Starman Jones (9 page)

Max knew that some spider puppies had been taught human speech, after a fashion, but it startled him; he jumped back. He then recovered and looked more closely. “Hello yourself,” he answered. “My, but you are a fancy little fellow.” The creature’s fur was a deep, rich green on its back, giving way to orange on the sides and blending to warm cream color on its little round belly.

“Want out,” stated the spider puppy.

“I can’t let you out. I’ve got work to do.” He read the card affixed to the cage: “Mr. Chips” it stated,
Pseudocanis hexapoda hesperae,
Owner: Miss E. Coburn, A-092; there followed a detailed instruction as to diet and care. Mr. Chips ate grubs, a supply of which was to be found in freezer compartment H-118, fresh fruits and vegetables, cooked or uncooked, and should receive iodine if neither seaweed nor artichokes was available. Max thumbed through his mind, went over what he had read about the creatures, decided the instructions were reasonable.

“
Please
out!” Mr. Chips insisted.

It was an appeal hard to resist. No maiden fayre crying from a dungeon tower had ever put it more movingly. The compartment in which the cats were located was small and the door could be fastened; possibly Mr. Chips could be allowed a little run—but later; just now he had to take care of other animals.

When Max left, Mr. Chips was holding onto the bars and sobbing gently. Max looked back and saw that it was crying real tears; a drop trembled on the tip of its ridiculous little nose; it was hard to walk out on it. He had finished with the stables before tackling the kennel; once the dogs and cats were fed and their cages policed, he was free to give attention to his new friend. He had fed it first off, which had stopped the crying. When he returned, however, the demand to be let out resumed.

“If I let you out, will you get back in later?”

The spider puppy considered this. A conditional proposition seemed beyond its semantic attainments, for it repeated, “Want out.” Max took a chance.

Mr. Chips landed on his shoulder and started going through his pockets. “Candy,” it demanded. “Candy?”

Max stroked it. “Sorry, chum. I didn’t know.”

“Candy?”

“No candy.” Mr. Chips investigated personally, then settled in the crook of Max’s arm, prepared to spend a week or more. It wasn’t, Max decided, much like a puppy and certainly not like a spider, except that six legs seemed excessive. The two front ones had little hands; the middle legs served double duty. It was more like a monkey, but felt like a cat. It had a slightly spicy fragrance and seemed quite clean.

Max tried talking to it, but found its intellectual attainments quite limited. Certainly, it used human words meaningfully, but its vocabulary was not richer than that which might be expected of a not-too-bright toddler.

When Max tried to return it to its cage, there ensued twenty minutes of brisk exercise, broken by stalemates. Mr. Chips swarmed over the cages, causing hysterics among the cats. When at last the spider puppy allowed itself to be caught, it still resisted imprisonment, clinging to Max and sobbing. He ended by walking it like a baby until it fell asleep.

This was a mistake. A precedent had been set and thereafter Max was not permitted to leave the kennel without walking the baby.

He wondered about the “Miss Coburn” described on the tag as Mr. Chips’ owner. All of the owners of cats and dogs had shown up to visit their pets, but Mr. Chips remained unvisited. He visualized her as a sour and hatchet-faced spinster who had received the pet as a going-away present and did not appreciate it. As his friendship with the spider puppy grew, his mental picture of Miss E. Coburn became even less attractive.

The
Asgard
was over a week out and only days from its first spatial transition before Max had a chance to compare conception with fact. He was cleaning the stables, with Mr. Chips riding his shoulder and offering advice, when Max heard a shrill voice from the kennel compartment “Mr.
Chips!
Chipsie! Where are you?”

The spider puppy sat up suddenly and turned its head. Almost immediately a young female appeared in the door; Mr. Chips squealed, “Ellie!” and jumped to her arms. While they were nuzzling each other Max looked her over. Sixteen, he judged, or seventeen. Or maybe even eighteen—shucks, how was a fellow to tell when womenfolk did such funny things to their faces? Anyhow, she was no beauty and the expression on her face didn’t help it any.

She looked up at him and scowled. “What were you doing with Chipsie? Answer me that!”

It got his back fur up. “Nothing,” he said stiffly. “If you will excuse me, ma’am, I’ll get on with my work.” He turned his back and bent over his broom.

