Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Of the peculiar coralline tint of the Wenuses' complexion, I think I have already spoken. That it was developed by their indulgence in the Red Weed has been, I think, satisfactorily proved by the researches of Dr. Moreau, who also shows that the visual range of their eyes was much the same as ours, except that blue and yellow were alike to them. Moreau established this by a very pretty experiment with a Yellow Book and a Blue Book, each of which elicited exactly the same remark, a curious hooting sound, strangely resembling the ut de poitrine of one of Professor Garner's gorillas.

  After concluding their repast, the Wenuses, still unaware of my patient scrutiny, extracted, with the aid of their glittering tintackles, a large packet of Red Weed from a quasi-marsupial pouch in the roof of the Crinoline, and in an incredibly short space of time had rolled its carmine tendrils into slim cylinders, and inserted them within their lips. The external ends suddenly ignited as though by spontaneous combustion; but in reality that result was effected by the simple process of deflecting the optic ray. Clouds of roseate vapour, ascending to the dome of the canopy, partially obscured the sumptuous contours of these celestial invaders; while a soft crooning sound, indicative of utter contentment, or as Professor Nestlé of the Milky Ray has more prosaically explained it, due to expiration of air preparatory to the suctional operation involved in the use of the Red Weed, added an indescribable glamour to the enchantment of the scene.

  Humiliating as it may seem to the scientific reader, I found it impossible to maintain a Platonic attitude any longer; and applying my mouth to the embouchure of the pipette, warbled faintly in an exquisite falsetto:

  "Ulat tanalareezul Savourneen Dheelish tradioun marexil Vi-Koko for the hair. I want yer, ma honey."

  The effect was nothing short of magical. The rhythmic exhalations ceased instanteously, and the tallest and most fluorescent of the Wenuses, laying aside her Red Weed, replied in a low voice thrilling with kinetic emotion:

  "Phreata mou sas agapo!"

  The sentiment of these remarks was unmistakable, though to my shame I confess I was unable to fathom their meaning, and I was on the point of opening the scullery door and rushing out to declare myself, when I heard a loud banging from the front of the house.

  I stumbled up the kitchen stairs, hampered considerably by my wife's skirt; and, by the time I had reached the hall, recognised the raucous accents of Professor Tibbles, the Classical Examiner, shouting in excited tones:

  "Let me in, let me in!"

  I opened the door as far as it would go without unfastening the chain, and the Professor at once thrust in his head, remaining jammed in the aperture.

  "Let me in!" he shouted. "I'm the only man in London besides yourself that hasn't been pulped by the Mash-Glance."

  He then began to jabber lines from the classics, and examples from the Latin grammar.

  A sudden thought occurred to me. Perhaps he might translate the observation of the Wenus. Should I use him as an interpreter? But a moment's reflection served to convince me of the danger of such a plan. The Professor, already exacerbated by the study of the humanities, was in a state of acute erethism. I thought of the curate, and, maddened by the recollection of all I had suffered, drew the bread-knife from my waist-belt, and shouting, "Go to join your dead languages!" stabbed him up to the maker's name in the semi-lunar ganglion. His head drooped, and he expired.

  I stood petrified, staring at his glazing eyes; then, turning to make for the scullery, was confronted by the catastrophic apparition of the tallest Wenus gazing at me with reproachful eyes and extended tentacles. Disgust at my cruel act and horror at my extraordinary habiliments were written all too plainly in her seraphic lineaments. At least, so I thought. But it turned out to be otherwise; for the Wenus produced from behind her superlatively radiant form a lump of slate which she had extracted from the coal-box.

  "Decepti estis, O Puteoli!" she said.

  "I beg your pardon," I replied; "but I fail to grasp your meaning."

  "She means," said the Examiner, raising himself for another last effort, "that it is time you changed your coal merchant," and so saying he died again.

  I was thunderstruck: the Wenuses understood coals!

  And then I ran; I could stand it no longer. The game was up, the cosmic game for which I had laboured so long and strenuously, and with one despairing yell of "Ulla! Ulla!" I unfastened the chain, and, leaping over the limp and prostrate form of the unhappy Tibbles, fled darkling down the deserted street.

