Troublemakers (36 page)

   
So that’s the yarn.

   
Hmmm? What’s that? Did he make me so I could run faster than anyone else in the school? Oh, yeah, sure.

   
You know anybody wants to hire a sixteen-year-old centaur?

Well, we’re nearing the end of our time together. Has this cheery little package of fantasies made you a better person? Are you kinder to little old ladies and people in wheelchairs?. Do you have respect for the environment and now crave a better class of music? Are your armpits kissing sweet, and has your flatulence abated? Listen up: in the history of the written word there are maybe only a hundred or so books that can truly be called “important.” That is to say, they changed peoples’ minds and habits, brought light and intelligence into otherwise dark and ignorant existences.
The Analects of Confucius;
Plato’s
The Republic;
the
Summa Theologiae
of Thomas Aquinas;
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes; Pascal, Descartes, Spinoza; Thoreau, Darwin, Hegel and Kant.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and
Nineteen Eight-Four.
Maybe a hundred and fifty, tops. You won’t find thinking as significant as any of that in here. Mostly, these stories were written to entertain, to tell a tale and get a quick reaction. If there are life lessons to be learned, that wisdom can only be unearthed in stories like these by the sharp tool of
your
imagination. Take this next space adventure. It’s a hunt-and-seek action psychodrama about a guy so consumed with the need for revenge that he forgets the admonition in Shakespeare’s line, “heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that thee burn thyself.” So what this story says, I suppose, is that when the fire in your gut overpowers the rational coolness in your brain, you are primed to slip on that slippery slope of action/reaction without consideration of consequences. Blind and stupid, we slip and slide through most of our lives. It
seemed
like a good idea at the time. But only the thickest brick among you doesn’t already
know
that lesson. If there is magic in this-or any-book, it can only be conjured by wit and intelligence. When you are a creature of raw emotion, behaving on the moment like a dead frog-leg with a live wire in it, you must, I tell you honestly you
must
inevitably become somebody’s tool, somebody’s fool. Only by keeping alert-remember all Art has but one message: PAY ATTENTION-can you hope to be the one dong the tracking, rather than winding up being the fool tool who has been tracked and finally trapped. That’s as close to genuine wisdom as I get, this late in the day.

C
laybourne’s headlamp picked out the imprint at once. It was faint in the beam, yet discernible, with the telltale mark of the huge, three-toed foot. He was closer than ever.

   
He drew a deep breath, and the plastic air-sack on his breather mask collapsed inward. He expelled the breath slowly, watching the diamond-shaped sack expand once more.

   
He wished wildly for a cigarette, but it was impossible. First because the atmosphere of the tiny planetoid would not keep one going, and second because he’d die in the thin air.

   
His back itched, but the loose folds of the protective suit prevented any lasting relief, for all his scratching.

   
The faint starlight of shadows crossing the ground made weird patterns. Claybourne raised his head and looked out across the plain of blue saw-grass at the distant mountains. They looked like so many needles thrust up through the crust of the planetoid. They were angry mountains. No one had ever named them; which was not strange, for nothing but the planetoid itself had been named.

   
It had been named by the first expedition to the Antares Cluster. They had named it Selangg-after the alien ecologist who had died on the way out.

   
They recorded the naming in their log, which was fortunate, because the rest of them died on the way back. Space malady, and an incomplete report on the planetoid Selangg, floating in a death ship around a secondary sun of the Partias Group.

   
He stood up slowly, stretching slightly to ease the tension of his body. He picked up the molasses-gun and hefted it absently. Off to his right he heard a scampering, and swung the beam in its direction.

   
A tiny, bright-green animal scurried through the crew cut desert saw-grass.

   
Is that what the
fetl
lives on?
he wondered.

   
He actually knew very little about the beast he was tracking. The report given him by the Institute at the time he was commissioned to bring the
fetl
back was, at best, sketchy; pieced together from that first survey report.

   
The survey team had mapped many planetoids, and only a hurried analysis could be made before they scuttled to the next world. All they had listed about the
fed
was a bare physical description-and the fact that it was telekinetic.

   
What evidence had forced this conclusion was not stated in the cramped micro-report, and the reason died with them.

   
“We want this animal badly, Mr. Claybourne,” the Director of the Institute had said.

   
“We want him badly because he just
may
be what this report says. If he is, it will further our studies of extra-sensory perception tremendously. We are willing to pay any reasonable sum you might demand. We have heard you’re the finest wild-game hunter on the Periphery.

   
“We don’t care how you do it, Mr. Claybourne, but we want the
fed
brought back alive and unharmed.”

   
Claybourne had accepted immediately. This job had paid a pretty sum-enough to complete his plans to kill Carl Garden.

   
The prints paced away, clearly indicating the beast was heading for refuge in the mountains. He studied the flat surface of the grassy desert, and heaved a sigh.

