Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (39 page)

"Send the second officer in to relieve you," Captain Scott called after him. "And have a detail bring up that Martian fellow—Dangdang something."

I whirled on him. "My instructions were to keep Didangul under close guard in the cabin!"

"Under the emergency powers vested in me," the captain barked, "I hereby invalidate your instructions. I'm positive this is a snake trick, and, if anything happens to Mr. Wisnowski, I intend to burn the secret out of them—Terran Justice Code or no Terran Justice Code!"

"Not a chance. Those babies, and especially a character like Didangul, can take more punishment than you can deliver before they'll crack. And they're smart enough to know that if they're hurt too badly, it won't do you any good to get away from that dud, because you'll be blasted by Edict twenty-two, thirty-four of the War Crimes Tribunal as soon as we hit Earth."

The second officer came in and took his position at the screen, his coal-black face twisted with worry. I knew how he felt. Under normal circumstances, a red herring was just a refined way of committing suicide while making certain your dependents received a posthumous medal. You took an open single-seater out and circled the proximity shell until you attracted it.

Then, when it changed its course and barged after the lifeboat, you jetted yourself out of the seat and just floated around in your spacesuit until the ship picked you up. If you were still around, that is. A spacerip covers a prodigious area, atomic channels almost as much.

With this gadget on our trail, it would be a little different. For one thing, the missile was already moving at almost as many gyros as the single-seater could turn; that meant that there wouldn't be much of a time gap between the attraction and the impact. Add to that fact that this new shell was almost certainly using spacerip, and Wisnowski stood a slightly better chance of being picked up by the ship afterwards than I did of getting a royal flush in spades the next time I played a hand of stud poker.

I slapped the second officer's back awkwardly. Wisnowski was evidently one of the more popular characters on the
Sunstroke
.

Somebody slammed against the door and began cursing in most colorful Afghan. I chuckled—Jimmie Trokee was also being reminded of the naval prejudice against dooraps on ships' bridges.

Then the door opened and Jimmie backed in, his Stifflitz at the ready, followed by nineteen feet of wet, angry, and superbly insolent lizard. Rafferty sauntered in behind the twitching tail with another Stifflitz.

"Goldfarb's keeping an eye on his two pals," Jimmie told me over his shoulder. "Want me to tie him up?"

"Yeah. You'd better."

Jimmie made an adjustment in his weapon and sprayed the Martian with a web of fine, low-power Stifflitz threads. When the former tetrarch was reduced to a mere waggling of the head and jaws, my junior handed the weapon to me and started out with Rafferty. "He's in your hands now, chief," he cracked, with a nod to me. Didangul said something which wouldn't have been printable even if it had been translatable.

"What's he saying?" the captain asked. Didangul had been whistling at the ceiling.

I waited until he repeated it, then I was almost afraid to translate. "He says he has been pulled out of his bath most unceremoniously and is feeling chilled all over. He says he is highly susceptible to colds and will probably catch one now. He wants to know if this is the vaunted democratic justice of Earth."

"And this is the monster who slowly dehydrated fifteen thousand men in his own palace a week before he bothered to make a formal declaration of war! The slimy—When I think of all the water headquarters diverted from their own supplies just so these blisters could be comfortable on their way to trial—Ask him if he knows anything about that lump of whatnot out there."

I whistled Scott's question at the Martian and listened intently to the answer. All I knew was the pidgin, and Didangul was perversely using literary Martian with all of its triple images and expanded noun phrases.

"He says he does. Probably one of his friends on the moon. Says we can't possibly escape it, no matter what we do. Says he will trade information on the only counter-measure for an ironbound opportunity to get away. By ironbound, he says he means give his fellow-prisoners a lifeboat and two hostages. After he's told us the counter-measure, he'll enter the lifeboat, and the hostages will be released. He won't have to worry about pursuit since the ship will be limping after traveling for so long at nine gyros."

"He doesn't, eh? Tell him to go straight to—to the Sahara! I wonder how this snake would stand up under a steady bath of medium power Stifflitz? Or some neurone tickling—Martians are as cowardly as Ionian Skelnicks."

