“It’s nothing at all,” said Flip. “We’d do the same for any friend. How about showing us around before you take off?”
Quang Dal thought for a moment and then quivered assent.
“Would be no real wiolation of Galactic Union order. Secret things are all behind panels.”
The control room had been considerably altered. In place of the complicated banks of controls that had flanked the pilot’s seat, there were two push buttons set in a simple black box.
“This one take care of nawigation,” explained Quang Dal. “One push, I go home. Start, go, stop—whole think automatical. Could not change course if wanted to.”
“You don’t have to tell us what the other one controls,” said Potsy. “One push and WHOOSH, Alpha Centauri in June.”
“Is not whoosh. Is putt-putt-putt. Wery conwenient, though.”
“Well, I guess we’re ready,” said Potsy. “Do you want to do the honors, Flip, or shall I?”
“Is not understanding,” Quang Dal equivalently frowned.
“Didn’t you tell him?” asked Flip.
“I thought he’d take it for granted. After all, somebody has to bring the ship back.”
Quang Dal reared up on his back four legs in an agitated fashion.
“Accompaniment cannot be, sweet entities. Is not only Galactic Union law wiolation, but not possible for two-legged human peoples.”
Flip produced a large and vicious-looking gun.
“Anything bugs can do, we can do better. Get aft before I splatter you against the bulkhead!”
“Weapon-using is sign of low socialization,” said Quang Dal with regret and pity.
“Are you talking or walking?” demanded Flip, sighting down the barrel of his gun.
“Is terrible thing you doing,” warned the little Centaurian as he backed out of the control room. “You have no right to do this to selves.”
Potsy walked over to the control box. He reached out to press the first button and then hesitated.
“What if something should happen?” he asked worriedly.
“Couldn’t be worse than twenty years in a lunar isolation cell,” said Flip. “You can stay behind if you want to, but I’m getting out of here.”
Potsy still hesitated. Finally he came back and sat down.
“You push it,” he offered.
Flip snorted in disgust and tossed his gun over to his partner. “Go on back and lock our little friend up in the aft stateroom. If we let him run around loose, he might get into mischief. I’ll take care of things up here.”
When Potsy had left the compartment, Flip took a deep breath, walked over to the control box, and slowly pushed the first button. The results weren’t spectacular. There was a hum of lifters as she ship rose slowly, and then, with a gentle push, they were off. Once out of the atmosphere, the ship pointed its nose toward Alpha Centauri and began to pick up speed.
Potsy came back into the control room and took a quick look out the side port to where the Moon hung like a great pockmarked balloon. The penal colony itself couldn’t be seen, but Lunaport was visible as a small glittering splotch.
He gave a little shiver and turned away.
“Everything under control?”
“So far. Do you think I ought to hit the other stud?”
Potsy shook his head. “The galactic ships never seem to use their drives until they are far enough away to be out of detection range. There must be a reason for it. Maybe the gadget blows up if it’s set off near a sun.”
They waited two days before Flip pressed the second button. There was a low whine from beneath the deck and then a squeal of fright from Potsy as a nerve-scraping vibration ran through the ship. A strange mistiness covered everything, as though the matter of which the ship was composed were turning to nothingness and then back again a thousand times a second.
With a final shudder, the ship returned to normal.
Potsy gave a sigh of relief and mopped his forehead. “Well, we’re still in one piece. And I guess we’re finally on our way.”
“Go let Quang Dal out,” said Flip. “If these controls are as completely automatic as he says, he can’t do us any harm now.”
Potsy came back five minutes later, alone.
“He’s got his door locked from the inside. He says that he’s going to take a little nap and we should wake him come June.”
Flip shrugged. “If that’s the way he wants it.”
As the weeks crawled slowly by, the two Earthmen found themselves growing more and more irritable.
“I think I’d almost prefer the Lunar prison colony,” said Potsy.
“Oh, well,” growled Flip, “we’ve only got two weeks left. I guess I can stand your ugly face that long.”
Potsy gestured toward Alpha Centauri which glimmered palely directly ahead. “You’d think it would be getting bigger by now.”
“It’ll stay like that almost to the end,” said Flip. “The way I got it figured, we’re going so fast that most of the light shoots past before it has a chance to get in. If you want to see the difference, go take a look through the rear scope. The Sun should be out of sight by now.”
Potsy trotted obediently to the rear and took a look out through the aft telescope. A moment later, he returned and asked in a timid and somewhat frightened voice, “If the Sun’s supposed to be so far away, how come I can still see most of the planets?”
“Huh? You can?” Flip looked nervous as Potsy nodded. “That lousy little bug must have given us cockeyed instructions, knowing the galactic drive is Greek to us.”
“But why should he?”
“How do I know? Maybe he wants us to break our necks some way while he’s safe in his cabin. Well, I’ll break his if he doesn’t give us the right dope!”
“Go easy,” Potsy advised anxiously. “Try to con the information out of him first. Then let him have it if he won’t talk.”
After considerable pounding, they managed to wake Quang Dal. His voice tube poked out through the grille at the top of his locked door and he asked politely, “Is June already?”
