The Blue Marble Gambit (17 page)

CHAPTER
16. OHOH

The
steel door kept swinging open; I kept staring at the blank spot of wall where
Trina had been. Microseconds
passed. Minutes. Weeks. A year. Two years. Five. A decade. A century. Trina was still gone.

"Freeze,"
Ned whispered, though no one could hear him but me. I was, incidentally, still frozen. Trina was still gone. It was
me
, I
decided, not Ned at all. I had gone
round the bend. Zot! Double Zot!
What a disappointment!
And after being so smugly proud of my
own sanity.
I suppose it
served me right, in some sort of karma-balancing way.

Four
Boffs tumbled through the doorway, big, burly, and heavily armed. All four turned to peer behind the steel
rectangle, directly at me. Twelve
watery yellow eyes.

Then
they froze. Apparently it was
catching.

They
looked behind, in the other direction. Then back at me.

Like
Keystone Kops, they did
double,
triple, and finally
quadruple takes, looking back and forth and forth and back again and again,
their combat harnesses rattling all the while. They looked straight at me again and
again. I felt naked as a nudist.

They
looked at each of the walls. They
looked up. They looked down.

They
chattered and gibbered and aped and rustled.

I
kept doing my perfect imitation of a still-life painting. Slowly, slowly, slowly, it sank in. They couldn't see me.

Using my peripheral vision, afraid to
move even my eyeballs, I glanced downward. It was worse than I thought.

I
couldn't see me. I was gone!

"Ned,"
I hissed silently. “My body! Where
is it!
"

"Oh,
look at you complaining now," Ned replied archly, appearing in front of me
as only an old-fashioned bowler hat floating in space. That rang a dim bell somewhere deep in
the cool gray depths of my brain.
The invisible man?
"I go through this every day of my life. You can't even take it for a few
seconds!"

I
gritted my teeth. “You worthless
pile of biochips! My body! Where is it?"

"It's
around," Ned said slyly. The
hat dipped rhythmically, as if he were chuckling.

"Not
funny! Not funny at all!" I felt myself start to totter with the effort of
silently yelling inside my head.

The
Boffs were gathered in a huddle.

"Oh,
relax - and hold still - your body is right where it belongs. Just rather cunningly camouflaged to
match the stones below and behind you." Ned's tone turned serious. “Alright. Get ready to move."

I
took a closer, harder look, and at first didn't believe him. But then I saw it was true - I was now a
flat, rectangular piece of stone, crumbling mortar and all. Against the wall, especially when viewed
by weak Boff eyes, I was invisible. My pattern matched exactly.

I
looked hard for Trina, precisely where I knew she had to be.

Nope. Couldn't see her.

"But
Ned," I began, "How-"

The
Boffs turned and moved out through the door in a mass of hurrying green.

"Out
the door," Ned ordered. “Now
now now. Go go go. And bring Trina."

I
was instantly gliding forward. I
think Ned may have jolted my motor center - a strict no no under our particular
intra-cranial agreement, but this wasn't the time to debate that point.

"Come
on," I whispered to where Trina had to be - she was still invisible - and
walked out the door.

The
hallway was long, rough-surfaced,
high-ceilinged
and
bleak. The Boffs were hurrying
away. But not for long, I was sure.

I
stopped, to pick a direction, and glanced behind me.

A
Boff guard stood there, its thick green flesh wrinkled in what I took to be a
malevolent grin.

I
instantly dropped into my fighting stance. Taking on a Boff unarmed was suicidal; but not taking one on could be
just as suicidal in certain circumstances.
Such as these.

I
whirled, beginning the movement that would deliver a high spin-kick to the
delicate nerve-ganglion in the Boffian top frazzle.

"Court,"
said the Boff in Trina's voice. “Stop it."

It
was too late to freeze the kick, but I pulled it short, letting my boot fan
that hated top tassel. Then I stood
stock still
. I was starting to feel like a clay actor in an ancient stop-action
movie. Stop. Go. Stop. Go.

The
Boff was Trina. On impulse I looked
down at myself. I was also a Boff -
in fact, I was also a Boff prison guard. I felt the faint stirrings of a first-rate identity crisis. For either I had lost all conception of
who and what I was, or - far more attractively - we were morphing. But the Boffs had taken our
morph-packs. So that was not possible. Unless-

"Exactly,"
Ned chimed in, watching my thoughts on the vid screen of my mind. “The left boot. That's why you had to throw the right
one."

I
puzzled over that. Morph-packs were
usually fist-sized or bigger. If
Ned was using one, it had to be some type of new and experimental miniaturized
unit, which could only be hidden in . .
. My
boot sole.
The left one.
I recalled Ned's
words,
that
everything was going according to plan.

"By
Saturn's many-ringed behind," I muttered.

"Court,"
Ned began, now a robed magician complete with wand. “I couldn't tell you about it - if they
had mind scanned you they would have learned everything. As it happened, they didn't.
But all the same.
Safety first."

"You-"
How to insult the munchkin? How not to? "Fatherless, motherless, parasitic,
useless, despicable tangle of Zotless-"

"Court,"
Ned broke in. “Don't say anything
you'll regret."

"I
won't regret any of that. Or
this." I continued, now
verging into a review of the finer anatomical and scatological references, with
an occasional pondering digression into Ned's ancestry.

Ned
turned himself into a captive, bound and tied to a stake, kindling piled around
him. A martyr. “Are you quite through?"

I
wanted to go on, but we had just broken out of prison on a hostile planet. Hanging around the cell door would
contribute neither to long life nor a nice set of leaves. “No, I'm not through. But let's go anyway. By the way, any idea what we are?"
I gestured at our sashes, which bore complex squiggles.

