Fiction Complete, page 19
Elphinstone considered him thoughtfully.
“Being administrator of a world, even a third-rate world like Irdra, provides a pleasant niche, with many delightful perquisites and a high status rating,” he said, savoring these good things. “Controlling the source of its wealth is even pleasanter. I think of a palace on Paradise, enough luxuries for my wife to make her the happiest of women, entree to the best Galactic society. . . . That’s just for openers. If I put my mind on it, I can think of more, and I’m sure you already have. But I don’t want you to be greedy, my boy. It’s bad for your character. It’s unfriendly. And it isn’t safe. We don’t want anything nasty to happen to you, do we?”
“But I’m telling the truth!” Bill insisted. “I haven’t the faintest notion what the zaps could trade for credits!”
“You haven’t?” Elphinstone sounded disappointed. “Ah, well. I daresay the station would seem a dull place without you, if anyone happened to notice you were missing. By the time they do, who knows what may have happened to you, alone on this hostile planet? As the situation now stands, I advise you not to return to the station without my protection, even if you could get out of here. A straightforward, factual account of your activities as founder and director of PIFFL would be ample to get you sent to a reject center fifty times over. Not even F-3 could save you. Perhaps, if you concentrate very hard, you’ll be able to remember what that trade item was. It would be valuable to both of us, wouldn’t it?”
He clomped off, leaving Bill to his thoughts; and most distressing they were, too. It was filtering through to him that he was in what Uncle Arpad used to refer to jocularly as “one mell of a hess.” Elphinstone was gallingly confident that he had the post of Galactic Administrator to Irdra nailed down and Zletz securely under his thumb; which was probably the case, unless Bill slipped him a curve. If the Elf should flub this masterpiece of finagling, what would the future hold for him? Certainly nothing so cushy as being The Man in Charge of a whole world. He wouldn’t give that up without a struggle, and, looked at objectively, in these circumstances his offer to spare Bill and even give him a share in the take was pretty sporting. It would be frighteningly easy to eliminate him outside the station. With the help of vot-vines there need be no corpus delicti to cause embarrassment, and the unrest among the zaps was more than sufficient to account for his disappearance. If he went back to the station now and Elphinstone got his story in first, and had the connections his self-confidence implied he did, Judson would go down the drain without a gurgle. It would be his word against Elphinstone’s, and who would believe him? He needed HELP!
. . . Misner. He wasn’t Admin, and he wasn’t SciCom. He was a law unto himself. He ought to be able to send a flash to F-j, if Bill could get to him, or get a message to him. Through the zaps? In the state they were in, that was doubtful. The engineer was at the construction site all the Irdran day, however. All he had to do was get over there. That was good for a laugh.
He wiped his brow with the tail of his shirt. Talk about sweating it! . . . Yeah, how about that? That wasn’t pure nervous perspiration trickling down his spine. It was getting hot in here. He’d been so preoccupied he’d forgotten to drink his vot-juice. He patted his waist. . . . No canteen. No pouch with SpEms. Now that he thought of it, he knew where they were, all right. That was another knee-slapper. They were on the floor beside his leaner in Gort’s burrow, and he had a fat chance of getting back there for them, even if they hadn’t been trampled into dust during the melee. Elphinstone obviously intended to have him kept prisoner in the Assembly Burrow until he agreed to cooperate, and he couldn’t if he wanted to. That was tantamount to a death sentence, unless he had SpEms. The GLANSTROPs would give him vot-juice, he wasn’t worried about that; but could he persuade them to get his food? He considered the possibility. Whizzers were a lighthearted lot, not prone to straining their brains with unnecessary thinking, but they were open to reason; and letting him starve to death or succumb to thirst-shock wasn’t reasonable. He could ask them; and if he could forget about how sticky and uncomfortable he was and think about something besides cold showers and pitchers of iced tea, he might be able to concentrate on the problem of getting out of here.
He went to the door. The two guards immediately stretched their arms across it, twiddling their palps amiably to indicate that they harbored no ill-will against him personally. He explained his predicament.
