by Don Wilcox
“Take me that way,” I said to the attendant who was examining the hitch at the end of the truck. “Take me back into the mountain trail that curves over the buildings.”
The attendant shrugged as if it made no difference to him, so long as I got my exercise. He went up front and crawled in beside the driver. Neither he nor the driver guessed what was in my mind. They were finding me a cooperative pet who could be led to water, and that was all they cared.
I couldn’t help wondering whether a pygmy driver would have been as unconcerned. But the authorities had their eye on that item, too. They knew that there might be a leak of information from this mountainside colony to the outside Mashas, and if so, that leak was probably one of the trusted little Masha slaves who, in spite of the doctor’s regular doses of serum, contained enough spark to know what was going on.
The pygmy servants were all being watched these days, for this reason. If someone on the inside should be found guilty of helping with the recent attack, he would no doubt be treated to something pretty severe. More serum, perhaps? Well, you never knew. These scientists were playing a bold game, and they would just as soon try grafting an elephant’s head on a two-and-a-half-foot Masha if they thought it would work.
There were a great many things along that line that continually disturbed my thoughts and stole my sleep, and I couldn’t help wishing that I could get Dr. Hunt under some special secret-revealing ray long enough to make him expose a few facts.
But this much was beginning to take root in my mind. The Mashas were tougher than the newcomers to this region. Their training period in Mars a century and a half ago had stiffened their resistance to the capricious forces of this planet which turned all manner of men into all manner of freaks. The Mashas had apparently already been cooked to a turn, so to speak, exactly to old Mother Nature’s taste. And so they lived on, almost unchanging from year to year.
And still, the serums were able to effect temporary differences in their week-to-week behavior. As long as they were well doped, they made excellent slaves—dull, obedient, dependable and, as a rule, non-vicious.
But on the other hand, the men of the earth and other solar planets where earth’s space ships had established new branches of earth’s peoples—these persons who had come more recently to Space Island—were arriving, in many cases, transformed.
Why? By what agencies? Well, let these brilliant scientists from Dr. Hunt’s great laboratories answer such questions if they were able. For my part, I stood as a living proof that such things did happen. I had seen the retransformation take place completely in the case of Flora Hessel—partially, in my own case. And there were other evidences . . .
What of Dr. Hunt’s arms? I wondered.
Had this been a trick of accidental transformation? Or controlled transformation?
This I knew: he wanted those four arms. He had use for all of them, and they did much to increase his efficiency. If he had wanted a completely normal body, wouldn’t he have applied the yellow powders? Or would that have been taking too great a risk?
What would have happened to him if the zeego guns had struck those arms? Would the very shock have acted for a quick change in nature’s delicate arrangement of his parts?
It was no wonder that I, the serpent victim of all this ungodly freak factory, was losing sleep trying to understand. There must be some underlying principles, I thought. The very essence of science dwells in principles or laws or some sort of generalizations that can be relied upon. Things happen because a given set of forces always makes such things happen.
And yet here I was, the only human serpent—the only four-legged serpent with human hands and a human brain!
In all of Space Island there was not another like me, they believed.
But there were men—ever so many normal men—like Dr. Winston and the attendants and guards. And there were a few women, at least. Had all of them come through some violent transformation, the same as Flora Hessel?
Ah, there was a girl. And as I now ran along beside the truck that was taking me out for exercise, this was at once the most hopeful and the most disturbing thought of all. Flora!
Who was I, a serpent, to try to bring scientific order out of this weird world of confusion? All I really knew, in the final analysis, were the obvious things. I knew Flora—yes.
I knew that there wasn’t another person on this planet who was so much a friend to me as Flora Hessel. Of all the brilliant persons who had observed me and questioned me and cared for me, she was the only one who had said, “You must get out of this form. You must get yourself back to your normal state”
And then I came back to the feverish, jealous thoughts that had caused me to ask the attendant to take me over this particular trail.
Jealousy? Or was it something less definite? Suspicion—that was it.
Flora had had a date with a charming wolf in sheep’s clothing, she had said.
That could mean only one thing, I thought. Ernest Marsch. He was still alive, he was somewhere in the immediate vicinity, and he had seen Flora.
I didn’t like it. I remembered what she had said about relying upon my protection during our space hop. Otherwise, she had said, she might have resorted to the use of her pistol.
Did she have a pistol now?
How had he found her? Where had they met? Why had she agreed to go with him through the spiral tunnel beyond Laboratory X to explore a museum full of bones?
Before this night’s exercise was over I meant to find some of the answers for myself. I had only the vaguest idea, I must admit, as to how much exercise would be required before I got to the bottom of things.
The truck had swung around the wide plaza and taken a cloverleaf turn to ascend the mountain road. We were moving at approximately ten miles an hour, I guessed.
I was using my legs to much greater advantage than ever before. You know how it is with a child who has spent several months crawling and suddenly discovers it can walk. I was not only walking, I was running.
The rope which they had fastened to the harness around my neck and shoulders was long enough that I could run up alongside the cab to check on my speed.
“How fast?” I asked.