"Even more so," I shrugged. "But only when it involves somehow the voluntary choice of self-destruction. They're fairly hardy—Perites especially—under torture. This individual knows enough about Terran government to understand we run as much risk by killing him as we do by kissing that proximity shell. On the basis of that knowledge, I don't think he'd ever crack, even if I could sanction such persuasion."

"What about psychological prodding? I understand the water needs of so-called civilized Martians are fantastically high. Perhaps some sort of a thirst treatment—"

I considered that. "First, there's the difficulty that Didangul here has just come from a combination bath and drinking party. We don't have nearly enough time for him to generate sufficient thirst—"

There were two flat noises from the nose of the ship. "Mr. Wisnowski has just jetted," the second officer reported.

Captain Scott and I hurried to the blue screen, where a tiny orange dot moved in a straightening arc towards the jagged shell. It curved away after a while and shot off in the direction opposite the
Sunstroke's
flight.

"The shell isn't following," Scott breathed. "The lifeboat has failed to attract it! Impossible!"

But it hadn't. Wisnowski, evidently noticing the failure of the maneuver, turned back to the shell in a diminishing spiral. The jagged brown mass completely ignored his tiny vessel. It continued following us in obstinate quest of self-destruction.

"The crazy fool! He intends to—he's trying to—Where in blazes is that communicator?"

Scott seized the curving panel with both hands and brought his great head almost inside it.

"Mr. Wisnowski! Are you trying to crash-explode that shell? Answer me, Mr. Wisnowski. This is your commanding officer speaking!" The astrogator's face appeared in the curve of the panel. "It's all that's left, sir. I can't get it to follow the lifeboat. I'll set it off and—"

"I'll break you, Wisnowski, I'll reduce you to third-class messman! I will not have my officers taking it upon themselves to throw their lives away, do you hear? Return to ship immediately. Immediately, Wisnowski! Don't you know that such an advanced weapon as this can't be detonated by a mere crash of an extraneous body? And your lifeboat is obviously irrelevant to the ship's course."

The lifeboat's spiral continued. Two or three more complete curves, and—

"I know there isn't much chance of detonating it, sir, but just the barest possibilities now—"

"Are matters that only I determine," the captain yelled. "We need you as astrogator, Wisnowski. Our only chance of evading impact depends on your presence on the bridge with me. I vitally need your help in formulating decisions. Return to ship, Wisnowski, or I promise by all that's holy to strip your uniform down to underwear!"

There was a moment of silence after this somewhat complicated threat. Then the speck of orange angled sharply away from the oncoming shell. It moved back towards the ship. We all breathed loudly again.

A few moments later, there was another high note and slight thud as the lifeboat entered the
Sunstroke
.

Captain Scott walked over to the chart table and poured himself a tumbler of water from the carafe.

Hearing a rattle behind me, I turned, bringing the Stifflitz up. Didangul, tightly wrapped in the golden threads, was stretching a yearning claw at the water bottle. Greedy! He'd practically just emerged from a bath, but get a Martian anywhere near water, in sight of wet stuff—

He saw my sneer and straightened. "After this fiasco, are the humans prepared to bargain?" he whistled.

I didn't bother to answer. How he knew what we had been doing puzzled me for a moment. No Martian, peritic or of any other cult, had ever deigned to learn so primitive a language as Universal Terran. Then I remembered he'd seen the whole operation in the screen; these babies were much more than normally intelligent.

"We're worse off than before," Scott was worrying. "The radiation from the lifeboat has increased the shell's acceleration to approximately nine and one-tenth gyros. It won't be long now. Hear that rumbling? The
Sunstroke
wasn't built to stand up under such strain."

I listened; the strange creaking noise underfoot had been growing in intensity. Sweating, I started for the water myself. Then I stopped.

"What is it?" the captain whispered. "Idea?"

"Sorta kinda. I was just thinking what water means to a Martian, a highly civilized one like Didangul. It represents survival in essence. Water is one of the triple images in the Martian noun for life. It has the connotation of the ultimate in luxury, the reward of the rich, the reason for striving for worldly success. An aristocratic Martian scientist will consider any investigation but the question of the irrigation of their desert lands as demeaning beyond all conception. I was wondering—"

"But you said they weren't thirsty enough!"

