The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “I thought you said that they gave him a shot of sixty-eight-J-sixty-nine.”

  “They did,” said Dr. Winston. “He was highly agreeable a few minutes ago.”

  “I’m highly agreeable now,” I said casually, rising to a more comfortable position, and straightening my front legs beneath my scaled shoulders. “If you want to start cutting me up right away, I’ll help you sharpen the knives.”

  “Oh, you will. You are being agreeable, aren’t you,” said Dr. Hunt.

  “These front legs of mine are pretty handy,” I went on. “I’ve a good pair of hands on them, as you can see. So I’ll help you dissect. I can begin cutting off cross-sections of my tail, if you like—”

  “The drug’s gone to his head,” said Winston. “We’d better give him something else.”

  Dr. Hunt was eyeing me closely, not saying a word. I knew that my “cutting” remarks had disturbed him. I had gotten under his skin.

  “Why don’t you boys get smart?” I said, following up my advantage.

  “Meaning what?” said Winston.

  “Meaning that you’re limping along with old-fashioned methods in this broken-down lab.” I said it with all the conviction I could muster, and it was driving home. Dr. Hunt’s twenty fingers began to twitch uneasily. I went on digging. “This broken-down lab might be good enough for Space Island, but it wouldn’t be a good give-away back on the earth, unless you could find some scientist who is a sucker for antiques.”

  Dr. Hunt reddened a trifle, and his two right hands stroked through his ruffled black hair.

  “What equipment do they have on the earth,” he asked bluntly, “that excels my best?”

  “They have a multiple X-ray attached to a plastic machine, so that they could turn out a perfect copy of my skeleton, in plastic, without ever touching a knife blade to my skin.” The two doctors exchanged glances. “The drug has gone to his head,” Winston repeated. “I’ll get something stronger.”

  CHAPTER IX

  I’ll never know whether their sixty-eight-J-sixty-nine accounted for my actions, two minutes later, when the zeego guns began to flash all over the place.

  They say that some men will rise to the greatest heights of bravery, or congeniality, or oratory under the influence of certain beverages, and afterward they’ll wonder whether the achievement was their own or whether it came out of the bottle. That’s how it was with me, two minutes later when the surprise attack struck Laboratory H.

  It was those damned pygmies! Whoever they were, and wherever they had come from, they were suddenly raiding the place with zeego guns!

  Flash-flash-flash-flash!!! Red fire blasted through the dark corridor, quick sharp lines of it—back and forth and across. Three bars of it cut through the double doors of Lab H.

  Dr. Winston dropped and I thought he had been hit.

  Dr. Hunt spun around, obviously looking for his rolling chair, but it was gone. He strode swiftly across to the nearest laboratory table and seized a telephone. Before he could speak, five of those two-and-a-half foot demons were racing in with their guns blazing.

  One of them guarded the door, two of them marched to Dr. Winston, crouched on the floor holding his arm as if he had been wounded. The other two were running toward Dr. Hunt.

  They didn’t appear to notice me, probably because I was just a specimen in a cage, lying there inert without showing any signs of knowing what was going on. That’s what they thought!

  I swung my arm down through an opening between bars and smacked my hand against the floor. My cage, resting on rollers, lunged forward. Another touch of my hand sent me coasting into the path of the two pygmies who were going for Dr. Hunt.

  They were moving fast, but so was I.

  The red fire splashed over the glass sides of my prison. I caught a bit of the spray in my back. It struck with the sharpness of a hundred needles. My coiled body snapped like a spring, and my shoulder crashed into the bars. I drew back, saw the opening I had made, and plunged through.

  “Look out! The monster! Look out!” one pygmy squealed.

  “Monster, huh?” I snarled back as if that word had been just one insult too many. I didn’t heed their gunfire, though it was needling through my scaled protection. I dived for the two of them with both arms swinging. I must have struck with pretty fair force. One of them sailed clear across the room and crashed into a stack of glass tubes, while his gun flipped into the air like something out of a catapult. The second little fellow simply dropped his weapon and went backing away, holding his hands behind him to keep them from being snapped off.

