The frammis in question was Georgie’s field-density equalizer. Without it, she was grounded as thoroughly as if I’d yanked her powerplant. Here she’d stay until I could figure out what to do about the miscreants below. Replacing the panel, I rejoined Truth, Justice, and the Yamaguchian Way, who were still waiting for an answer from me like puppies at Alpo time.
“Tell y’what, fellas, y’done okay, all things considered. Hell, I coulda woke up dead, couldn’t I?”
They’d screwed the after hatch down good and solid. Musta dragged my sleeping time-pirates and pitched ’em over the coaming, then somehow dropped the heavy lid without making freenieburgers of themselves in the process. I gave the wheel a gentle experimental turn, with no more luck than I’d expected. Appeared the prisoners had locked us out sometime after the Freenies had locked them in.
“Seems only fair,” I mumbled.
“I beg Your pardon, Lord?” one of the Freenies squeaked.
“Hunh? Oh, yeah. Look, guys, I been thinkin’...” The forward hatch is always down, lock-wheel dogged tight. Auxiliary Control ain’t so much for flying Georgie from. Any disaster that takes out the control deck’s gonna make scrap-metal of the rest of the ship. Mainly it’s for the convenience of the overhaul mechanics—somethin’ I’m that glad the Academy doesn’t trust to its radiocontrolled gorillas. Yet. Now the ’midships wheel wouldn’t turn, either. That meant the hijackers’d unshipped the access panel downstairs. I headed back to the control room, Freenies squiggle-marching right behind me.
“Like I said, I owe you fellas—first for Edna. She was gonna set me up in the tincup an’ pencil business. Also for roundin’ up the whole menagerie while I was, er, incapacitated.”
I paused, rockered a gang of switches. Sure enough, the belowdecks monitors focused on a pair of gleaming halfmeter vise-grips clamped through both lower hatch wheels, freezing ’em solid. Corridors were empty. Camera by camera, I tracked my prey to the messroom, then switched off real quicklike before someone noticed the monitor light.
I turned back to the Freenies. “Your ‘Evil Ones’ are down there, right enough, lickin’ their wounds. Looks like Cromney’s gonna be mashin’ his peas left-handed from now on.” I trickled to an awkward halt, mildly embarrassed at what I hadda say next, an’ surprised to be. “Listen, guys, what I was gettin’ at earlier is... well, I seem to’ve underestimated you all a mite. !... shucks, t’be perfectly honest, I can’t even tell you apart. Whyn’tcha start by givin’ me your names? Mebbe I can...”
There followed some kinda noisy chirping an’ warbling contest that didn’t do my headache any good. While the aliens were confabbing, I concentrated on the image of the lower airlock. The one everybody’d used back in Tokyo. Long as it was operating, Cromney and company weren’t really all that confined.
Grinning, I punched a phony collision alarm into Geor-gie's systems, suppressing the accompanying klaxons, and laughed out loud when I heard, even through her normally soundproof structure, the ’tween-compartments pressure doors thudding shut. Oughta keep those varmints where they were for the time bein’!
I was startin’ to enjoy this. Cackling like a fool, I electrified all the doorknobs and flooded the corridors with vomit-gas—two standard Academy preventatives against anachronistic intruders. No time-traveler relishes gettin’ boarded by Neanderthals, medieval sword-swingers, or twenty-first century Freedom Police.
I pulled a Command Override Key—only one aboard, thank Ochskahrt—outa my breast pocket. It’d gotten kinda quiet, and I gathered the Freenies were done with their conference. “Well?”
Careful to avoid getting fried, I overrode the lounge door, heading for a locker starboard of the after stair-well. The Freenies were right behind me.
“‘Well’ what, Lord?”
“Well, what did you people decide?” In the locker there’d be a plastic suit allowing me to traipse through vomit-gas totally unregurgitated.
“Decide, Lord?”
A moment of exasperation: “You gonna tell me your names, or what?” Make that double exasperation: unexpectedly, the locker was on the intruder circuit and hadda be overidden. Inserting the insulated Key, I cursed every overcautious bureaucratic safety-fetishist who ever—
“But Lord, those were our names.”
“Oh.”
