by Lin Carter
The girl kissed him again, grinning blissfully.
“Speakin’ of ogres, chief,” hailed Ace Harrigan, coming up to join the group gathered around the recumbent figure of the young geologist under the trees, “guess what started the fire?”
“The appropriately named ‘fire-devil,’ I gather from your tone,” commented Zarkon with a slight smile.
The handsome aviator nodded vigorously. “Right as rain, chief! Señor Valdez and me, we went under the house to scout around. Found where the thing broke in, out in back, by ripping away part of the floor.”
“You sure it was the ogre, not just some human firebug?” inquired Menlo Parker suspiciously.
Ace Harrigan nodded. “No doubt about it,” the aviator said positively. “Found one of the thing’s footprints in the dirt on top of the rocks, where it braced itself t’ climb in through the hole it had made in the floor. Footprint like an elephant or a rhino or something, no toe-marks or claw-scratches or anything, just a big thick pad-like print. It was the monster, all right! The touch of its red-hot hands or body musta set fire to the stuff in the storeroom —”
“Why, thet murderin’ critter!” wheezed Braxton T. Crawley, puffing with indignation. “Dang-fool thing, it tried to burn us in our beds!”
Zarkon looked grim. His lips parted to give voice to some remark, but, as things turned out, his words never got spoken. For suddenly Nick Naldini, stung by something the fat industrialist had just said, jumped guiltily and cried out.
“ ‘Burn us in our beds’ ” he croaked in alarm. “Cripes, that reminds me! Holy Houdini, chief — Scorchy just ran back inside there to get Johnny Jones out! We figgered as how he’d still be knocked out from the sedative you gave ‘im! And Scorchy ain’t come out yet!”
Instinctively, all eyes turned to the burning building. By now it was a raging inferno. Flames roared from every window; oily black smoke gushed from the interstices between the boards of the walls and leaked thinly through the wet thatched roof. The interior of the doomed building was one solid mass of seething, white-hot flame, like the inside of a furnace. Zarkon froze motionless for a split second, and across his face there came an expression of horror and dread such as none of them had ever before seen distort his features.
Seldom did the Man from Tomorrow register emotion. Most of the time he maintained an expressionless mask of serenity. But emotion was there now, rawly visible in his horror-struck eyes.
Only one thing could stir fear or horror within Zarkon. And that was the thought of serious harm or the death of one of the five men who fought by his side in his great crusade against evil. The five men who had leagued with him in the cause of Omega were the only human beings close to him in this age, his only friends. His love for his comrades was evident now in the horror that rose within him at the thought of one of them alone in that raging holocaust.
Then, in the next instant, Zarkon was on his feet and running for the burning building.
And at his side was Nick Naldini. The expression of horror had vanished from the features of the Lord of the Unknown by this time, for he had regained his self-control.
But fear was written large in the long horse-face of the vaudevillian. Although he would rather have died than have let Scorchy realize the depth of his feelings, the lanky magician was horrified at the thought of Scorchy’s danger. Ostensibly the bitterest of feuding foes, the two men were like brothers, although each would have perished from shame rather than let the other know how he felt.
“How’s about one a you birds helpin’ me down from up here,” came a familiar voice from above their heads.
Nick Naldini stopped short, as if he had just run into an invisible wall. Craning his neck, the stage magician stared up at the smoking thatched roof of the burning building. There, seated gingerly on the edge, was the soot-black figure of Scorchy Muldoon.
“Scorchy, are you all right?”‘ inquired Prince Zarkon.
“All right?” coughed the little boxer indignantly. “Sure ‘n Oi’ve inhaled enough smoke t’ make me swear off cigarettes fer life, Oi have! Dunno where Johnny Jones is, chief, but he sure ain’t in his room, at all, at all. Ouch, this blamed roof is gettin’ so hot it’s blisterin’ me backside! If any o’ you goggle-eyed goons c’d just leave off starin’ at a feller fer long enough t’ git ‘im down from here, Oi’d be that obliged, Oi would!”