“You’re sure you can’t eat our food?” one of them asked uncertainly. “Zletz told us to guard you, and he’s got this big thing about how we have to learn to be dependable and do what we’re told and not go whizzing off whenever we feel like it.”
“I’ve tried your food,” Bill said. “It’s a lot harder than my teeth. You can see this is a matter of life and death. Look how I’m sweating.”
“I can’t—it makes me sick,” the second guard gulped, turning his head away. “Moisture oozing right out of his hide! I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“Yeah,” the first one agreed weakly. “Me, too. You say ‘Don’t lose moisture,’ sometimes, but I never saw anybody actually do it before. I never thought of them doing it that way, either. Yeuch! How disgusting! If he goes into thirst-shock on top of it . . . I don’t care what Zletz says, I don’t have to stand around and watch anything like that. ‘Guarding’ him is a lot of hooey, anyway. How’s he going to get out of the Burrow? One of us can easy zip over to Gort’s and be back without anybody noticing.”
“Sure, go ahead,” the second guard encouraged. “We can’t let the poor thrip suffer.”
The Good Samaritan whizzed off and was back a minute later, popping like a string of Chinese firecrackers.
“Wow! Hey! Are we missing something!” he shouted, vibrating frenziedly. “It’s the fight of the century! You never saw anything like it! Wow-ze! but it’s wild out there! Zowie! Pow! Whammo!” He spun around, shadow-boxing madly. “It started in Gort’s burrow, and now it’s the whole village! Guys from all over! Mixing it up in the streets! Ka-zammie! Come on, let’s go, I’m not gonna miss this!”
“Hey, wow,” the second guard enthused, poised to dash off. “Oh. What about him? We are supposed to be guarding him.”
“You kidding? He goes out there, he won’t last longer than a flyer in a kripti nest. It’s him they’re after, lots of ’em want to kill him.”
“What for?”
“How should I know? Come on, let’s go! If you don’t get a move on you’ll miss it; it’s getting close to seal-up time!”
“Okay. Glaxie, you heard what he said. You stay here.”
They tore away, leaving Bill to his own devices, whatever they might be.
XIX
“Frustrating” was an inadequate word. “Maddening,” maybe? There was the unguarded tunnel sloping up to freedom, so close a three-year-old could hit it with a rock. All he had to do was walk out—if he wanted to take the chance of being torn to pieces by a mob of overexcited zaps who believed his death would save them from being enslaved by the Galactic Union. Or he could sit here stewing in his own juice and slowly starve to death. That would certainly be fatal. If he could somehow elude the zaps and get to the construction site, Misner might be able to smuggle him into the station. How could anyone know he had ever been out of it, if he was in his room, alive and healthy? It would be his word against Elphinstone’s, and the biotechs would never admit that he could have been living outside the station without a heat-suit for days.
“Onward and upward,” he encouraged himself, and dashed to the tunnel.
At the top of the stairs he encountered the first obstacle: The night-seals were in place, and whoever had put them on seemed to have meant them to be permanent. Bill kept an ear cocked toward the hall as he struggled impatiently, breaking fingernails and sweating rivers. The heat was getting unbearable, and he didn’t have time to stop and do mental gymnastics to persuade himself that it didn’t bother him. It did; and when he had unscrabbled the last hook and raised the door a bit, the blast-furnace outside threatened to be worse than the sweat-bath within.
He peeked out like a neurotic rabbit. The music of battle was borne to his ears, and by craning around he could see the cloud of dust raised by the fray over most of the village. From time to time combatants emerged to take a breather before plunging back into the melee. There was no cover beyond an occasional boulder. If one of these idlers should chance to look around, Bill would be as easy to spot as one pea on a plate. On top of that, he realized with dismay that his speed and agility were deserting him. He was moving almost as slowly as . . . a Glaxie! A soft-bodied slug who wasn’t afraid of the dark and didn’t pass out from the cold! He didn’t have to risk leaving the tunnel now! The GLANSTROPs certainly wouldn’t leave a dandy fight like that until they were just about ready to night-trance. He could hide somewhere, leaving the door open so they’d think he had gone outside. When they came back, they’d be so nearly unconscious they wouldn’t have time to look for him. He could wait peacefully until it got dark, then stroll to the construction site, make himself comfortable, and wait for Misner to appear in the morning. What could be simpler?
