“I surmise that it has to be a mechanism very like our own. That can be the only explanation for the tear in the fabric of space. We observed him as he turned his own Omniscope in our direction and the beams of the two devices interfered with each other, creating the disruption that has bridged the gap between our two worlds...”
“Oh,” said the professor succinctly before qualifying this pearl of wisdom with a superfluous, “Ah.”
The debate was obviously at an end.
Kong sent the launch hurtling into a broad channel lined with the corkscrew trees. It seemed to lead straight to the cyclopean tower.
“Let us all be on our guard,” he warned as we cocked our weapons.
Then some of the tree trunks moved in the water, and I realised that we were surrounded by hooting stilt-men who had hidden their upper bodies in the thick foliage.
“Hell’s teeth!” the professor bellowed, but their nets were upon us as he cried out. Our launch remained spinning in the water as we were hauled upwards in the sticky mesh. Even though we were hoisted by our own petard, we were well and truly sunk.
IV. Capitulation And Recapitulation
I have no memory of swooning, but I will never forget recovering consciousness at the top of that improbable tower. My self-disgust at passing out like the simpering heroine of dime-novel cliché was allayed by the realisation that both Kong and the professor were also recovering from fainting spells. I concluded fuzzily that we had all been drugged. Our guns were gone, but someone had had sufficient decency to leave me with my handbag. Then I managed to focus on my surroundings and was greeted by the nauseating sight of a nearly naked Monty Monk wearing what looked like a giant turban and holding hands with similarly attired stilt-men.
“Quisling quack-quack blancmange,” Monty announced.
“Toad snipe, toad snipe!” one of the Moon-men snapped, and Monty adjusted his strange headgear.
“Ah, hello? Oh yes, much better! Evening all!”
“What in the blue blazes is going on, dear boy?” the professor demanded. “What have these lanky fiends done to you?”
Monty laughed with a peculiarly girlish giggle. “I’m in the club! I’ve become a member of the lunar élite.” We looked at him as if he had lost the last of the few wits that God had given him. “The tall chaps are just servants around here, you see—it’s the floaty fellows on our heads who are la crème de la crème around here.” The strange hats did indeed look like swollen brains, and I realised with a shock that the clouds we had seen scudding towards the tower had actually been these curious lumps of grey matter.
“Long, long ago,” Monty went on, “before their ancestors came down from the stars and colonised the interior of the Moon, they were all the same. Then evolution took over. The menials who did the work stayed on the ground, growing ever longer legs to get around the swamps, while the nobility simply evolved into a more gaseous form of lighter-than-air being that could float free and enjoy the high life. Nowadays, the élite either sun themselves around the lodestone that holds the air in and lights up the place, or pop down, sit on people’s heads and tell their minions what do. It’s absolutely super! They want me to be part of it—and you too –”
“Now, Monty,” I said, “no one ever pretended that you were the sharpest blade in the shaving kit, but presumably, since you haven’t yet learned to fly, this would mean that they want you to be one of their slaves too.”
“Would it?” Monty asked before adjusting the brain-beast squatting on his head, as if he was tuning the cat’s whisker of a wireless set. “Oh, right, yes—it would.”
“Beatle wig, sandwich board, fondue,” one of the stilt-men ordered sternly while pointing at the three of us with a sucker-tipped finger. We were hauled to our feet and dragged towards a ledge like a gangplank at the edge of the tower. Three floating brains drifted towards us with menacing intent, their eyestalks and vestigial limbs wriggling greedily.
“Montgomery Montgolfier Monk, you are a disgrace to your country and the Crown!” Professor MacGuffin said with disgust. “You may be quite content to wander about naked as the day you were born wearing a power-crazed tea-cosy on your head, but I, sir, am certainly not of that kidney!” The professor struggled, but even under the lesser lunar gravity, he could not shake off his captors. “I am prepared to fight the mesmeric might of these malevolent mentalists with my own will, but spare the lesser fortitude of the woman and my servant –”
Kong turned his placid and inscrutable face to me, and whispered a few words of comfort: “Madam, as I believe Confucius himself once said, ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers!’”
