Read Ebook: Jupiter's Joke by Haley A L Freas Kelly Illustrator

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Ebook has 150 lines and 11455 words, and 3 pages

I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.

That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise! The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor, I eased along.

But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally. There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty.

Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing, though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.

I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even intimate--or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its expression.

I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone else. "I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming lady," I informed him. "However, I have something very special in the way of jewels--not with me, naturally--and the rumor is that she might be interested."

He reared back at that, and reaching up, plucked his right eye out of the socket and reeled it out to the end of a two-foot tentacle, and then he examined me with it just like an old-time earl with one of those things they called monocles. Pard hadn't warned me about those removable eyes, for reasons best known to himself. I still wake up screaming....

Anyway, when that thing pulled out its eye and held it toward me, I backed up against the side of the ship like I'd been half-electrocuted. Then I gagged. But I could still remember that I had to live in that suit for awhile, so I held on. Then that monstrosity reeled in the eye, and I gagged again.

My actions didn't bother him a bit. "Jewels, did you say?" he tapped out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....

A shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it, and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.

Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, "How's about taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida, old pal?" Or words to that effect.

He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. "Anything! Just anything you desire, my dearest friend."

I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. "I'm Casey Ritter. What's your label, chum?"

"Attaboy," he ticked coyly.

"Attaboy?" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. "Who named you that?"

He simpered. "My dear friend, Pard Hoskins."

I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. "How come you aren't mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?"

He hung his silly head. "I fear I am colorblind," he confessed sadly.

Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him. "Lead off, old pal," I sang out, and then had to tap it. "I'll follow in my boat."

Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?

Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts. Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.

Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions, all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt.

Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth.

It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly. It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant.

In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my eyeballs felt paralyzed.

Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C. persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.

Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was fumbling, too. "Zero hour, chump!" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the airlock.

That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of space.

In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me--just right, in fact--and still they had furniture sitting around in the air as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?

Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.

We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it glowed like the inside of a red light.

No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all that red!

A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one!

Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple--not a green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit. Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding, shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire.

Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went across to her alone with the arsenic.

Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.

"Who from?" asked Akroida.

That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code at all.

"Who from?" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush. "Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly remarkable jewels," he confessed coyly.

Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. "His name?" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my direction. "Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?"

Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. "I--uh--the stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention to the--uh--trader. He does seem to resemble an--ah--earthman." He ducked his head and fearfully waited.

A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. "An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?"

Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.

The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with that dragon's tail of hers.

I began to quake all over. My nice little jail, I thought frantically. My cozy little cell. Those dear sweet guards. I'd left them all to be eaten alive by that purple devil. Why didn't I bat my silly brains out on my cell wall when this idea first sneaked in? Marooned on that damned hassock a hundred feet above the floor I began to think, and fast.

"Bring him here!" roared Akroida, tapping it out so fast it sounded like gunfire. She gnashed her mandibles and glared until I started shriveling. "Bring him here! He'll dare to come around and insult me, will he? I'll flail him limb from limb and chew his bones to shreds! I'll bite him into chunks! I'll.... Bring him here!"

She made a furious lunge at Attaboy. Trembling and blanching to a muddy lavender, he got out of there and scrambled over to me with big tears rolling down his stiff shell cheeks. Why the poor purple sap, I thought, he really cares! These things really have feelings! I looked at him with new respect and even a little affection.

"Look, kid," I admonished, trying to keep my fingers from shaking as I tapped. "Just don't worry about a thing. I still think I can handle this. Just take me across slow and easy, and we'll hope for the best."

With a mournful sigh he picked me up, tossed me onto his shoulder, and as per instructions, drifted over to the floating platform.

All I had was the little bottle of Pard's scorp-scent. "This had better be good!" I confided to the image of Pard Hoskins, which somehow managed to get between me and that raging she-dragon on the couch. "This had sure better be good, son!"

I waited until Akroida was leaning forward practically gnashing her mandibles in my face while her front pair of legs grabbed and pawed for me. She was too fat and bulky to jump at me, or I'd have been a dead planet-bo right there. But I had to take the chance. There wasn't a drop of perfume to waste. At the last moment I lifted that precious little bottle and squirted the stuff right in her face.

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