He eased himself down the slide. The corridor was still empty. He draped the sealer strip at the bottom of the stairs, to give the impression that it had been dropped in a hurry, and headed toward the rear of the burrow. Near the back exit the passage looked unused. The walls and floor were rough, as vot-vines had made them, and a light-giving growth which coated the walls of inhabited places grew here only in patches. The air was musty, with a dank, graveyard odor; it seemed to hold more moisture and be a trifle cooler, for which he was grateful. His path took a bend to the left. There he spotted a dark opening which looked made to order for his purposes, and he squeezed himself into it.
Time snailed past. He waited. Eventually he heard, dimly, the noises made by GLANSTROPs entering the burrow to spend the night; then the voices of his guards, too muffled to be intelligible. The guards apparently noticed the sealer strip and came to the back exit, for their speech grew louder and clearer, but too fast for him to follow all they said. They didn’t seem particularly perturbed by his disappearance, however.
“. . . went out this way. We’ll have to seal it again. Hurry up, it’s getting late.”
“Think we should tell Zletz?”
“Now?”
“You’re right. He’ll be just as gone in the morning.”
“Zletz’ll probably fly when he finds out.”
“Let him. He wanted him guarded; he should’ve done it himself. It’s Glaxie business, anyway, not ours.”
He listened while they sealed the door, heard them drop their leaners and murmur drowsily for a few minutes. Soon the few scattered sounds from other parts of the burrow died, and the silence indicated that all the whizzers were safely in night-trance. Secure in the knowledge that nothing but heat could wake them, Bill crept out to unfasten the door while some light still lingered, then rested until it was fully dark.
There would be no zaps outside to hinder him now, so he lifted the trap and groped his way into pitchy darkness. The landscape was beautifully delineated in black on black. Where was the moon? Why wasn’t it on the job the way it was supposed to be, making the plants grow and providing illumination for the confused traveler? He oriented himself as well as he could, picked out a star to navigate by, and set forth none too confidently. Straining his eyes in the starlight to avoid hazards on the ground, he lost sight of his beacon and had trouble finding it again among the unfamiliar constellations. Watching the sky, he tripped and fell. The plants stirred as he passed among them. He had to move reasonably fast to avoid them, and that gave him no time to stop and make sure of his route. He stumbled along, praying, wondering when the moon would rise. He walked into a vot-vine whose teeth just missed him and kicked loose a chichi tendril which left a thread of fire encircling his ankles. He was tired, sleepy, hungry, thirsty, cold, and cranky. The trip seemed to be taking much longer than the distance warranted, and he was sure he was lost, doomed to spend the twenty-two hours of the Irdran night wandering further and further from his goal, unable to rest, more and more likely to fall into the jaws of a vot-vine as his alertness waned. . . . Then the moon rose, and he turned around to discover the construction site a good three hundred yards behind him. Fie had passed it in the dark. He swore so sulphurously the very plants flinched and stamped back.
He had made it. He crawled behind an incipient, half-finished partition, and huddled there to await the dawn and Misner, hoping no PIFFL member found him firs.
XX
Bill spent a miserable night, alternating between a sort of stupor and a painful state of being awake, aching for sleep, and too uncomfortable to achieve it. He began to think that he could endure no more, he would have to give up and make a try for the station regardless of the consequences, but a hint of increasing warmth in the breeze that had kept him shivering for hours encouraged him to wait a little longer. Finally eternity ended, the sky glowed with the promise of dawn, and soon after, he heard the roar of an approaching tractor and staggered to meet it. As it slammed to a halt, Misner jumped down and ran to catch him before he fell.
“Bill! What are you doing here? How long have you been out of the station? How did you get here? Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“I’ll be all right,” Bill croaked. “Do you have something to eat? And drink?”
