The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  A few minutes later I slithered over the edge of the crevasse once more, and mentally I vowed I would never seek those lower regions again. I was beginning to have some purposes of my own.

  There was first of all that big purpose, and all the way up through the dark walls I had tried my best to recall what it was. Someone I must find? That was getting close, I thought.

  Someone to find—the only someone I knew up here was the beautiful girl in the pool. Well, there was the one purpose that I could swear to. I wanted to know whether she was still there, and who she was, and where I had known her before.

  “Bob,” she had called me. If any words ever echoed in a snake’s ears, hers were the words. If any serpent ever felt obliged to go back to a beautiful woman and find out why she had dared to trust him as far as that girl had trusted me, I was that serpent.

  And so, out of these purposes, half defined, and half foggy, I acted with the slyness of a snake.

  I could see the outline of a small plane on the ground. In the light of the various moons, I could see that its door was open. Did I dare?

  The rope was still rising, being wound upward into a blimp that hovered darkly over the crevasse. The men had just reached the top. Now they would expect to take me in charge, using their pistols to command me.

  “This way, you. If you want that dinner—”

  I didn’t listen. Something from my half forgotten memories told me that I knew how to handle a plane, and the door was open. It was a perfect set-up if I could crawl in before the guns started heading me off with red fire.

  Swissssh. Zippp! I shot along over the cool grass and I ploughed right into the plane’s entrance.

  There, so far so good. I pushed my nose against a lever that locked me in. The men were coming, all right. The lines of red fire were zeego shots, the same as the pygmies had used. But they were outside and I was safe within, crawling across the floor to the controls.

  Could I, with my serpent’s nose, my teeth, my hammer-like head, my agile neck—could I get away with it? In another moment I would know.

  If it worked, then I would have the freedom to see what this strange land was all about. And first of all I would find that girl, if they hadn’t taken her already.

  The controls were locked I

  Not a thing responded to my touch. Not a switch—

  But suddenly, as I was trying one gadget after another, the lights went on—surely not from anything I had done!

  “There,” came a voice through the speaker, “I guess we’re ready to take him with us.” Those were voices from the blimp, coming in on the intercom.

  “Is he in?” another voice said.

  “He crawled right in without any coaxing,” said one of the voices that had come up from the depths with me. “That’s enough to prove that he is Bob. Look, he’s at the controls now. He’s our missing pilot, all right. That’s another victory, boys. We’re getting the party assembled gradually.”

  So I was Bob, a pilot. All right, if they said so, I’d be agreeable. But I was also a hungry serpent. I wasn’t a cooperative animal. I was sly and vicious, and all I wanted was to look out for myself. If they thought they were going to fly me somewhere as a prisoner, they had another think coming. I coiled around and crawled back to the door and nosed against the lever.

  It wouldn’t open.

  The plane was moving through the blackness. Yes, it was rising. They were flying it by remote control, and I was on my way somewhere, whether I liked it or not.

  CHAPTER VI

  No doubt about it, they had set a neat trap for me. And here I was thinking that I was the sly one. They may have had the advantage of human looks, but I’m darned if they hadn’t out-serpented the serpent.

  We went toward the pink dawn and landed in the early morning twilight on a shelf of concrete in the upper level of a valley between two huge shoulders of mountain. Here was the stronghold from which I had seen the planes come, not so many hours ago, after the blowup of a falling space ship.

  My plane landed and came to a stop in front of a magnificent arched entrance. The other planes and the blimp closed in around me, and a ground crew of blue-and-orange men came out to take over.

  The door of my plane was not opened until a glass-and-metal cage was set up for me.

  I crawled in without any undue coaxing. Their trickery was still working. They had put a pygmy in the far corner of the cage. I thought it was a pygmy. But when my jaws clamped over it I found that it was a wax imitation. I spat it out and recoiled to strike back at someone, I didn’t care whom. However, the door of my cage had already slid shut and I was caught.

  If I had been an honored ambassador from the earth, extending good will and a promise of interplanetary trade to this planet, I’m sure my hosts would have found it in their power to feed me without any undue delay. And I would have eaten, and a friendship would have been sealed then and there, by virtue of the universal law of brotherhood that springs from a full stomach.

  But I was a serpent in a cage, and neither my human voice nor the growlings of my lank intestines could prod my caretakers to move any faster than they wished to do.

  “Is he ready for the experiment?” I heard someone ask.

  “Better take him back into the Z Lab,” came the answer.

  Not bad looking scientists, I thought to myself. Plump and well-fed and sufficiently healthy to keep a hungry serpent nourished for a week. What other attributes these men may have had didn’t interest me much at the time. I had caught a fleeting glimpse of the arched doorway, a noble structure ornamented with polished brass, large enough for planes to enter. Of the three openings under the arch, I was taken through the one that served the automotive traffic. Two trucks spun past me on their way out to one of the mountain highways, and I saw that they were driven by pygmies!

  “This isn’t going to be so pleasant,” I told myself. “Now how many of those fellows will I have to account for when they bring me up before the judge?”

