He withdrew his head; there was a pause while a section of the bedroom floor grew up to meet him, bright colors flashing on its sides to warn anyone who might have stepped on it by accident. Then his feet appeared, his horribly-patterned suit-legs (this morning it was purple locked in mortal conflict with two shades of orange), then the rest of him. I signaled for him to be quiet on account of the sleeping Lieutenant.
“Constitution, Whitey,” Rogers answered in a voice only slightly quieter than an orbital shuttle taking off, “I was supposed to wake him up, too. Say, if you fit the catheters in that way, you’ll wake him up with your own screaming.” He was referring to certain of the suit’s inner arrangements. Very personal. Very embarrassing. Brushing my clumsy hands aside, he did what had to be done efficiently, without fuss.
“Now at least you’ll know whether you’re coming or going, Whitey. Just pass your hand along the diagonal seam, that’s right, hip to shoulder. You’re all done—except for selecting some real snazzy pattern.”
“I believe that I will pass, Rog, thank you.” I had noticed that the others preferred solid colors, or simply the natural silvery-gray hue of smartsuit material. Then, catching my old bedraggled Navy uniform in the corner of one eye, I asked him, “What could you do with that?”
“Fascist-modern,” he murmured appraisingly, then imitated Lucille by wrinkling his nose. “Oh well, you fish on your side, I’ll fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle. Is the color right, or has it faded? I assume that sleeve originally ended in a cuff, like the other one ...” Pressing buttons on my arm, he eventually created a very impressive facsimile of my Navy Reserve uniform, complete to the chevrons. Campaign pips decorated one counterfeit breast pocket. On the “collar” were displayed the hard-won crossed pistols of a field armorer.
“Great,” said Rogers, standing back for a look, “Sure you won’t have any jackboots? Sam Browne belt? We’re having a special on both of them this week. How about your hoglegs? I cleaned ’em up the best I could. Sorry there isn’t any ammo. The Dardick was a fine old design, and—oops! Forget I let that slip, Whitey, have mercy on a fellow peon.”
I looked at the man closely, then turned, retrieved my pistols from the bed, belted them around my waist, unaccustomed to the extra weight on the left side. “What are you talking about, Rog, ‘a fine old design’? Where in Hamilton’s name do you know Darricks from?” About a hundred extremely odd notions were flitting through my mind at once. Now I knew what Williamson had meant by “impossible things before breakfast”.
“Honest, Whitey, I can’t tell you—why, good morning, Lieutenant Sermander! Glad to see that you slept well. We’re docking in about ninety minutes. I’m here to invite you to breakfast.” News to me, too. Sermander blinked stupidly, hoisted himself upright, blinked stupidly again.
The Lieutenant said, “I shall have rock-lizard eggs on toast, four strips of crisply-grilled hamster, plenty of tea. You need not bother setting a place for me. My man, here, will serve me in my quarters.” Looking first up then down, his eyes settled on the pistol belt. “We shall be discussing those, later.” He stretched, threw his legs over the edge of the bed, arose, waddled off to the bathroom. Behind him, the door dwindled, leaving a blank wall. I had not known it did that.
Rogers appeared to be in deep thought. Then he, too, blinked at me, focusing again. “Lieutenant’s an uppity son-of-a-bureaucrat, isn’t he?”
Before I could reply, the carpet started doing odd things again. Couper was descending into our midst. The little cabin was getting crowded. “You fellows go on upstairs. Get yourselves something to eat,” he suggested. “You’ve got a big day ahead of you, Whitey. I’ll stay behind and straighten Lieutenant Sermander out. That arm of his needs looking at, anyway. And Whitey? Nobody gets waited on around here, especially by the individual who saved his life. How’s that leg?”
“I had completely forgotten about it, sir.”
“Then git—and don’t call me sir, I work for a living!”
We got, me wondering what it was like to live in a culture where nobody gets waited on. How he had known to come straighten out the Lieutenant?
Who were these people, anyway?
-5-
Strange food, stranger drink, strangest conversation. Only I was awake, now, fully rested. This morning Lucille smoked what everybody else did. Nobody said a word about my Darricks. I felt conspicuous, although the others were all carrying weapons of one kind or another. Couper came upstairs with the Lieutenant twenty minutes later. My fellow Vespuccian was red in the face, not looking pleased. He changed all that for Lucille’s sake, however. He was even mildly civil with me.
“You actually piloted that flimsy box-kite across two light years? Nine weeks—how horrible!” Lucille never looked at me, but smiled, flirting with the Lieutenant, fascinated by everything he had to say. The man glanced my direction before answering, warning written on his face.
“We had a good computer system, my dear, not like in the bad old days, when it was seat-of-the-pants flying against a grimly determined foe.”
“You’re too modest. I’ve never known a real aeroplane fighter before!”
You still do not, I found myself thinking, then shut it off: It is an officer’s world. There is nothing any NCO can do about it. I was mentally debating whether to be annoyed—the Lieutenant had adjusted his suit to duplicate his own, rather grander, Navy uniform—when Williamson stopped in the middle of an unlikely fable he had resumed about an old lady blowing up an entire planet to make a philosophical point.
