"Never mind that," Tesserax said, impatiently, snapping all six of his right-hand tentacles rapidly, making a noise like popcorn popping. "Just bring me those papers, will you?"
"Sir, yes," the adjunct said. But it just stood there.
"Well?" Tesserax asked.
"Knee joint my bent is some, sir," the robot said, mournfully. It made an obvious effort and broke the temporary paralysis, tottered hesitantly forward toward the alien. "Are you here, sir," it said, handing him the crumpled pile of print-outs. "Thought drop them would I."
"But you didn't."
The robot was very self-satisfied. "No, sir. Held them did tight I and fool no make myself of."
"Very good," Tesserax said, sorting the print-outs into two groups.
The robot suddenly coughed and fell into the table, knocked the bottles of liquor over and frightened Helena. It slid slowly to the floor, like a drunkard passing out, landed on its backside and fell backwards, its metal skull thunking the blue tiles.
"When appropriations time comes around," Tessie Alice Armbruster said, "I'm going to call all of you as witnesses."
Tesserax slid a complete set of print-outs across the table to Jessie. "There you are. Five hundred a day, apiece."
"It looks in order," Jessie said.
They got out of their shape-changing chairs, and Jessie came around the table to shake hands with the maseni official. "I think you'll see that your money was well spent with us, Mr. Galiotor."
"I sincerely hope you're right," Galiotor Tesserax said. "Not only for the sake of the maseni treasury, but for the sake of all the beast's potential victims and for the sake of future maseni-Earth relations." He let go of Jessie's hand as if he found contact with bone-jointed fingers less than pleasant. "You'll leave on the starship Poogai tomorrow morning."
"And good sir to you, luck!" the robot said, staring up at them from the floor, waving one five-fingered metal hand.
PART TWO: THE BEAST AT MIDNIGHT
Chapter Seventeen
Riding the escalator down the Poogai's long debarking tube into the largest terminal on the maseni home world, Tesserax said, "Oh, dear! I forgot to warn you about the Protector."
Jessie said, "Who?"
Tesserax slapped the top of his hairless, bulbous head and said, "Oh, damnation and thunderpunt! I really should have remembered it. It's all quite traumatic if you aren't expecting it — and even if you are." He looked anxiously ahead at the rapidly approaching terminal entrance, and he said, "Now don't be alarmed, sir, when it charges at you with all those sharpened teeth and claws."
"Teeth and claws?" Helena said.
"Teeth and claws?" Jessie said, clutching Helena's arm and.wondering if they should turn around and fight the traffic the whole way to the top of the moving stairs.
"Protector?" Brutus asked. "What's the matter with this toothy son of a bitch, anyhow?"
"The Protectors are one of our more colorful racial myths," the alien said. "There's one of them at every space port. You see, in the early days of maseni space travel—"
But the steps had run out, and they were forced through the door by a crush of other Poogai passengers on the escalator behind them. They walked into the arrivals hall before Tesserax could tell them anything more.
The arrivals hall was a masterpiece of aesthetic engineering, fully five hundred feet on a side, the walls cut by enormous windows shaped like the windows in an Earth cathedral and soaring from the floor to a point just a few feet short of the lofty ceiling, some hundred feet overhead. Thick, transparent pillars supported the massive, luminescent arches which held up the domed ceiling. All of this was more than mere supportive architecture. The windows, just like cathedral windows, were made of thousands of bits of colored glass cemented together to form abstract patterns which cast eerie images across the great, white floor. The transparent pillars and the luminescent white arches high over them were carved with hundreds of small figures, maseni flesh-and-blooders as well as maseni supernaturals: one great, panoramic, twisting, twining bas-relief that took the breath away and made one think the pillars were moving, the arches shimmering and twisting with the strivings of thousands of little living beings….
"The Protector—" Jessie began, not having forgotten the warning about teeth and claws despite the beauty that had taken his breath away.
