8

THE GREAT SHIP’S next touchdown was made on a wide flat about two miles north of a town estimated to hold twelve to fifteen thousand people. Grayder would have preferred to survey the place from low altitude before making his landing but one cannot handle a huge space-going vessel as if it were an atmospheric tug. Only two things can be done when so close to a planetary surface—the ship is taken straight up or brought straight down with no room for fiddling betweentimes.

So Grayder dumped the ship in the best spot he could find when finding is a matter of split-second decisions. It made a rut only ten feet deep, the ground being hard with a rock bed. The gangway was shoved out. The procession descended in the same order as before.

Casting an anticipatory look toward the town, the Ambassador registered irritation. “Something is badly out of kilter here. There’s the town not so far away. Here we are in plain view with a ship like a metal mountain. At least a thousand people must have seen us coming down even if all the rest are holding seances behind drawn curtains or playing poker in the cellars. Are they interested? Are they excited?”

“It doesn’t seem so,” contributed Shelton, pulling industriously at an eyelid for the sake of feeling it spring back.

“I wasn’t asking you. I am telling you. They are not excited. They are not surprised. They are not even interested. One would almost think they’d had a ship here that was full of smallpox or that swindled them out of something. What’s wrong with them?”

“Possibly they lack curiosity,” Shelton ventured.

Either that or they’re afraid. Or maybe the entire gang of them

[119]

is more cracked than any bunch on any other world. Practically all these planets were appropriated by dotty people who wanted to establish a haven where their eccentricities could run loose. And nutty notions become conventional after four hundred years of undisturbed continuity. It is then considered normal and proper to nurse the bats out of your grandfather’s attic. That and generations of inbreeding can create some queer types. But we’ll cure them before we’re through.”

“Yes, Your Excellency, most certainly we will.”

“You don’t look so well-balanced yourself, chasing that eyelid around your face,” reproved the Ambassador. He pointed south-east as Shelton stuck the fidgety hand firmly into a pocket. “There’s a road over there. Wide and well-built by the looks of it. They don’t construct such a highway for the mere fun of it. Ten to one it’s an important artery.”

That’s how it looks to me,” Shelton agreed.

“Put that patrol across it, Colonel. If your men don’t bring in a willing talker within reasonable time we’ll send the entire battalion into the town itself.”

“A patrol,” said Shelton to Major Hame.

“Call out the patrol,” Hame ordered Lieutenant Deacon.

“That patrol again, Sergeant Major,” said Deacon.

Bidworthy raked out Gleed and his men, indicated the road, barked a bit and shooed them on their way.

They marched, Gleed in front. Their objective was half a mile away and angled toward the town. The left-hand file had a clear view of the nearest suburbs, eyed the buildings wistfully, wished Gleed in warmer regions with Bidworthy stoking the hell-fire beneath him.

Hardly had they reached their goal than a customer appeared. He came from the town’s outskirts, zooming along at fast pace on a contraption vaguely like a motorcycle. It ran on a big pair of rubber balls and was pulled by a caged fan. Gleed spread his men across the road.

The oncomer’s machine suddenly gave forth a harsh, penetrating sound that reminded everybody of Bidworthy in the presence of dirty boots.

[120]

“Stay put,” warned Gleed. “I’ll skin the fellow who gives way and leaves a gap.”

Again the shrill metallic warning. Nobody moved. The machine slowed, came up to them at a crawl and stopped. Its fan continued to spin at slow rate, the blades almost visible and giving out a steady hiss.

“What’s the idea?” demanded the rider. He was lean-featured, in his middle thirties, wore a gold ring in his nose and had a pigtail four feet long.

Blinking incredulously at this get-up, Gleed managed to jerk an indicative thumb toward the metal mountain and say, “Earth ship.”

“Well, what do you expect me to do about it?—throw a fit of hysterics?”

“We expect you to cooperate,” informed Gleed, still bemused by the pigtail. He had never seen such a thing before. It was in no way effeminate, he decided. Rather did it lend a touch of ferocity like that worn—according to the picture books—by certain North American aborigines in the dim and distant past.

“Cooperation,” mused the rider. “Now there is a beautiful word. You know exactly what it means, of course?”

“I’m not a dope.”