The engineer gave him some of the chocolate he carried for the zaps and water from his suit-canteen. Some of Bill’s strength came back, and he gave Misner a brief summary of his adventures and the situation in which he found himself.
“Do you think you could get me back to my room without anybody seeing me?” he concluded.
“Back to your room! Are you out of your mind? Sick bay is where you belong!” Jerry expostulated.
“No! If I can sneak back without anybody seeing me, maybe I can brazen it out that I’ve never left the station. And I don’t want Elphinstone to know where I am, either. I don’t know what he could do, but I’m not going to underestimate him. He thinks I stand between him and something he’s been maneuvering long and hard to get. The way he was talking in the Assembly Burrow, I wouldn’t put murder past him, if he thought he could get away with it.”
Misner considered this.
“Perhaps you’re right. If what he told you is true, it’s just possible that he could swing an appointment as Galactic Administrator here, if he’s got good connections in Admin, and especially if Zletz insists on his getting the job. How many guys in his level could even dream of a post like that, no matter how long and hard they work? I can see him selling his soul for it. I think you’re right about reporting this to AMPAC and Thyg-F-3. There’s no use going to Willoughby. He hasn’t the brains or the imagination to handle it, and Elphinstone leads him around by the nose anyway—he’s blinded by that string of degrees. . . . It’ll be easy enough to slip you into your room. All we have to do is hide you in a repair ’port and take you through the inner corridor. You’ve told me about how strong and healthy Thygnans are, and you must be sturdy or you’d be dead by now. You don’t look too bad, at that. Are you sure food and rest are enough to get you back on your feet?”
“Positive,” Bill assured him. “And the sooner I get them, the better.”
Misner shook his head doubtfully and helped him into the tractor. They got back to the station and to Bill’s all-purpose without trouble, aided by the fact that it was the dead of night, Galactic time, and most of the personnel were asleep. Bill crawled off the ’port, stumbled to his bed, and fell on it with a blissful grunt. He was asleep instantly.
Hours later he awoke refreshed, optimistic, and ravenously hungry. Misner was snoozing at the desk with his feet up.
“Dial me about six breakfasts,” Bill caroled, heading for the bathroom. “Man, I feel great! How long did I sleep?”
“Going on twenty-seven hours.”
“No kidding! Anything happen while I was out?” Without waiting for an answer, he hopped under the shower. Next, fresh, clean clothes. He came out to a table amply spread with real food. How he had missed it!
“I’ve been here keeping an eye on you most of the time,” Jerry said. “None of my creepers showed up for work yesterday. The zaps seem to be all stirred up about something. According to the local news reports, they’re massing outside the station in ever increasing numbers. Nobody’s been able to find out why, but shouts of “Kill the Glaxies!” have been heard. There’s also a rumor that Elphinstone’s disappeared. He missed a couple of meals, and that’s not like him.”
“Maybe he went out to torture me, and the zaps got him,” Bill suggested brightly, more interested in deciding which item to devour next.
The intercom blatted rudely for attention. He flipped it on and was rewarded with the shrill accents of Irma.
“Judson? The Chief wants you in the sauna right away.”
“The sauna?” Bill repeated. It wasn’t like Irma to be funny, but how could she be serious?
“You heard me. Get over there, right now, on the double. Don’t stop to tie your shoelaces. Move it.” She snapped off.
“I’ve got to be hearing things,” Bill said, shaking his head to clear it. “Jerry, what did she say?”
“In effect, Mr. Willoughby requests the honor of your presence about five minutes ago.”
Bill looked wistfully at his half-eaten breakfast, but Misner checked him.
“Ah-ah. You’d better not. Mind if I come along? Curiosity is killing me, and with Willoughby’s disposition, who knows? You might need someone handy to carry you back to bed.”
“You would say something like that. . . . Why the sauna, for God’s sake?”
“Let’s find out.”
In the gym Bill’s old acquaintances Harvey and Kilmur, of the Bio team, were lounging against a pair of stretchers.
“Wonder Boy, for God’s sake,” one of them said disgustedly. “You might know he’d be mixed up in it.”
