The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

THE MAN WHO FOUND PROTEUS Robert Rohrer

Jake came running out of the mine like all hell and stopped just outside and looked back inside and stood panting into the mouth of the cave for a good while. Jake’s eyes were wide open and his face was white under the dirt, just like he was scared. As a matter of fact, he was scared.

Jake stood there looking into the mine with his shirt front going up and down and the hair on his neck going mostly up, and the mine was dark so Jake could not see a damned thing, which was fine with him. He’d seen enough ee-nough.

Finally, when it looked like nothing was going to come out of the mine and get him, Jake stopped panting and started thinking. This was a bad move, especially for Jake, and the situation got pretty unhealthy. Jake started thinking that maybe he was crazy. He was getting old, and he’d been living out there on the edge of the desert for a long time with this mine that didn’t look like it was going to be any great shakes, and he started thinking, “Well, maybe I’m goin’ crazy.” After all, you don’t see a chunk of rock get up and walk away just every day. You don’t see anything like that at all, unless you’re sort of off, so Jake started thinking, “Maybe I’m goin’—crazy.”

Jake was standing there thinking and his old mule was standing there thinking, too, Jake had one of those old mules just like every dried-up prospector has, and Jake said to the mule, “Mule, I think mebbe I’m goin’ crazy.”

Mule said, “Mebbe y’are, Jake.”

Jake said, “Gawd!” and he ran pretty quick into his shack. When he’d closed the door he sat down on that half-rotten cot he had and he began to think some more, and things got unhealthy again. Jake started pulling his hair out and hitting himself on the head; he was tolerably upset.

Finally Jake got up enough grit to look out the window of his shack and see if Mule was still out there. There was Mule, standing out on the dead orange ground, chewing on something that Jake couldn’t imagine what it was because all the food was in the back of the shack.

Mule looked up at Jake with two solid black eyes and hollered, “Hey Jake, where’s muh food, I’m hongry.”

Jake yelled out the window, “You ain’t gonna get no food from me, you dam’ mule!”

“Aw-w-w,” said Mule, and turned into a trickle of water and went splish-splash into the mine.

Jake said, “Gawd!” and was about ready to stand on his head when he thought, “Hold on there, Jake, get a-holt of yourself,” which was the first healthy thought he’d had in a good time. “There’s gotta be one o’ them logical explanations for this, asides that I’m loco, which mebbe I am,” he thought, and he sat down on the dirt floor and concentrated, hard.

After a while he started a headache from all that hard thinking, and he still couldn’t figure out a logical explanation for a rock getting up and walking off, or a mule talking and then turning into water. Jake muttered, “That ain’t no way for a ol’ mule to act,” and he kept on thinking, that ain’t no way for a ol’ mule to act, that ain’t no way for a of mule to act; and then he got a pretty good-sized idea for his type brain. Maybe that mule he saw out there wasn’t a mule.

Jake jumped up and went around back of the shack where he kept Mule hitched up, and sure enough, Mule’s bridle was there all hitched to the hitching post and dangling in the air, and there were some white mule-bones lying on the hard baked earth.

Jake got a nasty look on his face and said, “Somebody et my mule.” He and Mule had been pretty good friends. Mule was the only one left from the old days before the others had died, and now Mule was gone and old Jake was all alone. Jake was pretty mad, and he stomped around past the three crosses to the front of the shack again because he wanted to get his old shotgun.

He stopped cold before he went inside because somebody had written in big red-crayon letters across the face of the shack, “I’M HUNGRY.” This made Jake pretty sure that there was some no-good lout out there who was running around eating mules and who ought to have his head blown off, so Jake walked into the shack and loaded up his shotgun and put the box of shells in his pocket.

Just when he was about to go outside again, there were a couple of knocks on the door, and Jake shot his gun straight at the door. That pretty well tore the door to hell, and Jake didn’t hear anybody yelling so he cussed because he figured he’d missed and ruined the door for nothing.

He loaded up again and pushed open what was left of that door. Right away his mouth fell open, because out there on the ground in big red clear block-type letters was “I’M HUNGRY!” There were even a block-type exclamation point and a block-type underline.

Jake said, “Wha-a-a-t the hell?” Right while he watched, those letters changed around until they said “I’LL EAT ANYTHING!”

Jake said, “Rg-l-s-p-ch?” which was a pretty complicated word for Jake.

The letters sat there for a while and finally they changed and said, “WELL?”

By that time Jake had gotten a little bit of control over himself, and he said, “Who the Bill Hill Blazes are you, anyhow?”

“The letters wriggled around and said, “I AM PROTEUS.” They wriggled around again and said, “I HAVE COME A LONG WAY.” They wriggled around again and said, “I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THE HELL I AM.” They wriggled around again and said, “I AM LOST. I AM STARVING.” They wriggled around again and said, “GIVE ME FOOD, CHOP-CHOP.”