However, before he could finish what he had been about to ask Tesserax, a huge, dark-winged monstrosity, which had been perched on one of the high arches, leapt away from its glowing white rafter and dropped toward them like a stone, screaming at the top of its voice, like an aircraft plunging toward file earth….
"Good God!" Jessie said, having forgotten altogether that Pritchard Robot had proven God was no good. He stepped backward into the passengers who were crowding into the terminal behind him.
"Never fear," Tesserax said. "It's a terrifying experience, but the thing won't harm you."
The beast was fully as large as an elephant, but much meaner looking, craggier than any pachyderm, with a great head much like that of an enraged lion and a mouth that took up half of its fluttercar-sized skull. With one bite, it could devour all of them, with nothing left sticking between its gravestone teeth. Its eyes were a pair of dinnerplate red discs without any pupil delineation, and they appeared to be focused directly on Jessie and Helena. The monster's wings flapped open, to slightly break its fall, though it still plummeted at them too fast for comfort. In the last second before it would be on them, it extended two telephone-pole legs tipped with talons as long as pitchfork tines and as thick as fat winter icicles. And then—
— it slammed into an invisible barrier five feet above their heads, flopped around as if in its death throes.
"The Protector," Tesserax said.
They were directly beneath the beast as it regained its senses, and now it turned its red eyes straight upon them, looking even meaner from this vantage point. It began to claw at the barrier with its big talons; it hissed at them, showing row on row of razored teeth and a tongue tipped with what appeared to be a steel barb.
The other passengers from the Poogai passed them, with hardly a glance at the thunder monster apparently lying on thin air only a few feet overhead.
"In the early days of maseni space travel," Tesserax continued, peering into the vicious red eyes glaring down at them, "our people encountered a murderous alien race somewhat superior to our own. A galactic war ensued, and we were nearly defeated. The enemy, a race much like your mythical centaurs but far more violent, drove us to our home world and then landed here to claim complete victory and to exterminate our people. Strangely, however, none of these aliens could remain on the surface of our home world for more than a few minutes; they died in the most terrible agony. At first, it was thought that some bacterium or some trace gas in the home world atmosphere was extremely toxic to these invaders. But when they donned space suits and used special tanked air from their own world, they still crumpled up and died when they set foot on our soil. Only one of them lasted long at all, and he managed to hold on for eight long hours, raving about horrendous steel claws that were ripping up his insides — and great mad, red eyes staring relentlessly down at him, dark wings, many teeth…. Nothing more than the lunatic rantings of a creature driven mad by pain. However, over the thousands of years since then, the myth of the Protectors has grown and been nourished by the simpler people. Grown and nourished, in fact, until, now, we really have them."
The Protector screamed and clawed the invisible shield more furiously than ever.
"But what was the real cause of those alien's deaths?" Jessie asked.
"We never have learned that," Tesserax said. "Currently, the most popular theory is that the solar and gravitational fields of our home world were in some way peculiarly deadly to this single alien race. As you've seen, many other races come and go, and are not bothered by the invisible killer. Something in the physiology of those centaurs made them highly susceptible to our geography, perhaps."
&nb
sp; "They lost the war, in the end?" Brutus asked.
"Of course," Tesserax said. "We exterminated them."
The Protector stood on its four powerful legs and began to jump up and down on the invisible shield, screaming, spitting, flailing at the air with its barbed tongue.
"Does he attack everyone who comes to your world?" the detective asked, watching for a crack in a barrier he couldn't see to begin with.
"Well, it doesn't have much choice," Tesserax said. "It has to fulfill its mythical role, after all. It must attempt to destroy any alien which sets foot on maseni soil, since the myth doesn't specify that it should attack only hostile aliens. There are three hundred Protectors, one in every spaceport on the planet, relentlessly bashing their brains out on these power shields that we've had to erect to contain them."
"Don't they ever learn that it's no use? Don't they understand that the barrier's there all the time?" Helena asked.
"Oh, I suppose they learned that scores of years ago. But they can't help themselves. The myth says attack: they attack."
"Poor dears," Helena said.
