The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Frank Belknap Long

Steve saw me then. He was sitting up very straight, his hand on Azala’s tumbled, red-gold hair, and I heard him say: “Holy smoke.”

  I stared down at the jewel, blazing and shuddering and shivering in the desert air, and I shut my eyes tight, wishing for the first time in my life that it did not proclaim me Tulan Sharm, the Glorious One, Temporal Ruler of the Seven Cities before Whom the Stars Bowed.

  THE WORLD OF WULKINS

  Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1948.

  Molly Denham was scornful and made no attempt to hide her sentiments.

  “Antique shops!” she exclaimed. “What do children see in them?”

  “Incredible things!” Ralph Denham replied, winking at his son and giving his small daughter’s hand a squeeze. “The past through rose-colored glasses and—thingummies!”

  Molly Denham smiled mischievously. Her bamboo-colored hair whipped by the wind, her hat tilted at a rakish angle, she moved up close to her husband and shook a reproving finger at his reflection in the window.

  “Conspiring again and leaving me out of it,” she complained. “Just you three. Winking and whispering together. Ye canna do that, laddie.”

  “For the last time,” Denham said. “Will you put another nickel in Johnny’s sun glasses before the polarization clicks off?”

  “People who like gadgets should carry their own change,” Molly challenged. “Renting sun glasses for a boy of eight! If you want the nickel—you’ll have to catch me first.”

  Denham let go of his daughter’s hand and made a frantic grab for his wife. Molly leapt nimbly to one side. Denham missed his footing and went crashing into the shop window, his long arms outflung.

  Fortunately he didn’t go very far into the window. The shatterproof plastiglass sagged under his weight, and bounced him back to his feet on the long boardwalk with scant respect for his dignity.

  Denham turned slowly, a big man with keen gray eyes and gray-streaked hair—a man well past his first youth, but happy in his marriage, happy in his work.

  Denham liked to think of himself as an easy-going family man—an anchor of security to his children, a gay sweetheart to his wife. But sometimes it was a little difficult, especially when the woman he’d married became a radiant water sprite with the puckish impulses of a willful child.

  He suddenly realized that his daughter was plucking at his sleeve. “Daddy, look! It’s a rabbit! One of the olden kind—a little one. I bet you could buy him cheap, daddy. He’s all rusty.”

  “She means a robot!” Johnny Denham said.

  Denham avoided looking at his daughter. There was no need for him to look at her. He’d gotten over his surprise long ago. Betty Anne Denham was big for her age, saucer-eyed and insatiably curious—but what child of seven wasn’t?

  “Tell her you like stores like that too, Pop. G’wan, tell her! Tell her! She thinks it’s just me.”

  Molly Denham grimaced and spoke directly to her son. “Don’t take off your hat, Johnny. Your father’s had a sunstroke. There are dozens of stores like that on Maiden Row. But we came to the beach to get away from cobwebs and musty antiques.”

  “Aw, Pop knows what he’s doing,” Johnny said.

  Good lad, Denham thought. If he went away and never came back, his children would remember him and stand up for him. They’d—“You could buy it cheap, daddy,” Betty Anne insisted.

  Denham turned with a shrug and stared into the antique shop window at the musty relics which time’s relentless tides had washed up from a past that was best forgotten. To an imaginative man like Denham, a teacher of advanced semantics, the last years of the Twentieth Century loomed through the mists of time with all the fascination of a vast dust bin infested with black widow spiders.

  Nightmarish was the word for it. From behind the plastiglass there stared out at Denham a goggle-eyed horror which sent a chill coursing up his spine. Robot manufacturers had experimented with dozens of different models between 1985 and 2025, but rust-green Mr. Small was certainly an odd one!

  The robot was big-little and ugly, with a perfectly square head, bulging sea-green eyes and a globular body case. Big-little in that it conveyed a disturbing impression of hugeness despite its size.

