COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 436
Still, it was business. And since Dillon had been prepared to pay much more than two hundred pesos if necessary, he was satisfied.
-
By the time he reached the plaza, it had become increasingly evident that something was wrong with El Jeep. The car seemed remarkably unstable. Although standing on hard-packed earth, El Jeep might as well have been on ice. More than a dozen men were trying to hold the car steady while the burros were hitched on with patched leather and rope harness. Felipe, at the wheel, was handed the reins and a whip.
"Vámanos!" he cried, and the men holding El Jeep sprang back. The car slewed wildly sidewise, dragging the reluctant burros after it, while Felipe jammed his foot on the brake and demanded of El Jeep what was wrong.
Dillon stared, trying to discover how the trick was being worked.
The burros reared in terror. The harness snapped. Completely unanchored, El Jeep, with the devoted Felipe clinging to the steering wheel, slid, slowly circling, toward the scattering crowd. Felipe's wife shrieked and ran to aid her husband, but was captured by the Mayor. The priest was exorcising the wildly gyrating car. Dillon gasped and sprinted to safety as El Jeep rushed, tail first, toward him, crashed into a wall, and bounced back in the best Newtonian tradition.
Obviously this was not of God.
El Jeep spun like a top. He darted around the plaza, battering his fenders in noisy caroms against anything that got in the way. The shouting rose to a crescendo. Dozens of dodging figures alternately tried to help and risked their necks.
"Jump, Felipe!" voices cried. "For your life!"
But Felipe shook his head violently. He shouted that he would not desert the poor little one. Just then the poor little one bounced off a wall at an angle, dislodging the last remaining basket of prawns, and slid nearly the full length of the plaza.
"Jump!" voices shrieked. For El Jeep was rushing toward an adobe wall which was all that was left of a house. And the wall was obviously ready to fall at a reasonably heavy impact. When it did, there would probably be little useful left of either El Jeep or Felipe.
"Oh, no," Dillon heard himself saying. "I didn't mean—Felipe! Jump!" He sprinted after the receding jeep, in a futile attempt to reach it and, somehow, divert it from its fatal course.
But El Jeep slid backward inexorably toward the crumbling wall, and somehow its mechanical face seemed more animated than Felipe's frozen one. The latter sat petrified, while the headlights of El Jeep wore a look of intolerable anguish, and as Dillon ran forward in a frantic attempt to do something ...
Something happened.
There was a startlingly loud twanging sound that rang through the plaza. There was a brief, blinding flash of white light. El Jeep glittered like a diamond for one instant, vibrated violently from bumper to bumper, and then shot up into the air as though jet-propelled, clearing the ruinous wall by millimeters.
The air-borne jeep rushed madly skyward, gradually slowed, and then, fifty feet up, swept in a wide arc, circling back toward the plaza as Felipe's hands automatically turned the steering wheel. Every head was tilted back; every eye bulged. In perfect silence the jeep slanted impossibly down the air and came to a halt in the center of the plaza. The tires spun slowly nearly a foot above the sunbaked ground. El Jeep rocked a little and was still.
Dillon was caught in the throng that pressed forward. There was a wild outburst of congratulations. Dillon fought his way toward El Jeep. Still weak with reaction, he squatted and passed his hand unbelievingly through the air between a revolving wheel and the ground.
"Levitation?" Dillon said in a faint voice, and stood up to meet Felipe's innocent gaze. "Felipe. What happened?" The young man shrugged.
"Quién sabe? One suspects magic. Ah, well. At any rate"—and Felipe patted El Jeep's rusty dashboard affectionately—"at any rate, the poor little one is saved, and—why, now that I think of it, so is Pueblo Pequeño."
"Ole!" cried all the villagers approvingly.
Time had passed. Tio Ignacio turned the muñeco of El Jeep hopelessly in his gnarled hands.
"I am sorry, señor," he told Dillon. "It is the same thing that happened when I put a spell on Felipe when he was a bad little boy. The spell was too weak, and Felipe became vigoroso instead of getting a fever or measles. After that, he was immune to magic."
"But El Jeep didn't become vigoroso," Dillon said in a desperate voice. "El Jeep flew."
Tio Ignacio nodded.
"A thing can do only that which is possible to it," he explained. "Felipe could not fly. No man is capable of flight. But there are men who are strong. So any man may become strong."
"Go on," Dillon said feebly.
"Puis, a machine cannot become vigoroso. But there are machines of flight like your own. So any machine may become one. As El Jeep has done now, because my first spells were too weak, so that he developed immunity."
"But it's physically impossible! A machine of flight, yes. But El Jeep's built to move along the ground, not through the air."
"And fish are built to swim. Yet the flying fish flies, truly."
"It doesn't. It glides. It jumps out of the water when bigger fish chase it."
"El Jeep jumped off the ground when my magic chased him," said the wizard, with an air of complacent triumph.
There was a deadlocked pause.
"See!" cried Tio Ignacio, pointing.
