Black Roger himself was a large man, going soft around the middle, but with an upstanding, jetty mustache which lent him a look of ferocity. He was one of the last of the great space-pirates, whose breed had wrought havoc in the pioneer days of a generation before. Then, Earthly legal codes had proved inadequate to the vastnesses of interplanetary space, and bureau piled on bureau had failed to enforce what laws did apply—until someone had conceived the brilliant idea (so familiar to Queen Elizabeth I and her contemporaries) of setting a pirate to catch a pirate. The more promising freebooters had been licensed and given considerable immunities in return for keeping down the more unruly. Now, a pirate was a spaceship owner who lived by his wits without publicly breaking the law—a feat which Black Roger had found not too hard hitherto, since his wits were excellent and interplanetary law still was scarcely out of diapers.
Dirk leaned close to the space rover, peered intently at his mustache, then recoiled with a shudder.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” asked Black Roger.
“It really is waxed,” Dirk deplored. “Tsk, tsk.”
Black Roger’s eye lit on the badge. “Oh, a cop; sit down and take a load off your flat feet.”
“I’m not a cop; I’m a Park Ranger,” corrected Dirk. “I’ve brought you greetings from the Commission for Parks and Monuments.” He produced the document. “To Black Roger Wiescopfennig, Pirate First ClassS notification of limitation of sojourn on a planetary body within the Commission’s jurisdiction, according to Article V, Paragraph 3a of the Act of 2012, as amended—”
Black Roger studied it a trifle nearsightedly, then grunted, “Oh, that,” tore the paper to pieces and threw the pieces on the floor.
Dirk regarded him severely. “Maybe you think I don’t know what you’re up to here.”
“Oh, was that you snooping around a while back? So what, says I. I don’t care if you took pictures; you have no case, and you know it.”
“Maybe so,” conceded Dirk evenly. “But, legalities aside, I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Roger. A great big pirate like you, and look who you’re picking on. A sweet, innocent, helpless little girl who owns the lease on this asteroid—”
“I’ve seen the babe.” Black Roger leered. “Her and me might work up a deal—with you nowhere around, brother.”
Dirk sighed. He hadn’t expected much, though, from an appeal to the buccaneer’s better nature. “One more thing,” he said ominously. “Had you considered that the game you’re playing might not be safe—for you?”
Black Roger laughed coarsely.
That put an end to any surviving hesitation on Dirk’s part. Coolly he drew the whammy-gun, sighted at the other’s amusement-convulsed solar-plexus, and pulled the trigger.
“Urk!” gasped Black Roger, and lapsed into a rigid silence.
WITH SOME difficulty, Dirk hoisted the body onto his shoulder and went out. The crew-robots who saw this, had no instructions for this contingency. They would have known what to do had someone tried to murder their master, steal his liquor, or sabotage the ship’s engines; but to their penetrating electronic gaze it was clear that the master was alive and in good health, though stiff as a board.
Dirk crammed Black Roger into a spacesuit, and once beyond the ship’s gravity propelled him without trouble to the patrol boat.
Lorraine Farrar was gloomily going over the mine’s books with her uncle. Krachmeyer was sweating; he looked up with marked relief at Dirk’s entrance.
“Come on, folks,” invited Dirk airily. “You don’t want to miss the big show.”
“What show?” Lorraine gave him a suspicious look.
“Satisfaction or your money back,” Dirk guaranteed, waving them toward the door.
Puzzled, they allowed him to shepherd them into spacesuits and across a bare stretch of asteroid to the patrol-cruiser. Entering its cabin, they halted in stupefaction at the sight of the rigid body extended on the floor.
“This,” Dirk introduced it, “is Black Roger.”
Lorraine’s face lit; she gazed at Dirk, thawing visibly. “Is he dead?” she asked eagerly.
“No,” said Dirk. “Just whammied.”
Krachmeyer’s reaction was horror. “Have you gone crazy? No? Well, then I will. When he comes to, he’ll not only prosecute you for false arrest, but he’ll probably sue us for abetting!”
