Calmly, Martell said, "I don't mind taking a gas nap. You can't stay in here forever, and when we awaken, we Peacekeepers will be once more the masters."
There was an official sounding rap on the door. "Open!" came the cry.
"Go ahead, Terry, open it."
"And let them in?"
"No, to let me out for a moment."
"I--er--"
"Open it, Terry," said the painful voice of Peter Hawley. "He--knows what--he's doing."
Terry opened the door. Beauregarde leaped out, catching the Peacekeeper outside by the throat, and carrying him backwards by yards before the two of them went down. The man screamed in fear and pain, and Beauregarde cold-bloodedly raked the soft throat to make ugly furrows that ran together and down to a spreading red puddle on the pavement.
Then with a leap the dog turned, made three long bounds and on the third passed back inside the van.
Terry slammed the door behind the dog; he was just in time to stop a spattering of missiles that further cracked the glass but did not breach it.
* * * *
Beauregarde faced Martell; there was menace in the dog's forward pose and there was anger in the dog's voice.
"You, Martell, listen to me. We're safe in this bullet-proof, mobile castle of yours, but you're likely to win so long as you can keep us bottled up. But we're not staying. Peter is here--"
"I'm not much--like my fighting--self," groaned Peter Hawley.
"In fighting trim or barely able to sit up and take nourishment, you're good for this game."
"Game? Oh, the one about the farmer with the fox, the goose and the sack of grain, and one wide river to cross in a leaky boat?"
"The same--with Terry as the prize. Now, Martell, hear this! I am a dog, and while I have Understanding, it is a dog's Understanding because, being a dog, I think like a dog.
No civilized person commits murder, Martell. But isn't 'murder' confined to the killing of one's own species? I hardly think of it as 'murder' when Peter Hawley points at some ugly bastovich and says, 'Beauregarde, kill!' because the deceased isn't my kind of herring.
"Now," went on the dog, "that Peacekeeper out there on the street isn't dead, but he will bear the scars of dog-fangs for life, and he will forever more be scared of the sight of Terrestrial dog. You, Martell, think of him as an example and tell your mob of Peacekeeping warriors outside to think of their Glorious Leader, Commissioner Martell, lying out there for real with his throat slashed with sharp teeth--because that is the name of the game of the farmer with the fox and the goose and the grain."
"Threats cannot--"
"Get off it!" snapped the dog. "They can, too. You will therefore give orders that Homburg's tame Peacekeeper is to drive through your battle line with Terence Lincoln, and your outfit remains honest. Once Terence is in the hands of the local Terrestrial Office at the spaceport, your Peacekeeper and Peter will return, at which point I will permit your man Homburg to depart as whole as he ever will be. It shouldn't be too bad," said Beauregarde with a cynical tone in his voice, "because a man in his position hardly needs a good, flexible, fast-drawing gun wrist. Once Homburg gets to a sawbones for his shattered wrist, and Peter gets a shot of perk-up to dissipate that nerve-stun hangover, he himself can return alone, and we happy trio will walk out of here with you in the middle."
"You fools, you cannot--"
"But you forget. It's really your throat that we are wagering, isn't it--Bod Martell?"
* * * * Now, to end all this, this is the ending that got lost. Fred Pohl remarked that it was far better, and I'm reasonably certain that John W. Campbell would have said the same thing. I leave it to you readers to decide. Go back to Martell's exclamation:
* * * * "Threats cannot--"
"Get off it," snapped the dog. "They--
"No, Beauregarde, he is right," said Terry Lincoln calmly.
Understanding is like maturity. In fact, it is a part of maturity, so one explains them both in the same terms. Then, some acquire maturity and Understanding early, others take a long time, and some never acquire either. At no time in the life of the young who are passing from late adolescence to youthful maturity does some upper being wave a wand and transform one overnight. One starts to acquire Understanding as a babe, when one realizes that sounds have meaning and begins to make them, and one finally has acquired Understanding when operations and traits foreign to the maturing adolescent, but quite conventional to someone else, make sense to the someone else, despite the fact that he who has just acquired Understanding would have no part in the other's behavior. Thus Terry Lincoln passed his last test. Martell's operations were anathema to Terry, but he Understood how and why Martell behaved as he did.
Terry said, "Threats won't work, Beauregarde. Homburg and Martell rank quite high in the Empire of Xanabar; they did not come to their rank by chance, nor by family, nor any other reason beyond ambition and competence. To yield under a threat would be a disastrous mistake, one that couldn't be explained to the next highest above them. Indeed, they and theirs would fair far better if they gave their lives to defend what is expected of them."
Homburg groaned, and stirred from his faint. Martell said, as calmly as Terry had,
"You can't win against these odds, young Lincoln."
"Can't I?" replied Terry. "Can't I? Remember the mission I was sent upon. I don't have to die to complete it. Keep him away from me, Beau!"
The dog took a stance before Martell, and said, "You may prefer to die for your cause, Martell, but you have enough Understanding to realize that if you attack me you will die without accomplishing anything."
And as the dog took his stance, Terry went to the front of the van and pulled away the crushables, and behind it he found what he sought. He snapped the switch, turned the function dial to "general broadcast, all frequencies including planet to starcraft" and picked up the microphone.
"Record this," he said, "and re-broadcast it for the entire universe to hear:
"The secret of Scholar's Cluster is a complicated multi-modulated series of waveforms generated by three of the central suns of the cluster and intermodulated as the radiation passes through the ionized gases between the three suns. The process is far from new. In the early days of the first wireless telegraph systems, one of the radio transmitters was an electric arc immersed in a heavy magnetic field.
"The three source suns generate radiation that inter-modulates to produce the wave trains that affect the brain. It has the form--" and here Terry rattled off three minutes of mathematical symbols in a notation as far above calculus as calculus is above simple algebra.
To which Beauregarde said, "What does that mean?"
Terry smiled. "Specifically, I haven't the foggiest notion. I was taught it by rote just as one can recite higher mathematics without knowing what it means. Specifically, it means nothing to me. But in detail, here and now, I have accomplished my mission, and from here and now, the peoples of the outer spiral arm will not have to pass through this mare's nest of graft and colossal dishonesty called the Empire of Xanabar.
"You have lost, Martell, haven't you,
Bod Martell!"
The Worlds of George O Page 35