The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “If your leader is so evil that his poison saturates the persons around him, it’s too bad for them. Maybe they didn’t want it that way. But after it’s happened they’re lost. They can’t be redeemed. They’re stumbling blocks to the justice that every honest man fights for. Gentlemen, we’re going to have to kill, capture, or beat into submission exactly five hundred guards.”

  Midge Jupiter said pessimistically, “That oughta be easy. Five hundred of them and two thousand of us—the only thing being that they have the guns.”

  “Our weapons,” said Lathrop, “are our tools—picks, shovels, mauls. They reach no farther than the swing of your arm. Their ray-guns are good for exactly a hundred yards. Did you ever run a hundred yards for a touchdown, Midge? That’s how far you’d have to run to miss the sweep of an atomic gun.”

  Old man Kandaroff went over our plans with us; said he thought we were in for plenty of difficulty.

  “To mount that ship when she sits up there a half mile in the air isn’t easy. How can you get there in the first place? And when you do, what’s to prevent the guards from turning you into a wisp of smoke with a gun before you ever get on board?”

  “But if we do get on board?” said Lathrop.

  “Once you’re there, the guns wouldn’t go into action so fast. A clear shot inside a ship isn’t easy. I’ve seen those guns work. I well remember one quick flash I saw. The target was a man, and suddenly his left side just wasn’t there. But that wasn’t all. The end of the table behind him wasn’t there. And the wall behind it opened up, and a tree beyond that came bouncing down, and a metal signboard caved in and three fence-posts melted away. Everything that lay in the hundred-yard path disintegrated in a twinkling.”

  This talk was followed by other accounts of the efficiency of ray-guns. We tried to content ourselves that they were positively too destructive to be used on a space ship. But we couldn’t grow comfortable about that. In any event we bade fair to be on the receiving end. When the meeting was over I heard my name called. Kandaroff had something to tell me.

  “See here, Briff, you’ve done a fine job of keeping me supplied with food. But I suggest you let me starve for a while.”

  His words scared me. My first thought was that Violet Speer had got our number.

  “Not yet,” Kandaroff. “But that’s what I’m afraid of. We’ve been watched. Some young girl has picked up the trail to my cave. I saw her watching you yesterday as you went back down the mountain path.”

  “Over that trail?” I asked. “She must be a bear for punishment. Or a mountain goat—”

  “A deer would be a more appropriate figure,” said Kandaroff. “I think you’d better turn hunter on your next trip to make sure she isn’t a spy. If necessary I can go to a new hideout.”

  “Sooner or later,” said Lathrop, “your executioner will find out you’re still alive.”

  “The later the better,” said Kandaroff. “I want to stay alive. I want to see tins revolution through.”

  No one would doubt it, in view of the fierce burning of his eyes. Someone stirred the low embers of the fire, and a few of us carried on. Among us we came to the conclusion that the girl in question must have been a descendant of one of the early Venus colonists. She lived with her parents in a shack about a mile off the brown brick road.

  “Then she won’t be a spy,” said Kandaroff confidently. “These early colonists don’t like this Miss Violet Speer’s rule any better than we do.”

  “Anyway I’ll keep a lookout,” I said. “How old a girl?”

  “Eighteen or nineteen.”

  “I’ll help you keep a lookout, Briff,” said Midge Jupiter.

  CHAPTER V

  Mountain Secrets

  A few days later I got acquainted with this girl. She was eighteen, blonde, pretty and amiable. She was an American, of the stock that colonized this planet three and four hundred years ago. You could tell—the very regular features, the archaic accents reminiscent of the old twenty-first century movies, a physical hardihood characteristic of the pioneers.

  Her education was negligible, her interests limited. Her conceptions of the immensity of the world and its affairs were pitifully behind the times. Ideas about time and space had advanced to new levels of complexity since her ancestors struck out on their great pioneering adventure.

  However, when it came to such fundamental matters as honesty and fair play and cooperation with one’s fellow-men, this pretty little girl seemed to be very much up to date. She and her family were generous and hospitable. I should know: the very hour that I met her found me on the way to her home.

  It began with our mountainside conversation. I had turned suddenly to see her bob down behind a boulder. When she peeked around I was there looking down at her.

  “Why are you following me?” I asked.

  “To see where you take the food.”

  “I have a place to take it,” I said. “There is a hungry mouth in the mountains that needs to be fed.”

  She showed an inclination to be superstitious about this. “A hungry mouth in the mountains.” She looked in awe toward the great purple-shadowed craggy slopes. Then she turned to me, laughing. “You are joking. The mountains do not eat food.”

  “The mountains are full of secrets,” I said. “Why do parents think I come to these foothills with food? Have you told them?”

  “My parents say you must have someone in hiding. But I’ll tell them you said there was a mouth in the mountains.” She smiled at me quizzically to know whether she was on the right track.

  I was at once worried over how far this rumor of a fugitive might have travelled. But the girl assured me, in my own words, that the mountains were full of secrets.

  She suggested, then, that I might accompany her to her house and talk with her parents, and I accepted gladly.

