The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Whatever we have here,” said Professor Theodore White, stroking his beard, “I am ready to predict that the time will come when the wisest of men, in harmony with the forces at work here, will be able to utilize them to great advantage.”

  The French scientist broke in with an astonished outcry. “Look! Zare ees someone appearing!”

  Before their gaze a man came forth, seemingly materializing out of the air above the wooded ravine. As he took form he was striding toward them. The black silks of his mask and garments were rustling. The jewels that adorned his fan-shaped cap, his belt, and his gloves, flashed in the noonday sun.

  Louise ran out to him, took him by the hand. Then at her request he removed his mask as she presented him to the crowd. They crowded closer.

  “I have been listening,” Robert Porter said in a slow, impressive voice. “Professor White may count upon my cooperation, for I am sure he is on the right track. Already this invisible river is available for man’s use. I have been employing it for my needs for many years. Just now I am using it to hold ten prisoners whom I collected, one at a time, because they tried to stop your conference.”

  At Bob Porter’s order, ten men came marching out of the misty air above the ravine. They were a neglected and none-too-happy group. Their eyes squinted from the sudden change into the glare of the sunshine and the stares of scientists. They gave no sign of trying to escape as they were encircled by the scientists.

  “They’ve been wanting to see you, Senator Clark,” said Bob. “They think they should have some of the bills you’ve been using as a bribe on Dr. Marcus. Yes, they’ve been able to watch you from their shady resting places—and within the past ten minutes they’ve seen Dr. Marcus jump into his car and drive off, quite contented over his catch.”

  Bob Porter paused. Several of the scientists were taking notes, some were whispering and nodding. Theodore White strutted as proudly as if he owned the world. Then he stopped, attracted by the wide face and brown bushy hair of one of the prisoners. He doubled his fist and swung. Kerpop!

  “Don’t punch me,” the skylight invader yelped, backing into the circle. “The senator’s the one—”

  “Where are you going, Stark?” Bob cried.

  The handsome young senator was striding straight toward the ravine.

  “Come back!” Bob Porter yelled.

  “Don’t chance it. Stop! If you’re not in harmony—”

  “The prisoners got away with it!” Stark retorted.

  “Not that way. I know the secrets! Stop!” Bob bounded through the crowd and raced toward the bank.

  “Secrets! Your monopoly, do you think? I’ll show—”

  Senator James Stark’s voice faded very suddenly. His form likewise disappeared quickly as if suddenly consumed.

  In weeks and months to come, Louise and Bob often wondered about that moment. It all happened so swiftly, and it was all so final.

  Fifty, scientists would be embarrassed for the rest-of their lives, trying to understand it.

  Neither could Louise or her husband, for all their acquaintance with unknown realms, offer much, of an explanation, except to say that some people seem to put themselves in harmony with the laws of the Universe, and others don’t.

  INVASION DUST

  First published in Amazing Stories, December 1944

  A man made of iron couldn’t have gotten that message through; but a man of stone could!

  CHAPTER I

  June sixth—the invasion—at last! The zero hour had struck. All at once the thick gray skies and leaden waters between England and France became the world’s busiest traffic-way. Four thousand ships, numberless troops, gliders, guns and tanks streamed eastward to strike the German beast.

  “And to think that Big-Noise Bill had lived for this day,” Lou Wagner muttered as he threaded his way through the plane’s strange cargo. “If Big-Noise hadn’t volunteered to substitute for that sick Looey on the Sunday milk run, he’d be with us this morning. But he would volunteer.”

  “He would,” Captain Marchand echoed.

  With his usual ease March sat in the pilot’s seat waiting for the take-off signal. Any minute now. The motors roared with eager thunder. Above the field lights, the skies were graying. Nine planes abreast, the vast air trains were taking to flight. Already the invasion was two or three hours old. Every passing minute heightened the fever of those awaiting their turns.

  March appeared as cool as ever. But Lou Wagner knew that the veteran pilot was alert to everything as he sat there, dryly commenting about their late friend.