She grabbed his arm and swung him around. “Answer me! Or…or—I’ll tell the Captain, that’s what I’ll do!”

Max counted ten, then just to be sure, recalled the first dozen 7-place natural logarithms. “That’s your privilege, ma’am,” he said with studied calmness, “but first, what’s your name and what is your business here? I’m in charge of these compartments and responsible for these animals—as the Captain’s representative.” This he knew to be good space law, although the concatenation was long.

She looked startled. “Why, I’m Eldreth Coburn,” she blurted as if anyone should know.

“And your business?”

“I came to see Mr. Chips—of course!”

“Very well, ma’am. You may visit your pet for a reasonable period,” he added, quoting verbatim from his station instruction sheet. “Then he goes back in his cage. Don’t disturb the other animals and don’t feed them. That’s orders.”

She started to speak, decided not to and bit her lip. The spider puppy had been looking from face to face and listening to a conversation far beyond its powers, although it may have sensed the emotions involved. Now it reached out and plucked Max’s sleeve. “Max,” Mr. Chips announced brightly. “Max!”

Miss Coburn again looked startled. “Is that your name?”

“Yes, ma’am. Max Jones. I guess he was trying to introduce me. Is that it, old fellow?”

“Max,” Mr. Chips repeated firmly. “Ellie.”

Eldreth Coburn looked down, then looked up at Max with a sheepish smile. “You two seem to be friends. I guess I spoke out of turn. Me and my mouth.”

“No offense meant I’m sure, ma’am.”

Max had continued to speak stiffly; she answered quickly, “Oh, but I was rude! I’m sorry—I’m always sorry afterwards. But I got panicky when I saw the cage open and empty and I thought I had lost Chipsie.”

Max grinned grudgingly. “Sure. Don’t blame you a bit. You were scared.”

“That’s it—I was scared.” She glanced at him. “Chipsie calls you Max. May I call you Max?”

“Why not? Everybody does—and it’s my name.”

“And you call me Eldreth, Max. Or Ellie.”

She stayed on, playing with the spider puppy, until Max had finished with the cattle. She then said reluctantly, “I guess I had better go, or they’ll be missing me.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Oh, of course!”

“Ummm… Miss Eldreth…”

“Ellie.”

“—May I ask a question?” He hurried on, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but what took you so long? That little fellow has been awful lonesome. He thought you had deserted him.”

“Not ‘he’—‘she’.”

“Huh?”

“Mr. Chips is a girl,” she said apologetically. “It was a mistake anyone could make. Then it was too late, because it would confuse her to change her name.”

The spider puppy looked up brightly and repeated, “‘Mr. Chips is a girl.’ Candy, Ellie?”

“Next time, honey bun.”

Max doubted if the name was important, with the nearest other spider puppy light-years away. “You didn’t answer my question?”

“Oh. I was so mad about that, I wanted to bite. They wouldn’t let me.”

“Who’s ‘they’? Your folks?”

“Oh, no! The Captain and Mrs. Dumont.” Max decided that it was almost as hard to extract information from her as it was from Mr. Chips. “You see, I came aboard in a stretcher—some silly fever, food poisoning probably. It couldn’t be much because I’m tough. But they kept me in bed and when the Surgeon did let me get up, Mrs. Dumont said I mustn’t go below ‘C’ deck. She had some insipid notion that it wasn’t proper.”

Max understood the stewardess’s objection; he had already discovered that some of his shipmates were a rough lot—though he doubted that any of them would risk annoying a girl passenger. Why, Captain Blaine would probably space a man for that.

“So I had to sneak out. They’re probably searching for me right now. I’d better scoot.”

This did not fit in with Mr. Chips’ plans. The spider puppy clung to her and sobbed, stopping occasionally to wipe tears away with little fists. “Oh, dear!”

Max looked perturbed. “I guess I’ve spoiled him—her. Mr. Chips, I mean.” He explained how the ceremony of walking the baby had arisen.

Eldreth protested, “But I must go. What’ll I do?”

“Here, let’s see if he—she—will come to me.” Mr. Chips would and did. Eldreth gave her a pat and ran out, whereupon Mr. Chips took even longer than usual to doze off. Max wondered if spider puppies could be hypnotized; the ritual was getting monotonous.

