by Don Wilcox
At any rate, they had now found me, safe and quite dead and fleshless, and they were bearing my bones off proudly to the circular door of the Twisted Arm tower.
I crept along the upper trail. The red sea water was dancing in my eyes. The prized knife was folded into the small pocket of my trunks. I had a curiously free feeling of being out of existence.
Now I spotted David and Uncle Willard, skulking along a lower trail, moving from shadow to shadow about fifty feet below me. Occasionally I could hear them discussing the problem of breaking the news to their two remaining crewmen. They were as troubled over phrasing their report as anyone might be if he were confronted with the job of announcing that he had murdered a rich relative.
Along the way I came to the place where Bud had hidden his “treasure.” A few steps beyond, I turned and sauntered back to look down into the crevice. Something had occurred to me. An idea that might be well worth the trouble—if Bud were willing to give me this cooperation.
Carefully I crawled down between the walls, making use of the climbing glue which I had picked up along the way. Halfway down to Bud’s hiding place I stopped. I could distinctly hear the light sobbing of a child.
“Bud!” I whispered softly. “Bud, is that you?”
The sobbing broke off. “It’s me. Who are you?”
“George. George Freeman. Can I come down?”
The boy gave a surprised gurgle. “Is it really you, George? It can’t be. George is dead. I saw him—Who are you?”
I had forgotten about my painted face. The boy thought I was a guard, and he was caught with his stolen skeleton.
“But I am George. Don’t you know my voice? I gave them the slip, Bud. Don’t mind this paint. I had to do something for disguise.”
“You are—oh-ooh.” His breath sort of gave way, and he was suddenly bawling like a baby, and he couldn’t seem to talk. It took a few minutes for the tension to melt. “I didn’t know what I was going to tell Loonza,” he said, when he regained control of himself. “Does she know?”
“No. Not yet. But she’ll hear as soon as the guards come back from delivering the skeleton. And she’ll wonder which one it was. Whether it might have been David—or your uncle—”
“It wasn’t any of us, Bud.”
“Then who was it?”
“No one. It was supposed to be me. But I swam out, like you told me to, and I bumped into the Paint-Face station under the water level. Lucky for me, there was a skeleton in it. I borrowed it, dressed it up, and set it up for them to find.”
“Gee!”
The admiration in Bud’s eyes repaid me for all the risk I had taken. It was as if I were being paid high honors for having saved my own life. But Bud showed a flicker of worry right away and I knew he had caught sight of some unfinished business.
“They’ll soon miss the skeleton from their station, and then they may know somebody pulled a trick.”
“Then what?”
“They’ll be made to know you outwitted them. The Paint-Faces always win. They can’t stand to lose. They’ll start searching the hills.”
“I took that chance, Bud. Unless I miss my guess, they’ll quarrel among themselves, and nobody will know whether the new skeleton is yours truly or someone else.”
“The thing for us to do,” Bud volunteered, “is to take my skeleton down to the station under the rock, so that they’ll never know.”
I could have hugged him for that.
I knew it meant a sacrifice of his stolen treasure, but he knew, as well as I, that it might prevent a search for me among these rocky hills.
“Would we dare?”
“I can do it myself, as soon as the decks are clear. Gee, with all of your guard paint, you might get by easier than I. But that would be taking an awful chance. They’d be sure to wonder which guard you are. What’s your name? . . . M-m-m. That’s an awful smear.”
Our discussion came to an abrupt end when Bud broke off with, “Get back! Out of the light. Quick!”
We ducked.
“What did you see, Bud? Was it Uncle Willard again?”
“Worse than that. It was somebody on the tower—you know, the porch up there on the Twisted Arm. It’s higher than almost anything except the big ceiling, and it can look down into a lot of these crevices.”
“Did you see someone?”
“The magician and two guards. They seemed to be looking this way.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I’ll bet they’ve been observing you all the time.”
I felt the chills chase through my spine. During all my breathless maneuvers in and under the water, screened from the view of the town by the water gate, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was, of course, perfectly visible from the top of the Twisted Arm, a hundred and twenty feet overhead. I couldn’t recall having seen anyone up on that porch; I couldn’t recall having looked.
“If they saw you, there’ll be a search,” said Bud.
“If they’ve discovered that the skeleton isn’t fresh, there may be a search too. Listen, Bud, is there any way into that place other than the Leopard Walk and the circular door?”
“Sure, there’s a wall path up to the rear entrance. The Paint-Faces use it all the time.”
“I’m a Paint Face.”
Bud looked me over skeptically. “Gee, I don’t know. I’d hate for you to get caught.”
“I need to see your Mong. If I could once break in, I might be able to swing a deal.”
“I don’t think strangers ever get in,” Bud said. “What do you want?”
“It’s like this. The old man that originally founded this colony owes me a small fortune, and the books deserve to be straightened. Have you ever been in?”
“Gee, no. But I’ve seen the Mong several times.”
“What does he look like?”
“He’s the oldest man you ever saw, and he looks mean enough to scare an ocean lizard. I don’t think he ever talks with anyone. He lets Propsander, the magician, do all the talking.”
