Fifteen minutes later, he had released himself and me. We went into the tiny galley, which was next to the cabin and part of the same structure. There we each took a large butcher knife and a large iron cooking pan. And when, after a long wait, one of the midgets came down into the cabin, Raffles hit him alongside the head with a pan before he could yell out. To my horror, Raffles then squeezed the thin throat between his two hands, and he did not let loose until the thing was dead.
'No time for niceties. Bunny,' he said, grinning ghastlily as he extracted the jewel-egg from the corpse's pocket. 'Phillimore's a type of Boojum. If he succeeds in spawning many young, mankind will disappear softly and quietly, one by one. If it becomes necessary to blow up this ship and us with it, I'll not hesitate a moment. Still, we've reduced its forces by one-third. Now let's see if we can't make it one hundred percent.'
He put the egg in his own pocket. A moment later, cautiously, we stuck our heads from the structure and looked out. We were in the forepart, facing the foredeck, and thus the old salt at the wheel couldn't see us. The other two midgets were working in the rigging at the orders of the steersman. I suppose that the thing actually knew little of sailsmanship and had to be instructed.
'Look at that, dead ahead,' Raffles said. 'This is a bright clear day, Bunny. Yet there's a patch of mist there that has no business being there. And we're sailing directly into it.'
One of the midgets was holding a device which looked much like Raffles' silver cigarette case except that it had two rotatable knobs on it and a long thick wire sticking up from its top. Later, Raffles said that he thought that it was a machine which somehow sent vibrations through the ether to the spaceship on the bottom of the straits. These vibrations, coded, of course, signalled the automatic machinery on the ship to extend a tube to the surface. And an artificial fog was expelled from the tube.
His explanation was unbelievable, but it was the only one extant. Of course, at that time neither of us had heard of wireless, although some scientists knew of Hertz's experiments with oscillations. And Marconi was to patent the wireless telegraph the following year. But Phillimore's wireless must have been far advanced over anything we have in 1924.
'As soon as we're in the mist, we attack,' Raffles said.
A few minutes later, wreaths of grey fell about us, and our faces felt cold and wet. We could barely see the two midgets working furiously to let down the sails. We crept out onto the deck and looked around the cabin's corner at the wheel. The old tar was no longer in sight. Nor was there any reason for him to be at the wheel. The ship was almost stopped. It obviously must be over the space vessel resting on the mud twenty fathoms below.
Raffles went back into the cabin after telling me to keep an eye on the two midgets. A few minutes later, just as I was beginning to feel panicky about his long absence, he popped out of the cabin.
'The old man was opening the petcocks,' he said. 'This ship will sink soon with all that water pouring in.'
'Where is he?' I said.
'I hit him over the head with the pan,' Raffles said. 'I suppose he's drowning now.'
At that moment, the two little sailors called out for the old sailor and third member of the trio to come running. They were lowering the cutter's boat and apparently thought there wasn't much time before the ship went down. We ran out at them through the fog just as the boat struck the water. They squawked like chickens suddenly seeing a fox, and they leaped down into the boat. They didn't have far to go since the cutter's deck was now only about two feet above the waves. We jumped down into the boat and sprawled on our faces. Just as we scrambled up, the cutter rolled over, fortunately away from us, and bottom up. The lines attached to the davit had been loosed, and so our boat was not dragged down some minutes later when the ship sank.
A huge round form, like the back of a Brobdingnagian turtle, broke water beside us. Our boat rocked, and water shipped in, soaking us. Even as we advanced on the two tiny men, who jabbed at us with their knives, a port opened in the side of the great metal craft. Its lower part was below the surface of the sea and suddenly water rushed into it, carrying our boat along with it. The ship was swallowing our boat and us along with it.
Then the port had closed behind us, but we were in a metallic and well-lit chamber. While the fight raged, with Raffles and me swinging our pans and thrusting our knives at the very agile and speedy midgets, the water was pumped out.
