POGO PLANET

As my ship hit the darkness that was the outer atmosphere of Midplanet, I thrilled to the thought that I, Ajax Calkins, had at last achieved my rightful place among the pioneers of space. Even when my ship bounced on the green soil, flew end over end upwards to come down ka-plunk in the wrong side of a gooey thick swamp, I exulted that I was the first in possession of a major planet that had been overlooked by the rest of the interplanetary crowd.

As I picked myself up from the midst of a pile of miscellaneous equipment, hiking ropes, elephant guns, para-rays, spare shoes and cans of Unifood, and rubbed my bruised arms and head, I thought of how many millions would give their all to be in my place.

Midplanet! How the whole system had thrilled when its discovery was finally determined last year! For decades science had known there was a planet between Saturn and Uranus, ever since Pickering had proved the perturbations of those planets' orbits pointed to a body between them. Yet telescopes had always failed to detect it. Few had taken it seriously. Yet, it was there.

It was discovered finally by electromagnetic induction coils at the Mars Prime Observatory. It was rechecked from Flagstaff and searched for by Tycho Eye. The latter could not see it. It was still invisible, a strangely dark world.

It was then that I conceived my great idea. For years I had secretly nourished my grievance against the world into which I found myself born. All the great heroic acts had been done. The major planets pioneered, Gretelspoon had at last opened up Pluto, and there was nothing left for me to do to show that I too was made of godlike stuff. But Midplanet ... there was my chance!

Hastily I outfitted a small spaceship with all that I would need. Hastily but craftily I had the orbits charted and the controls processed. My destiny was always certain for had it not been my destiny to come into a large fortune early in life? Surely this had been ordained?

Then I had hurtled through space towards Midplanet alone, secretly. The world would not know of my triumph until I returned to tell them and receive their adoring plaudits. Months went past while I endured the hardships of space-sickness, the cosmitch, and voidal ague.

At last Midplanet loomed dark in the celestial panorama. Still it cast no light, still it was a black orb sailing silently on its mighty orbit, unattended by any moon.

Finding that my ship was irrevocably destined to hit the planet, I determined to land rather than turn back. So it came about that I plunged down through the darkness and found to my amazement that after several hundred yards of opaque gaseous envelope, I emerged into brilliant blue sky and rapidly approached the green surface.

After the crash and after I had picked myself up and rubbed arnica on my black-and-blue spots, the problem of the dark planet turned light demanded my attention.

I realized that some strange gas or mixture of gases chanced to make up the outermost strata of the atmosphere of Midplanet. A gaseous compound that absorbed light one way but would not pass it once it had struck the surface of the planet. So that above the planet remained swathed in lightless mystery, while below the sky seemed to radiate blue and the lighting and warmth was held in to appear as a beautiful spring day on Earth.

This then had been the circumstance which had kept Midplanet veiled from the sight of man until I, Ajax Calkins, tore aside the veil. I felt a glow of warmth suffuse my body with pride for this accomplishment.

Buckling a para-ray to my belt (for I did not think heavier weapons were necessary in this peaceful looking scene), I stepped to the door of the ship and forced it open. At my feet the swamp oozed and gurgled. A scant distance away the bank of solid ground lay. I leaped the distance and I am proud to say misjudged it by a mere foot or so. Dragging myself out of the thick gummy mess I clambered to the bank of the strangely greenish soil, placed one foot forward, scowled, and raised my right hand.

"I hereby take possession of this land in my name, Ajax Calkins, and proclaim it subject to my will as Emperor." This I pronounced with firm dignity becoming a Magellan or a Cortez.

You may seem surprised that I should make myself ruler of this land and not merely annex it to the Interplanetary Union? Why should that surprise you? Was it not mine by right of priority? And how, indeed, do you think kingdoms and empires are won?

I am not a modest man. I have always said that I am a man of great destiny. Why should I bow to traditions?

Having satisfied my will, I looked about.

Before me stretched a long rolling plain, green as if covered with fields of grass. Yet it was not grass but a curious green hard clay that seemed to make up the soil. Far to the distance low hills rose. The oddest feature of the soil was the fact that it was interminably interlaced with deep sharp cracks like a clay that had been baked improperly and cracks all over.

It seemed to me that there was a strange discoloration far off in the base of the hills from which white and grey plumes of vapor arose as if marking the factories of some hillside city. A city it could well prove to be and if that were so, then I had found a capital and subjects!

I set out to walk the several miles to the hills. I had sufficient equipment for such a reconnoiter already on me.

The going was not easy. The ground was flat and hard enough to walk on, but the deep cracks and narrow crevices which one constantly came across made the trip difficult. I would have to leap perilously over the more narrow cracks or else carefully find a way around the wider ones.

