The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Jattleworth growled an order toward the table and there was a general exodus. The elevator door clanged and they went down. I stayed behind.

  I went to the window. You couldn’t see much through the thick darkness down there in the canyons. A few dim lights showed the outlines of the concrete structures that rambled around the summit of the tower hill. Presently I saw gunfire streaking through the blackness. Then I made out a few light figures—long shadowy oblong forms—as they galloped around the hillsides and away into the pitch blackness of the canyons below.

  “Robbers on rikits!” I said to myself. I stood looking out at the jagged black land beneath the starry sky. A strange world, Mars. A visiting American like myself had little notion of the kind of life that filled these mysterious mountains. I longed for tomorrow’s daylight and a view of the wrecked ship. I wondered how far it would be to Marshington Spaceport and whether Bill Rambler would dare try to take me through on his tame rikit.

  The whole McCune-Romanoff-Menniker scandal started whirling in my mind every time I was left to myself for a moment. I hadn’t had time to think of much of a plan. How could I take a load of convincing evidence back to Washington and blow the lid off this deal?

  “The government is being played for a sucker,” I said under my breath, already thinking of my report to the Senate. “These murdering thieves are sitting back gloating, selling those impossible lands, and at the same time playing ruin on the government’s effort to establish a base.”

  I paused, fascinated by the colored lights of the control panel across the room. I sauntered across the concrete floor, gazing in awe. Here were the switches and levers that did the dirty work. The nerve center of the invisible hand that reached into the sky. There were other towers, I knew, that played their part. I had glimpsed them on my approach to this, the headquarters.

  “Do you want an ax?”

  It was Bill Rambler, walking in cautiously, guessing my thoughts.

  “I’ve had the same inspiration many times,” he said. “But I’ve held off, for fear I’d muff the job. This whole devilish nest has got to be cleaned out.”

  “Between you and me,” I said, “who brought the Blue Palace down?”

  Bill lifted an eyebrow as if secretly amused, and again I caught that impression that I already knew him. His familiar mannerisms—“Didn’t Jattleworth give you any convincing explanations?” he asked.

  “He said some rank amateur got overeager to demonstrate and pulled the switch without order.”

  “That’s a laugh,” said Bill. “Jat was the one who got overeager. He’d been drinking. He called an understudy in to take a lesson in downing the ships, and he began blowing to this understudy that it would take the fellow months to learn. Then the Blue Palace came in. The understudy warned him that it was a passenger ship, and Jat shut him up and threatened him and slapped him and said that he knew his own business and he’d not take any insubordination from an underling. Then he began pulling switches, and the Blue Palace came down.”

  I listened to Bill’s inside story. The whole camp knew that Jattleworth would choose someone besides himself to place the blame upon, and everyone was scared stiff. Things had eased a little with our false news that Menniker hadn’t been aboard. But they were still plenty worried about me.

  “As Senator McCune, you’re in a position to burn his pants off for the mistake,” Bill told me. We walked back to the window. Everything had quieted out there in the blackness. The men would soon be returning. “He thinks he’s getting by you easy.”

  “Let him think it,” I said. “Until I can be sure of a quick ride out of this den of dynamite, he’s got me, whether he knows it or not.”

  “We’ll keep our fingers crossed.” We. Bill and I had fallen into the most natural combine in this job. Without him I’d have been as helpless as those bumbling Martians who had just tried their hand at plundering firearms. Bill must have known from the start where I stood. This was surprising, too. Earth newspapers and news bulletins didn’t filter down to third-class workers here.

  Mischievously I put Bill to a test. The elevator was on its way up and there wasn’t much time, but I said, “How do you know I’m not in league with Menniker?”

  Bill grinned as he looked back. “Yeah? How do you know I’m not in league with them myself, leading you on like a lamb to the slaughter?”

  We both knew. Bill gave me a wave and hurried off. I felt confident, then. With him to protect me, I would get my dope, plenty of it, and go back to Washington and make headlines that would leap all the way across the solar system.

  But just then something happened that knocked our pretty set-up sky-high.

