The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Randall and Sondra jumped out of the plane. They looked over the small riot they had caused and decided they could use a pair of horses as the quickest way of getting to the Arena at the rear of the grounds.

  It was a mistake. Prince Randall had forgotten that these mounted guards were the king’s special pets, known to be so belligerent that even the horses wore chips on their shoulders.

  “Come back with those horses, you two! Who the devil do you think you are?” The captain of the guards spurred his mount to give chase. “Oh, it’s them! That young upstart of a prince. Come on, men.”

  The mounted guards hadn’t meant to do any hard riding this late in the afternoon. They were on dress parade, policing the grounds for the benefit of the Askandia crowds that were gathering in the Arena. But now that the king had sounded the emergency bell, every loyal officer knew it was his duty to arrest any disturbers of the peace.

  Randall and Sondra galloped over a hedge and down the ramp that led to one of the outside Arena entrances. They could see that thousands of people were gathered, and at first they thought that the meeting was in progress.

  But as soon as they were recognized, by the clusters of people at the entrance, and hailed with loud greetings of, “The prince! Sondra! Here they are! Make way! Make way!” they realized that they were not only in time, but were face to face with an impatient audience. “Come on in!” several people yelled. “The Red Door is waiting! Let’s see you do it!”

  Randall laughed inside himself. So it had happened. The rumor had spread far and wide that here was a door of death. A door with knives that spun invisibly. A death trap that had claimed its own inventor, the incomparable Whiteblock. And would claim anyone else who walked into it. But not Prince Randall. He had walked through it unscathed, and by now all Askandia had heard.

  For a moment he ignored the bellow of the captain of the mounted guards, at his rear. “You are arrested, Prince Randall, in the name of the King!”

  He could afford to ignore the bellow because Sondra was whispering news to him that one of her servant friends had just given her.

  “The Old Lady hasn’t shown up. Everyone’s waiting.”

  “Where could she be?”

  “Across the village, perhaps, at her own mansion.”

  “We’ll get her. Come on.”

  Randall and Sondra reined about and started up the ramp. The mounted guards rode after them, and the captain continued to recite his orders for arrest . . . But they weren’t listening. They broke into a gallop, they headed for the nearest open gate. The gatekeeper jumped to save his neck, and spun about like a top. The two riders were being pursued by fourteen mounted guards and two unmounted ones coming on a dead run.

  The crowds at the entrances of the Arena heard the hard hoofbeats and the shouting of orders. People began to pour out, to look down on the village and watch the zigzagging course of this wild chase.

  The Old Lady’s mansion yielded nothing. “She’s gone!” someone yelled in response to their flying questions. “She left early this morning. Hasn’t been seen since!”

  “This is dreadful!” Sondra cried, hugging the saddle her brown hair flying. “What could have happened?”

  “We’d better tackle Levaggo!” Randall yelled.

  “He wouldn’t dare harm her—or would he?”

  They galloped back into the road and up through the village. Again fourteen mounted guards were hot on the trail, shouting threats, now, that they would shoot. “I command you to halt and submit! Halt or we’ll fire.”

  “Bullets, indeed!” the prince yelled back, borrowing the king’s favorite expression. “Why don’t you give us an escort? We want to see the king.”

  Again he underestimated the captain’s belligerence. Bullets began ~to pop through the streets. By the time the race returned to the palace grounds, the guards were shooting right and left. They seemed to be missing, and they couldn’t understand it. They tried harder. Toward the palace the curious throngs surged back, screaming.

  Pandemonium all over the palace grounds—the most undignified and unsuccessful engagement in the history of Askandia’s mounted nobility!

  Meanwhile, Muggs the chauffeur had again been brought face to face with the king inside the palace.

  “You lout. You liar. You’ve failed me on every hand. Did they find a chemical laboratory down that tunnel or didn’t they?”

  “Honest, your majesty, I don’t know.”

  The king looked to the window. “There they go again, defying death and liking it. Is the Old Lady as much alive as they are?”

