by Don Wilcox
All of which meant that this particular party of earth men had come with a special purpose that had something to do with the Mashas. The scientists up in the mountains had better beware.
Once again I hurried back to the sleepy, grunting beast that I had left at the edge of a pool. As an officer, he wouldn’t be taken over by the search squadron too easily, I thought.
But it happened that the planes didn’t spot him. Their pygmy enemies got to him first. They came on him with zeego guns.
Once again, I thought that Flora Hassel should have been here to see, for she had also been the target of zeego fire.
Flash-flash-flash!
I held back, hardly breathing. Was it going to work again? Yes, it was happening. The three pygmies approached cautiously, then more confidently.
He was changing.
From grunting pork chops into a muttering officer! The transformation took place as swiftly as grease melts in a hot pan.
He was evidently the same officer. He had lost a share of his dignity with the loss of his clothes; but he was the same in his mannerisms, as soon as the pygmies had offered him a wrap to throw around his body. They were welcoming him, calling him by name, asking him whether he felt okay. They found him bewildered and a trifle uncertain of his directions. He wanted to consult a map from the clothing that he had lost, but when he examined the scraps he found everything too nearly demolished to be of any service. He placed his faith in the pygmies, then, and they conducted him away toward the five-mound entrance.
I drew a deep breath. My serpent cunning had permitted me to see a great many things in the last few minutes, and I was beginning to understand much that I hadn’t understood before.
If the planes had found this sleeping hog first, I knew that they would have restored him to normal and taken him back to the fortress, just as they took Flora, and would have pressed him into service as a cook, or an attendant, or a guard, or a laboratory assistant—according to his talent. That was the way their kingdom was growing . . . And they might never know that he had come here with the secret purpose of plotting with the Mashas—not until sometime later when the Mashas’ own brand of hell would break loose.
Moreover, I was understanding the series of conditions, at last, which appeared to underlie all of these weird bodily changes.
And as I understood, it gave me new hope that I too might find my way back to normal.
It was a triple punch—a game of one, two, three.
The first punch was man’s ingenuity—the effects of hidden ray-guns which the scientists had planted in the mountains.
The second punch was nature’s own, and must have been operating for centuries. Certain waters in this region played their surprise tricks upon the bodies of all comers who, stunned and fainting and thirsty, partook of their seemingly magic qualities.
The third punch—undoing nature’s transformation—was something that might be accomplished by shock.
Any shock? Zeego fire?—yes. A flare of yellow powders?—yes. Other explosions or concussions? Perhaps. As I say, I was beginning to feel hopeful, for at last I was seeing a way to work these powders for my own purpose.
If I wanted Dr. Hunt to listen to my pleading, I should first return to human form. Then I could march back to the mountain fortress and make him hear me.
It was a hopeful moment for me, watching the Mashas lead the officer away. Just beyond my fingertips were the tracks of the pig’s feet sharp-cut in the mud.
But I couldn’t be too optimistic. I had already proved too hard-crusted for the zeego guns. As for the powders, I had withstood two explosions, and each time I had been only partially restored.
For the remainder of that day I lolled around in the sun, devising all sorts of shock treatments for myself, in imagination. I imagined throwing myself over the side of the mountain; but the memory of my fall through the crevasse gave me an awful shudder.
Could I leap under the wheels of a speeding truck? Could I start a forest fire and leap into it? Could I creep into the ranks of the guards at the fortress and start devouring them, so that they would shoot me with bullets?
None of these plans appealed to me as being pleasant, and I had visions that any of them might prove uncomfortable.
My nerves were pretty jumpy over all of this speculation. I wanted to restore myself to normal, but I didn’t want to kill myself in the attempt. After all, it was better to live as a serpent than to die as a man.
“It is better to live as a serpent,” I said to myself several times, “than to die as a man.”
I was fond of that conclusion and was tempted to carve it in stone. At any rate, I had found some consolation. I was a serpent, but at least I had my human memory and most of my normal faculties of reasoning, only lightly adulterated by serpent instincts. I had better leave well-enough alone, and not tempt the fates to cancel what was left of me.
“It’s not so bad being a serpent,” I told myself, “after you once get your belly toughened up.”
And so, after crawling through a maze of mysteries, I was beginning to find myself.
I approached the mounds quietly.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Mashas were inside their mounds, warm and comfortable, no doubt. A light rain was sprinkling down over my forty-foot form, and I shivered with the thought that the waters of Space Island might transform me again and take away the arms and legs . . .
But no, I had encountered rains before with no ill effects. I was safe. My theory of transformation might be faulty, but I needn’t fear the rain.
The only trouble was that these foothills I was crossing so carefully were structures of earth. I was not only leaving a twisted path in the moistened dust, I was occasionally causing a piece of some Masha’s roof to fall in.
Clunk!
I heard a screech of annoyed pygmy voices below me. I had probably knocked half a ton of earth down on their supper. I scurried down into the depression between the mounds and threaded my way swiftly to other places.
I came back to one of the five mounds that provided the entrance to this honeycomb city. Of all the hundred questions that were making quick chills of adventure play along my spine, the most tantalizing was, Why had these newly arrived full-grown earth people been welcomed here? What strange game was going on within these mounds?
