The Worlds of George O

by George O. Smith

  Their days and nights were copies of one another. They awoke in the morning and found water for drinking and a meager washing. They stole food in a process that became more and more refined as they gained practice. They walked, Terry openly along busy streets; Beauregarde racing through alleyways and gangways and backways so he would not call attention to the youth by his very presence.

  Terry once suggested that they travel by night. At this, Beauregarde snowed the youth with a flurry of objections, none of which Terry could wholly understand--other than the fundamental concept that they were objections complete with valid argument to support them. The basic idea, Terry managed to grasp, was that he could easily mingle with the people of Coleban by day, whereas by night there would always be the unexpected watcher who would find it interesting for fair or foul reasons to note that a youth alone was walking through the neighborhood in the middle of the night.

  So they traveled by day, with Terry walking from checkpoint to checkpoint located by Beauregarde, who operated as a scout.

  * * * *

  Their progress was marked in fine detail by pinpoint lights and glowing stripline on the huge illuminated map of City Coleban. Their progress would have gratified Peter Hawley, but it was far from satisfactory to the watchers of City Coleban.

  "When will the youth gain Understanding?" groaned Homburg.

  "They seem to have worked out a routine that makes it unnecessary," said Martell.

  "Not even Doktur gave a thought to the possibility that Beauregarde, the dog, could lead young Terence Lincoln through the streets of City Coleban without first bringing the youth to Understanding."

  "May I offer a suggestion, Zer Martell?"

  "A solution?"

  "No, Zer. Just a possible explanation."

  "Go ahead, Bod Homburg."

  "Zer, possibly the dog, Beauregarde, is too capable for our purpose. He does not need a youth with Understanding to act for him."

  "An acceptable explanation," nodded Martell. "No doubt a lesser dog might have turned the trick. But--" and Martell twisted his face in a sour smile--"Beauregarde is the only dog in all of Xanabar." He thought deeply for a full minute. Finally he took a deep breath and said, "Bod Homburg, their way must be made more difficult. You know what to do."

  "I do indeed, Zer Martell."

  * * * *

  VII

  Morning came as usual, and Beauregarde and Terry came awake shortly after dawn. They drank at a bubbly fountain, and washed in the water of a small lagoon in a tiny park that still retained some of the long-gone elegance of the day when this district was strictly for the ruling class of Coleban.

  The pair killed time until the customary store-opening hour by sauntering through the merchandising district and casing the stores and supermarkets for a likely source of food.

  When the stores began to fill with customers, they made their usual play. It was, by now, a well rehearsed program. They entered from opposite sides, and, as usual, the very presence of Beauregarde created excitement. Some of the citizens were petrified with fright at the proximity of the animal, others were fascinated, still others wanted to move in close so they could tell their friends about the incident. With all attention distracted, Terry made his haul from the open shelves--

  Or rather, he began to.

  He was in the midst of filling a small sack with choice groceries when one of Xanabar's Peacekeepers in the full glittering regalia appeared behind him and laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. Terry whirled, twisting his shoulder out of the Peacekeeper's grip by ducking his head under the Peacekeeper's arm, and plunging away at an angle.

  "Halt! Halt in the name of Xanabar!" To back up his order, the Peacekeeper's hand slid toward the stunner in its holster.

  And at the same moment, Beauregarde came around the corner of the counter on a dead run. The dog slid to a crouching stop beside the Peacekeeper and emitted an ugly-sounding snarl. "Stop right there, Peacekeeper," growled the dog. "Draw that thing and you'll lose your hand at the wrist."

  Terry stopped at the sound of Beauregarde's first deep-throated snarl; he turned to face them. The Peacekeeper whirled to face the dog. "You are the Terrestrial dog, Beauregarde."

  "You are so right. I am."

  "You may not threaten the peace of Xanabar."

  "If you were capable of keeping it, which both I and my master doubt--or willing to try, which we question--neither I nor my master would be required in Xanabar."