  I was counting back over my indiscretions, shall we say, when the tunneled driveway opened into a lighted room. They wheeled me past a row of elevators, on through a lobby of automotive vehicles, and at last through a door of three square green-metal panels marked Laboratory Z.

  The room would have been perfectly dark if someone hadn’t been meddling with a lightning machine. As soon as the Lab door closed behind me, the lightning had me. I mean, it would have captured anyone’s attention the first time. Dark-dark-dark-flash! Dark-dark-dark-flash!

  After the first fifteen purplish-white flashes you began to think you’d caught the rhythm and could tell when the next flash was coming. But that was an illusion. Flash-flash-flash! All at once they were coming fast, and you had a premonition that they were going to close in on you and electrocute you. You couldn’t tell exactly where they were coming from. But all at once you saw the door of your cage fly open, and no one was standing there with guns, so it was your chance.

  I flashed around and darted out through the opening. My flying tail struck the rear wall as I turned, only to add a hard push to my sudden effort to slither out while there was a chance. Wouldn’t I ever learn?

  It was nothing more than a trick, of course.

  I realized it the moment the last of my forty-foot body found the cool concrete floor. The very next flash showed a derrick-like arm swinging down from the ceiling. One glimpse—the resemblance was unmistakable—it was a package of sulphur-colored powders, the same as those that had descended on the girl in the pool. Floooof!

  On the instant the blackness of the room gave way to what seemed a luminous dust storm. My serpent-like form writhed and whipped and scraped and fought. The deluge was over me. I coughed and choked with wild unspeakable tortures.

  It was over. The air was clearing, and the steam that had stung deep in my lungs was melting away. Bars of lights came on around the room, and the first thing I saw was my own form in a huge mirror.

  I moved, half crawling and half walking, towa
rd the mirror.

  If you can imagine the classical facade of an old fashioned colonial home, with two pairs of fifty-foot columns standing white and solid on either side of the entrance, that’s the sort of frame I now approached. It was the highest mirror I ever saw. A full sized giraffe could have used it to advantage and still had room to spare.

  I move up the six wide concrete steps with considerable pride in my bearing. You see, I was watching myself in that mirror, fully aware that something had transformed me. I had two arms once more, and also a good pair of human legs.

  The arms, somewhat to my dismay, were about six feet long—long enough that I had at once begun to use them for front legs. My snake-like body was still all there, from my scaled face and sly greenish-yellow eyes all the way down to my brightly colored tail. But I had legs! I was walking as well as crawling.

  “How do you like it?”

  The voice came out of a speaker in the wall.

  “How did you do it?” I replied. I looked around to see who was conversing with me, and I spied them—three men in a plexiglass pill-box on the opposite wall.

  “Come over this way so we can see you,” one of the men said. “Do you remember who you are?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m Bob Garrison, a registered space ship pilot. I came to this space island on an errand—”

  I checked myself. After all, it was none of their concern, so far as I knew. Just now I was whirling with more thoughts than I could hold, but it wouldn’t do to spill any of the confidential ones. I was not too sure, after all, that I was among friends.

  “I’m Bob Garrison,” I repeated.

  “Walk around the room, Bob Garrison,” came the order.

  I didn’t mind obeying. It paid to know what one’s body would and would not do, and if this was it—well, I needed a bit of exercise to get my balance.

  All at once the hunger pangs shot through me, and I stopped, immediately below the platform where the three men were perched and looked up at them. Then the dreadful fact of my pygmy dinners came back with a new surge of remorseful conscience. That was awful. It was hideous. It was terrifying, and my serpent blood ran cold at the thought.

  There I was, however, caught between the human impulse to recover my civilized feelings and my bestial instincts to leap up at the platform and devour one of those men.

  I leaped I leaped and struck at the plexiglass enclosure, and almost hit it.

  “Good action,” one of the men mumbled through the speaker. “I can’t recall that we’ve ever had such a specimen as that before.”

  “I don’t understand,” another scientist replied, “why he shouldn’t have transformed more completely into his original stage. He seems to have regained the human memory, all right. And we’re not going to have any trouble bringing his arms back to normal. But he’s taken a pretty deep shock, somehow, to have that serpent’s body fixed upon him so stubbornly. How large a dose of powders did we apply?”

  Their discussion went on along these lines. The girl, they mentioned, had come back to normal with only half as strong an explosion as they had given me. But someone protested that she had already been partially reconverted by means of a shock from zeego gunfire.

  “Why don’t we try the zeego fire on this one, then?”

  That matter was worth a few minutes’ earnest discussion, and two or three times I was sure they would decide to do it. (Once, not so many hours ago, I had captured three zeego guns of my own, I recalled, and had tried to find a pygmy to use them on, but in the end my appetite had always won over my scientific ambitions.) They eventually suspended their discussion. The boss had better be consulted before they did anything more to me.

  “He’s a pretty valuable specimen, just as he stands,” said the chief spokesman. “We might ruin him with zeego fire. I have a hunch—”

  He paused as if perhaps he should hold back his confidences, but the other two consultants were already guessing his thought.

