Yes, I knew that these comments struck home at least partly, by the way he reacted. There were no enigmatic grins of cockiness; there was just a sour and rather helpless snarl— “Shut up, Durbin!”
And very soon another thing took place, to heighten the effect on Brunder, though it happened to his cat. Toby didn’t tell me the precise details; but suddenly, and for quite awhile afterward, he was a mighty terrified feline, staring wildly into corners and spitting, his fur puffing out like a balloon at the least movement. His eyes were all bloodshot, and his nose was swollen far out of shape. This was the first evidence we had that our little friends were not to be handled without gloves—which we’d been wearing the time that we had touched them—that their flippers carried a potent sting.
Brunder had to catch and medicate, and try to calm down his tomcat. To hear him crooning, “Poor Toby,” was incongruous, comic, and for once somewhat pathetic.
I am sure that my campaign of ridicule would soon have forced Brunder to bring the pan, serving as Marty’s and Martia’s residence, out into the open again, for all of us to see and observe how they lived. But incidents moved so fast that in the end that became pointless.
One enigma I was especially glad to see cleared up within forty-eight hours of our departure for Earth, because it had been driving Terry Miklas fairly wild.
“Their music, which we haven’t heard since, Popeye," he kept saying. “Is it vocal—or what? Dammit, I gotta know!”
To this end he kept playing his harmonica or his guitar softly, during his off-time, hardly sleeping at all, hoping that they’d be drawn to him, and that he would hear the tiny xylophone again, and see.
So it happened, when we were both off-watch, and sprawled on our bunks. We noticed nothing of the silent entry. But suddenly there was a tinkly warble of sound—a sort of chord, molded like a questioning chirp. Both of us looked toward its source, which brought our gaze to the shelf over the washbasin. Up against the glass tumbler which I used for brushing my teeth, was a little gold-green shape—Marty, it must be. Two claw-tipped flippers were cupped together against the thin vitreous material. The beady black eyes were watchful. Like many a little animal on Earth, he knew how to stay perfectly still.
To be sure not to frighten him, I moved only my eyes. And Terry had only to lift his fingers a few inches to bring his harmonica to his lips. He blew one enquiring ripple of notes on it. Then we waited and watched. For each of us in our opposite bunks, the distance of our visitor from our eyes was only about a yard. Yes, this was surely Marty, the bold one, and we saw just what he did as again strange, haunting music, as of some tiny xylophone, honored our quarters. For maybe five seconds it lasted; then it died away.
There was a long pause before Terry Miklas said: “Did you .see how it works, Popeye? His claw’s, vibrating rapidly against the glass of the tumbler, made the tinkling. The way his dippers were cupped and placed and shifted, at the same time, must have varied the pitch and modulated the sounds. That’s all there is to it, then. I suppose any sort of fairly resonant material would serve as well as a tumbler, though with a different musical quality. Maybe that’s why, from what we hear, Marty and Martia like to collect junk in the place where they live—to see what sonic quality they can get out of it . . .”
Terry sounded quiet and relieved, now, as if at an enigma solved. But I wasn’t so satisfied, yet.
“Okay,” I said. “We understand that much. But there are more mysteries. For instance, is the music instinctive, like the singing of birds? Or is it created, consciously—as an art? What I mean is—is mind working here, Terry?”
The kid chuckled, and a funny smile came to his lips. “Did you hear what the man asked, Marty?” he remarked. “Yep—there are lots of questions. Me—I’m wondering what you came to us for—out of your native icecap—that first time. Oh, there was my mouth-organ blowing, of course. But there’s always a quest beyond music, isn’t there? Me—I’ve felt it too. What is it with you, Marty? Or don’t you quite know, either? Except that maybe there’s distance and time and strangeness in it.”
Terry’s own restlessness was in his musing tone. Of course he didn’t expect an answer. But in a way, he got one.
The little green-gold figure reared up against the tumbler again. Flippers were cupped and pressed against its surface.
Claws vibrated. What came forth was still a tinkling; but it was molded—or modulated—by those small hand-like members, as tongue and lips mold a human voice, to form syllables and words:
“Kkorrekkt—Mmmarrtee?”
Yes. Call it another approach to vocal speech—used just in parrotlike mimicry, or with the potentials of real speech that might be learned, behind it. Real communication between aliens? There had been other intelligences in the solar system. But today, until now, at least, Man knew only himself.
Startled, Terry and I both sat suddenly bolt upright in our bunks. It was a mistake, for Marty was startled, too. He flopped from the shelf to the deck, and skittered away, seeming to run on his flippers, no doubt to return to Brunder's quarters and Martia by a route best known to himself.
I felt a chill and a thrill. “Things get better and better,” I laughed. "Well—another time, Terry . . .”
We didn’t realize then how near these glamorous little people who had come into our lives—with all the romantic and violent history of Mars in their background—could bring us to disaster. No, we are sure now that it was not a designed and sinister plotting on their part; it was a more innocent and explorative tampering, like that of children. But in space that can be serious enough.