  "You may not criticize--"

  "Stop it, Peacekeeper," said the dog. "The very fact that I am here is proof enough that someone in your upper office is playing games. Otherwise young Terence Lincoln would have been found and returned to the spaceport, instead of being harried and chased and herded from one slum to another and forced to steal."

  "There are no slums in Xanabar."

  "Call them 'Points of historic interest,' then," said Beauregarde.

  "This is the missing Terrestrial youth, Terence Lincoln?"

  "You call it 'missing," but we call it something else."

  "This is the missing person. He is also a thief. He must answer to the Justice of Xanabar."

  "That's what you think," said Beauregarde with a snarl. "Terry has had enough of the so-called Justice of Xanabar to last him a lifetime. Now if your justice were real and honest, you would escort us to the spaceport and make certain that this youth is properly restored to those who will see him home to Mother Earth."

  "You cannot conceal his thieving under a cloak of false righteousness! Nor may you impute that Xanabar renders false justice when we take a thief to jail instead of releasing him to fly free and clear. He must answer to--"

  * * * *

  "Oh, knock it off," snapped Beauregarde. "Terry and I will go out of here in one piece and on our feet, whether you live to tell your family about it or not. Now stand aside, and don't put a hand on that stunner--or we'll find out how fast we are, you and I."

  "You cannot threaten--"

  "I already have. Now, if you want to try your skill against my speed, start reaching. Go ahead, draw it. Start now. I'll have plenty of time to take you after you start. Make your play first--"

  "Look out!" shouted Terry. With a single, whirling motion, the youth turned, scooped up a container of something handy in size and shape and hardness, and hurled it in a bullet-throw over the dog's back into the face of what looked like an ordinary citizen of City Coleban.

  But the ordinary citizen was far from ordinary, for truly ordinary citizens do not carry minibeams in the breast pocket ordinarily reserved for pens and pencils.

  The hard canister caught the citizen across the bridge of the nose. The rim bit deep as bone splintered. No will of iron was ever strong enough to prevent the reaction; pain and shock removed all plan for action from the man's mind. By reaction, his hand opened and let the minibeam drop as he raised the hand to his face in the instinctive gesture.

  Beauregarde leaped, caught the falling minibeam in his mouth, and with a sharp snap of his powerful neck, he hurled it against the face of the counter beside him. It hit and smashed with an ear-splitting

  crack! and a blinding flash of light as its bottled power went radiant.

  In the excitement, the Peacekeeper managed to draw his stunner and was bringing it to bear on Beauregarde.

  "Hit him low!" barked the dog as he leaped for the Peacekeeper's throat.

  Terry plunged forward in a football tackle, hitting the Peacekeeper several inches lower than any referee would have allowed. But this was no game, and neither was it time to behave like a gentleman.

  The Peacekeeper went over in a tangle, his legs cut out from under him by the flying tackle, and his topside completely overwhelmed by the mass of the dog, who hit him at the throat. There was little bloodshed. Beauregarde merely nicked the soft flesh, but he kept that throat between his fangs until the Peacekeeper had time to realize just what the dog could have done.

  Then with a gesture calculated to live in the humility of the Pe
acekeeper for the rest of his life, Beauregarde slurped the man from the chin to hairline with a large, soggy, rough-surfaced tongue-of-dog. "You're dead," he said. "Lie down and be counted."

  Then the dog looked at Terry. "I think we've stirred us up a Donnybrook in the good old Peter Hawley tradition," he said. "Let's cut out and slope for home."

  * * * *

  Terry scrambled to his feet, pocketing the Peacekeeper's stunner because it seemed like a good idea at the time. He looked around at the people of Coleban; some were frozen, some were leaving, and a fair number were converging warily. "Beau," he replied, "I read you a solid five by five."

  Side by side, the Terrestrial youth and his dog headed for the nearest door. The crowd melted before them, opening a way; those who were the professionals in this game beat a parallel course outside the immediate crowd and began to converge on the door.

