As they piled on, Cleevy had another inspiration. He imagined himself to be a snake, very fast, deadly, with poison fangs that could take a wolf’s life in an instant.
They were off him at once. Cleevy hissed, and arched his boneless neck. The wolves howled angrily, but showed no inclination to attack.
Then Cleevy made a mistake. He knew that he should stand firm and brazen it out. But his body had its own ideas. Involuntarily he turned and sprinted away.
The wolves loped after him, and glancing up, Cleevy could see the vultures gathering for the remains. He controlled himself and tried to become a snake again, but the wolves kept coming.
The vultures overhead gave him an idea. As a spaceman he knew what the land looked like from the air. Cleevy decided to become a bird. He imagined himself soaring, balanced easily on an updraft, looking down on the green rolling land.
The wolves were confused. They ran in circles, and leaped into the air. Cleevy continued soaring, higher and higher, backing away slowly as he did so.
Finally he was out of sight of the wolves, and it was evening. He was exhausted. He had lived through another day. But evidently his gambits were good only once. What was he going to do tomorrow, if the rescue ship didn’t come?
After it grew dark, he lay awake for a long time, watching the sky. But all he saw were stars. And all he heard was the occasional growl of a wolf, or the roar of a panther dreaming of his breakfast.
* * * *
Morning came too soon. Cleevy awoke still tired and unrefreshed. He lay back and waited for something to happen.
Where was the rescue ship? They had had plenty of time, he decided. Why weren’t they here? If they waited too long, the panther . . .
He shouldn’t have thought it. In answer, he heard a roar on his right.
He stood up and moved away from the sound. He decided he’d be better off facing the wolves . . .
He shouldn’t have thought that either, because now the roar of the panther was joined by the howl of a wolf pack.
Cleevy met them simultaneously. A green-yellow panther stepped daintily out of the underbrush in front of him. On the other side, he could make out the shapes of several wolves. For a moment, he thought they might fight it out. If the wolves jumped the panther, he could get away . . .
But they were interested only in him. Why should they fight each other, he realized, when he was around, broadcasting his fears and helplessness for all to hear?
The panther moved toward him. The wolves stayed back, evidently content to take the remains. Cleevy tried the bird routine, but the panther, after hesitating a moment, kept on coming.
Cleevy backed toward the wolves, wishing he had something to climb. What he needed was a cliff, or even a decent-sized tree ...
But there were shrubs! With inventiveness born of desperation, Cleevy became a six-foot shrub. He didn’t really know how a shrub would think, but he did his best.
He was blossoming now. And one of his roots felt a little wobbly. The result of that last storm. Still, he was a pretty good shrub, taking everything into consideration.
Out of the corner of his branches, he saw the wolves stop moving. The panther circled him, sniffed, and cocked his head to one side.
Really now, he thought, who would want to take a bite out of a shrub. You may have thought I was something else, but actually, I’m just a shrub. You wouldn’t want a mouthful of leaves, would you? And you might break a tooth on my branches. Who ever heard of panthers eating shrubs? And I am a shrub. Ask my mother. She was a shrub, too. We’ve all been shrubs, ever since the Carboniferous Age.
The panther showed no signs of attacking. But he showed no signs of leaving, either. Cleevy wondered if he could keep it up. What should he think about next? The beauties of Spring? A nest of robins in his hair.?
A little bird landed on his shoulder.
Isn’t that nice, Cleevy thought. He thinks I’m a shrub, too. He’s going to build a nest in my branches. That’s perfectly lovely. All the other shrubs will be jealous of me.
The bird tapped lightly at Cleevy’s neck.
Easy, Cleevy thought. Wouldn’t want to kill the tree that feeds you . . .
The bird tapped again, experimentally. Then, setting its webbed feet firmly, proceeded to tap at Cleevy’s neck with the speed of a pneumatic hammer.
A damned woodpecker, Cleevy thought, trying to stay shrublike. He noticed that the panther was suddenly restive. But after the bird had punctured his neck for the fifteenth time, Cleevy couldn’t help himself. He picked up the bird and threw it at the panther.
The panther snapped, but not in time. Outraged, the bird flew around Cleevy’s head, scouting. Then it streaked away for the quieter shrubs.
Instantly, Cleevy became a shrub again, but that game was over. The panther cuffed at him. Cleevy tried to run, stumbled over a wolf, and fell. With the panther growling in his ear, he knew that he was a corpse already.
The panther hesitated.
Cleevy now became a corpse to his melting finger tips. He had been dead for days, weeks. His blood had long since drained away. His flesh stank. All that was left was rot and decay. No sane animal would touch him, no matter how hungry it was.
The panther seemed to agree. He backed away. The wolves howled hungrily, but they too were in retreat.
Cleevy advanced his putrefaction several days. He concentrated on how horribly indigestible he was, how genuinely unsavory. And there was conviction in back of his thought. He honestly didn’t believe he would make a good meal for anyone.