"Dumb sons of bitches," Brutus said.
Tesserax said, "Oh, I wouldn't feel any pity for them. The myth doesn't specify any intelligence in a Protector, merely an ability to spot and destroy an alien. They really can't think; they're rather mindless constructs. No need to be sorry for their lot." He looked away from the monster overhead and said, "Shall we go through customs and get out of here, so it can go back to its roost? It's not harmful, but it does make a fearful screeching sound that gets on the nerves of the terminal employees."
Five minutes later, having passed through customs without opening their luggage, they boarded a fluttercar limousine which was waiting for them outside the terminal. The passenger compartment of the car consisted of two extremely comfortable bench seats which faced each other across a good two yards of leg room. Tesserax and the hell hound sat at opposite ends of the front-facing bench, while Jessie and Helena sat close together on the rear-facing seat.
A maseni robot, efficient and well maintained, loaded their bags into the spacious trunk, slipped into the driver's niche where a front seat would have been in a manually steered vehicle, and connected itself to the control leads which dangled from the instrumentless dashboard: acceleration, brakes, steering, turn signals, and systems monitors. He pulled them away into a heavy flow of traffic and quickly accelerated above two hundred miles an hour….
"We're all very pleased that you've chosen to participate, my friend," the maseni said. "We believe that your refreshingly alien viewpoint may tear this case wide open."
Jessie said, "Where are we going — into those mountains?" He indicated a range of snow-capped peaks that flanked the rushing fluttercar, needling the leaden sky a great distance west of them, beyond the flat grass plains that now lay all around.
"That's correct, my friend," Tesserax said. He was speaking in his own language now; and whereas his form of address in English was "sir", now it had become "my friend" in translation. Jessie, Brutus and Helena had all taken speed-teach hypno lessons in the maseni tongue on the way from Earth and, in two short days, had absorbed enough to speak it well. "Those mountains are among the highest on our world and are called the Gilorelamans, which is an Old Tongue word that means 'Home of the Gods'."
"That's where the beast has been marauding?" Helena asked. She leaned toward the window and stared at the rugged slopes, and she thought that was just the sort of place for some invisible gargantuan to play havoc with an unsuspecting populace. The mountains looked remote, more alien than anything she had yet seen on this world though, in actual fact, they did not look that much different from mountain ranges back on Earth.
"Yes, up there, my friend," Tesserax said. "The beast has slaughtered nearly five hundred flesh-and-blooders and more than four hundred maseni supernaturals, all residents of the Gilorelamans."
The robot chauffeur made several turns onto smaller freeways and, in time, took them close to the foothills that lay around the greater peaks. They started the climb on a two-lane road that was closely framed by black-boled, white-leafed trees that swayed in the wind like fragile dancers, now and then bending to canopy the road with a frothy lace of snowy leaves.
They were more than an hour into the foothills when a car passed them doing quite a bit more than their sedate hundred miles an hour. It forced them toward the burm, horn blaring, then whipped over a rise and was out of sight.
"You have highway crazies here, too," Jessie said.
When they topped the hill over which the car had gone, they found that it had turned and was barreling back at them, on the wrong side of the highway.
The robot wheeled the car into the other lane.
The unknown driver countered, turned back to his proper lane and came at them at full speed.
"He'll kill us all!" Helena cried.
The robot jerked their limousine violently back into their own lane and narrowly avoided a collision.
As the other car flashed by, Jessie thought he saw a middle-aged, bald, red-faced man looking over at them and laughing. "Was that an Earthman?" he asked Galiotor Tesserax.
"I think—" the maseni began.
The red-faced man in the car roared past them again, slued back and forth on the road in front of them, disappeared over another hillock.
"It was a human being," Helena said. "Is that how our scientists behave when they come here to study maseni society?"
When they crested the next rise, the stranger, as before, had turned and was roaring back at them, blowing his horn and weaving from side to side of the narrow road.
"I can't watch," Helena said.