  Midge would have been jealous of my good fortune. These homes of the remaining families of Venus colonizers were apart from the city which Violet Speer was making over. We who had been brought in during the decade were usually kept too busy to make friends. Still more to the point of my good fortune, this young girl, Ellen by name, was as charming and pretty as a mountain flower.

  We ascended the steps of a porch that was supported by stilts, and there Ellen’s parents sat, apparently passing the long day by gazing down at the swampy lakes, across to the old city, and up at the mammoth space ship overhead.

  We chatted in a very leisurely manner. They were willing to talk about their ancestors who pioneered here, about the old buildings that were being torn down for a wider space port and a more up-to-date city around it. But upon the burning subject of Miss Violet Speer they would say nothing.

  They watched me suspiciously, and I wondered if they thought I was a spy from our tyrannical ruler.

  What a strange household! These people seemed to have hidden themselves away in the hills for generations. They hardly realized that the achievements of their ancestors were buried under the dust of time.

  A trophy that interested me was an ancient three-bladed rotor on the wall. It was a model that I judged had come down the second half of the twentieth century, from the long outmoded heliocopters which people used to jump from roof to roof. In their day they had been the latest and most convenient mode of short individual hops, as from home to the other side of the city or even down town for the groceries. There had been a day when the owners of such vehicles had been the new aristocracy. The forerunners of a more advanced technological age. And that was no doubt the reason that family pride had preserved this relic.

  How curious that these people should have grown so provincial! The spirit of adventure had brought their forefathers to this far-off outpost ahead of the sluggish spread of civilization. Far ahead of the mass of emigrants they had come. Now, with the passing generations, the families had lapsed into a society of stragglers, bound down with a burden of museum pieces from the past, helicopter rotors!

  One could see in their fine, intelligent features the c
apacity for taking their place with the ranks of the moderns. Circumstances had done this to them.

  When I bade the girl and her family good afternoon I promised to come to see them again. Here were friends who could be trusted completely. It was then, as Ellen walked with me out toward the brown brick roadway, that I stated my confidence: It was no dragon’s mouth or monster that I fed; it was indeed a man who was hiding—hiding because the cruel Violet Speer had meant to kill him.

  “And why?”

  “Because she thinks he is too old to be a good worker. She does not appreciate his years of hard effort.”

  “I wish,” said Ellen, “that someone would send her and her ship to another world.”

  “You mustn’t think such thoughts aloud,” I warned.

  “But all of my people think such thoughts. My father has said that he would gladly fight the red and silver guards who ride up and down from her ship.”

  “Promise that you will tell no one what we have talked about.”

  “I promise—and you must promise that no guard will catch you befriending this man who-is hiding.”

  With these vows we parted company.

  The following day, and the next and the next, we met and talked again. To me it became a double pleasure to do this errand—the pleasure of my talks with Kandaroff, wise old man that he was, and the enjoyment of my visit with this simple girl and her rough and hardy parents.

  One night I said to her, “Ellen, will you go with me tonight, and I will show you where this man lives, so that you may take food to him until I come back again. I may be gone for a long time.”

  So she and her father accompanied me and promised to take Kandaroff into their home during ray absence.

  I could not explain how or why I would not be leaving. I only knew that Jay Lathrop had heard a rumor. There would be a change of climate for the two of us very soon.

  CHAPTER VI

  Ray-Gunning for Sport?

  The red and silver guards marched up to us in their formal manner and requested us to accompany them. We obeyed on the instant. They led us out across the space port plaza. Midget Jupiter kept trailing along with us, asking where we were going.

  “What does this mean? Hey, what’s the idea? Will you be sure to come back?”

  “He’s a pest. Let’s give him a real change of climate,” one of the guards barked. They snapped an order at him and were about to turn him over to another set of guards when the enlarged image and the amplified voice of Violet Speer set forth a command. The suddenness of her voice alarmed the people in the streets like a fire siren.

  “We may need another man. Bring him along. There will be some deck scrubbing to do, and it will be amusing to use that little short man for a mop.”

  “I may not be much more than a midget,” Midge said under his breath, “but she’d better not forget that I’m a Jupiter too.”

  So he came, right by our side, and the next thing we know we were on the half-mile high elevator, gasping for breath as the cage went sailing up and up. Around us were the great spheres of stone hanging motionless in the air. Above us was the huge orange hull of the space ship.

  The aperture spread black and ominous, to engulf us and our elevator car. A few minutes later we found ourselves in a mammoth parlor high in the sky, looking out at the steamy clouds that brushed past our big ship’s nose.

  “You are my guests for some days to come, gentlemen,” came the voice of the lady of this great ship. A television screen was, as usual, her means of appearing before us. “I welcome you as fellow passengers on a long journey.”

  “Long journey!” Midge groaned for our benefit. “Famous last words.”

  “A space trip,” Lathrop whispered. “Don’t get scared. Act natural.”

