Short Science Fiction

Walter Sills reflected now, as he had reflected often before, that life was hard and joyless. He surveyed his dingy chemical laboratory and grinned cynically⁠—working in a dirty hole of a place, living on occasional ore analyses that barely paid for absolutely indispensable equipment, while others, not half his worth perhaps, were working for big industrial concerns and taking life easy.

He looked out the window at the Hudson River, ruddied in the flame of the dying sun, and wondered moodily whether these last experiments would finally bring him the fame and success he was after, or if they were merely some more false alarms.

The unlocked door creaked open a crack and the cheerful face of Eugene Taylor burst into view. Sills waved and Taylor’s body followed his head and entered the laboratory.

“Hello, old soak,” came the loud and carefree hail. “How go things?”

Sills shook his head at the other’s exuberance. “I wish I had your foolish outlook on life, Gene. For your information, things are bad. I need money, and the more I need it, the less I have.”

“Well, I haven’t any money either, have I?” demanded Taylor. “But why worry about it? You’re fifty, and worry hasn’t got you anything except a bald head. I’m thirty, and I want to keep my beautiful brown hair.”

The chemist grinned. “I’ll get my money, yet, Gene. Just leave it to me.”

“Your new ideas shaping out well?”

“Are they? I haven’t told you much about it, have I? Well, come here and I’ll show you what progress I’ve made.”

What happened was that the moment the ammonium-plated spoon was exposed to open air, the most horrible odor ever conceived assailed their nostrils!⁠—an odor that cannot be described, a terrible broth of Hell that plunged the room into sheer, horrible nightmare.

With one strangled gasp, Sills dropped the spoon. Both were coughing and retching, tearing wildly at their throats and mouths, yelling, weeping, sneezing!

Taylor pounced upon the spoon and looked about wildly. The odor grew steadily more powerful and their wild exertions to escape it had already succeeded in wrecking the laboratory and had upset the vat of Ammonaline. There was only one thing to do, and Sills did it. The spoon went flying out the open window into the middle of Twelfth Avenue. It hit the sidewalk right at the feet of one of the policemen, but Taylor didn’t care.

“Take off your clothes. We’ll have to burn them,” Sills was gasping. “Then spray something over the laboratory⁠—anything with a strong smell. Burn sulphur. Get some liquid bromine.”

Both were tearing at their clothes in distraction when they realized that someone had walked in through the unlocked door. The bell had rung, but neither had heard it. It was Staples, six-foot, lion-maned Steel King.

One step into the hall ruined his dignity utterly. He collapsed in one tearing sob and Twelfth Avenue was treated to the spectacle of an elderly, richly-dressed gentleman tearing uptown as fast as his feet would carry him, shedding as much of his clothes as he dared while doing so.

There was a spatter of pebbles against the window and the youngster stirred in his sleep. Another, and he was awake.

He sat up stiffly in bed. Seconds passed while he interpreted his strange surroundings. He wasn’t in his own home, of course. This was out in the country. It was colder than it should be and there was green at the window.

“Slim!”

The call was a hoarse, urgent whisper, and the youngster bounded to the open window.

Slim wasn’t his real name, but the new friend he had met the day before had needed only one look at his slight figure to say, “You’re Slim.” He added, “I’m Red.”

Red wasn’t his real name, either, but its appropriateness was obvious. They were friends instantly with the quick unquestioning friendship of young ones not yet quite in adolescence, before even the first stains of adulthood began to make their appearance.

Slim cried, “Hi, Red!” and waved cheerfully, still blinking the sleep out of himself.

Red kept to his croaking whisper, “Quiet! You want to wake somebody?”

Slim noticed all at once that the sun scarcely topped the low hills in the east, that the shadows were long and soft, and that the grass was wet.

Slim said, more softly, “What’s the matter?”

Red only waved for him to come out.

“Of course not.”

“Okay. I’ve got them in the barn. Do you want to see them?”

They were almost at the barn; its huge open door black. Too black. They had been heading there all the time. Slim stopped in his tracks.

He tried to make his words casual. “Are they big?”

“Would I fool with them if they were big? They can’t hurt you. They’re only about so long. I’ve got them in a cage.”

They were in the barn now and Slim saw the large cage suspended from a hook in the roof. It was covered with stiff canvas.

Red said, “We used to have some bird there or something. Anyway, they can’t get away from there. Come on, let’s go up to the loft.”

They clambered up the wooden stairs and Red hooked the cage toward them.

Slim pointed and said, “There’s sort of a hole in the canvas.”

Red frowned. “How’d that get there?” He lifted the canvas, looked in, and said, with relief, “They’re still there.”

“The canvas appeared to be burned,” worried Slim.

“You want to look, or don’t you?”

Slim nodded slowly. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, after all. They might be⁠—

But the canvas had been jerked off and there they were. Two of them, the way Red said. They were small, and sort of disgusting-looking. The animals moved quickly as the canvas lifted and were on the side toward the youngsters. Red poked a cautious finger at them.

“Watch out,” said Slim, in agony.

“They don’t hurt you,” said Red. “Ever see anything like them?”

In 1952 they were about ready to give up trying to climb Mt. Everest. It was the photographs that kept them going.

As photographs go, they weren’t much; fuzzy, streaked and with just dark blobs against the white to be interested in. But those dark blobs were living creatures. The men swore to it.

I said, “What the hell, they’ve been talking about creatures skidding along the Everest glaciers for forty years. It’s about time we did something about it.”

Jimmy Robbons (pardon me, James Abram Robbons) was the one who pushed me into that position. He was always nuts on mountain climbing, you see. He was the one who knew all about how the Tibetans wouldn’t go near Everest because it was the mountain of the gods, he could quote me every mysterious manlike footprint ever reported in the ice 25,000 feet up, he knew by heart every tall story about the spindly white creatures, speeding along the crags just over the last heartbreaking camp which the climbers had managed to establish.

It’s good to have one enthusiastic creature of the sort at Planetary Survey headquarters.

The last photographs put bite into his words, though. After all, you might just barely think they were men.