He moved with startling grace, catching his captors off balance and flinging them bodily into the guards holding me. Then the Chinaman’s hands and feet moved with uncanny speed in the reduced gravity, chopping and kicking this way and that. The spindly guards were sent flying and we were free for a moment, but more of the puppet-like stilt-men were already charging up the stairs to seize us.
“Miss Underhill,” Kong cried, even as he was brought down and gagged, “your cigarette lighter –”
It seemed odd that any man should suggest that a woman should commit the social faux pas of smoking outside, even at a time like this. However, as one of the floating monsters reared above me, I guessed what he meant. If the things were lighter than air, then they had to contain pockets of gas like a Zeppelin—gas that was probably combustible.
In a trice, I pulled my lighter from my bag and struck the flint. The brain-beast veered, but I tickled its underside with the naked flame.
There was ghastly, flatulent bang and the ugly lump of grey matter shot off like a skyrocket before exploding messily in mid-air. Everyone else froze for a moment. I advanced on the other creatures, all perched like substandard millinery on the stilt-men’s heads, and the rout began.
The humid and watery environment of the lunar interior had meant that fire, the Achilles’ heel of the floating dictators, had never troubled them before. Once some of the stilt-men had been released from their mental bondage, their minds soon cleared, and they helped us to liberate more of their kind. All-out revolution was in progress around the tower before long. Freedom spread—and I choose my words with care—like wildfire. The brain-beasts knew they were toast and fled for the skies, floating dejectedly away from the lands they had ruled so poorly.
We returned to our launch escorted by a host of joyful stilt-men.
“Parsnip! Parsnip!” they cried gratefully as we cast off, but the comment was lost on us. We tried to be polite by randomly shouting the names of other root vegetables back at them.
We returned to the Omniscope portal uneventfully, and were pleasantly surprised to re-enter the world we knew in time for breakfast.
V. Coda In Codicil
“So you see, I was on the Moon,” Ursula Underhill concluded with a twinkle in her eye.
I stared at her, quite lost for words. “Oh, don’t concern yourself, young man, I didn’t expect you to believe me. Now, could you take my bag and escort me to my room? I am weary and must retire.”
As I took Ursula by the arm and helped her to the elevator, I finally found my voice.
“Why did you never tell anyone before?”
“Well, that was the first thing Monty did. They put him in the booby hatch for a couple of years before he learnt to keep his trap shut.”
“What about the professor?”
“Oh, he wanted to hush it all up. I had worked out that Kong was responsible for most of the actual work, and the old fool was ashamed that he had taken credit for another man’s work—a Chinaman’s creation at that. The ‘professor’ title was also a sore point. I don’t believe he’d ever attended a university, let alone taught at one…”
“And the redoubtable Kong?”
“Well, I don’t know much about the martial arts, but I can assure you that he was very accomplished at the marital ones. We were wed the following spring, you see.”
We reached her room and I helped her to a cushioned chair. Ursula asked me to open her bag and place its contents on the dressing table.
“A gift from my late husband,” she told me.
I found a curious box, not unlike a manual typewriter, with brass controls and some kind of projector.
“I’m so old, my dear,” she said sadly. “My bones are brittle and all my friends have gone. I’m not long for this world, you know.”
“It’s been an honour,” I said, and left her to her thoughts.
Then a strange thing happened in the hallway. I heard a pop, saw a purple flash, and then someone or something clearly said, “Semolina trouser press.”
Ursula Underhill’s door swung open and, concerned, I went back in, but there was no one there and the curious gift from Kong had gone too. Outside the window, a full moon hung over the New York skyline.
I bowed politely in its direction, saying, “Parsnip, parsnip,” before I left the room again and gently closed the door.
Recent work by Andrew J. Wilson has appeared in Weird Tales, Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Professor Challenger: New Worlds, Lost Places, Double Bill: Poems Inspired by Popular Culture and Chilling Horror Short Stories. With Neil Williamson, he co-edited the award-nominated anthology Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction.
Model Organisms
Caroline Grebbell