“What do you mean, magician? Do you have someone who works some kind of magic?”
“They say Propsander reads your thoughts. That’s how he can protect the Mong from any enemies. If any enemies get through, they always give their thoughts away, and that cooks them.”
The figures now disappeared from the tower top, and Bud and I ventured out into the brighter light. It was a wide and busy ocean den to look down upon. Several groups of boys were swimming over from the farther end of the great cavern to see what the excitement was all about. Throngs had gathered from the markets and were skimming along through the surface of the water, looking this way and that. The fact that two strangers had tried the walk along the ghagstic gate was enough to fill the shore town with gossip. You could see the heads bobbing this way and that. Everyone was on the alert for more possible visitors.
The town had been nervous for two days, Bud explained, ever since he himself had let the cat out of the bag that there were some invaders back in the hills.
“I was pretty mad at all the strangers but you, and I started spreading the alarm,” Bud admitted. “But sis quieted me. Lots of folks didn’t know whether to believe me. There are always rumors about people coming down from some world on top. It’s mostly Mercurians, of course, and they all work up into skeletons for the Mong’s galleries.”
What an air-tight world! It resisted Mercurians! It resisted earthmen! And it had all started only three or four generations ago when a certain great-step-uncle of mine had gathered up his criminal record and fled along with a boat load of space travelers, to a safer climate.
Later, I thought, if time permitted, I would have to tell Bud and Loonza more about the curious criminal personality of my great-step-uncle, who was said to have accumulated a great amount of experience in assembling his own art galleries and museums of sculpture. There had once been black headlines when my great-grandfather disappeared from the scene, soon after his return from this planet with a tw
enty ton cargo of ghagstic. And blacker headlines, many months later, when he was found encased within a handsome ghagstic statue of himself, perfectly preserved and stone dead.
Probably no one had ever tried more daring experiments with ghagstic than my great-step-uncle Montgomery. His specimens would have gone over well in this Mong’s gallery, I thought. Or was that where this Mong had picked up his ideas? The only trouble was, each of my great-step-uncle’s statues represented a murder, which he himself performed simply by placing a man under a shower of liquid ghagstic and allowing it to freeze him in.
“What did your great-step-uncle look like?” Bud asked.
“I’ve only seen his pictures in the papers. After he skipped the earth, the interplanetary police tried to trail him. They may have followed him here, but they never brought him back to the earth for justice.”
“They may have swum in this water and taken a liking to it and stayed. That often happens, you know.”
This fact, as Bud elaborated it, helped to explain how the spaceship load of passengers whom my great-step-uncle forced into this ocean den, became a permanent population.
“Maybe our Mong is your great-step-uncle,” Bud suggested.
I smiled at this suggestion. I knew that my father had been tempted to explore in this direction, before his death, believing that he might find the remnants of my great-grandfather’s stolen fortune. But he had desisted fearing that Montgomery might still be alive.
By now, however, we had deemed ourselves safe on this score; for the years would have piled up into ten more than a century of age for W.W. Montgomery, if he had lived until now.
“As I say, the Mong is a very old man,” Bud repeated.
“Mong . . . Montgomery . . . Mong . . . Um-m . . . I wonder. I’ll look in on him soon,” I said. “But first I’d better listen in on David and his father to see how they feel about my death.” Bud beamed. “Sure, let’s do.” And he was already a dozen steps ahead of me and going like a bullet.
CHAPTER IX
There were only two figures to be seen in the cave through our stone lattice. Uncle Willard and his son were talking it over. Their voices were low, sullen, reeking with guilt.
“We’re going to have to wedge our way into the good favor of some official before we can crack the tower,” Uncle Willard declared. He was more nervous than I had ever seen him before. My “death” had stirred him with a frenzied restlessness, and you could see that his conscience was going to hound him every minute for a long time to come.
“We’ll not cross the Leopard Walk,” David said. “There must be another way.”
“I think we might get help from that Paint-Face named Zober. You remember him at the market. Very uncommunicative, a solid-looking fellow, in spite of his paint.”
“I’d rather not rely on anyone. Why trust any of them? Trusting—that was George’s policy, but it isn’t mine.”
“Zober.” Uncle Willard fondled the name as if trying to keep his mind occupied. “Black and yellow painted face. Never said a word when they gave him the basket of supplies for the Mong, but you could tell from the way that merchant handed it to him that he respected him.”
“Respect for the big-shot’s errand boy, sure. That’s not much to go on.”
“I thought you favored Zober.”
“I only said that he had better looking hands than the others. His fins were only fancy gloves removable . . . S-s-sh. Here come Blanchard and Casey.”
It was a cold silence that held reign in the cave then for several minutes.
Then men ate, and Bud and I exchanged nudges which meant that we would go down and have a whirl at those victuals, too, as soon as the coast was clear.
Casey spoke harshly. “We heard some very bad news down the line.”
“Whom have you been talking with?” David asked accusingly.
“With no one. But we listened. They say two strangers have been converted into skeletons. Skeletons, did you hear? It happened within the past few hours.”
“Indeed?” said David. “Interesting. Mercurians?”
