BIPED
by Basil Wells
(Author of "Rebirth of Man," "Winged Warriors," etc.)
It was a monster who come among those peaceful people, a monster that walked on 
two legs!



"STRANGE MAN," spoke gray-bearded Nab Tul, Elder of N'voo Canyon, "we have come 
to a decision. Tonight you must choose what your fate will be. You must go to 
the Temple, where the priests of Urim and Thummim will destroy your monstrous 
body, or you must consent to have those useless lower limbs amputated.
"It is not good," he continued, "that a monster roam among us, affrighting our 
women and children. We of Nephi have come to like you. You are a good, though 
clumsy, worker in the corn fields and in the orchards.
"We hope you will decide to remain with us, for, despite your physical handicaps 
several of our young women have admitted a definite interest in you. One in 
particular," and he smiled.
I knew whom he meant very well--Inya Tul, his granddaughter. And I loved her 
too. We had planned to build a home somewhere in the canyon some time in the 
future. But now...!
ONLY two months before I had come drifting down into N'voo Canyon, an uncharted 
hidden oasis in the savage wastelands just north of the Four Corners along the 
Colorado River, and landed beside a shady pool where Inya swam alone.
She had screamed and swum be neath a screening wall of willows, only her shapely 
shoulders and damp red curls thrusting out through that leafy covering. Never, 
in all the cities of Greater America, had I seen a more lovely face than hers . 
. .
"Go away," she had cried. "I am bathing here."
"So I gather," I replied with a grin, and loosened the wide straps that 
harnessed me to my D grav cylinder. Carefully I moored my cylinder to a 
projecting branch of a nearby cottonwood tree and then turned my back.
"Go ahead," I shouted, "and jerk on your clothes."
Shortly afterward I heard her soft steps approaching and turned to meet her. I 
gasped. Never, in all the known world of the Twenty-second Century, had I beheld 
so lovely and feminine a girl as was Inya--yet she was but a half-woman!
From her waist down there was nothing, save a pair of shapeless withered feet, 
beneath her brief, woven-leather kilt!
Her firm, high-breasted bosom was confined by a laced jacket of pale gray 
homespun, and on her long, firm-fleshed brown arms were heavy leather mittens. 
She walked, as would a normal person, on her two palms, placing one arm before 
the other as she proceeded; not like the usual legless cripple who hitches along 
on his stumps. Her walk was graceful and dainty like herself, and after the 
first moment of revulsion I was filled with admiration.
"Where do you come from, Monster ?" she demanded angrily. "The priests of Urim 
and Thummim will hear of this. It is their duty to destroy such as you in 
infancy, and you are man-grown."
"I am from the outside world," I told her. "And my name is Morton Whipple. I was 
prospecting for gold and other precious metals here in Utah, pulling the D grav 
unit that I use to descend and ascend into the sheerest canyons, when I stumbled 
across your valley. Chance for some fresh cool water and food instead of this 
radio-transmitted hot water and sawdust, I told myself; so here I am."
"There is no world beyond this valley," the girl cried. "Only a desert of 
sun-baked rocks and looming red and yellow cliffs lies beyond."
I looked down at her and smiled. Apparently her people had been out of touch 
with the world for many years and had taught her nothing of civilization. (Many 
people have fled from the complexity of modern life into the wilderness, there 
to live the simple wholesome life of an earlier happier age.) Perhaps they had 
hidden here to shield her deformity from the world....
So, while I weighted down my D grav cylinder with several hundred pounds of 
rocks until my return, the girl, Inya, told me of the valley and the thousand or 
more Nephites who lived there.
Many ages ago, she told me, strange, wicked beings, the Wolf Hunters, she called 
them, had driven the Nephites into N'voo and sealed the outer pass forever. Then 
the power of the peepstones, Urim and Thummim, was called upon by the priests of 
the Temple and all the outer world blasted to a cinder.
And the Wolf Hunters, I learned, had long, sturdy legs even as did I! The 
Nephites, all of them, were legless!
No wonder she had called me a monster, I realized; slowly I began to piece 
together a true pictures of what had happened many years before.
Banished here to this isolated canyon by the Mormon Wolf Hunters some time in 
the Nineteenth Century, these people had, through the course of many 
generations, weeded out all normal offspring by ruthlessly destroying them. Even 
as the children of six-fingered parents were likewise so afflicted, and armless 
parents often bore armless offspring, so these people ran true to their freakish 
heredity....
LATER Inya led me to the central village, her smooth strong arms carrying her 
along at a pace that taxed my legs, and shortly I was surrounded by a waist-high 
crowd of muttering human torsos. After a time her father, Nab Tul, led me away 
to his home and gave me food and a place to sleep.
After that, as I walked about the village or roamed the valley three or four 
armed men were always close by. When I walked or ran they were always beside or 
ahead of me, their great shoulder and arm muscles working as smoothly and 
powerfully as my own lower extremities.
They could spring across the irrigation ditches or brooks as easily as could I 
and in tests of strength they could always best me. So, since I was so well 
guarded, I did not try to return to my D grav cylinder and escape. In a few 
days, I decided, when their vigilance had slackened, I would slip away to my 
cylinder, free it of excess weight, and float out of the valley again as I had 
come.