  II.

  THE MAN AT UXBRIDGE ROAD.

  At the corner a happy thought struck me: the landlord of the "Dog and Measles" kept a motor car. I found him in his bar and killed him. Then I broke open the stable and let loose the motor car. It was very restive, and I had to pat it. "Goo' Tea Rose," I said soothingly, "goo' Rockefeller, then." It became quiet, and I struck a match and started the paraffinalia, and in a moment we were under weigh.

  I am not an expert motist, although at school I was a fairly good hoop-driver, and the pedestrians I met and overtook had a bad time. One man said, as he bound up a punctured thigh, that the Heat Ray of the Martians was nothing compared with me. I was moting towards Leatherhead, where my cousin lived, when the streak of light caused by the Third Crinoline curdled the paraffin tank. Vain was it to throw water on the troubled oil; the mischief was done. Meanwhile a storm broke. The lightning flashed, the rain beat against my face, the night was exceptionally dark, and to add to my difficulties the motor took the wick between its teeth and fairly bolted.

  No one who has never seen an automobile during a spasm of motor ataxy can have any idea of what I suffered. I held the middle of the way for a few yards, but just opposite Uxbridge Road Station I turned the wheel hard a-port, and the motor car overturned. Two men sprang from nowhere, as men will, and sat on its occiput, while I crawled into Uxbridge Road Station and painfully descended the stairs.

  I found the platform empty save for a colony of sturdy little newsboys, whose stalwart determination to live filled me with admiration, which I was enjoying until a curious sibillation beneath the bookstall stirred me with panic.

  Suddenly, from under a bundle of British Weeklies, there emerged a head, and gradually a man crawled out. It was the Artilleryman.

  "I'm burning hot," he said; "it's a touch of--what is it?--erethism."

  His voice was hoarse, and his Remarks, like the Man of Kent's, were Rambling.

  "Where do you come from?" he said.

  "I come from Woking," I replied, "and my nature is Wobbly. I love my love with a W because she is Woluptuous. I took her to the sign of the Wombat and read her The War of the Worlds, and treated her to Winkles, Winolia and Wimbos. Her name is Wenus, and she comes from the Milky Way."

  He looked at me doubtfully, then shot out a pointed tongue.

  "It is you," he said, "the man from Woking. The Johnny what writes for Nature. By the way," he interjected, "don't you think some of your stuff is too--what is it?--esoteric? The man," he continued, "as killed the curate in the last book. By the way, it was you as killed the curate?"

  "Artilleryman," I replied, "I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little meat-chopper. And you, I presume, are the Artilleryman who attended my lectures on the Eroticism of the Elasmobranch?"

  "That's me," he said; "but Lord, how you've changed. Only a fortnight ago, and now you're stone-bald!"

  I stared, marvelling at his gift of perception.

  "What have you been living on?" I asked.

  "Oh," he said, "immature potatoes and Burgundy" (I give the catalogue so precisely because it has nothing to do with the story), "uncooked steak and limp lettuces, precocious carrots and Bartlett pears, and thirteen varieties of fluid beef, which I cannot name except at the usual advertisement rates."

  "But can you sleep after it?" said I.

  "Blimy! yes," he replied; "I'm fairly--what is it?--eupeptic."

  "It's all over with mankind," I muttered.

  "It is all over," he replied. "The Wenuses 'a
ve only lost one Crinoline, just one, and they keep on coming; they're falling somewhere every night. Nothing's to be done. We're beat!"

  I made no answer. I sat staring, pulverised by the colossal intellectuality of this untutored private. He had attended only three of my lectures, and had never taken any notes.

  "This isn't a war," he resumed; "it never was a war. These 'ere Wenuses they wants to be Mas, that's the long and the short of it. Only----"

  "Yes?" I said, more than ever impressed by the man's pyramidal intuition.

  "They can't stand the climate. They're too--what is it?--exotic."

  We sat staring at each other.

  "And what will they do?" I humbly asked, grovelling unscientifically at his feet.