Nonetheless, by the time I got the closet open, I was chuckling gleefully over the fact that, like the Command Key, there was only one antigas outfit aboard ship. To the Freenies: “All righty, why don’t I just think of somethin’ t’call you that us mere mortal gods can pron—smoldering slothdung!”
Instead of a nice shiny plastic Yves St. Laurent, there hung a large manila-colored tag from an Academy inspection crew:
OBSOLETE EQUIPMENT REPLACE AT NEXT OVERHAUL
“An I.O.U. for a pressure-suit? Goddamn form-fillers think the paperwork’s as good as the real—”
“Which one of us, Lord?” One of the aliens tugged at my pants cuff with a greenish tentacle. It clashed with my uniform.
“Howzat again?”
There was a hint of disappointment in his little voice. “Which of us is to be named ‘Smoldering Slothdung’?”
I turned from Ma Hubbard’s cupboard to face my turtleshaped worshipper. “Listen, let’s not get into an Abbott and Costello routine here. From now on you’re.. .Color.”
“‘Color’, Lord?” I swear his compound eye almost blinked in astonished delight. Now where the hell had I left my cigar?
“Sure, sport. An’ this one over here—hey you, eatin’ that maintenance tag! You’re Charm. That suit you, kiddo?” The second alien sorta quivered all over and hooted!, which— together with a missing p-suit and the sudden depressing realization that I’d rendered my ship impassable to myself— seemed to give my headache new lease on life.
With an option to purchase.
“I take it this meets with your approval?”
“O, indeed, Lord, a calling personally bestowed by the One True—”
“Just don’t get effusive, okay? That leaves the one over there in the comer, lookin’ for the sandbox. How ’bout Spin for a monicker? And t’round things off, let’s make a... well, in the spirit of the occasion, call it a Covenant. Hereafter, you three are officially entitled t’call me Bemie and put a stop to all this conversational theology.”
Silence. Limp necks. Lackluster eyeballs. Maybe I’d left my cigar on the monitor panel.
“All right, make that a Commandment. Bemie is a religious name, y’know, from the ancient, um, Urdu, meaning’ ... Bearer of Precious Ambrosia. Not caffeine, but brandy—close enough for Holy Work. Any of you guys got a cigar?”
In the end. I’d collected a whole handful of cigars, plus assorted lightweight survival gear, including my nifty combination lockback foldknife and thermolighter. Absorbs body-heat all day an’ gives it back in stogie-sized doses. Pretty fair penlight, too.
Escape & Evasion wasn’t exactly the course I woulda chosen for myself, but it started with Georgie screamin’ at me from the control cabin.
“What in Ochskahrt’s Rosy Red?...” Indicators said there was a fire, small but very, very hot. General vicinity of the messroom. I slapped the intertalkie.
“Cromney, whatcha think you’re doin’ t’my ship, you brassbound bastard?”
A loud hissing I knew altogether too well almost drowned out the answering voice. “Denny Kent here, Capt—er, Gruenblum.” Apparently, my .45 hadn’t made the impression on him I’d hoped for. “We’re cutting our way out of here, that's what we’re—”
“Get away from that pickup, you cretin!” Cromney interrupted. “Captain, make things easy on yourself while you still have a chance. You’re not going anywhere. Before too very long, we’ll be coming up to get you!”
The hissing continued.
He was right. Without any accurate idea of where and when we were, I couldn’t plot a course home that’d make any sense. I let it ride and keyed the video. They’d blinded it.
“Outa
curiosity, Cromney, how’d you get the welding torch? I thought I’d closed off all the—”
There was a considerable pause. “Let us say only that there was a sizable, er, obstruction in the path of the starboard workroom door. Professor Kent now possesses a fractured humerus to add to his initial grievances against you and is operating presently under the influence of powerful stimulants—with a correlative satisfaction of once more having sacrificed himself to the Cause.”
I shut my mike down instantly. This wasn’t the time to let ’em hear me laughing hysterically. And to top it off, neoamphetamines were accumulative murder on the nervous system. Kent hadn’t any surplus of brains to offer Crom-ney’s Cause in the first place. Edna’d be tyin’ his suit-boots an’ helpin’ him go pee-pee when the drugs wore off.
I turned to my faithful alien companions. “How about it, boys, should we tell ’em about the vomit-gas?”