“Being administrator of a world, even a third-rate world like Irdra, provides a pleasant niche, with many delightful perquisites and a high status rating,” he said, savoring these good things. “Controlling the source of its wealth is even pleasanter. I think of a palace on Paradise, enough luxuries for my wife to make her the happiest of women, entree to the best Galactic society. . . . That’s just for openers. If I put my mind on it, I can think of more, and I’m sure you already have. But I don’t want you to be greedy, my boy. It’s bad for your character. It’s unfriendly. And it isn’t safe. We don’t want anything nasty to happen to you, do we?”
“But I’m telling the truth!” Bill insisted. “I haven’t the faintest notion what the zaps could trade for credits!”
“You haven’t?” Elphinstone sounded disappointed. “Ah, well. I daresay the station would seem a dull place without you, if anyone happened to notice you were missing. By the time they do, who knows what may have happened to you, alone on this hostile planet? As the situation now stands, I advise you not to return to the station without my protection, even if you could get out of here. A straightforward, factual account of your activities as founder and director of PIFFL would be ample to get you sent to a reject center fifty times over. Not even F-3 could save you. Perhaps, if you concentrate very hard, you’ll be able to remember what that trade item was. It would be valuable to both of us, wouldn’t it?”
He clomped off, leaving Bill to his thoughts; and most distressing they were, too. It was filtering through to him that he was in what Uncle Arpad used to refer to jocularly as “one mell of a hess.” Elphinstone was gallingly confident that he had the post of Galactic Administrator to Irdra nailed down and Zletz securely under his thumb; which was probably the case, unless Bill slipped him a curve. If the Elf should flub this masterpiece of finagling, what would the future hold for him? Certainly nothing so cushy as being The Man in Charge of a whole world. He wouldn’t give that up without a struggle, and, looked at objectively, in these circumstances his offer to spare Bill and even give him a share in the take was pretty sporting. It would be frighteningly easy to eliminate him outside the station. With the help of vot-vines there need be no corpus delicti to cause embarrassment, and the unrest among the zaps was more than sufficient to account for his disappearance. If he went back to the station now and Elphinstone got his story in first, and had the connections his self-confidence implied he did, Judson would go down the drain without a gurgle. It would be his word against Elphinstone’s, and who would believe him? He needed HELP!
. . . Misner. He wasn’t Admin, and he wasn’t SciCom. He was a law unto himself. He ought to be able to send a flash to F-j, if Bill could get to him, or get a message to him. Through the zaps? In the state they were in, that was doubtful. The engineer was at the construction site all the Irdran day, however. All he had to do was get over there. That was good for a laugh.
He wiped his brow with the tail of his shirt. Talk about sweating it! . . . Yeah, how about that? That wasn’t pure nervous perspiration trickling down his spine. It was getting hot in here. He’d been so preoccupied he’d forgotten to drink his vot-juice. He patted his waist. . . . No canteen. No pouch with SpEms. Now that he thought of it, he knew where they were, all right. That was another knee-slapper. They were on the floor beside his leaner in Gort’s burrow, and he had a fat chance of getting back there for them, even if they hadn’t been trampled into dust during the melee. Elphinstone obviously intended to have him kept prisoner in the Assembly Burrow until he agreed to cooperate, and he couldn’t if he wanted to. That was tantamount to a death sentence, unless he had SpEms. The GLANSTROPs would give him vot-juice, he wasn’t worried about that; but could he persuade them to get his food? He considered the possibility. Whizzers were a lighthearted lot, not prone to straining their brains with unnecessary thinking, but they were open to reason; and letting him starve to death or succumb to thirst-shock wasn’t reasonable. He could ask them; and if he could forget about how sticky and uncomfortable he was and think about something besides cold showers and pitchers of iced tea, he might be able to concentrate on the problem of getting out of here.
He went to the door. The two guards immediately stretched their arms across it, twiddling their palps amiably to indicate that they harbored no ill-will against him personally. He explained his predicament.