In the distance, up over the rooftops of Pueblo Pequeño, rose El Jeep, laden with baskets of prawns, Felipe at the wheel. There was a far outburst of cheering.
The jeep turned, about a hundred feet up, and headed eastward. Felipe looked down and waved at the two men. Then the car was beyond the cliff and steadily moving over the Gulf toward Guaymas.
Tio Ignacio hopefully flung the muñeco into the water. There was a small splash. El Jeep remained air-borne. The wizard shrugged.
"Ah, well," he said. "All things happen for the best. Now, instead of taking the prawns to Santa Rosalia, Felipe will fly them directly to Guaymas across the Gulf. As you have desired, señor. At the beginning of our negotiations, you observed that you wished the prawns to fly to Guaymas. This occurs. So if you will now pay me two hundred pesos, the conclusion of these events will be completely harmonious."
Dillon stared after the dwindling shape of El Jeep.
"And I call myself a business man," he murmured, as though to himself. "Me, Tom Dillon, the guy who's never been outsmarted in a business deal. Well, there goes my record. This is the first time I ever came out of a deal showing a loss instead of a profit, and I still don't know how the con was worked. If I only knew ..."
He stiffened. He turned his head and met the wizard's wicked old eyes. Then, very quickly, Dillon looked away.
"So that's it," he said. "I'll be damned." And, suddenly, Dillon looked vastly relieved.
"Tio Ignacio," he said, carefully watching the horizon.
"Señor?"
"When did you first hypnotize me?"
"Hypnotize you? But I did not—"
"Of course you did," Dillon said, his voice firmer now. "There's no other possible answer. Except magic, and—with all due respect—I don't believe in magic. I thought I saw El Jeep fly. Well, jeeps don't fly. But people can be hypnotized. You're a smart business man, Tio Ignacio."
"I know nothing of business, señor. I am only a poor old wizard—"
"You," said Dillon, "are a crook. But now my eyes are open. Do you still have the nerve to say I owe you two hundred pesos?"
"A bargain is a bargain. The prawns did not go to Santa Rosalia. Moreover, to you the sum is a small one."
"Well, you just try and get it," Dillon said triumphantly, and turned away.
"One moment, señor," the wizard called. "One moment. Let us, at least, part friends. I will agree that you owe me nothing. Let us forget that. And, to make an end, perhaps you will accept a small souvenir to prove that I hold no ill will."
Dillon hesitated and glanced back. From the folds of his grimy serape Tio Ignacio had extracted a little clay image. Something about the doll made Dillon's heart jump.
"What have you got there?" he asked quickly.
"This toy?" the wizard said. "Merely a souvenir—"
"That's a muñeco of me!"
"Of you, señor? Well, there is a certain resemblance, I must admit," Tio Ignacio agreed, examining the doll. "However, you do not believe in magic, so what of that? Now, if you will accept this small gift—"
Dillon, somewhat pale, reached.
"One moment. It is customary among men of good will to exchange gifts," said Tio Ignacio reprovingly, withholding the image. "So if you wish to give me, merely as a souvenir, a few pesos, perhaps—let us say, the amount we agreed upon as payment for that last spell ... ah. Muchas gracias, señor. Muchas gracias!"
The End
EARTH'S LAST CITADEL
Fantastic Novels Magazine - July 1950
with Henry Kuttner
Contents
Prologue
Chapter I The Citadel
Chapter II Carcasilla
Chapter III The Way of the Gods
Chapter IV The Portals of Light
Chapter V The Alien's Embrace
Chapter VI Heirs of the Shattered Citadel
-
At the dying Earth's flaming Source of Power, Alan Drake pitted puny human strength against the all-consuming Alien's irresistible might—in lost mankind's last struggle for survival ...
-
Prologue
BEHIND the low ridge of rock to the north was the Mediterranean. Alan Drake could hear it and smell it. The bitter chill of the North African night cut through his torn uniform, but sporadic flares of whiteness from the sea battle seemed to give him warmth, somehow. Out there the big guns were blasting, the battlewagons thundering their fury.
This was it.
And he wasn't in it—not this time. His job was to bring Sir Colin safely out of the Tunisian desert. That, it seemed, was important.
Squatting in the cold sand, Alan ignored the Scots scientist huddled beside him, to stare at the ridge as though his gaze could hurdle its summit and leap out to where the ships were fighting. Behind him, from the south, came the deep echoing noise of heavy artillery. That, he knew, was one jaw of the trap that was closing on him. The tides of war changed so swiftly—there was nothing for them now but heading blindly for the Mediterranean and safety.
He had got Sir Colin out of one Nazi trap already, two breathless days ago. But Colin Douglas was too valuable a man for either side to forget easily. And the Nazis would be following. They were between the lines now, lost, trying desperately to reach safety and stay hidden.
Somewhere in the night sky a nearing plane droned high. Moonlight glinted on Drake's smooth blond head as he leaped for the shadow of a dune, signaling Sir Colin fiercely. Drake crouched askew, favoring his left side where a bullet gouge ran aslant up one powerful forearm and disappeared under his torn sleeve. He'd got that two nights ago in the Nazi raid, when he snatched Sir Colin away barely in time.