As we were to find out, the vessel was sinking back to the mud of the bottom.
The two midgets finally leaped from the boat onto a metal platform. One pressed a stud in the wall, and another port opened. We jumped after them, because we knew that if they got away and got their hands on their weapons, and these might be fearsome indeed, we'd be lost. Raffles knocked one off the platform with a swipe of the pan, and I slashed at the other with my knife.
The thing below the platform cried out in a strange language, and the other one jumped down beside him. He sprawled on top of his fellow, and within a few seconds they were melting together.
It was an act of sheer desperation. If they had had more than one-third of their normal intelligence, they probably would have taken a better course of action. Fusion took time, and this time we did not stand there paralysed with horror. We leaped down and caught the thing halfway between its shape as two men and its normal, or natural, shape. Even so, tentacles with the poisoned claws on their ends sprouted, and the blue eyes began to form. It looked like a giant version of the thing in Persano's matchbox. But it was only two-thirds as large as it would have been if we'd not slain the detached part of it on the cutter. Its tentacles also were not as long as they would have been, but even so we could not get past them to its body. We danced around just outside their reach, cutting the tips with knives or batting them with the pans. The thing was bleeding, and two of its claws had been knocked off, but it was keeping us off while completing its metamorphosis. Once the thing was able to get to its feet, or I should say, its pseudopods, we'd be at an awful disadvantage.
Raffles yelled at me and ran toward the boat. I looked at him stupidly, and he said, 'Help me, Bunny!'
I ran to him, and he said, 'Slide the boat onto the thing, Bunny!'
'It's too heavy!' I yelled, but I grabbed the side while he pushed on its stern; and somehow, though I felt my intestines would spurt out, we slid it over the watery floor. We did not go very fast, and the thing, seeing its peril, started to stand up. Raffles stopped pushing and threw his frying pan at it. It struck the thing at its head end, and down it went. It lay there a moment as if stunned, which I suppose it was.
Raffles came around to the side opposite mine, and when we were almost upon the thing, but still out of reach of its vigorously waving tentacles, we lifted the bow of the boat. We didn't raise it very far, since it was very heavy. But when we let it fall, it crushed six of the tentacles beneath it. We had planned to drop it squarely on the middle of the thing's loathsome body, but the tentacles kept us from getting any closer.
Nevertheless, it was partially immobilised. We jumped into the boat and, using its sides as a bulwark, slashed at the tips of the tentacles that were still free. As the ends came over the side, we cut them off or smashed them with the pans. Then we climbed out, while it was screaming through the openings at the ends of the tentacles, and we stabbed it again and again. Greenish blood flowed from its wounds until the tentacles suddenly ceased writhing. The eyes became lightless; the greenish ichor turned black-red and congealed. A sickening odour, that of its death, rose from the wounds.
Chapter 8
* * *
It took several days to study the controls on the panel in the vessel's bridge. Each was marked with a strange writing which we would never be able to decipher. But Raffles, the ever redoubtable Raffles, discovered the control that would move the vessel from the bottom to the surface, and he found out how to open the port to the outside. That was all we needed to know.
Meantime, we ate and drank from the ship's stores which
had been laid in to feed the old tar. The other food looked nauseating, and even if it had been attractive, we'd not have dared to try it. Three days later, after rowing the boat out onto the sea – the mist was gone – we watched the vessel, its port still open, sink back under the waters. And it is still there on the bottom, for all I know.
We decided against telling the authorities about the thing and its ship. We had no desire to spend time in prison, no matter how patriotic we were. We might have been pardoned because of our great services. But then again we might, according to Raffles, be shut up for life because the authorities would want to keep the whole affair a secret.
Raffles also said that the vessel probably contained devices which, in Great Britain's hands, would ensure her supremacy. But she was already the most powerful nation on Earth, and who knew what Pandora's box we'd be opening? We did not know, of course, that in twenty-three years the Great War would slaughter the majority of our best young men and would start our nation toward second-classdom.