“With all respect...Bemie." Charm was the one I’d always thought of as the Ambassador. “You had better begin considering what to do once they break through the door and recover from it.”
I snorted. “My only fear is that they’ll knock out the corridor cameras before I get t’see ’em pukin’ their guts out. Wanna watch with me? I’ll buy the popcorn.”
Perched on one arm of my chair, Charm shook its eye from side to side. “Lord—Bernie—is it not the case that your perfidious assistant possesses the same knowledge of this vessel as yourself?”
“Not the same at all—RNA-drippings! Hadda get my education the hard way. Six miles t’school every day through blinding snowdrifts, an’—”
“Your pardon, Bemie.” Color offered unwanted opinions from the cabin floor. “It snows neither upon Luna nor, if I am informed correctly, in your native southwest Texas.” Spin was probably still looking for the kitty box. “However, may we not ask what recourse you might take in their position? Upon such contemplations may you formulate your own—”
“Sweet Mudder of Citation!” Cromney was a tricky hairpin. Could be he’d mentioned attacking me merely as a feint. Into my mind leaped an image of Auxiliary Control, including a big red lever curiously labeled FAILSAFE AU-TODESTRUCT. Surely they wouldn’t... But then I remembered that crack about sacrificing oneself to the Cause. Never did trust an unselfish sonofabitch.
“Vomit-gas or no vomit-gas, I gotta get down there before they do! Outa my way!” I checked my automatic and sprinted to the flight-deck airlock. I could Key my way back through the lock downstairs and...
Then I trudged back into the control room feeling like an idiot. The monitor agreed with me: they’d jammed their airlock, just as they’d done the ’tween-decks hatches. They were locked in, I was locked out. Bad design. Made a note t’complain if I ever got back home.
"Great God in ARRRGHHH!" said the intercom suddenly. I sniggered to myself. They’d finally holed through into the corridor to the tune of wretching, coughing, and the soft splashing of semiliquids in four-part harmony.
I hiked up the companionway air pressure, making sure they got a real dose, and felt for the reassuring bulge of the field-integrating frammis in my coverall pocket. There weren’t any spares aboard, thanks to some unknown paranoid genius at the Academy.
“Hey, creeps,” I shouted into the ’talkie, “when you’re through turnin’ yourselves inside-out, just file out the starboard lock, stark naked with your fingers interlaced on top your heads! Anybody tries t’get cute, there’s a .45 slug waitin’ for him—or her!" I added, tom between the vision of Edna Janof in the altogether or Edna Janof fulla bullet holes. I didn’t get an answer from below; dry heaves tend t’preoccupy you.
I punched up some specifications. Georgie's lethal explosive radius was a startlingly modest five kilometers, 99.999 percent of her energies being directed upward in a pillar of fire’d make C. B. DeMille turn twenty-three shades of envious chartreuse. I closed my mind savagely to the thought of my best girl endin’ up like that; time Bemie an’ his little friends made like pea-soup.
Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, it’d gotten black as pitch outside. What I needed was a local hilltop, something with a nice cliff backside t’drop over if and when I saw the flare. Another heat-alarm winked on the board—Georgie's way of teliin’ me Cromney an’ his cronies were workin’ on the engine-room hatch. I gathered up my worshippers and left the flight deck. Pistol in hand, I cracked the lock.
Thunder split the air!
By the time I unglued myself from the overhead, gratified that the Gold Cup’s safety was in good condition, a solid wall of high-country rain filled the darkened meadow. I glanced at my—
Those sons of bitches! Somewhere in the past few crowded hours, they’d managed t’smash my graduation watch! Dunno why I hadn’t noticed before. I unstrapped it hastily, wondering what the microfission instrument might’ve leaked all over me already. Firming my conviction, I stepped outside, letting my left wrist take a good rain-soaking. The Freenies were right behind me.
Lightning flashed!
And three hours later, I was as lost as I ever have been.
In hopes of later recovery and repair, I’d buried my fractured Nukatron near Georgie's landing ramp, given her titanium flank a fond final pat, and made for the sheltering pines. They’re overrated. Dunno if you’ve ever tried using a tree t’get outa the rain. Wasn’t long before I was wet clean through an’ crinklin’ up around the edges. The Freenies chittered happily, their carapaces shedding precipitation like greased Teflon. Intermittent lightning strokes ruined my night vision; the downpour itself was blinding. I kept looking for a cave, the bole of a big tree—anyplace where it was drier’n I was.
