The early williamson, p.22
The Early Williamson, page 22
That unearthly, half-seen shape leaped at him.
He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the floor. Claws were rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit. His arm was seized crushing in half-visible jaws.
Desperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated electrode was driven toward his body. He fought to keep it away; he knew that it would burn through even the insulated fabric of his suit.
A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound, as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and felt a thin pencil of pain drawn along his body, where a claw cut his skin.
Suddenly the suit was full of the earthy fetor of the monster’s body, nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and thrust upward hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood trickling from the wound.
A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was carried from his hand. Flung to the side of the room, it clattered to the floor; and then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing the breath from his lungs. The monster stood upon his body and clawed at him.
Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet, encountering a great, hard body. Futilely he beat and thrust with his arms against the pillarlike limb.
His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick fabric. He heard it tear again, along his right thigh. But he felt no pain, and thought the claws had not reached the skin.
It was the yellow dog that gave him the chance to recover the weapon. The animal had been running back and forth in the opposite end of the room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now, with the mad courage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at the monster.
A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled it back across the room. It lay still, broken, whimpering.
For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from Thad’s body. And Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung himself across the room, snatched up the welding tool.
In an instant the creature was upon him again. But he met it with the incandescent electrode. He was crouched in a corner, now, where it could come at him from only one direction. Its claws still slashed at him ferociously. But he was able to cling to the weapon, and meet each onslaught with hot metal.
Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his blind, thrusting blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A terrible choking, strangling sound came from the air. And he heard the thrashing struggles of wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He prodded the thing again and again with the hot electrode, and it did not move. It was dead.
The creature’s body was so heavy that Thad had to return to the bridge, and shut off the current in the gravity plates along the keel, before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which he had entered the flier, and consigned it to space…
Five days later Thad brought the Red Dragon into the atmosphere of Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in response to his signals, and docked the flier safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again, with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard o inspect the vessel.
Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in the hold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at the treasure, he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of white crystal, and looked once more upon the still form of the girl within it. Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat. Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so lovely. How terrible her last days of life must have been, with doom shadowing the vessel, and the men vanishing mysteriously, one by one! Terrible—until she had sought the security of death.
Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half the incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the award of salvage. If only the girl were still living…He felt a poignantly keen desire to hear her voice.
Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. A hasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among glittering gems.
This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty minims of zeronel.
She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.
I entreat the finders of this to have care given her, and to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other claims.
Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and the injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time that must elapse.
If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing upon the ship has destroyed me and all my men.
Please do not fail me.
Levington Cross.
Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its Martian garden of Saffron and purple, among the low ocher hills beside Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where the girl of his dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaulted chamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay, to look into her pallid face, and feel her cold wrist. He kept a nurse in attendance, and had a physician call daily.
A long Martian year went by.
Looking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting was aging him. And it might be a hundred years, he remembered, before Linda Cross came from beneath the drugs’ influence.
He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while Linda lay still young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep; if she might awake, after long years, and see in him only a feeble old man. And he knew that he would not be sorry he had waited, even if he should die before she revived.
On the next day, the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay. He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue, glorious.
A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful wonder, then with confidence, and dawning understanding. And at last she smiled.
People used to ask why I didn’t write something besides science fiction, usually with some implication that they considered it hardly worth writing. The best answer is that I love and respect science fiction, that it’s a big element in my whole mental world, and that it has always given me a flexible and sufficient vehicle for what I wanted to say.
Now and then, however, I have tried something else. ‘We Ain’t Beggars’ was an attempt at what used to be called quality fiction. At first I was doubtful about its place in this book, but it does illustrate another chapter in the writing life of the early Williamson—and anyhow it’s only three thousand words.
In the depression year of 1932, with Clayton in trouble and Gernsback not paying, my writing income fell to $465. I retreated to the family ranch, where I could help a bit with the work and live for almost nothing. When I wanted a vacation from the typewriter that summer, I bought a backpack and set out on foot, with about $40 for expenses.
I tried hitchhiking, but got no rides. After I learned to catch the freight trains, I had better luck. I rode them a thousand miles, across New Mexico, into Colorado as far as Denver, back home through Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle.
I stopped a few days at a fifty-cent hotel in each of the interesting cities to explore the sights and look for science fiction in the public library—never finding much of that. I toured the steel mil! at Pueblo, hiked up Pikes Peak, discovered burlesque in Denver, panned for gold on Cherry Creek, visited hobo jungles, talked to a lot of people.
Though the freights were uncomfortable, the whole trip was a good adventure. Now and then I encumbered a professional hobo, with his alarming tales about such malevolent railroad bulls as Denver Bob, but most of the men I met were as young and naive as I was, victims of the broken-down economic system, riding the rails in search of some way to survive.
