Nevertheless, it was with a certain grim enjoyment that 12-Upjohn poured into Robin One a good two-ounce jolt of vodka. Robin coughed convulsively and sat up, blinking.
“Your Excellency—how—what’s happened? I thought we were dead. But we’ve got lights again, and gravity.”
He was observant, that had to be granted. “The lights are ours but the gravity is Calle’s,” 12-Upjohn explained tersely. “We’re in a part of the ship that cracked up.”
“Well, it’s good that we’ve got power.”
“We can’t afford to be philosophical about it. Whatever shape it’s in, this derelict is a thoroughly conspicuous object and we’d better get out of it in a hurry.”
“Why?” Robin said. “We were supposed to make contact with these people. Why not just sit here until they notice and come to see us?”
“Suppose they just blast us to smaller bits instead? They didn’t stop to parley with the fleet, you’ll notice.”
“This is a different situation,” Robin said stubbornly. “I wouldn’t have stopped to parley with that fleet myself if I’d had the means of knocking it out first. It didn’t look a bit like a diplomatic mission. But why should they be afraid of a piece of a wreck?”
The Consort of State stroked the back of his neck reflectively. The boy had a point. It was risky; on the other hand, how long would they survive foraging in completely unknown territory? And yet obviously they couldn’t stay cooped up in here forever— especially if it was true that there was already no water.
He was spared having to make up his mind by a halloo from the direction of the office. After a startled stare at each other, the two hit the deck running.
Sergeant Oberholzer’s face was peering grimly through the split in the bulkhead.
“Oh ho!” he said. “So you did make it.” He said something unintelligible to some invisible person outside and then squirmed through the breach into the room, with considerable difficulty since he was in full battle gear. “None of the officers did, so I guess that puts you in command.”
“In command of what?” 12-Upjohn said dryly.
“Not very much,” the Marine admitted. “I’ve got five men surviving, one of them with a broken hip, and a section of the ship with two drive units in it. It would lift, more or less, if we could jury-rig some controls, but I don’t know where we’d go in it without supplies or a navigator—or an overdrive, for that matter.” He looked about speculatively. “There was a Standing Wave transceiver in this section, I think, but it’d be a miracle if it still functioned.”
“Would you know how to test it?” Robin asked.
“No. Anyhow we’ve got more immediate business than that. We’ve picked up a native. What’s more, he speaks English—must have picked it up from the Assam Dragon. We started to ask him questions, but it turns out he’s some sort of top official, so we brought him over here on the off chance that one of you was alive.”
“What a break!” Robin One said explosively.
“A whole series of them,” 12-Upjohn agreed, none too happily. He had long ago learned to be at his most suspicious when the breaks seemed to be coming his way. “Well, better bring him in.”
“Can’t,” Oberholzer said. “Apologies, Your Excellency, but he wouldn’t fit. You’ll have to come to him.”
III
It was impossible to imagine what sort of stock the Callean had evolved from. He seemed to be a thorough-going mixture of several different phyla. Most of him was a brown, segmented tube about the diameter of a barrel and perhaps twenty-five feet long, rather like a cross between a python and a worm. The front segments were carried upright, raising the head a good ten feet off the ground.
Properly speaking, 12-Upjohn thought, the Callean really had no head, but only a front end, marked by two enormous faceted eyes and three upsetting simple eyes which were usually closed. Beneath these there was a collar of six short, squidlike tentacles, carried wrapped around the creature in a ropy ring. He was as impossible-looking as he was fearsome, and 12-Upjohn felt at a multiple disadvantage from the beginning.
“How did you learn your language?” he said, purely as a starter.
“I learned it from you,” the Callean said promptly. The voice was unexpectedly high, a quality which was accentuated by the creature’s singsong intonation; 12-Upjohn could not see where it was coming from. “From your ship which I took apart, the dragon-of-war.”
“Why did you do that?”
“It was evident that you meant me ill,” the Callean sang. “At that time I did not know that you were sick, but that became evident at the dissections.”
“Dissection! You dissected the crew of the Dragon?”
“All but one.”
There was a growl from Oberholzer. The Consort of State shot him a warning glance.
“You may have made a mistake,” 12-Upjohn said. “A natural mistake, perhaps. But it was our purpose to offer you trade and peaceful relationships. Our weapons were only precautionary.”
“I do not think so,” the Callean said, “and I never make mistakes. That you make mistakes is natural, but it is not natural to me.”
12-Upjohn felt his jaw dropping. That the creature meant what he said could not be doubted: his command of the language was too complete to permit any more sensible interpretation. 12-Upjohn found himself at a loss; not only was the statement the most staggering he had ever heard from any sentient being, but while it was being made he had discovered how the Callean spoke: the sounds issued at low volume from a multitude of spiracles or breath-holes all along the body, each hole producing only one pure tone, the words and intonations being formed in mid-air by intermodulation—a miracle of co-ordination among a multitude of organs obviously unsuitable for sound-forming at all. This thing was formidable—that would have been evident even without the lesson of the chunk of the Novoe Washingtongrad canted crazily in the sands behind them.