  I pivoted from one arm, then, and whirled my forty-foot length like a whip. That knocked down three of them. A bit of carelessness on my part, I’m afraid, in the final flash of my tail. Dr. Winston had just come to his feet, and I caught him, too. So that everyone was on the floor except Dr. Hunt and the pygmy who had stayed to guard the door. I went for the guard. The pygmy at the door, I mean. He went for the corridor.

  The first part of the pygmy attack ended then and there, as far as I was concerned. For Dr. Hunt had touched a switch, and the inner door of Laboratory H closed.

  Clang! That was the outer door.

  So there were seven of us, all locked in securely—and for a moment it was a toss-up as to who would be masters and who would be prisoners. Four pygmies—their brown little bodies adorned with nothing but red loin cloths; two doctors—probably the smartest on all of Space Island; and one serpent—a four-legged monstrosity powerful enough to burst out of his cage—and he was out.

  I was out, and it seemed to me that I could have scooped all of the other persons in that room into my clutches then and there, and made them submit to my will—or choked them.

  I say, it seems to me that I could have.

  But it wouldn’t have worked, and I should have known better than to think that one could defeat a scientist in his own laboratory.

  I did go so far as to gather up three of the four attackers and start toward Dr. Hunt with them—and you may wonder why, when Dr. Hunt was planning to strip the flesh from my bones, that I should trouble myself to play the hero in his defense. But you must remember that there was still a certain plan and purpose boring through my mind. I still had the dim hope that I might somehow lift Dr. Hunt out of this weird world and take him back to the earth.

  A pretty fancy ambition for a fourlegged serpent, you think? All right, I’ll admit that I had hitched to a pretty high star. But I wasn’t ready to let go.

  Dr. Hunt must have flashed the lights off. I stopped in my tracks. The place was utterly dark—no, not quite that dark, after all. As soon as my eyes adjusted, I could see the single flooding light—dim, purple light that was almost like a shower bath of luminous purple dust. It was coming down over me, lighting my long six-foot arms, and casting a baleful glow over the three pygmies I held.

  I had stopped in my tracks, and now I knew why I had stopped. The flood of purple light had stopped me.

  I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. I was frozen. And that ugly pygmy, over whose waist I had clamped my left hand, was quite as frozen as I. The other two, who I had caught by the feet and who hung upside down from my uplifted right arm, never twitched or flicked an eyebrow.

  We were all frozen together by some diabolical paralysis ray. It was a trifle embarrassing. My serpent’s jaws were open and my head was inclined toward the object in my left hand. Even in the dim purple light I knew that the two doctors would be able to see, plainly enough, what might have happened.

  I won’t say that it would have happened. I only say that the instant the room was plunged in darkness, I must have made a motion as if I were going to eat one of the pygmies—and that was how the paralysis had caught me.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Winston?” Dr. Hunt called out.

  “I’m here,” said Dr. Winston. “That was quick action on your part, Dr. Hunt. You escaped injury, didn’t you?”

  “Were you knocked down, Dr. Winston? I saw you falling.”
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br />   “The beast’s tail caught me. Have you got the freeze on solid?”

  “Solid,” said Dr. Hunt. “Another minute and we can put the lights on. We’d better get a report on the rest of the units meanwhile. This attack may be widespread. I’ve been uneasy for days.”

  “The Mashas haven’t a chance against us, don’t worry,” said Dr. Winston as stoutly as he could. “This little flare-up can’t last. They tried before, you know.”

  “They’ve been trying for a century and a half,” said Dr. Hunt. “I’ve studied the records of this planet, and I’ve found that troubles like these have recurred every ten or fifteen years.”

  Dr. Hunt got through to his various secretaries on the telephone. He talked fast, at first, until the reassurances calmed him. The attack had come and gone like a quick thundershower. He hung up, satisfied.

