sadistic slap at an underling who has outdistanced him? There was a treacherous danger. I tried to think how I might warn Hi—and as I thought, I seemed to be growing again.
With even such slight feelings of growth there came an easing of my pains. Perhaps my crumpled bones were straightening a little.
I wondered what effect I might enjoy from those cream-colored drugs, which the captain was still sampling with such gusto.
The big seventy-five footer from the sub-swamp region came across the wasteland. His costume was a brilliant luminous red in the midday light. With handsome strides he wended his way toward our own seventy-five footer.
About two miles away from the boat he and Hi Turner met and joined their forces against the little blue and green pests that remained of the swamp army.
Soon some of our fighters came dribbling back home. The big man from the chasms, they said, had been fascinated by Hi’s strategy for routing the swamp pests. And though the subswamp world was never bothered by them, he was well aware that they were human rattlesnakes and must eventually be exterminated.
Above all, Seventy-five was grieved to know that three of our fighting party had been lost.
Now that our guns had fallen silent, Dorothy and her father appeared at the
edge of the clearing. Our gunners and returned fighters went out to greet them, and they all trekked across the battlefield toward the spot where our three lads had fallen.
Some of the larger men carried me. Skinny, too, appeared to join these moments of memorial service above the blood-stained swamp waters.
We trudged back slowly, talking of many things. Nobody talked in bitter tones about our ship, two-thirds sunk; or the lifeboat, poised for a breakneck voyage through the void; or even the stupid, boastful captain that had cost us so much trouble.
My carriers and I lagged along behind the others to talk with Skinny. His short legs were almost worn out, for he had been following Dorothy and her father like a watchdog.
“They had a long talk with the sage,” said Skinny. “Dorothy won her point.
Blackwell was reasonable. He was in a good mood, because the Brain Hop had just turned him into a six-footer. Seems he’d always had an inferiority over being short. Anyhow he gave his permission for her to choose her own planet and her own society.”
“Then there’ll still be at least nine stair-steps,” I said. “Unless she changes her decision when she sees the captain.” Skinny was shocked at such a suggestion.
“Redfife could never change her mind—could he?”
The thought struck Skinny with terror, the more so because Blackwell and Dorothy had hurried back to the clearing ahead of the rest of us.
We were still a half mile away when all at once we heard the swoo-oo-oommm of the lifeboat taking off.
Skinny was out ahead of us, racing over the swamp like a jack rabbit.
I told the two men who were carrying me to put me down and follow him. But they clung to me and we covered the distance at a good clip.
“She must have gone, after all,” one of them kept saying. “Redfife generally gets what he wants.”
But as we came up to the ship we learned that Redfife had received such an unqualified, “No!” from his Martian brunette that he’d barged off in a rage.
Now Skinny was talking with her, and they were laughing as if nothing in the world mattered except themselves. It was the first time Skinny had dared to face her since his loss of size, and I was curious to know whether she would still be interested in him.
But as we passed, I heard Skinny say stoutly, “Whatever happens to the ship and the rest of the party, I’m staying here. I’ve already gained back half a foot. I’ll soon be tall enough to marry in the five-foot class.”
“I can get you a job helping the sage,” she said, and it was plain that her smiling eyes were only for him.
A little later I observed Dwight Blackwell more closely. His clothes, for once, were not neat, being too skimpy ever to fit him again. However, the rise of this dapper little man of wealth into the six-foot class had given him a fresh pride that made his poise and dignity more genuine than ever.
Two immense shadows came across the beach.
We looked up to see Hi Turner and the other seventy-five footer approaching, looking like a couple of giant mud packs. They were talking in their tones of soft thunder and you could tell they were like brothers.
Hi looked down at us with a strange glint in his big eyes. He had an idea. And maybe, too, he was seeing us for the first time in a new perspective.
He gave a nod to the red-shirted Seventy-five, and the two of them got busy.
With their big hands they scooped tons of wet sand away from the sides of the Sky Cat. For many hours it had been at least two-thirds buried in the quicksand.
Slowly and carefully they lifted it out.
They carried it into the lake, washed the dirt off, and brought it back clean, placing it on the edge of the clearing.
An hour later we were ready to take off.
We realized we still had time to catch up with the captain’s lifeboat. Hi advised that we should follow through, right on the captain’s tail, and ride into port with him. All of us, Hi said, would be needed at the judge’s stand, now that we had lost our doctor. We must be ready to pool our testimony.
“If you need more evidence, we may come later, in a larger ship,” said Hi, speaking for his sub-swamp twin and himself. “But the Sky Cat wasn’t built for us. Good luck, Blackwell—Blonder—all of you.”
But there was another moment’s delay just before we got into motion.
Two figures came running toward us from a thicket, waving us to wait. They were Greekel and the little one-foot Stair-step.
