by Don Wilcox
I watched, not daring to follow.
When it looked out, peering cautiously through the clump of bushes at the foot of the crags, I saw that its arms and shoulders were those of a beautiful girl. Its two heads had been reduced in size to correspond with its human body, but they were not human heads. They were feline heads, in every detail, and their four cat-like eyes were all watching me with deadly suspicion.
I went back to where the three zeego ray guns had fallen and wondered how I could manage to pick them up and use them.
CHAPTER III
It was a strange world, a world in which no new arrival could know his rights. In the first place he couldn’t be sure that he knew himself. In the second place, he couldn’t be sure of his own eyes when he tried to know his neighbors. In the third place, how could he be sure that anything he did know for sure today would be the same tomorrow?
If it isn’t being too sarcastic, I must admit that this serpent was tying himself in knots, almost literally, for many hours to come.
When I would find a pool of water, and look in and see my new face reflected there, for a moment I would despise myself. Those evil yellowish eyes of mine were enough to make anyone hate and distrust me. The fine scales around my nose and jaws were almost as sly as my eyes, the way they would catch the tints from the rocks and trees and flowers. I knew that I could lurk in a pool where the pygmies came to pick the brilliant orange-colored water flowers—the flopetals—and I could catch enough protective coloration that a pygmy wouldn’t see me until I sprang. I was sure I could, and if I ever got hungry enough I would.
But my powers as a serpent, as I have already hinted, were the source of much mental torture. It was bad enough to possess an animal instinct that would cause me to kill and devour little human beings. It was even worse to realize that these people must somehow be related to myself, as proved by the fact that (a) they were human and (b) they talked English and (c) they used earth-men’s weapons.
Probably you’ve never had an occasion to eat a human being. But if you have, you know that after your stomach is filled and your soul is again at peace with the world, then you can feel all sorts of remorse for your evil deed.
I was remorseful regularly about every twelve hours. But just as regularly, too, I became quite hungry—and at such times I was guilty of hoping, with all of my forty-foot being, that the supply of pygmies wouldn’t run out.
I hoped, too, that they wouldn’t get too handy with their zeego guns. As a serpent, I had certain responsibilities which needed to be carried out faithfully. One of them was to take care of my prisoner.
Pm speaking of her.
Yes, she was my prisoner, and I was taking care of her. I was protecting her, too. Whenever I thought the pygmies were in danger of discovering her hiding place, I found a way to warn her that they were coming.
Her two cat-like heads were always alert to my coming, it seemed. Whenever I came crawling along the cliff path toward the cavern pool where she lived, I would hear her plunge into the water, and that was proof that she had heard me coming. Then I would see her—the two heads of her—swimming along quietly to the narrow opening in the wall of rock. Somehow it reminded me of a corner in a well planned zoo, for it was a perfect retreat from the passing public. The public, in this case, being one forty-foot purple and green serpent.
So it was that I kept her a prisoner, and cared for her, and came to think of her more as a pair of untamed cats, joined by a whimsy of nature into a single body. Either the water or the cave would conceal her body from my eyes, as a rule, and I ceased to think of her as having human qualities.
At first I had tried a few times to talk with her; but neither of her heads had offered any answers. I lapsed into a more frequent use of my warning hisses, consequently, and began to neglect my serpent’s efforts to talk English.
One day—which is to say, many many hours after this very strange life had begun—something happened which changed everything almost with the speed of light.
A broken space ship came hurtling down out of the sky, and when it fell within five hundred feet of the surface it blew outward in dozens of pieces, like a shell exploding. The pieces must have scattered over at least a five mile radius, and there wasn’t much chance, I assumed, that any band of half civilized pygmies would ever pick them up. And I was right.
But I was wrong in thinking that this rain of wreckage would go unnoticed.
From a mountain peak twenty-five or thirty miles away a whole squadron of planes came out to swish back and forth across the valley, and I knew that there was someone in these parts who was more concerned with this hail of trouble than the pygmies. Fifteen planes hummed over, as slowly as a hawk soars over a field in search of a mouse.
They came low over the edge of the crevasse.
I crawled back into a clump of bushes where I wouldn’t be seen. I could see the two cat heads at the mouth of the small cave, so I knew that she was watching too.
“Don’t let them see you,” I called. It was the first time I had spoken in English for many hours. She looked at me and folded her white arms tighter. She moved deeper into the water so that only two pink noses and four yellow eyes remained above the surface.
A few minutes later the plane drifted directly over the small pool. By this time I had guessed that they were look-down upon every bit of lake or rivulet or feeder stream that cascaded into the deep crevasse. Why, I would learn later.
One of the planes circled back over the little pool. By this time she was back in the cave, and I was reasonably sure that they hadn’t seen either her or me. But they threw out a package as they went over and it fell toward the pool.
It burst just before it struck. It burst like a cloud of flour—or better, sulphur, for it was creamy yellow in color. It struck the surface of the water, and there was a bubbling and hissing of steam.
Then I heard her cry.