“The precise degree of your idiocy is not under discussion at the moment,” the rider pointed out. His nose-ring waggled a bit as he spoke. “We are talking about cooperation. I take it you do quite a lot of it yourself?”

“You bet I do,” Gleed assured. “And so does everyone else who knows what’s good for him.”

“Let’s keep to the subject, shall we? Let’s not sidetrack and go rambling all over the conversational map.” He revved up his fan a little then let it slow down again. “You are given orders and you obey them?”

“Of course. I’d have a rough time if—”

“That is what you call cooperation?” put in the other. He hunched his shoulders, pursed his bottom lip. “Well, it’s nice to check the facts of history. The books could be wrong.” His fan flashed into a circle of light and the machine surged forward. “Pardon me.”

The front rubber ball barged forcefully between two men, knocking them aside without injury. With a high whine the machine shot

[ 121]

down the road, its fan-blast making its rider’s plaited hairdo point horizontally backward.

“You substandard morons!” raged Gleed as the pair got up and dusted themselves. “I told you to stand fast. What d’you mean by letting him run out on us like that?”

“Didn’t have much choice about it, Sarge,” answered one surlily.

“I want none of your back-chat. You could have busted one of his balloons if you’d had your guns ready. That would have stopped him.”

“You didn’t tell us to use our guns.”

“Where was your own, anyway?” added a sneaky voice.

Gleed whirled on the others and demanded, “Who said that?” His eyes raked a long row of impassive faces. It was impossible to detect the culprit. “I’ll shake you up with the next quota of fatigues,” he promised. “I’ll see to it that—”

“The Sergeant Major’s coming,” one of them warned.

Bidworthy was four hundred yards away and making martial progress towards them. Arriving in due time, he cast a cold, contemptuous glance over the patrol.

“What happened?”

“Giving me a lot of lip, he was,” complained Gleed after providing a brief account of the incident. “He looked like one of those Chickasaws with an oil well.”

“Did he really?” Bidworthy surveyed him a moment, then invited, “And what is a Chickasaw?”

“I read about them somewhere once when I was a kid,” explained Gleed, happy to bestow a modicum of learning. “They got rich on oil. They had long, plaited haircuts, wore blankets and rode around in gold-plated automobiles.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” said Bidworthy. “I gave up all that magic-carpet stuff when I was seven. I was deep in ballistics before I was twelve and military logistics when I was fourteen.” He sniffed loudly and gave the other a jaundiced eye. “Some guys suffer from arrested development.”

“They actually existed,” Gleed maintained. “They—”

“So did fairies,” snapped Bidworthy. “My mother said so. My mother was a good woman. She didn’t tell me a lot of goddam lies—often.” He spat on the road. “Be your age!,” Then he glowered

[ 122]

at the patrol. “All right, get out your guns—assuming that you’ve got them and know where they are and which hand to hold them in. Take orders from me. Ill deal personally with the next character who comes along.”

Sitting on a large rock by the roadside, he planted an expectant gaze on the town. Gleed posed near him, slightly pained. The patrol remained strung across the road with guns held ready. Half an hour crawled by without anything happening.

One of the men pleaded, “Can we smoke, Sergeant Major?”

“No!”

They fell into lugubrious silence, licking their lips from time to time and doing plenty of thinking. They had lots about which to think. A town—any town of human occupation—had desirable features not to be found anywhere else in the cosmos. Lights, company, freedom, laughter, all the makings of life. And one can go hungry too long.

Eventually a large coach emerged from the town’s outskirts, hit the high road and came bowling towards them. A long, shiny, streamlined job, it rolled on twenty balls in two rows of ten, gave forth a whine similar to but louder than that of the motorcycle, and had no visible fans. It was loaded with people.

At a point two hundred yards from the road-block a loudspeaker under the vehicle’s bonnet blared an urgent, “Make way! Make way!”

“This is it,” commented Bidworthy with much satisfaction. “We’ve caught a dollop of them. One of them is going to confess or I’11 resign from the space service.” He got off his rock and stood in readiness.

“Make way! Make way!”

“Perforate his balloons if he tries to bull his way through,” ordered Bidworthy.

It wasn’t necessary. The coach lost pace, stopped with its bonnet a yard from the waiting file. Its driver peered out of the side of his cab. Other faces snooped curiously farther back.