It was dawn before they could make any serious estimate of the damage. Surprisingly enough, it turned out to be superficial, after all. While the entire rear of the trading post had been completely gutted, and the storeroom, pantry, and kitchen were totally destroyed by the fire, the remainder of the rooms and the building itself still stood and were relatively unharmed.
The only way to account for this was the simple fact-that the structure and flooring were made of hard island woods, like teak logs, and the walls dividing the building into rooms were made mostly of hollow bamboo tubes. Few woods are harder than teak, and bamboo, because of its slick, glossy outer sheath, is remarkably difficult to set afire. Once the conflagration had been drowned, and the smoke aired out, the rest of the building was in pretty fair shape, although black and foul with soot and dirty water, and charred in many places.
At the last minute, what saved the building from being completely gutted was the unexpected arrival of outside help. The native firefighters with their primitive bucket-brigade had been instrumental in halting the spread of the flames, but what really turned the trick was the landing of the sailors from the crew of Fooey Mulligan’s yacht, the Phoenicia, which was anchored offshore near the rocketplane in which the Omega men had come to the island.
The crew of the yacht had been asleep, except for the duty officer and the deck-watch. It had taken them some time to notice the flames, for at first the rising plumes of smoke had been mistaken for vapor coming from the volcano itself. Once Phoenicia Mulligan’s sailors had realized their natural mistake, however, the sailors had come swiftly to the aid of the villagers, with sophisticated firefighting equipment of the sort that smothers flames beneath a thick, sudsy layer of chemical foam.
When the full damage to the trading-post had been estimated, which was not until morning when they could explore the char-blackened interior by light of day, the destruction caused by the fire proved trivial enough, and less than they might have imagined.
Señor Valdez even managed to be quite cheerful about it. His friends among the workmen of the village could easily enough repair the damage, he said, and as for the loss of his surplus stock, well, his supplies had been rather low at the time and could quickly be replenished when the next boat came from the main island, where he placed his orders.
“It is indeed fortunate that I have done well in my business over the years,” said the gentlemanly old hidalgo, “and have managed to place many pesos on deposit in the vaults of the First National Bank of Mantilla. One must, somehow, remain philosophical in the face of adversity and of calamities such as this one! Merchandise can be replaced; but I give my thanks that in the fire naught was destroyed but goods. Human lives cannot be replaced,” he said, crossing himself fervently. “I would be irreparably injured had any of my distinguished guests been harmed by the conflagration while visiting under my roof!”
Scorchy thought that the old man’s sentiments were eminently admirable. He could not understand why Nick Naldini scowled so satanically when the silver-haired gentleman expressed them in his eloquent, Old-World manner.
“What’s eatin’ you, Long, Lean, and Ugly?” he demanded in a scornful whisper. “Seems t’ me th’ old geezer’s bein’ pretty nice about it!”
“I’m not denying that, Short and Stupid,” his friend snorted contemptuously. “I guess you’re just too thick-witted to have thought about what else was burned up in that fire besides a mess of canned goods!”
Scorchy scratched his slightly-singed scalp puzzledly.
“I don’t get yer meanin’, me bucko,” he confessed.
“Our equipment cases, you
cretin!” hissed Nick Naldini under his breath. “We stored all the equipment cases we brought with us in that storeroom! They were completely destroyed in the fire, they and their contents, too!”
“Yeah, well, so what?” grunted Scorchy unconcernedly. “We ain’t needed ’em yet, and we got some back-up gadgets out in the tail storage-compartment of the Skyrocket, and the chief’s rich enough t’ replace all the lost equipment and never feel it. So what’s eatin’ you?”
Nick gritted his teeth, squeezed his fists tightly, and tried to be calm.
“It hasn’t occurred to you, then, Small Change,” he snarled sarcastically, “that packed away in those cases was an experimental heatproof suit the chief was gonna use this morning to go down inside the volcano and see if he could find the place the fire-devil hides out, when he isn’t out rampagin’ through the countryside, killin’ folks and settin’ fire to things?”
Scorchy’s eyes popped. He voiced a low whistle.
“Jeez, that’s right, Nick,” muttered the runty boxer. “I fergot about the heat-suit, what with all the excitement around here —”
“What’s more,” hissed the lanky vaudeville artist venomously,- “just last night, when we were going to bed, the chief announced his intentions of using the special suit to git down inside the mountain — in front of us all! He was standing right out on the veranda when he said it.”
