Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  The ability to move returned to them together. They left the couch in a clumsy, frenzied scramble and reached the head of the cellar stairs not a step apart. With the second shattering crash, the telephone leaped from the wall beside Hogan. His hand on the stair railing, he stared back.

  He couldn’t see the door from there. The fire roared and danced in the hearth, as if it enjoyed being shaken up so roughly. The head of the eight-point buck had dropped off the cabinet and lay on the floor beside the fire, its glass eyes fixed in a red baleful glare on Hogan. Nothing else seemed changed.

  “HOGAN!” Julia wailed aloud from the shadows at the foot of the stairs. He heard her start up again and turned to tell her to wait there.

  Then Greenface hit the door.

  Glass, wood and metal flew inward together with an indescribable explosive sound. Hogan slid down four steps and stopped again, his head on a level with the top of the stairs. Below him he heard Julia’s choked breathing. Nothing else stirred.

  A cool draft of air began to flow past his face. Then came a heavy scraping noise and the renewed clatter of glass.

  “Hogan!” Julia sobbed recklessly. “Come down! IT’LL GET IN!”

  “It can’t!” Hogan breathed.

  As if in answer, the stairs began to tremble under his feet. Wood splintered ponderously; the shaking continued and seemed to spread through the house. Then something smacked against the wall, just around the corner of the room that shut off Hogan’s view of the door. Laboriously, like a floundering whale, Greenface was coming into the lodge.

  At the foot of the stairs, Hogan caught his foot in a mess of telephone wires and nearly went headlong over Julia. She clung to him, trembling.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Just its head!” Hogan gasped. He was steering her by the arm through the dark cellar. “We gotta keep away from the stairs, out of the light. Stay there, will you? And, Julia, kid”—he was fumbling with the lock of the side entrance door—“keep awful quiet, please!”

  “I will,” she whispered scornfully. The timbers groaned overhead, and for a moment they stared up in tranced expectation, each sensing the other’s thought. Julia gave a low, nervous giggle.

  “Good thing that floor’s double strength!”

  “That’s the fireplace, right over us,” he said frowning. He opened the door an inch or so and peered out. “Look here, Julia!”

  The shifting light of the fire streamed through the shattered frame of the main lodge door. The steps leading up to it had been crushed to kindling wood. As they stared, a shadow, huge and formless, dropped soundlessly across the lighted area. They shrank back.

  “Oh, Hogan!” Julia whimpered. “It’s horrible!”

  “All of that,” he said, with dry lips. “Do you feel anything—funny?”

  She peered at him through the gloom. “Feel anything, Hogan?”

  “Up here!” He put his fingertips to her temples. “Sort of buzzing?”

  “Oh,” she said; “yes, I do!” She was getting panicky again, and he squeezed her arm reassuringly. “What is it, Hogan?”

  “A sort of sound our friend makes,” he explained, “when he’s feeling good. But it should be much louder. Julia, that thing’s been out in the cold and rain all week. No sun at all. I should have remembered! I bet it likes that fire up there. It’s getting friskier now, and that’s why we hear it.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Let’s run for it, Hogan! The car’s right up on the road.”

  “Uh-uh!” He shook his head. “We might make it all right, but Greenface can come along like a horse when it wants to . . . and the fire’s pepping it up—it might know perfectly well that we’re ducking around down here!”

  “Oh, no!” she said, shocked. “Anyway, it wouldn’t settle anything. I got an idea—Julia, honey, promise just once you’ll stay right here and not yell after me, or anything? I’ll be right back.”

  “What you going to do?”

  “I won’t go out of the cellar,” Hogan said soothingly. “Look, darling, there’s no time to argue—do you promise, or do I lay you out cold?”

  “I promise,” she said after a sort of frosty gasp.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Letting out the kerosene tank.” He was breathing hard. “Is it still there?”

  “HOGAN!”