Sands? He looked about with a start. Until that moment the Callean had so hypnotized his attention that he had forgotten to look at the landscape, but his unconscious had registered it. Sand, and nothing but sand. If there were better parts of Calle than this desert, they were not visible from here, all the way to the horizon.
“What do you propose to do with us?” he said at last. There was really nothing else to say; cut off in every possible sense from his home world, he no longer had any base from which to negotiate.
“Nothing,” the Callean said. “You are free to come and go as you please.”
“You’re no longer afraid of us?”
“No. When you came to kill me, I prevented you, but you can no longer do that.”
“There you’ve made a mistake, all right,” Oberholzer said, lifting his rifle toward the multicolored, glittering jewels of the Callean’s eyes. “You know what this is—they must have had them on the Dragon.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Sergeant,” 12-Upjohn said sharply. “We’re in no position to make any threats.” Nor, he added silently, should the Marine have called attention to his gun before the Callean had taken any overt notice of it.
“I know what it is,” the creature said. “You cannot kill me with that. You tried it often before and found you could not. You would remember this if you were not sick.”
“I never saw anything that I couldn’t kill with a Sussmann flamer,” Oberholzer said between his teeth. “Let me try it on the bastard, Your Excellency.”
“Wait a minute,” Robin One said, to 12-Upjohn’s astonishment. “I want to ask some questions—if you don’t mind, Your Excellency?”
“I don’t mind,” 12-Upjohn said after an instant. Anything to get the Marine’s crazy impulse toward slaughter sidetracked. “Go ahead.”
“Did you dissect the crew of the Assam Dragon personally?” Robin asked the Callean.
“Of course.”
“Are you the ruler of this planet?”
“Yes.”
“Are you the only person in this system?”
“No.
”
Robin paused and frowned. Then he said: “Are you the only person of your species in your system?”
“No. There is another on Xixobrax—the fourth planet.”
Robin paused once more, but not, it seemed to 12-Upjohn, as though he were in any doubt; it was only as though he were gathering his courage for the key question of all. 12-Upjohn tried to imagine what it might be, and failed.
“How many of you are there?” Robin One said.
“I cannot answer that. As of the instant you asked me that question, there were eighty-three hundred thousand billion, one hundred and eighty-nine million, four hundred and sixty-five thousand, one hundred and eighty; but now the number has changed, and it goes on changing.”
“Impossible,” 12-Upjohn said, stunned. “Not even two planets could support such a number—and you’d never allow a desert like this to go on existing if you had even a fraction of that population to support. I begin to think, sir, that you are a type normal to my business: the ordinary, unimaginative liar.”
“He’s not lying,” Robin said, his voice quivering. “It all fits together. Just let me finish, sir, please. I’ll explain, but I’ve got to go through to the end first.”
“Well,” 12-Upjohn said, helplessly, “all right, go ahead.” But he was instantly sorry, for what Robin One said was:
“Thank you. I have no more questions.”
The Callean turned in a great liquid wheel and poured away across the sand dunes at an incredible speed. 12-Upjohn shouted after him, without any clear idea of what it was that he was shouting—but no matter, for the Callean took no notice. Within seconds, it seemed, he was only a threadworm in the middle distance, and then he was gone. They were all alone in the chill desert air.
Oberholzer lowered his rifle bewilderedly. “He’s fast,” he said to nobody in particular. “Cripes, but he’s fast. I couldn’t even keep him in the sights.”
“That proves it,” Robin said tightly. He was trembling, but whether with fright or elation, 12-Upjohn could not tell; possibly both.
“It had better prove something,” the Consort of State said, trying hard not to sound portentous. There was something about this bright remote desert that made empty any possible pretense to dignity. “As far as I can see, you’ve just lost us what may have been our only chance to treat with these creatures…just as surely as the sergeant would have done it with his gun. Explain, please.”
“I didn’t really catch on until I realized that he was using the second person singular when he spoke to us,” Robin said. If he had heard any threat implied in 12-Upjohn’s charge, it was not visible; he seemed totally preoccupied. “There’s no way to tell them apart in modern English. We thought he was referring to us as ‘you’ plural, but he wasn’t, any more than his I was a plural. He thinks we’re all a part of the same personality—including the men from the Dragon, too— just as he is himself. That’s why he left when I said I had no more questions. He can’t comprehend that each of us has an independent ego. For him such a thing doesn’t exist.”
“Like ants?” 12-Upjohn said slowly. “I don’t see how an advanced technology…but no, I do see. And if it’s so, it means that any Callean we run across could be their chief of state but that no one of them actually is. The only other real individual is next door, on the fourth planet—another hive ego.”
“Maybe not,” Robin said. “Don’t forget that he thinks we’re part of one, too.”
12-Upjohn dismissed that possibility at once. “He’s sure to know his own system, after all…What alarms me is the population figure he cited. It’s got to be at least clusterwide—and from the exactness with which he was willing to cite it, for a given instant, he had to have immediate access to it. An instant, effortless census.”
“Yes,” Robin said. “Meaning mind-to-mind contact, from one to all, throughout the whole complex. That’s what started me thinking about the funny way he used pronouns.”
