The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Zeb to Sharpie. Hilda, I love and respect you. And while you show a reckless tendency to fight out of your weight, you sometimes can keep Deety straight when she won’t listen to me or to her father. If you feel the least bit tired, will you ask for that flier? If you are beyond range for walkie-talkie even for Gay’s ears, Tawm Takus can relay through Western Union. Deety won’t listen to me; I’m just her husband. But if her Aunt Hilda wants to fly home, she’ll come with you … I think. So, please? Pretty please with sugar on it? Promise?”

  “Zebbie, you could sell cornflakes to cannibals. I promise. If I get tired, I’ll holler.”

  “My captain?”

  “Yes, Deety?”

  “My captain, we will fly home. It is now ten-thirty-one local sun time. Since we are halfway there, we should arrive very close to local noon. Say two hours for a picnic lunch, or fourteen o’clock. I’ll convert that to their time, so will you please request the prince regent to have us picked up at …”

  “My princess!”

  “Yessir.”

  “No need to hurry. Since you are flying home, make it one hour or five—suit yourselves. Have a leisurely picnic. Stretch out and take a nap. Wake up and have tea and a snack. Pet Kanakook and tell her I said she’s a good girl. Have a holiday and enjoy yourselves. If you haven’t called for a flier by about sixteen-thirty, the patrol flier will land and ask your pleasure.”

  “Yes, my captain. Thank you. And please convey our thanks to the prince regent. Over.”

  “Cart will be relieved, so will Jake. Over and out.”

  Hilda and Deety hardly needed a holiday; they had been having one. Neither could be of use to Jake as an interpreter; I neither needed nor wanted help in deciding how to rearrange and resupply Gay Deceiver. So they were free to poke around the city—safely, as Tawm Takus and Kach Kachkan were their personal guards, on detached duty from their regiment, assigned as military aides to the prince regent and reassigned by him as bodyguards to the Princesses Hilda and Deety. The giants were quartered across the corridor from the Burroughs-Carter ménage, always wore regimental full-dress leathers with insignia, military awards, helmets, and all weapons but their lances: long sword, short sword, rifle, and pistol. The banquet hall turned out to be useful as they often ate with the family, and when they did, foods preferred by green men showed up at once, under Tira’s management, as well as huge goblets shaped to fit giant mouths with tusks.

  Hilda tried to get them to leave their weapons in the foyer during meals. Kach Kachkan said nothing; his superior officer, Tawm Takus, fell into so strong a lisp as to be unintelligible in a frantic attempt to do the impossible: agree to anything the Princess Hilda wished while simultaneously refusing her suggestion.

  Of course I had to intervene. “Wait a half, Sharpie. What you are doing is equivalent to asking a teaching fellow back home to come to dinner at your house without his trousers. Let me handle this. Tawm, note that Jake is wearing just his saber, no pistol. All I’m wearing is my sword. This is family—and you two are family, by adoption; you’re our oldest friends on this planet and you rescued us from the wilderness. Wouldn’t a belt and a short sword be suitable at home?”

  Tawm Takus got over his lisp. Helmets, trappings, ornaments, long swords, pistols, rifles, and nameless gear were placed on the floor of the foyer, laid out for quick retrieval. The giants lost their military stiffness and behaved as friends in the company of friends.

  This wasn’t a shot in the dark; I had gauged the situation better than Hilda had, being a touch more chameleon than she. But our family had quickly adjusted to Barsoomian customs in dress. Save for bathing and sleeping, Hilda and Deety always wore daggers and seldom anything else; Jake and I did the same with sword and saber.

  One more mix-up occurred over dress. One afternoon when we men were away, as the story was related to me, Dejah Thoris sent word that she would call—if convenient. Both women understood that the jeddara’s wish was a command, but Deety felt that they must have Tira and her eight helpers make them up and deck them out in every item of gifted finery … while Mrs. Burroughs insisted shrilly that Dejah Thoris had set the precedent and she was damn well going to receive the jeddara in her hide! She knew it wasn’t much of a hide compared with Dejah’s but, by yumpin’ yiminy, it was hers and she would wear it!

  They compromised; each wore dagger and sword and fresh baths—no makeup—and received Dejah Thoris in the foyer, Deety nervous, Hilda miffed. Tira had blandly refused to advise them.