  “All right!” he whispered excitedly. “I’m going to fix that devil’s whistling. Now then, I’ll put a match to it. But we won’t leave just yet. Wait here as long as we can—and then slip over into the nearest cabin. No running around in the moonlight!”

  He ducked off again. After a minute, she saw a pale flare light up the chalked brick wall at the end of the cellar, and realized he was holding the match to a wad of paper. The kerosene fumes went off suddenly with a faint BOOM! and the glare of yellow light drove the shadows back with a rush toward Julia.

  She heard Hogan move around in the passageway behind a door to her left, There were two more muffled explosions; then he came out and closed the door softly behind him.

  “Going up like pine shavings!” he muttered gleefully. “Well, we wanted a new lodge anyhow. Now, Julia—”

  “It looks almost like a man, doesn’t it, Hogan? Like a sick old man!”

  Hogan hushed her nervously. The buzzing in his brain was louder now, rising and falling as if the strength of the thing were gathering and ebbing in waves. And Julia unconsciously had spoken too loud.

  “Keep under the ledge of the window.” he told her. “It hasn’t any real eyes, but it sees things somehow just as well as you and I.”

  Julia subsided reproachfully, and he gave her arm a quick squeeze. “If it’ll just stay put for another two minutes, the fire ought to catch it—”

  From the corner of the cabin window he could see half of the main room of the lodge through the door Greenface had shattered. Greenface itself filled most of that space. It was hunched up before the fireplace, its great, red-splotched head bending and nodding toward the flames; in that attitude there was something vaguely human about it. But its foot ribbons sprawled over all the rest of the floor space like the tentacles of an octopus, and Hogan noticed they, too, were now splotched with red.

  Most of his attention was directed toward the cellar windows of the lodge. Every one of them was alight with the flickering glare of the fires he had spread, and that glare was deepening while smoke poured out through the open door. The gathering roar of the fire mingled in his mind with the soundless, nervous rasp that meant Greenface’s strength was returning.

  It was like a race between the two: whether the fire would trap the thing before the heat which the fire kindled made it alert enough to perceive its danger and escape. It wasn’t just a question of its escaping, either! Hogan hadn’t told Julia how convinced he was that Greenface knew the two of them were there, to be caught at leisure as soon as it recovered enough to want to make the exertion. But it would make the exertion anyhow the instant it sensed they were trying to get away.

  WOULDN’T THAT FIRE EVER BREAK THROUGH?

  Then it happened—with blinding suddenness.

  The thing swung its head around from the fireplace and lunged hugely backward. In a flash it turned nearly transparent, and Hogan heard Julia cry out beside him—he hadn’t told her about that particularly ghastly little trick. In the same moment, the vibration in his mind became like a ragged, piercing shriek, like pain, brief and intolerable.

  Hogan reeled away from the window, dragging Julia with him. There was a sudden series of muffled explosions—it wasn’t till afterward he remembered the shells left lying on the table—then the lodge floor broke through into a cellar with a thundering crash, and the released flames leaped bellowing upward.

  They were out of the cabin by then, running down toward the lake.

  “Your Pa isn’t going to like the idea,” Hogan pointed out thoughtfully.

  “He better like it!” Julia sounded a trifle grim. “But God bless the forest
rangers—though they were kind of nasty!”

  “They put the fire out anyhow,” he said. “How would you care to mop up after a half-wit who lights a match to see how much kerosene he’d spilled in the dark?”

  “Poor Hogan . . . I got to tell you, too: I did get myself engaged in the city! I just couldn’t go through with it without coming back first—”

  “To find out if I really was batty? Can’t blame you, honey! Well, it’s all over with, anyhow,” he said cheerily and put his arm around her.

  “Hogan,” Julia murmured after a suitably lengthy interval, “you think there might be anything left of it?”

  He shook his head decisively. “Not after that bonfire. We can go have a look.”

  They walked up from the dock together toward the blackened, water-soaked mess that had been the lodge building. It was still an hour before dawn. They stood staring at it in silence. Greenface’s funeral pyre had been worthy of a titan.