  Just why that should be Denham couldn’t imagine. But he came to a sudden decision. He knew that if Betty Anne turned sulky he’d have to buy her candies and dolls and everything nice—every day for a week. Not only would the robot save him money, it would amuse his guests when his occasional weekend parties came a cropper over an eccentric professor’s collection of Duke Ellington hot jazz recordings, not to mention his more priceless Louis Armstrongs.

  With this thought in mind he took hold of his daughter’s hand again. “It won’t cost us anything to ask the price of that robot!” he whispered. “Come on, honeybunch!”

  The shopkeeper flashed one brief glance at Betty and shook his head. “You wouldn’t want it,” he said. “I put it in the window solely as an—eye-catcher. If I sold it to you, you’d come back and assassinate me. As you can see, it’s clogged with rust inside and out. There’s nothing inside its brain case but a lot of charred wires!”

  The shopkeeper rapped the robot’s ugly head sharply as he spoke, eliciting a hollow, jangling sound.

  “Don’t let him do that to you,” Molly whispered. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  The shopkeeper was a gaunt, thin-lipped man with hair so sparse that it enmeshed the shiny contours of his skull like a cobweb. Denham momentarily expected that the spider which had spun the web would pop into view, eliciting a scream from Betty Anne.

  He looked the shopkeeper straight in the eye. “Where did you get it?” he demanded.

  “Ah, that’s a story in itself. The man was a derelict—thin as a scarecrow. I felt sorry for him!”

  “I see,” Denham said, skeptically. “If you bought that little monstrosity from a seedy looking bum, you must have wanted it pretty badly!”

  “No, I didn’t,” the shopkeeper protested, and there was a ring of sincerity in his voice. “But I couldn’t help it—I felt sorry for the man! He—he told me he found it in the woods, covered with leaves, half buried in the earth!”

  “Well, anyway, my daughter wants it!” Denham was insistent. “How much?”

  The shopkeeper looked shocked. “But it isn’t a toy! A child wouldn’t—”

  “Sev—six dollars!” the shopkeeper stammered, his eyes on Molly’s accusing face.

  Out in the warm, bright sunlight again, walking with his arm linked with Molly’s, Denham was seized with misgivings. The robot dangled between his brats like a little, blue-green monkey, its segmented metal feet barely grazing the boardwalk.

  It was easy to see that the children were in a world of their own now. As they walked on ahead of their parents, supporting the little monstrosity by its elbows, they kept grinning and whispering together.

  Denham felt like an outsider, and a little out of humor with his wife. She had brought it on herself by accusing him of conspiring with his children.

  Children never conspired with adults except when they wanted something. When they were accused of doing so they wriggled out from under, repudiating the entire adult world with a vehemence which could sunder a man from his offspring until—they needed him again.

  It happened more quickly than Denham could have anticipated. Betty Anne shivered and came to an abrupt halt, as though she’d been hit by an idea that was causing her acute anguish.

  “Daddy, could we take Wulkins for a ride on the roller coaster? Could we, Daddy?”

  “Yeah, why not, Pop?” Johnny Denham chimed in, his tousled head jogging in the sunlight as only the head of an eight-year-old boy could jog when excitement swirled through it.

  Wulkins! So the secret whispering had borne fruit, in the deep dark of a wor
ld no adult could enter. Denham was sure there were names for everything under the sun in that world. But why Wulkins? Why not Scheherazade? Oh, well—Wulkins.

  Five minutes later Denham sat beside his wife in the back seat of a roller coaster, staring at the ugly head of the robot. Betty Anne and Johnny occupied the front seat, with Wulkins wedged securely between them on red plastic cushions that brought his entire brain case into view. Two round human heads flanking a square metal head for which Denham felt no affection.

  The vista which stretched around them was one of enchantment. Above a cluster of carnival-bright concessions and fine-spun aerial traceries loomed the immense, stationary bulk of the roller coaster, its ascending rails enveloped in shafts of electric-blue magnetic energy. Something close to pure magic had been instilled into the scene by the architects who had designed the amusement park and the individual concessions.