“You’re sure you can’t eat our food?” one of them asked uncertainly. “Zletz told us to guard you, and he’s got this big thing about how we have to learn to be dependable and do what we’re told and not go whizzing off whenever we feel like it.”
“I’ve tried your food,” Bill said. “It’s a lot harder than my teeth. You can see this is a matter of life and death. Look how I’m sweating.”
“I can’t—it makes me sick,” the second guard gulped, turning his head away. “Moisture oozing right out of his hide! I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“Yeah,” the first one agreed weakly. “Me, too. You say ‘Don’t lose moisture,’ sometimes, but I never saw anybody actually do it before. I never thought of them doing it that way, either. Yeuch! How disgusting! If he goes into thirst-shock on top of it . . . I don’t care what Zletz says, I don’t have to stand around and watch anything like that. ‘Guarding’ him is a lot of hooey, anyway. How’s he going to get out of the Burrow? One of us can easy zip over to Gort’s and be back without anybody noticing.”
“Sure, go ahead,” the second guard encouraged. “We can’t let the poor thrip suffer.”
The Good Samaritan whizzed off and was back a minute later, popping like a string of Chinese firecrackers.
“Wow! Hey! Are we missing something!” he shouted, vibrating frenziedly. “It’s the fight of the century! You never saw anything like it! Wow-ze! but it’s wild out there! Zowie! Pow! Whammo!” He spun around, shadow-boxing madly. “It started in Gort’s burrow, and now it’s the whole village! Guys from all over! Mixing it up in the streets! Ka-zammie! Come on, let’s go, I’m not gonna miss this!”
“Hey, wow,” the second guard enthused, poised to dash off. “Oh. What about him? We are supposed to be guarding him.”
“You kidding? He goes out there, he won’t last longer than a flyer in a kripti nest. It’s him they’re after, lots of ’em want to kill him.”
“What for?”
“How should I know? Come on, let’s go! If you don’t get a move on you’ll miss it; it’s getting close to seal-up time!”
“Okay. Glaxie, you heard what he said. You stay here.”
They tore away, leaving Bill to his own devices, whatever they might be.
XIX
“Frustrating” was an inadequate word. “Maddening,” maybe? There was the unguarded tunnel sloping up to freedom, so close a three-year-old could hit it with a rock. All he had to do was walk out—if he wanted to take the chance of being torn to pieces by a mob of overexcited zaps who believed his death would save them from being enslaved by the Galactic Union. Or he could sit here stewing in his own juice and slowly starve to death. That would certainly be fatal. If he could somehow elude the zaps and get to the construction site, Misner might be able to smuggle him into the station. How could anyone know he had ever been out of it, if he was in his room, alive and healthy? It would be his word against Elphinstone’s, and the biotechs would never admit that he could have been living outside the station without a heat-suit for days.
“Onward and upward,” he encouraged himself, and dashed to the tunnel.
At the top of the stairs he encountered the first obstacle: The night-seals were in place, and whoever had put them on seemed to have meant them to be permanent. Bill kept an ear cocked toward the hall as he struggled impatiently, breaking fingernails and sweating rivers. The heat was getting unbearable, and he didn’t have time to stop and do mental gymnastics to persuade himself that it didn’t bother him. It did; and when he had unscrabbled the last hook and raised the door a bit, the blast-furnace outside threatened to be worse than the sweat-bath within.
He peeked out like a neurotic rabbit. The music of battle was borne to his ears, and by craning around he could see the cloud of dust raised by the fray over most of the village. From time to time combatants emerged to take a breather before plunging back into the melee. There was no cover beyond an occasional boulder. If one of these idlers should chance to look around, Bill would be as easy to spot as one pea on a plate. On top of that, he realized with dismay that his speed and agility were deserting him. He was moving almost as slowly as . . . a Glaxie! A soft-bodied slug who wasn’t afraid of the dark and didn’t pass out from the cold! He didn’t have to risk leaving the tunnel now! The GLANSTROPs certainly wouldn’t leave a dandy fight like that until they were just about ready to night-trance. He could hide somewhere, leaving the door open so they’d think he had gone outside. When they came back, they’d be so nearly unconscious they wouldn’t have time to look for him. He could wait peacefully until it got dark, then stroll to the construction site, make himself comfortable, and wait for Misner to appear in the morning. What could be simpler?