Low voices were welling up through the open ventilator of the farthest mound as I crept up to the crest of its earthen roof. They were pygmy voices. Two wizened little officials were in conference. They were sitting on the earth floor, their bronzed bodies highlighted by a flickering red fire.
“We lost one of them to the blimp,” one was admitting. “They will hold him unless we invade and rescue him. Marsch says there isn’t time. We’ll attack tomorrow morning.”
“Anyway three of Marsch’s leaders came through. If they’re as clever as Marsch claims, we have a fighting chance to win, this time.”
Marsch? Ernest Marsch? Was he mixed up in this world? I was holding my breath for fear I’d gasp too loudly over the tile ventilator shaft.
They were obviously planning to storm the fortress again soon, and these pygmy officials were saying that the newly arrived men were leaders who had come at Marsch’s request. There was some grumbling of disappointment because one of the newcomers had been whisked away by the blimp. The same thing, someone said, had happened to the girl that Marsch had brought a few days before. She had been one of his special employees, and the fortress had got her.
“We should have had her, at all costs.”
“Well, who’s to blame? You saw for yourself that she’d become a two-headed cat. All you had to do was turn the zeego fire on her.”
“All right, keep harping on it. We’d have had her if that snaky monster hadn’t whirled into the picture.”
“So you stopped shooting?”
“He got one of us, as it was.”
“You might have turned your guns on him.”
“But Marsch didn’t want him—not al
ive, I mean. Let the scientists have him. By this time they probably have him on a pedestal.”
They ceased to grumble about lost opportunities a moment later when a messenger brought them the announcement that Marsch would hold a pre-invasion assembly tonight.
“Pre-invasion?” someone said skeptically. “I have the inside information that Marsch is really planning something else. Those new ships he’s patched together are all set for a space hop. He’s going to take the whole lot of us to some new planet to start a new colony.”
By this time I knew there were at least a dozen pygmy officials in the room, though my view allowed me to see only three or four at a time. There was considerable dissention over what Marsch might be planning for them. The official report was that bombing ships were ready, and that the Masha volunteers would fly over the fortress and win it by dropping a few bombs.
But the rumor was spreading that Marsch’s real plan was to transport them all to a brighter land.
All of which left me guessing. What was Marsch’s commercial angle? He wasn’t playing missionary to these downtrodden outcasts. One could be sure that he had his eye on the dollar in the bargain. But so far, I couldn’t see the dollar.
In fact, I hadn’t even seen Marsch since I had turned serpent. I wasn’t sure that he had come through alive.
A few minutes later I was looking down through the triple-tiled ventilators at the other end of the row of five mounds, and there he was—Ernest Marsch in person.
His cigar smoke had led me to him. Through the rain-washed air the aroma had reached me, and I had moved along through the night’s darkness until I had come to what was apparently his own Masha headquarters.
He was pacing, smoking, waiting impatiently. Around him were a few earth men—three who had come today, and a few from the ship that I had piloted.
“The girl should be here soon,” Marsch said, glancing at his watch. “We need her to put the assembly over. The whole Masha gang will trust us if she’ll say the right words.”
“They won’t trust us very long,” someone said. “Not after we take off.”
“We don’t give a damn about that,” Marsch snorted. “Just so we get them aboard the ships. Hell, as soon as we’re out in space it makes no difference. Before they ever wake up to what’s coming, we’ll have them unloaded and sold as slaves Nobody seemed surprised to hear these words. The men were all in on a well-organized scheme that was just about to come off. They talked of lining their pockets well, and Marsch assured them that the interplanetary market where these slaves were to be dumped didn’t pay off in peanuts.
There was a little sentimental talk about Pete Hogan, who had had the hard luck to fall over the precipice when my ship had dropped us here. “Poor Pete,” Marsch said, “he should have got in on this gravy. He was the best yes-man I ever had.” But Pete had fallen into the depressed river, just as I had done, and the conclusion was he’d changed into a fish. Now I recalled that several pygmies had been at work, during my first hours of consciousness on this planet, trying to get something out of that deep stream. Marsch had failed to recover his lost mate—but I had got my first pygmy dinner out of the deal!
They spoke of losing a pygmy in their attempted rescue.
“Who was that devilish serpent?” someone asked.
“Probably my pilot, Bob Garrison,” Marsch said. “I’ll rest easier when I know they’ve run him through the lab and scoured his bones. He was a trouble-maker. I think he had his own scheme in coming here. He wanted to rescue Dr. Hunt.”
“From what I hear, there’s no chance of that,” one of the newly arrived men said.
“No, not as long as the White Head keeps both of the doctors under his thumb,” Marsch said.
There was something about the way he intoned the words, “White Head” Instantly I thought of the shadowy white skull I had glimpsed in my spree of eavesdropping in the laboratories.
Marsch added, “Have no fear about our plan, as far as the White Head is concerned, gentlemen. As I have assured you, he plays both sides of the fence. I have his complete approval.”