  But it was a magic which made Denham distinctly uneasy, as though some elusive, hard-to-pin-down aspect of danger had been added to the scheme without impairing its mechanical stability.

  “Here we go, Pop!” Johnny yelled.

  The car started off in a sinuous glide and picked up speed rapidly. Before Denham could get a firm grip on the sides of the car they were ascending through a dark tunnel at an almost perpendicular angle.

  “We’ll die a thousand deaths!” Molly whispered. “It gets progressively worse. They want to be orphans—just to see how it feels to cry their hearts out.”

  They were almost at the summit of the first loop, out in the sunlight again, when Betty Anne twisted about to stare back at her parents, the waist strap which held her to her seat giving her a feeling of superiority which she made no effect to conceal.

  “You’re not strapped in, Daddy!” she observed. “Aren’t you nervous?”

  “We’ll talk about it in the ambulance,” Denham gritted. “Why don’t you ask Wulkins if he feels nervous? He—Ullp! Here it comes!”

  The car seemed to hang for an instant motionless in the middle of the sky, a gleaming spiral of blackness falling away beneath it.

  Then—it started down.

  At first Denham felt nothing at all. Then something like a little breeze came into existence at the base of his spine and blew up through him.

  He experienced a sudden, onrushing giddiness. The breeze became a hurricane, and the dizziness twisted his brain around so that he seemed to be moving back up the gleaming rails in the wake of the plunging car.

  Suddenly—he realized that the front seat was slipping away from him. Not parting from the car, but unmistakably lengthening as it plunged downward with ever increasing velocity. It was as though—the car were stretching like an elastic band, carrying the children and the robot down the rails much faster than it was carrying him.

  It wasn’t an illusion spawned by the steepness of the drop. It wasn’t, it wasn’t—it couldn’t be! He was dizzy, but not that dizzy. He wasn’t deceived for one second. Despite his terror, despite the vertigo which plucked and tore at him, he could see that the children were leaving him.

  Their heads were getting smaller. The robot’s head too—dwindling as the car lengthened. The entire car was rocking furiously from side to side, its velocity threatening to carry it from the rails. But the lengthening was a thing apart.

  As Denham tightened his grip on the sides of the car something like a wrinkled film of water seemed to float between himself and his dwindling children. For an instant the sheet remained translucent, glimmering in the sunlight above a converging blur of rails.

  Then shapes loomed out of it—square-headed, metallic and hideous. The shapes resembled Wulkins but—were much larger. Enormous! Behind them he could see trees now, growing out of the water and something that looked like a bald-headed vulture sweeping low above the water.

  He tried to cry out, but the shapes wouldn’t let him. They were reaching out toward him with their segmented metal hands spread wide, and something about the hands constricted Denham’s throat muscles, so that he couldn’t utter a sound.

  * * * *

  The next instant the weird glimmering was gone. The car had reached the bottom of the spiral and was ascending again. And directly in front of Denham, so close he could have reached out and touched them, bobbed two small heads, dark against the clear, bright sky.

  The car had contracted and the children had come back again! All in the length of a heartbeat—though Denham’s heart had almost ceased to beat. It began to beat again as he stared, in great, tumultuous contractions that brought an ache to his throat.

  The same instant there was a flurry of movement in the seat ahead, and Johnny’s excited face popped into view.

  “Gee, Pop, that was terrific! What made the light?”

  “You—you saw the light?” Denham said, and choked.

  Betty Anne squirmed about in her seat. “It got bright,” she confirmed, breathlessly. “It got awful bright, Daddy. It got brighter faster when we went as fast as anything.”

  “Why didn’t we turn upside down, Pop?” Johnny exclaimed. “If I put a train on a track standing straight up, it would fall off backwards, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not—if you stretched it!” Denham muttered.

  It wasn’t what he’d meant to say. On a roller coaster the impetus acted as a brake, gluing the car to the rails. Friction. It wasn’t the steepness of the drop that had—“Daddy! Wulkin’s waking up!”

