It was a Depression. Different in type but at least as punishing in effect as the more civilized types of Depression that were rampant in the more civilized countries.
The cattle-herding tribes were affected too. The Martians loved to jump onto the backs of cattle and stampede them. Of course, since a Martian had no substance or weight, a cow couldn’t feel a Martian on its back, when the Martian leaned forward and screamed “Iwrigo ’m N’gari” (“Hi-yo, Silver”) in Masai at the top of his voice in the cow’s ear while a dozen or more other Martians were screaming “Iwrigo ’m N’gari” into the ears of a dozen or more other cows and bulls, the stampede was on.
Africa just didn’t seem to like the Martians.
But, back to Bugassi.
“Make big juju, he had told M’Carthi. And a big juju it was going to be, literally and figuratively. When, shortly after the green Pygmies had come from the sky, M’Carthi had called in his six witch doctors and had conferred long and seriously with them. He had tried his best to persuade or to order them to pool their knowledge so that one of them, using the knowledge of all six, could make the greatest juju that had ever been made.
They had refused and even threats of torture and death could not move them. Their secrets were sacred and more important to them than their lives.
But a compromise had been reached. They were to draw lots for their turns, a moon apart. And each agreed that if, and only if, he failed, he would confide all of his secrets, including and in particular the ingredients and incantations that went into his juju, before he made his contribution to the tribal stomach.
Bugassi had drawn the longest twig and now, five moons later, he had the combined knowledge of all of the others as well as his own—and the witch doctors of the Moparobi are famed as the greatest of all Africa. Furthermore, he had exact knowledge of every thing and every word that had gone into the making of the five jujus that had failed.
With this storehouse of knowledge at his fingertips, he had been planning his own juju for a full moon now, ever since Nariboto, the fifth of the witch doctors, had gone the way of all edible flesh. (Of which Bugassi’s share, by request, had been the liver, of which he had saved a small piece; well putrefied by now, it was in prime condition to be included in his own juju.)
Bugassi knew that his own juju could not fail, not only because the results to his own person were unthinkable if it did fail, but because—well, the combined knowledge of all of the witch doctors of the Moparobi simply could not fail.
It was to be a juju to end all jujus, as well as all Martians.
It was to be a monster juju; it was to include every ingredient and every spell that had been used in the other five and in addition was to include eleven ingredients and nineteen spells (seven of which were dance steps) which had been his own very special secrets, completely unknown to the other five.
All the ingredients were at hand and when assembled, tiny as most of them were individually, they would fill the bladder of a bull elephant, which was to be their container. (The elephant of course, had been killed six months before; no big game had been killed since the Martians came.)
But the assembling of the juju would take all night, since each ingredient must be added with its own spell or dance and other spells and dances interspersed with the adding of ingredients.
Throughout the night no Moparobi slept. Seated in a respectful circle around the big fire, which the women replenished from time to time, they watched while Bugassi labored, danced and cast spells. It was a strenuous performance; he lost weight, they noticed sadly.
Just before dawn, Bugassi fell supine before M’Carthi, the chief.
“Juju done,” he said from the ground.
“Gnajamkata still here,” said M’Carthi grimly. They were very much still there; they had been very active all night, watching the preparations and joyfully pretending to help them; several times they had made Bugassi stumble in his dancing and once fall flat on his face by darting unexpectedly between his legs while he had danced. But each time he had patiently repeated the sequence so no step would be lost.
Bugassi raised himself on one elbow in the dirt. With the other arm he pointed to the nearest large tree.
“Juju must hang clear of ground,” he said.
M’Carthi gave an order, and three black bucks leaped to obey it. They tied a rope of woven vines around the juju and one of them shinned up the tree and passed the rope over a limb; the other two hoisted the juju and when it was ten feet off the ground Bugassi, who had meanwhile climbed painfully to his feet, called to them that it was high enough. They secured it there. The one in the tree came down and they rejoined the others.
Bugassi went over to the tree, walking as though his feet hurt (which they did) and stood under the juju, he faced the east, where the sky was gray now and the sun just under the horizon, and folded his arms.
“When sun strike juju,” he said solemnly if a bit hoarsely, “gnajamkata go.”
The red rim of the sun came into sight over the horizon; its first rays struck the top of the tree in which the juju hung, moved downward.
In a very few minutes now, the first rays of the sun would reach the juju.
By coincidence or otherwise it was the exact moment when, in Chicago, Illinois, United States or America, one Hiram Pedro Oberdorffer, janitor and inventor, sat sipping beer and waiting for his anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator to build up potential.
4.
And as near as matters to three quarters of an hour before that exact moment, at about 9:15 P.M. Pacific Time in a shack on the desert near Indio, California, Luke Devereaux was making his third drink of the evening.
It was his fourteenth thwarting evening at the shack.
It was the fifteenth evening since his escape, if one can call so simple a walk-away an escape, from the sanitarium. The first evening had been thwarting too, but for a different reason. His car, the old ’57 Mercury he had bought for a hundred dollars, had broken down in Riverside, about half-way between Long Beach and Indio. He’d had it towed to a garage, where they’d told him it couldn’t possibly be fixed until the next afternoon. He’d spent a dull evening and a bad night (it seemed so strange and so lonesome to be sleeping alone again) at a Riverside hotel.
He’d spent the following morning shopping and carrying his purchases to the garage to load them in the car while a mechanic was working on it. He’d bought a used portable typewriter, of course, and some stationery. (He’d been in the process of choosing the typewriter when, at 10 A.M. Pacific Time, Yato Ishurti’s speech had come on the air, and business had been suspended while the proprietor turned on a radio and everyone in the store had gathered around it. Knowing Ishurti’s fundamental premise—that there really were Martians—to be completely wrong, Luke had been mildly annoyed at the interruption to his shopping, but had found himself quite amused at Ishurti’s ridiculous reasoning.)
He bought a suitcase and some extra clothing, razor, soap and comb, and enough food and liquor so he wouldn’t have to make a shopping trip into Indio for at least a few days after he got to the shack. He hoped what he had to accomplish there wouldn’t take any longer than that.
He got his car back—with a repair bill almost half as much as the original cost of it—in midafternoon and reached his destination just before dark. He found himself too tired to try very hard that evening, and, anyway, he realized that he had forgotten something: Alone, he had no way of telling whether or not he had succeeded. The next morning he drove back to Indio and bought himself the best and most expensive table model radio he could find, a set that would bring in programs from all over the country, a set on which he could find newscasts emaciating from somewhere or other almost any tune of day or evening.