  The jeddara and Princess Thuvia arrived, Thuvia decked out as ornately as she had been when she had come to escort them to meet her mother-in-law. But the jeddara’s jewels and ornaments made Thuvia look as if she had grabbed a few knickknacks at the last minute—and both women from Earth felt their hearts sink. Faux pas!

  The feeling lasted only seconds, according to Deety. Dejah Thoris clapped her slender hands together under her chin and exclaimed, “Oh, how lovely you two are! I had not fully realized, the other day; there was too much hiding your beauty.” Then she had glided forward, slipped an arm around Deety’s waist, the other around Hilda’s shoulders, kissed Hilda, kissed Deety.

  They went on into the great hall. On the right wall, the divan stretched some four meters long and a meter deep on elevation of the floor thirty centimeters high, padded as softly as a sleeping room and heaped with cushions. Hilda had draped across it her mink cape to make the borrowed apartment a touch their own. The jeddara went straight for this divan, lounged on it like a cat—thereby letting her hostesses and daughter-in-law sit or lounge. Tira’s troop got busy with wines and bits of food.

  Dejah Thoris accepted a tidbit, touched a cup of wine to her lips, made polite conversation—then squirmed uncomfortably. “Dears,” she asked, “could I have your gentle consent to be as comfortable as you are?”

  In eleven seconds flat, I was told, Tira, Fig, Kona, and Larlo had Jeddara and Prince’s Consort bare to their daggers. Dejah Thoris stretched, starfished, slumped into a round heap, then rubbed her cheek against the mink cape—seemed to notice it for the first time. “Deety, this is not from Barsoom?”

  Hilda answered, “From Earth, Imperial Majesty.”

  “Why, Hilda! I thought we were friends? Must I be formal here?”

  “Sorry, Dej’. It’s a cape of mutated mink. This shade is called ‘sunset.’ Try it on—I think the shade goes well with your hair and complexion.”

  Dejah Thoris floated to her feet; Hilda slipped it on her, showed her how to wear it. “It fastens at the throat. Or you can hold it tight around you by the inside pockets. Or let it drop off one shoulder. Or both.”

  The jeddara tried it all four ways. “Feels lush! Does Tira have a mirror?”

  Four of Tira’s squad appeared at once, with a thin, highly polished metal mirror, almost a meter wide, almost as tall as the slaves. (Deety later told me that she’d wondered, “Where has Tira been hiding that?”—could’ve used it several times.)

  Dejah Thoris tried the cape all four ways again, then found endless variations, from wrapped tightly, to half a dozen sweetly provocative striptease effects, save that she was not teasing but unselfconsciously seeing what could be done with a beautiful garment.

  At last she slipped it off, let Tira return it to the divan. “Thank you for letting me try it, Hilda.”

  “It’s yours, Dej’.” As Hilda explained to Jake—it just looked like it was made for her.

  The jeddara looked troubled. “Hilda, I feel certain that this is a gift to you from your learned doctor.”

  “No such thing, Dej’. I bought it with my own money long, long before I was married.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Deety. “I know Hilda owned it at least two cycles before she married Pop. I remember seeing her wear it.”

  Dejah Thoris curtsied (and startled Deety again). “I shall wear it often, Hilda—thinking of you. I can barely wait for my husband to see it.”

  She stayed another half hour, then said, “To my regret, I m
ust appear with my son at a dullness. Don’t you hurry, child,” she added to Thuvia. “Carthoris and I will handle it and send them on their way. No, Tira, I won’t put those on ’til I must.” She left, wearing the cape, followed by Laba and Teeka carrying her formal ornaments, and surrounded by armed men.

  Thuvia came back from the doors with her hostesses, dropped to the floor, scratched her ribs, and said, “Chums, tell me your secret.”

  “What secret, Thu?” asked Deety.

  “How did you know that Mama Dej’ hates to dress up? I didn’t tell you; I was told not to. Tira? Not Tira; she won’t admit what day it is. Besides, Tira likes to dress up … while she enjoys the comfort of never having to wear even a dagger belt. Tira, you’re a tyrant! So who spilled it? Cart?”

  “Pure logic,” explained Hilda; she had to do it a second time for me. “Since Dej’ has had to dress formally thousands of times ….”

  “Tens of thousands of times, Hillbilly. Me, not as often—but far too many.”