“No,” said Flip, “it’s only the middle of May. Potsy and I are sorry to have to wake you up, but something seems to have gone wrong with the drive. Would you mind coming out and fixing it?”
“Is nothing wrong,” replied Quang Dal. “Can hear with properness from here. Sound smooth.”
“The planetary drive is on, all right, but the faster-than-light didn’t cut in. After all this time, we’re still only a stone’s throw from Earth. We should be almost to Alpha Centauri by now.”
There was silence within the stateroom for a minute. “Is unhappiness to say this,” the little Centaurian said regretfully, “but as I explain past times, faster-than-light drive is theoretical impossibility. Galactic Union scientists work two, maybe three million years now. For all this time, nothing, except once in a while little conweneince. Is still taking twenty years going Earth, Alpha Centauri, or wice-wersa.”
“Then how in hell do you expect to get home in three months?”
“Is three months between time, not three months pass time. Wery different things,” said Quang Dal. “Between time is from little conwenience I tell you before about. With it, can take trip maybe two hundred years and still not be away from family too long. Wery fine conwenience.”
“Two hundred years!” gasped Potsy.
“Is one other thing which you mistake for faster-than-light drive. Old galactic peoples like Centaurians live thirty-five, maybe forty thousands Earth years. Would not be socialized to tell poor Earth two-legged stander-uppers they live and die same thing like I get up and go bed. Is not well-wishing to make other entities unhappy. Would not tell you this, only I think you unhappier if I do not explain. So sorry.”
Flip stood rigid, his brain freezing as the cold and horrid truth began to seep in.
“Then the second button…
“Is biggest conwenience. Faster-than-light drive impossible, but not time travel. Push second
button, whole ship come back nineteen years, nine months. Could make it exactly same time of same year we leave Earth when we reach Alpha Centauri, but I like better awaken at time of sewening, so I set controls for June.”
His voice was drowsier.
“You will wake me in June, kindly? Until, I take small nap only twenty years. Apologizing that you cannot do likewise.”
Quang Dal’s voice was almost inaudible as he withdrew his voice tube from the grille.
“Is wishing well with a wengeance,” he said, too conditioned to politeness to let weariness excuse him from the ritual of farewell. “Note, please—I love you.”
THE SHORT COUNT
“How does this sound?”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“I have seen the years pass like frightened men, and now I am afraid.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You’re lifting again.”
“Who this time?”
“Eliot. The bang and whimper thing, isn’t it?”
He thought for a minute and then wet his finger and drew an invisible line in the air. “Half a point for your side. It is Eliot. Prufrock, though. Something about the eternal footman holding his coat and snickering.”
He picked up the empty pack of cigarettes beside him for the tenth time, fished in it, and then suddenly aware of what he was doing, snorted and threw it in the wastebasket beside his desk.
“Any decent-sized butts in your ashtray?”
“Two. But I’m saving them.”
“Pig.”
“Smoke your pipe. You paid three-fifty for it and you’ve only used it twice.”
“It bites my tongue.” He got up and went and got it out of the brass bowl on top of the bookcase. It was filled with charred, half smoked tobacco. He grimaced and put it back.
“It stinks.” He fished around in his own ashtray but there was nothing there over half an inch long. He pulled open his desk drawer, took out a thin, translucent second sheet, and carefully tore a long rectangle from one corner. Taking the tobacco from several of the short butts, he shredded it in his palm, poured it into the paper, and deftly rolled a passable cigarette. He eyed it critically. “Not bad.”
“I don’t see how you can smoke those things.”
“Necessity is the toothless mother of. Out of the depression and sired by Spain. I always ate but cigarettes were scarce. In high school we used to have the institution of first and second butts. Nobody was passing out cigarettes then but if you could afford them you were expected to be fairly generous with the fag ends.
“It was a silly damn habit to pick up on a two bit a week allowance but somehow one felt that a cigarette between the lips and long nonchalant jets of smoke through the nostrils had an almost aphrodisiac effect on the girls who gathered in little clusters on the sidewalk in front of school during the lunch hour. I guess they wore lipstick for the same reason.”
“You’re half right,” she said. “The direction was the same but the drive was more diffuse. What we primarily wanted…was to be wanted. At least my fantasies were social rather than sexual. I saw myself being taken to smart places by handsome men.” She paused and chuckled. “I’ll admit that sometimes they took me to their apartments, but that was the end of the evening rather than the beginning.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “I’m wearing a jade green evening gown and we’re sitting at a little table in the corner drinking champagne. There’s a gypsy violinist playing softly to us and Raoul is pleading with me to marry him. As he talks I can see the curling wrought iron grill work set in the windows of his hacienda. Gauchos are singing softly behind the stables where he keeps his thoroughbreds… He and I are standing side by side on the balcony and I’m smoking a gold-tipped monogrammed cigarette in a long jade cigarette holder.” She laughed softly. “If you’d been around, I’d have given you first butts.”
There was a sudden flare as his homemade cigarette burst into flame from too hard a drag.
“Damn. They’re always doing that.”
“Do you want to see it?”
“What?”
“My jade cigarette holder.”
“Sure.”
