The Kzinti-produced swamp was congealing from the bottom up. His boots were getting heavy. Each had collected a growing mass of ice. He kept walking so that they wouldn’t freeze to the bottom.
He’d searched the neutral setting, handle and sphere, for hidden controls. Nothing showed—nothing obvious. He tried twisting various parts of the handle. Nothing broke, which was good, but nothing would twist either.
Maybe something should break. Suppose he broke off the gauge?
He wasn’t strong enough. He tried twisting the ball itself. Nothing. He tried it again, holding the trigger down.
The silvery sphere twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, then clicked. Jason released the trigger, and it started to change.
“I’ve found it, Nessus. I’ve found something.”
“A new setting? What does it look like?”
Like a white flash, thought Jason, waiting for the single instant in which it would look like a white flash. It didn’t come. The protean material solidified.
“Like a cone with a rounded base, pointing away from the handle.”
“Try it. And if you are successful, good-bye, Jason. Knowing you was pleasant.”
“The blast could include you, too.”
“Is it thus you assuage my loss of you?”
“You sure you don’t have a sense of humor? Good-bye, Nessus. Here goes.”
The cone did not explode. A time bomb? Jason was about to start looking for a chronometer on the thing when he noticed something that froze him instantly.
A hazy blue line led away in the direction he happened to be pointing the cone. Led away and upward at forty degrees, wavering, as tremor in his fingers waved the cone’s vertex.
Another weapon.
He released the trigger. The line disappeared.
The Kzinti ship wasn’t in sight. Not that he would have used it as a target, not with Anne-Marie aboard.
A hidden weapon. More powerful than the others? He had to find out. Like Chuft-Captain, he tried to assume marksman’s stance.
His feet were frozen solidly into the ice. He’d been careless. He shrugged angrily, aimed the weapon a little above the horizon, and fired.
A hazy blue line formed. He slowly lowered the vertex until the line touched the horizon.
The light warned him. He threw himself flat on his back and waited for the blast. The light died almost instantly, and suddenly the shiny horizon-to-horizon ice rippled and shot from under him. It took his feet along. His body snapped like a whip, and then the ice tore away from his feet.
He was on his face, with agony in his ankles.
The backlash came. The ice jerked under him, harmlessly.
“Jason, what happened? There was an explosion.”
“Hang…on.” Jason rolled over and pulled his legs up to examine them. The pain was bad. His ankles didn’t feel broken, but he certainly couldn’t walk on them. The boots were covered with cracked wet ice.
“Jason. Puppeteer. Can you hear me?” It was the slurred, blurry voice of the boss kzin.
“Don’t say anything, Nessus. I’m going to answer him.” Jason switched his transmitter to the common channel. “I’m here.”
“You have discovered a new setting to the weapon.”
“Have I?”
“I do not intend to play pup games with you. As a fighter, you are entitled to respect, which your herbivorous friend is not—”
“How are your ribs feeling?”
“Do not speak of that again, please. We have something to trade, you and I. You have a unique weapon. I have a female human who may be your mate.”
“Well put. So?”
“Give us the weapon. Show us where to find the new setting. You and your mate may leave this world in your own ship, unharmed and unrestricted.”
“Your name as your word?”
No answer.
“You lying get of a…” Jason searched for the word. He could say two words of Kzin; one meant hello, and one meant—
“Do not say it. Jason, the agreement stands, except that I will smash your hyperdrive. You must return to civilization through normal space. With that proviso, you have my name as my word.”
“Nessus?”
“The herbivore must protect itself.”
“I think not.”
“Consider the alternative. Your mate is not entitled to the respect accorded a fighter. Kzinti are carnivorous, and we have been without fresh meat for some years.”
“Bluff me not. You’d lose your only hostage.”
“We’d lose one arm of her. Then another. Then a lower leg.”
Jason felt sick. They could do it. Painlessly, too, if they wished; and they probably would, to avoid losing Anne-Marie to shock.
He gulped. “Is she all right now?”
“Naturally.”
“Prove it.” He was stalling. Nessus could hear everything; he might come up with something…and was ever there a fainter hope?
“You may hear her,” said the boss kzin. There were clunking sounds; they must be dropping her helmet over her head. Then Anne-Marie’s voice spoke swiftly and urgently.
“Jay, darling, listen. Use the seventh setting. The seventh. Can you hear me?”
“Anne, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she shouted. “Use the seventh…” Her voice died abruptly.
“Anne!”
Nothing.
There was fast, muffled kzinti speech in his earphones. Jason looked at the weapon a moment, then dropped the guide to setting number seven. Maybe she had something. The cone writhed, became a mirror-surfaced sphere…
“Jason, you now know your mate is unharmed. We must ask for your decision immediately.”
He ignored the burry voice, watched the weapon become a flat-ended cylinder with a grid near the handle. He’d seen the kzinti using that.
“Oh,” he said.
It was the computer, of course. The tnuctip computer. He smiled, and it hurt inside him. His wife had given him the only help she had to give. She’d told him where to find the only tnuctipun expert in Known Space.