I tried to interpret the wail as that of two voices, not one. There was no reason, I thought, that one of the voices should cry and not the other. Yet I somehow knew, in spite of the spine-chilling echoes of the cavern, that it was only one voice. And not a feline voice, either. It was the cry of a girl.
Instantly I plunged into the pool. It was the first time that I had tried to approach her since that morning when I had seen her as a dangerous furry monster. The whirl of steam blinded me for a moment, and the fumes caught in my lungs and seemed to burst out through my chest—if I could call it a chest—and thudded out like pounding hammers at my shoulders—
My shoulders?
The fumes stung my lungs, and the steam burned at my eyes, and then suddenly it was over and the air was clear, and there was the pool of blue water, with my long snake-like body showing green and purple through the waves.
I was ashamed to be there, so close, then. For the girl in the cave before me thought I was being ill-mannered to intrude upon her.
The girl? Yes, with the same white arms folded tightly over her breasts, and the pink light of the sun kissing her pink shoulders. She moved down a little deeper into the water, so that only her head—her beautiful human head, with flowing dark hair, a pair of frightened dark eyes, and lips parted in speechless wonderment—showed above the surface of the water.
I knew this person. I had seen her before. Where? When? If I could only remember how this had all come about—
She spoke, then, breathlessly.
“Look, Bob, you have arms now,” she said. Then, “You are Bob, aren’t you?”
CHAPTER IV
Before I had a chance to answer, she cried, “Hide quick! They’re coming!”
The hum of planes was on us almost without warning. I made a dart toward the cave—her cave—and at the same instant I caught sight of my own reflection in the water—my vicious-looking eyes! That was what turned me back. As a serpent I didn’t trust myself to invade her private refuge. I whirled about, and the water splashed high around the rocky walls.
“Quick! Get out of sight!” s
he cried.
I crawled faster than I had ever crawled before. I thought I was headed in the right direction to make the clump of bushes before the planes came too close. But I was wrong on both counts. With my serpent’s head whirling to keep watch on their approach, I missed my direction and sped right into the crevasse!
My human arms grabbed frantically at the ragged edge of rock. What a futile gesture! My muscular forty-foot body was racing too fast to be caught by a thin pair of arms. I rolled into the opening.
As I fell, I caught myself momentarily on the first ledge. My head and neck fought to catch around the rocky projections, and my hands beat at the walls for a hold. But the bulk of my body was already falling, like the loops of a cable, and if I had tried to hold fast I would surely have snapped my head off.
It was a strange thought for my mind to feed upon as I fell. Some boyhood experience was coming back to me. In the fields—in the pastures—somewhere long ago on a more friendly planet, the earth. The snakes of those fields may have been friendly, but I was a boy and a snake was a snake, and I had used to kill them by grabbing their tails and cracking them like a whip to break their necks.
I was falling, falling, down and down through two or three miles of rocky walls. I was turning, writhing, twisting, trying to widen my coiled body to catch like a steel spring within the narrowing walls.
Rip! The curve of my side struck a projection, and the green and purple pattern tore with a gash of red.
Within a hundred feet of the bottom, I managed to straighten out my body so that the loop was in a vertical plane, and the wall burns were avoided.
Splasssssssh!
What an echo, up and down through the crevasse. I sank under instantly, still I heard it, and it seemed that the greenish-black waters were alive with the sounds for minutes afterward.
When my head emerged and again I began to breathe the soft blossom-filled air, my first thought was of the girl. She had called me Bob.
Was I Bob?
What had made her think that I was anything more than a slimy reptile?
The thought was too much for me, burdened as I was by a water-spanked belly and a torn side. I relaxed and failed to find the stamina I needed to keep my consciousness from ebbing away. I fainted away in serpent sleep.
CHAPTER V
When I awakened, the moons were sliding slowly over my tiny streak of sky. There would be hours of night before I should be able to see any human figures at the top of the opening. And I was hungry.
“I’m hungry,” I said aloud. “It’s good that she isn’t here now.”
When you speak aloud, that way, you always stop and wonder whether someone might have heard you. Maybe that’s what gave me the weird feeling that someone had heard, and that I was in the presence of company. I tried not to rustle the waves as I stretched my neck and peered into the surrounding darkness. I listened. Nothing but the low gurgle of water and an occasional complaining murmur of my empty intestinal tract.
I made a disheartening discovery, then, and I groaned aloud. I wondered how a mountain climber would feel if he got almost to the top and then skidded on the ice and slid all the way back and had to start over.
It had taken me hours and hours of work to get to the top the first time, and here I was back in the depths again.
But that wasn’t all. My arms and hands were gone!
With a commendable human impulse to forego the pleasure of feasting on a pygmy (since none were likely to be handy before daybreak) I had decided to try this stream for clams or fish. There must be something, I thought, or the pygmies wouldn’t have been down here with nets. But my inspiration was blasted by my discovery. My shoulders had shrunken into slight lumps where my cylindrical body enlarged below my neck. All traces of the appendages had disappeared.
Hunting clams or fish without the aid of hands wasn’t going to be easy. My serpent’s instinct urged me not to plow through the water with my mouth open.