  "That's what I've been thinking," said the gunner. "I ain't an ornamental soldier, but I've a good deal of cosmic kinetic optimism, and it's the cosmic kinetic optimist what comes through. Now these Wenuses don't want to wipe us all out. It's the women they want to exterminate. They want to collar the men, and you'll see that after a bit they'll begin catching us, picking the best, and feeding us up in cages and men-coops."

  "Good heavens!" I exclaimed; "but you are a man of genius indeed," and I flung my arms around his neck.

  "Steady on!" he said; "don't be so--what is it?--ebullient."

  "And what then?" I asked, when my emotion had somewhat subsided.

  "Then," said he, "the others must be wary. You and I are mean little cusses: we shall get off. They won't want us. And what do we do? Take to the drains!" He looked at me triumphantly.

  Quailing before his glory of intellect, I fainted.

  "Are you sure?" I managed to gasp, on recovering consciousness.

  "Yes," he said, "sewer. The drains are the places for you and me. Then we shall play cricket--a narrow drain makes a wonderful pitch--and read the good books--not poetry swipes, and stuff like that, but good books. That's where men like you come in. Your books are the sort: The Time Machine, and Round the World in Eighty Days, The Wonderful Wisit, and From the Earth to the Moon, and----"

  "Stop!" I cried, nettled at his stupidity. "You are confusing another author and myself."

  "Was I?" he said, "that's rum, but I always mix you up with the man you admire so much--Jools Werne. And," he added with a sly look, "you do admire him, don't you?"

  In a flash I saw the man plain. He was a critic. I knew my duty at once: I must kill him. I did not want to kill him, because I had already killed enough--the curate in the last book, and the Examiner and the landlord of the "Dog and Measles" in this,--but an author alone with a critic in deserted London! What else could I do?

  He seemed to divine my thought.

  "There's some immature champagne in the cellar," he said.

  "No," I replied, thinking aloud; "too slow, too slow."

  He endeavoured to pacify me.

  "Let me teach you a game," he said.

  He taught me one--he taught me several. We began with "Spadille," we ended with "Halma" and "Snap," for parliament points. That is to say, instead of counters we used M.Ps. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true. Strange mind of man! that, with our species being mashed all around, we could sit following the chance of this painted pasteboard.

  Afterwards we tried "Tiddleywinks" and "Squails," and I beat him so persistently that both sides of the House were mine and my geniality entirely returned. He might have been living to this hour had he not mentioned something about the brutality of The Island of Dr. Moreau. That settled it. I had heard that absurd charge once too often, and raising my Blaisdell binaural stethoscope I leaped upon him. With one last touch of humanity, I turned the orbicular ivory plate towards him and struck him to the earth.

  At that moment fell the Fourth Crinoline.

  III.

  THE TEA-TRAY IN WESTBOURNE GROVE.

  My wife's plan of campaign was simple but masterly. She would enlist an army of enormous bulk, march on the Wenuses in Westbourne Grove, and wipe them from the face of the earth.

  Such was my wife's project. My wife's first step was to obtain, as the nucleus of attack, those women to whom the total loss of men would be most disastrous. They flocked to my wife's banner, which was raised in Regent's Park, in front of the pavilion where tea is provided by a maternal County Council.

  My mother, who joined the forces and therefore witnessed the muster, tells me it was a most impressive sight. My wife, in a nickel-plated Russian blouse, trimmed with celluloid pom-pons, aluminium pantaloons, and a pair of Norwegian Skis, looked magnificent.

  An old Guard, primed with recent articles from the Queen by Mrs. Lynn Linton, marched in a place of honour; and a small squadron of confirmed misogynists, recruited from the Athenaeum, the Travellers' and the Senior United Service Clubs, who professed themselves to be completely Mash-proof, were in charge of the ambulance. The members of the Ladies' Kennel Club, attended by a choice selection of carefully-trained Chows, Schipperkes, Whippets and Griffons, garrisoned various outposts.

  The Pioneers joined my wife's ranks with some hesitation. The prospects of a world depleted of men did not seem (says my mother) to fill them with that consternation which was evident in my wife and her more zealous lieutenants. But after a heated discussion at the Club-house, which was marked by several resignations, it was decided to join in the attack. A regiment of Pioneers therefore, marching to the battle-chant of Walt Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers!" brought up (says my mother) the rear.