The hell of it was, she was perfectly right. But the computer couldn’t hear him, and he couldn’t hear the computer, and they didn’t speak a common language anyway.
Wait a minute. This was setting number seven; but if you counted neutral as the first setting, then—no. Setting six was only the laser.
Finagle! The Belter oath fitted. Finagle’s First Law was holding beautifully.
His ankles stopped hurting.
Decoyed! He twisted his head around to find his enemy. The bargain had been a decoy! Already his head buzzed with the stunner beam. He saw the Kzin, hiding behind a half-melted bulge of ice with only one eye and the stunner showing. He fired at once.
The weapon was on computer setting. His hand went slack, then his mind.
“I do not understand why she wanted him to use the seventh setting.”
“The computer, was it not?”
“Chuft-Captain, it was.”
“He could not have used the computer.”
“No. Why then did the prisoner—”
“She may have meant the sixth setting. The laser was the only weapon a human could have used against us.”
“Urrr. Yes. She counted wrong, then.”
The ship-to-suit circuit spoke. “Chuft-Captain, I have him.”
“Flyer, well done. Bring him in.”
“Chuft-Captain, do we still need him?”
The Kzin was not in a mood to argue. “I hate to throw anything away. Bring him in.”
His head floated, his body spun, his ankles hurt like fury. He shuddered and tried to open his eyes. The lids came up slowly, reluctantly.
He was standing in a police web, slack neck muscles holding his head upright in one-eighth gee. No wonder he hadn’t known which way was up. Anne-Marie was twelve inches to his side. Her eyes held no hope, only exhaustion.
“Damn,” he said. One word to cover it all.
The Kzinti yowrling had been so much a part of the background that he didn’t notice it until it stopped. After a moment the boss kzin stepped in front of him, moving slowly and carefully, and curled protectively around his left side.
“You are awake.”
“Obviously.”
One massive four-clawed hand held the tnuctip weapon, still at the computer setting. The Kzin held it up. “You found a new setting on this. Tell me how to reach it.”
“I can’t,” said Jason. “I found it by accident and lost it the same way.”
“That is a shame. Do you realize we have nothing to lose?”
Jason studied the violet eyes, fruitlessly. “What do you mean?”
“Either you will tell me of your own free will, or you can be persuaded to tell, or you cannot. In any case, we have no reason not to remove your mate’s arm.”
He turned and spoke in the kzinti tongue. The other aliens left the room.
“We will be leaving this world in an hour.” The boss kzin turned and settled his orange bulk carefully in a kzinti contour couch, grunting softly with the pain of movement.
He meant it. His position was too simple for doubt. The boss kzin had a tnuctip weapon to take back to Kzin, and he had two human captives. The humans were of no use to him. But he had great use for Jason’s knowledge. What he offered was a simple trade: knowledge for the meat on their bones.
“I can’t talk,” said Jason.
“All right,” Anne-Marie said dully.
“I can’t.” The cone form was too powerful. Its beam must set up spontaneous mass conversion in anything it touched. And he couldn’t explain. The boss kzin might hear him, and the kzinti didn’t know just what they were after.
“All right, you can’t. We’ve had it. How did they get you?”
“I got stupid. While the boss kzin was talking to me, one of the others snuck up and used a sonic.”
“The seventh setting—”
“I didn’t have time to figure anything out. There isn’t enough air to carry sound out there.”
“I didn’t think of that. How’s Nessus?”
“Still free.”
The boss kzin broke in. “We will have it soon. The puppeteer has no place to hide and nothing with which to fight, not even the inclination. Do you expect it to rescue you?”
Anne-Marie smiled sourly. “Not really.”
The other kzinti returned, carrying things. There were pieces of indecipherable kzinti equipment, and there was a medkit from the emergency doc in the Court Jester. They set it all down next to the police web and went to work.
One piece of Kzinti equipment was a small tank with a pump and a piece of soft plastic tubing attached. Jason watched them wrap the tubing three or four times around Anne-Marie’s upper arm. They joined the other end to the pump and started it going.
“It’s cold,” she said. “Freezing.”
“I can’t stop them,” said Jason.
She shivered. “You’re sure?”
He gave up. He opened his mouth to shout out his surrender. The boss kzin raised his furry head questioningly—and Jason’s voice stopped in his throat.
He’d used the hidden setting just once. For only an instant had the blue beam touched the horizon, but the explosion had damn near killed him. Obviously the hidden setting was not meant to be used on the surface of a planet.
It could be used only from space. Was it meant to destroy whole worlds?
But Anne-Marie hurt!
She said, “All right, you’re sure. Jay, don’t look like that. Jay? I can grow a new arm. Relax! Stop worrying about it!” The anguish in Jason’s face was like nothing she’d ever seen.
The burry voice said, “She will never reach an autodoc.”
“Shut up!” Jason screamed.
Soft kzinti noises entered the silence. One of the kzinti left: the pilot, the one with a white streak. The others talked. They talked of cooking, kzinti sex, human sex, Beta Lyrae, how to hunt puppeteers, or how to turn a sphere inside out without forming a cusp. Jason couldn’t tell. They used no gestures.