“Buck up, Uncle Krach—I mean Mr. Krachmeyer.” Dirk slapped him on the back, dislocating some internal organs which the mine manager, rightly or wrongly, valued. “I didn’t arrest him, I just brought him along; and I don’t think he’ll sue.”
He lifted the ship several miles into space and sent it on a great arc around the asteroid. Then, with a skillful use of braking jets, he brought it to a stop relative to that body and let it go into free fall—whose rate, under the gravitational circumstances, would take some time to become perceptible. Through the nose window they could see the valley where the Vulture lay.
“Watch,” Dirk told his questioning audience. “You too, Roger.”
Black Roger had recovered enough to move his eyes. They gave Dirk a dirty look or two, but after that spent most of their time following Lorraine, who, even in a spacesuit coverall, was worth the effort. Dirk considered putting blinders on him; but more humane counsels prevailed, and he propped the pirate up so that he, too, could see out the nose window.
A MINUTE later, the section of landscape they were watching vanished in a terrific flare of light and heat. Vapor puffed outward and diffused instantly into the vacuum. Except for the special glass of the rocket ship’s window, designed to guard against the dangerous radiations of deep space, the sight of the explosion might have been permanently blinding.
As it was, they blinked at each other through a haze of dark after-images.
Strangely, it was Black Roger who got out the first words; the shock seemed to have restored his power of speech. “You dirty crook!” he characterized Dirk. “Kidnaper! Saboteur! I’ll break you for this; you’ll rot in jail—”
“Uh-uh,” said Dirk. “All I did was save your life by removing you from the scene of an impending accident.”
“Accident, horse manure!” snarled the pirate.
“ ‘You can’t prove differently,’ ” quoted Dirk. ‘What’s sauce for the goose may be a bit of gravy for the gander, too.”
Black Roger evidently understood all too well; he subsided unhappily.
“I trust,” Dirk admonished him gently, “that this will be a lesson to you; go straight from now on, Roger!”
The pirate looked unenthusiastic, but he managed to move his head enough to bring Lorraine back into his field of view, and a little light returned to his eyes. “Maybe,” he suggested, “the love of a good woman would—” Lorraine shook her head firmly, moving instinctively closer to Dirk. “I’d shave off my mustache,” offered Black Roger wistfully.
“Nothing doing,” Dirk told him, enfolding the girl protectively. Then he frowned. “Don’t stare.” He grasped Black Roger by the shoulders and turned him with his face to the wall.
Krachmeyer found his voice. “How,” he inquired awedly, “did you do it?” Dirk glanced fondly through the window at the still-glowing crater gouged out of the asteroid. “Simple. I abstracted some plutonium from this ship’s fuel-stores, and scattered it in small packages where the guzzler would be sure to make a meal on it. Rich, concentrated food, calculated to give it acute indigestion. For a while, though, the plutonium was strung out through its multiple stomachs, slowly piling up in its abomasum. About the time it got back to the Vulture, the accumulation reached critical mass, and the guzzler burped.
“And now,” Dirk regretfully slid the whammy-gun from his holster, “Lorraine and I would like to be alone.”
He stacked the stiffened Krachmeyer up, face to the wall, beside Black Roger.
1956
JUNIOR
All younger generations have been going to the dogs . . . but this one was genuinely sunk!
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br /> “JUNIOR!” bellowed Pater.
“Junior!” squeaked Mater, a quavering echo.
“Strayed off again—the young idiot! If he’s playing in the shallows, with this tide going out. . . .” Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror.
No sign of Junior.
Mater was peering fearfully in the other direction, toward where, as daylight faded, the slope of the coastal shelf was fast losing itself in green profundity. Out there, out of sight at this hour, the reef that loomed sheltering above them fell away in an abrupt cliffhead, and the abyss began.
“Oh, oh,” sobbed Mater. “He’s lost. He’s swum into the abyss and been eaten by a sea monster.” Her slender stem rippled and swayed on its base and her delicate crown of pinkish tentacles trailed disheveled in the pull of the ebbtide.