  The elevator door opened and it wasn’t the Jattleworth party returning. It was a messenger from the arched gateway, a third-class worker. He was looking for Jattleworth.

  “Menniker’s come. He’s down at the gate and he wants permission to enter. Will you come down and identify him, Senator McCune, so we can admit him?”

  I gulped hard. “Er—does he look like Menniker?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But he’s been in the crash, all right. What’s more, he’s got one arm in a sling. He said some one took a shot at him on board—”

  “Ugh. Did you tell him I was here?”

  “Yes. And he said I was crazy. He said you’d been killed back in Washington. And I told him he was nuts, that you were here, and that you had said he wasn’t on board. That’s why I think he’s a fake.”

  “He is a fake!” I snapped my fingers to punctuate my bluff. “Tell him Senator McCune refuses to see any imposters.”

  The bewildered messenger rang for the elevator. He turned back to give me a doubtful look. I snapped my fingers again and he drew back. But he wasn’t satisfied.

  “It’s Jattleworth he wanted to see,” he said. “I’ll find Jattleworth.”

  The elevator door swung open and Jattleworth and his aides stepped out. They had caught the messenger’s words.

  “Who wants to see me?” Jattleworth bellowed, and he was in a savage mood.

  “Menniker—Menniker and six guards.”

  “Menniker! I thought he—”

  “Menniker,” the messenger repeated. “He’s waiting down at the gate, and I think he’s mad.”

  “Ugh.” Jattleworth turned pale.

  “Help me, boys. We’ve got to stall for time.”

  CHAPTER XV

  Cat and Mouse

  Swishing footsteps sounded from the stairs. We whirled about to face Menniker! He and six of his guards from the Blue Palace had crashed in and were on us before I had time to catch my breath.

  I was caught. I started to edge back of someone. In my clothing of a first-class worker I might not be noticed immediately, but I was caught—almost.

  “Well, Jattleworth!” Menniker growled, ignoring the rest of us. It wasn’t what you’d call a cordial greeting. Menniker had an arm in a sling. He looked rugged in his explosion-blotched clothing. His tie and half of his collar were gone. He had tied his suit coat around his shoulders by the sleeves, and it swung like a cape as he swaggered toward us. An atomic pistol hung through his belt and his good hand rested on it.

  The bumbling messenger crossed in front of Jattleworth and began making excuses, and that gave Jattleworth a moment to collect himself. The black-mustached boss shot a speculative eye at me, and I knew he was getting ready to pass the buck. “Well, Jattleworth!” Menniker repeated. You could tell it in his voice. He was all set to explode. He and his guards.

  Jattleworth pointed at me.

  “You, Senator McCune. You lied to me. You said Menniker wasn’t with you on the Blue Palace.”

  “That’s not Senator McCune!” Menniker snapped.

  “Then what’s the plot? What have you two made up?” For an instant the black mustached boss jumped at impossible conclusions.

  “Senator McCune’s dead!” Menniker was moving into the circle slowly now, and there was no doubt that he was the master of the situation.
Jattleworth’s black eyebrows jumped as Menniker turned his cruel eyes on me. “Say, who do you think you are? Halt, you! Well, I’ll be damned. Senator Pollard!”

  I stood petrified, taking Menniker’s cold glare. I said nothing.

  “He said he was Senator McCune.” This from Jattleworth. His aides were gaping at me. “He said—”

  “Shut up. He’s no other than my would-be assassin.” Menniker gave me an evil “Ha!” as he gestured toward his wounded arm. I was on the opposite side of the circle from him, ten yards out of reach, “Well, this is a pretty dish. The last time I saw you, Pollard, you were slicing at me with an atom blaze. That’s when the ship went down. And we all went down with it. And I went down vowing that if I ever saw you alive again, damn me if I wouldn’t rip you from ear to toenail! Well, here’s my chance. Turn about is fair play, you know, Senator Pollard. Dear Senator Pollard. This is going to be a pleasure. In the presence of these witnesses, I hereby perform one of the noblest acts of my life.”

