by William Tenn
The guide nodded and pulled a long stick of chalk from his flank canister. "Save it. I don't think you could work out his nature if you stood on your head and walked around on your ears. Who knows what in space those brainy crayfish considered holy? And if we did figure it out, how much chance would we have of giving him what he wants? No, let it ride. I said I had one last idea as to how to crack this joint—let's try it."
Gently, Punnello smiled at the chalk. "Oh, that. No, I'm afraid it won't work. If he can rearrange the maze, if he can repair holes we make in the stone with our rocket shells—"
He walked slowly to the four idols sitting about their involved game. "Somehow, I'm positive that this is the answer. Why all four manifestations of Priipiirii playing saea against each other? Why an altar which is nothing more than a problem in saea? If we can solve the problem, now, it might loosen something essential in the god's powers. There had to be a reason for this stone game."
"Listen, doc," Hartwick urged. "I've seen too many archaeologists talking through the top of their heads because they tried to learn saea. And this problem they set up here is bound to be ultimate stuff. Give it the go-by, and come with me."
Punnello hadn't heard. He was standing before the board, studying the carved pieces carefully. From time to time, he made motions with a metal-covered hand.
—|—
Hartwick shrugged and strode into the cable-littered tunnel. He bent over and made a cross on the floor every ten steps. "If my oxygen holds out, I should make it," he pondered. "No more circle-walking."
After he had gone a hundred feet, he gave up and wandered aimlessly: Chalk cross-marks had appeared on the floor ahead, in every tunnel...
When he arrived in the spheroid room again, he walked directly to Punnello's gesticulating figure. He froze when he saw the archaeologist's contorted face, now screaming at the four red idols, now raised in anguish to the god floating in his carnate purple. He understood the muted gibberings he had been hearing in the headset for the past fifteen minutes—and had dismissed as Punnello's necessary self-communion over the saea problem.
Punnello stood before the immutable saea problem—and was mad.
The guide clenched his fist fiercely, then sighed and opened his fingers wearily. There was nothing to strike, nothing to grip, nothing...
He dropped to the floor and spread himself on his back. The moment he lay down, Priipiirii left the insane archaeologist to undulate over him.
"What are you?" he wondered, noticing the first faint foulness in his oxygen supply. "What do you want? Why do you tear us down this way, when we've done nothing to you? You aren't the kind of god who would punish for desecration of his temple?"
As if in reply, the deity went through all of his sexual forms, ending up as masculine once more. Hartwick watched, cursing.
His sanity began to slip into the narrow chasm of the problem. He got a grip on it by reverting to practical approaches. Lutzman had taken a shot at it. Perhaps—
His oxygen already was dangerously low.
He shot at it several times. Useless. Weapons were useless here. Lutzman shouldn't have tried. If Lutzman hadn't been killed, he might have been able to work out the god's desires from crustacean psychology.
An angle! His mind, fogged by the poisons his respiratory system was inhaling in lieu of air, groped desperately. What—what would be a highly intellectualized crustacean viewpoint? Not really crustacean, though—Martian biology was so different that bioareology was the name of the science here—Lutzman, now, Lutzman might have...
Desperate struggling through the night that was coming down over his brain. It was such torment to breathe—to think—crustacean—that was it—all he had to do was work out something peculiarly crustacean—
Priipiirii replied again. This time, he became a fish, a mammoth, a Martian polar beetle, in turn. Then himself again.
Hartwick's mind, Hartwick's life, slipped out too fast for him to hold on. Faster—
Above him, the god watched the approaching extinction of his last worshipper—which meant his own extinction, too—with courteous delight. Faster and more ecstatic grew his squirmings over the two dying lunatics in the temple of a dead and decadent race. So sweet to receive again obeisance from insanity!
For was not Priipiirii most gloriously and intricately the God of Puzzles?
DUD
So there I was. Set. The war was over, and the moment the Sunstroke landed on Earth, I would hand my prisoners over to some official of the War Crimes Tribunal and be a full-fledged civilian again. I would be free to drink the wine, sing the song, and—well, you know what I mean—all set.