The attendant and the driver both gave a nervous lurch whenever they discovered me moving along beside their window.
“Eight miles an hour,” said the attendant. “Take it easy. You’re not supposed to overwork.”
“I feel like going faster,” I said. I stepped up my speed and would have run along in front of them if they hadn’t stepped on the accelerator.
I don’t think they liked the sight of me, moving along in their lights. After all, I must have looked to them like the world’s biggest, snakiest lizard, galloping along on a leash.
They moved past me, and I caught up again.
“Step on it,” I said. “I feel the need of exercise.”
They doubled their pace, and I stayed with them.
In a moment the attendant called out to me, “We’re up to thirty-two miles an hour. That’s fast enough. They’ll give me hell if I let you run your legs off.”
“It’s a perfectly comfortable speed,” I said. “But I’m in the mood to race.”
“Oh, so that’s it.” The attendant growled something to the driver. They figured they’d take it out of me in another five minutes.
I kept an eye on the trail as we accelerated again. I was kicking up my share of dust, now, at forty-five miles an hour, and every now and then my tail would whip down against the road, and that, you may believe, was unintentional. It was a beginner’s awkwardness, you might say. No snake spanks himself on purpose.
I was watching the trail, and here came the curving mile I had been waiting for. It was a good piece of road, except that it was so full of twists and turns you might think it would put a permanent wave in a serpent’s backbone. Just below the edge of the road the ledge dropped straight down about sixty feet—to the roofs of the fortress.
In other words, we h
ad gained enough elevation to switch back over the laboratories.
I bounded up beside the cab and shouted, “Faster!”
The driver moved the speedometer up to sixty-five miles an hour. “How’s that?” he yelled.
“Just right,” I said, falling back gradually. “Hold it right there for ten minutes.”
“Can you take it?”
“If I can’t, I’ll shout.”
Then I fell back gradually. The driver and the attendant kept their spotlight on the curves ahead and let me shift for myself. That was just what I wanted.
Snap! Ever since we had started, I had been biting at the rope that was fastened to my harness. With one savage bite I finished the job. I was free.
The truck whirled on around the bend, dragging the rope behind it.
I bounded down over the embankment, clinging tight with all of my crawling muscles.
Four or five minutes later, when the sounds of the truck’s brakes reached my ears, I was already slithering over the glass and metal roofs of the laboratories. I was in the mood to be free, for a change, and it would take more than six moons and a truck’s spotlight to find me among these roofs.
CHAPTER XII
I rested for a full hour, lying in a perfect hiding place a few feet from a chimney and a ventilator. I could imagine what the driver and the attendant were saying as they played their spotlight over the rocks, up and down the mountainside and out across the roofs, looking for me. They had better practice their story well before they went back empty handed, I thought, if they were going to make it stick.
I could just hear them trying to pass the buck. “I told the driver we shouldn’t race him faster than fifteen miles an hour.” Or—“How the hell did I know? I’m just the driver, and if the damned snake wanted exercise, it made no difference to me, as long as the attendant didn’t kick.”
But the alibis wouldn’t be enough, I was sure: not unless someone could produce the serpent. The crusty old Captain of the Guards would be pretty sure to get the job of running me down. And I knew that he would be the guy who could make a thorough job of it. So I had better make hay before they got the squads on my trail.
As soon as those flashes of light ceased to glide over the roofs, I took a long chance and crawled quietly to the nearest dimly lighted section of glass roof.
“A greenhouse,” I said to myself. “Now where would the laboratories be from here?”
I lumbered along at a good pace over the metal surfaces. They were still warm from the day’s sun, and their rust and grime and rock dust didn’t make for comfortable crawling. Over the glass roofs I took extra care, for once I struck a loose pane and it fell through with a crash. Another light came on, down in that section of greenhouse, and a pygmy gardener came in with a sprinkler in his hand, looking around to see what was the matter.
I tried to hold my breath. When I let go with a quiet “Hssssh!” he looked up and saw my head through the aperture. He screeched bloody murder and rolled over his sprinkler in a faint. I didn’t wait to see how soon he revived, but skimmed along to a safer realm.
At least, I hoped it would be a safer realm. But the direction I chose failed to offer the solitude I needed.
Eight pygmies on the roof! Now what were they doing there?
The most obvious answer was, they were playing with fire. I crawled up toward them silently and looked in on their party.
Down in a four-foot depression where the irregular roofs had been joined with a patchwork of corrugated metal, they had lighted a few torches and were heating a branding iron.
“Put your initials on him while you’re at it,” one of them said, adding a low, cackling laugh.
“Don’t let him squeal and spoil the fun,” came another Masha cackle.
One of the dark little creatures waved a restraining hand across the firelight. “Before we touch the iron, he might like to have one more chance. How about it, Kipper?”
It was seven against one. I crept a little closer to study the evil faces by the light of the torches. Eight little Mashas. Seven of them wore only the red loin cloths, the costume of the outsider.
The eighth wore, in addition to the red loin cloth, a green neckband which was the band of the servant, and an armband which denoted his particular rank and function. He was tied, and gagged, and as completely helpless as a mouse dying in a trap.
