Nearly Complete Short Fiction, page 66
“I see you’ve repaired the execution pot,” Percy commented.
The king shook his head unhappily. “No, it was a dead loss. And we can’t get any kind of decent replacement anywhere. But we’ve been experimenting with barbecue recently. The results, while not perfect as yet, show a good deal of promise. I’m very hopeful.”
Percy walked outside to watch the fifty men being assembled. The priestesses had broken them into very small groups and were explaining the functions of the strange new weapons to them. The men looked half-dazed and half-resentful; the fact that women were teaching them how to fight seemed especially confusing. But the presence of “the hero”, and the young women’s business-like approach successfully kept their attention from wandering.
The head of Medusa stirred in the open kibisis. Hurry, my son. The time of my last weakness draws near.
“One last thing,” Percy assured her. He turned back to the palace entrance where Polydectes stood munching on the dripping leg of a sheep and watching the whole scene with friendly interest. I’ve done my part, his attitude suggested. I’ve given of the flower of my country. The best I have. No sacrifice can be too great. . . .
He stared from the king to the weeping women bidding their husbands and sons goodbye, the nervous male conscripts trying to understand their instructors and obviously wondering how they had gotten into a war with Olympians, and back to the chewing monarch.
“There’s one thing you haven’t been told,” he announced. “King Polydectes has volunteered to lead his troops into combat. King Polydectes isn’t afraid of the Olympians, so long as he has our weapons to use against them. King Polydectes says, ‘Damn the thunderbolts, full speed ahead!’ ”
“I d-do?” The chunk of mutton dropped to the ground, the sound of its fall obscured by the cheer that went up.
“You most certainly do,” Percy told him. He grabbed the quivering monarch with one hand and, stroking the back bag suggestively with the other, drew him gently on to the metallic rug which Athena operated. The other priestesses followed suit with their charges, “This is why,” he said in a voice that echoed back and forth across the square, “they call you Brave King Polydectes!”
THEY TOOK off to the accompaniment of another wildy rattling cheer.
Once they were scudding along the curve of the Greek mainland, Athena began explaining one of the weapons to the ruler of Seriphos.
“You sight your target in the holes running lengthwise through these spears—like this. See that rock? Then, as soon as you’ve made your sight, you press this little button in the rear. After that, all you have to do is let go of the spear. It won’t miss.”
“I’m an old man,” Polydectes muttered. “Toothless, worn and feeble. In the bleak winter of my life, all I want to do is lie by the fire and watch the youths frolic and fight. Ah, youth, youth!”
Percy walloped his back heartily. “Well, we’re giving you a new lease on life! You might as well pay attention, because when we come down, we’ll come down fighting. And there’s no turning back!”
They passed two great peaks near the coast. “Mount Pelion,” Athena said, nodding at the first. “And that’s Mount Ossa. Olympus is next.”
My son. came the hurried thought. I am dying fast. Grasp my head by the long hairy spines on its back and hold it in front of you when you attack, And, if you are about to be overcome, throw it at your enemies. But you must move rapidly! Already can I sense the dissolution of the impermanent interspace, that keeps one world from disturbing another. Our enemies will pour through and overwhelm the pitiful striving. Remember your strength! Remember that it is greater now than when the false Olympian led you to the. balcony of my temple in Key Cnossus. Feel it, my son, feel it leap through you; feel your mightiness!
And, as they neared the majestic mountain and swung into a circle of carpets for the attack, Percy felt the strength boil in his muscles. He wouldn’t have any trouble wielding the harpe now!
The only trouble with that was that all of his weapons had been given to him by the Olympians. Wouldn’t they know how to deal with them?
He seized a spear as a horde of golden-skinned men swirled off the side of the mountain and rose to meet them. Sighting somewhere in the center of the group, he pressed the button. The spear buzzed out of his hand and plunged downward, splitting three Olympians like so much shish kebab.
