The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  CHAPTER XV

  Turban’s-Eye View

  In my cowboy career swimming has never been one of my major sports.

  Fifteen minutes of wallowing around in a mudhole on Dry Creek would exhaust me. So I was more than a little surprised to find how well I was able to swim in this pool. Mae and I swam for hours, not from choice, but necessity.

  The strange fact was that the linger we swam the more energetic we felt.

  The trouble was, our destination kept retreating from us. We had seen at once that the opposite end of this pool offered steps and a railing. At every other side, ascent appeared impossible. Hence, we made for the far end, which I concluded to be not more than thirty strokes away. The pool was growing. These thousands of little human creatures jumping out of our course were expanding. Even the waives and the splashing drops of water were enlarging.

  How large are the drops of water that stream down over your eyes when you are swimming? These expanded until they were like basket-balls in front of our faces. And yet their weight did not exhaust us. Our physical power was multiplying by leaps and bounds.

  “We’re being reduce to the size of these turban creatures,” said Mae.

  I couldn’t believe it. I felt husky enough to tear the walls down.

  But by the time we reached that remote end of the world a great change had come over us. What had been tiny blue light bulbs in the ceiling now appeared to be vast blue moons in a great expanse of sky.

  As Mae had so aptly noted, our sizes had changed. We weren’t quite so small as these little turban creatures swimming around us, but small enough that they no longer looked like tiny dolls.

  They looked like miniature Japanese, and that’s what they were.

  When they talked in their little, squeaky voices, they talked in Japanese.

  We were to get plenty of proof of this later.

  “Let’s swim some more,” said Mae. “I feel like swimming some more.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” I said, and so we plunged in for another round of the vast purple ocean.

  Take my word for. it, I couldn’t understand this overwhelming desire for exercise. It was still with us when we emerged the second time. By then we were almost as small as these little Japanese moppets. The purple liquid had given us entirely new suits of clothing along with our diminished forms. We were now wearing neatly fitted purple tights. Our hair had changed to silky tassels, and I felt like a brightly colored rag doll.

  But Mae still looked like Mae to me. Her hair and eyes were as black as ever, and her smile was present again in place of the expression of terror I had seen when we slid into this trap. She was by far the prettiest thing in the pool.

  “I feel stout enough,” I said, “to juggle a ton of concrete.”

  “There’s an exercise ground some place if we can only find it,” said Mae. “Let’s follow the crowd. Shall we?”

  Once we started to explore we went everywhere. Tubes led us out of this swimming room and we got into the troughs that circulated through the big laboratory. How immense everything looked! I don’t know how a mountain might look to an ant that is used to an ant-hill. But you should have seen some of those objects through our eyes—light switches, nail heads, a stray pencil mark, a pile of dust. Every glance brought a surprise.

  We rested, at last, from a long and exhilarating game of catch played with a stone that must have been as large as a bass drum. (It seemed larger than a building.) We sat on the edge of a tank of crimson dye and swung our purple legs and laughed over what a funny experience we were having.

  Then we sobered down and began to think of our responsibilities.

  Mae said, “Steve, I never supposed that these turban creatures could be such happy, carefree little imps. From the first sight of the thousands I was repelled. But now—”

  “Now,” I said, “we’d better do some serious thinking before we forget what brought us here. You’re going to be missed by your doctor.”

  “And Joe is going to miss you.”

  “But what we’re going to find out about Mr. Taggart,” I said, “will make up for a lot of missing.”

  Well, we learned to get around. And right away we discovered we had two big advantages over all these little Japanese creatures we were mixed up with.

  In the first place, we knew our way around from the viewpoint of the big folks.

  In the second place, we had our wits about us. These little Japs were driving in definite directions, but their drive was almost automatic. As if they’d lost the power to direct themselves. A strong will, like Taggart’s, could send them scampering off on the two-week task of digging the earth out from under a building. They wouldn’t come back until it was done.

  As soon as we learned that we were nearly invisible and could get around on our own initiative without being detected, we defied Taggart’s laboratory routines. We struck out to find Mr. Bondpopper, and late one night we found him.

  The fat, jolly, white-haired, little fellow was in his office working on his will. He was all out of breath from jumpings around over the typewriter keys.

  “Don’t laugh at my typing,” he said. “It’s better than my usual hunt and peck; no joking.”

  He crawled down over the space bar. The three of us flattened ourselves into something like patches of turban goods and slid under the door. On the way to Taggart’s we had a big talk. Mr. Bondpopper had learned a lot since he’d reduced to midget size. He trusted Mae completely and he took me on faith.

  “Where do you think all these thousands of Japanese came from?” I asked. “And what are they—bird, beast or fish?”

  “Mostly beast,” said Bondpopper. “However, the younger generation is flexible. It’s their damnable traditions that do the damage. That’s why Taggart made Betty keep experimenting on those turban designs.”

  “She used the younger generation?” Mae asked.