  “We won’t build here again till spring,” Hogan told her at last. “We can winter in town, if you like. There won’t be anything left of it then, for sure. There was nothing very solid about it, you know—just a big poisonous mass of jelly from the tropics. Winter would have killed it, anyhow.

  “Those red spots; it was rotting last week—it never really had a chance.”

  “You aren’t feeling sorry for it, are you?”

  “Well, in a way,” Hogan admitted. He kicked a cindered two-by-four apart with his foot and stood there frowning. “It was just a big crazy freak shooting-up all alone in a world where it didn’t fit in, and where it could only blunder around and do a lot of damage and die. I wonder now smart it really was and whether it ever understood the fix it was in.”

  “Quit worrying about it!” Julia commanded.

  Hogan grinned down at her. “O.K.,” he said.

  “And kiss me,” said Julia.

  THE END.

  1949

  AGENT OF VEGA

  A new author points out that, in an inhabited galaxy, trouble can grow to enormous size before any organization becomes aware that danger’s a-brewing!

  “It just happens,” the Third coordinator of the Vegan Confederacy explained patiently, “that the local Agent—it’s Zone Seventeen Eighty-two—isn’t available at the moment. In fact, he isn’t expected to contact this HQ for at least another week.

  And since the matter really needs prompt attention, and you happened to be passing within convenient range of the spot, I thought of you!”

  “I like these little extra jobs I get whenever you think of me,” commented the figure in the telepath transmitter before him. It was that of a small, wiry man with rather cold yellow eyes—sitting against an undefined dark background, he might have been a minor criminal or the skipper of an aging space-tramp.

  “After the last two of them, as I recall it,” he continued pointedly, “I turned in my final mission report from the emergency treatment tank of my ship—And if you’ll remember, I’d have been back in my own Zone by now if you hadn’t sent me chasing wild-eyed rumor in this direction!”

  He leaned forward with an obviously false air of hopeful anticipation. “Now this wouldn’t just possibly be another hot lead on U-1, would it?”

  “No, no! Nothing like that!” the Co-ordinator said soothingly. In his mental file the little man was listed as “Zone Agent Iliff, Zone Thirty-six Oh-Six; unrestricted utility; try not to irritate—” There was a good deal more of it, including the notation:

  “U-1: The Agent’s failure-shock regarding this subject has been developed over the past twelve-year period into a settled fear-fix of prime-motive proportions. The Agent may now be intrusted with the conclusion of this case, whenever the opportunity is presented.”

  That was no paradox to the Coordinator who, as Chief of the Department of Galactic Zones, was Iliff’s immediate superior. He knew the peculiar qualities of his agents—and how to make the most economical use of them, while they lasted.

  “It’s my own opinion,” he offered cheerily, “that U-1 has been dead for years! Though I’ll admit Correlation doesn’t agree with me there.”

  “Correlation’s often right,” Iliff remarked, still watchfully. He added, “U-1 appeared excessively healthy the last time I got near him!”

  “Well, that was twelve standard years ago,” the Co-ordinator murmured. “If he were still around, he’d have taken a bite out of us before this—a big bite! Just to tell us he doesn’t think the Galaxy is quite wide enough for him and the Confederacy both. He’s not the type to lie low longer than he has to.” He paused. “Or do you think you might have shaken some of his supremacy ideas out of him that last time?”

  “Not likely,” said Iliff. The voice that came from the transmitter, the thought that carried it, were equally impassive; “He booby-trapped me good! To him it wouldn’t even have seemed like a fight.”

  The Co-ordinator shrugged. “Well, there you are! Anyway, this isn’t that kind of job at all. It’s actually a rather simple assignment.” Iliff winced.

  “No, I mean it! What this job takes is mostly tact—always one of your strongest points, Iliff.”