“Pish, my dear!” said Pater. “There are no sea monsters. At worst,” he consoled her stoutly, “Junior may have been trapped in a tidepool.”
“Oh, oh,” gulped Mater. “He’ll be eaten by a land monster.”
“There ARE no land monsters!” snorted Pater. He straightened his stalk so abruptly that the stone to which he and Mater were conjugally attached creaked under them. “How often must I assure you, my dear, that WE are the highest form of life?” (And, as for his world and geologic epoch, he was quite right.)
“Oh, oh,” gasped Mater.
Her spouse gave her up. “JUNIOR!” he roared in a voice that loosened the coral along the reef.
ROUND about, the couple’s bereavement had begun attracting attention. In the thickening dusk, tentacles paused from winnowing the sea for their owners’ suppers, stalked heads turned curiously here and there in the colony. Not far away, a threesome of maiden aunts, rooted en brosse to a single substantial boulder, twittered condolences and watched Mater avidly.
“Discipline!” growled Pater. “That’s what he needs! Just wait till I—”
“Now, dear—” began Mater shakily.
“Hi, folks!” piped Junior from overhead.
His parents swiveled as if on a single stalk. Their offspring was floating a few fathoms above them, paddling lazily against the ebb; plainly he had just swum from some crevice in the reef nearby. In one pair of dangling tentacles he absently hugged a roundish stone, worn sensuously smooth by pounding surf.
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”
“Nowhere,” said Junior innocently. “Just playing hide-and-go-sink with the squids.”
“With the other polyps,” Mater corrected him primly. She detested slang.
Pater was eyeing Junior with ominous calm. “And where,” he asked, “did you get that stone?”
Junior contracted guiltily. The surfstone slipped from his tentacles and plumped to the sea-floor in a flurry of sand. He edged away, stammering, “Well, I guess maybe . . . I might have gone a little ways toward the beach. . . .”
“You guess! When I was a polyp,” said Pater, “the small fry obeyed their elders, and no guess about it!”
“Now, dear—” said Mater.
“And no spawn of mine,” Pater warmed to his lecture, “is going to flout my words! Junior—COME HERE!”
Junior paddled cautiously around the homesite, just out of tentacle-reach. He said in a small voice, “I won’t.”
“DID YOU HEAR ME?”
“Yes,” admitted Junior.
The neighbors stared. The three maiden aunts clutched one another with muted shrieks, savoring beforehand the language Pater would now use.
But Pater said “Ulp!”—no more.
“Now, dear,” put in Mater quickly. “We must be patient. You know all children go through larval stages.”
“When I was a polyp . . .” Pater began rustily. He coughed out an accidentally inhaled crustacean, and started over: “No spawn of mine. . . .” Trailing off, he only glared, then roared abruptly, “SPRAT!”
“I won’t!” said Junior reflexively and backpaddled into the coral shadows of the reef.
“That wallop,” seethed Pater, “wants a good polyping. I mean. . . .” He glowered suspiciously at Mater and the neighbors.
“Dear,” soothed Mater, “didn’t you notice?”
“Of course, I. . . . Notice what?”
“What Junior was doing . . . carrying a stone. I don’t suppose he understands why, just yet, but. . . .”
“A stone? Ah, uh, to be sure, a stone. Why, my dear, do you realize what this means?”
PATER was once more occupied with improving Mater’s mind. It was a long job, without foreseeable end—especially since he and his helpmeet were both firmly rooted for life to the same tastefully decorated homesite (garnished by Pater himself with colored pebbles, shells, urchins and bits of coral in the rather rococo style which had prevailed during Pater’s courting days as a free-swimming polyp).
“Intelligence, my dear,” pronounced Pater, “is quite incompatible with motility. Just think—how could ideas congeal in a brain shuttled hither and yon, bombarded with ever-changing sense-impressions? Look at the lower species, which swim about all their lives, incapable of taking root or thought! True Intelligence, my dear—as distinguished from Instinct, of course—pre-supposes the fixed viewpoint!” He paused.