He eased himself down the slide. The corridor was still empty. He draped the sealer strip at the bottom of the stairs, to give the impression that it had been dropped in a hurry, and headed toward the rear of the burrow. Near the back exit the passage looked unused. The walls and floor were rough, as vot-vines had made them, and a light-giving growth which coated the walls of inhabited places grew here only in patches. The air was musty, with a dank, graveyard odor; it seemed to hold more moisture and be a trifle cooler, for which he was grateful. His path took a bend to the left. There he spotted a dark opening which looked made to order for his purposes, and he squeezed himself into it.
Time snailed past. He waited. Eventually he heard, dimly, the noises made by GLANSTROPs entering the burrow to spend the night; then the voices of his guards, too muffled to be intelligible. The guards apparently noticed the sealer strip and came to the back exit, for their speech grew louder and clearer, but too fast for him to follow all they said. They didn’t seem particularly perturbed by his disappearance, however.
“. . . went out this way. We’ll have to seal it again. Hurry up, it’s getting late.”
“Think we should tell Zletz?”
“Now?”
“You’re right. He’ll be just as gone in the morning.”
“Zletz’ll probably fly when he finds out.”
“Let him. He wanted him guarded; he should’ve done it himself. It’s Glaxie business, anyway, not ours.”
He listened while they sealed the door, heard them drop their leaners and murmur drowsily for a few minutes. Soon the few scattered sounds from other parts of the burrow died, and the silence indicated that all the whizzers were safely in night-trance. Secure in the knowledge that nothing but heat could wake them, Bill crept out to unfasten the door while some light still lingered, then rested until it was fully dark.
There would be no zaps outside to hinder him now, so he lifted the trap and groped his way into pitchy darkness. The landscape was beautifully delineated in black on black. Where was the moon? Why wasn’t it on the job the way it was supposed to be, making the plants grow and providing illumination for the confused traveler? He oriented himself as well as he could, picked out a star to navigate by, and set forth none too confidently. Straining his eyes in the starlight to avoid hazards on the ground, he lost sight of his beacon and had trouble finding it again among the unfamiliar constellations. Watching the sky, he tripped and fell. The plants stirred as he passed among them. He had to move reasonably fast to avoid them, and that gave him no time to stop and make sure of his route. He stumbled along, praying, wondering when the moon would rise. He walked into a vot-vine whose teeth just missed him and kicked loose a chichi tendril which left a thread of fire encircling his ankles. He was tired, sleepy, hungry, thirsty, cold, and cranky. The trip seemed to be taking much longer than the distance warranted, and he was sure he was lost, doomed to spend the twenty-two hours of the Irdran night wandering further and further from his goal, unable to rest, more and more likely to fall into the jaws of a vot-vine as his alertness waned. . . . Then the moon rose, and he turned around to discover the construction site a good three hundred yards behind him. Fie had passed it in the dark. He swore so sulphurously the very plants flinched and stamped back.
He had made it. He crawled behind an incipient, half-finished partition, and huddled there to await the dawn and Misner, hoping no PIFFL member found him firs.
XX
Bill spent a miserable night, alternating between a sort of stupor and a painful state of being awake, aching for sleep, and too uncomfortable to achieve it. He began to think that he could endure no more, he would have to give up and make a try for the station regardless of the consequences, but a hint of increasing warmth in the breeze that had kept him shivering for hours encouraged him to wait a little longer. Finally eternity ended, the sky glowed with the promise of dawn, and soon after, he heard the roar of an approaching tractor and staggered to meet it. As it slammed to a halt, Misner jumped down and ran to catch him before he fell.
“Bill! What are you doing here? How long have you been out of the station? How did you get here? Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“I’ll be all right,” Bill croaked. “Do you have something to eat? And drink?”