Composing himself and determined to try the effect of fraternal cordiality, Bidworthy went up to the driver and said with great difficulty, “Good morning!”

“Your time-sense is shot to pot,” responded the other ungratefully.

[123]

He had a heavy blue jowl, a broken nose, cauliflower ears and looked the sort who usually drives with others in hot and vengeful pursuit. “Can’t you afford a watch?’

“Eh?”

“It isn’t morning. It’s late afternoon.”

“So it is,” admitted Bidworthy, forcing a cracked smile. “Good afternoon!”

“I’m not so sure about that,” mused the driver, leaning on his steering-wheel and moodily scratching his head. “We get an afternoon in every day. It’s always the same. Morning goes and what happens? You’re stuck with an afternoon. I’ve become hardened to it. And this one is just another nearer the grave.”

“That may be,” conceded Bidworthy, little struck with this ghoulish angle, “but I have other things to worry about and—”

“Fat lot of use worrying about anything, past, present or whatever,” advised the driver. “Because there are far bigger worries to come. Stick around long enough and you’ll have some real stinkers in your lap.”

“Perhaps so,” said Bidworthy, inwardly feeling that this was a poor time to contemplate the darker side of existence. “But I prefer to deal with my own troubles in my own way.”

“Nobody’s troubles are entirely their own, nor their methods of coping,” continued the tough-looking oracle. “Are they now?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” growled Bidworthy, his composure thinning down as his blood pressure built up. He was irefully conscious of Gleed and the patrol watching, listening and probably grinning like stupid apes behind his back. There was also the load of gaping passengers. “I think you’re talking just to stall me. You might as well know that it won’t work. I’m here for a purpose and that purpose is going to be served. The Terran Ambassador is waiting—”

“are we,” emphasized the driver.

“He wants to speak to you,” Bidworthy went stubbornly on, “and he’s going to speak to you.”

“I’d be the last to prevent him. We’ve got free speech here. Let him step up and say his piece so that we can go our way.”

“You,” informed Bidworthy, “are going to him.” He signed to the rest of the coach. “The whole lot of you.”

[ 124]

“Not me,” denied a fat man sticking his head out of a side window. He wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look like poached eggs. Moreover, he was adorned with a tall hat candy-striped in white and pink. “Not me,” repeated this vision with considerable firmness.

“Me neither,” supported the driver.

“All right.” Bidworthy displayed maximum menace. “Move this birdcage one inch backward or forward and we’ll shoot your potbellied tires to thin strips. Get out of that cab.”

“Ha-ha. I’m too comfortable. Try fetching me.”

Bidworthy beckoned to the nearest six men. “You heard him—take him up on that.”

Tearing open the cab door, they grabbed. If they had expected the victim to put up a futile fight against heavy odds, they were disappointed. He made no attempt to resist. They got him, lugged together and he yielded with good grace. His body leaned to one side and came halfway out of the door.

That was as far as they could get him.

“Come on,” urged Bidworthy, showing impatience. “Heave him loose. You don’t have to be feeble. Show him who’s who. He isn’t a fixture.”

One of the men climbed over the body, poked around inside the cab and announced, “He is, you know.”

“What d you mean?

“He’s chained to the steering column.”

“Nonsense. Let me see.” He had a look and found that it was so. A chain and a small but heavy and complicated padlock linked the driver’s leg to his coach. “Where’s the key?”

“Search me,” invited the driver.

They did just that. The effort proved futile. No key.

“Who’s got it?”

“Myob!”

“Shove him back into his seat,” ordered Bidworthy, looking savage. “We’ll take the passengers. One yap is as good as another so far as I’m concerned.” Striding to the doors, he jerked them open. “All out and make it snappy.”

Nobody budged. They studied him silently, with various expressions not one of which did anything to help his ego. The fat man

[125]

with the candy-striped hat mooned at him sardonically. Bidworthy decided that he did not like the fat man and that a stiff course of military calisthenics might thin him down a bit.

“You can come out on your feet,” he suggested to the passengers in general and the fat man in particular, “or on you necks. Whichever you prefer. Make up your minds.”

“If you can’t use your head you can at least use your eyes,” commented the fat man happily. He shifted in his seat to the accompaniment of metallic clanking noises.