  “Big-Noise was a kind of superstitious cuss.”

  “He was fatalistic about this day, you know,” Wagner admitted. “But he figgered his luck would hold till the invasion began.”

  “You say the ack-ack got him through the heart?”

  “Damned close to it. My girl and I had a few words with him in the hospital. He was dying. God, if it hadn’t been for the weather holding us back a day it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “It’s no good talking about it,” said March. He set his hand to the stick. A few more seconds to wait. His voice softened to a low mumble. “Big-Noise was an all-right guy. He and I had our disagreements—his superstitions, for one thing. But he was okay.”

  “Sure. You should have heard the way he talked to Helene and me.” Wagner took a deep breath. “It’s hell he couldn’t have lived. He had a special mission for today, you know.” The motors accelerated. “All set, Lou? . . . Here we go. . .”

  The plane rose. With the sickening sensation, Lou Wagner’s thoughts whirled back to the momentous business at hand. This was invasion! This was it. And there was a thrill about it that made one’s heart beat wildly.

  He glanced through the left window. Eight planes formed the V beyond his left wing. Along with them he and March were sliding up through the semi-darkness with all the ease of a rehearsal flight.

  Now he looked back through the darkness of the plane’s interior to survey his fifty-seven straw passengers. These were secret weapons of a sort—fifty-seven straw dummies that would ride down like sky troopers on parachutes and set off explosions to confuse the enemy.

  They were riding quietly—all but the fifty-seventh. For some reason that dummy in the rear of the plane had shaken out of position and was lying upon the other dummies’ heads, its arms outstretched. It was moving. It was crawling forward.

  “Who’s there?” Wagner snapped. He reached for his pistol.

  “It’s me,” said a low, thick voice. Darkness obscured the face. But that voice was like something returned from the dead. The figure groped its way forward until Wagner could see that the features were those of Big-Noise Bin.

  March, half turning, barked. “What you got back there, Lou?”

  “I guess we’ve got Bill Bradford.”

  Lou Wagner’s slow-spoken words sounded like an announcement of ghosts. His throat tightened.

  “I thought he was dead.” March turned his head long enough to stare full into Big-Noise Bill’s face. “I thought you were—”

  “Dead, huh?” The ghost himself spoke. “Maybe I am. But I’m still flesh and blood. And I couldn’t miss the invasion.”

  For no reason, Lou Wagner gave a nervous laugh. But neither Bill’s looks nor his tone of voice were anything to laugh at. His chest had caught a bullet. Wagner knew that for a fact—and less than twenty-four hours ago he had been on the point of death. Now he clambered down to his feet, a man sick and in pain. His gaunt face, his hollow eyes, his expressionless lips made Lou Wagner shudder.

  Marchand, at the controls, was too busy to catch these details. He seemed to think Wagner had deceived him, and he kept up a low, disturbed mumbling.

  Big-Noise spoke again, in a slow, heavy voice. “Don’t be sore because I showed up, March.”

  “Hell, man, we’re glad to see you. Damned glad—you now that.” March tossed a reassuring look over his shoulder. “It’s just the shock of seeing you alive, after a halfway h
onest guy like Lou says—”

  “And don’t blame Lou. If you want to blame anyone blame his girl friend. Just before I passed out, she fixed me up with this. That is, her zany uncles did.”

  His gesture toward his puffed out chest referred to some concealed bandages, Wagner supposed. Wagner’s eyes must have widened as he took in the manifest facts. Some miracle had occurred. Helene’s “zany uncles”—it was he himself who had called them zany, for Big-Noise Bill had termed them geniuses from the start—had evidently come through with a life-saving experiment. Wagner wondered.

  The plane was moving over the channel. The morning light grew whiter, though gray mists blanketed wide patches of the lead-blue sea. The three men, as silent as their fifty-six companions of straw and cloth, gazed downward, trying to take in all the signs of movement around and beneath them. What they couldn’t see they could guess. The sea and air were alive with armies and arms. The vanguard of this mighty military machine had at last established a path—perhaps a score of paths.