Beside him, he heard a similar noise as Polydectes let a weapon go too. The king’s success was even greater—he got four flying outsiders. Now that they were in combat, Polydectes was concentrating on nothing but the kill, the most efficient kill, as befitted a barbarian monarch.
A SHEET of flame flashed down from one of the carpets as someone brought another weapon into play. An entire group of ascending Olympians vanished. They turned and sought shelter in the mountain again.
Now, they had the advantage. The long, purple cone of a ray gun raked across a carpet and exploded it. Then another shattered outward. The priestesses brought their craft up higher, out of the ray gun’s obvious range.
“Won’t work,” Polydectes told Percy crisply, as if he’d been advising him on military strategy for the past five campaigns. “They’ll come up one at a time now and burn us down. Whatever this thing is that we’re flying, we’ve got to go in after them!” Percy nodded. He gestured to Athena who, making an overhead motion to the other priestesses, spun the little wheel rapidly. They swooped down, the fore-part of a long parabola of carpets.
Take me now, my son, came the urgent summons. Now!
Percy grabbed the lizard-like head cut of the bag by a lock of something on the back that was very much like green hair and held it out in front of him. He reached around and whipped out the harpe.
The purple rays died out. He heard screams of terror from below. “A Gorgon, a Gorgon!”
“Yes,” he said grimly. “What’s left of the one you fellows talked me into killing. It’s coming back to roost along with the sucker that did the job!”
They touched the ground and he leaped down, clicking his boot switches into action. With this much extra speed, he’d match a sword against a ray gun any old time!
Except that from the mouth of the immense cave halfway up the mountain a dozen golden-skinned men poured out wearing identical boots and blasting purple cones ahead of them! And they moved so much faster than he did, their boots were either better-fueled or better-made.
Polydectes behind him accounted for one of them. And a sheet of flame flapping down from one of the nearest descending carpets burned half of the rest out of existence. He ran on toward the cave desperately trying to dodge and circle around the burst-provoking rays.
ONE OF THE Olympians angled in front of him. Percy cursed, realizing he would never be able to reach him in time to use the harpe. The fellow’s ray gun came up.
And Medusa struck.
Percy, catching her agony in his mind, realized what the effort had cost her. But the Olympian fell forward in cracking fragments; he had been completely ossified on the spot!
So another aspect of the legend was true! Medusa could—
He was inside the cave now and had no time to think. In front of him there was a rank of determined and armed Olympians, some sixty or seventy deep. And beyond them, over their heads, his eyes rapidly followed intricate whirls of wiring and shimmering instruments to where—at the rear of the cave—a little whirlpool of red energy was growing larger in the rocky ceiling.
They were breaking through! At this very moment, they were acquiring reinforcements from the dread other side!
Feverishly, he poured into the attack, slashing them from before him like so many scallion heads on the restaurant cutting board. Beside him, he could hear Polydectes roaring and the men of Seriphos as they poured up.
But he couldn’t make it! He’d have to climb those Olympian-filled steps. He knew it despairingly as he hacked and dodged, slew and was ripped himself. He saw that the little whirlpool had grown larger now, that a huge machine had taken shape on the other side and was coming through.
Throw me, Percy! The Gorgon abruptly screamed in his mind.
He brought his arm back and threw the head straight at the skimming scarlet circle high overhead. There was a moment of last instruction that thrummed inside his brain, then the shrill agony of dissolution as the head touched the red energy whirlpool and exploded.
The Olympians screamed their despair when the dust had blown aside sufficiently to show that the entrance was gone. It had been sealed again forever, Percy knew. Never again would they be able to pool their feet of half-knowledge and rebuild their side.
The men of Seriphos pressed in for the completion of the kill. A few Olympians managed to escape out of the cage mouth and soar away, but those who remained fought listlessly.
What were those last instructions the Gorgon had shot at his mind? The poem! The poem!