‘We Ain’t Beggars’ came from that trip. Though it is fiction, most of the details I had observed or heard about. Writing it, I was trying hard to put experience into literary form. My success, clearly, was not complete. When I mailed the story to such literary magazines as Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, it came back without comment.
A little richer that fall, with checks from Weird Tales and Amazing, I returned to college for my junior year, though not to West Texas. I rode the Santa Fe freights back to Albuquerque and enrolled there in the University of New Mexico as a psychology major. Understandably discouraged with the fiction business, I had written Dr. Breuer to ask how to become a psychiatrist. His reply convinced me that this was financially impossible, but at least I hoped the psychologists could teach me a little more about people and about myself.
That college year was rewarding. I had a glimpse of the Pueblo Indian cultures and came to know some of the anthropologists who were studying them. I had good fortune in my roommate, Langdon Backus, a civilized and idealistic Easterner who is still a friend. A great teacher, Dr. George St. Claire, gave me a deeper respect for classic literature. I studied biology and helped edit the literary year-book and even learned a little psychology.
‘We Ain’t Beggars’ was published there the following fall, in the New Mexico Quarterly, for no pay at all. The editor had reservations, natural at the time, about soiling his academic pages with such a rude phrase as ‘son of a bitch,’ but finally decided to let it stand. The story says something about American life in those depression years, I think, and maybe something about me.
‘WE AIN’T BEGGARS’
He took the crushed stale bun out of his overalls pocket. It was the last of the four he had bought in Ft. Worth for six pennies. He had meant to save it for tomorrow…
The dog lying against him whined and licked at his hand.
In the cold faint moonlight that fell through the half-open door of the box car he broke the dry bun carefully in half.
‘Here, Tige, ol’ man. It ain’t much. But we’ll git to Uncle Jethro’s tomorrow, shore.’
The bony dog gnawed and gulped the piece of bread. Slowly, with lingering joy, the boy ate his own share, chewing each frugal bite until it became a sweetish liquid in his mouth.
The car lurched and jolted. The boy’s body was sore at hips and shoulders from lying on the bare splintery floor. Through the door rang the incessant rumble of the wheels, and a white arm of moonlight moved back and forth to rest on one or another of the untidy men sleeping with their heads on paper bundles. In worn overalls and thin blue shirt the boy’s slight body was cold; he was glad for Tige’s warm body against him.
A man groaned and rose. A match lit a weary, unshaven face, cast uncertain shadows over motionless bodies. Reek of cheap tobacco filled the car. The man shook out a dusty vest that had been rolled up under his head; he put it on, and walked across the sleepers to close the door.
The roar of the wheels was a little diminished; but yet it filled the car, mighty and unending.
In the new inky darkness the boy felt slightly warmer. He turned over, and drew Tige’s rough body closer to him.
He tried to go to sleep, and wished that he had another bun. He licked fragments of the last from the corners of his mouth and chewed at them and swallowed.
The hammering of the wheels grew slower and ceased. The train had stopped. In the new silence the boy could hear the snores of sleeping men. The car started again, with a jerk that slid his sore body over the rough planks, stopped as abruptly.
The door had been flung open; the man in the vest peered out furtively.
‘Wake up, you guys,’ he called. ‘The dirty hogheads have set us out, to hell and gone from no place!’
Men stirred and yawned and groaned. They struck matches that lit the car fugitively, rolled cigarettes, moved toward the door with their bundles.
The boy slipped out of the door, and took Tige in his arms to set him down. Cold dry air struck through his thin cotton garments. In the dead light of the narrow waning moon he saw that the car stood on a siding, in a string of empties.
‘She’s coupling up over yonder,’ said the man in the vest.
He walked away, wearily cursing. The boy followed him through the line of cars, calling to Tige.
He saw the train on another track, the engine headlight blazing on telegraph poles and a section shack. A man with a flashlight was coming back along the cars.
‘A damn shack,’ muttered the man in the vest. ‘Get out of sight.’
He and the boy stepped back between two cars.
‘He’ll play hell keeping me off. I’m riding this damn rattler to the end of the division. And then I’m going to eat. Ain’t had a sit down since I left K. C.’
There was a pause, while they shivered in the cold moonlight that struck through between the cars. The man looked cautiously out. Then the boy asked:
‘You got folks waitin’ for you?’
‘Hell, no. I stem what I get.’
Curiously, the man looked at the thin, proud childish face, pallid and grimy in the moonlight.
‘Don’t you bum, kid?’
The boy shook his head.
‘Hell, it’s easy. Just stick with me and we’ll stem hell out of the next dump.’
‘I ain’t no beggar.’
The dog put his velvety head up against the boy’s hand, and whined. The boy looked down at him quickly, and patted the soft fur.