Bidworthy accepted the idea, leaning through the doors for a better look. Then he clambered into the vehicle, went its full length while carefully studying each passenger. His florid features were two shades darker when he emerged and spoke to Sergeant Gleed.

“They are all chained. Every one of them.” He glared at the driver. “What’s the purpose of manacling the lot?”

“Myob!” said the driver airily.

“Who has the keys?”

“Myob!”

Taking a deep breath, Bidworthy declaimed to nobody in particular, “Every once in a while I hear of somebody running amok and laying them out by the dozens. I’ve always wondered why—but now I know.” He gnawed his knuckles, added to Gleed, “We can’t run this contraption to the ship with that dummy blocking the controls. Either we must find the keys or get tools and cut them loose.”

“Or you could wave us on our way and then go take a pill,” offered the driver.

“Shut up! If I’m stuck here another million years I’ll see to it that—”

“Here’s the Colonel,” muttered Gleed, giving him a nudge.

Colonel Shelton arrived, walked once slowly and officiously around the outside of the coach, examined its construction and weighed up its occupants. He flinched at the striped hat whose owner leered at him through the glass. Then he came over to the disgruntled group.

“What’s the trouble this time, Sergeant Major?”

“They’re as crazy as all the others, sir. They’re full of impudence and say, ‘Myob’ and couldn’t care less about His Excellency. They

[ 126]

don’t want to come out and we can’t make them because they’re chained in their seats.”

“Chained?” Shelton’s eyebrows lifted halfway toward his hair. What on earth for?”

“I don’t know, sir. All I can tell you is that they’re fastened in like a bunch of gangsters being hauled to the pokey and—”

Shelton moved off without waiting to hear the rest. He had a look for himself, came back.

“You may have something there, Sergeant Major. But I don’t think they are criminals.”

“No, sir?”

“No.” He threw a significant glance towards the fat man’s colorful headgear and several other sartorial eccentricities including a ginger-haired individual’s foot-wide polka-dotted bow. “It’s more likely they’re a consignment of lunatics being taken to an asylum. I’ll ask the driver.” Going to the cab, he said, “Do you mind telling me your destination?”

“Yes,” responded the other.

“Very well, where is it?”

“Look,” said the driver, “are we talking the same language?”

“Eh? Why?”

“You’ve just asked me whether I mind and I said yes.” He made a disparaging gesture. “I do mind.”

“You refuse to tell?”

“Your aim’s improving, Sonny.”

“Sonny?” put in Bidworthy, vibrant with outrage. “Do you realize that you are speaking to a colonel?”

“What’s a colonel?” asked the driver interestedly.

“By hokey, if you—”

“Leave this to me,” insisted Shelton, waving the furious Bidworthy down. His expression was cold as he returned attention to the driver. “On your way. I’m sorry you’ve been detained.”

“Think nothing of it,” said the driver with exaggerated politeness. I’ll do as much for you some day.”

With that enigmatic remark he let his machine roll forward. The patrol parted to make room. Building up its whine to the top note, the coach sped down the road and diminished into the dusty distance.

[127]

“This planet,” swore Bidworthy, staring purple-faced after it, “has more no-good bums in need of discipline than any place this side of—

“Calm yourself, Sergeant Major,” urged Shelton. “I feel exactly the same way as you do—but I’m taking care of my arteries. Blowing them full of bumps like seaweed won’t solve any problems.”

“Maybe so, sir, but—”

“We’re up against something mighty peculiar here,” Shelton went on. “We’ve got to find out precisely what it is and how best to cope with it. In all probability it means we’ll have to devise new tactics. So far the patrol has achieved nothing. It is wasting its time. Obviously we’ll have to concoct a more effective method of getting into touch with the powers-that-be. March the men back to the ship, Sergeant Major.”

“Very well, sir.” Bidworthy saluted, swung around, clicked his heels, opened a cavernous mouth. “Patro-o-ol . . . right form!”

Aboard ship the resulting conference lasted well into the night and halfway through the following morning. During these argumentative hours various oddments of traffic, mostly vehicular, passed along the road. But nothing paused to view the monster spaceship, nobody approached for a friendly word with its crew. The strange inhabitants of this world seemed to be afflicted with a local form of mental blindness, unable to see a thing until it was thrust into their faces and then surveying it squint-eyed.