“Earthmen.”
“Too bad.”
“Where are Jim Sutter and George Freeman?” Casey asked sharply.
“I haven’t seen them,” said Uncle Willard.
“Repeat your question, Casey,” said Blanchard, and he reached for a gun. David must have expected this. He whipped out his automatic pistol, and there was a bad light in his eyes.
“Settle down and don’t get nervous,” David snapped.
Blanchard stood, tense, frozen.
“Careful, son,” Uncle Willard said. “We need these men. Settle your nerves.”
“Settle your own nerves, damn it,” David retorted. Uncle Willard now stopped his pacing and stood glaring.
Blanchard relaxed and folded his arms. “All right, give us the worst. What do you want of us, now that you’ve got rid of Jim and George?”
“Stop your devilish talk. We’ve got rid of no one. If two of our men have blundered straight into an ocean trap, who could stop them? It’s happened. They got their feet tangled somehow, and from all appearances some of the Mong sea pets cleaned them up before we knew anything about the danger. We’re plenty cut up over losing them.
Aren’t we, David? Sure. All right. That’s that.”
“Cut up, are you?” said Casey, not nearly as sarcastically as he might have said it. “Come on, serve us the best deal you’ve got left, and we’ll let you know whether we’ll take it.”
Both Uncle Willard and David squirmed. Casey and Blanchard followed their advantage. They demanded to know what was to become of the coveted Freeman fortune, now that, as they believed, both Kenneth and George Freeman were out of the picture.
“We can listen to reason,” Blanchard said. “Deal us a hand.”
“Listen close,” said Uncle Willard. “Only one cargo of ghagstic has ever been brought back to the earth and that was so many years ago that the metallurgists still get a dreamy look when they speak of it. It wasn’t gold and it wasn’t platinum, but it brought a solid one hundred dollars a pound, and there were twenty tons in the cargo. George Freeman’s great-grandfather grossed four million dollars on that haul. Now. We have ample room for twenty tons in the ship we left up there on the surface.”
“Or you might add another three hundred and sixty pounds, with Jim and George both gone,” Casey said coldly.
Uncle Willard ignored the remarks. “We’ll handle this with gloves or with an iron fist, whichever the Mong prefers. We can worm our way into his sanctum in the big stone tower over yonder and invite him to sign over free samples—which he ought to do if he’s reasonable, seeing as how it’s as much ours as anyone’s.”
“It is ours’,” David interpolated.
“Or, if he fails to come through, or talks of making trouble over it, I figure that with a little more equipment we can soon drain twenty tons out of the sea, right from this ocean den’s back door. You boys can swim well enough to go under that Black Ledge, I presume.”
“What’s this?” Casey asked. “I’m no swimming champion.”
“There’s a Black Ledge down beyond the Twisted Arm tower which they claim opens into the sea. If either of you can swim under that and bring the lines through, we can draw the material right out from under the Mong’s foundation stones so to speak.”
They waited for Casey and Blanchard to reply. The men looked at each other and Casey gave a slight shrug.
“I suppose,” said David, “that you’re waiting for us to cut you in on a big slice before you’ll agree to go through.”
“You aren’t even close,” said Casey. David rose, fingering his gun nervously. “What’s your secret smirking about? Out with it. What’s your price?”
Casey rose and met David’s eyes and you could practically feel the sparks of hatred.
“We’d have done most anything for George Freeman,” Casey answered slowly. “The one thing we’ve been waiting to hear someone say is, there ought t
o be some kind of services for Sutter and Freeman. Or are we too damn busy countin’ the dollars’ worth of ghagstic to think of that?”
Uncle Willard gave a quick gesture to David and the two of them marched out of the cave. The two crewmen were left, and as long as Bud and I waited, they simply sat there in the silence of their own thoughts.
CHAPTER X
Loonza went with me when I delivered the two baskets of sea delicacies to the service entrance of the Twisted Arm tower. There were three Paint-Faces working around; two in the kitchen, and one as houseman, moving his cleaning tools out onto a back porch. The rear of the high stone palace had been connected by a stone and ghagstic structure to another tower of stone beyond, which served as a combination backyard and outdoor parlor, not visible from the red waters below. Here was luxury unlike anything I had seen for a long time. Loonza was fairly gasping. This was simply out of her world.
A Paint-Face waved us away and we took the hint and started off, looking back like two children who had meant to sneak under the tent and see the circus.
We were both taking long chances even looking in from the back door. As we came away, Loonza said that the big silent Paint-Face named Zober had winked at her. She guessed he was warning her.
“A wink can mean lots of things,” I said. We watched our chances as we started down the path. No one seemed to be watching so we ducked into a shelf in the rock where a hole for a small window had been cut through. Temporarily we were safe and secluded in the rear wall of the Twisted Arm tower. Anyone coming or going along the path would have to look sharp to find us. If we had slipped off the edge of the shelf, the ocean lizards would have found us a hundred and twenty feet below. The window had been barred against chance intruders like ourselves. The bars were six femur bones from the legs of human skeletons. A mute warning to trespassers, I thought.