  “Alive,” said Muggs, “but stuck. Imprisoned. Trapped.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that I closed the mine after she went in. Since she didn’t escape in the airplane with them, she must still be there.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” the king sighed hopefully. “So you think they flew out the top and she’s still there. Stuck. I hope you’re right this time. As long as she’s there, I can still save my face. She can’t enforce any deal now. She’s too late. They’re already beginning to leave. In another ten minutes—what are you staring at?”

  The king’s eyes traced the chauffeur’s stare through the window and saw for himself. It was the Old Lady, driving up the highway in a jeep.

  The steel gate was closed, but she drove right through and kept on coming.

  The king knocked Muggs off his feet in his haste to get out of the room. For all his weight, he made a record dash from his study to the nearest Arena entrance. The aisles had begun to jam with people who had grown impatient and decided to leave. But suddenly the throngs began to surge back shouting, and the whole auditorium crowd at once knew.

  “The Old Lady. The Old Lady. OOOOOOLD LAAADEEEE!”

  A cortege of guards in white uniform and gold braid escorted the king along a balcony passage. He descended to the Arena floor and marched toward the front just in time to see the Old Lady enter.

  The aisles made way for her. She was standing up in the jeep, her wild white hair was flying, her eyes were jumping in all directions at once, she was taking in the whole crowd and they were welcoming her, like a long lost mother.

  She had driven down the ramp to enter, and now she drove straight through the center aisle, straight toward the twenty steps at the front of the Arena.

  The path didn’t close in after her. Instead, it widened, to make way for the heavy galloping hoofs. She glanced back, nearly running over a pair of guards as she did so, and saw that Sondra and Randall were riding in after her as hard as they could come.

  “Climb aboard, you youngsters!” she yelled back at them.

  Randall leaped from his horse to the rear of the jeep and reached up to swing Sondra down in his arms. Back of them came their trail of pursuers, angry and cursing in the name of the king. The Old Lady stepped on it.

  “The Red Door!” some shrill voice cried out. “Look out!”

  And a thousand people were shrieking, “LOOKOUT! Stop! STOPPPP!”

  With its three passengers, the jeep climbed the twenty steps and shot through the Red Door. It whirled half around, so that Sondra, Randall, and the old Lady stood, looking out at their crowd from beneath the horizontal knives. Neither they nor the jeep had been scratched during this ordeal, and the crowd went wild.

  They went wilder still to discover that the mounted guards were coming on, determined not to be outdone. In fact, King Levaggo was there on one of the lower steps, shouting to his guards to come on.

  They came, with plopping hoofs. The king pointed the way. And when some shrill voice cried, “A new king!” the arms of Levaggo struck the air savagely.

  “Remove them, I command you! Arrest them!” Levaggo’s rasping voice was lost in the clatter of hoofs up the twenty steps.

  “We’ve got them now!” the captain of the guards shouted, as he passed the twentieth step.

  Approximately ten thousand pairs of eyes saw what happened. The first horse and rider got it.
Captain and mount. They were sliced like colored paper, too fast to be believed, and the slices went out. The rear hoofs of the horse survived and fell back. The rest, along with the rider, were simply gone.

  The second rider saw and leaped from his horse just in time. The horse plunged into the knives’ invisible whirl but was dead before it was half through. In fact, the rearward half never got through for its momentum was lost. Half a horse fell on the stone at the twentieth step and half a saddle bounced down the steps to the Arena floor.

  The third horse and rider were much too determined to succeed where the others had failed. Half a horse and half a rider fell back. But the half rider was struck by the oncoming horse and flew into the knives again and was gone.

  The fourth rider’s horse lost only a head.

  The fifth, sixth, and seventh changed their minds and turned the chase back.

  The king, running up to the eighteenth step, waving his arms madly, had changed his tune. In all justice to him, let it be said that he had tried to put the whole parade in reverse as soon as he had seen the captain of the guards depart into nothingness.