  “Under these conditions,” said Midge, “there’s nothing so natural as acting scared. What’s she going to do?” I had an idea she had taken us along for ballast and would drop us off when the time came, but for some reason Jay Lathrop was more hopeful. He preferred, at least, to be optimistic until he saw where the danger lay.

  “In other words,” I relayed my own interpretation to Midge, “Jay and I aren’t going to get nervous until they bump you off.”

  “Don’t. Don’t even say it for a joke,” Midge whispered.

  Lathrop talked to us in a low whisper for fear the very floors might have ears.

  “I think I know why we’ve come. She’s smelled a revolution cooking and she wants to know who the cooks are that are stirring it. It may cool down with us gone.”

  “For our good health,” said Midge, “I hope it keeps stewing.”

  I must admit there was a certain aesthetic pleasure in being here, looking out on the big universe previous to our take-off, looking down on our port where our fellow creatures were struggling. One who hasn’t experienced it can hardly appreciate the different way you suddenly feel about everything. You’ve been grubber of the soil, an industrious earthworm, up to this moment. All at once you find yourself a winged bird with the power to float in the air and study the world beneath you. Too much of this pleasure would be the undoing of a rebel. It puts so much clean distance between himself and the men down there who are getting whipped and led across to other climates.

  Violet Speer came in. She was the slickest dresser you ever saw. She must have had a corner on the world’s finest jewels and most beautiful gowns. I don’t think they could have been fashioned by any of the few artisans gathered at Venus. She was a person who could walk into the room and make all conversations stop off short. I had a dreadful fear that she might be able to kill revolutions as easy as conversations. I mean, here we were, all sworn rebels, and good ones as long as we were on the ground. But up here, with her smiling at us and talking in her quick-witted manner, we could almost believe we were her long-lost friends.

  As to age, anyone’s guess is good. She was as vivacious as a sixteen-year-old, as witty and wise as a grandmother, and as quick to seize an advantage as a spoiled child. She could have easily have been, from her appearance, twenty-five or forty. The more you watched her the more you weren’t sure whether she was really beautiful, or young either. Once when she dropped the remark that this ship had been in the family one hundred and twenty years you had a weird feeling that she might, by some mysterious manner, be remembering back that long.

  She sat down beside Jay Lathrop, and as soon as she had talked with the others of us just long enough to know we were practically speechless in her presence, she turned her attentions to him.

  “If you’ll come to the windows, Mr. Lathrop,” she said, taking him by the hand, “you’ll have a splendid view of the newest meteor. It came to us out of nowhere on our last trip out.”

  “I don’t understand it at all,” said Lathrop. “How do you account for it?”

  Now they went on talking, and their backs were toward us. She was holding to Lathrop’s arm, and I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful chance for us simply to do what was needed to be done then and there. Midge and I were carrying the small ray pistols we had once taken from guards.

  We exchanged sharp glances. Maybe it was something that Lathrop said just then that stopped us. “It would be a long fall from here.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Speer, “I’ve often thought how unfortunate it would be if anyone should accidentally shoot through this wall and it would melt away under atomic fire. The whole system of gravitational control would collapse if any chambers in the walls were damaged.”

  “It isn’t pleasant to contemplate,” Lathrop said. “Isn’t there some way that such a space ship wall could be made to resist gunfire?”

  “These modern ray-guns play no favorites, you know. But I’ll give your question my best thought, and maybe I’ll turn out an answer.”

  “Then you yourself are an inventor?” Lathrop asked. Midge and I were all ears now.

  “After a fashion,” she smiled, as if being very modest over some great talent. “I turn my attention to such little matters as
inventions just for pastime. A pleasant diversion, inventing.”

  “What have you found most diverting recently?” Lathrop asked.

  With a pleased smile Violet Speer took up a pencil and notebook.

  “Let me sketch one of my curious little theories. It is related to such things as walls and atomic gunfire. Here in a line are G, the gun; M, a man; and W, a space ship wall. The idea is, in brief, that one substance that might be treated to resist an attack of gunfire would be human material.”

  “Living persons?” asked Lathrop in astonishment. At the same time Midge and I began to back away. It didn’t sound safe to be around a woman who would talk like that. There wasn’t so much as a hint of sentimentality in her voice to lift the mood of any of her icy theory talk.

  “A rather surprising theory, do you think, Mr. Lathrop?” she asked.

  “Surprising isn’t the word for it,” said Jay Lathrop. “It’s horrifying.”

  “Just as so many theories are until they get past the stage of experimentation.”

  “Have you already begun experimenting along these lines?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s an instructive way to while away one’s time on a trip to another planet.”

  “Just what form does this experimenting take?”

  “You’re sure this won’t bore you, Mr. Lathrop? Or you other gentlemen?” She turned to us, and it seemed to me she was gloating over our discomfort. Very deliberately she told us what this was all about, and we sat there trying to take it in. I began to feel all choked up.

  As she explained it, the general idea was that living tissue could be adapted to endure lots of things, such as to resist diseases, to overcome much poison. It was within the realm of possibility that, if treated with certain substances, this same remarkable human body might even learn to resist atomic fire.