Inside Man and Other Science Fiction Stories Part 16

"I just hope I can stay awake," said the Head Witch Doctor wearily. "I've got a six-month backlog of mental cases since the other tribes came."

"If I can help with the laying on of hands, call on me," offered the Super Chief.

"Thanks. I'll keep that in mind. Wait! There's a young girl who"

I left them talking shop and wandered around the compound just as the lights came on. Huge as it was, it seemed more crowded even than New York or Boston, each hut spilling adults and children of all ages into the street, and everywhere under foot ran the mult.i.tudes of dogs that had come along as part of each family. Naturally, I had to say h.e.l.lo every step of the way, so I was glad to join the crowd entering the meeting hut.

By Pigmy standards, the hut was as enormous as Yankee Stadium. There were wooden benches that the Professor had ordered built s.p.a.ced evenly from the entrance to the movie screen at the extreme end, leaving only enough room for the aisles, which right now were jammed with men and women from all over, cl.u.s.tered in loud, gesticulating groups. They mostly spoke English, though I did hear some French and Russian.

"Order, please! Order!" said the voice of Prof. Todd over the loudspeakers mounted on the poles holding up the roof. "Everyone please be seated!"The hubbub died as the people took their seats, including us Pigmies, and I saw Todd in the center aisle with a movie projector.

"This had better be good!" someone said very loudly.

"That," Todd said into his microphone, "is for posterity to judge. But I think my using the secret a.s.sembly call will be justified."

He dimmed the house lights and turned on the projector. The screen lit up with vividly colored swimming shapes that I recognized as bacteria and blood cells. This, of course, was what the Professor and I had been filming with microscope and movie camera. Into this swarming colony came a giant blunt object a pipette and suddenly the bacteria began shrinking. The crowd murmured excitedly.

"That's our secret ingredient!" the Head Witch Doctor said to me through his teeth.

"How did he get hold of it?"

"The work parties?" I suggested, innocently.

He nodded and subsided as the Professor explained that this substance, unknown anywhere else in the world, was shrinking one deadly lyacillus after another right before their eyes.

"Why doesn't it shrink the blood cells?" someone called out.

"That," Prof. Todd evaded, "needs more study. After all, I have been here only a few weeks."

"What about viruses?" somebody else inquired.

He was intimating that they too were undoubtedly shrunken, but that his equipment had necessarily been limited in portability, while I, translating all this to the Super Chief with one part of my mind, was using the other part to figure out another question: why hadn't the blood cells also contracted?

The answer came to me so suddenly that I almost jumped up and blurted it out: the blood was from us Pigmies and Lundeen and Mrs. Todd only! Which led to still another question: how would he keep the audience from testing it on their own blood? I didn't know, but my respect for him had grown even greater; I was sure he had it all worked out in his mind.

When the film ended, the scientists sat stunned. One man finally stood up and said, "If ever I have seen a discovery worthy of the n.o.bel Prize, this is it!"

Everybody applauded. Prof. Todd looked as if he wished he had a pebble to kick, so he could say, "Aw, shucks, fellas" They crowded around him, noisier than before the show, while my people left the meeting hut in cold silence.

I pretended to have some reason for going to the laboratory, but my husband took my wrist in his hand and led me politely but firmly to our hut. "We have somematters that need to be taken care of," he said, and the chiefs and witch doctors of the tribes nodded grimly.

He pulled the old trunk from beneath his bunk and opened it. The five rocks looked exactly as they always had. And why not? I had exposed the moss to light until the little scratches I had made grew back again. But I needn't have bothered, I discovered, for he dragged it into the street, filled it with firewood and threw a blazing torch into it.

"There," he said. "Wherever the professor got his sample no longer matters. It is a sheer miracle that it hadn't been discovered long ago." He turned toward me.

"Princess," he said, "you must find and destroy his specimen!"

"Right!" a chief said. "If it is used by everyone, being a Pigmy won't be the great honor it is today!"

"Maybe they won't want the honor," I said diplomatically.

"Not want it?" the Super Chief repeated in outraged amazement. "Have you ever heard such nonsense?"