One passer-by in mid-morning was a long, low truck whining on two dozen balls and loaded with girls wearing bright head-scarves. The girls were tunefully singing something about one little kiss before we part, dear. A number of troops loafing near the gangway came eagerly to life, waved, whistled and yoohooed. Their effort was a total waste for the singing continued without break or pause and nobody waved back.

To add to the discomfiture of the love-hungry, Bidworthy stuck his head out of the airlock and rasped, “If you monkeys are bursting with surplus energy I can find a few jobs for you to do—nice, dirty ones.” He seared them one at a time before he withdrew.

Up near the ship’s nose the top brass sat around the chartroom’s horseshoe table and debated the situation. Most of them were con-

[128]

tent to repeat with extra emphasis what they had said the previous evening, there being no new points to bring up.

“Are you certain,” the Ambassador asked Grayder, “that this planet has not been visited since the last emigration transport dumped its final load four centuries ago?”

“I’m quite positive, Your Excellency. Any such visit would be on record.”

“Yes, if made by a Terran ship. But what about others? I feel it in my bones that at some time or other these people have fallen foul of one or more vessels calling unofficially and have been leery of spaceships ever since. Perhaps somebody got tough with them and tried to muscle in where he wasn’t wanted. Or perhaps they’ve had to beat off a gang of pirates. Or maybe they’ve been swindled by unscrupulous traders.”

“Absolutely impossible, Your Excellency,” declared Grayder, suppressing a smile. “Emigration was so widely scattered over so large a number of worlds that even today every one of them is under-populated, under-developed and utterly unable to build spaceships of any kind no matter how rudimentary. Some may have the technical know-how but they lack the industrial facilities, of which they need plenty.”

“Yes, that is what I’ve always understood.”

Grayder went on, “All Blieder-drive vessels are built in the system of Sol and registered as Terran ships. Complete track is kept of their movements and their whereabouts are always known. The only other spaceships in existence are eighty or ninety antiquated rocket jobs bought at scrap price by the Epsilon system for haulage work between its fourteen closely-spaced planets. An old-fashioned rocket-ship couldn’t reach this world in a hundred years.”

“No, of course not.”

“Unofficial boats capable of this long range just don’t exist,” Grayder assured. “Neither do space buccaneers and for much the same reason. A Blieder-drive ship is so costly that a would-be pirate would have to be a billionaire to become a pirate.”

“Then,” said the Ambassador heavily, “back we go to my original theory; that a lot of inbreeding has made them crazier than their colonizing ancestors.”

“There’s plenty to be said in favor of that idea,” put in Shelton.

[129]

“You should have seen the coach-load I looked over. There was a fellow like a bankrupt mortician wearing odd shoes, one brown and one a repulsive yellow. Also a moon-faced gump sporting a hat apparently made from the skin of a barber’s pole, all stripy.” With a sad attempt at wit, he finished, “The only thing missing was his bubble-pipe—and probably he’ll be given that when he arrives.”

“Arrives where?”

“I don’t know, Your Excellency. They refused to tell us where they were going.”

Giving him a satirical look, the Ambassador remarked, “Well, that is a valuable addition to the sum total of our knowledge. Our minds are now enriched by the thought that an anonymous individual may be presented with a futile object for an indefinable purpose when he reaches his unknown destination.”

Shelton subsided wishing that he had never seen the fat man or, for that matter, the fat man’s cockeyed world.

“Somewhere they’ve got a capital, a civic seat, a center of government wherein function the people who hold all the strings,” the Ambassador asserted. “We’ve got to find that place before we can take over and reorganize on up-to-date lines. A capital is big by the standards of its own administrative area. It is never an ordinary, nondescript place. It has obvious physical features giving it importance above the average. It should be easily visible from the air. We must make a systematic search for it—in fact that’s what we should have done in the first place. Other planets’ capital cities have been identified without trouble. What’s the hoodoo on this one?”

“See for yourself, Your Excellency.” Grayder poked several photographs across the table. “The situation is rather similar to that on Hygeia. You can see the two hemispheres quite clearly. They reveal nothing resembling a superior city. There isn’t even a town conspicuously larger than its fellows or possessing enough outstanding features to set it apart from the others.”