“That’s right,” mused Scorchy thoughtfully, scratching his bestubbled chin with one thumbnail. ”Even John James Jones coulda heard ’im if’n he was still awake then, ’cause the chief was standing right under the open window to his room —”
“Yeah,” remarked Nick with a leering grin, “— and so could anyone .,. or anything ... that might-a been lurkin’ around the edge of the woods, listenin’ and tryin’ t’ overhear our plans!”
Scorchy shivered nervously and shot an anxious glance into the thick wall of vegetation that edged the clearing in which the village was built.
“You mean you think the volcano monster was hangin’ around, out there somewhere, and heard the chief talkin’ about the heat-suit?” he demanded feebly.
“That’s exactly what I think,” snapped Nick Naldini.
Scorchy sneaked another surreptitious glance at the silent mass of palm-trees and thick, motionless bushes. Then he shivered again-and not just because he was still standing around in nothing but his shorts.
CHAPTER 13 — Introducing Chicago Louie
After a hasty breakfast, Prince Zarkon and the five lieutenants took the skiff out to where the Skyrocket was anchored in the bay. Nick and Doc and Scorchy had wearied of running around in nothing but their shorts, and if there was going to be any mountain-climbing to do, they wanted to be suitably dressed for the occasion.
Luckily, the lockers aboard the experimental rocket-plane contained spare clothing for them all, including the Man of Mysteries, whose gunmetal gray jacket, slacks, and turtle-neck pullover were considerably the worse for wear, after his experiences in the blazing trading-post the night before.
While they climbed into fresh clothes, Scorchy queried the Ultimate Man on the course of their. investigations.
“Say, chief, now that this heat-suit of yours was ruined in the fire, along with everything else in the equipment cases, how we gonna get down inside of that dang volcano?” he asked inquiringly. “Now that I got some fresh duds on, I don’t exactly relish the thought o’ gettin’ ’em burnt off’n me by goin’ skinny-dippin’ in a lake a lava!”
“I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you, Scorchy,” replied Zarkon gravely. “Without the heat-suit, I’m afraid it will be impossible for us to investigate the interior of the volcano crater at first hand.”
“So that’s out, eh, chief?” piped Doc Jenkins cheerfully. It was noticed by his comrades that the huge, dumb-looking man with the miracle brain did not exactly sound depressed or woeful over the news that the expedition down into the interior of Mount Rangatoa had been called off.
The fact of the matter was that Doc was not exactly enamored of the notion of climbing mountains. “Everest-or-Bust!” was a motto that could never, by any stretch of the imagination, be ascribed to the big, clumsy man with the outsized hands and feet. It was not so much that Theophilus “Doc” Jenkins suffered from acrophobia, or fear of heights, as it was that, like many big men, he was clumsy, and like many clumsy men, when nervous he tended to exaggerate his inclination to stumble over his own feet.
Doc had been known to trip and stumble over a postage stamp pasted to a mirror-smooth ballroom floor. Or so Menlo Parker claimed, anyway, it being the skinny little scientist’s chief pleasure in life to good-humoredly rag his lumbering, heavy-footed colleague over his propensities to trip over his own outsized dogs. Given this tendency to exaggerate his own clumsiness, though, it’s easy enough to see why the fine art of mountain-climbing was not exactly Doc’s notion of a fun thing to do.
“Doc don’t sound too crushed over the idee of not climbin’ around inside the volcano, does he?” grinned Menlo with a nasty cackle.
“He sure doesn’t,” laughed Ace. “Big lummox probably figures if he has to climb the thing, he’ll probably fall off down the other side.”
Menlo emitted another cackle. “If that much beef ever fell off th’ mountain,” he smirked, with an ogle at Doe’s huge torso, “it’d bounce from here t’ Cleveland!”
Flushing scarlet, Doc said plaintively, “Now, lissen here, you skinny old beanstalk, you! You watch yer tongue — it ain’t nice to keep on alla time makin’ cracks about a feller’s size ’n’ weight ’n’ —”
“— And — remarkable talent for falling over a dime flat on his big puss, eh?” sneered the little man, dancing nimbly out of the way as Doc made a halfhearted grab for him.