  The statement was not entirely true; but the Agent ignored it and the Co-ordinator went on serenely: “. . . so I’ve homed you full information on the case. Your ship should pick it up in an hour, but you might have questions; so here it is, in brief:

  “Two weeks ago, the Bureau of Interstellar Crime sends an operative to a planet called Gull in Seventeen Eighty-two—that’s a mono-planet system near Lycanno, just a bit off your present route. You been through that neighborhood before?”

  Iliff blinked yellow eyes and produced a memory. “We went through Lycanno once. Seventeen or eighteen Habitables; population A-Class Human; Class D politics—How far is Gull from there?”

  “Eighteen hours cruising speed, or a little less—but you’re closer to it than that right now. This operative was to make positive identification of some ex-spacer called Tahmey, who’d been reported there, and dispose of him. Routine interstellar stuff, but—twenty-four hours ago, the operative sends back a message that she finds positive identification impossible . . . and that she wants a Zone Agent!”

  He looked expectantly at Iliff. Both of them knew perfectly well that the execution of a retired piratical spacer was no part of a Zone Agent’s job—furthermore, that every Interstellar operative was aware of the fact; and, finally, that such a request should have induced the Bureau to recall its operative for an immediate mental overhaul and several months’ vacation before he or she could be risked on another job.

  “Give,” Iliff suggested patiently.

  “The difference,” the Co-ordinator explained, “is that the operative is one of our Lannai trainees!”

  “I see,” said the Agent.

  He did. The Lannai were high type humanoids and the first people of their classification to be invited to join the Vegan Confederacy—till then open only to Homo sapiens and the interesting variety of mutant branches of that old Terrestrial stock.

  The invitation had been sponsored, against formidable opposition, by the Department of Galactic Zones, with the obvious intention of having the same privilege extended later to as many humanoids and other nonhuman races as could meet the Confederacy’s general standards.

  As usual, the Department’s motive was practical enough. Its king-sized job was to keep the eighteen thousand individual civilizations so far registered in its Zones out of as much dangerous trouble as it could, while nudging them unobtrusively, whenever the occasion was offered, just a little farther into the path of righteousness and order.

  It was slow, dangerous, carefully unspectacular work, since it violated in fact and in spirit, every galactic treaty of nonintervention the Confederacy had ever signed. Worst of all, it was work for which the Department was, of necessity, monstrously understaffed.

  The more political systems, races and civilizations it could draw directly into the Confederacy, the fewer it would have t
o keep under that desperately sketchy kind of supervision. Regulations of membership in Vega’s super-system were interpreted broadly, but even so they pretty well precluded any dangerous degree of deviation from the ideals that Vega championed.

  And if, as a further consequence, Galactic Zones could then draw freely on the often startling abilities and talents of nonhuman peoples to aid in its titanic project—

  The Department figuratively licked its chops.

  The opposition was sufficiently rooted in old racial emotions to be extremely bitter and strong. The Traditionalists, working chiefly through the Confederacy’s Department of Cultures, wanted no dealings with any race which could not trace its lineage back through the long centuries to Terra itself. Nonhumans had played a significant part in the century-long savage struggles that weakened and finally shattered the first human Galactic Empire.

  That mankind, as usual, had asked for it and that its grimmest and most powerful enemies were to be found nowadays among those who could and did claim the same distant Earth-parentage did not noticeably weaken the old argument, which to date had automatically excluded any other stock from membership. In the High Council of the Confederacy, the Department of Cultures, backed by a conservative majority of the Confederacy’s members, had, naturally enough, tremendous influence.

  Galactic Zones, however—though not one citizen in fifty thousand knew of its existence, and though its arguments could not be openly advanced—had a trifle more.

  So the Lannai were in—on probation.

  “As you may have surmised,” the Third Co-ordinator said glumly, “the Lannai haven’t exactly been breaking their necks trying to get in with us, either. In fact, their government’s had to work for the alliance against almost the same degree of popular disapproval; though on the whole they seem to be a rather more reasonable sort of people than we are. Highly developed natural telepaths, you know—that always seems to make folks a little, easier to get along with.”