“Wait a minute.” She got up and went into the bedroom. He found his eyes sliding back to the silent television screen and for a moment he was afraid again. A minute later she came back out carrying a twine-tied cardboard box.
“Hey, don’t you ever get tired of staring at that thing?”
He started at the sound of her voice and turned to face her. “It fascinates me. Ten years of wrangling over color television and all we finally get is a pretty amber glow on a blank screen.”
“Just be glad it’s only amber,” she said. “Look.” Carefully she untied the string on the box and took the frayed cover off. She set a ribbon-tied package of letters to one side and took out a long slim object wrapped in tissue paper.
“I put this away fifteen years ago.” She slowly unwrapped it and passed it to him. It was a long green cigarette holder made of some glasslike substance.
“Ming?”
“Walgreens. They were on sale for eighty-seven cents. I borrowed seventeen cents from Marcy Thomas and bought it, I only used it once.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Where?”
“At the Winston Roof after the Senior Prom Bill Hendricks and I had a corner table. He wandered off for some reason or other and I was left alone. The setting wasn’t all that I had dreamed of—most of the people at the other tables looked like the people next door all dressed up for a night out, but there was soft music and the lights weren’t too bright. I was trying to work up nerve enough to take the holder out of my purse, but every time. I’d put my fingers on it the lights would seem to get brighter and everybody would seem to be looking at me. Then HE came in and I tenned. Did you ever ten?”
“Ten?”
“You know, when there’s something you want to do or have to do but you’re scared to do it so you start a long slow count inside your head and promise yourself that when you get to ten you’ll do whatever it is that’s supposed to be done.”
“Only half the time you chicken out and jump to twenty.” He grinned reflectively and blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “I got all the way to forty on my first pick-up.”
“Stop looking so pleased with yourself. Before you did what?”
“A proper story has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he said sternly.
She tucked her legs under her and curled up like a small grave kitten. “Carry on.”
“Bob and I were over on the North Side in his dad’s new Terraplane. Women over there were reputed to be easy and eager, and we drove up and down the side streets whistling at the girls. Sometimes they’d look back at us and giggle. We didn’t stop though. Bob would say, ‘Christ what a couple of pigs,’ or else I’d say it, and we’d drive on sort of relieved. We finally parked by an old beat-up church that had half its windows busted out and sat there listening to the radio. Bob talked about driving out to a roadhouse we’d heard about as being a really rough place, but we both knew they wouldn’t let us in so we didn’t do anything about it. Then a couple of girls walked by and Bob made a crack. They laughed but kept on going. A couple of minutes later they came by again. This time they stopped and one thing led to another and pretty soon Bob had one in front and I had the other in the back seat.
“We drove out into the country and I was glad of the radio because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I kept smoking one of Bob’s cigarettes after another, not because I wanted them but because the ritual of lighting and puffing gave me something to do with my hands. She didn’t smoke.
“Bob had his arm around his girl. Mine was sitting way over on the other side of the seat kind of stiff like. The two feet between us seemed like a million miles and I couldn’t figure out how to get across it. Then Bob took a corner fast and she came tumbling over. When we got untangled I had my arm around her and she didn’t seem to mind.
“Then Bob parked on a side road and he and his girl started to kid back and forth. He’d say something like, ‘Boy, am I hot tonight,’ and she’d say, ‘Don’t be a fuel, crank down the window.’ And then they’d both laugh like crazy and he’d reach over to her and pretty soon they’d be all tangled up.
“I wanted to try something like that but I was suffering from a sort of personality paralysis. So I started tenning. I must have stretched that count to a good three minutes. When I finally got to ten I couldn’t make it so I went on to twenty. The silence kept getting silenter and I couldn’t think of anything to say so I kept on counting and waiting for the dam to break.”
“The poor girl,” she said.
“Poor girl, hell! Poor me. At thirty-nine I almost decided to stretch the count to fifty but I knew that if I did I’d be counting for the rest of the evening so I pulled her to me and bent my head down. She turned her face up to me and shut her eyes just like in the movies, but her lips were dry and I could feel her teeth through them and neither of us got much out of it. Her name was Edna and she’d eaten something for supper with garlic in it and I could smell the garlic more than I could feel the kiss.
“After we dropped the girls, I climbed up into the front seat and Bob and I started swapping progress reports. I knew dam well he hadn’t done anything but fool around a bit but to hear him tell about it you’d have thought he had her stripped.
“‘I could have had it,’ he said, ‘but she was a pig.’
“‘Mine was too,’ I said. ‘She was practically begging me; but you know what? She’d been eating garlic. How do you like that?’
“‘What do you expect from a pig,’ said Bob.”
There was silence in the apartment and then he lifted his head suddenly. “Now how in the hell did I get off on that?”
She laughed. “You were tenning.”
“Oh, yeah. So were you. Sorry to cut in on you like that.”
“Don’t give it a thought. It’s all out of the same cloth.” She looked down at the long green cigarette holder and twisted it reflectively between her fingers. “You made out better than I did. I wasn’t able to salvage anything.
The First Theodore R. Cogswell Megapack Page 20