  He turned on the lights and opened the laboratory doors, all the while reporting to Dr. Winston.

  “They’ve captured fifteen of the troublemakers—none of them identified as our servants. There hasn’t been any general uprising among our servants, I’m glad to say. That means that our serums are still working.”

  “Then the only trouble came from outsiders?” Winston asked.

  “Apparently.”

  “If it had been our servants, they might have reason to make trouble, but I can’t understand why those outside Mashas who have the whole countryside to live in, and who haven’t been in any way enslaved, should take it in their heads to storm our fortress.”

  “I don’t understand it, either,” Dr. Hunt admitted slowly. He stroked his sharp black beard thoughtfully. “I wish we had some way of finding out.” They sauntered back in my direction, and then, as if with a single inspiration, they stopped and stared at me. They gazed at the three scared Mashas in my grasp.

  “I wonder,” Dr. Hunt said slowly.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said Dr. Winston. “Maybe we do have a way of finding out—a decidedly ingenious way.”

  Dr. Hunt looked me over carefully, giving particular attention to my open jaws. The Mashas were doubly frozen—once from the ray and once from fear.

  “I’d hate like sin to let one of the finest specimens we’ve ever created get away. But I’d risk a lot to know the Mashas from the inside. Yes, I think it might be worth a try,” said Dr. Hunt.

  CHAPTER X

  You never saw such tender care exercised upon a serpent. They fed me the most wonderful foods, and gave me the most comfortable bed I could ask for. They treated my wounds with a dozen kinds of salves and oils; they bathed and massaged me and manicured me; they took me out for exercise, allowing me to run along at my own pace, hitched to a ten-ton truck.

  It was wonderful while it lasted. I was their favorite pet dog, you might say, and they considered it a privilege to walk me.

  The only trouble with the exercise periods was that they always occurred at night, so that I didn’t, have much chance to study the countryside. That was their precaution. They didn’t want the outside pygmies—that is, the Mashas—to know that they were grooming me for a special purpose.

  Best of all, they gave me access to an indoor swimming pool where I could thrash around and whip the water to my tail’s content.

  “Is everything perfectly satisfactory?” the attendants would ask me. “Is the water the right temperature? You don’t care for a towel, do you? If so, don’t hesitate to put in your request.”

  “Ah—er—I think of just one thing,” I said, recalling those first strange hours down in the stream in the bottom of the crevasse. “I have a weakness for blossom-scented air. Could you arrange to have some flowers brought in and placed beside the pool?”

  When Flora Hessel came to visit me in my room, and I described all of these luxuries to her, she was not as surprised as I had expected.

  “It’s no more than you deserve,” she said. “After all, you saved the lives of the two most important men in this kingdom.”

  “I did?”

  “Oh, you needn’t be so modest about it. Everyone has heard, by this time. That little band of Mashas was all set to take over this fortress from the inside. If they had captured Laboratory H, as they planned, they could have given orders from Dr. Hunt’s phones, and that would have done it. There’d have been a thousand Mashas pouring in from all directions before the trick was known.”

  I studied over that set-up, shaking by head slowly.

  “Now I’m not trying to argue for the sake of argument,” I said, “and if these rumors are making the rounds, I suppose there must be some basis for them. But tell me this: how could any pygmy—or Masha, I mean—imitate Dr. Hunt over the phone?”

  “People do imitate people, you know.”

  “But a pygmy imitating Dr. Hunt—that would be like a mouse imitating a lion. Have you heard Dr. Hunt’s big solid voice? It’s deep, it’s throaty, it’s full of chesty thunder. Have you heard any of these pygmy servants speak? . . . All right.”

  Flora came back to her original point that anyway I had saved a couple of lives—important ones, too. So I swelled up my snakely chest with pride. She didn’t notice. She was looking out the window at the green ridge of mountains, thinking her private thoughts, and I guessed that my argument about the voices had disturbed her.