Army Intelligence meant such work, very often. Drake was a good man for his job, which was dangerous. A glance at his tight-lipped poker-face would have told that. It was a face of curious contrasts. Opponents were at a loss trying to gauge his character by one contradictory feature or the other; more often than not they guessed wrong.
The plane's droning roar was very near now. It shook the whole sky with a canopy of sound. Sir Colin said impersonally, huddled against the dune:
"That meteor we saw last night—must have fallen near here, eh?"
There were stories about Sir Colin. His mind was a great one, but until the war he had detested having to use it. Science was only his avocation. He preferred the pleasures which food and liquor and society supplied. A decadent Epicurus with an Einstein brain—strange combination. And yet his technical skill—he was a top-rank physicist—had been of enormous value to the Allies.
"Meteor?" Drake said. "I'm not worried about that. But the plane—" He glanced up futilely. The plane was drawing farther away. "If they spotted us ..."
Sir Colin scratched himself shamelessly. "I could do with a plane now. There seem to be fleas in Tunisia—carnivorous sand-fleas, be damned to them."
"You'd better worry about that plane—and what's in it."
Sir Colin glanced up thoughtfully. "What?"
"A dollar to a sand-flea it's Karen Martin."
"Oh." Sir Colin grimaced. "Her again. Maybe this time we'll meet."
"She's a bad egg, Sir Colin. If she's really after us, we're in for trouble."
The big Scotsman grunted. "An Amazon, eh?"
"You'd be surprised. She's damned clever. She and her sidekick draw good pay from the Nazis, and earn it, too. You know Mike Smith?"
"An American?" Sir Colin scratched again.
"Americanized German. He's got a bad history, too. Racketeer, I think, until Repeal. When the Nazis got going, he headed back for Germany. Killing's his profession, and their routine suits him. He and Karen make a really dangerous team."
The Scotsman got laboriously to his feet, looking after the vanished plane.
"Well," he said, "if that was the team, they'll be back."
"And we'd better not be here." Drake scrambled up, nursing his arm.
The Scotsman shrugged and jerked his thumb forward. Drake grinned. His blue eyes, almost black under the shadow of the full lids, held expressionless impassivity. Even when he smiled, as he did now, the eyes did not change.
"Come on," he said.
The sand was cold; night made it pale as snow in the faint moonlight. Guns were still clamoring as the two men moved toward the ridge. Beyond it lay the Mediterranean and, perhaps, safety.
Beyond it lay—something else.
-
IN the cup that sloped down softly to the darkened sea was—a crater. A shimmering glow lay half-buried in the up-splashed earth. Ovoid-shaped, that glow. Its mass was like a monstrous radiant coal in the dimness.
For a long moment the two men stood silent. Then, "Meteor?" Drake asked.
There was incredulity in the scientist's voice. "It can't be a meteor. They're never that regular. The atmosphere heated it to incandescence, but see—the surface isn't even pitted. It must be tougher than beryllium steel. If this weren't war I'd almost think it was"—he brought out the words after a perceptible pause—"some kind of man-made ship from—"
Drake was conscious of a strange excitement. "You mean, more likely it's some Axis super-tank?"
Sir Colin didn't answer. Caution forgotten, he had started hastily down the slope. There was a faint droning in the air now. Drake could not be sure if it was a returning plane, or if it came from the great globe itself. He followed the Scotsman, but more warily.
It was very quiet here in the valley. Even the shore birds must have been frightened away. The sea-battle had moved eastward; only a breeze stirred through the sparse bushes with a murmur of leaves. A glow rippled and darkened and ran like flame over the red-hot metal above them when the wind played upon those smooth, high surfaces. The air still had an oddly scorched smell.
The night silence in the valley had been so deep that when Drake heard the first faint crackling in the scrubby desert brush he found that he had whirled, gun ready, without realizing it.
"Don't shoot," a girl's light voice said from the darkness. "Weren't you expecting me?"
Drake kept his pistol raised. There was an annoying coldness in the pit of his stomach. Sir Colin, he saw, from the corner of his eye, had stepped back into the dark.
"Karen Martin, isn't it?" Drake said. And his skin crawled with the expectation of a bullet from the night shadows. It was Sir Colin they wanted alive, not himself.
A low laugh in the dark, and a slim, pale figure took shape in the wavering glow from the meteor. "Right. What luck, our meeting like this!"
Underbrush crashed behind her and another shape emerged from the bushes. But Drake was watching Karen. He had met her before, and he had no illusions about the girl. He remembered how she had fought her way up in Europe, using slyness, using trickery, using ruthlessness as a man would use his fists. The new Germany had liked that unscrupulousness, needed it—used it. All the better that it came packaged in slim, curved flesh, bronze-curled, blue-eyed, with shadowy dimples and a mouth like red velvet, the unstable brilliance of many mixed races shining in her eyes.