Which poem? The one beginning: “And thence came the son of Danae, flaming with courage and spirit—” ?
HE WAS standing on a sunny hill-top in the northern part of a small island. There was no one near him.
Percy looked around stupidly. What—
Then, as his mind settled slowly and he remembered the advice Medusa had frantically telepathed to him, he understood. He wasn’t happy, but he understood.
Now that the Perseus sequence was over in that particular space-time universe, it was possible only to arrive at the beginning of the one in the next. And while the parchment was gone, the poem related to him, to Percy-Perseus. With that subjective aura and the psychological impetus the Gorgon had given him, he had only to remember the lines of the poem to be precipitated into the next universe.
Why? So that this time there would be no mistake. So that this time he would not be talked into slaying the last surviving Gorgon and removing from humanity the fountain of ancient peaceful wisdom which could nourish it. So that this time he would not—at long, long last—be a sucker.
He regretted it. He especially regretted the loss of Ann whom he had hardly come to know.
But, come to think of it, wouldn’t there be another Ann Drummond in this universe? Yes, and couldn’t he be even more successful? He knew his way around now. He’d do that little job for the Gorgon, all right, but first Percy—or Perseus as he might as well call himself here—was going to strut a little. He was carrying a small armory, he knew his power—and he wasn’t taking any con games from any man.
No, this time Seriphos was going to hear from him right at the start.
He started down the hill-side, not noticing the young man paddling furiously in a just-materialized bathtub out in the bay.
Nor did he notice the squad of King Polydectes’ soldiers eating their uninteresting meal in a clump of bushes halfway down the hill. Nor, if he had seen them, would he have known that their commander was the type to have annoying strangers knocked out from behind so their fine clothes could be stolen at leisure.
Especially was their commander that type after a hot, irritating day spent fruitlessly chasing harpies in the hills by order of King Polydectes. . . .
THE END
“Will You Walk a Little Faster”
If the human race wanted to wipe itself out, fine, but there was no need to wreck such a valuable piece of real estate as Earth . . . .
ALL right. So maybe I should be ashamed of myself.
But I’m a writer and this is too good a story to let go. My imagination is tired, and I’m completely out of usable plots; I’m down to the gristle of truth. I’ll use it.
Besides, someone’s bound to blab sooner or later—as Forkbeard pointed out, we’re that kind of animal—and I might as well get some private good out of the deal.
Why, for all I know, there is a cow on the White House Lawn this very moment! . . .
Last August, to be exact, I was perspiring over an ice-cold yarn that I never should have started in the first place, when the door-bell rang.
I looked up and yelled, “Come in! Door’s open!”
The hinges squeaked a little, the way they do in my place. I heard feet slap-slapping up the long corridor which makes the rent on my apartment a little lower than most of the others in the building. I couldn’t recognize the walk as belonging to anyone I knew, so I waited with my fingers on the typewriter keys and my face turned to the study entrance.
After a while, the feet came around the corner. A little man, not much more than two feet high, dressed in a green knee-length tunic, walked in. He had a very large head, a short pointed red beard, a long pointed green cap, and he was talking to himself. In his right hand, he carried a golden pencil-like object; in his left, a curling strip of what seemed to be parchment.
“Now, you,” he said with a gutteral accent, pointing both the beard and the pencil-like object at me, “now you must be a writer.”
I closed my mouth carefully around a lump of air. Somehow, I noted with interest, I seemed to be nodding.
“Good.” He flourished the pencil and made a mark at the end of a line halfway down the scroll. “That completes the enrollment for this session. Come with me, please.”
He seized the arm with which I had begun an elaborate gesture. Holding me in a grip that had all the resiliency of a steel manacle, he smiled benevolently and walked back down my entrance hall. Every few steps he walked straight up in the air, and then—as if he’d noticed his error—calmly strode down to the floor again.