“If that’s the case, Robin, we are spurlos versenkt. And my pronoun includes Earth.”
“They may have some limitations,” Robin said, but it was clear that he was only whistling in the dark. “But at least it explains why they butchered the Dragon’s crew so readily—and why they’re willing to let us wander around their planet as if we didn’t even exist. We don’t, for them. They can’t have any respect for a single life. No wonder they didn’t give a damn for the sergeant’s gun!”
His initial flush had given way to a marble paleness; there were beads of sweat on his brow in the dry, hot air, and he was trembling harder than ever. He looked as though he might faint in the next instant, though only the slightest of stutters disturbed his rush of words. But for once the Consort of State could not accuse him of agitation over trifles.
Oberholzer looked from one to the other, his expression betraying perhaps only disgust, or perhaps blank incomprehension—it was impossible to tell. Then, with a sudden sharp snick which made them both start, he shot closed the safety catch on the Sussmann.
“Well,” he said in a smooth, cold, empty voice, “now we know what we’ll eat.”
IV
Their basic and dangerous division of plans and purposes began with that.
Sergeant Oberholzer was not a fool, as the hash marks on his sleeve and the battle stars on his ribbons attested plainly; he understood the implications of what the Callean had said—at least after the Momma’s boy had interpreted them; and he was shrewd enough not to undervalue the contribution the poor terrified fairy had made to their possible survival on this world. For the moment, however, it suited the Marine to play the role of the dumb sergeant to the hilt. If a full understanding of what the Calleans were like might reduce him to a like state of trembling impotence, he could do without it.
Not that he really believed that any such thing could happen to him; but it was not hard to see that Momma’s boys were halfway there already—and if the party as a whole hoped to get anything done, they had to be jolted out of it as fast as possible.
At first he thought he had made it. “Certainly not!” the Consort of State said indignantly. “You’re a man, Sergeant, not a Callean. Nothing the Calleans do is any excuse for your behaving otherwise than as a man.”
“I’d rather eat an enemy than a friend,” Oberholzer said cryptically. “Have you got any supplies inside there?”
“I—I don’t know. But that has nothing to do with it.”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘it.’ But maybe we can argue about that later. What are your orders, Your Excellency?”
“I haven’t an order in my head,” 12-Upjohn said with sudden, disarming frankness. “We’d better try to make some sensible plans first and stop bickering. Robin, stop snuffling, too. The question is, what can we do besides trying to survive, and cherishing an idiot hope for a rescue mission?”
“For one thing, we can try to spring the man from the Dragon’s crew that these worms have still got alive,” Oberholzer said. “If that’s what he meant when he said they dissected all but one.”
“That doesn’t seem very feasible to me,” 12-Upjohn said. “We have no idea where they’re holding him–”
“Ask them. This one answered every question you asked him.”
–and even supposing that he’s nearby, we couldn’t free him from a horde of Calleans, no matter how many dead bodies they let you pile up. At best, sooner or later you’d run out of ammunition.”
“It’s worth trying,” Oberholzer said. “We could use the manpower.”
“What for?” Robin One demanded. “He’d be just one more mouth to feed. At the moment, at least, they’re feeding him.”
“For raising ship,” Oberholzer retorted, “If there’s any damn chance of welding our two heaps of junk together and getting off this mudball. We ought to look into it, anyhow.”
Robin One was looking more alarmed by the minute. If the prospect of getting into a fight with the Calleans had scared him, Oberholzer thought, the notion of hard physical labor evide
ntly was producing something close to panic.
“Where could we go?” he said. “Supposing that we could fly such a shambles at all?”
“I don’t know,” Oberholzer said. “We don’t know what’s possible yet. But anything’s better than sitting around here and starving. First off, I want that man from the Dragon.”
“I’m opposed to it,” 12-Upjohn said firmly. “The Calleans are leaving us to our own devices now. If we cause any real trouble, they may well decide that we’d be safer locked up, or dead. I don’t mind planning to lift ship if we can—but no military expeditions.”
“Sir,” Oberholzer said, “military action on this planet is what I was sent here for. I reserve the right to use my own judgment. You can complain if we ever get back—but I’m not going to let a man rot in a worm burrow while I’ve got a gun on my back. You can come along or not, but we’re going.”
He signaled to Cassirir, who seemed to be grinning slightly. 12-Upjohn stared at him for a moment and then shook his head. “We’ll stay,” he said. “Since we have no water, Sergeant, I hope you’ll do us the kindness of telling us where your part of the ship lies.”
“That way, about two kilometers,” Oberholzer said. “Help yourself. If you want to settle in there, you’ll save us the trouble of toting Private Hannes with us on a stretcher.”
“Of course,” the Consort of State said. “We’ll take care of him. But, Sergeant…”
“Yes, Your Excellency?”
“If this stunt of yours still leaves us all alive afterwards and we do get back to any base of ours, I will certainly see to it that a complaint is lodged. I’m not disowning you now because it’s obvious that we’ll all have to work together to survive, and a certain amount of amity will be essential. But don’t be deceived by that.”
There Will Be War Volume III Page 10