Podkayne of Mars (17 page)

“Oh, not much of a bomb. Just a little squeezer job. Total destruction not more than a kilometer. Nothing much.”

I reswallowed my heart. “Why a bomb? And what did you do with it?”

He shrugged. “They were stupid. They paid me this silly amount, see? Just to sneak this little package aboard. Gave me a lot of north wind about how it was meant to be a surprise for the Captain—and that I should give it to him at the Captain’s party, last night out. Gift wrapped and everything. ‘Sonny,’ this silly zero says to me, ‘just keep it out of sight and let him be surprised—because last night out is not only the Captain’s party, it’s his birthday.’

“Now, Sis, you know I wouldn’t swallow anything like that. If it had really been a birthday present they would just have given it to the Purser to hold—no need to bribe me. So I just played stupid and kept jacking up the price. And the idiots paid me. They got real jumpy when time came to shove us through passport clearance and paid all I asked. So I shoved it into your bag while you were yakking to Uncle Tom—then saw to it you didn’t get inspected.

“Then the minute we were aboard I went to get it—and got held up by a stewardess spraying your cabin and had to do a fast job and go back to relock your bag because Uncle Tom came back in looking for his pipe. That first night I opened the thing in the dark—and opened it from the bottom; I already had a hunch what it might be.”

“Why?”

“Sis, use your brain. Don’t just sit there and let it rust out. First they offer me what they probably figured was big money to a kid. When I turn it down, they start to sweat and up the ante. I kept crowding it and the money got important. And more important. They don’t even give me a tale about how a man with a flower in his lapel will come aboard at Venus and give me a password. It
has
to be that they don’t care what happens to it as long as it gets into the ship. What does that add up to? Logic.”

He added, “So I opened it and took it apart. Time bomb. Set for three days after we space.
Blooey!
”

I shivered, thinking about it.

“What a horrible thing to do!”

“It could have turned out pretty dry,” he admitted, “if I had been as stupid as they thought I was.”

“But why would anybody want to do such a thing?”

“Didn’t want the ship to get to Venus.”

“But
why?
”

“You figure it out. I have.”

“Uh . . . what did you do with it?”

“Oh, I saved it. The essential pieces. Never know when you might need a bomb.”

And that’s all I got out of him—and here I am stuck with a Saint Podkayne oath. And nineteen questions left unanswered. Was there
really
a bomb? Or was I swindled by my brother’s talent for improvising explanations that throw one off the obvious track? If there was,
where is it?
Still in the
Tricorn?
Right here in this suite? In an innocent-looking package in the safe of the Tannhäuser? Or parked with his private bodyguard, Josie? Or a thousand other places in this big city? Or is it still more likely that I simply made a mistake of three kilograms in my excitement and that Clark was snooping just to be snooping? (Which he will always do if not busy otherwise.)

No way to tell. So I decided to squeeze what else I could from this Moment of Truth—if it was one. “I’m awful glad you found it,” I said. “But the slickest thing you ever did was that dye job on Mrs. Garcia and Mrs. Royer. Girdie admires it, too.”

“She does?” he said eagerly.

“She certainly does. But I never let on you did it. So you can still tell her yourself, if you want to.”

“Mmm . . .”
He looked quite happy. “I gave Old Lady Royer a little extra, just for luck. Put a mouse in her bed.”

“Clark! Oh, wonderful! But where did you get a mouse?”

“Made a deal with the ship’s cat.”

I wish I had a nice, normal, slightly stupid family. It would be a lot more comfortable. Still, Clark has his points.

But I haven’t had too much time to worry about my brother’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors; Venusberg offers too much to divert the adolescent female with a hitherto unsuspected taste for high living. Especially Dexter—

I am no longer a leper; I can now go anywhere, even outside the city, without wearing a filter snout that makes me look like a blue-eyed pig—and dashing, darling Dexter has been most flatteringly eager to escort me everywhere. Even shopping. Using both hands a girl could spend a national debt there on clothes alone. But I am being (almost) sensible and spending only that portion of my cash assets earmarked for Venus. If I were not firm with him, Dexter would buy me anything I admire, just by lifting his finger. (He never carries any money, not even a credit card, and even his tipping is done by some unobvious credit system.) But I haven’t let him buy me anything more important than a fancy ice cream sundae; I have no intention of jeopardizing my amateur status for some pretty clothes. But I don’t feel too compromised over ice cream and fortunately I do not as yet have to worry about my waistline—I’m hollow clear to my ankles.