“Ammonium nitrate, she told me, soaked down with Number Three diesel fuel—although where she got it in the Asteroid Belt—excuse me a moment, will you?” He generated an expression of mild concentration.
Suddenly, the computer-generated mural wrapped around the room faded, replaced by a more accurate frozen starscape in the midst of which blinked a solitary light. The brilliant point seemed to explode into a solid object, a blazing upper slice of a hemisphere, hanging in the void before us, swelling to occupy our entire field of vision. It seemed to rotate as we swung around to approach it from its flat underside.
There was nothing to convey any sense of scale, but the thing was possibly six or eight times larger than the Asperance, at least three times greater in diameter than Little Tom. Its curved upper surface was featureless, seemingly lit from within by an eerie, grainy scintillation. Underneath, near an edge, a bowl-shaped opening yawned, one of seven: six deep cavities around a seventh in the center. Each, save the empty one we closed on, was neatly filled with a smaller craft, miniatures of the giant ship, identical to the Little Tom. The seams were nearly invisible—our pilot outlined them for us on the viewscreen—the lower contours of the small ships matched that of the mother vessel. Their colors matched, too, a brilliant sparkly blue-white.
“Last chick home to the nest, as usual!” Williamson relaxed again as the great form closed over us. The original starry screen display was restored. He pointed a broad-nailed finger ceilingward. “In case you two Vespuccian gentlemen are wondering, that baby up there is big. Eight hundred sixty-nine Jeffersonian metric feet across. Dunno what that would be by your reckoning.” He rose. “Well, it’s been a barrel. Thanks for traveling Little Tom. If something profitable ever comes from that benighted dustball—which I misdoubt sincerely—kindly let me know. Whatever it turns out to be, I’ve got three percent.”
General laughter around the table.
I got up, started belowdecks to collect my few belongings. Behind me, despite the finality of his words, the pilot lingered, perched on a corner of the table as the conversation continued. “You can be sure, Ev,” Rogers told him, “that whatever policy is ultimately decided on, with regard to this discovery, we’ll be doing the Confederacy—the entire galaxy, for that matter—a real favor. Besides, there’s bound to be something—organics, minerals, handicrafts—that we can use.”
Buried to my shoulders in the floor, I could not see the pilot, but I heard
his scorn-laden reply. “Easy to say! Since when were you an expert on planetary exploitation or sterilization? Rog, I’ve seen dry planets before. Don’t con a starship, I won’t run herd on your pet savages!”
Savages?
My head sank below the carpet, while my heart was sinking deeper than the dungeon on Sca. So we Vespuccians were savages, were we? No wonder, then, this run-around about going home. I gathered my uniform, left the robe behind, rode the pillar of extruded floor back upstairs, knowing I would have to discuss this with the Lieutenant as soon as possible.
The breakfast table had been put away when I returned. Couper, Lucille, their “pet savage” expert, all stood together in the center of the room, a few small items of hand luggage scattered about their feet. The Lieutenant, chatting with the girl, turned to me as I approached.
“Ah, Corporal O’Thraight,” he proclaimed. “Enough is enough. It is time to hand those play-toys over. I am the ranking survivor, after all.”
“Sir?” I knew perfectly well what he was talking about, but I intended making him come out with it plainly, in the hearing of the others.
“The sidearms, Corporal, give them to me.” I sighed, draped my tattered uniform over a travel case, reached for the quick-lock of the belt.
Couper stepped between us.
“Wait just a second, son. Lieutenant, we’ve got a long-standing tradition where I come from. We don’t permit self-styled authorities to badger a man out of his rights.” I would not have liked being on the receiving-end of that scowl. The Lieutenant, in turn, looked confused.
“Permit?” he demanded stiffly. “Rights have nothing to do with it at all, sir. Those pistols were issued by a state of which I am the highest-ranking representative present. O’Thraight, give me that belt now!”
I reached for the buckle once again. “As you were, son.” Couper ordered. I sighed, dropping my hands. “Lieutenant Sermander, you’re in my—what’s the word, Rog?—jurisdiction, now. Whitey earned those rotary popguns preserving your self-important carcass. Moreover, no state has the right to issue weapons or reclaim them—no, nor any rights at all, even to exist! This argument’s over, unless you want everyone you meet from now on to know the true color of Vespuccian gratitude.”
The Lieutenant’s face reddened, veins stood out on his forehead, he trembled a little. Then, abruptly, he relaxed with a big shrug. I unclipped the left-hand scabbard from its eyelets on the pistol belt, extended the holstered sidearm. “Take this one, sir, that way we will both—”
KLANGKLANGKLANGKLANGKLANG!!!!!
Abruptly, a blood-curdling alarm filled the ship. The Lieutenant froze in place. I looked around, heart racing, wondering what it all meant. The Earthians each stood at alert attention, their eyes on Ev Williamson.
That individual, his own eyes closed momentarily, his head cocked as if listening to something, stood rigidly for a few seconds. When he opened his eyes, he was almost a different person. His deep voice rumbled:
“Rendezvous is aborted. Take your places.