“You already et muh mule,” said Jake, since he’d figured out that this Proteus must have eaten Mule.

“YOUR MULE WAS FULL OF LICE./I NEED SOMETHING WITH VITAMINS AND/MINERALS TO GET ME OUT OF THIS/HOLE.”

“Well, you ain’t gettin’ nothin’ from me,” said Jake, and he let those letters have it right in the vowels with his shotgun. The letters got together in one heap and hopped back into the mine.

Jake walked right up to the mine and squinted into it and shined his flashlight into it. He was so scared by that time that he didn’t know he was scared any more. And he was angry about Mule, too.

Jake said, “Hey! You in there?”

Nobody said anything in the mine, so Jake took his shotgun and shot it into the mine a couple of times.

Almost right away something went bam! bam! in the mine, and Jake’s old felt hat got pulled right off his head and he felt a breeze across his left cheek. He yelled, “Hey! Hey!” He turned around to get the hat but there wasn’t much left of it so he loaded up and charged straight into the mine. If he’d looked back, he’d have seen the little shot pellets that had torn his hat and almost his cheek bouncing along right behind him. They finally passed him, but he didn’t see them because it was too dark.

Jake got in to about the place where that rock had gotten up and he saw something he sure hadn’t seen before. There was a big crack in the floor—it wasn’t really big, but it was pretty wide and it looked like it went down a long, long way. Jake shined his flashlight down into it and he couldn’t see anything like a bottom anywhere. There was a kind of green slime all the way down the side of the crack.

All this sort of made Jake shiver, because he wasn’t a fissure man, and so he walked on into the cave, waving his flashlight all over the place before he took a step.

All of a sudden a “STOP” sign jumped up in front of Jake. Jake let the sign have it with both barrels, but all the little pieces hopped back together and turned into a rattlesnake.

Jake swung his shotgun down holding the barrels and he missed the snake and that took care of the shotgun. He started stomping around after the snake—he had on high leather boots, so he didn’t have to worry—and when he finally got his foot right smack on the snake it wasn’t a snake anymore, it was a two-inch nail, and Jake cussed like the devil and jumped up and down with one leg.

The nail turned into a rubber ball and bounced away. Jake hobbled after the ball as fast as he could. Finally he caught the ball and he went wham right down on the ground, because it wasn’t a rubber ball any more, it was a portable hi-fi-stereo combination radio-TV set with built-in jacks for earphones and a war movie going on.

Jake lay there with his hand stuck underneath the TV-radio. Then the war movie cut off and an announcer came on and said, “We now have a special announcement. Everybody needs vitamins. You need vitamins, I need vitamins. I need vitamins more than you do, because I’ve had to do without them for three thousand years. I’ve been crawling around under the ground everyday, day in and day out. It’s hot, sweaty work, and I get tired and dragged out. Won’t you contribute your vitamins to the Vitamins for Half-Dead Greek Gods Association/5763 Red Lane/ Rum-Tum-Tummy, Nebraska? Thank you.” A Messerschmitt went wham! into a tree.

Jake got red in the face and said, “No! No! No! I ain’t gonna give you any of my grub! I’m gonna get my gasoline and burn you up, that’s what I’m gonna do!” He jerked his hand from under the TV set and stood up.

Right away he had to duck again, because the TV set turned into a locomotive and went pounding out of the mine at full throttle. Jake heard a lot of crashing outside, and he guessed what it was. He showed his teeth and limped out into the open heat of the sun.

The back of his shack was flying up into the air board by board. By the time Jake got back there, all the tins were either open and hollowed out, or gone. There were the big letters on the floor: “AND I’M STILL HUNGRY, TOO!!” The letters turned into an MG and va-voomed back into the mine.

Jake didn’t stop to think about what the thing’s still being hungry might mean. His foot hurt, and his hand hurt, and he was mad as hell. He waded into what was left of his cellar and started searching for the gasoline cans.

By the time he found the cans, the sun was almost down and the light was dim. Jake’s eyes weren’t any too good anyway, and he walked toward a big black spot he thought was the mine and when he got to it it wasn’t there any more, it was a little more to his left. Jake shook his head and flicked on his flashlight and went inside, muttering “I’m gonna burn you up” all the time.

At first he didn’t notice, but the farther and farther that Jake got into the mine, the less and less it looked like a mine to him. There was something funny about the walls, and maybe about the ground. All of a sudden old Jake got a pretty scary idea, and his chest got all knotted up inside, and he turned around to scram out of there.

Just then the mine started shaking, and the ground sort of pushed up, and Jake fell down. He didn’t even have a chance to get close to the mouth of that cave before CHOMP !