It was during my watch in the control room. Everything was at norm. The lights burned; the air-purifier units murmured sleepily. That was all. After a ship has full acceleration and is on a fixed course across the void, the rockets are silent; no machine moves except those necessary to maintain life and comfort. I was just sitting, reading a book, anticipating no trouble, of which there was no sign. Or had I heard a small, scrambling rodent-like sound?
Suddenly, though, one of the five big drive-rockets, mounted in a cluster at the center of our ship’s ring-like hull, began to roar at full thrust. Since its companions remained inactive, it gave a one-sided reaction, that quickly had our old Searcher turning lazily edge over edge, like a spinning coin. Our other wheel-like rotation, to maintain centrifugal gravity, continued, but its effect, with new forces acting, became disturbed and confused. As an automatic alarm siren began to howl I toppled from my stool, went rolling and tumbling painfully up one wall to the ceiling, and down the opposite wall to the deck again. But of course instead of stopping here, my cycle of tumbling proceeded to repeat itself at an accelerating rate.
Mingled with the thunder of that runaway rocket-tube .and the siren’s shriek, was the rattle of loose and rolling equipment and supplies, and shouts—from Terry and Brunder, aware now of danger, and no doubt trying rather helplessly to reach the control room. But in a matter of seconds the ship would be spinning—like the coin I mentioned—so fast that we’d all be pinned down by centrifugal force. The rate of spin, driven by that loony atomic jet, would go right on mounting inexorably, until the substances of various density composing our flesh—water, fat, and so forth—either separated into layers as in a centrifuge, or the ship blew apart.
Encouraged by its absolute necessity, I managed to catch onto a girder on that second roll up the wall. Then like a crab I worked my way to the manual controls. First I cut out the robot piloting device, which must be the source of that rocket-cube's going haywire. Then I opened all rockets, and fiddled around a little with their throttles to balance their thrust. That crazy roll ended.
Next I had to center the ship back on course, and use the opposed retard tubes, to cut the excess velocity we had picked up. All this was routine stuff, done by the time a somewhat bruised Terry, and a similarly bruised and trailing Brunder, arrived in the control room.
“You okay, Popeye?” Terry began. “Just knocked around some? . . .”
But of course Brunder’s lusty roar drowned him out.
“What in hell are you doin', Durbin!” he hollered. “What kind of a nincompoopish trick was that you just pulled?”
He smelled of booze. He didn’t drink too much ordinarily; but of late he’d been hitting the jug—I suspected not without reason. I’m no prim critic myself; but I do especially dislike being bawled out by a drunk when I’m sober. And now I had a suspicion which made me doubly sure that I wasn’t going to take any blab from Brunder.
I went over to the robot piloting device, and banged on the side of its metal cabinet. Out of its bottom there skittered two little green-gold forms that quickly and prudently lost themselves among surrounding equipment.
“Brunder,” I said, “I thought that you had made yourself personally responsible for Pisces Martis. So why do you let them try to take the insides of the robot pilot apart?”
Well, first he just stared, looking sort of sick and defeated. Then he was muttering to himself; “Hell! Still getting out? . . . I tied down that mesh cover . . . And there was no sign . . . Smart, they are . . . Like people! . . . Gonna be rich, if I live . . .”
Yeah—so you see how Blunder’s mind worked. But with the job on my hands of getting things put back into place aboard the old Searcher, and maybe capturing and restraining the habitual runaways, I couldn’t dwell on the matter. Brunder did help me with the work. By the end of my watch, order was restored. There was also a gratifying development when I returned to quarters.
Terry met me there with a wide grin. “I’ve got them, Popeye,” he announced. “Marty and Martia. They came to me, of their own free will, for refuge. So we’ve got them away from Brunder.”
They were there in our washbowl, along with some water, and Martian algae for food, and a broken watch and a spool of fine-gauge copper wire which Terry had given them to fool with. He had also secured another wire mesh over their new home, in the hope that this time it would restrain their wanderings.
“Good boy, Terry,” I said. “Of course now we will keep Brunder locked out.”
Up from the washbowl came a buzzing voice, which originated in small claws vibrating against that worn-out time-piece:
"Hhhellllo-o-o, Poppaiee-eee!”
"Hello, yourself!” I responded, startled.
Terry grinned wider than before. “You see, I’ve been teaching them,” he declared.
Matters seemed to have taken a turn for the better. But this condition endured for only a few hours.
I was asleep when that warning siren shrieked again. First making sure that Marty and Martia hadn’t escaped, I rushed out, not pausing to relock our door. I found no one in the control room. But a red light was flashing danger. Since there were no accompanying signs of trouble, I concluded that the difficulty was in the panel itself. I was right. It took me five minutes to correct a short-circuit, which began to seem unusual, anyway, as if arranged. This thought was belated. Still half asleep I must have been, to be so dull.
The kid would be in the galley, now, doing his extra chore of preparing dinner. Brunder was the one who should be watching the controls, but wasn’t. Damn him, and my thick-headedness! What was he up to? I raced back to my quarters, and found my suspicions confirmed. Marty and Martia were gone from the washbowl! So were the algae and the water and the wire and the watch.