“What—who—” I said, stumbling and tripping and occasionally getting walloped by the wall, “you wait, you—who—who—”
“Please do not make such repetitious noises,” he admonished me. “You are supposed to be a creature of civilization. Ask intelligent questions if you wish, but only when you have them properly organized.”
I brooded on that while he closed the door of my apartment behind him and began dragging me up the stairs. His heart may or may not have been sure, but I estimated his strength as being roughly equivalent to that of ten. I felt like a flag being flapped from the end of my own arm. “We’re going up?” I commented tentatively as I swung around a landing.
“Naturally. To the roof. Where we’re parked.”
“Parked, you said?” I thought of a helicopter, then of a broomstick. Who was it that rode around on the back of an eagle?
Mrs. Flugelman, who lived on the floor above, had come out of her apartment with a canful of garbage. She opened the door of the dumbwaiter and started to nod good-morning at me. She stopped when she saw my friend.
“Yes, parked. What you call our flying saucer.” He noticed Mrs. Flugelman staring at him and jutted his beard at her as we went by. “Yes, I said flying saucer!” he spat.
Mrs. Flugelman walked back into her apartment with the canful of garbage and closed the door behind her very quietly.
Maybe the stuff I write for a living prepared me for such experiences, but—somehow—as soon as he told me that, I felt better. Little men and flying saucers, they seemed to go together. Just so halos and pitchforks didn’t wander into the continuity.
When we reached the roof, I wished I’d had time to grab a jacket. It was evidently going to be a breezy ride.
The saucer was about thirty feet in diameter and, colorful magazine articles to the contrary, had been used for more than mere sightseeing. In the center, where it was deepest, there was a huge pile of boxes and packages lashed down with criss-crossing masses of gleaming thread. Here and there in the pile, was the unpackaged metal of completely unfamiliar machinery.
Still using my arm as a kind of convenient handle to the rest of me; the little man whirled me about experimentally once or twice, then scaled me accurately end over end some twenty feet through the air to the top of the pile. A moment before I hit, golden threads boiled about me, cushioning like an elastic net, and tieing me up more thoroughly than any three shipping clerks. My shot-putting pal grunted enthusiastically and prepared to climb aboard.
Suddenly he stopped and looked back along the roof. “Irngl!” he yelled in a voice like two ocean liners arguing. “Irngl! Bordge modgunk!”
There was a tattoo of feet on the roof so rapid as to be almost one sound, and eight-inch replica of my strong-arm guide—minus the beard, however—leaped over the railing and into the craft. Young Irngl, I decided, bordge modgunking.
His apparent parent stared at him suspiciously, then walked back slowly in the direction from which he had run. He halted and shook a ferocious finger at the youngster. Beside me, Irngl cowered.
Just behind the chimney were a cluster of television antennae. But the dipoles of these antennae were no longer parallel. Some had been carefully braided together; others had been tied into delicate and perfect bows. Growling ferociously, shaking his head so that the pointed red beard made like a metronome, the old man untied the knots. and smoothed the dipoles out to careful straightness with his fingers. Then, he bent his legs slightly at their knobby knees and performed one of the more spectacular standing broad jumps of all time.
And, as he hit the floor of the giant saucer, we took off. Straight up.
When I’d recovered sufficiently to regurgitate my larynx, I noticed that old redbeard was controlling the movement of the disc beneath us by means of an egg-shaped piece of metal in his right hand. After we’d gone up a goodly distance, he pointed the egg south and we headed that way.
Radiant power, I wondered? No information—not much that was useful—had been volunteered. Of course, I realized suddenly: I hadn’t asked any questions! Grabbed from my typewriter in the middle of the morning by a midget of great brain and greater muscle—I couldn’t be blamed, though: few men in my position would have been able to put their finger on the nub of the problem and make appropriaate inquiries. Now, however—
“While there’s a lull in the action,” I began breezily enough, “and as long as you speak English, I’d like to clear up a few troublesome matters. For example—”