"I wish I had a dish of bourbon," the hell hound moaned. The stranger weaved past them, somehow avoiding a collision, was gone, his horn fading, gradually, until they could no longer hear it at all.
"I think that wasn't a real Earthman," Tesserax said. "I believe that was one of our more recent myth figures."
"You maseni have a myth figure that looks like an Earthman?" Jessie asked, watching pebbly gray lids slide down and lift off the deepset yellow eyes.
"Yes, my friend," Tesserax said. He fluffed his orange robes. "We maseni are incapable of becoming intoxicated, as you may know. Indeed, your own race is somewhat unique in that respect, compared to all the races we have thus far encountered. Certainly, we have drugs that make us — as you might say 'high'. But we are always in command of our senses, perfectly rational and able to exercise as good judgment as before taking drugs. It fascinates our people that your race can become so mindlessly drunk. The fact that tens of thousands are killed every year on your highways by drunken drivers has sparked the imagination of the maseni people. A Drunken Driver is a rather mysterious, inexplicable creature to us. And, in the past few years, a new myth has arisen to explain accidents on our own highways."
"The myth of the Drunken Driver?" Jessie asked, not quite able to get that one down.
"Yes," Tesserax said. "Enough superstitious people have taken up belief in the marauding Drunken Driver who haunts our home world highways that, in fact, he has come to exist. Fortunately, though he's a recent supernatural, laws have been passed to keep him from killing anyone. He may only careen around, frightening people — as you just saw."
For a while, everyone was silent, digesting this. Then the detective said, "I didn't realize that diplomatic and social relations between our two races could give rise to new superstitions."
"Oh, yes, my friend. It's surprising there are no new Earth-born myths based on things your people have picked up from our culture."
Jessie said, "Is it possible that this marauding behemoth in the mountains is such a new myth?"
Tesserax shook his large head. "It's unlikely. We've run computer depth studies of new trends in maseni society, and we found nothing that could account for this murderous mountain giant."
"Still…"
"I don't want to cloud your fresh perspective," the maseni sai
d. "But I truly believe you'd be wasting time in following up that possibility."
The black-boled, white-leafed trees grew thicker at the sides of the road, and the hills grew steeper and the clouds gradually came down like heavy blankets onto a bed. They drove on toward Gilorelamans Inn, an ancient hotel on the slopes of the high peaks, which would serve as their base of operations until the case was closed.
Chapter Eighteen
Gilorelamans Inn lay on the lush green lower slopes of the largest peak in the whole range, Piotimkin. It was as far down the rocky mountain as it could get without moving into the foothills, but the view from its grounds was staggering, no matter which direction one looked. Behind were the snow forests and then the bare granite cliffs and finally, high above, the snowfields themselves. On the other three sides one could view vast panoramas of lower lands: hills, hillocks, sparse woods, plains and robot-tended fields.
The inn was pleasing to the eye. It was made from the wood of the conifers which had replaced the black-boled trees as the land rose and the temperature dropped. Its roof had three peaks and two steep valleys between and was shingled with slabs of wood stained black by sap and tar. The windows were deepset and flanked by wooden shutters, reflecting the late afternoon sun and the moving clouds that raced across the sky. Not a single daub of paint marred the inn's natural beauty.
The two-lane road fed directly into the inn's drive, and their robot chauffeur brought them right around the spouting fountain to the front door, which was fully ten feet high and six wide, graced by a shining coppery knob and knocker, each so large it seemed a man would need two hands to grasp them.
"It's lovely," Helena said. "It must be very old."
"The whole place is a mythical establishment," Tes-serax said. "It dates back centuries. And because it is mythical, it remains constant, unweathered, untouched by decay."
As they got out of their limousine, the big front door of the rustic inn swung outward with a great deal of groaning and creaking, successfully attracting everyone's attention. A maseni in black robes came out to greet them. He glided forth, his tentacle hands folded against his chest in such a manner that he suggested a mandarin emperor of another Earth age. He bowed to them, twice to Helena, and said, "Welcome to Gilorelamans Inn."
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