  But also, in all fairness, let it be noted that a moment earlier the king had hoped the captain of the guards would try. For whatever the facts of atomic immunity, it always seemed on the surface of things that if one person walked or rode through a door, another should be able to. It was the same fallacy that had once seized Whiteblock.

  The fact was, as Levaggo became accustomed to saying in later years, either you have it or you don’t.

  Muggs the chauffeur came to that conclusion himself at this moment. He was standing somewhere in the rear of the Arena, taking in the whole weird show. And like hundreds of other simple and good hearted souls he would have liked to believe that he might move beneath those stationary electric knives as easily as Prince Randall.

  “And then maybe I could be the king and have a beautiful queen like Sondra.”

  His eyes moistened a little as he listened to the hearty boom of the Old Lady, reciting from the documents she had found in the Vault.

  Finally, to give the crowd what they wanted, she made her own little speech. “So I congratulate you upon your new king and—as soon as a wedding can be arranged—your new queen.”

  She paused to wait for the tumultuous cheering to die away.

  “I know they’ll be worthy. They are not only young, strong, and fearless, but they are also strangely gifted to live and to resist danger for all of their natural lives. Old age will take them in time, just as it is about to take me—” she rubbed her hip, thinking of the tough fight she had had in the tunnel.

  Then she brightened, and slapped her white hair back over her forehead and felt strangely young. After all, she had had the nerve to take her own dose of that atomic magic, by hanging a weight on the cable and driving her jeep in front of the big black cannon. She felt young enough to shake the daylights out of stupid chauffeur if she ever got her hands on him—though he was probably acting under the king’s orders, for all she knew.

  Her eyes caught the figure of the ex-king.

  “In conclusion—you, Levaggo. Don’t go away. The new king and queen are going to have a hard time clearing up all the troubles you’ve piled up for them.”

  Then she gestured to what lay on the stairs.

  “Speaking of troubles piled up,” she boomed, “I recommend to the new king and queen their first official order. Why not appoint your cousin Levaggo to an office? Let him begin at once. Let him do something big and clean. Make him the first superintendent in charge of cleaning up all surplus horsefleas!”

  From the thunderous cheers that greeted this suggestion, everybody, including ex-King Levaggo, knew that the appointment was unanimous.

  GREAT GODS AND LITTLE TERMITES

  First published in Amazing Stories, December 1946

  It was an incredible world where size didn’t mean a thing—because it was all so mixed up. An ant might be almost godlike.

  CHAPTER I

  Shrinky and I were strolling through the zoo when she noticed the life and death struggle at our feet.

  “Look at them fight!” she said. “Isn’t that dreadful? Someone’s going to get killed, ’Spando! Don’t just stand there. Do something!”

  “Why not let them fight it out?” I said.

  “Why, you heartless thing. Suppose the little black one gets his head bitten off?” Shrinky wailed.

  “It’ll teach him not to pick on monsters ten times his size,” I said. “Any little black ant ought to have better sense than to pick on a worm that big . . . By George, they are an even match, at that!”

  “I wonder which one ought to win,” Shrinky said, and the serious look in her pretty face was too much for me.

  “All right, dear,” I said. “I’ll reduce myself in size and crawl through the fence and pick up a worm’s eye”iew of this fracas. It’ll only take a few minutes. You wait right here—”

  “If you’re going to shrink, I’m going to, too,” Shrinky said. So we both gritted our teeth and began to shrink. We shrank, clothes and all, until we were as small as thimbles.

  We rolled through the steel fence to stand within three inches of this furious little slug-fest. Believe me, that little inky monster—a black ant to you—was hurling a mean belly-punch. Thump, thump, thump, slug! The big puffy green squirmer—worm to you—whirled and coiled and writhed in pain. He was scrapping for dear life, what there was left of it.

  “Do something!” Shrinky squealed in her pipsqueak voice.

  “Not till I shrink some more,” I said. So I shrank some more . . .