The panther continued to move away, followed by the wolves. He was saved! He could go on being a corpse for the rest of his life, if necessary . . .
And then he smelled truly rotten flesh. Looking around, he saw that an enormous bird had landed beside him.
On Earth, it would have been called a vulture.
Cleevy could have cried at that moment. Wouldn’t anything work? The vulture waddled toward him, and Cleevy jumped to his feet and kicked it away. If he had to be eaten, it wasn’t going to be by a vulture.
The panther came back like a lightning bolt, and there seemed to be anger and frustration on that blank, furry face. Cleevy raised his metal bar, wishing he had a tree to climb, a gun to shoot, or even a torch to wave ...
A torch!
He knew at once that he had found the answer. He blazed in the panther’s face, and the panther backed away, squealing. Quickly Cleevy began to burn in all directions, devouring the dry grass, setting fire to the shrubs.
The panther and the wolves darted away.
Now it was his turn! He should have remembered that all animals have a deep, instinctive dread of fire. By God, he was going to be the greatest fire that ever hit this place!
A light breeze came up and fanned him across the rolling land. Squirrels fled from the underbrush and streaked away from him. Families of birds took flight, and panthers, wolves and other animals ran side by side, all thought of food driven from their minds, wishing only to escape from the fire—to escape from him!
Dimly, Cleevy realized that he had now become truly telepathic himself. Eyes closed, he could see on all sides of him, and sense what was going on. As a roaring fire he advanced, sweeping everything before him. And he could feel the fear in their minds as they raced away.
It was fitting. Hadn’t man always been the master, due to his adaptability, his superior intelligence? The same results obtained here, too. Proudly he jumped a narrow stream three miles away, ignited a clump of bushes, flamed, spurted . . .
And then he felt the first drop of water.
He burned on, but the one drop became five, then fifteen then five hundred. He was drenched, and his fuel, the grass and shrubs, were soon dripping with water.
He was being put out.
It just wasn’t fair, Cleevy thought. By rights he should have won. He had met this planet on its own terms, and beaten it—only to have an act of nature ruin everything.
Cautiously, the animals we
re starting to return.
The water poured down. The last of Cleevy’s flames went out. Cleevy sighed, and fainted.
* * * *
“ . . a damned fine job. You held on to your mail, and that’s the mark of a good postman. Perhaps we can arrange a medal.”
Cleevy opened his eyes. The Postmaster was standing over him, beaming proudly. He was lying on a bunk, and overhead he could see curving metal walls.
He was on the rescue ship.
“What happened?” he croaked.
“We got you just in time,” the Postmaster said. “You’d better not move yet. We were almost too late.”
Cleevy felt the ship lift, and knew that they were leaving the surface of 3-M-22. He staggered to the port, and looked at the green land below him.
“It was close,” the Postmaster said, standing beside Cleevy and looking down. “We got the ship’s sprinkler system going just in time. You were standing in the center of the damndest grass fire I’ve ever seen.” Looking down at the unscarred green land, the Postmaster seemed to have a moment of doubt. He looked again, and his expression reminded Cleevy of the panther he had tricked.
“Say—how come you weren’t burned?”
<>
* * * *
JACK WILLIAMSON
If your father read science fiction, he very likely counted Jack Williamson high among his favorite writers; for, young enough to have served with the Air Force in the South Pacific during World War II, Williamson is old enough, and has been writing first-rate science-fiction long enough, to have attained a remarkable status as a sort of combination revered old master and bright new star. It’s close to a quarter of a century since Jack Williamson’s first yarn appeared in the old, earlyAmazing Stories; we can wish him, and the thousands of his fans, no greater good than another twenty-five years as productive as the first, including in it the writing of a great many more superlative short stories like-
The Happiest Creature
The collector puffed angrily into the commandant’s office in the quarantine station, on the moon of Earth. He was a heavy hairless man with shrewd little ice-green eyes sunk deep in fat yellow flesh. He had a genial smile when he was getting what he wanted. Just now he wasn’t.
“Here we’ve come a good hundred light-years, and you can see who I am.” He riffled his psionic identification films under the commandant’s nose. “I intend to collect at least one of those queer anthropoids, in spite of all your silly red tape.”
The shimmering films attested his distinguished scientific attainments. He was authorized to gather specimens for the greatest zoo in the inhabited galaxy, and the quarantine service had been officially requested to expedite his search.
“I see.” The commandant nodded respectfully, trying to conceal a weary frown. The delicate business of safe guarding Earth’s embryonic culture had taught him to deal cautiously with such unexpected threats. “Your credentials are certainly impressive, and we’ll give you whatever help we can. Won’t you sit down?”
The collector wouldn’t sit down. He was thoroughly annoyed with the commandant. He doubted loudly that the quarantine regulations had ever been intended to apply to such a backward planet as Earth, and he proposed to take his specimen without any further fiddlefaddle.
The commandant, who came from a civilization which valued courtesy and reserve, gasped in spite of himself at the terms that came through his psionic translator, but he attempted to restrain his mounting impatience.