Once ashore, we took passage back to London. There we launched the month's campaign that resulted in stealing and destroying every one of the sapphire-eggs. One had hatched, and the thing had taken refuge inside the walls, but Raffles burned the house down, though not until after rousing its human occupants. It broke our hearts to steal jewels worth in the neighbourhood of a million pounds and then destroy them. But we did it, and so the world was saved.
Did Holmes guess some of the truth? Little escaped those grey hawk's eyes and the keen grey brain behind them. I suspect that he knew far more than he told even Watson. That is why Watson, in writing The Problem of Thor Bridge., stated that there were three cases in which Holmes had completely failed.
There was the case of James Phillimore, who returned into his house to get an umbrella and was never seen again. There was the case of Isadora Persano, who was found stark mad, staring at a worm in a match box, a worm unknown to science. And there was the case of the cutter Alicia, which sailed on a bright spring morning into a small patch of mist and never emerged, neither she nor her crew ever being seen again.
BRASS AND GOLD
(OR HORSE AND ZEPPELIN
IN BEVERLY HILLS)
Foreword
* * *
This is one of The Beverly Hills Trilogy, the other two being 'Down in the Black Gang' and 'Riders of the Purple Wage.' All were written while I lived in Beverly Hills, and all take place there. I lived for the first and I hope the last time in my life in an apartment building while in B.H. My cat and I got a little crazier each day, a little unhappier. One day, when I opened the lid of a mailbox and a hand came out and took the letter I was about to drop in, I knew I had to get out. It was either that or go amok.
So we moved to a small house on South Holt in Los Angeles, not far from Beverly Hills but far enough – I thought. Then a flash flood barrelled down Burton Way and around the corner and down into my garage, which was set halfway below the street level. Over half of my collection of books and magazines, still in packing boxes, was destroyed. All my Oz books, my Tarzans and Doc Savages and many other valuable pulps, many of my science-fiction books and magazines, including Science Wonder and Air Wonder, stuff I'd been collecting since 1929, a lot of my manuscripts, and so on.
So we moved to the biggest house I'd ever owned deeper in the city. I did sort of dislike leaving the huge fir tree and the giant raven which sat on top of it, but I wasn't far enough from the maleficent influence of B.H.
I was somewhat happy in the big house on South Burnside, and when I got laid off with thousands of others by the aerospace industry a month before the first landing on the moon, I became very happy. I decided to take the plunge, become a full-time writer. I didn't have to travel more than a few feet on foot to go to work. No more ninety-mile roundtrips each day on the freeway. And I was never going to work for anybody else again. If things got so bad I couldn't make a living at writing, I'd take up bank robbing.
I don't live now in the land of earthquakes and mudslides. I live in a land of cyclones, violent electrical storms, and ice-age winters. I like it. But the strange thing is that when I go to the L.A. area for a visit, I now like it. I don't even get uneasy when I walk through Beverly Hills, though I do make a wide detour around the street-corner mailboxes.
h.a.z.i.b.h.
* * *
A man named Brass lived in Beverly Hills in its slum area south of the tracks along
Santa Monica Boulevard
. Brass was surrounded by Golds, Goldsteins, Goldbergs, Goldfarbs, and by Silvers, Silversteins, Silverbergs, and Silverfarbs.
'I give up! I surrender!' he would yell out of his apartment window when the gold of the full moon had turned green with smog. He would take another swallow from the fifth of Old Turkey, smack his lips, and lean out of the window again.
'Carry me off in your Brinks to your bank, and lock me up in the vault! Melt me down! Make rings and bracelets from me! But you will find that there is more to me than a potential profit in money! Brass is good for more than herding horses or boozing it up!'
Brass was, if you believed the neighbours, a drunken goy poet from Utah. He was supposed to have been a sheepman before being driven from the land by the cattle barons. This rumour infuriated Brass, who was born of a long line of horse raisers. He was also maddened by the other rumour, which said that he was a cowboy.