  “… and since she received us informally, not even her dagger belt, and asked us to treat her as a friend, naturally we knew how to dress. But we assumed that omitting the dagger belt would be overstepping the line.” (Deety used her impassive face.)

  “Yes, Mother Dejah is the only one who can receive guests without that formality—I don’t dare, even with chums. And I don’t have many chums—can’t have; my job doesn’t permit it. Which makes you folks so precious to Cart and me—gosh, we’ll miss you when you leave! If you leave—we hope you don’t.”

  “We must, Thuv.”

  “I know, Deety. You want to have them at home. Must be a strange feeling—to keep a fertile egg inside you. It’s a loving thought—but I’m not sure I’d want the responsibility.” She suddenly reached for her belt. “I don’t even want to wear this. Invite me to take a bath with you. My answer is ‘yes.’ ”

  “Thuv, I’m sweaty. Come take a bath with me.”

  “Why, thank you, Deety! Tira—here, catch!”

  “Wait for baby!” demanded Mrs. Burroughs.

  It was a wonderful story that proved how resourceful our brides were.

  XXVI

  Zebadiah

  Asituation can be so desperate that it is necessary to tell the truth.

  I don’t recommend it for daily use. I’ve yet to meet a man who prided himself on “always telling the truth” who had any friends. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” should be reserved for courtrooms; it is poison in social relations. Some people (my wife Deety, for example) have no talent for creative distortion and must take refuge in clamming up … which Deety does beautifully. This serves her as well as does the razzle-dazzle Sharpie uses to conceal her thoughts.

  But a reputation for truth is a great asset. However, one does not acquire that reputation by blurting out everything one knows. It comes from telling the truth selectively, keeping one’s lip zipped much of the time, and by telling no unnecessary lies … especially ones that can turn and sink their fangs in you.

  Barsoom stretched my talent for creative soothsaying to the limit. Until … I’d better lay a foundation.

  The trouble started from a most innocent source: the warm-heartedness of Deety and Sharpie, and Cart’s generosity. His calling Tawm Takus and Kach Kachkan to active duty, attaching them to the royal household and assigning them as bodyguards to our ladies was a kingly thing to do. It pleased our wives, it pleased our giant friends, it pleased Jake and me—and it pleased Cart because he was the sort who gained great pleasure from doing something nice for his friends.

  But, in addition to being a pleasure, it was a great help to Jake, to me, and to Cart himself. I had work to do—fiddling, but lots of it—trying to modify Gay Deceiver to make her a tolerable home in freefall or on the ground (anywhere!) and for longer, unpredictable periods. (The translation and transition to Barsoom had scared me more than I had admitted. I had no reason to expect the air of Barsoom to be breathable; the atmosphere of her analog, Mars, is not. It is possible to choose between certain suffocation and taking chances over a fresh, radioactive crater—but it is not a happy choice. This next time I planned to be better prepared.)

  Jake had still more difficult work: trying to carry out our promise to give Cart space-time travel—a gift that might solve the politico-economic problems of his realm and, at least, put Barsoom in a more nearly even footing with Earth-Ten in export-import. How important that was we did not learn at once; all we knew was that Earth sent tourist ships about twice a month. That told me that Earth-Ten had solved the problem of constant-boost ships, a conclusion confirmed by seeing one ground: nothing as clumsy as rockets; that spaceship simply floated down from zenith, first a speck, then a disc, then at last a huge cylinder a kilometer away on a broad stretch of dead sea bottom.

  The spaceport was under extraterritorial agreement; citizens of Barsoom did not board spaceships. Cart and other royalty had been taken on a red-carpet tour, and Cart admitted sheepishly that the tour had not included control room or engineering spaces—and questions about them had been answered with vague ambiguity. But even the Warlord had not pressed the matter because that one tour showed that a planet terribly impoverished in energy and in metal could not build such a ship even if its people knew how. (John Carter must have understood far more than his subjects did about the enormous industrial complex that lay behind even an ocean freighter; I wondered whether or not his long absences from the capital were caused by distaste for lopsided interplanetary trade—even though Helium needed the “invisible export” of tourism. I do not envy kings … or jeddaks. I recalled what had happened to the once-great nations of Polynesia and decided that the only thing that saved Barsoom from the same sorry fate was that Barsoom was an interesting place for Earthlings to visit—but not to live.)