Anne-Marie said, “They could have planted a mike on us.”
“Yah.”
“So you can’t tell me what you’re hiding.”
“No. I wish I spoke Wunderlander.”
“I don’t speak Wunderlander. Dead language. Jay, I can’t feel my arm any more. There must be liquid nitrogen in this tube.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help.”
“It is not working,” said Chuft-Captain.
“It should work,” said Slaverstudent. “We may not get results with the first limb. We probably will with the second. The second time, they will know that we mean what we threaten.” He looked thoughtfully at the prisoners. “Also, I think we should eat our meals in here.”
“They know that limbs can be regrown.”
“Only by human-built machines. There are none here.”
“You have a point.”
“It will be good to taste fresh meat again.”
Flyer returned. “Chuft-Captain, the kitchen is programmed.”
“Good.” Chuft-Captain incautiously shifted his bulk and tensed all over at the pain. It would have been nice if he could have put pressure bandages around his ribs. The ribs had been set and joined with pins, but he could not use pressure bandages; they would remind his crew of what had happened. He would be shamed.
Kicked by a puppeteer.
“I have been thinking,” he said. “Regardless of what the human tells us, we must take the tnuctip relic to Kzin as quickly as possible. There I will drop you, Slaverstudent, along with the weapon and the freeze box containing Telepath. Flyer, you and I will return here for the herbivore. He cannot be rescued in that time. He will be easy to find. A sight search will find him unless he digs a hole, in which case we may use seismographs.”
“He will have a month to anticipate.”
“Yes. He will.”
“Can you understand me?”
Three pairs of kzinti eyes jerked around. The voice had belonged to none of them. It sounded foreign, artificial.
“Repeating. Can you understand me?”
It was the gun speaking. The tnuctip weapon.
“It’s learned their language,” said Jason. And all the hope drained out of him.
“It’ll tell them where to find that setting you were trying to hide.”
“Yah.”
“Then tell me this, Jay.” She was on the edge of hysteria, “What good will it do me to lose my arm?”
Jason filled his lungs and shouted. “Hey!”
Not one kzin moved. They hovered around the weapon, all talking at once.
“Hey, Captain! What sthondat was your sister?”
They all jerked around. He must have pronounced the word right.
“You must not use that word again,” said the boss Kzin.
“Get this thing off my wife’s arm!”
The boss kzin thought it over, spoke to the pilot. The pilot manipulated the police web to free Anne-Marie’s arm, using a cloth to protect his hand while he removed the cold, deadly tube. He turned off the pump, readjusted the police web, and went back to the discussion, which by then had become a dialogue. The boss kzin had shut the others up.
“How’s your arm?”
“Feels dead. Maybe it is. What were we hiding, Jay?”
He told her.
“Ye gods! And now they’ve got it.”
“Could you use an anesthetic?”
“It doesn’t hurt yet.”
“Let me know. They’re all through torturing us. They may eat us, but it’ll be all at once.”
The computer was doing most of the talking.
A kzin was holding up the tnuctip cap, the one they’d found in the stasis box. The computer spoke.
He held up the small metal object that might have been a communicator. The computer spoke again.
The boss kzin spoke.
The computer spoke at length.
The boss kzin picked up the weapon and did things to it. Jason couldn’t see what. The kzin was facing away from him. But the weapon writhed. Jason snarled in his throat. He commonly used curses for emphasis. He knew no words to cover this situation.
The boss kzin spoke briefly and left, cradling the weapon. One of the others followed: the expert on Slavers. Jason caught one glimpse of the weapon as the boss kzin went through the door.
The kzin with the white stripe, the pilot, remained.
Jason felt himself starting to shake. The weapon, the soft, mutable weapon. When the boss kzin had left the room, he’d carried a gun handle attached to a double cone with rounded bases and points that barely touched.
He didn’t understand.
Then his eyes, restlessly searching the room as if for an answer, fell on the empty stasis box. There was a tnuctip cap and a small metal object that registered in hyperspace and a preserved Slaver hand.
It began to make sense.
Did the computer have eyesight? Obviously. The Kzinti had been showing it objects from the stasis box.
Take a computer smart enough to learn a language by hearing it spoken for an hour. Never mind its size; any sentient being will build a computer as small as possible, if only to reduce the time lag in thinking with impulses moving at lightspeed or less. Let the computer know only what its tnuctipun builders had taught it, plus what it had seen and heard in this room.
It had seen a tnuctip survival kit. It had seen members of a species it did not recognize. The unfamiliar beings had asked questions which made it obvious that they knew little about tnuctipun, and that they could not ask questions of a tnuctip. They didn’t speak the tnuctip language. They were desperately anxious for details about a tnuctip top-secret weapon.
Obviously they were not allies of the tnuctipun.
They must be enemies. In the Slaver War there had been, could be, no neutrals.
He said, “Anne.”
“Still here.”
“Don’t ask questions, just follow orders. Our lives depend on it. See that kzin?”
“Right. You sneak up on him from behind; I’ll hit him with my purse.”
“This is not funny. When I give the word, we’re both going to spit at his ear.”