  Mentally I had been moving backwards. But I stood, and he moved closer. He brought his gun up slowly. The cold sweat had popped out all over me.

  “Hold it, Menniker,” I blurted. “You’d give a lot to know what I know about this gang—” It was a long chance. “—what they’re plotting on you—”

  “I’ll find out without your help,” Menniker snarled. Nevertheless he made a deliberate and accusing turn toward Jattleworth, and that moment was what saved my life. That plus Bill Rambler, who couldn’t have been far off.

  Off went the lights!

  I ran. I kicked the elevator door on the way past. I don’t know whether it fooled anyone or not. All I know was that it gave a metallic clang, and I was already making tracks in another direction. The rush of feet through the darkness was confusing enough to help. The gun that had aimed at my heart a moment before wouldn’t dare flash through this chaos.

  I hit the railing of the stairway and swung over. For minutes past I had been calculating—

  “Get him, there, damn you!” I heard Menniker blast, and he followed his order with an oath that kept me company as I went down. Someone had flashed a beam of light toward the head of the stairs where I had just been. That helped. And there was light below.

  I wasn’t falling, exactly. My arms were doing the ape-like act of catching one railing after another as I dropped, down and down. I remembered that the newspapers had once published a picture of me doing my exercises in my basement through a series of horizontal bars. The photographers should have seen me now.

  The fire was flashing somewhere overhead. It never caught me. From the wild scramble that echoed down to me, they must have got one of Jattleworth’s officers by mistake.

  I was three levels below my starting point when the lights in the stair well came on.

  “This way!” It was Bill. He had somehow got there ahead of me.

  We took a side stairs for the final flight, then ducked out a side door. The air of the outdoors struck my face. I smeared the sweat out of my eyes. Things were pretty black, and I was afraid it wasn’t all from the night. My head and shoulders started swinging down toward the ground.

  “Wait, Bill. I’m fagged!”

  “Whee-pee! Whee-pee, Tan-Jack! Whee-pee!”

  A rikit was there in the blackness. Bill had thought of everything. The big shadowy Martian tiger-horse was prancing, standing by, waiting for orders, and the whee-pee was all he needed.

  The rikit leaped into a gallop on first bound. I jumped for him and missed. Why didn’t he draw me? He was off like a faintly visible comet darting through a black sky.

  I fell back helplessly. There went my chance.

  As the rikit raced through a path of light, past the front entrance of the tower headquarters, I saw that there was some sort of passenger on its back. It looked like a first-class worker hanging on for dear life.

  It couldn’t have been Bill, for he was dressed as a third-class worker. No, he was still here beside me, crouching down in the blackness at the base of the building.

  Off the beast went, with his mysterious passenger clinging tight, around the curved trail. His galloping feet beat a barely audible tattoo, like a muffled drum. Just as he rounded the sharp curve to cut down into the canyon, the spotlights from the fourth floor of the tower swept over him. He and his rider showed up perfectly in that brief moment. The guns blazed at him too late. He was away.

  “Oh, I get it,” I whispered to Bill. “There I go.”

  “And they’ll be right after you,” said Bill. “Sit tight . . . Here, get back in the bushes. There’s a little window back here. Wait. Wait till the chase starts.”

  It was a perfect ruse. In a minute or two the pursuers were hot on the trail, racing out on the road in their little jeep-like cars with spotlights sweeping the mountainsides around them. The fourth-floor searchlights kept up their agitated flashing, too. Menniker wanted me, and he meant to have me.

  I could imagine what he was saying to Jattleworth, and it wasn’t pleasant. The reputation of Jattleworth and his whole tower outfit was at stake. Jattleworth would have to make good if he didn’t want his reputation for efficiency to go awfully damned flat. And one way to prove his efficiency was to overtake me and bring me back. The way the guns were flashing down through the canyon, I could safely assume that they weren’t particular about bringing me back alive. Anything to please Menniker.