"Never!" said the Head Witch Doctor, and even I had to join the nodding; I hadn't believed my suggestion for an instant. He pointed in the general direction of the lab and said, "Go! Do your duty!"

I left quickly, as a good little Pigmy wife should, and a few minutes later was at the lab, ringing the doorbell. The Professor peeked at me through the peephole and let me in, pointing to the other stool. I climbed up it as he raised the volume of his radio-looking thing, which he had been listening to.

"This will give you a kick, Princess!" he said with that typical crooked grin.

"Recognize anybody's voice?"

I had been looking intently at the enameled tray he had dumped the test tube into and put up near the night light and wondering how I could get up there without his noticing. It was impossible with him present. I would have to find an excuse for staying after he left and hope he would believe it.

I unfrowned and c.o.c.ked my head toward the radio, pretending to listen and almost fell off the stool, for, hearing the squeaky little voices of Lundeen and Mrs. Todd, I glanced up and saw their cage with its door open and them gone!

"How how " I stammered.

"By tying tag strings together and getting through the air-conditioning duct," he said happily.

"You don't look as if you cared," I said.

"Oh, but I do!" he exclaimed. "Listen! They're at the English hut.""Naturally," I said. "Where else would that silly Anglophile go?"

A genuine British voice could now be heard saying, "It isn't as if we doubted your word, old boy, but how do we know you weren't always this size and that this perfectly ordinary-looking moss you've brought us isn't perfectly ordinary?"

Lundeen's very high, very excited and very fake British voice said, "Dash it all, try it on yourselves!"

"On ourselves?" echoed another speaker. "What if it's poisonous or something?"

"Absolutely," the first man agreed. There was silence, broken by the barking of the ubiquitous dogs outside. "I've got it!" he said. "Why not try it on one of these cursed mongrels?"

"Capital idea!" "Excellent suggestion!" and other compliments led to someone going out into the street and returning shortly with a yapping mutt.

"How do we feed it to him?" someone asked. "In Scotch, like you?"

"I don't think dogs drink.

"Scotch," Lundeen said. "Why not water?"

"Why not indeed?" said the first man. There was a splashing sound followed by a mixing sound, and he said, "Here you are, Bowser! Drink it down like a good fellow," which was succeeded by a lapping sound, then silence.

"Great Scott!" one of the men cried in horror, and the rest made a sort of suppressed retching sound.

"You see? You see?" Lundeen and Mrs. Todd kept shrilling.

When it was all over, the first man asked, "Did anyone think of measuring the poor beast before and after?"

"No, but I'd say he's no more than one-tenth his original size," a man answered.

The others agreed.

"Well," the first one said briskly, "let's get down to cold facts, shall we? The stuff works; I think we're all convinced of that. That being so, the next question is: have you brought us enough to serve as a starter set?"

"Plenty!" shrilled Lundeen. "Todd dumped the same amount into a tray and kept it under a light and now the tray is almost overflowing!"

I looked up at the tray and down at Prof. Todd, who was listening with a great beatific smile on his face. So that was why he had emptied the test tube with such seeming indifference.With equal seeming indifference, I moved my stool under the light. He didn't notice.

I took a beaker of some acid and warily stood on the stool. His back was to me when I poured the acid into the tray. I climbed down and put the beaker back just as he turned off the radio and swung around to face me.

"Let's get out of here, Princess," he said, grinning. "Those two have to get back in again without suspecting we know what they've done."

Of course, I a.s.sented readily. Half of my job was done. The only problem remaining was: how could I get rid of the last of the moss in the British guest hut?

Todd and I said good night, and he made for his hut while I went toward the British one. Crouching in its shadow, I waited until after the light was doused. When I was sure they were all asleep, I began edging to the door. I heard a faint noise and stopped dead. A man in pajamas came stealing out. He darted from hut to hut, pausing at each one to look about before going on to the next. He slipped into the seventh hut, and in a moment the light went on.

I sneaked up to the hut and listened in its shadow, naturally.

"Mean by waking us up?" a heavy Slavic voice was demanding.

"I had to," a British voice said urgently. "It's of the utmost importance. Now please listen attentively. I may not have time to repeat." And he told them all about Lundeen, Mrs. Todd, the moss and the dog.