  “Ack-ack!” Big-Noise couldn’t have said it in a more ominous tone. Not a tone of terror, but one of cold fatalism. A few tracer bullets came up through the gray like strings of red beads. One of them thumped through the left wing. Soon the stream of red dots fell short.

  “The coast is under us, anyway,” Wagner observed with something of relief. Somehow he had expected these skies to be thick with enemy resistance. So far the chief problem was to watch out for other Allied planes and gliders. They were everywhere.

  The sky train roared on. There was a breathing spell, and Wagner took advantage of it.

  “Here, Big-Noise. Let’s see that chest. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  What he found within Bill’s shirt could hardly be called a bandage. It was a metal instrument that glistened like a band master’s silver helmet. It was fastened firmly over Bill’s heart with girdings of black tape. In general outlines the arms of tape extending from the conical metal plate looked like a giant insect.

  “What the devil are you doing with a silver spider nesting on your chest?”

  Big-Noise motioned Wagner closer.

  “Can you hear it? It’s ticking like a clock. Your zany uncles—”

  “An artificial heart?”

  “A crude heart, they said. They’ll tell you everything—they and Helene.

  She went to them as soon as you left, and within an hour they slipped into the hospital to see me. Since I was dying anyway I had nothing to lose.”

  “But you’re not dying. They’ve given you life!”

  The tall, hollow-eyed Bill shook his head slowly. “Remember a few hours ago when I put Helene’s hand in yours. Remember what I told her? You’d be back. But me—the little birdies have told me my time is about up.”

  “But now—with this artificial heart!”

  “It’s a heart with a clock. It’s ticking off my last hours,” said Big-Noise Bill in his quietest voice. “Ask our girl friend—your girl friend, I mean. Shell tell you all about it. I always told you she was a mysterious person.

  CHAPTER II

  Helene Danzelle’s Uncles

  They had met her in April, two months before the invasion. They had first seen her giving a beggar a coin in the park. She had hurried on her way. They had followed, at a safe distance, betting each other that she was bound for some swanky palace. Instead, she led them a merry chase to the slums, and there she met a group of ragged children. The party of them went on to the first vacant lot, and there she went to work helping the kids make a garden.

  “What do you know about that?”

  Big-Noise had said. “I still think she’s an actress. Those jewels. That face. That chassis—”

  “Why don’t we walk up and get acquainted,” Lou Wagner had suggested.

  “What, with all those kids around her?”

  “I think I’d like a date with her.”

  “Two of us. Of all the girls I’ve seen in England—but we wouldn’t have a chance with her.”

  “You go on back to headquarters,” said Wagner. “I’m gonna help those kids plant radishes.”

  So Big-Noise and Wagner spent the afternoon spading up a vacant lot while the slum kids asked a lot of bright-eyed questions about America, and Helene Danzelle looked on with amusement.

  A few evenings later she met them at an amusement palace, and this time the sight of her fairly knocked them off the Christmas tree. She wore a white tailored suit and enough bright colored ornaments to start a jewelry shop. One of her gold bracelets was at least two inches wide. One of her rings was set with a huge topaz, which, Wagner noted, was a perfect match for her yellowish amber eyes. Her hair was reddish gold in bold waves that hung loosely at her shoulders.

  Her dazzling beauty was enhanced by a theatrical manner. Wagner whispered to Big-Noise that he had her all figured out to be some famous European actress.

  Big-Noise was the first to dance with her. But Wagner strolled through the court garden with her and was getting along fine until Big-Noise came out to join them.

  Helene Danzelle could laugh readily. She could make them forget their intense minutes of riding bombers over the continent. But she had little to say about herself, and Bill Bradford, with his weakness for superstitions and mystical ideas, would say to Lou in confidence, “I’ll bet there are a thousand skeletons in her family closet. Who is she anyway? What do we know about her family? Does she have a father and a mother?”