  “Yes, gentlemen, I have a hunch that Dr. Hunt will prefer to dissect this specimen as he now stands. An undamaged skeleton of this sort will give us one of the finest studies in the laboratory.”

  So that was it! I was to be Dr. Hunt’s undamaged skeleton, was I? That was too much.

  And to think that I was the man who had come to this ghastly outpost of space on a secret mission, if you please—to rescue the lost scientist, Dr. Emerson Hunt.

  I leaped and struck the underside of the transparent enclosure so hard that the floor cracked, and a brace tore loose from its wall mooring. The three gentlemen must have decided to take their conference elsewhere. They made a quick exit and locked the wall door behind them.

  CHAPTER VII

  I shall be everlastingly thankful to the caretaker who fed me before my visit with Flora Hessel. I was ravenous, and I simply couldn’t have maintained any outward appearance of civilized serpenthood if they hadn’t fed me.

  The cage was around me again. I didn’t mind that. It was just the protection I needed while I did some tall thinking. Flora Hessel, bless her heart, came to me and helped me think. With her help, it all seemed worthwhile.

  “We were both warned against coming to this outpost in the first place,” she said.

  I nodded. I was thinking how beautiful a person she was, even dressed in one of the workmen’s uniforms—a rough one-piece suit of blue and orange and a liberal sprinkling of grease spots. Her dark hair was loosely combed, falling free over one shoulder. Her bare legs and arms were lithe and graceful as she settled herself comfortably in the chair which a caretaker provided for her outside my cage.

  “I remember what you said, Bob,” she smiled, “when they warned you against coming. You said you had your own good reason for coming—something more than hiring out as their pilot, I was sure. But you never told me.”

  “No, I’ve never told anyone,” I said cautiously. The fact was that I had been on the verge of telling her more than once during our long hours of flight together. But Ernest Marsch had done his very best to keep us from becoming acquainted. Ernest Marsch had hired each of us for our specialized jobs, and he had intended that we should keep our minds on our work.

  “We have heard tales of these strange transformations before we came,” Flora went on, looking dreamily off into space, “don’t know about you, but I simply didn’t believe they could happen.”

  “I didn’t quite realize,” I admitted. “Still, that was the very earliest report that ever came from this land—you know—after the first wave of settlers from the earth were shipped off Mars—”

  It could be found in any modern history, even though each historian was careful to word his account in such a way that the story could be taken as a legend rather than fact. The first wave of American and English settlers on the earth colonies of Mars had gone through the bitter ordeal of becoming adjusted to new climatic and gravitational conditions, and the awful experience had taken its toll. Fifty years after the first wave of settlers, the second wave had come to Mars in great numbers. They came equipped with better means of setting up conditions congenial to their own needs, and they made a healthy go of it.

  But the second group of Martian settlers simply couldn’t endure the first! That was the original tragedy—and this was the fact that every writer of history deplored. The first group had become so changed and twisted in their human nature—shrunken in mind and body and spirit, and animal-like in their tastes—that in a sudden act of hysteria the second group had loaded up hundreds of the first group on derelict space ships and simply rocketed them out of the solar system!

  Beyond the solar system, they had fallen to this mysterious space island, where the forces of gravitation had been found to be much like those of the earth. The drifting planet’s inner heat provided conditions suitable for life, and there was life here—life in innumerable forms. Since much of the interplanetary driftwood, living and otherwise, from the solar system and three other systems, found its way to this particular catchall in the sky, i
t was not surprising that there would be many forms of life here.

  But, according to the fanciful legend which the historians handled with great caution, those varying forms of life were the results of transformations that occurred as soon as the creatures from other planets began to eat the food and drink the water which this space island provided.

  And according to the legend, the first outcasts from the earth colony on Mars were still living here—not their descendants, but the original members of the first group. If this were true, they must be men and women more than two hundred years of age—or were they men and women?

  Or were they beasts who roamed the mountains of Space Island?

  The historians could only cite the legend and promise that in time the scientists would have more answers.

  But scientists were not too eager to come, considering the odds that a personal tragedy of some sort would strike them before they had a chance to set up a laboratory. As few persons on the earth realized, Dr. Hunt had come, but not of his own accord. There had been a bit of smooth interplanetary gangsterism back of his sudden disappearance from the well-known Emerson Laboratories.

  All of this background came welling up into my thoughts while I talked with Flora Hessel from my glass and metal cage. The recent liberation from the awful serpent-thoughts gave me a flare of new hope that I might still be on the trail of my original purpose.

  “I am going to confide in you,” I said quietly, trying my best to keep the hiss out of my voice. “But first, you must tell me something. How did you know, when you first saw me as a serpent, that I might be Bob? Why didn’t you guess me to be Ernest Marsch. Or Pete Hogan? Or one of the others?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “There were ten of us on board,” I said, “and the explosion that struck us as we were coming in must have either killed or transformed all of us into something unrecognizable. I certainly didn’t recognize you when you were in your cat-monster body. Not until you began to reduce into human form. And even then my mind was too bleary to remember who you were. I only knew that I felt friendly toward you.”