  “It was a good trick, Bill,” I breathed, still smearing the perspiration from my neck. “But I’m still here, and so are you. And we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “If I could have been sure that Tan-Jack would get away, we’d have gone with him,” Bill said. “Two passengers would have slowed him up quite a little—still, we might have made it. I wonder . . . I’ve never put Tan-Jack to a test like this before. I couldn’t be sure.”

  “What’ll become of him?”

  “The jeeps won’t touch him. By this time he’s found a hiding place off the trail. He finds dozens of hiding places on any mountainside. If they come close enough to discover him, he’ll draw them.”

  “That fellow that rode off was just a—”

  “A dummy. I fixed it while you were having dinner. In case of emergency.”

  I breathed more easily.

  “By daylight,” Bill said, “they’ll send their helicopters out to look for Tan-Jack. Then he won’t have so many advantages because they won’t have to confine their search to the trails. I don’t know how he’ll fare then. I’d hate to lose him.”

  It was well after midnight, Mars time, when the searchers began to straggle home empty handed. There must have been some doubt among them as to whether their quarry was the genuine article. We heard echoes of a discussion from the front entrance, and it warned us that there was about to be a more thorough search made around the premises. If I had escaped, it seemed likely that I had had some good cooperation from the inside.

  Bill and I crawled through the small basement window and made our way over the heaps of fuel barrels in the dimly lighted room.

  “We’ll be safer,” he said, “if we can make it across to the storage rooms. They’ve got several warehouses full of the undamaged cargo they’ve collected, for which the United States government has paid the bill. You could hide out, and I could bring you anything you’d need. Unless they decided to make a room by room search you should be safe for a time.”

  “They’ll make a thorough search as soon as they overtake Tan-Jack and find I’m a dummy,” I declared. “Jattleworth’s job is at stake. He’s already got too much to answer for. If I slip through them, Menniker will clean house.”

  We crawled over barrels until we reached the aisle. Bill took off his soiled brown cloth hat, rolled it into a wad, and pocketed it. He smeared dust over his face and roughed up his hair. The two of us were thick with dirt by now, and I knew it wouldn’t be too easy for anyone to recognize whether we were third-class workers, or first-class, much less to identify us at a glance.

  “You’re
in this pretty deep, Bill,” I said. “Jattleworth will have missed you by this time.”

  “Yeah. He’s toppled, all right. By now he’s guessed I’m your key man.”

  He peeked out into the aisle cautiously. There might be guards waiting at any doorway. Footsteps were echoing toward us from the left. We couldn’t afford to get caught here. We slipped to the floor and sprinted down the corridor, about as quiet as a pair of kangaroos, and ducked into the next accommodating shadows.

  That was the beginning of the game. Cat and mouse. Two mice against a whole towerful of cats. It was nerve-wracking. Back and forth. From one room to another. Through the high-stacked cases of goods in the warehouse rooms. Under tables, behind doors, into boxes, up into the rafters, behind water pipes.

  The morning shifts were coming on, and we were dodging workers in a regular beehive. And all the time there were those guards from the Blue Palace—Menniker’s prize guards—beating a trail back and forth through the basement rooms and storage buildings, inquiring whether they had seen any trace of us. The Menniker guards were out to show the regular tower staff that culprits weren’t going to slip through their fingers. A simple ruse with a rikit wasn’t going to sidetrack them. There was at least one guilty party on these premises. And maybe there was senator, too.

  Approaching daylight showed through the basement windows while we were still dodging.

  We heard one party of searchers speak of Bill by name. There had been a general roll call, and Bill Rambler hadn’t been present.

  “It won’t be long,” Bill whispered. “Our luck can’t last.”

  By the light of dawn, filtering through the dusty narrow basement window, I saw the white light of desperation in Bill’s eye. It was time to take long chances. The two of us would probably never get out of here alive.

  “You stay here,” Bill said. “I know where I can pick up enough explosives to do some good.”

  I glanced toward the stairway that led to the sub-basement. I remembered this part of the establishment. We were only fifty yards from the roots of the invisible hand that reached into the sky—the millions and millions of windings of wire—the gigantic electromagnets.