  Denham stiffened, a cold chill darting up his spine. The robot had turned its head and was staring at Johnny, its body was vibrating like a tuning fork!

  Molly screamed. The car had reached the crest of the spiral and was starting down again.

  The children went further this time and there was a frantic bobbing about that made Denham think of dead autumn leaves being carried by chill gusts into a city of dreadful night.

  But there was no city beneath him. Merely a shifting landscape wrapped in filmy light. He saw more trees, and something huge and hideous with gauzy wings he couldn’t quite make out.

  As the car started up again a change came upon Denham. His eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened in savage fury. Leaning forward, he wrapped his arms about the robot and jerked it straight back into the seat beside him, wrenching another scream from Molly.

  Call it desperation. Call it courage, or the fiercely protective instincts of a parent at bay. Whatever it was, Denham had been quick to sense that the robot was malign, something unnatural from a plane of existence alien to humanity which had reached out to enmesh his children—and was still reaching out.

  Very deliberately Denham drew the little horror across his knees and turned it over on its back. Its movements were chillingly spiderlike. Its bulbous eyes twitched and its arms tried to wrap themselves around Denham as he struggled with it.

  Denham felt the impact of cold, merciless metal, bruising his flesh, creeping upward toward his throat. But luckily the plates which protected the robot’s vitals had worked a little loose.

  Jabbing at the metal arms with his elbow, Denham wedged the fingers of his right hand beneath one of the plates, and pried it completely loose. Deep within him there squirmed a cold revulsion and a growing terror. But relentlessly he thrust his hand into a narrow opening in the robot’s back, and grasped a tangle of quivering wires, cold to the touch.

  Furiously Denham tugged at the wires. He was still tugging when the car reached the top of the loop and started down again. But the robot had ceased to quiver.

  Five minutes later Denham stood facing his daughter on a firm plastiglass platform, the robot lying in a crumpled heap at his feet.

  “Daddy, what did you do him?” Betty Anne shrieked. “He—he’s dead. You killed him! You did! You did! I heard him scream.”

  Molly grabbed Betty Anne by the shoulder, and shook her vigorously. “He didn’t make any noise�
��not a sound. Your father should have flung that horrible little monster out of the car. Now we’ll have to use an ax on him.”

  Denham stood it as long as he could. Then he stepped forward and gave his daughter a resounding whack on her little behind.

  “No recriminations, honeybunch,” he said. “Your mother’s right. I did what I thought was best. You’ll just have to take my word for it because—I don’t intend to discuss it!”

  “Not even when we get home, Daddy?” Betty Anne said, oddly mollified by her father’s forbearance. Not that he’d ever used a hairbrush but—there could always be a first time!

  “Not until—Hades freezes over!” Denham said, firmly. “Perhaps not even then. So you can wipe that wheedling smirk off your face. It won’t get you anywhere.”

  But Denham had spoken rashly, failing to take into consideration the tyranny which his daughter was capable of wielding. He discovered his mistake the following afternoon, when the children’s hour brought her into his book-walled study and straight to the arm of his chair with a bad case of sulks.

  Logs were crackling in the fireplace, Molly was out in the kitchen preparing dinner and late autumn sunlight was slanting in through the tall, antique windows at Denham’s back.

  Denham had made a deliberate effort to recapture for home consumption the serene, rose-petaled atmosphere of the middle Nineteenth century, which hadn’t been half as feverish as the Twentieth.

  Not only did he enjoy lecturing about the past, he liked to surround himself with objects from the past—a stuffed owl under glass, a china closet filled with rare porcelain bric-a-brac, a tasteful selection of Currier and Ives prints.

  Beautiful, serene, decorative objects and not ugly ones like—hold on, he’d best stop right there!

  It was Betty Anne who did the reminding. “You’re not really going to destroy Wulkins, are you, Daddy?”

  Denham was nettled. He sat up straight in his chair, flushing a little and glaring at his daughter.