Eldreth showed up next day under the stern eye of Mrs. Dumont. Max was respectful to the stewardess and careful to call Eldreth “Miss Coburn.” She returned alone the next day. He looked past her and raised his eyebrows. “Where’s your chaperone?”

Eldreth giggled. “La Dumont consulted her husband and he called in your boss—the fat one. They agreed that you were a perfect little gentleman, utterly harmless. How do you like that?”

Max considered it. “Well, I’m an ax murderer by profession, but I’m on vacation.”

“That’s nice. What have you got there?”

It was a three-dimensional chess set. Max had played the game with his uncle, it being one that all astrogators played. Finding that some of the chartsmen and computermen played it, he had invested his tips in a set from the ship’s slop chest. It was a cheap set, having no attention lights and no arrangements for remote-control moving, being merely stacked transparent trays and pieces molded instead of carved, but it sufficed.

“It’s solid chess. Ever seen it?”

“Yes. But I didn’t know you played it”

“Why not? Ever play flat chess?’

“Some.”

“The principles are the same, but there are more pieces and one more direction to move. Here, I’ll show you.”

She sat tailor-fashion opposite him and he ran over the moves. “These are robot freighters…pawns. They can be commissioned anything else if they reach the far rim. These four are starships; they are the only ones with funny moves, they correspond with knights. They have to make interspace transitions, always off the level they’re on to some other level and the transition has to be related a certain way, like this—or this. And this is the Imperial flagship; it’s the one that has to be checkmated. Then there is…” They ran through a practice game, with the help of Mr. Chips, who liked to move the pieces and did not care whose move it was.

Presently he said, “You catch on pretty fast.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course, the
real
players play four-dimensional chess.”

“Do you?”

“Well, no. But I hope to learn some day. It’s just a matter of holding in your mind one more spatial relationship. My uncle used to play it. He was going to teach me, but he died.” He found himself explaining about his uncle. He trailed off without mentioning his own disappointment

Eldreth picked up one of the starship pieces from a tray. “Say, Max, we’re pretty near our first transition, aren’t we?”

“What time is it?”

“Uh, sixteen twenty-one—say, I’d better get upstairs.”

“Then it’s, uh, about thirty-seven hours and seven minutes, according to the computer crew.”

“Mmm…you seem to know about such things. Could you tell me just what it is we do? I heard the Astrogator talking about it at the table but I couldn’t make head nor tail. We sort of duck into a space warp; isn’t that right?”

“Oh no, not a space warp. That’s a silly term—space doesn’t ‘warp’ except in places where
pi
isn’t exactly three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six two six four three three eight three two seven, and so forth—like inside a nucleus. But we’re heading out to a place where space is
really
flat, not just mildly curved the way it is near a star. Anomalies are always flat, otherwise they couldn’t fit together—be congruent.”

She looked puzzled. “Come again?”

“Look, Eldreth, how far did you go in mathematics?”

“Me? I flunked improper fractions. Miss Mimsey was very vexed with me.”

“Miss Mimsey?”

“Miss Mimsey’s School for Young Ladies, so you see I can listen with an open mind.” She made a face. “But you told me that all you went to was a country high school and didn’t get to finish at that. Huh?”

“Yes, but I learned from my uncle. He was a great mathematician. Well, he didn’t have any theorems named after him—but a great one just the same,
I
think.” He paused. “I don’t know exactly how to tell you; it takes equations. Say! Could you lend me that scarf you’re wearing for a minute?”

“Huh? Why, sure.” She removed it from her neck.

It was a photoprint showing a stylized picture of the solar system, a souvenir of Solar Union Day. In the middle of the square of cloth was the conventional sunburst surrounded by circles representing orbits of solar planets, with a few comets thrown in. The scale was badly distorted and it was useless as a structural picture of the home system, but it sufficed. Max took it and said, “Here’s Mars.”

Eldreth said, “You read it. That’s cheating.”

“Hush a moment. Here’s Jupiter. To go from Mars to Jupiter you have to go from here to here, don’t you?”

“Obviously.”

“But suppose I fold it so that Mars is on top of Jupiter? What’s to prevent just stepping across?”

“Nothing, I guess. Except that what works for that scarf wouldn’t work very well in practice. Would it?”

“No, not that near to a star. But it works fine after you back away from a star quite a distance. You see, that’s just what an anomaly is, a place where space is folded back on itself, turning a long distance into no distance at all.”