The communicator on the beautiful pastel ceiling showed the mileage remaining—two million. Why, that was a hop, a skip, and a burp! It had been a fairly pleasant trip—the Sunstroke was a private luxury yacht requisitioned for the needs of the Terran Navy in bringing my peculiar charges to justice. I hoped I'd be able to afford a vessel like her someday. When I had been a civilian for a long, long—
My eyes drooped shut. Jimmie Trokee would be waking me in four hours to take over the watch on the prisoners. And I'd have to be super sharp. I dozed.
"Mr. Butler!" I twitched up to a squat. Captain Scott's huge head was glaring from the communicator. "Report to the bridge on the double. On the double, Mr. Butler!" He faded rosily.
I tilted the bed, got out, and dressed. Five years in the service and you develop certain reflexes toward orders. It was only after I'd walked through the doorap that I remembered to stop and curse.
"What does that spacehound mean by talking to me like that? I'm Army, not Navy. Not even that, I was discharged before we took off. And my only responsibility is to and for the prisoners. I've got to make a couple of fine distinctions for the old boy."
All the same, I started for the bridge. But not before I walked to the end of the corridor to see how our Martians were getting along.
Jimmie Trokee, my junior, was lounging against the doorap of the combination prison-stateroom. He dropped the cigarette quickly and ground it out.
"Sorry, Hank. But honestly, everything's under control. Rafferty and Goldfarb stopped their chess game so I could get a smoke. They won't miss a trick."
"Sure," I said. "I do the same thing, myself. Your lungs get awful dry in that joint. How are our friends feeling? Still taking baths?"
He grinned. "Didangul took five during my watch. His two pals spelled him in the pool. Only a Martian could loll in the water like that with a probable death sentence hanging over his scaly head!" His face tightened. "But when they aren't bathing, they fool around with that converter and whistle at each other."
"I know, I don't like it either. But the white-haired boys at headquarters cleared their request for the gadget. Said they couldn't possibly make anything dangerous with one that size. It's all part of this coddle-them-before-you-kill-them idea. The condemned Martians surrounded a hearty supper."
"Yeah. I don't get it. When I think of what Didangul did to the boys of the Fifteenth Army. Of course, they can't spit a weapon out of the converter. All they've been getting is tiny hunks of neutronium that not even the three of them can lift. Yet—"
"Mr. Butler," a communicator shrilled down the hall, "Captain Scott says if you aren't on the bridge in two minutes, he'll send a detail to drag you up by the short hairs."
Jimmie got angry. "Who does he think he is? You don't take orders from that guy. He's Navy!"
"He's the captain of the ship," I reminded him. "You know, power of life and death in empty space. I better get going."
"Well, don't take any guff from him," Jimmie called after me. He waved his hand at the doorap and walked through.
I adjusted my tunic before walking through the heavy panel leading to the bridge, and straightened the Eagle over Saturn on my chest. The first PX our occupation forces had established on Mars was stale out of civvies; I was wearing my uniform home. And Scott was death on sloppy uniforms.
Then I caressed
the panel and started through. Whop! I massaged my nose and blasted the Terran Navy from heck to brunch. Why they had to remove a perfectly good doorap and substitute an old-fashioned hingie, just because of naval tradition—
I felt around for the doorknob and walked in, still aching in the olfactory. Nobody so much as batted a wink of sympathy at me. Everyone but Cummings the quartermaster was clustered around one of the five great visiscreens in the bridge. I sighed.
"Mr. Butler," Captain Scott called over his shoulder, "if your manifold social obligations will permit you to comply with my suggestions, would you care to stroll up to the screen for a moment?"
I glared at the back of his shaggy head and light blue fatigues. Then, very obviously, I strolled up to the screen beside Lieutenant Wisnowski, the astrogator. I heard Scott rub his teeth against each other, and Wisnowski twisted a quick grin at me.