  “She has two uncles—her father’s brothers,” said Lou, “if that makes any difference to you.”

  “It’s uncanny the way she knows things before they happen. She tries to conceal her knowledge, but, by George, I’d bet a case of whiskey she already knows the invasion date. You just listen when she starts talking, and see how much you can read between the lines.”

  But Lou preferred not to bother his head about such matters. She was a good-looking girl, a clever girl, a friendly girl. And she was coming his way.

  One the afternoon that Lou Wagner and Helene had their first date alone, Bill crashed the party. He found the couple in a booth, eating sandwiches and cracking wise. They didn’t look too happy to see him walk up.

  But Bill Bradford was on fire with big talk about the recent raids on the Reich. He just had to talk—and loud. When he was in a mood like this, about all that his friend Lou could say was, “Now you see why we call him Big-Noise.”

  That was enough to say. The name did him in. Once he had been proud of it. But his big noise didn’t go over with Helene. From that day on he preferred to date Lou alone.

  “There’s something mysterious about that girl,” was about all Bill could say.

  Then he met her two uncles. If she was mysterious, they were positively weird. All of Bill Bradford’s superstitions rose to the surface from the first hour he talked with them. In fact, that was why he took to the old codgers.

  “Would you believe, young man, that we can see your fortune in a jeweled kaleidoscope?” one of them said.

  “I’ve had my fortune told before,” said Bill, alert with interest, “but never by a kaleidoscope.

  The two uncles led him into the circular, ivory-walled room where the roof of glass showered sunlight on the bright upright object in the center of the floor. But for the moment Bill was most interested in the comic appearance of the two old men.

  Both were in their sixties. One was tall, thin, and droopy; the other was short, chunky, and full of snap. The latter did most of the talking, and he vigorously waggled his broad head of fluffy white hair that must have been cut to the pattern of an inverted bowl. He had a frog voice.

  “I’m a doctor and a scientist,” he croaked. “But all of Helene’s friends call me Uncle Pete.”

  “They call me Uncle Rudy,” cackled the tall, thin one, caressing his long gray beard. “I’m an architect, a demist, an artist, an electrician, and too many other things to mention.”

  “Mostly he’s conceited,” Uncle Pete added. “Come this way, Lieute
nant Bradford—”

  “Just call me Bill,” said Big-Noise, in the interests of being congenial.

  “Good. Here, Bill, is the most remarkable machine for seeing the past, the present and the future that our two master minds could devise. A jeweled kaleidoscope,—”

  “It was my idea,” Uncle Rudy put in, slumping langorously in one chair and hooking his feet over another.

  “All Pete did was build it.”

  “It’s a kaleidoscope,” Uncle Pete continued, “containing some of the rarest jewels of India. You never know what it’s going to tell you next—that is, unless you bother to ask some specific question. For example—”

  “The invasion date turned up yesterday,” Uncle Rudy volunteered. His curt brother hushed him with a snap of the fingers, and Uncle Rudy, just teasing, cackled with laughter. “Aw, I wouldn’t tell, Pete, not really.”

  “Here we are, Bill,” said Uncle Pete with a brisk effort to restore his ruffled dignity. “Step right up.”

  The object in the center of the room was a four-foot chromium cylinder mounted on a little pyramid of black marble. You could step up three steps, lean on a brass rail, and look straight down into the cylindrical shaft to see what was going on.

  Uncle Pete touched a button. The drums at the base began to rotate like overlapping roulette wheels. Bill looked in. What he saw was dazzling bright light spinning in a thousand little flickers of color.

  Then the spinning slowed down to a stop, and the lighted jewels fell into chance arrangements. The triangle of mirrors in the cylinder’s walls turned the pattern into a perfect hexagon. Every jewel that shone through that elaborate design seemed to have been placed with a miraculous precision.

  “It’s a wonderful jumble of color,” Bill mumbled uncertainly. “What am I supposed to see?”