“We’re under attack!”
Mysterious Strangers
Surprisingly little action filled the next few moments.
Lucille followed Couper, huddling with the pilot Williamson as if in conference. However none of the three uttered a single word, nor even seemed to be looking at the others. Each stood in eerie silence, eyes closed, consciousness apparently directed inward. Owen Rogers glanced their way, then started shouting orders. “Whitey! Lieutenant! Come with me—no, never mind your stuff, it’ll be just fine where it is!”
Three long steps, he dragged both of us by the elbows, to the center of the room, the Lieutenant emitting an indignant, “My good fellow—!”
“Lie down—right on the floor. No, not that way, on your back so you can see what’s going on! There’s gonna be a little shooting, and you’ll be out from underfoot. I know, Lieutenant, I know. You’re Snoopy, Lando Calrissian, and the Red Baron all rolled into one. You wanna be in on the action. Me, too—but as a praxeologist or even as an armorer, I’m strictly a supernumerary in this dustup, just like you.”
Without waiting for us to obey him, he threw his bulk onto the carpet. I should not have been surprised. He began to sink, a cavity forming around his body, until all but his rounded belly lay flush with the surface. “Well, you guys, what the state are you waiting for?”
We followed his example, the Lieutenant somewhat reluctantly. The versatile flooring molded itself around us. Only the handles of our luggage showed; it, too, was now part of the deck. Lucille, Couper, Williamson the pilot, also lay on the floor, in it, as the overhead showed the Rendezvous-ship spitting out vessels similar to Little Tom.
Suddenly: “Here they come!” A bright ferocity rang in Lucille’s voice. At an eyestraining distance from the Little Tom, a cluster of small dots showed infinitesimal against the starry background. Our craft pulled away from the mother ship, all of the other auxiliaries taking up positions of their own in a loose sphere about the larger vessel.
“I guess we might as well let our two passengers see what we’re up against,” observed Williamson. No excitement was audible in his voice at all. Many of the dots turned to scarlet—rather more than had been immediately apparent. Hundreds of “stars” now stood revealed as an attacking fleet, growing as it approached, individual craft still too small to be discernible except as pin-pricks of blood-colored light.
“Lee, Tom-squared, here,” crackled a voice in the ceiling. “I’ve got ’em on instruments at twenty, closing like a revenuer on a widow’s homestead.”
Another voice, not one of ours, answered, “Acknowledge, Tom-Tom, twenty-thousand and closing. Hold your position and engage as you bear.”
The first voice was tinged with masculine excitement, the second serenely feminine. Rogers said, “Tom-Tom’s another auxiliary. He’s the closest. These bandits don’t show on radar, it’s what makes them so—”
“Bandits?” squeaked the Lieutenant, a beat ahead of me.
Blamm! The little ship shook with the impact, our makeshift acceleration nests cushioning what must have been a titanic shock. “Where the state did he come from?” swore Williamson. The starscape reeled momentarily as Little Tom regained headway and maneuvered sharply. In an instant, we could see the enemy, headed straight for us again.
Peculiarly, the object resembled Asperance, not streamlined like Little Tom, yet different from our Vespuccian ship, too. With nothing to give us an idea of scale, it consisted of a central shaft, a lozenge-shaped nodule at one end. Where the shaft met the presumed crew-cabin, half a dozen hydraulic-looking landing-jacks sprouted, angled slightly outward toward the stern. Our adversary had sustained some collision damage. A couple of his legs were bent, fuselage dented badly.
But he was persistent.
As the enemy loomed nearer, its shaft-end pointed menacingly toward us. What destruction had Little Tom suffered? Closer ... closer ... tension filled the room until it seemed the hull would burst. The Lieutenant ground his teeth. His corporal suppressed a whimper.
“Right on, baby,” our pilot growled from his own gravelike depression, “Come and get your medicine!” A brilliant flash washed out the sky-display. The enemy fighter reappeared, damaged worse, its body charred, its legs burned away to stumps. “Son-of-a-bureaucrat! I got him!”
Williamson’s cheer was a bit premature. Despite the punishment, our adversary swiveled until we saw it base-on, swelling as it bore unstoppably closer. The heavens flashed again—an explosion, a shower of debris. “Just in time, too,” the pilot observed, “Let’s see how many of these vermin we can burn before they punch us full of holes!”
“Rogers,” demanded the Lieutenant—the tip of his nose just visible as he talked, “You said we Vespuccii were the only space-traversing—”
Flash!
He was cut off by another brilliant, frightening display. To the right, a saucer-shaped vessel, sister to our own, confronted two of the strange enemy craft. Each of them was at
least three times larger, shaft-end to lozenge-tip, than the diameter of the scout. Suddenly, the smaller vessel’s underside pulsed blindingly. Energy spat from the entire surface, crashed against the alien antagonists. Both retreated, severely hurt. The saucer pursued, firing its peculiar keel-batteries again and again. One oddly-shaped attacker dissolved in a greasy cloud of scattering scrap. Little Tom swerved again, blasting away at an unseen opponent, losing sight of the other ship, the outcome of its battle.