Where he came from, he could ride for a day and not see a cow, he would shout out the window. But no one seemed to hear him. At night the neighbours were holding noisy parties which shut out all outside sounds or they were attending parties elsewhere.
In the daytime the men were at their offices and the wives were leaning out of their windows and shouting at their neighbours across the way. Between the buildings were complexes of clotheslines on which hung hundred-dollar bills drying in the smog-green and dollar-green sun.
'It isn't like it was in the old country, the Bronx,' Mrs Gold cried to her neighbour. 'There it was people that counted the money, not money that counted the people!'
'For God's sakes, shut up!' Brass roared out of his window. 'I'm a poet! I can't write poetry while all this talk of money, which I don't have, anyway, is making the welkin ring!'
Mrs Samantha Gold saw his mouth moving in the gold of his beard. She smiled and waved. Time was when she wasn't so friendly. The day she looked out of her third-story window into the second-story window of the apartment building next door and saw a bearded man with long hair, wearing a hat, and reading a tall thick book, she thought he was a Talmudic scholar or a rabbi or both.
It is a well-known fact that no Talmudic scholars or rabbis live north of Olympic Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It is not good for them, they can't pay the high rents, and they cause embarrassing pauses in conversations. If caught in town on any day but Saturday, they are scourged back to Olympic and southwards with credit cards, which have sharp cutting edges.
Mrs Gold called the city police the first time she saw Brass. But the investigating officer reported that Brass had no car. He could not be persecuted with overtime parking tickets or a summons for running red lights. The officer would, however, watch Brass closely. There was always the chance he would jaywalk.
The report ended up on the desk of the Gentile mayor. In a speech to the Chamber of Commerce, he revealed that there were people in the city who paid less than $400 a month rent. Some were not paying over $150 a month.
'I'm all for the depressed and underprivileged, as you well know!' the mayor thundered. 'But that kind of people must get out! They're ruining the image of Beverly Hills!'
Wild applause.
Mrs Samantha Gold talked to the cop and found out that Brass was not a rabbi. He wasn't even Jewish.
'Time was when you could identify a person by the way he looked,' she said. 'Everything's mixed up now. Even the young businessmen sometimes look like hippies.'
She added, when the cop eyed her, 'But well-dressed hippies with expensive clothes. And clean.'
> 'That's right,' he said. 'Take me. Irish Catholic, and yet my name's Oliver Francis Cromwell.'
Cromwell was not eyeing her because of her near-subversive remarks. She was just over thirty, and, if she would lose fifteen pounds, she could have worked as a double for Sophia Loren.
Mrs Gold, two months before, had looked more like Sophie Tucker or Sidney Greenstreet. She was of the Conservative faith, but, where others were addicted to whiskey or cigarettes or heroin, she lusted after pork on rye with mushroom gravy. Her husband locked her in the bedroom and slipped her a restricted but well-balanced and Mosaically correct breakfast through a small door originally installed for the dog. At noon the maid pushed through another tray. At evening her husband let her out of the bedroom but supervised her while she cooked.
Nevertheless, she sometimes succeeded in her smuggling. Once, her husband unexpectedly came home at noon, and she had to put the sandwich and gravy in a plastic container and lower it outside the window on a string.
Brass, the golden poet, hungry because he had spent his month's money on rent and Old Turkey, took the sandwich and gravy and ate them.
Mrs Gold's husband, searching for hidden food, discovered the string, but he could prove nothing. The next day, Mrs Gold found that she had lost enough weight to squeeze through the dog door. She went to Brass' apartment to thank him for having saved her and also to demand the sandwich back. And they fell in love.
Samantha Gold read much because she had little else to do. She knew, or thought she knew, why she was in love with Brass. He resembled her father when he was young, though Brass was much taller. There were other reasons, of course. He was a poet. And she was even more thrilled because he was a cowboy, though he soon set her straight on that.