  Slowly; they would bring up behind and surround the pair with the aid of those outside.

  A large figure loomed in the door, blocking it almost completely.

  "Beau! It's old saffron-face. Hit 'im high; I owe him one!"

  They hit old saffron-face one-and-two. Beauregarde caught the throat with the soft-trained mouth of a retriever, and the dog's mass bent old saffron-face backward, thrusting the barrel stomach forward on an arched spine. Terry connected with this massive facade in a shoulder block that caught the plexus and the pit of the stomach with a paralyzing blow.

  Saffron-face did not go down. He went back and back and back, off-balance on the rounds of his stumbling heels, his trained body struggling to regain footing. The mass of his flesh, which he'd used as a barrier at the doorway, became the main point of a one-body flying wedge which battered its way backward through his own men and created an avenue through which Terry and Beauregarde went before the opening could close behind their human battering ram. At the curb, the stumbling heels found no means of support, and saffron-face went over on his back, walloping the back of his head on the pavement.

  He was out stone cold in the gutter when Terry and Beauregarde used him as a gangplank toward freedom.

  * * * *

  Once free of immediate hands, both of them turned left and ran along the center of the street. They outdistanced the local gathering with ease, since the locals were still trying to figure out what had happened. By a zigzag course, they managed to get themselves out of sight.

  "And now which way?" asked the dog.

  "The shortest and quickest," said Terry immediately.

  "That may lead us through some trouble," said Beauregarde, after looking around to locate himself with respect to the rest of City Coleban.

  "That may be," replied Terry, "but there's two things wrong with trying to make it on the sly."

  "Two?"

  "Two. First, I've suspected all along that this was a planned operation. Now I know it is. So the sooner we can get out of it the better--it'll give us less time to get trapped. Two, the reason I know it is a planned operation is because I now know why they want me alive and with Understanding. You see, Beau, I am a courier."

  "A courier?"

  "Beau, I could hardly understand you before, even though you were speaking and thinking in my own native tongue. Now even this mess they gabble around here makes sense to me. I understand the tongue of Xanabar. Now, how could you send a secret message through enemy territory in a universe where Understanding is the way of life?"

  Beauregarde said, "I wouldn't know. My world is not filled with intrigue and secret messages."

  "Well, one of the first things about secret messages is to conceal the fact that a message is being sent. In this universe of Understanding, the only way is to send the message by some courier who does not yet have Understanding--neither he nor anyone he meets will be aware of the fact. Second, of course, no one could simply carry a letter. To carry the information, I was given posthypnotic orders to forget what I'd been told until I was back home on Earth. Unfortunately, I gained Understanding while here in Xanabar. And if they get their clutches on me, they can extract the information because, with Understanding, I can call up information from my subconscious."

  "And you know what this message is?"

  "Sure--and so does whoever runs the Peacekeepers of Xanabar. So it's no secret.

  Professor Marquart discovered the secret of Scholar's Cluster and planted it in my mind to carry back home."

  "Whoof!" said Beauregarde. He looked up into the sky. "My eyes are not as sharp as my nose, and I can neither see nor smell a hovercar at twenty thousand feet. Terry, do you see anything up there?"

  "Clouds. Oh, there's a flash, a speck. Can't make anything out."

  "That will be an observer in a hovercar. Probably with a rifle-microphone which lets him listen to every word we say."

  "So we cannot go by stealth," said Terry. "Then we will go boldly and defy them to do their worst. Come on," he said, "which way toward the spaceport?"

  Beauregarde pointed, then, as Terry started walking in that direction with a determined stride, Beauregarde aligned himself at the lad's side.

  * * * *

  VIII

  Once more there came a change in the environment. A subtle change; not one of cracked windows, peeling paint, nor of lost elegance or a standard of living. It was a change in the traffic, both vehicle and human. It was not a change in the pattern, but in the density; as if some computer had extrapolated the natural city pattern of shaded randomness along an asymptote toward zero. It looked exactly like one of those periods in the life of any community in which, in certain hours, everyone in the area is busy inside.