  If you want to know how we got that way—Shrinky and I—you’re welcome to look up our case histories in any up-to-date library. Consult Volume 25 of the 25th century Anatomical Laboratories, Inc., and you’ll get the whole history of the flexible hormone theory. You’ll find that Shrinky and I are the first successful experiments in this line. The doctors were considerate, you’ll observe, in applying their miracles to the two of us, rather than to me alone. You see, whether a fellow’s as big as an elephant or as tiny as a candle, he still appreciates companionship.

  Of course you’ve seen those outlandish pictures of us in the science supplements of the newspapers. The ones taken on our wedding day were reprinted in the encyclopedia yearbooks.

  Remember the one of me standing fifteen feet tall, smiling down at Shrinky? She was just two inches high, coquetting up at me from under the cuff of my trousers.

  “Can this be love?” the caption read.

  Beside it was the other picture with our dimensions reversed. I was two inches tall, and Shrinky was all of twelve feet. I stood on the back of her hand, and the caption had her saying, “Isn’t Expando a little dear?”

  Now, many people still think that this was trick photography. But anyone who has seen us in our Vaudeville act knows better. We can, and do, change our sizes. We can change as easily as a chameleon seems to change his colors. It’s almost as natural with us as eating or sleeping.

  The one deceptive thing about those pictures was that they gave the impression we are usually of very different sizes—that when one of us is a giant the other is likely to be a Tom Thumb, very rarely is this the case. Except during our vaudeville stunts, we are nearly always matched for size.

  Why?

  Because Shrinky is a very gracious wife, and she adapts herself quickly. A very lovely and agreeable kid. The moment she finds me making a change she follows suit.

  “How does it feel to be able to change your size?” people are forever asking us.

  “Very convenient,” Shrinky will say with a twinkle. “For instance, if Expando and I become embarrassed at a party, we can literally grow small and hide under the rug.”

  And that’s no exaggeration. Fact is, we can shrink down to pin-point caliber.

  Maybe smaller. But we don’t often try. Shrinko gets nervous. So do the onlookers. For example, back stage, before our first vaudeville performance, we gave a li
ttle demonstration for the stage hands. And you should have seen that colored janitor’s eyes bug out. We’d only shrunk to football size when he began to wave his arms.

  “Boy, you all sure can, shortify,” he said, showing his white teeth in a nervous grin. “Jis’ be sure you-all don’ forgit how to spandify!”

  Well the master of ceremonies had been scraping to think up a stage name for us, and he seized on that colored janitor’s word. He told the story to our first audience, and we’ve been Mr. and Mrs. “Spandify” ever since.

  Soon after this unique ability came into our possession, we began to recognize little changes in our characters. Already, we differ from you in a number of ways, no doubt. And one of the important differences is this new interest we take in the smaller forms of life about us. We feel a concern for their struggles.

  And that brings me back to this life-and-death combat in the zoo, just inside the big steel fence marked PACHYDERMS.

  CHAPTER II

  Knockout Drops

  I jumped around like a referee at a prize fight.

  The battle royal could easily have involved all four of us if Shrinky and I hadn’t been nimble. Here they came, rolling, jumping, slugging and biting. The big green squirmer flung himself into a figure S and snapped out like an exclamation mark. His crusty green mandibles caught the inky monster by a leg and nipped some hairs off.

  The inky monster leaped over him—and caught sight of us. For an instant he ducked low like a car caught by a stop-light. He was almost as big as a car to me. In comparison to my reduced body, his head was a shiny black barrel’ with steel jaws. His long, stocky, elbowed antennae jerked back. The holes in the ends of those black antennae had a sensitive look, like the ends of elephants’ trunks.

  “He smells you!” Shrinky cried. “Come back!”

  Those antennae vibrated, and I knew Shrinky was right. He did smell me. I could take that as an insult if I wanted to. It made no difference to him. He had spied me, and here he came like an armored truck of death. For some foolish reason, I had reduced myself to less than half his size. In a fight I would be no match for him and I knew it.