I tried to think of a way out. I was too hungry to think. I needed a pygmy. I was too weak and sore to start the journey back to the surface, two or three miles overhead. I wondered . . . Didn’t any pygmies ever get lost on their way home from a celebration and tumble into this place by mistake? I didn’t wish them any ill luck, and still—
The thought heartened me and I began to swim, slowly, painfully, up the stream. I feared that I might be doomed to spend much time down here, and if so I had just as well explore the whole weird river.
Curious, the sensations that accompanied me on that long night. A few minutes of moonlight filtered all the way down to my bright eyes and gave them a frightening yellow glow in the water’s reflection. After the moonlight, darkness. Cloudy darkness, and rain. Thin drops that splashed over the length of me as I raised one loop after another of my rope-like body to the surface. The sky, again; again the moon. Again, that mystifying feeling that someone else was present.
“Maybe it’s one of those pygmies I ate,” I said aloud. I listened, unmoving, trying to determine whether my words had been answered with an ever so delicate sound—the amused puff of breath from some listener back there in the blackness.
I swam faster. I stopped suddenly and allowed the waters to swirl around me. I listened. I did hear the sounds of breathing—no, whispering!
It was almost over me. Now it was retreating. I waited, and it was gone. I was tempted to follow. A human whisper was a promise of food for a hungry serpent. But I was puzzled as to how any follower could be hovering over me.
My plan formed slowly. It would depend upon finding a sharp turn in the river to make sure that I would not give myself away.
I plowed ahead, increasing my speed. The narrow line of night sky, high above me, was darkening again. In a few moments I came to a sharp turn that would close away any sights momentarily from my pursuer. Swishing through the turn, I applied my muscled coils to the wall and climbed up.
Good luck—I slipped out of the water almost silently, so there was no warning splash! Now—careful!
I bridged between the walls less than twenty feet above the stream’s surface. The humps that would have been my shoulders rested against one side, and the coil of my belly braced solid against the other. Thus, my head and neck were free to move back and forth between the walls.
In a moment it came—a length of rope with a weight on the lower end. I knew it! My pursuer—or rather, pursuers—hung from a rope that was being moved by some guiding force two or three miles up, at the top of the crevasse.
The rope rubbed against my unseen body. The occupants of the swing at the lower end coasted to a stop and dangled like an uncertain pendulum.
“What’s happened?” one of them whispered.
“We’ve caught on something,” said the other. “We’d better get loose, too, or he’ll get away. He was swimming fast.”
“Are you sure it was he? It might be the girl, you know.”
“If he turned serpent, it’s more likely to be a man. Here, let’s kick the wall together and maybe we’ll jar loose. By George, I can see something right above us. Looks like it bridges all the way across. Where’s the light?”
“We don’t dare show a light,” said the first voice. “That beast wouldn’t know whether we were a friend or foe, and what’s more, he wouldn’t care.”
That was when I broke my long silence with an ugly hissing question.
“Whicccch are you?”
I felt the jerk of the rope as it scraped past an injured spot on my body and instantly pulled away from me. The two men must have had close contact with their guides high overhead. Whatever their signal system, they swung back from me before I could dart forward with my head. They swung back and up, without stopping for a word of argument.
“What’s the hurry?” I hissed.
One of them answered, “Who are you?”
I didn’t know. The girl had called me Bob, and the name had begun to ring pleasantly. I had caught the impression that it was all right to be Bob, as far as she
was concerned, but that it might not be so good to be anyone else. I wondered.
“Bring me some food,” I called.
“Who are you?” the voice returned.
“How do I know?” I said. “I’m too hungry to know anything.”
There was a short whispered consultation. Should they flash the light on or shouldn’t they? Would the monster snap at them or would he give them a chance? The wisps of conversation were reassuring, and I began to know that these two meant to be friends, if I would give them a chance.
“Are you Bob?” one of them asked presently.
“Who is Bob?” I asked.
They put their heads together again. If I didn’t know who Bob was, maybe I wasn’t one of the party they were seeking after all. Maybe I hadn’t come to the space island recently—maybe I was an old-timer here who had simply kept myself well hidden until yesterday when I had been lured to the surface by the sight of that two-headed cat-monster.
It was all a mystery to me, but I wasn’t going to turn away any advantage or miss a chance to eat.
“Pull me up to the surface,” I said, “so I can find my dinner.” I put considerable hiss in my voice as I added, “Otherwise I’ll have to eat what I find down here.”
“Meaning what?” one of the voices asked sharply.
“Meaning you. Hsssssssh. You.” The rustle from the swing was the sound of two men making ready for trouble with ray pistols.
“All right, fellow,” one of them said. “Crawl up this way and twine yourself around the rope. We’ll take you up to the surface. No false moves, though, or you’ll never eat another dinner.”
I obeyed. My long body swished quietly upward between the walls and I crossed over to the rope. A moon slipped into sight, high above, and the two men below me must have had a fair view of me as I corkscrewed upward. My sore belly was put to a cruel test, trying to hold a grip on a rope no bigger around than your arm, but presently I was on and I gave them the signal to take me up easy. Up we went.