  “You know,” she said presently, “I think you’ve got an angle. Maybe those pygmies weren’t going to use a pygmy to imitate Dr. Hunt. Maybe they were going to use someone here at the fortress—one of the guards—one of the doctors—one of Dr. Hunt’s secretaries.”

  “M-m-m.” I didn’t say it with much conviction. Nevertheless it was a tantalizing thought.

  “Maybe this Winston you told me about was all set to step into Dr. Hunt’s shoes, using the little people as his army,” Flora went on, now looking farther away than ever.

  “No, no, it couldn’t be that.” Refusing to give it a thought, I changed the subject. “It’s like Dr. Hunt says, all you have to do is consult the record to see that the Mashas have been bursting out with an attack every ten or fifteen years.”

  It was natural enough for them to try to regain their lost power, we agreed. The Mashas were the original outcasts from Mars. Their original name, Martians, had degenerated into the word Mashas. Their physical characteristics had been warped and changed from the original man-like stature to the small, wiry, shrunken bodies they now possessed. That was what their first forty or fifty years away from the earth had done for them. Mars had “marshed” them, as the phrase had originally given it; or later, it was said to have “mashed” them.

  The later generations of Martian settlers had first called them, accordingly, not Martians, but Mashas. And it was the new settlers who had more or less brutally exiled them.

  Here they were, still alive and still rankling from the mistreatment a hundred and fifty years later.

  “One can’t help feeling sorry over their plight,” Flora said philosophically. “It’s all a trick of fate.”

  “It’s been done, and it can’t be undone,” I said. “For all we know, they may live on another couple centuries—or hell, they may make trouble for a thousand years, who knows. This freakish planet might refuse to let them die.”

  “Well, they can die, you know,” said Flora, giving me a quick eye. “You’ve already accounted for a few of them.” I nodded, a bit shamefaced. Then I told her what had happened at the end of my rescue, when the attack had been made on Laboratory H. I described in all its gory details the statue of the three pygmies caught under my open jaws when the purple paralysis ray shot down on us from the ceiling and froze us in action.

  “That little party proved two things to the doctors, as plain as day,” I said. “One, my tough scales can withstand a certain amount of zeego fire. Two, my tough stomach is good for at least a limited quantity of pygmy steak.”

  “I could have told them that,” said Flora.

  “Well, there you have it. That’s the reason they’re treating me to all these luxuries.”
/>   “You mean it isn’t because you’re a hero?”

  “Heroes get banquets and medals and speeches. That’s because their work is already done. But these boys are grooming me for a new job—a big job that’s never been done before. They’re virtually bribing me to do it well.” I told her about it.

  “H-m-m-m.” Flora Hessel was more than a little disturbed. “Just where does this get you in relation to your own purpose? When you get through exploring the inside of the Masha world as a favor to Dr. Hunt, is he going to pack up and go back to the earth as a favor to you?”

  I couldn’t answer that in the affirmative and be truthful. And in Flora’s presence I didn’t feel like being a snake. So I didn’t answer.

  She walked to the door, and just before she walked away she gave her own answer.

  “The first chance you get,” she said, “take a walk down the spiral passage beyond Laboratory X and you’ll come to the museum of Dr. Hunt’s skeletons. You’ll find your answer there.” She seemed to be saying, “Walk into the trap, you stupid fool,” though she hadn’t actually said so.

  But there was one thing she had said that deserved a little more explanation, and I called to her sharply.

  “Just a minute, there, High-and-Mighty,” I said. “How did you happen to find your way down into the museum of skeletons? I thought you were a prisoner here. Or are you a first-class tourist? Or are you asking for a job, feeding the skeletons?”

  She tossed her dark hair over her shoulders and flashed her dark eyes at me. “I guess it wouldn’t make any difference to you if I did tell you.”

  “I’ve got tough scales. I think I can take it,” said.

  “All right, you asked for it. I went down there because I had a date with a charming wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  CHAPTER XI

  I must have been pretty desperate to take the chance I took the very next night. I was desperate. I was boiling with an inner rage that was born not of fear but of jealousy.