When he finished, someone laughed. As if at a signal, the others began laughing, too.

"Please! Please!" the British voice said. "If you don't believe me, try it on a dog. But do it quickly, before I'm missed!"

"It is your story," another Slavic voice said. "You get the dog."

I retreated behind the hut as the man in pajamas came out and looked up and down the street. "Just my luck," he muttered bitterly, "they're all asleep. Here, Spot! Here, Prince, Fido, Rags!" And he snapped his fingers until a dog a few huts away came ambling up with its tail wagging drowsily.

He took it inside. For the next s.p.a.ce of time I was glad again that I only had to hear the process instead of seeing it.

"So," the first Slavic voice said stolidly. "It is like you say. The dog is maybe a tenth of its former size. So?"

"What good is that?" another said. "Who would want such little dogs?"

"For this you expect to get paid?" the leader asked.

"d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n and double d.a.m.n!" the Englishman exploded in a furious whisper.

"Do you think I'm a traitor? I brought you some of this stuff because it might havemilitary importance. Don't ask me how I'm only a scientist. But if it does, I don't want one half of the world using it on the other half and that means your half as well as mine!"

"Da, we have such soft-headed people among us, too," said the leader. "But it could be. It could be..."

"Well, you work it out yourselves," the Englishman said. "I must get back now."

"Wait!" said the leader. "What should we do with the little dog?"

"That's your problem," said the Englishman, sprinting out the door.

So I set the hut afire, then went down to the British hut and did the same there. They were lovely fires. I stood admiring them while the men of both huts came rushing out.

"Did you save anything?" one of the Englishmen asked another.

"Just the moss and my tennis racquet," the second replied.

My heart fell. But it lifted as I followed the Englishman with the peculiar morality to the Russian hut.

"Did you save the moss?" he asked anxiously.

"Just that and my balalaika," the leader said.

I trudged worriedly home to bed. My husband, the Head Witch Doctor, opened his eyes and asked, "Have you destroyed the moss?"

"Half of it," I said with elliptical truth. I didn't dare tell him now I had two more halves to destroy.

V.

When he was gone the next morning, I took the revolver from his footlocker and put it in my pocket, then went asking for the English and Russian scientists. I was told that Dr. Perry and Prof. Kropotkin were with Todd, whom they had asked to radio for a bush plane. I ran to the lab. Todd and the two men were in the jeep, about to leave.

"Stop!" I yelled. "I have to come along!"

They waited for me. When I was aboard, Todd stepped on the gas. I looked at their luggage. Each had an overnight bag, donated, no doubt, by luckier fellow countrymen. And each overnight bag carried the moss, I was sure.

"Terribly sorry about the fire," said Todd. "Lost everything, eh?"

"Down to the last b.u.t.ton," Dr. Perry said."Me, too," said Prof. Kropotkin. "But why only our two huts?"

"I can't possibly imagine," said Todd dauntingly.

I sat back, trying to work out my strategy. I could shoot Todd and perhaps one of the others, not both, before being overpowered. The jeep would smash into something and spill the moss all over the place. No good. I had to get aboard the bush plane somehow and wait for my chance.

The plane was waiting on the airfield when we got there. Pulling up alongside it, Prof Todd shook hands with both men, put his hand in a pocket, brought it out and shook my hand. When he let go, I felt something wadded up in, my palm. I didn't have time to look as he all but pushed us into the plane.

"Have a good trip!" he sang out. "As for you, Princess Wamba, come back when you're ready!"

The pilot closed the door and came through for the fares. I opened my hand and found in it a ball of green papers. When I smoothed them out, the pilot goggled and said. "Golly, Princess, I can't change that!"

Prof. Todd had slipped me four thousand dollar bills!

I smiled nervously and promised to have one changed when we landed, so I could pay him. He said, "Never mind. Royalty rides free on my plane!"

"Thank you," I said regally.

He disappeared up front, closing the door behind him. I sat in back of the two men until we took off and leveled out. Then I got up and menaced them with the revolver.

"All right," I said, "hand over the moss and no funny business or you get plugged!"

Dr. Perry studied me and the gun. "What bad movie is that from?"