   
He’d been at it three weeks, and all he’d found had been tracks. Clear, unmistakable tracks, and all leading toward the mountains. The beast could not know it was being tracked, yet it continued moving steadily.

   
The pace had worn away at Claybourne.

   
He gripped the molasses-gun tighter, swinging it idly in small, wary arcs. He had been doing that-unknowing-for several days. The hush of the planetoid was working on him.

   
Ahead, the towering bleakness of Selangg’s lone mountain range rose full-blown from the shadows of the plain. Up there.

   
Twenty miles of stone jumbled and strewn piece on piece; seventeen thousand feet high. Somewhere in those rocks was an animal Claybourne had come halfway across the galaxy to find. An animal that was at this moment insuring Carl Garden’s death.

   
He caught another print in the beam.

   
He stooped to examine it. There was a faint wash of sand across it, where the wind had scurried past. The foot-long paw print lay there, mocking him, challenging him, asking him what he was doing here-so far from home, so far from warmth and life and ease.

   
Claybourne shook his head, clearing it of thoughts that too easily impinged. He’d been paid half the sum requested, and that had gone to the men who were now stalking Garden back on Earth. To get the other half, he had to capture the
fetl.
The sooner that was done, the better.

   
The
fetl
was near. Of that he was now certain. The beast certainly couldn’t go
over
the mountains and live. It had to hole up in the rocks somewhere.

   
He rose, squinted into the darkness. He flicked the switch on his chest-console one more notch, heightening the lamp’s power. The beam drove straight ahead, splashing across the gray, faceless rocks. Claybourne tilted his head, staring through the clear hood, till a sharply-defined circle of brilliant white stabbed itself onto the roc\l: before him.

   
That was going to be a job, climbing these mountains. He decided abruptly to catch five hours sleep before pushing up the flank of the mountains.

   
He turned away, to make a resting place at the foot of the mountains, and with the momentary cessation of the tracking, found old thoughts clambering back into his mind.

   
Shivering inside his protection suit-though none of the chill of Selangg could get through to him-he inflated the foam-rest attached to the back of his suit. He lay down, in the towering ebony shadows, looking up at the clear, eternal night sky. And he remembered.

   
Claybourne had owned his own fleet of cargo vessels. It had been one of the larger chains, including hunting ships and cage-lined shippers. It had been a money-making chain, until the inverspace ships had come along, and thrown Claybourne’s obsolete fuel-driven spacers out of business.

   
Then he had taken to blockade-running and smuggling, to ferrying slaves for the outworld feudal barons, gun-running and even spaceway robbery.

   
Through that period he had cursed Carl Garden. It had been Garden all the way-Garden every step of the way-who had been his nemesis.

   
When they finally caught him-just after he had dumped a cargo of slaves into the sun, to avoid customs conviction-they canceled his commission, and refused him pilot status. His ships had been sold at auction.

   
That
had strengthened his hatred for Garden. Garden had bought most of the fleet. For use as scum-ships and livestock carriers.

   
It had been Garden who had invented the inverspace drive. Garden who had undercut his fleet, driving Claybourne into receivership. And finally, it had been Garden who had bought the remnants of the fleet.

   
Lower and lower he sank; three years as a slush-pumper on freighters, hauling freight into shining spacers on planets that had not yet received power equipment, drinking and hating.

   
Till finally-two years before-he had reached the point where he knew he would never rest easily till he had killed Garden.

   
Claybourne had saved his money. The fleshpots of the Periphery had lost him. He gave up liquor and gambling.

   
The wheels had been set in motion. People were working, back on Earth, to get Garden. He was being pursued and harried, though he never knew it. From the other side of the galaxy, Claybourne was hunting, chasing, tracking his man. And one day, Garden would be vulnerable. Then Claybourne would come back.

   
To reach that end, Claybourne had accepted the job from the Institute.

   
In his rage to acquire money for the job of getting his enemy, Claybourne had built a considerable reputation as wild-game hunter. For circuses, for museums and zoos, he had tracked and trapped thousands of rare life-forms on hundreds of worlds.

   
They had finally contacted him on Bouyella, and offered him the ship; the charter, and exactly as much money as he needed to complete the job back on Earth.

  
 
Arrangements had been quickly made, half the pay had been deposited to Claybourne’s accounts (and immediately withdrawn for delivery to certain men back home), and he had gone out on the jump to Selangg.

   
This was the last jump, the last indignity he would have to suffer. After Selangg-back to Earth. Back to Garden.

   
He wasn’t certain he had actually seen it! The movement had been rapid, and only in the comer of his eye.

   
Claybourne leaped up, throwing off the safeties on the molasses-gun. He yanked off the inflation patch with stiff fingers, and the foam-rest collapsed back to flatness in his pack.