  And, being so natural-looking, it went unnoticed by Terry and Beauregarde.

  The total area was roughly elliptical, with the major axis aligned with their general course. Being further geometric, Terry and Beauregarde were approximately at one focal point of the ellipse, the behind point, so that the other focus was always ahead of them. As they walked toward the spaceport--still far across the city--the citizens of Xanabar were being ordered aside and away, to clear the area; they remained aside and out of sight until the Terrestrial pair passed, and were then permitted to resume their daily lives.

  It was an operation that could only have been carried out with the resources of a large, despotic organization which was driven by the prospect of great gain or loss.

  From the site, the operation was not possible to grasp, but it was clearly visible to Martell and Homburg.

  These Xanabarians had abandoned their offices and the huge illuminated map for cramped quarters in a huge tractor-trailer van, fitted inside as temporary field offices. In place of the citywide map was a sectional area to the same approximate scale and detail, showing the neighborhood. Tiny colored pointlets of light labeled and identified all vehicular and pedestrian traffic so that citizen could be told from Peacekeeper, with Terry and Beauregarde especially coded.

  * * * *

  They were not alone, citizen, Peacekeeper, and the two targets. Peter Hawley was present, too. Peter did not have the advantage of the high-flying hovercars, with their rifle microphones and the super tele video lenses, and the computer that maintained surveillance over the neighborhood by following the moving traffic and maintaining the code once the object was identified.

  But Peter Hawley was not without his own sources of information. Earth's recognition of the silliness of trying to operate under cover in a universe full of Understanding had another facet. By using Beauregarde, an object as conspicuous as a paid political advertisement, Peter could keep track of Terry with fair accuracy. For the passage of anything as exotic as Terrestrial dog through any district made various waves. Some were frightened, some curious; many had heard of this strange beast with the tongue of man.

  Speculation, fear, wonder, sometimes amusement, and quite frequently fanciful tales of personal encounter were commonplace in the streets and in the vurguzz joints; all one had to do was listen carefully and then sort fact from fiction.

  By keeping one ear
to the ground, Peter Hawley had been able to keep track of Terry and the dog, and so long as progress was maintained, Peter let well enough alone.

  Like Terry, Peter was at a total loss to figure out what Xanabar had in mind; certainly there was enough manpower to collect the kid if Xanabar wanted to, and was willing to pay the price of overt kidnap. In the hope of gaining some idea of what was going on, Peter let things ride, while watching carefully.

  When the call went out to execute one of their mobilization plans, its interception by the Terrestrial Office was a matter of standard operating procedure. Peter went to the periphery of the ellipse, along with Martell, Homburg, and their specialized force of Peacekeepers. Knowing the city well, Peter stationed himself fairly accurately on a near-line between Beauregarde's position and the spaceport. This left an error-probability of several city blocks, but it was close.

  So in this area there were three very determined attitudes. One, a very large and determined group, was not going to let Terence Lincoln get to City Coleban spaceport; they were restrained only by the sure knowledge that open violence would bring about retaliation, and they were wary of the fratchy temper of all Terrestrials. The second, a minority consisting solely of Peter Hawley, was bent on joining forces with Terry and Beauregarde, and marching out of the district with them, daring any Xanabarian to put one toe over the line demarking a forty-foot circle about them. The third consisted of Terry and Beauregarde, who wanted out and were going to get out, with or without help, with flags flying or furled, either marching down the avenue or slinking through the alleys.

  * * * *

  It was Terry who noted the lightening traffic. Not as such, however, but in an entirely different way.

  The sight of standard urban traffic is natural, as inconspicuous to the city man as Poe's purloined letter or the postman whose presence was so stereotyped and scheduled that he was above suspicion. But when traffic thins down, it is no longer the collective City Traffic, but individuals and vehicles which are not a mass, but a bunch of articles that neither look nor act alike.