There wasn't much on screen that meant anything to me. A fairly large disc of Earth, the moon approximately the same size, lots and lots of little lights that were stars or meteors or fireflies.
"What do you expect me to—" I began.
"This part," Wisnowski said, whirling a little doohickey with a handle. A section of the screen in front of me seemed to spread out, and the little white lights got thicker.
There was an odd something moving there, a something with an irregular shape and all kinds of protruding edges. Dark brown in color, it seemed to jerk itself along. I'd never seen anything quite like it before.
"Small asteroid? Meteor?"
"Neither," Scott told me. "It's not on any chart, and this area is mapped to twelve decimal places. The speed and movement—jerky movement, you notice—disqualify it as a solar body. Besides, it's been following us."
My mind danced to the Martians below. "Rescue party?"
"Hardly think so." The captain walked to the middle of the room, where Cummings sat alertly before his hundred switches. "Forty, five-nine, forty. The object has no discernible jets."
"Forty, five-nine, forty," Cummings mumbled through his wad of tobaccogum. He flipped three switches toward him, moved two others back. He peered at the slowly revolving "grampus" on the ceiling. "Forty, five-nine, forty. On arc."
"Well, if it has no jets, how can it be following us?" I asked reasonably. "I don't know how far off it is, but—"
"Over three hundred thousand miles." Captain Scott had returned to the visiscreen and was studying it intently. I was amazed at the look of worry on his old, space-pale face. "Much too far away for gravitation to be asserted, if that's what you can't understand, Mr. Butler.
"The Sunstroke may have been a large yacht, but it makes a very small naval vessel, and that thing is too tiny for any real attraction to exist. Yet it moves at approximately our number of gyros, and—see there, now!—it changes course with us."
Sure enough, it did. As the Sunstroke curved into its new arc, the celestial bodies on the screen seemed to slant away. All but our new little friend. One of its great uneven edges came round slowly, and the whole mass moved into relatively the same position on the screen it had held before.
"Lock the magnification, Mr. Wisnowski."
The astrogator pushed on the doohickey, and it clicked into permanent place. He and the captain hurried back to the chart table. The second officer, after an anxious look at the grampus, moved to the door and left the bridge. Not before another sidelong glance at the thing in the visiscreen. "I'll check battle stations, sir."
"Good. And you might sound a secondary alert. I called you to the bridge, Mr. Butler, because I believe this—whatever it is—is definitely related to your distinguished prisoners. Perhaps—"
"In that case, I insist you radio Earth immediately. Or a military base on the moon. They'll send whatever help—"
"Mr. Butler! You insist? You? Until such time as you can carry five red jets on your shoulders, I give all the orders on this ship!" He had whirled to face me angrily, his lips curved into each other. The old boy was mad down to his bottom gyro.
But I still had statements to make for publication. "You're master in all spatial matters," I told him, trying to imitate his bluster, "but I'm directly responsible to the War Crimes Tribunal and, through them, to the Solar Council for the safe delivery of these prisoners. Didungal is the only one of the four peritic tetrarchs we caught—"
"I don't care if he is the chief embezzling field-marshal in the whole blasted Terran Army, I still give all orders on this ship. I can prove that to you, if necessary, by throwing you into the brig, the real brig—not the fancy home away from home those lizards are enjoying.
"You have chosen to become a civilian, Mr. Butler—though you still prefer the uniform—and, as far as I'm concerned, you are merely a civilian employee of the government charged with seeing that three sensitive Martians don't catch colds or commit suicide. You take orders from me and my officers—is that clear?"
Deeply inhaling, I thought of pointing out that all of us "civilian employees" were the most frequently wounded and decorated men in the entire Third Corps, who had elected to take their discharges on Mars, and who had volunteered to guard the most vicious criminals of the Peritic War on their way home because no occupation troops could be spared. But—I grimaced, but didn't unzip.
"Good." Some of the sudden red lines in Scott's face faded to pink, and he picked a book off the chart table. "I won't use the radio—as you call it, in army slang—because of the Jetsam incident. You've heard of it? The Jetsam, a small scout operating off Deimos about a week before the armistice, reported via radarito that it was being followed by a strangely shaped object that matched its speed but seemed to maintain its distance.
