L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 (7 page)

“Get away from that pickup, you cretin!” Cromney interrupted. “Captain, make things easy on yourself while you still have a chance. You’re not going anywhere. Before too very long, we’ll be coming up to get you!”

The hissing continued.

He was right. Without any accurate idea of where and when we were, I couldn’t plot a course home that’d make any sense. I let it ride and keyed the video. They’d blinded it.

“Outa curiosity, Cromney, how’d you get the welding torch? I thought I’d closed off all the—”

There was a considerable pause. “Let us say only that there was a sizable, er, obstruction in the path of the starboard workroom door. Professor Kent now possesses a fractured humerus to add to his initial grievances against you and is operating presently under the influence of powerful stimulants—with a correlative satisfaction of once more having sacrificed himself to the Cause.”

I shut my mike down instantly. This wasn’t the time to let ’em hear me laughing hysterically. And to top it off, neoamphetamines were accumulative murder on the nervous system. Kent hadn’t any surplus of brains to offer Crom-ney’s Cause in the first place. Edna’d be tyin’ his suit-boots an’ helpin’ him go pee-pee when the drugs wore off.

I turned to my faithful alien companions. “How about it, boys, should we tell ’em about the vomit-gas?”

“With all respect
...Bemie."
Charm was the one I’d always thought of as the Ambassador. “You had better begin considering what to do once they break through the door and recover from it.”

I snorted. “My only fear is that they’ll knock out the corridor cameras before I get t’see ’em pukin’ their guts out. Wanna watch with me? I’ll buy the popcorn.”

Perched on one arm of my chair, Charm shook its eye from side to side. “Lord—Bernie—is it not the case that your perfidious assistant possesses the same knowledge of this vessel as yourself?”

“Not the same at all—RNA-drippings! Hadda get
my
education the hard way. Six miles t’school every day through blinding snowdrifts, an’—”

“Your pardon, Bemie.” Color offered unwanted opinions from the cabin floor. “It snows neither upon Luna nor, if I am informed correctly, in your native southwest Texas.” Spin was probably still looking for the kitty box. “However, may we not ask what recourse
you
might take in their position? Upon such contemplations may you formulate your own—”

“Sweet Mudder of Citation!”
Cromney was a tricky hairpin. Could be he’d mentioned attacking me merely as a feint. Into my mind leaped an image of Auxiliary Control, including a big red lever curiously labeled
FAILSAFE AU-TODESTRUCT.
Surely
they wouldn’t... But then I remembered that crack about sacrificing oneself to the Cause. Never
did
trust an unselfish sonofabitch.

“Vomit-gas or no vomit-gas, I gotta get down there before they do! Outa my way!” I checked my automatic and sprinted to the flight-deck airlock. I could Key my way back through the lock downstairs and...

Then I trudged back into the control room feeling like an idiot. The monitor agreed with me: they’d jammed their airlock, just as they’d done the ’tween-decks hatches. They were locked in, I was locked out. Bad design. Made a note t’complain if I ever got back home.

"Great God in ARRRGHHH!"
said the intercom suddenly. I sniggered to myself. They’d finally holed through into the corridor to the tune of wretching, coughing, and the soft splashing of semiliquids in four-part harmony.

I hiked up the companionway air pressure, making sure they got a real dose, and felt for the reassuring bulge of the field-integrating frammis in my coverall pocket. There weren’t any spares aboard, thanks to some unknown paranoid genius at the Academy.

“Hey, creeps,” I shouted into the ’talkie, “when you’re through turnin’ yourselves inside-out, just file out the starboard lock, stark naked with your fingers interlaced on top your heads! Anybody tries t’get cute, there’s a .45 slug waitin’ for him—or
her!"
I added, tom between the vision of Edna Janof in the altogether or Edna Janof fulla bullet holes. I didn’t get an answer from below; dry heaves tend t’preoccupy you.

I punched up some specifications.
Georgie
's lethal explosive radius was a startlingly modest five kilometers, 99.999 percent of her energies being directed upward in a pillar of fire’d make C. B. DeMille turn twenty-three shades of envious chartreuse. I closed my mind savagely to the thought of my best girl endin’ up like that; time Bemie an’ his little friends made like pea-soup.

Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, it’d gotten black as pitch outside. What I needed was a local hilltop, something with a nice cliff backside t’drop over if and when I saw the flare. Another heat-alarm winked on the board—
Georgie
's way of teliin’ me Cromney an’ his cronies were workin’ on the engine-room hatch. I gathered up my worshippers and left the flight deck. Pistol in hand, I cracked the lock.

Thunder split the air!

By the time I unglued myself from the overhead, gratified that the Gold Cup’s safety was in good condition, a solid wall of high-country rain filled the darkened meadow. I glanced at my—

Those sons of bitches! Somewhere in the past few crowded hours, they’d managed t’smash my graduation watch! Dunno why I hadn’t noticed before. I unstrapped it hastily, wondering what the microfission instrument might’ve leaked all over me already. Firming my conviction, I stepped outside, letting my left wrist take a good rain-soaking. The Freenies were right behind me.

Lightning flashed!

And three hours later, I was as lost as I ever have been.

In hopes of later recovery and repair, I’d buried my fractured Nukatron near
Georgie
's landing ramp, given her titanium flank a fond final pat, and made for the sheltering pines. They’re overrated. Dunno if you’ve ever tried using a tree t’get outa the rain. Wasn’t long before I was wet clean through an’ crinklin’ up around the edges. The Freenies chittered happily, their carapaces shedding precipitation like greased Teflon. Intermittent lightning strokes ruined my night vision; the downpour itself was blinding. I kept looking for a cave, the bole of a big tree—anyplace where it was drier’n I was.

Next time I turned around, I couldn’t tell which direction
Georgie
was.

The rain finally faded away, leaving the goddamn trees t’dribble down my neck another couple hours. Darkest night I ever did see. I spent most of it looking for my ship. And all the next day. The hills were lousy with vacant, flower-filled meadows. Goddamn scenery, anyway. I did stumble across the skeleton of an elk, which cheered me up no end. If
he
couldn’t make it out here in the boonies where he belonged, what chance did Mister First Nighter of Greater Oklahoma City stand?

Says here in the survival manual, “When in doubt, go downhill”—especially if you’re following a creek, few of which flow the other way. “Eventually, you’ll come to civilization.” That’s how I spent the second day and mosta the third, following a creek. It led me to another creek.

Nights I endured with my suit turned up as high as it would go (not high enough), hunched over a cautious little teacup-sized fire. Second morning, I woke up covered with frost. Warmed through by a vigorous fit of coughing, I ate the last of my concentrates, sharing powdered instant coffee with the Freenies, who seemed otherwise content to forage.

The principal disadvantage to nature-in-the-raw
isn’t
that it’s uncomfortable. It’s boring. One authentically rustic tree or boulder looks pretty much like another, and half a million acres of ’em tends t’pall. Nothin’ to listen to except the squishing of your muddy shoes. Gimme a junkyard or a roadside holoboard
any
time—idiots who like gawkin’ at the Great Outdoors never hadda measure it one exhausted footstep at a time, using moldy leaves for toilet paper an’ not knowin’ if they were ever gonna make it back t’beer-on-tap an’ that redhead in Vonbraunsville.

it was the third night, now. As before, I shaved a couple twigs an’ touched ’em to the lighter in the handle of my knife. They smoldered agreeably; I only sneezed once. Setting them carefully on a bed of rust-brown needles and other twigs, I blew them into a tiny, sputtering fire and rested till I wasn’t dizzy anymore.

It was dark again, as seems t’happen with some regularity. The fire flickered as I fed it, baking myself on the front side while my back froze, then turning to bake my back as I stared, flame-blinded, into the fathomless night.

I’d given up on Color, Charm, and Spin for intelligent conversation. Dirty jokes involving seventeen sexes hafta be spelled out for unfortunates with only two. Likewise, they didn’t get “The Sleeve-Job,” even
after
I’d explained it, and considered “The Green Horse" just plain dumb. All they could blabber about was how Gruenblum had invented coffee-nerves, thus saving Yamaguchikind from destruction. I’d heard the story before.

It was more diverting just observing the little critters— reminding myself sourly that’s how I’d gotten stuck with ’em in the first place. Now they had names, seemed I could tell ’em apart more reliably. English was their only language, cribbed offa cornflake boxes an’ suchlike I’d had in my garbage along with the teabags and coffee grounds. Among themselves they revved it up to 78 RPM.