“Lay off, you two,” grinned Scorchy. “Nick an’ I, we got the local feudin’ concession in this here gang!”
While the Omega men repaired to their plane for a change of clothing, Miss Phoenicia Mulligan had her sailors take her and her uncle out to the yacht to replenish their own missing haberdashery. Fooey Mulligan, who, despite her adventuresome inclinations, was all gal deep down where it mattered in the instincts, kept her closets aboard the Phoenicia well-stuffed with the latest creations of Park Avenue and Paris. In no time she was fully rigged and ready to sail.
Locating a change of clothes for Braxton T. Crawley, however, proved quite a problem. The red-faced industrialist with the walrus mustache was so fat that he was twice the size of even the heftiest seaman aboard the Phoenicia. Fussing and fuming, the fat man struggled to squeeze his rotund girth into a variety of clothes his niece’s crew obligingly dug up for him from sea-chest and ship’s locker, but to no avail. The sailors themselves got a good laugh out of the spectacle.
“Gee, you’d sure make a good sailor, Mr. Crawley,” said one young crewman with a straight face.
“I would, eh?” puffed the fat man, ruefully regarding a pair of dungarees whose every seam he had just split asunder. “How come, young feller?”
Another seaman lounging nearby guffawed loudly. “What Red means, Mr. Crawley,” he grinned, cocking a thumb at the fat man’s belly, “you’d never hafta worry about bein’ swep’ overboard in a storm. Ya sorta got a built-in life preserver, if ya know what I mean
“Is that so, you young whippersnapper,” growled the fat man with a glare that would have stopped any self-respecting torpedo dead in its tracks at thirty yards. “Well, let me tell you something, you dang-fool better be glad you work for my niece Fooey an’ not for me, or you’d be down pumpin’ out the hatches and battenin’ down the bilge for the rest o’ this here voyage!”
Fooey Mulligan thrust her blond head in the cabin door, looking remarkably smart in white ducks and a blue pullover.
“Uncle Braxton, will you stop badgering my men, and shake a leg?” she suggested sharply. “And you mean ‘battening down the hatches and pumping out the bilge,’ ” she added by way of an afterthought.
“Hesh up
!” rumbled her uncle flusteredly. “I sure dang-fool know what I dang-fool mean! And these-here sailorboys of your’n are badgerin’ me! Git busy and find me some clo’es t’ fit a full-grown man, willya?”
Eventually, from a fat Chinese cook, Braxton T. Crawley found trousers and a striped jersey almost large enough to squeeze into, and after Phoenicia let out a seam or two — or maybe three — with a lot of pushing and groaning and jamming and squeezing they got the fat man dressed and into the skiff.
On the beach it was Scorchy who first spotted Fooey Mulligan in her nautical threads. The little boxer, always highly susceptible where blondes were concerned (not to mention brunettes and redheads), popped his eyes and let his jaw hang loose at the sight she made in the tight slacks and even tighter pullover.
“Wowie,” he said faintly.
“Close your yap, Irish, before you start catching flies,” snapped the girl.
“Yes’m,” he breathed. “Wowie.”
“Wowie to you, and plenty of ’em,” the girl said feelingly. “Where’s the action?”
“Down at Señor Valdez’ trading-post,” said Scorchy with a sappy expression on his face.
“I know. Wowie,” said Phoenicia Mulligan, heading for the burnt building.
“Where you been hiding, Short an’ Ugly?” inquired Nick Naldini amiably, strolling up to where Scorchy stood transfixed as if suddenly rooted to the spot, a glassy look in his eyes.
When his query elicited no response, Nick peered more closely at his Hibernian comrade, waved one languid hand in front of the fixed and staring eyes, then pinched his arm fiercely. Scorchy jumped, bleated, and rubbed his arm, giving the lanky vaudevillian an accusing glower. “Thought rigor mortis had set in,” drawled Nick, looking relieved. “What’s up? Gettin’ the glad-eye from the local hula-hula gal?”