  Once I had Gay Deceiver’s needs figured out and Barsoomian artisans fashioning from my sketches some fittings we needed, I tried to help with Jake’s problem. Even compressed air in spheres and an odd sort of CO2 scavenger turned out to be possible, as a planet that had as its greatest engineering achievement a plant for replenishing its atmosphere did have gas technology even though it lacked printing presses and myriad other sorts of machinery.

  I was not foolish enough to attempt to teach mathematics I did not comprehend—I leapfrogged it. I took an engineering approach with Cart. Engineers do not insist on knowing why as long as they know how.

  I told Cart that I did not understand the mathematics behind Doctor Burroughs’ continua manipulator … but, Cart, I can tell you how to move space chariots with it, and these films show its gizzards—do you want to see whether or not your technologies can duplicate its gizzards?

  Projecting microfilm turned out to be easy. They had been making lenses so far back that their history recorded no beginning. The projector they built overnight did not look like anything from Eastman Kodak, but it blew those films up to any size without distortion and with cold light. Photograph and projections? No, project them on translucent screens and careful artists painted those blowups on the backs of screens. Two days later twenty artists were painting from twenty projectors.

  Cart knew spherical geometry—which I should have guessed, as his race had been navigating their planet in the air when my race thought the Earth was flat.

  From there it was an easy jump to the notion of a closed, curved space. I spent one morning with Cart making thread models of tesseracts and hypertetrahedrons and such, using clay and “toothpicks” (slivers of a Barsoomian bamboo)—when Cart suddenly got the idea. “Zeb, if that thing is a sketch of a cube with an extra dimension—a hypercube, a ‘tesseract’ you called it—and I understand now that it is, then there could be a hypersphere, just as a sphere is a hypercircle, and a cube is a hypersquare! By the Eggs of Issus, Yes! Though I can’t visualize what a hypersphere would look like.”

  “Neither can I, Cart. I doubt that Jake can. But it isn’t necessary to visualize it; it’s enough to realize that one cou
ld exist.”

  It was another easy step to the caltrop analogy. Before we stopped to eat, Cart was thinking in terms of six dimensions—and very excited. So we drank more than we ate, and talked still more, and both of us got tipsy.

  Thuvia found us in that state, started to kid us about it—got fascinated by what could be done with little balls of clay and slender sticks, built a tesseract projection under her husband’s direction—and started drinking with us.

  The least halfway coherent remark I recall from that session was Thuvia saying, while we were being steamed out in their bathing room (like our own, but larger): “Tell me, Zeb—a hypercircle is a sphere, and a hypersphere is one more dimension—what does a hyperteat look like?”

  At that moment she seemed to have four. I managed to get my eyes to track and said very carefully: “Princess Suvia—Princess Thuvia—let’s not even think about it! Some things are perfect the way they are. I have spoken!”

  “Hear, hear!” agreed her husband, and ducked her. Whereupon she ducked me. Then we both ducked him. It was a highly successful seminar in higher geometry.

  Cart concluded, some days later, that the only things needed that could not be built, on Barsoom by Barsoomian artisans, were the gyros. “I guess that whips us, Zeb.”

  “Does it? Can you buy things from Earth?”

  “Yes. But we rarely do. Expensive.”

  “Let’s find out just how expensive. We have the specifications for the gyroscopes. Can’t the Trade Commissioner at the Terrestrial Embassy get a price for you, delivered in Helium?”

  “I suppose he could. But I think it would be a jeddara’s ransom.”

  “Hmm … maybe we can get competition for a lower price. Don’t ask for Sperry gyroscopes—just ask for bids to meet the specifications. I’ll phrase the specifications; you translate them into Barsoomian. Get Thuv to translate them back into English and Earth units. I’ll check to see that her translation means exactly what we want it to say. Then you submit the Barsoomian version along with Thuv’s English version … and they’ll never guess why you want them or that I had a hand in it. They’ll laugh at how easy it is … and overcharge you. But not nearly as much as they would have had you not said ‘lowest bidder.’ Let ’em think that you are trying to decide whether it’s cheaper to buy them or cheaper to make them. I’ll write to make it sound that way. Then we’ll see how Thuvia’s sounds. She must not see my version until after she translates your version. You’ll be robbed … but not as outrageously as you would be if the commissioner thought you were helpless.”