"Oh, Didangul isn't thirsty, all right. But water is something more than a physical need. It's an emotional, intellectual requirement. Especially water in their neighborhood that they aren't using. I wonder how much of a need it is! It was enough to make them dehydrate fifteen thousand living humans merely to get at the water imprisoned in their bodies. I'm going to try something."

Carelessly, I walked to the chart table and poured myself a drink. I smacked my lips after I had finished and sighed happily. Then I strolled back to the enormous Martian, sloshing the water in the carafe. I held it up to him silently.

He shuddered and tried to straighten. Then painfully, almost pitifully, he strained both claws against the tight threads in the direction of the water bottle. The well-tended, pointed nails scraped horribly against the glass.

"Very fine water," I whistled. "Very wet. Moist. Very, very wet. Nice water to feel fine against your skin, Didangul. Cool and wet water to slide happily down your throat. You can have it, Didangul, to splash around in, to drink, to give you moist and lovely pleasure. What must we do to avert the explosion?"

His great green tail attempted to curl back upon his head. He opened his long jaws, closed them again. His eyes were fixed fiercely, unwinkingly upon the container I held just out of his reach.

He whistled a few bars, and I leaned forward intently. Just a meaningless babble of yearning—no recognizable words.

Wisnowski came in and stopped near the door as he grasped the scene. He was still wearing part of a spacesuit.

I shook the carafe again, letting the water splash about inside. "Nice wet water for you, all moist and damp for you. How do we stop the shell?"

Another uncommunicative whistle, another convulsive wriggle. Didangul seemed to want that water more than I've ever seen any living thing want anything. "Only trouble," I said aloud, "is that his psychological block against divulging information which will prevent his escape seems as strong and maybe a little stronger than his desire."

"Lots of humans can be forced to give secondary info when the most brutal torture won't extort a particular secret," Wisnowski said suddenly. "Even a Martian has an unconscious. Try asking him something that doesn't seem so obviously important—ask him what kind of shell it is."

I brought the water bottle up to Didangul's reptilian snout. "Plentiful moisture," I trilled. "Delightful wetness. Just tell us how the shell works, and you will bathe and drink deep. We don't want to know how to evade it—just its nature. Tell us its nature, Didangul, for this swirling water you see and may have. Why does it follow us? Why didn't it follow the lifeboat? All this wetness for you alone."

An awkward whistle. Then a few more, his whole being concentrated on the water bottle. "The shell—gravity—artificial gravitation—no power source, no jets—just artificial, magnified attraction to—to neighboring body of greatest mass." He halted, wheezed, writhed and went on, "—greatest mass moving at variable acceleration as all non-celestial bodies—lifeboat's mass smaller than ship's—let have water—let me—need it—need—"

I translated. "Does it help?"

"Yes!" Captain Scott said emphatically. "Artificially magnified gravitation! Must have been one of their last, desperate spurts of scientific development before the end. All we have to do is get a greater mass out of the ship than remains in it—leave, say, only the personnel, the hull and the radarito—attach our gyros in automatic operation to this greater mass and send it off in a different arc than the ship's. Then, after the spacerip, we radarito a lunar base for help—"

"Excuse me, sir," Wisnowski broke in. "We couldn't possibly weld it all together in time. And if we don't weld, the individual pieces we accumulate will spread out in space as fast as they are pushed through the ports. The drive won't affect the entire mass. It'll only send the individual fragment it's attached to in a different arc."

I remembered the gadget that headquarters had cleared at the Martians' request. The converter—neutronium! "They've been fiddling with it ever since the voyage started, Captain! That's the price—the gadget they were going to give us for their freedom. But it's only one small converter. You'd need a skilled industrial mechanic to convert a sufficient quantity of ship's mass into neutronium—"

The second officer had come up. "With your permission, Captain Scott, I believe I could handle it. I specialized in industrial naval techniques at the academy. Converters are my own potatoes."