The engineer gave him some of the chocolate he carried for the zaps and water from his suit-canteen. Some of Bill’s strength came back, and he gave Misner a brief summary of his adventures and the situation in which he found himself.
“Do you think you could get me back to my room without anybody seeing me?” he concluded.
“Back to your room! Are you out of your mind? Sick bay is where you belong!” Jerry expostulated.
“No! If I can sneak back without anybody seeing me, maybe I can brazen it out that I’ve never left the station. And I don’t want Elphinstone to know where I am, either. I don’t know what he could do, but I’m not going to underestimate him. He thinks I stand between him and something he’s been maneuvering long and hard to get. The way he was talking in the Assembly Burrow, I wouldn’t put murder past him, if he thought he could get away with it.”
Misner considered this.
“Perhaps you’re right. If what he told you is true, it’s just possible that he could swing an appointment as Galactic Administrator here, if he’s got good connections in Admin, and especially if Zletz insists on his getting the job. How many guys in his level could even dream of a post like that, no matter how long and hard they work? I can see him selling his soul for it. I think you’re right about reporting this to AMPAC and Thyg-F-3. There’s no use going to Willoughby. He hasn’t the brains or the imagination to handle it, and Elphinstone leads him around by the nose anyway—he’s blinded by that string of degrees. . . . It’ll be easy enough to slip you into your room. All we have to do is hide you in a repair ’port and take you through the inner corridor. You’ve told me about how strong and healthy Thygnans are, and you must be sturdy or you’d be dead by now. You don’t look too bad, at that. Are you sure food and rest are enough to get you back on your feet?”
“Positive,” Bill assured him. “And the sooner I get them, the better.”
Misner shook his head doubtfully and helped him into the tractor. They got back to the station and to Bill’s all-purpose without trouble, aided by the fact that it was the dead of night, Galactic time, and most of the personnel were asleep. Bill crawled off the ’port, stumbled to his bed, and fell on it with a blissful grunt. He was asleep instantly.
Hours later he awoke refreshed, optimistic, and ravenously hungry. Misner was snoozing at the desk with his feet up.
“Dial me about six breakfasts,” Bill caroled, heading for the bathroom. “Man, I feel great! How long did I sleep?”
“Going on twenty-seven hours.”
“No kidding! Anything happen while I was out?” Without waiting for an answer, he hopped under the shower. Next, fresh, clean clothes. He came out to a table amply spread with real food. How he had missed it!
“I’ve been here keeping an eye on you most of the time,” Jerry said. “None of my creepers showed up for work yesterday. The zaps seem to be all stirred up about something. According to the local news reports, they’re massing outside the station in ever increasing numbers. Nobody’s been able to find out why, but shouts of “Kill the Glaxies!” have been heard. There’s also a rumor that Elphinstone’s disappeared. He missed a couple of meals, and that’s not like him.”
“Maybe he went out to torture me, and the zaps got him,” Bill suggested brightly, more interested in deciding which item to devour next.
The intercom blatted rudely for attention. He flipped it on and was rewarded with the shrill accents of Irma.
“Judson? The Chief wants you in the sauna right away.”
“The sauna?” Bill repeated. It wasn’t like Irma to be funny, but how could she be serious?
“You heard me. Get over there, right now, on the double. Don’t stop to tie your shoelaces. Move it.” She snapped off.
“I’ve got to be hearing things,” Bill said, shaking his head to clear it. “Jerry, what did she say?”
“In effect, Mr. Willoughby requests the honor of your presence about five minutes ago.”
Bill looked wistfully at his half-eaten breakfast, but Misner checked him.
“Ah-ah. You’d better not. Mind if I come along? Curiosity is killing me, and with Willoughby’s disposition, who knows? You might need someone handy to carry you back to bed.”
“You would say something like that. . . . Why the sauna, for God’s sake?”
“Let’s find out.”
In the gym Bill’s old acquaintances Harvey and Kilmur, of the Bio team, were lounging against a pair of stretchers.
“Wonder Boy, for God’s sake,” one of them said disgustedly. “You might know he’d be mixed up in it.”
