Pogo Planet

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.