“Actually, these creatures are human,” he answered firmly. “And we are stationed here to protect them.”
“Human?” The collector snorted. “When they’ve never got even this far off their stinking little planet!”
“A pretty degenerate lot,” the commandant agreed regretfully. “But their human origins have been well established, and you’ll have to leave them alone.”
The collector studied the commandant’s stern-lipped face and modified his voice.
“All we need is a single specimen, and we won’t injure that.” He recovered his jovial smile. “On the contrary, the creature we pick up will be the luckiest one on the planet. I’ve been in this game a good many centuries, and I know what I’m talking about. Wild animals in their native environments are invariably diseased. They are in constant physical danger, generally undernourished, and always more or less frustrated sexually. But the beast we take will receive the most expert attention in every way.”
A hearty chuckle shook his oily yellow yowls.
“Why, if you allowed us to advertise for a specimen, half the population would volunteer.”
“You can’t advertise,” the commandant said flatly. “Our first duty here is to guard this young culture from any outside influence that might cripple its natural development.”
“Don’t upset yourself.” The fat man shrugged. “We’re undercover experts. Our specimen will never know that it has been collected, if that’s the way you want it.”
“It isn’t.” The commandant rose abruptly. “I will give your party every legitimate assistance, but if I discover that you have tried to abduct one of these people I’ll confiscate your ship.”
“Keep your precious pets,” the collector grunted ungraciously. “We’ll just go ahead with our field studies. Live specimens aren’t really essential, anyhow. Our technicians have prepared very authentic displays, with only animated replicas.”
“Very well.” The commandant managed a somewhat sour smile. “With that understanding, you may land.”
He assigned two inspectors to assist the collector and make certain that the quarantine regulations were respected. Undercover experts, they went on to Earth ahead of the expedition, and met the interstellar ship a few weeks later at a rendezvous on the night side of the planet.
The ship returned to the moon, while the outsiders spent several months traveling on the planet, making psionic records and collecting specimens from the unprotected species. The inspector reported no effort to violate the Covenants, and everything went smoothly until the night when the ship came back to pick up the expedition.
Every avoidable hazard had been painstakingly avoided. The collector and his party brought their captured specimens to the pickup point in native vehicles, traveling as Barstow Brothers’ Wild Animal Shows. The ship dropped to meet them at midnight, on an uninhabited desert plateau. A thousand such pickups had been made without an incident, but that night things went wrong.
A native anthropoid had just escaped from a place of confinement. Though his angered tribesmen pursued, he had outrun them in a series of stolen vehicles. They blocked the roads, but he got away across the desert. When his last vehicle stalled, he crossed a range of dry hills on foot in the dark. An unforeseen danger, he blundered too near the waiting interstellar ship.
His pursuers discovered his abandoned car, and halted the disguised outsiders to search their trucks and warn them that a dangerous convict was loose. To keep the natives away from the ship, the inspectors invented a tale of a frightened man on a horse, riding wildly in the opposite direction.
They guided the native officers back to where they said they had seen the imaginary horseman, and kept them occupied until dawn. By that time, the expedition was on the ship, native trucks and all, and safely back in space.
The natives never recaptured their prisoner. Through that chance-in-a-million that can never be eliminated by even the most competent undercover work, he had got aboard the interstellar ship.
The fugitive anthropoid was a young male. Physically, he appeared human enough, even almost handsome. Lean from the prison regime, he carried himself defiantly erect. Some old injury had left an ugly scar across his cheek and his thin lips had a snarling twist, but he had a poised alertness and a kind of wary grace.
He was even sufficiently human to possess clothing and a name. His filthy garments were made of twisted animal and vegetable fibers and the skins of butchered animals. His name was Casey James.
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He was armed like some jungle carnivore, however, with a sharpened steel blade. His body, like his whole planet, was contaminated with parasitic organisms. He was quivering with fear and exhaustion, like any hunted animal, the night he blundered upon the ship. The pangs of his hunger had passed, but a bullet wound in his left arm was nagging him with unalleviated pain.
In the darkness, he didn’t even see the ship. The trucks were stopped on the road, and the driver of the last had left it while he went ahead to help to adjust the loading ramp. The anthropoid climbed on the unattended truck and hid himself under a tarpaulin before it was driven aboard.
Though he must have been puzzled and alarmed to find that the ship was no native conveyance, he kept hidden in the cargo hold for several days. With his animal craftiness, he milked one of the specimen animals for food, and slept in the cab of an empty truck. Malignant organisms were multiplying in his wounded arm, however, and pain finally drove him out of hiding.
He approached the attendants who were feeding the animals, threatened them with his knife, and demanded medical care. They disarmed him without difficulty and took him to the veterinary ward. The collector found him there, already scrubbed and disinfected, sitting up in his bed.
“Where’re we headed for?” he wanted to know.
He nodded without apparent surprise when the collector told him the mission and the destination of the ship.