Through the darkness I had been hearing other voices. A party was approaching this earthen city from somewhere down the valley. Within a few minutes the footsteps were thudding softly through the underground passages and presently they came into Marsch’s headquarters. It was a party of pygmies—I recognized Padderman and Jallan whom I had once encountered on the fortress roof—and they brought with them Flora Hessel.
“I told you we’d succeed,” one of them gloated.
Marsch complimented them and dismissed them. Then he and his guests viewed the prize that stood before them: beautiful, black-haired, darkeyed Flora. Her face was tilted upward in a characteristically proud pose, and I could read her fearlessness in her firm lips.
Marsch stepped up and put his hands on her shoulders as if he possessed her.
“Well, well, so you’ve finally come back to the right camp. My little sweetheart is all dressed for a party, isn’t she?”
She was wearing a fragile pink and white dress that must have been a gift from someone at the fortress. She responded to Marsch’s approach in the manner of a prisoner rather than a sweetheart.
“Relax, relax,” Marsch said. “You’re among friends.”
Having introduced the other men of his party, he proceeded to go over his plans step by step. But his story was somewhat altered for Flora’s benefit. He said not a word about pressing the Mashas into slavery. Oh, no, nothing like that. He was going to take them to a new planet and allow them to start a new colony. It all sounded very beautiful.
And all that Flora needed to do was help get them in the mood to accept his magnanimous offer.
“The four space ships are all ready,” and he winked with pride over his cleverness. “At dawn—”
I was gathering fever over these cross-currents of deception, and was probably uttering serpent profanity when I was interrupted by a slight tap on my arm. I almost jumped off the mound.
“Move over,” came a tiny whisper in my ear. “I want to see, too.”
“Kipper!”
“In person. Pleased to meet you.”
“What are you doing here? They’ll brand you.”
“I had to keep an eye on our lady friend,” he whispered. “How’d I know you’d already be here?”
“Listen,” I said. “There’s a devilish plan afoot. Do you know about it? Get an earful!”
We both listened. Marsch was pouring it on thick, and I didn’t know but what Flora was eating it up.
“You’ll speak to them at the assembly,” he was saying, “so they won’t doubt our promises. The main thing you have to do is look honest—and how could you miss? Give them a pep talk on running their own kingdom. Tell them they’ll grow into strong men again. Strong men—that’s the angle. Let them think they’ll have a chance to jail in love with a beautiful woman like you.
Flora answered with the edged tone of sarcasm.
“Shall I promise them female companions, like you promised me on the trip? How is your supply of terriers, Mr. Marsch?”
“Ha-ha-ha-rrrhuh. Yes, er—just a little joke, gentlemen. Don’t mind Miss Hessel, gentlemen,” Marsch said hastily. “She’s always clowning.”
CHAPTER XIX
I wanted to hug Flora for what she had just said, and I might have if I hadn’t been a serpent.
Under the conditions, all I could hope for was to let her know somehow that she had friends up here on the mud roof. The simplest way to let her know was to put my nose to the ventilator and breathe deep.
“Ssssss!”
“What’s that?” said one of the men, looking up sharply. I knew he couldn’t see anything through the blackness above the ventilator. But Marsch went pale and moved back.
“Was it pygmies?” someone asked. “We’d better not be overheard.”
“It’s not pygmies,” said Flora, in a tone that comforted me. “It’s only a breeze from the river.”
> “We’d better get on with the assembly,” Marsch said abruptly.
We went down into the Masha world together. Kipper and I. I think I would have gotten lost if I had gone alone. The tunnels were endless. Most of them were not lighted. But the Mashas knew their way from an almost instinctive sense of direction, and Kipper, like the others, had been here for most of two centuries.
He straddled by neck and clung tight and whispered the directions in my ear. Part of the time we moved along at a gallop. Part of the time I couldn’t use my legs because the ceilings were so low, and then we squirmed along the earth in traditional serpent fashion.
“All foot tracks lead to the assembly,” Kipper would say whenever a lighted room showed us the tracks of those who had gone before.
“It won’t be an assembly if they see me,” I said. “It’ll be a stampede.”
But Kipper assured me that he’d get me into the underground chamber without creating any undue disturbance, and he made his promise good. We crept in by way of a shelf of natural rock about ten feet above the level of the Masha path, and there we huddled, within full view of the torchlights.
Several hundred little pygmies were thronged before us, looking across the cavernous chamber toward a cubical baked-mud platform. They were being swayed by Marsch’s eloquence.
Waving his arms and shouting like a politician who is about to save the country with promises, Marsch brought his speech to a ringing conclusion.
“When the sun sets tomorrow night, you Mashas shall again be a proud people. The battle will be over, and you will be in possession of this land that is rightfully yours.”
The hundreds of pygmies applauded with shouts.
“No longer will you be outcasts of space—fugitives from the earth and from Mars. You will be masters of your own destinies. And as for the scientists who have invaded this realm, they will be your servants, and with their own serums you shall make them slaves who will do your bidding!” When the applause quieted, Marsch helped Flora Hessel to the platform. She stood, looking over the multitude of torchlighted faces, and somehow I knew she wasn’t going to say what Marsch had wanted her to say.