That eye of theirs could focus telescopically, I discovered; each of them could see a thousand stars in the Seven Sisters and insisted on naming every one of ’em, until I put a stop to it. At the opposite end of the scale, they were fascinated at the minute protozoans t’be found under every leaf and in the rain-filled hollows, even as they munched ’em down and swallowed. They were dismayed when it turned out, in the gathering twilight, that I could only see in the narrow spectral band that they called ultrared to infraviolet.

Some kinda god I was turnin’ out t’be!

So here I sat before my tiny, ineffectual fire, weary and bored, shivering and soaking wet as usual (never seemed t’get dry in those woods), listening to the local coyotes praying to the moon, and my own minuscule worshippers debating the question: since Gruenblum is Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Benevolent, how come were we lost?

Simple: I was Stupid, too.

Suddenly, all conversation stopped. Three straining eye-stalks pointed toward a wild thrashing in the bushes that defined our little clearing. Blinded by firelight, I drew my Colt, seeking a target in the leafy gloom. Over the tromping and crashing, which grew louder, came a clamor like a Canada goose being molested by a set of bagpipes.

I thumbed the hammer back. Adding a shaky left hand to the shaky right hand on the pistol grip, I pointed its garbage-can snout in the direction of the disturbance. Mountain lions, sabertooth tigers, black bears, grizzlies-—only Ochskahrt knew, and he was dead
—this
animal was
real
sick, maybe rabid.

The Freenies stretched their necks, peering into the darkness.

Abruptly, two huge hairy paws thrust through a housesized raspberry bush not ten feet away. I placed my front sight right between them, waiting tensely to see more. Something cylindrical and queerly flexible swung between the claws.

The racket ceased. Over a moist, fur-covered ebony muzzle, a pair of savage eyes blinked at me. I blinked back, wetting my lips. Each massive shoulder of the gigantic ursine monster bore a brightly-colored stripe—connected to a day-glo yellow knapsack! At the ponderous, blackly-furred waist lay a broad leather belt; at the right hip, carried diagonally forward in the “appendix” position, hung an automatic hand-cannon that made my pistol suddenly feel like a bracelet charm.

The creature's gaze calmly took in the palsied quivering of my .45, the little fire-camp I’d built, the three funny-looking organisms presently crowding each other behind my back.

It opened its cavernous mouth, revealing hideously gleaming fangs.

“Please don’t shoot me. Mister,” the gorilla said. “I’m the President’s only niece, and he wouldn’t like it.”

6 
The Jape of the Ape

SO IT’S 123 B.C.
—
THAT’S 630 A.U.C. TO US
CITIzens-—
an’ I’m decked out in my snazziest gabardine toga, swappin’ conversational Latin at a lie-down dinner for two with this left-wing Tribune, Caius Sempronius Gracchus, I ran into at the corner of Vth and Esquiline, playin'
bocci
in an S&M bar.

In the second-century Republic, they’re
all
S&M bars.

This Gracchus puts me in minda Denny Kent. We’re arguin’ sword-control; he says the Senate oughta decree anything shorter’n a cubit—'specially those cheap bronze Saturnalia Specials—gotta be confiscated, melted down, an' cast into the memorial likeness of his martyred brother, Tiberius.

The Tribune’s scheme’d do away with 99 percent of all the
gladii
an’
spathae
in the Eternal City.
/
wonder what he’d make of good ol' Bernardus Semiticus here, with a .45 caliber
ballista
tucked under his left armpit. I allow as how certain Greeks mighta thought well of his idea, an’ look how
they
finished up: servin
us
candied pheasant bladders.

He gets sore, throws a buncha grapes at me. I jump up t’flatten his nose, an’ one of the slaves hollers “Bucketeers!"
Nobody
punches out a Tribune, says the night-court Quaestor. I wind up playin' seventh paddle in a trireme headed for the Cornish tin-mines and doubling on chains.

—I woke up shivering and sweaty, trying to remember where I was.
Brrrrl
Been a long time since I had
that
one.

Bernie’s Roman Holiday. Gotta take things slower; this havin’ seventeen adventures in thirty-six hours is for the young guys.

I turned over in bed, reaching for the light-switch before I recalled that where I was now, all y’gotta do is ask:
‘‘Fiat lux!"
I whispered, still in the mood of rny nightmare. And behold, there
was
Italian sportscar soap. Little section of the wall pretending to be a digital clock at the moment said it was 4:07 a.m.