"It broke in on its own message to announce that the object had accelerated since transmission started and was now approaching very rapidly. A moment later, the entire Deimos beachhead was shaken by a tremendous spacerip blast. Nothing of the Jetsam or its crew was ever found."
"M-m-m-m. Spacerip yet. Atomic channels aren't bad enough. So you won't use the radio—oops, radarito—because you're afraid it'll help set off this mine, or anyway excite it to increase its speed. But a mine doesn't make sense. If it's anything that new, the Martians haven't had time to plant it. They've cleared from this area since long before the Battle of the Southern Hemisphere."
"Not on this side of the moon," the captain pointed out. "There are still guerilla bands of Martians holding out in forgotten mountain forts on the moon. It may be a loose mine—or a new-fangled sort of proximity shell. It may be practically anything. It's probably a dud, in any case, but that doesn't make it less dangerous. It might be one of our own weapons. The Martians are essentially imitators. They haven't discovered a single scientific principle for themselves."
I smiled at him and shook my head. "Don't go falling for our propaganda, Captain. The Martians are, each and every one of them, better scientists than any five thousand humans. Just because they weren't interested in mechanics until we caressed their scales with all sorts of nasty weapons. Why, the gyrospeed drive your ship is using was copied from a Martian derelict in the war's first stages."
'I wasn't aware that was publicly accepted, Mr. Butler," he said, his thin body very erect in the blue uniform. "Mr. Wisnowski, how many gyros are we turning?"
"Five, I think."
"You think?"
"Five, I know," Wisnowski amended after a hasty glance from the grampus to his charts.
"Raise it to nine. I know it's over our limit, but tell the engine room we'll hold that acceleration only until we've shaken this dud, if it is a dud."
Captain Scott walked swiftly past me to the visiscreen and opened the book in his arms. He turned the metallic pages slowly, staring with desperate intentness first at the illustrations and then at the weird brown object in the magnified portion.
Wisnowski raised the engine room on the communicator and ordered the nine gyros. He closed the switch on their surprised yelps.
"Don't mind the old cometcatcher," he whispered. "He won'
t take any backtalk from even an ex-Army guy. It's a shame we have to have two separate services in the first place. Crazy jurisdictional squabbles in the middle of a war, whether a battle is deep-space or planet-based. It's silly and positively twentieth-century."
I agreed with him. "But the captain was way off base when he said I had to prevent my Martians from committing suicide. Catching colds yes; committing suicide, no. If a Martian could ever bring himself to voluntarily slither off into the great moist beyond, we'd have lost the war a month after Antarctica was gouged out.
"They've been civilized too long and enjoy life too much for that. They'd have stayed civilized, too, if we hadn't objected to their dreaming in their baths and insisted on showing them the delights of pugnaciousness. How their placidity used to annoy us!"
Wisnowski nodded. "Most soldiers I've talked to feel the same way. I remember how everyone was intrigued when the first two Martians were persuaded to attend an old-fashioned heavyweight fight at Madison Square Garden."
"Sure. We're responsible for changing an attitude a million years old. And then, the people we used to colonize Mars! The supermen philosophers of Germany and Japan we didn't have the nerve to kill after the second atomic war."
"Drop to six gyros," Captain Scott called. "This thing has increased its acceleration to match ours. I hope you're keeping an accurate account of all this in the rough log, Mr. Wisnowski."
"Yes sir, I am. Very accurate." Wisnowski blushed, passed the order down to the engine room and began to write very rapidly. I was glad I'd never served under such a commander. "Almost forgot about it completely," he whispered, after a while, his eyes glued to the log.
"My dad told me how the government sold the idea 'Let those brilliant but misguided men build a new life for themselves on a new world. They will help themselves become better in the struggle with this hostile planet—they will help humanity stretch its empire farther into space.' Empire—phtaaa!"