I had reckoned without Inya, however. Being with her every day soon made me 
forget my plan to leave the valley--I was in love!
So I worked with the legless men in their fields and made many friends among 
them. All thought of leaving the canyon and Inya was banished from my mind. We 
were planning a little cabin and . . .
I MUST think it over," I told Nab Tul. "Tonight after we have eaten I will give 
you my answer."
The skin of my body was clammy with cold sweat as I staggered away up the valley 
to the distant corn fields where I was working....Lose my legs, never to walk 
again? Creep along on my weak hands and the tender stumps of my legs?
I worked among the rustling yellow corn stalks that afternoon, my 
fellow-workers' heads and squat torsos hidden among those dying rows; I tried to 
imagine how it would feel to be little more than three feet tall, and the flesh 
of my body crawled. . . . I shuddered and swung the corn-knife viciously, as 
though it were a machete, mowing down the leafy clumps of cornstalks about me.
My eyes ranged along the canyon--nine miles long and more than a mile in width; 
the winding emerald bands of willow, cottonwood, aspen and cedar along the 
narrow irrigation ditches and winding brooks; the upper slopes, terrace upon 
terrace, thick with the dark green ranks of towering evergreen forests, and 
above it all the soaring, unscalable sheerness of the encircling iron-red walls 
and lofty, lemon-colored crags.
Further to the north, where a projecting wall of rock shouldered out into the 
valley, a narrow canyon--a deep cleft into ruined red cliffs tottering 
overhead--opened. It was there that I had landed beside the rocky pool where 
Inya and the other girls of the valley played and swam all through the summer.
And there, where I had concealed my D grav unit beneath the weight of many flat 
stones, I decided to go.
Forgotten now were Inya and our plans for the future. Only the blind urge to 
escape from this hellish valley and the mutilation that awaited me was in my 
mind. I looked about the field.
THE nearest Nephite was a hundred yards away, half-hidden from me by the 
intervening rows of corn. Quietly then I bent down and slipped away through the 
field toward that looming red butte and the escape that awaited beyond its 
walls.
I left the shelter of the brownleaved stalks several hundred feet further along 
the way, and went plunging away across muddy ditches and reddish rocky soil 
toward my goal. A thousand feet or more I raced ere my flight was discovered; 
then ten or twelve of the workers, unarmed save for the heavy cornknives slung 
between their shoulder blades, came racing in long, prodigious bounds after me. 
Fast as I ran yet their muscular arms carried them at a swifter pace and they 
were rapidly overhauling me when I darted into the narrow side canyon.
Some of them swung their longarmed bodies forward in mighty leaps; touched their 
grotesque withered feet to the ground momentarily, and swung forward again; 
while others ran as a man runs, their arms twinkling swiftly forward along the 
uneven ground.
They drew closer behind; two of them far in advance of the others shouted for me 
to halt at once, but I spurted onward faster than before. The grassy little 
glade beside the pool lay but a few feet ahead now.
But despair was in my heart. Before I could free the D grav of its burden of 
rocks, adjust the harness, and spring into the air, they would be upon me. 
Perhaps I could jerk my Z gun from the pack, however, and send its paralyzing 
bolts of electricity smashing into them.
Then I was beside my cache and the blood drained from my stricken brain for a 
moment.... The D grav and all my equipment was gone!
I turned to face the legless men, whipping the corn-knife from its sheath along 
my backbone, and leaping toward them. Better to go down fighting, I thought, 
than live on a crippled torso.
My first blow sheared through the wrist of Dav, fleetest of my pursuers, and 
then I was engaged in a duel with the other man. Now at last my superior height 
and ability to move about as I willed told in my favor and before his fellows 
could reach his side I had slashed down through his guard and laid open his 
shoulder to the collar-bone.
I turned, just in time, and my heavy knife sent Dav's blade--and spinning. Then 
I dared a quick glance toward the empty cache and swore.
The D grav tilted upward from a sturdy cottonwood branch, the same one I had 
used before, and beneath the tree, clutching the mooring rope, sat Inya!
"Inya!" I cried. "You knew?"
"Yes, Morton," sobbed the girl. "I knew that you would not be willing to lose 
your legs even for me. And I love you too much to ask it."
I kissed her once, hastily, slashed at the mooring line and jumped upward with 
all my power. Upward shot the D grav, so swiftly that the flung knives of my 
pursuers fell far short. Then I was hooking my arms through the loops of my 
harness and fighting against the downward surge of gravity all the while.
At last my straps were buckled into place and I was drifting slowly downward 
once more out over the main valley. I dropped several chunks of rock from the 
ballast sack beside me to halt my descent and looked back toward the little 
glade beside the pool.
Inya was there, her eyes fixed sadly on me. I waved to her and she replied. Then 
she flung herself prone on the soft grass, her shoulders heaving convulsively as 
great sobs tore at her body.
My own eyes were not dry as I drifted higher and higher into the clear dry air 
above the canyon of N'voo.
Then I was above the weathered rimrock and splintered crags that hemmed in that 
fertile oasis, drifting slowly away on a hot breeze toward a world where men did 
not walk on their hands....



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