Mater murmured, “Yes, dear,” as she always did obediently at this point.
Junior undulated past, swimming toward the abyss. He moved a bit heavily now; it was growing hard for him to keep his maturely thickening afterbody in a horizontal posture.
“Just look at the young of our own kind,” said Pater. “Scatter-brained larvae, wandering greedily about in search of new stimuli. But, praise be, they mature at last into sensible sessile adults. While yet the unformed intellect rebels against the ending of care-free polyphood, Instinct, the wisdom of Nature, instructs them to prepare for the great change!”
He nodded wisely as Junior came gliding back out of the gloom of deep water. Junior’s tentacles clutched an irregular basalt fragment which he must have picked up down the rubble-strewn slope. As he paddled slowly along the rim of the reef, the adult anthozoans located directly below looked up and hissed irritable warnings.
He was swimming a bit more easily now and, if Pater had not been a firm believer in Instinct, he might have been reminded of the grossly materialistic theory, propounded by some iconoclast, according to which a maturing polyp’s tendency to grapple objects was merely a matter of taking on ballast.
“See!” declared Pater triumphantly. “I don’t suppose he understands why, just yet . . . but Instinct urges him infallibly to assemble the materials for his future homesite.”
JUNIOR let the rock fragment fall, and began plucking restlessly at a coral outcropping.
“Dear,” said Mater, “don’t you think you ought to tell him. . .?”
“Ahem!” said Pater. “The wisdom of Instinct—”
“As you’ve always said, a polyp needs a parent’s guidance,” remarked Mater.
“Ahem!” repeated Pater. He straightened his stalk, and bellowed authoritatively, “JUNIOR! Come here!”
The prodigal polyp swam warily close. “Yes, Pater?”
“Junior,” said his parent solemnly, “now that you are about to grow down, it behooves you to know certain facts.”
Mater blushed a delicate lavender and turned away on her side of the rock.
“Very soon now,” said Pater, “you will begin feeling an irresistible urge . . . to sink to the bottom, to take root there in some sheltered location which will be your lifetime site. Perhaps you even have an understanding already with some . . . ah . . . charming young polyp of the opposite gender, whom you would invite to share your homesite. Or, if not, you should take all the more pains to make that site as attractive as possible, in order that such a one may decide to grace it with—”
“Uh-huh,” said Junior understandingly. “Tha
t’s what the fellows mean when they say any of ‘em’ll fall for a few high-class rocks.”
Pater marshaled his thoughts again. “Well, quite apart from such material considerations as selecting the right rocks, there are certain . . . ah . . . matters we do not ordinarily discuss.”
Mater blushed a more pronounced lavender. The three maiden aunts, rooted to their boulder within easy earshot of Pater’s carrying voice, put up a respectable pretense of searching one another for nonexistent water-fleas.
“No doubt,” said Pater, “in the course of your harum-scarum adventurings as a normal polyp among polyps, you’ve noticed the ways in which the lower orders reproduce themselves; the activities of the fishes, the crustacea, the marine worms will not have escaped your attention.”
“Uh-huh,” said Junior, treading water.
“YOU will have observed that among these there takes place a good deal of . . . ah . . . maneuvering for position. But among intelligent, firmly rooted beings like ourselves, matters are, of course, on a less crude and direct plane. What among lesser creatures is a question of tactics belongs, for us, to the realm of strategy.” Pater’s tone grew confiding. “Now, Junior, once you’re settled you’ll realize the importance of being easy in your mind about your offspring’s parentage. Remember, a niche in brine saves trying. Nothing like choosing your location well in the first place. Study the currents around your prospective site—particularly their direction and force at such crucial times as flood-tide. Try to make sure you and your future mate won’t be too close down-current from anybody else’s site, since in a case like that accidents can happen. You understand, Junior?”
“Uh-huh,” acknowledged Junior. “That’s what the fellows mean when they say don’t let anybody get the drop on you.”
“Well!” said Pater in flat disapproval.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 81