"Of
course I know,"
Ned
replied in a disdainful
professorial tone, which contrasted with the first licks of flame appearing in
the timbers at his feet. “You and
Trina are now both Senior Captains of the Western Stalk of the Vegetorian
Guard, visiting Gastro on an inspection tour."

"Ned,"
I said with some admiration, despite my lingering bitterness, "that's just
about perfect." As visitors, the locals couldn't be expected to know us.

"Just
about," Ned agreed. “Which
brings us to the next problem."

Ned
did a lot of things that I hated, but one of the things I hated most was when
he said things like that.

"The
next problem?" I parroted.

"We
have no idea where the Hall of Marvels, and therefore the Time Oscillator,
is," he said. “Only that it is
somewhere in this building. Which
is
a mile high and three wide. That's a lot of ground to cover. Even for an ambulatory vegetable."

"Especially
for an ambulatory vegetable," I muttered.

"Court,"
Trina said, "how are we going to find the Time Oscillator?"

"Funny,"
I said, meaning funny strange, not funny funny, "Ned and I were just
discussing that. So I'll tell you
what I was about to tell him."

"Which
is?" they chorused nicely.

"We'll
have to depend on luck." I picked a random direction and we set off, in
the leg-killing Boff crawl.

The
Central Security Facility was chaos - Boffs hurrying everywhere, colliding and
slapping and racing. It was a
living salad gone haywire. All this
was caused by our disappearance, and in a nice twist it enabled us to slip out
of the prison section of the vast edifice.

On
the theory that more distance from prison was better, we rode jetvators high
into the building, and wandered from floor to floor to floor.
For hours.
Finally we were exhausted, and, it
seemed, no closer to finding the Hall of Marvels. We stopped in a narrow, tunnel-like
hall.

"I
have a new plan," I announced.

"I
can't wait," rustled Trina. “All your others have been so good."

"Hush,
sprout. It's simple. We'll just ask for directions."

Trina's
eyes widened. “Ask? Directions?
Just ask? Ask who?"

"Them,"
I said, pointing at a group of Boffs far down the damp stony passage.

"Er,
Court, maybe that's a bad idea?" Trina suggested. “There must be protocols, rules,
etiquette that we can't even guess at. And since they know we've looked like Boffs before, the slightest
inaccuracies might give us away."

"That's
all true," I agreed. “Therefore, we have to ask very very carefully. Here we go." I began moving.

"I
don't like this," Ned moaned.

"It's
my blood."

"It's
our blood."

We
drew near the circle of stalks, arranged in a tall, conical chamber. They turned to regard us.

"Greetings,
fellow greenlings," I boomed. Then, because there was no need to beat around the bush, so to speak, I
said, "Can you direct us to the Great Hall of Marvels?"

There
was a long, sap-curdling silence, before the tallest of the three unfurled a
dripping tentacle. The trembling
tip waved towards a wet cave-like opening in the far wall.

"That
is the way."

"In
the name of all things spineless, we thank you," I said as we moved
towards the cave.

"I
see," said the same Boff in a voice as cold as day-old peas, "from
your uniforms that you are visitors from the Western Stalk."

A
ghostly Ned appeared beside a translucent placard explaining that the swirls
and dips on this particular Boff identified a Senior Commandant.

"The
Third Root of the Western Stalk, I see," continued the Senior Commandant
drolly. “The Legion of the Foul
Swampy Odor."

"Yes,
Senior Commandant, that is true. I
am Tendril Ruta and this is Offshoot Bega.
A great pleasure to meet you.
We would be happy to discuss our service
with the Great Stalk at length with you later, perhaps at a suitably loathsome
watering hole. But now our time is
short. Thank you again."

I
turned to leave but the Senior Commandant stopped me with his words.

"The
Legion of the Foul Swampy Odor is a proud and noble unit, with a history
littered with fallen enemies and sap-covered heroes of Boff."

I
didn't know where this was going but I knew I wouldn't like it. “All true, loyal Commandant."

"Yes,
I know.
My very
own unit.
But we have no
Tendril Ruta and no Offshoot Bega. You are frauds!"

Ah,
bitter irony! To be exposed not as chimps but as imposter vegetables! What were
the odds of that? For anyone else, no doubt low. For someone named diz Astor, well . .
. .

The
three Boffs moved to flank us, their razor scythes flicking in and out with
very disturbing, slightly damp, snicks.

The
Commandant's tentacles were bobbing and weaving and darting, like a frenzy of
giant earthworms. I wondered -
would the earthworms survive when the Etzans took Earth?

"Diz!"
Trina shrieked in a whisper.
Another interesting effect.
“You clown! I told you!"

Yes,
she did. I'd ignored her then and I
ignored her now.

Several
quivering tentacle tips pointed
at me and the Commandant made
a rumbling, grating noise
. “My honor is offended. I
demand ritual combat!" All seven of his razor scythes flicked in and out
in unison,
each dripping
with viscous yellow
threat. “We will fight to the
death!"

The
Boffs closed in. Our backs were to
the wall. Happily, that wall held a
doorway.

"No,
we won't," I countered.

"You
admit your infraction? Very well. Assume the position of Thagalog, and I shall dispatch you slightly more
quickly and with slightly more pain than you would suffer in combat. Of course, it will also be with far
greater ignominy."

Hmm. No, not even remotely tempting. Trina and I kept slowly backing away.

"I
think not," I said.

The
Commandant rustled angrily. “It is
a matter of honor! There is no other way!"

"Oh,
but there is," I said. I was
thinking madly, hoping for a bolt of inspiration, but all I received was a thin
and malnourished ray of impertinence. It would have to do. It
always did.