It seemed to me that it would be difficult to make roads across such a terrain, the bridges would be innumerable. I wondered how the natives got around. I had seen no sign of animals as yet, but that was not to be considered surprising if there were a city so near. There were plants, a large number scattered here and there in clumps, reddish and greenish masses somewhat like the vegetation of our American Western deserts.

After walking and jumping and still more walking and leaping I became tired after about an hour. The city was still a distance away but it could now be seen with greater distinctness. It was indeed what I had thought, a cluster of buildings obviously constructed for intelligent beings and there were indeed columns of smoke rising from them. More than that I could not distinguish.

I had come across no roads as yet which was odd if this were a city though comprehensible considering the nature of the ground.

At last I saw a building of some sort in my path. It was a small structure, hardly more than a frame-work construction of clay. I made my way to it and looked at it. The building itself was nothing, just a frame-work as I had said. It was what was propped up beside it that puzzled and amazed me.

It was a nine-foot cylinder of shining metal. About the middle of this metal shaft was fixed a circular frame. There were a number of what might be controls set in the cylinder just above this central railwork and a large mass like a doughnut running underneath the metal hoop which might have held an engine of some sort. The bottom of the shaft was capped by a large rubbery mass.

I could not figure out what this was. I stood it upright (it was not too heavy) and looked at it from all directions. It was a puzzle. Then I climbed on to the hoop affixed to its middle and sat down. The central shaft ran between my legs, the engine was under me and the controls faced me. It occurred to me that here was a machine designed to be operated by someone in my position and of my general size.

Because I am afraid of nothing, I touched the controls and pressed them. Below me there was a sort of murmuring and rumbling. Then the cylinder seemed to vibrate slightly, to grow more tense. I grasped the metal bar tightly.

There was a terrifying hiss and then a terrific crash and the cylinder suddenly hurtled into the air. I held on for dear life, my composure dreadfully shaken. The whole machine bounced upwards into the air and then came down on its rubber-capped bottom. I held on. It hit, a shaft within the cylinder contracted and absorbed the shock and suddenly flicked out again and up we went.

As I grasped the main tube for dear life I realized what it was. A pogo stick! A giant, mechanically controlled, powered pogo stick!

Up and down, jarring and violent, down and up. I was dizzy and ill and I didn't know how to stop it. It was progressing madly in the general direction of the city. I pushed buttons wildly when I wasn't holding on for dear life but I didn't seem to get the right combination.

The stick would hurtle wildly forward into the air many dozens of feet then come down to hit the earth with a shock, contract, and then recoil violently again and up with a sickening jolt into the air again.

I saw that it was a means for travel over terrain impassible because of its crevices and cracks to wheeled vehicles or beings on foot. I saw this as the unguided power-pogo came down directly into a narrow crack. The capped bottom slid between the sides, the engine box hit the sides of the narrow cleft hard, there was a terrific kick and the shaft hit out again futilely in the airy emptiness of the depth below it, and I went sailing out head over heels to land several yards away in the midst of a band of Midplanetarians.

The next thing I knew I was being pinned down by a number of grey fuzzy arms while a kangaroo looked down at me and questioned me in a squeaky language. At least it looked like a kangaroo for it had the giant legs and the long powerful tail of one, it had upstanding mousey ears, a pointed rodentlike face, and a mammalian body covered with short grey-brown hair. Around its waist was strapped a belt-like harness from which several pouches were slung. In one hand it held a weapon like a sort of combination of pistol and sling-shot.

Naturally I did not answer its questions. It, the chief kangaroo-man, shrugged its shoulders and motioned to its fellows who were holding me down. They allowed me to get to my feet when I was surprised to find that I was still all in one piece and that they had not touched my equipment including my para-ray.

A little distance away was standing a simply gigantic power-pogo, towering a couple of dozen feet high, with a large circular platform set around its middle. Facing that they started to walk towards there. Started, I say, for they walked in kangaroo leaps and I simply fell when they tried to make me do the same.

They picked me up bodily and bounded over and up to the platform. There they hold on to straps attached to the main cylinder and waited. I think I must have fainted because I have no recollection of the trip outside of a nightmare of terrible leaps and falls.

When I came to again it was in the city by the hills. Several of the creatures were standing around me trying to question me in their odd language and, of course, making no headway. I felt that this was not the time to inform them of my imperial accession, I was not sure that they were the most fitting inhabitants of this world to receive that honor. There might be other intelligent races inhabiting the same planet even as there are on Venus.

Accordingly I kept my mouth shut and stared them down. That was a feat of which I could be proud considering the odd nature of their eyes and faces.

Finally they led me away in short bounds to a building and up a ramp to a room. There they thrust me and closed the door.

The room was large, partly open to an interior patio. But it had another inhabitant. A girl!

She was standing by the open semi-balcony staring into the courtyard. When I exclaimed, she turned sharply and looked at me.