The leader of the seven outsiders swung the red-hot iron in a circle. “Anything to say, Kipper? Wouldn’t you like to play on our side for a change?”
“Wug!” That was all he could say, choked by a cloth gag.
“Touch him up with the heat and he’ll whistle out of his ears. Here, give me the iron—”
But the leader kept the party in his own hands. He recited a little speech which gave me the lowdown I needed to understand the situation. He said that if Kipper had been so completely drugged by the scientists’ serums that he couldn’t do anything but stupidly obey orders, it would be different.
“But we’ve put you to the test, Kipper, and we’ve found out that you’re not one of their victims. You’re playing their servant, all right, but you’re also playing some game of your own. Now we’re giving you your chance to come back to us.”
Kipper’s eyes were stubborn slits, and his wrinkled brown cheeks were as hard as steel, and there was a defiance in his little jaws that his seven torturers weren’t going to break down.
“All right, Kipper.”
The leader ran the point of the red-hot iron across his chest to burn a thin dark line. Kipper’s elbows dug tight at his sides.
The leader withdrew the iron, so that for the moment its light showed the gleam of cruelty in his own round eyes. His large mouth sagged with a brutal expression. You could almost hear the clank of chains in his thin, taunting voice. This was Jallan, one of the plotters who had engineered the recent attack on the fortress.
“Now, Kipper,” Jallan snatched the gag out of his mouth, “we give you your last chance. Are you willing to play our game, and help us into control? Are you willing? Or are you going to go on, another hundred years, being a lone wolf?”
“I was a lone wolf on Mars,” said Kipper coldly. “I’ve never asked a damned thing of any of you except that you let me go my own way.”
Jallan gave a flourish with the iron. He touched the point of it to the torches that burned together in a single red flame.
“Put the gag in his mouth, Padderman. Or should we let his scream make music for the whole valley of Mashas? That’s it, gag him well. Now I’ll give him something he’ll carry with him for a thousand years.”
“Brand him with an L.W.—for ‘lone wolf,’ ” said Padderman, marking the letters in the air with his gnarled finger.
“I’ll brand a hole right through his guts. Here goes!”
“Hisssssss!” I breathed audibly. Then forcibly. “HISSSSSSSSS!”
The second blast from my serpent lips upset the party and blew the fire out.
“Serpent!” someone cried. They all saw me, looming there above them. And that did it. Talk about bats out of hell. You never heard such a beating of feet over a tin roof. Clatter-clatter-spill-clang!! Clatter-clatter—over and away and off into the distant sounds of the night.
When the sounds of their disorganized retreat had died away, there was still the low hissing of my breath, and the sizzle of my spit on the red-hot branding iron. And there was still the muffled choking, gasping and coughing of Kipper as I drew the gag out of his mouth and unfastened the cords that bound him.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” I said, as gently as any serpent could be expected to speak under the circumstances. “I had a square meal earlier in the evening. I’ll not be dangerous.”
CHAPTER XIII
It was a strange friendship that grew out of that meeting. If I ever met a bold and hardy spirit, Kipper was it. The old term, Lone Wolf, had never meant much to me before. But here, believe me, was a man who filled the bill.
A man, did I say?
&nb
sp; For the first time, I was thinking of a pygmy not in terms of the calories he would offer for my hungry stomach, but in terms of the staunch, stubborn, indomitable human will that characterizes a man.
Here was a two-and-a-half-foot human creature who had cut his own pattern of life for more than two centuries. The rigors of severe Martian winters, and the magic of that baffling climate, had taken a toll. He no longer possessed the proud five-foot-ten stature that had been his earthly possession. But shrunken and dwarfed and wrinkled and ancient, he was still a man who possessed his own will.
Before that night was an hour older, he was telling me, as confidentially as a brother, how he came and went through the halls of Dr. Hunt’s scientific fortress.
“A servant? Yes, I’m a servant. I’m a servant because I want to be, not because the serums force me to be.”
“But they do give you the serums?” I asked.
“As regularly as the setting of the sun. But I resist the effects. Don’t ask me how. That’s just me. I resist the effects of medicine the same as I resist the influences of my enemies. Sometimes I pay a price.”
He touched the burn across his chest. The squadron from the Captain’s headquarters was at work by this time, moving along the mountain trail above the building’s roofs, playing their searchlights in all directions. The scampering Mashas were probably getting a second scare, unless they had a very safe hiding place near the fortress.
“We’ll be safer down in the laboratories,” Kipper said. “Or do you dare go down? There’s an open skylight over this way. It’s my regular night exit when I need a breath of air—and incidentally, it’s a favorite entrance for the Mashas who have designs on this realm.”
“Lead the way, Kipper,” I said. Kipper led the way and I followed. For Kipper it was a well-worn trail. For me it was full of hazards—openings that were too small and glass walls that were too fragile. However, twenty minutes of twisting and turning and feeling our way through dark passages, brought us into a deep basement descent, dimly illuminated with blue wall-lights.