‘Tige and me are hungry,’ he said. ‘But v/e ain’t goin’ to beg. We got folks.’
His slight shoulders stiffened as he looked at the man.
‘Don’t be a fool, kid. We can mooch enough in an hour to last two days. Hell, it’s easy. No sense starving. You’ll get weak, and fall under the wheels.’
‘We ain’t beggars. I’m goin’ to my Uncle Jethro.’
The man started to laugh. Then the whistle sounded two blasts and the train began to move.
‘Them sons of bitches set out all the empties,’ he grumbled. ‘We gotta ride on top.’
He swung on the end of a car as it passed.
The next was a tank car. The boy lifted Tige in his arms and set him on the running board. The dog seemed very heavy; he staggered a little beneath the weight.
‘Easy, ol’ man. I’m a-comin’.’
He climbed on the steps at the end of the car and walked back along the narrow plank to Tige. By the ladder at the middle of the car he sat down, swinging off his feet. He grasped a rung of the ladder with one hand, and curved an arm around Tige’s body.
The boy felt a little queer and dizzy, but he set his jaw and held up his chin.
‘We ain’t beggars, are we, ol’ man?’ he whispered at last to the dog. ‘I reckon he was right about me gittin’ weak. An’ I’m shore sorry about you havin’ to go without. But I can’t beg. An’ we got Uncle Jethro.’
The train gathered speed. The wind grew stronger. Most of the buttons were gone off the shirt, and the wind whipped it away from the boy’s body. He was colder than he had been in the box car.
The car swayed and lurched. The sound of the wheels was the clangor of sledges on a thousand anvils. Ceaseless, powerful, terrible. A demoniac yell that never ended.
The black edge of the grade raced endlessly back at his feet, and interminable rows of weeds. Sometimes cinders rained on him. When one got in his eye, he forgot the cold until tears had washed it out. The arm with which he grasped the ladder was stiff and numb, but he dared not move to exercise the cold and the cramp from his body while the train plunged rocking through the night. He or Tige might fall, and the screaming, inexorable wheels were very near…
Dull eternities dragged away, and he clung shivering to the cold iron.
Lee Haskell came of a proud breed. His mother he knew only as a tight-mouthed face on a fading photograph. He and his father had always lived in lonely independence in the pine shack at the edge of the stony forty acres. Lee did not remember when he had been too small to go with his father to the cotton patch.
A proud and lonely breed. They asked no favors, and fate had given them none. All the year before Lee’s father had been too infirm to help in the field. Lee did his stubborn best. But cotton was five cents, and the boll weevil got into the crop. His father sold the best half the forty, and could not pay the taxes on the rest. He would not ask for a loan.
That spring he was feebler still. Lee put in the crop alone. When the cultivation was but well begun, Toby, the old mule, foundered himself when he broke into Jim Cole’s green corn, and died. Jim Cole, owner of a rich bottom farm, came next day, driving a team of grays to a riding cultivator. He found Lee’s father sitting on a rickety chair in the shade of the lone peach tree by the shack.
‘I’m right sorry about your mule foundering,’ he said. ‘Colonel,’—the stiff pride of the old man’s bearing must have won him the title, for he had seen no military service-‘Colonel, I’m loaning Lee my outfit to plow out his cotton.’
The old man stiffened in his chair.
‘Thankee, sir,’ he said. ‘But I reckon we can make out.’
‘Why, I won’t be needing them for a week, Colonel. We just got through this morning.’
‘We ain’t askin’ nothin’, sir, from nobody.’
Jim Cole laughed. ‘I know you didn’t ask, Colonel. But I’d be glad to loan you the team.’
‘Thankee, sir. But we don’t want it.’
When Cole had abandoned his efforts to lend the team and driven away, the old man called Lee out of the shack where he had been preparing their meal.
‘Did you go beggin’ Jim Cole for help, boy?’ his shrill voice cracked accusingly. ‘Ain’t you got no pride? Beggin’! An’ off a damn Yankee!’
‘I didn’t ask him, Pa. I ain’t spoke a word to him since Toby died.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, Lee my son. We ain’t no poor white trash. And I reckon we can get along without askin’ help from nobody. You jest finish choppin’ out the cotton, Lee. An’ then get what weeds you can with the hoe. An’ don’t be thinkin’ of beggin’!’
During the summer, as Lee toiled in the shrunken, weed-grown field, the old man took by degrees to his bed. One flaming noon, when the boy trudged in from the field, sweat-streaked and dusty, worn hoe on his shoulder, he found Mrs. Cole standing in the door of the shack. A large, energetic, jovial woman; Lee had always liked her. In a basket on her arm were a pail of milk and loaves of white bread and a pat of new butter.