Next time I turned around, I couldn’t tell which direction Georgie was.
The rain finally faded away, leaving the goddamn trees t’dribble down my neck another couple hours. Darkest night I ever did see. I spent most of it looking for my ship. And all the next day. The hills were lousy with vacant, flower-filled meadows. Goddamn scenery, anyway. I did stumble across the skeleton of an elk, which cheered me up no end. If he couldn’t make it out here in the boonies where he belonged, what chance did Mister First Nighter of Greater Oklahoma City stand?
Says here in the survival manual, “When in doubt, go downhill”—especially if you’re following a creek, few of which flow the other way. “Eventually, you’ll come to civilization.” That’s how I spent the second day and mosta the third, following a creek. It led me to another creek.
Nights I endured with my suit turned up as high as it would go (not high enough), hunched over a cautious little teacup-sized fire. Second morning, I woke up covered with frost. Warmed through by a vigorous fit of coughing, I ate the last of my concentrates, sharing powdered instant coffee with the Freenies, who seemed otherwise content to forage.
The principal disadvantage to nature-in-the-raw isn’t that it’s uncomfortable. It’s boring. One authentically rustic tree or boulder looks pretty much like another, and half a million acres of ’em tends t’pall. Nothin’ to listen to except the squishing of your muddy shoes. Gimme a junkyard or a roadside holoboard any time—idiots who like gawkin’ at the Great Outdoors never hadda measure it one exhausted footstep at a time, using moldy leaves for toilet paper an’ not knowin’ if they were ever gonna make it back t’beer-on-tap an’ that redhead in Vonbraunsville.
it was the third night, now. As before, I shaved a couple twigs an’ touched ’em to the lighter in the handle of my knife. They smoldered agreeably; I only sneezed once. Setting them carefully on a bed of rust-brown needles and other twigs, I blew them into a tiny, sputtering fire and rested till I wasn’t dizzy anymore.
It was dark again, as seems t’happen with some regularity. The fire flickered as I fed it, baking myself on the front side while my back froze, then turning to bake my back as I stared, flame-blinded, into the fathomless night.
I’d given up on Color, Charm, and Spin for intelligent conversation. Dirty jokes involving seventeen sexes hafta be spelled out for unfortunates with
only two. Likewise, they didn’t get “The Sleeve-Job,” even after I’d explained it, and considered “The Green Horse" just plain dumb. All they could blabber about was how Gruenblum had invented coffee-nerves, thus saving Yamaguchikind from destruction. I’d heard the story before.
It was more diverting just observing the little critters— reminding myself sourly that’s how I’d gotten stuck with ’em in the first place. Now they had names, seemed I could tell ’em apart more reliably. English was their only language, cribbed offa cornflake boxes an’ suchlike I’d had in my garbage along with the teabags and coffee grounds. Among themselves they revved it up to 78 RPM.
That eye of theirs could focus telescopically, I discovered; each of them could see a thousand stars in the Seven Sisters and insisted on naming every one of ’em, until I put a stop to it. At the opposite end of the scale, they were fascinated at the minute protozoans t’be found under every leaf and in the rain-filled hollows, even as they munched ’em down and swallowed. They were dismayed when it turned out, in the gathering twilight, that I could only see in the narrow spectral band that they called ultrared to infraviolet.
Some kinda god I was turnin’ out t’be!
So here I sat before my tiny, ineffectual fire, weary and bored, shivering and soaking wet as usual (never seemed t’get dry in those woods), listening to the local coyotes praying to the moon, and my own minuscule worshippers debating the question: since Gruenblum is Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Benevolent, how come were we lost?
Simple: I was Stupid, too.
Suddenly, all conversation stopped. Three straining eye-stalks pointed toward a wild thrashing in the bushes that defined our little clearing. Blinded by firelight, I drew my Colt, seeking a target in the leafy gloom. Over the tromping and crashing, which grew louder, came a clamor like a Canada goose being molested by a set of bagpipes.
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