“I don’t put great faith in pictures especially when taken at high speed or great altitude. The naked eye always can see more. We’ve got four lifeboats that should be able to search this world from pole to pole. Why don’t we use them?”

“Because, Your Excellency, they were not designed for such a purpose.”

[130]

“Does that matter so long as they get results?”

Patiently, Grayder explained, “They were built to be launched in free space and to hit up forty thousand miles an hour. They are ordinary, old-style rocket-ships to be used only in a grave emergency.”

“Well, what of it?”

“It is not possible to make efficient ground-survey with the naked eye at any speed in excess of about four hundred miles per hour. Keep the lifeboats down to that and you’d be trying to fly them at landing-speed, muffling their tubes, balling up their motors, creating a terrible waste of fuel and inviting a crash which you’re likely to get before you’re through.”

“Then,” commented the Ambassador, “it is high time we had Blieder-drive lifeboats on Blieder-drive ships.”

“I couldn’t agree more, Your Excellency. But the smallest Blieder apparatus has an Earth-mass of more than three hundred tons. That’s far too much for little boats.” Picking up the photographs, Grayder slid them into a drawer. “The trouble with us is that everything we’ve got moves a heck of a lot too fast. What we really need is an ancient, propeller-driven airplane. It could do something that we can’t—it could go slow.”

“You might as well yearn for a bicycle,” scoffed the Ambassador, feeling thwarted.

“We have a bicycle,” Grayder informed. “Tenth Engineer Harrison owns one.”

“And he has actually brought it with him?”

“It goes everywhere he goes. There’s a rumor that he sleeps with it.”

“A spaceman toting a bicycle!” The Ambassador blew his nose with a loud honk. “I take it that he is thrilled by the sense of immense velocity it gives him, an ecstatic feeling of rushing headlong through space?”

“I wouldn’t know, Your Excellency.”

“H’m! Bring this Harrison here. I’d like to see him. Perhaps we can set a crackpot to catch a crackpot.”

Going to the caller-board, Grayder spoke over the ship’s system. “Tenth Engineer Harrison will report to the chartroom at once.”

Within ten minutes Harrison appeared, breathless and dishev

[ 131]

elled. He had walked fast three-quarters of a mile from the Blieder room. He was thin and woebegone, expecting trouble. His ears were large enough to cut out the pedaling with the wind behind him and he wiggled them nervously as he faced the assembled officers. The Ambassador examined him with curiosity, much as a zoologist would inspect a pink giraffe.

“Mister, I understand that you possess a bicycle.”

At once on the defensive, Harrison said, “There’s nothing against it in the regulations, sir, and therefore—”

“Damn the regulations,” swore the Ambassador. “Can you ride the thing?”

“Of course, sir.”

“All right. We’re stalled in the middle of a crazy situation and we’re turning to crazy methods to get moving. Upon your ability and willingness to ride a bicycle the fate of an empire may stand or fall. Do you understand me, Mister?”

“I do, sir,” said Harrison, unable to make head or tail of this.

“So I want you to do an extremely important job for me. I want you to get out your bicycle, ride into town, find the mayor, sheriff, grand panjandrum, supreme galootie or whatever he is called, and tell him that he is officially invited to evening dinner along with any other civic dignitaries he cares to bring. That, of course, includes their wives.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Informal attire,” added the Ambassador.

Harrison jerked up one ear and drooped the other. “What was that, sir?”

“They can dress how they like.”

“I get it. Do I go right now, sir?”

“At once. Return as quickly as you can and bring me the reply.”

Saluting sloppily, Harrison went out. His Excellency found an easy-chair, reposed in it at full length, smiled with satisfaction.

“It’s as easy as that.” Pulling out a long cigar, he bit off its end. “If we can’t touch their minds we’ll appeal to their bellies.” He cocked a knowing eye at Grayder. “Captain, see that there is plenty to drink. Strong stuff. Venusian cognac or something equally potent. Give them lots of hootch and an hour at a well-filled table and they’ll

[ 132]

talk all night. We won’t be able to shut them up.” He lit the cigar, puffed luxuriously. “That is the tried and trusted technique of high diplomacy—the insidious seduction of the distended gut. It always works. You’ll see!”

[133]

Chapter 7 | TOC | Chapter 9