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Read Ebook: Death of a B.E.M. by Livingston Berkeley
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Ebook has 39 lines and 4625 words, and 1 pages
an somewhere in the drawing, make the woman appear as if she'd lost half her clothes in a struggle, and you've got your piece. With me it's different."
Gangreneyellow snorted. This character, he thought, knew as little of art and the difficulties of composition as the next guy.
Zmilch was half-turned, facing his friend across the width of one shoulder. At the other's words, Zmilch turned all the way, got up from his chair and strolled to the board on which a drawing in full color was in its last stages. The drawing depicted a jungle scene. In the foreground a man and woman stood in petrified stance, the man's arm around the woman's shoulders. He was dressed for safari, pith helmet, breeches, boots, open shirt and all. The woman looked like she'd spent all her life in the jungle. She wore a leopard skin draped becomingly to show the greater part of her charms. They were in semiprofile so that the artist could depict the terror on their faces. And full in the center of the drawing was an immense web stretched between the boles of two jungle giants. Descending the web was a gigantic bug, or spider, the artist had not detailed it too well.
"I thought you said you were finding it hard to do?" Zmilch asked. "Why you've just about finished it."
Gangreneyellow, not to be outdone by his friend, walked over to the other's desk and read aloud from the author's manuscript:
"'... Tom Brighteyes knew he hadn't the smallest chance of escaping. The hordes of Micro Ambrosia were but a short way off. Ahead the Great Swamp blocked any chances of escape for him and the Leopard Girl. Their doom was sealed. He turned to her and said:
"Leopard Girl, I love you. I know. I'm from another world, a world where men and women are not the same as this. Oh, I don't mean the outward man and woman, but the inward. This is a savage world, a world where both men and women have to struggle to exist against terrifying odds. Horrible beasts, terrible insects, and natural phenomena make this place a nightmare of existence. But here I found love and perhaps death. I am not sorry I came."
"Tom Brighteyes," the girl turned to him and drew close. "I love you too. I think I felt love from the first instant I saw you, backed against a tree, with your puny weapons facing Hogo the Mogo, king of all the swampland. Hogo the Mogo used to eat guys like you for breakfast. Yet you drew a cigarette from a silver, enamel case upon whose shining face a small chaste crest revealed your excellent taste in such things, and while Hogo the Mogo slavered his hate in your face, you drew a king's size, Exhilirato from the case and lit it with a nonchalance that took my breath away...."
"What the heck are you complaining about?" Gangreneyellow asked. "You're not doing so badly yourself."
"Yeah," said a strange voice. "Neither of you are doing badly. Everything is just horrible, isn't it? The B. E. M's. march across your pages and drawing boards with assembly-line facility. But have either of you two had any feelings for us?"
The two men turned startled and terrified faces in the direction of the mysterious voice. They could see nothing. Yet they could feel the impalpable presence of some strange being in this very room with them. Suddenly they became aware of a strange fog emanating from one wall. It swept closer drawing them into its greasy folds. The voice seemed to come from the very heart of this fog:
"... Well, perhaps things will be different soon...?"
Then the fog enveloped them completely, and their senses fled from them....
It was an odd sort of voice, mellow, fluid, yet holding accents of anger in its even flow:
"Both of you complained you couldn't imagine this. So we brought you here to prove its existence."
The writer and artist opened their eyes and the fog in which they'd been bound was no longer there. They were in an immense chamber whose vaulted ceiling extended for a full hundred feet in the air and seemed suspended by slender strings, so tenuous were the web-like supports, so fragile were the arches. They were standing before a tremendous table whose semi-circular length might have been fifty feet from one end to the other. And seated at the table were the most horrifying monsters they had ever seen.
"... And there is the rub," the voice went on. "We are all as you have imagined us. We exist only in your imagination."
"But how can that be?" Harry Zmilch asked. "We are here. We can see you...."
"Only because your imaginations have been developed to such a degree," the voice replied. "Were you able to you would imagine us as something altogether different. But since there are limits to your imagination we are as we are. Now you must pay the penalty of that imagination.
"Torture will be the price we will exact from you...."
In an instant they were transported to the torture chamber. They saw the horrible machines, the Copper Conker, the Pallid Pulley, and the rest. And up on the platform they saw Sally Patica in all her glory, her seven pairs of eyes watering so great was her excitement.
The monsters got in each other's way so hurried were they to tie and make fast the two humans to the torture machines. And despite Harry's and Jack's screams, they were bound, hand and foot and placed on each of the machines in turn. But though the machines whirled and clanked and ground and grunted and snarled their vicious ways the two humans could not feel a single thing. Yet all about them the horrible monsters screamed and shouted and laughed and danced and on the platform Sally Patica shrieked with joy.
"A torture party at last," she screamed. "Oh, Hiah-Leugh, I'm so happy. I'm the happiest monster in the whole world."
But down below, on the last of the machines in the assembly line, Harry Zmilch thought as he was being whirled around, his head always meeting a mace-like thing which was supposed to shear a slice from his head at every turn but which felt like a feather, gosh! If I get back alive what a story I could do on B. E. M's.
While on another instrument of torture, the Pallid Pulley, a device supposed to tear the limbs slowly from a man, Jack Gangreneyellow thought, man! what a cover I could make if ever I get out of this.
A strange thing happened then.
The machines stopped their whirring, the monsters stopped their shriekings, and Jack and Harry stopped moving.
"Ohh, you nasty humans," Hiah-Leugh said. "Now you've spoiled our party!"
"Why?" Harry asked.
"Because all this has been in vain. All you can see is that we're monsters. And as such we have no feelings except for the giving of pain, torture and death. Gosh, fellas! Can't you see these things aren't real? We're the nicest monsters."
But all Harry and Jack could think of was that B. E. M's. were real. Further, they were as terrible as anything they had ever imagined.
"Yes," Hiah-Leugh went on. "We are as you have imagined because we live only in your imagination. And there we live as monsters. If in the beginning you had given us other lines to read and other lives to live, things might be as they really are. But no. The human race had to be the master race. The insect world and the animal world could only provide danger and conflict." He turned to the assembled monsters and said, sadly, "Okay, boys. Turn 'em loose. Let them go back to their typewriters and drawing boards...."
Harry Zmilch shook his head savagely and looked at his friend. He was doing the same.
"Got dizzy for a second," Harry said. "Gees! Have I got a swell ending for my story...."
"Funny," Jack said. "I got dizzy too. And have I got a sweet idea for a monster. All detail...."
Harry went back and typed:
'But Tom Brighteyes was no longer listening to the voice of his beloved. Behind him were the advance guards of Hogo the Mogo. And ahead the dreaded swamp. There was but one thing to do, go into the sixth dimension, the fifth was already too perilous. Drawing the girl within the embrace of his brawny arms, he closed his eyes and sent out the powerful thought waves which would send him into the sixth dimension....'
And at the end, he tacked on:
To be continued next month....
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