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Bondpopper. “If the young ones can be segregated from their old militaristic culture—and it’s next to impossible for them to pick it up from these dwarfed automatons—then they are like any other young life—responsive, alert, eager. It’s no wonder that Taggart’s turbans have worked as talent magnifiers. These young specimens remain pressed within the design, but completely alive and self-sufficient. In a turban or a necktie they provide the sympathetic audience so much needed by every artist or musician.” Thus Mae and I caught the distinction between the old, hardened and destructive creatures—some of which had inhabited Constanza’s first turban—and the younger generations.

  I recalled that Betty Morris had once relied upon the friendship of a few creatures from that turban. And she had sent some along with me as a possible protection. But my scrap of that turban, as events proved, must have contained the older and more belligerent variety.

  These swarms of miniature people had been smuggled over from Japan. Bondpopper had found out about that, too.

  “Taggart and some of his agents,” said Bondpopper, “are getting set for a new Japanese war against us. They lost their military war. This time they mean to sneak into this country several million strong. They’ll undermine our great cities and get hold of the nerve centers of our nation—if Taggart can get away with these preliminary experiments . . . Here we are at his twenty-second floor office. Let’s seep in quietly.”

  We slipped under the door and moved across to his desk as unobtrusively as colored shadows. Eventually we crawled up the side of the window frame (through which I had once dived) so that we could look down on the real estate map spread out on Taggart’s desk.

  Taggart was in conference with two of Bondpopper’s top men, one a lawyer, the other a secretary. It was hard to say which of the two was more stubborn. Taggart couldn’t shake either of them.

  “But you can see with your own eyes, gentlemen,” he protested, “that every foot of ground along Park Avenue is doomed. We don’t know what day or what hour any of these buildings may collapse. So I’m offering to buy it—not for bu
ilding purposes. That’s out. It’s no good. Every stone that has been planted on Park Avenue is a mistake.”

  “So what?” said the lawyer.

  “So I’ll buy it at a good price and turn it into a park. If Mr. Bondpopper were living he would applaud my generosity. He’d realize that the Hall of Arts and all those other structures are doomed.”

  “We’ll not sell anything,” said the secretary, “until Mr. Bondpopper’s will appears.” The lawyer backed him up.

  That was all we stayed for. Mr. Bondpopper led the way down to the laboratory and we checked all the subterranean channels. There were three excavations that the little Japanese termites had dug—to the Taggart sidewalk cave-in, to the knight on his horse, and to the Walter Montzingo building. There were no others at present. But with a million or so Japanese termites at his command, Taggart’s threat could be made good on short notice.

  “What good can we do,” I protested, “unless we can get back to our normal size? Are we going to be little creatures forever?”

  “That’s the least of my worries,” said Bondpopper. “So far we’ve played our size to advantage. All we’ve learned has come from our being able to mix with these Japs. But you’re right, there must be a way to convert them back to normal size. They invented the scheme of soaking themselves to a miniature form during the battle of Tokyo. You know it has always been a mystery what became of hundreds of thousands of them.”

  “What did happen, then?” Mae asked.

  “They were evacuated in barrel lots, preserved in miniature in this purple fluid,” said Bondpopper. “If you can understand their language you’ll catch a comment occasionally. But all their talk now is as automatic as their actions. They’ve been pickled too long.” Mae and I exchanged anxious glances. “I know what you’re thinking,” said Mr. Bondpopper, “and you’re right. We’ve got to do our thinking and acting in a hurry. The fewer hours we while away in the swimming pool the better. It might be weeks or months or only days. But I’m sure, before long, that this same mental lethargy will close in on us. Once it comes we’ll be content to dig tunnels or tear down buildings or be pressed into turbans for Taggart the same as the others.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Betty’s Special Design

  When we got down to brass tacks all three of us thought of Betty Morris.

  Betty held the keys to the success or failure of our plan. She knew her turban termites. She had sorted them and experimented with them; she’d watched them work after she’d poured them into the dyes and rolled them through the presses and flattened them into living turbans.

  Betty had nerve—that’s why my pal Joe had fallen for her. The way to Betty was through Joe.

  I found Joe singing very mournfully in our old studio. I worked with a pencil twice my size until I’d scribbled a note for him to meet me on a certain practice stage—where I knew there was a vocoder.

  I set the keys on the vocoder to lower the pitch of my squeaky little voice to its old normal. When Joe came in I spoke to him and he began talking with me. But he couldn’t see me. To him I just wasn’t there. He turned pale and grabbed his head and began to weave.

  Well, it took me quite a little time to get him straightened out on everything. But finally I got it across that I was no phoney and that we wanted some special co-operation from Betty.

  “We’re going to explode this racket sky-high, Joe,” I said. “We are going to prove that these turbans are hiding places for half-visible little humans; that some of these creatures are murderous; that any of them may become dangerous in a crisis. That Taggart is deliberately planting them all over the city to be ready to do damage—”

  “Not so fast,” said Joe, jerking the neckerchief off and holding the thing at arm’s length.

  “And, finally, that these little turban termites are little Japs who have been commanded to undermine our cities—”

  Joe was a man of action. If his neckerchief was this dangerous he wanted no part of it. He promised he’d get Betty to help us; but first of all he was going to take his gay colored neckerchief out on the fire-escape and touch a match to it.