So, after a hard day of sweating over the latest Rio styles Dexter takes me to an ice cream parlor—one that bears the same relation to our Plaza Sweet Shoppe that the
Tricorn
does to a sand car—and he sits and toys with café au lait and watches in amazement while I eat. First some little trifle like an everlasting strawberry soda, then more serious work on a sundae composed by a master architect from creams and syrups and imported fruits and nuts of course, and perhaps a couple of tens of scoops of ice cream in various flavors and named “The Taj Mahal” or “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” or such.

(Poor Girdie! She diets like a Stylite every day of the year. Query: Will I ever make that sacrifice to remain svelte and glamorous? Or will I get comfortably fat: like Mrs. Grew? Echo Answereth Not and I’m not afraid to listen.)

I’ve had to be firm with him in other ways, too, but much less obviously. Dexter turns out to be a master of seductive logic and is ever anxious to tell me a bedtime story. But I have no intention of being a Maid Betrayed, not at my age. The tragedy about Romeo and Juliet is not that they died so young but that the boy-meets-girl reflex should be so overpowering as to defeat all common sense.

My own reflexes are fine, thank you, and my hormonal balance is just dandy. Dexter’s fruitless overtures give me a nice warm feeling at the pit of my stomach and hike up my metabolism. Perhaps I should feel insulted at his dastardly intentions toward me—and possibly I would, at home, but this is Venusberg, where the distinction between a shameful proposition and a formal proposal of honorable marriage lies only in the mind and would strain a semantician to define. For all I know, Dexter already has seven wives at home, numbered for the days of the week. I haven’t asked him, as I have no intention of becoming number eight, on any basis.

I talked this over with Girdie and asked why I didn’t feel “insulted.” Had they left the moral circuits out of my cybernet, as they so obviously did with my brother Clark?

Girdie smiled her sweet and secret smile that always means she is thinking about something she doesn’t intend to be fully frank about. Then she said, “Poddy, girls are taught to be ‘insulted’ at such offers for their own protection—and it is a good idea, quite as good an idea as keeping a fire extinguisher handy even though you don’t expect a fire. But you are right; it is not an insult, it is never an insult—it is the one utterly honest tribute to a woman’s charm and femininity that a man can offer her. The rest of what they tell us is mostly polite lies . . . but on this one subject a man is nakedly honest. I don’t see any reason ever to be insulted if a man is polite and gallant about it.”

I thought about it. “Maybe you’re right, Girdie. I guess it is a compliment, in a way. But why is it that that is all a boy is ever after? Nine times out of ten anyhow.”

“You’ve got it just backwards, Poddy. Why should he
ever
be after anything else? Millions of years of evolution is the logic behind every proposition. Just be glad that the dears have learned to approach the matter with handkissing instead of a club. Some of them, anyhow. It gives us more choice in the matter than we’ve ever had before in all history. It’s a woman’s world today, dear—enjoy it and be grateful.”

I had never thought of it that way. When I’ve thought of it at all, I’ve mostly been groused because it is so hard for a girl to break into a “male” profession, such as piloting.

I’ve been doing some hard thinking about piloting—and have concluded that there are more ways of skinning a cat than buttering it with parsnips. Do I
really
want to be a “famous explorer captain”? Or would I be just as happy to be some member of his crew?

Oh, I want to space, let there be no doubt about that! My one little trip from Mars to Venus makes me certain that travel is for me. I’d rather be a junior stewardess in the
Tricorn
than President of the Republic. Shipboard life is fun; you take your home and your friends along with you while you go romantic new places—and with Davis-drive starships being built those places are going to be newer and more romantic every year. And Poddy is going to go, somehow. I was born to roam—

But let’s not kid ourselves, shall we? Is anybody going to let Poddy captain one of those multimegabuck ships?