She was dressed surprisingly like an earth girl, she looked very much like the earth type. I congratulated myself on having picked for my empire a planet which held a race so similar to my own. But my hopes were dashed two seconds later when she opened her mouth and said in perfect English:

"Hello, stranger, how'd you get to Midplanet so soon?"

I recovered my composure and introduced myself modestly, not telling her of the position I had taken upon myself. "And who are you?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm Nadia Landor and I came with the Official I. U. Expedition. Our ship is about thirty miles away and I came here on a geological survey in a single-seater flier. I stopped to say hello but our hosts don't seem to know the meaning of the word."

"Oh," I said and fell silent. What was I to say? I had been so certain that I could get to Midplanet first and now it seemed that the Union had beaten me out again. Then, I squared my shoulders. This was no way for Ajax Calkins, Emperor of at least half Midplanet, to act. My destiny would see me through.

"You need have no fear," I said. "I will find a way for us to escape."

She looked at me oddly and smiled. "Oh, that? That's all settled. We'll escape immediately if you want to. I've fixed things with our buggy friend."

"With whom?" I gasped.

"Why, haven't you seen the buggers yet? Look, there's Bosco in the yard." She beckoned to the inner courtyard. I went over to her side and looked.

In the courtyard, standing just below us stood a monstrous insect. A thing somewhat larger than a horse. A big squat compact looking broad-backed creature. For a moment I stared at it without comprehension and then suddenly its appearance struck a responsive chord in my brain. It was a flea, a gigantic flea!

"Isn't he cute?" murmured Nadia. "He's agreed to help us escape."

"He's what? Do you mean to say he's...." I started.

"Intelligent?" she finished. "Yes, the buggers have a rather high intelligence. Not as good as our kangaroo friends but nonetheless clever. The fleas are a sort of semi-barbarian group inhabiting a section about a thousand miles away. This fellow, whom I call Bosco, was captured and doesn't like the idea of making a banquet for some kangaroo holiday."

I goggled at the creature and it stared with an interested flicker of its feelers at me.

"I'm glad you still have your para-ray. It was all that I was missing. Come on, let's go now." Nadia suited her actions to her words by vaulting the stone balustrade and landing astride the monster bug's back. I gingerly followed her and seated myself in front.

"Now what?" I said for I didn't know how this was going to help us escape.

"Hold tight and use your ray when the guard appears," she said and then screamed at the top of her lungs. I was nearly paralyzed myself with the sound but the guard who opened the gate was more so and I beamed him nicely.

Bosco seemed to sink lower and then his monstrously powerful legs smashed down and we made the most colossal bound I have ever dreamed of. That super-flea must have covered at least three hundred yards with that first bound and he must have made two hundred at least with every subsequent bounce.

We held on for dear life and the air whished past us like mad. Behind us the city of kangaroos sprang to life as they saw their assorted prisoners escaping and very soon I saw over my shoulder that a line of gigantic steam-powered pogos were bounding along after us, each manned by several armed creatures.

The flea was fast but the pogos, powered by terrific steam-boilers, were equally so. And thus we raced across the clay creviced terrain, two humans on the back of a flea-colossus followed by a single-file line of puffing steel pogos, their plumes of smoke leaving a trail behind them.

I turned and tried to pick off the riders with my ray but it was hopeless, so violently was everything going up and down. I gave up and clung for dear life to the hard neck of our steed.

But it seemed to be impossible to shake off our followers. They remained fast on our trail and after a while I realized that Bosco was tiring out, his leaps were not so high or far.

"What shall we do?" called Nadia to me. "We can't shake them."

It was then that the idea occurred to me that saved us. We were already very close to where my spaceship had landed and I succeeded to conveying in signals what I had in mind to our quite intelligent flea.

On we went and when we came to the side of the swamp in which my ship had landed, Bosco gave a terrific leap which must have well set a record for all Midplanet and sailed fully five hundred yards across the swamp to land exhausted on the other side.

But the pogos could not make that great leap, nor could the giant things stop so easily. On they rushed and one after another they landed in the middle of that thick gummy deep swamp-like mass. The automatic vibrations of their shafts continued but their bases were hopelessly gummed in. The crews were hurled off in all directions and fell helplessly into the gooey morass.

We were saved! My ship was around at the other side but we could walk it. Nadia signalled our thanks to the bugger and it bounded off alone towards the distant horizon.

As we walked, Nadia complimented me on my trick of the swamp. I glowed within and, turning to her, said:

"Let us stay here and master this world, my Empress. I, Ajax Calkins, lay my heart and a planet at your feet."

But women are fickle creatures and cannot understand the ways of the great. She laughed and said: "Don't be silly, my husband is waiting for me at our own spaceship."

And then when we found that my ship had, while I had been away, sunk into the swamp completely and that we would have to walk the twenty or so miles to Nadia's craft, she laughed even louder. Women do not appreciate destiny.