  The march of my wife's troops was a most impressive sight. Leaving Regent's Park by the Clarence Gate, they passed down Upper Baker Street, along Marylebone Road into Edgware Road. Here the troops divided. One detachment hastened to Queen's Road, by way of Praed Street, Craven Road, Craven Hill, Leinster Terrace and the Bayswater Road, with the purpose of approaching Whiteley's from the South; the other half marched direct to Westbourne Grove, along Paddington Green Road to Bishop's Road.

  Thus, according to my wife's plan, the Wenuses would be between the two wings of the army and escape would be impossible.

  Everything was done as my wife had planned. The two detachments reached their destination almost simultaneously. My wife, with the northern wing, was encamped in Bishop's Road, Westbourne Grove and Pickering Place. My mother, with the southern wing (my wife shrewdly kept the command in the family), filled Queen's Road from Whiteley's to Moscow Road. My mother, who has exquisite taste in armour, had donned a superb Cinque-Cento cuirass, a short Zouave jacket embroidered with sequins, accordion-pleated bloomers, luminous leggings, brown Botticelli boots and one tiger-skin spat.

  Between the two hosts was the empty road before the Universal Provider's Emporium. The Wenuses were within the building. By the time my wife's warriors were settled and had completed the renovation of their toilets it was high noon.

  My wife had never imagined that any delay would occur: she had expected to engage with the enemy at once and have done with it, and consequently brought no provisions and no protection from the sun, which poured down a great bulk of pitiless beams.

  The absence of Wenuses and of any sound betokening their activity was disconcerting. However, my wife thought it best to lay siege to Whiteley's rather than to enter the establishment.

  The army therefore waited.

  The heat became intense. My wife and her soldiers began to feel the necessity for refreshment. My wife is accustomed to regular meals. The sun grew in strength as the time went on, and my wife gave the order to sit at ease, which was signalled to my mother. My mother tells me that she was never so pleased in her life.

  One o'clock struck; two o'clock; three o'clock; and still no Wenuses. Faint sounds were now audible from the crockery department, and then a hissing, which passed by degrees into a humming, a long, loud droning noise. It resembled as nearly as anything the boiling of an urn at a tea-meeting, and awoke in the breasts of my wife and her army an intense and unconquerable longing for tea, which was accentuated as four o'clock was reached. Still
no Wenuses. Another hour dragged wearily on, and the craving for tea had become positively excruciating when five o'clock rang out.

  At that moment, the glass doors of the crockery department were flung open, and out poured a procession of Wenuses smiling, said my mother, with the utmost friendliness, dressed as A.B.C. girls, and bearing trays studded with cups and saucers.

  With the most seductive and ingratiating charm, a cup was handed to my wife. What to do she did not for the moment know. "Could such a gift be guileless?" she asked herself. "No." And yet the Wenuses looked friendly. Finally her martial spirit prevailed and my wife repulsed the cup, adjuring the rank and file to do the same. But in vain. Every member of my wife's wing of that fainting army greedily grasped a cup. Alas! what could they know of the deadly Tea-Tray of the Wenuses? Nothing, absolutely nothing, such is the disgraceful neglect of science in our schools and colleges. And so they drank and were consumed.

  Meanwhile my mother, at the head of the south wing of the army, which had been entirely overlooked by the Wenuses, stood watching the destruction of my wife's host--a figure petrified with alarm and astonishment. One by one she watched her sisters in arms succumb to the awful Tea-Tray.

  Then it was that this intrepid woman rose to her greatest height.

  "Come!" she cried to her Amazons. "Come! They have no more tea left. Now is the moment ripe."

  With these spirited words, my mother and her troops proceeded to charge down Queen's Road upon the unsuspecting Wenuses.

  But they had reckoned without the enemy.

  The tumult of the advancing host caught the ear of the Wonderful Wisitors, and in an instant they had extracted glittering cases of their crimson cigarettes from their pockets, and lighting them in the strange fashion I have described elsewhere, they proceeded to puff the smoke luxuriously into the faces of my mother and her comrades.