“We’ll go too,” Greekel yelled. “But not with your captain. We didn’t like him.”
“Besides,” the little fellow added, “he crowded us out.”
After many hours in space we gained a fuller appreciation of the little fellow’s comment. We came upon the lifeboat. It was speeding along at almost full blast. But its only passenger, Captain Red fife, was no longer tending the controls.
He was dying.
He was large—but not from brains.
He had grown too big for the lifeboat. His mountainous, formless body had become choked within the metal prison, and his swollen, bulging head, which pressed against the thick glass of a window, showed that he was slowly strangling.
The pressure of his growing size must have been tremendous.
Even as we watched, the lifeboat burst . . .
Our journey is done.
At this moment, we are riding safely into port. I am at the typewriter bringing my story up to date, batting the keys with my one good hand.
Although Hi Turner is not with us, the influence of his leadership is very much upon us. And Dwight Blackwell, to whom Hi gave official command, has had good cooperation from all.
The prize? We’re holding our breath. Maybe so—maybe not. It depends upon what the other expeditions have dug up.
But at least there’ll be an individual prize for our most valuable man, which we’ve already voted to Hi; though he doesn’t know it.
And Hi has another surprise in store, but not a pleasant one. I suppose it will fall to me to tell him the lifeboat was lost in a weird explosion caused by envious combustion.
[1] The Swampy Satellite is a moon of the planet Efde-Aurus, located mathematically during the 20th century by Earth astronomers, and later sighted by an amateur astronomer with a homemade telescope. Efde-Aurus is not ordinarily visible from any of the four inner planets; but both planet and satellite can at times be seen by the naked eye by the inhabitants of Jupiter and Uranus. The name “Swampy Planet” was attached after one of two early space explorers was said to have sunk, space ship and all, through a surface of dead timbers which apparently concealed a bed of treacherous quicksand. The second of the two explorers endeavored to lead rescue parties to the scene of the disaster but he failed to relocate the swamp which swallowed up the space ship.
[2] The method of Socrates was to question his fellow men for their opinions and knowledge, to learn from them, and likewise to teach them, through the process of sharing their interests and inquiring with them. Modem students of human character recognize that great men are usually quick to establish bonds of sympathetic understanding with others, high or low; while the pretenders to greatness are prone to force their own personal interests into the limelight, remaining callous to the honest accomplishments of others. It is apparent that the narrator of this story believes Hi Turner is achieving what the captain is too selfish to achieve, namely a social integration of the various members of the expedition.
[3] In the Earth year 2016 the Mars Center Observatory found the period of rotation of the Swampy Satellite to be sixteen standard interplanetary hours (i.e. Earth hours). Later computations refined this figure; by 2032 it was established at IS hours, 57 minutes and 40 seconds.
[4] The pituitary, a small round gland within the cranium, is a regulator of the nutrition of bone and other tissues, and therefore the ruler of one’s growth. Abnormal height results from excessive functioning of the pituitary gland.
CHARIOT OF DEATH
First published in Fantastic Adventure
s, August 1943
The most fantastic ride a man ever took! He rode in the chariot of the Lord of Temporary Death!
CHAPTER I
I was whizzing through space in a rickety rocket wagon—the first of its kind and in all probability the last—and I assumed that I was entirely alone.
I was banging away on the typewriter keys when my metal suitcase handle set up the damnedest rattle. What a discordant buzz! It was like a voice with a tin frog in it . . .
Optimistic of me to have brought a suitcase? You said it, brother. The scientist who had shoved me off had assured me that my destination was death.
A hero’s death, if you please. (If Sally had only known!)
Maybe I didn’t look the hero. When it came to muscles and the much glorified square jaw I didn’t quite measure up to your athletic ideal. I fell short of six feet by a couple inches or so; I was wiry and full of nerves on the jump. My friends used to tell me that I was Hollywood stuff. (Ahem!) But not your two-fisted hero. They typed me as the rattle-brained go-getter salesman who high-pressures innocent people into buying steamboats on mountain tops or Florida lots under twenty feet of water.
But this superficial aspect of my nature hadn’t prevented my becoming the Morning Zephyr’s most notorious editorial writer, nor did it prevent my feeling like a hero now.
In all sincerity I thought I was rocketing forth to give my all.
I was banging away on the typewriter keys, recording my sensations of flight in accordance with my promise to the eccentric scientist, when my suitcase handle started annoying me with that persistent fiin-n-n-nnn . . . flin-n-n-nnn . . . flin-n-n-nndrrrs . . .
Disturbing, to say the least. My name is Flinders. Jim Flinders. Nothing wrong with a name like that. But some unkind individuals had added it to their repertoire of profanity after my notorious editorial exploded across the country. Hence, to have one’s very suitcase handle rattle a resemblance to one’s name smacked of mockery.