Dexter’s chances are a hundred times as good as mine. He’s as smart as I am, or almost; he’ll have the best education for it that money can buy (while I’m loyal to Ares U., I know it is a hick college compared with where he plans to go); and also it is quite possible that his daddy could
buy
him a Star Rover ship. But the clincher is that Dexter is twice as big as I am and male. Even if you leave his father’s wealth out of the equation, which one of us gets picked?

But all is not lost. Consider Theodora, consider Catherine the Great. Let a man boss the job . . . then boss that man. I am not opposed to marriage. (But if Dexter wants to marry me—or anything—he’ll have to follow me to Marsopolis where we are pretty old-fashioned about such things. None of this light-hearted Venusberg stuff. Marriage should be every woman’s end—but not her finish. I do not regard marriage as a sort of death.

Girdie says always to “be what you are.” All right, let’s look at ourselves in a mirror, dear, and forget “Captain Podkayne Fries, the Famous Explorer” for the nonce. What do we see?

Getting just a touch broad-shouldered in the hips, aren’t we, dear? No longer any chance of being mistaken for a boy in a dim light. One might say that we were designed for having babies. And that doesn’t seem too bad an idea, now does it? Especially if we could have one as nice as Duncan. Fact is, all babies are pretty nice even when they’re not.

Those eighteen miserable hours during the storm in the
Tricorn
—weren’t they just about the most fun you ever had in your life? A baby is lots more fun than differential equations.

Every starship has a crèche. So which is better? To study crèche engineering and pediatrics—and be a department head in a starship? Or buck for pilot training and make it . . . and wind up as a female pilot nobody wants to hire?

Well, we don’t have to decide now—

 

 

I’m getting pretty anxious for us to shape for Earth. Truth is, Venusberg’s fleshpots can grow monotonous to one of my wholesome (or should I say “limited”) tastes. I haven’t any more money for shopping, not if I am to have any to shop in Paris; I don’t think I could ever get addicted to gambling (and don’t want to; I’m one of those who lose and thereby offset in part Clark’s winning); and the incessant noise and lights are going to put wrinkles where I now have dimples. And I think Dexter is beginning to be just a bit bored with my naïve inability to understand what he is driving at.

If there is any one thing I have learned about males in my eight and a half years, it is that one should sign off before he gets bored. I look forward to just one last encounter with Dexter now: a tearful farewell just before I
must
enter the
Tricorn
’s loading tube, with a kiss so grown-up, so utterly passionate and all-out giving, that he will believe the rest of his life that Things Could Have Been Different if Only He Had Played His Cards Right.

I’ve been outside the city just once, in a sealed tourist bus. Once is more than enough; this ball of smog and swamp should be given back to the natives, only they wouldn’t take it. Once a fairy in flight was pointed out, so they said, but I didn’t see anything. Just smog.

I’ll settle now for just one fairy, in flight or even perched. Dexter says that he knows of a whole colony, a thousand or more, less than two hundred kilometers away, and wants to show it to me in his Rolls. But I’m not warm to that idea; he intends to drive it himself—and that dratted thing has automatic controls. If I can sneak Girdie, or even Clark, into the picnic—well, maybe.

But I have learned a lot on Venus and would not have missed it for anything. The Art of Tipping, especially, and now I feel like an Experienced Traveler. Tipping can be a nuisance but it is not quite the vice Marsmen think it is; it is a necessary lubricant for perfect service.

Let’s admit it; service in Marsopolis varies from indifferent to terrible—and I simply had not realized it. A clerk waits on you when he feels like it and goes on gossiping with another clerk, not even able to see you until he does feel like it.

Not like that in Venusberg! However, it is not just the money—and here follows the Great Secret of Happy Travel. I haven’t soaked up much Portuguese and not everybody speaks Ortho. But it isn’t necessary to be a linguist if you will learn just one word—in as many languages as possible. Just “thank you.”

I caught onto this first with Maria and Maria—I say “gobble-gobble” to them a hundred times a day, only the word is actually “obrigado” which sounds like “gobble-gobble” if you say it quickly. A
small
tip is much more savoir-fairish—and gets better, more willing service—when accompanied by “thank you” than a big tip while saying nothing.