  And that’s what he was doing when I hurried on my way . . .

  They called Taggart to account that very night—Monty and all the other big shots who were puzzling over falling buildings and the real estate turmoil came together in this same room in the Hall of Arts where I had talked with Joe.

  That’s how it happened that Mr. Bondpopper’s voice hurled the charges. He used the vocoder, the same as I had done, and he sprang the whole story of this underground Japanese intrigue.

  Taggart turned all colors. Mae whispered to me, “He’s caught. He’ll have a heart attack or fall through the floor.”

  But Taggart was surly and defiant. He said he had a packet of brand new turbans with him and he’d be glad to have anyone make a test—any test—of them.

  “You make the test,” said Bondpopper’s mysterious but unmistakable voice.

  The pressure of the audience was crowding Taggart a little, but he never hesitated. He put on the first turban out of the package. A television receiver fed his image to a screen, so that the audience got the benefit of an enlarged moving picture of his facial expressions, as he sat there in sullen silence.

  Meanwhile, Bondpopper called Constanza to the stage and she testified that she had suffered little gashes on her forehead from the original turban, though she didn’t know what caused them.

  Then came the unexpected entrance of a cowboy and a cowgirl—Joe and Betty, dressed up like desperadoes out of the Wild West—and each with a pair of six-shooters.

  “We didn’t plan this,” Mae whispered to me. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know. Darned nervy of them to steal our show.”

  “Don’t anybody move!” Joe commanded in an unusual voice.

  Just then Taggart gave out with a painful “Yeouw!”

  “And don’t anybody speak!” Joe yelled. Knowing him as I do I’d say he meant business. He gave more orders. Monty, as dumbfounded as anyone, executed them.

  “That’s it,” said Joe. “Take one turban from that package—no, one will be enough. We’ve only got four guns on us . . . Now, touch a match to it.”

  Monty did. Thinks I, migosh, suppose I was one of the creatures lurking in that turban—

  The blaze ran up past Monty’s hand, a big puff of smoke blew outward, and there stood eight Japanese—four women and four soldiers.

  “There’s your proof, Taggart!” Joe growled. “Come on, you eight mavericks. I’ve got a pen for you.”

  As he and Betty marched them away, Bondpopper called after him. “Joe, how’d you know?”

  “I tried to burn up my own neckerchief this afternoon,” Joe yelled back. “I’ve got thirteen of these critters tied up on the roof—a little idea I borrowed from Taggart.”

  The next thing you know Taggart was screaming bloody murder, and so was the audience, to see what was happening to him. A batch of those little fellows were running all over his head with axes. I hate to tell you just how that ended, because it was pretty hideous. It was more than anyone of us had counted on.

  It seems that Betty had played her own will upon her hand-picked little creatures, and had instructed them that what Taggart was planning would cause them all a lot of grief. So when they got their chance at Taggart, they acted accordingly.

  Heptad and some of his men were caught bolting for the door, and they were conducted out with military order. But Taggart, what was left of him, had to be carried out . . .

  Well, that is just about that. Unfortunately, these moments of recounting our experience find Mae Wing,

  Mr. Bondpopper and myself still swimming around in the purple pool. Our system of justice is characteristically fair but often slow. The million or so little creatures are being brought back to life size as rapidly as possible.

  Those who are found to be dangerous Japs are being penned up for the nation’s safety. Only a few—mostly from the younger
generation—are getting more favorable treatment. We’re awaiting our turns. I’m surprised that they don’t get mad and poison the whole batch of us. But I still have hopes of getting back to help Joe make good for Monty with our music.

  Mr. Bondpopper has ceased to work on his will. He hints that he’s intending to replace those two bronze knights on horseback with statues of a nightclub singer and a cowboy, but Mae thinks he’s kidding.

  Meanwhile, I’m teaching Mae to like cowboy music—no kidding.

  THE SINGING SKULLS

  First published in Fantastic Adventures, April 1945

  Muriel never hoped to be queen, yet when the skulls sang, her dream came true—but there was a penalty!

  CHAPTER I

  Among the vast red rock caverns, a ten-year-old child like Neeka, could easily lose her way if she strayed too far from the underground city. Fortunately, Muriel had taken the little orphan under her wing. Muriel was nineteen.

  “You must never come this far alone,” Muriel would warn her as they explored new tunnels in search of food. “We’re a long way from home.”

  “I’m tired, Muriel,” the little girl complained. “Isn’t there any shorter way home?”

  So today they tried a shortcut. Soon the passage narrowed until the flames of their torches touched the red rock ceiling, and Muriel’s flowing blonde hair sometimes brushed the walls.

  They were about to turn back when a flickering red light appeared only a few yards ahead. At once their tunnel opened into a circular rock chamber. There, before a pit of sputtering yellow lava and red flame, stood a grizzled little old man.

  “Who is he?” Neeka whispered. “S-s-sh!” Muriel held the child’s hand. “We shouldn’t have come here.”