Passing the galley, I hollered to Terry. Together, we located our captain at the lower-level airlock. But just as we rushed forward, he closed the inner door on us, working the mechanism with the levers inside the lock-chamber, so that all we could do was peer in at him through the bullseye window of the door.
He held up something for us to see—a large whiskey demijohn of dark brown glass, its mouth plugged and waxed, and its wicker jacket removed. It must have been the same jug that he had been toiling to finish. But there was no whiskey in it now—just a murky, flaky liquid, and sinuous movement . . .
Brunder was wearing a space suit. Now, with an air of alcoholic drama and clowning, he opened the outer door of the airlock, and heaved the jug outward with all his might. It sped away from the ship, growing quickly smaller, and then vanishing.
As far as I am concerned, if I could have opened that inner door just then, my boot would have sent our captain sailing right after that demijohn of his—into the vastness and eternal silence and cold of the void.
"They were inside that thing!” Terry Miklas said in a terrible voice, just above a whisper. “Marty and Martia! You must have seen them, too! Has there ever been such an example of senseless, drunken meanness? . . . Don’t try to stop me from fixing Brunder this time, Popeye!”
Yeah—slight though Terry Miklas was, the way his face looked then, there was murder in the offing. Up to then, I might have helped commit it. But I’m a peaceful, patient fella—maybe to a fault. Besides, now, certain thoughts came to me. So, at the instant that Brunder unbolted that inner door, I grabbed Terry, and hung on with all my might.
Brunder swaggered and staggered forth. Of course he wasn’t very vulnerable in a space suit, as he no doubt knew. Muffled a bit, his voice reached us through his helmet.
“Finished,” he pronounced. “Dammitall—ff-finish-hed! No more trouble. Musical Martian f-fish gone for good! Can’t have ’em wrecking my ship, can I? Captain’s duty! Gotta protect the old Searcher, don’t I? You gentlemen know that! So—banish the wonderful, pretty, music-makin’ little devils! Give ’em a whiskey-jug planet! Haw-haw! . . . Must of come out of a whiskey jug, anyhow—same as Aladdin’s genie out of a lamp! Haw-haw-haw . . . No—don’t try to go after ’em in the life-rocket! . . . Fixed so you won’t get it working till it’s too late! Haw-haw-haw . . .”
Terry Miklas was practically frothing at the mouth, like a mad dog, by then. He couldn’t even say anything. I guess he couldn’t think of words terrible enough to throw at Brunder.
Still managing somehow to hold him, I hauled him off to our quarters, and in this privacy, proceeded to put him straight on a few points.
“Now wait a minute, Hot Head!” I growled. “The setup ain’t what it seems! There’s a bug in it . . . In the first place, I know Brunder, and he’s not nearly as drunk as he pretends! In the second place, our little friends may look delicate, but they have some of the imperishable qualities of the elves they resemble. They are used to freezing up and thawing out with the icecaps of Mars. Sealed in a demijohn of dark brown glass, which affords them effective protection from even the hard ultraviolet rays of the sun, they should be in no danger. In the third place, drunk or sober, Brunder would never throw away a chance to make a lot of money, no matter how much trouble and risk it had caused him. In fact, he really risked his neck facing you just now—which makes me sure that he thinks he’s got something so big that it’s like some vast treasure to him, over which he’s gone considerably nuts, and ready to take longer and crazier chances to grab it all for himself . . .”
Here I paused to let my logic soak into Terry’s head. Already he was showing calmer interest.
“In the fourth place,” I continued, “though the interplanetary regions are enormous, anything moving in them—in a vacuum, that is—follows a fixed and mathematically predictable path, and can’t be hard to trace and locate, as long as you know the starting point and the dominant vectors controlling direction and velocity, and an approximation of the lesser forces acting—for instance, the minor muscular forces with which Brunder threw that jug from the ship. In fact the latter is about the only thing which distinguishes the motion of the demijohn from the motion of the ship—until we start using rocket power again to decelerate, and to modify our direction, slightly. Otherwise, the jug will follow right along with the Searcher, in a gradual inward curve toward the Earth, with a slight lateral drift of a number of miles per hour, imparted by Brunder’s pitching arm. Offhand, I’d say that the demijohn will fall into a rather eccentric but planetary orbit around the sun, somewhat larger than Earth’s orbit.
“Yes, Brunder has all the necessary data to f
igure out where the jug is at a given moment, and pick it up again. It’s his trick to gain full possession of Marty and Martia—because we’re supposed to think that they’re hopelessly lost, if not dead. The catch is that I was in the control room, and have all of that data, too—I have the time, and the position and speed of the ship well in mind, and can do well enough with mathematics . . . Fifth place—well, I won’t risk making you mad by even mentioning that . . .’’
I stopped talking. Still, the way Mr. Brunder loved that old tomcat of his kept hovering in my mind, as evidence that even he would avoid deliberate cruelty to Marty and Martia.
Terry had cooled off a lot by now. In fact a kind of secret gleam came into his eye. “Thanks for the dope, Popeye,” he said. “So we just ride out the trip to Earth, hand in our resignation notices well in advance, watch Brunder for tricks while cooperating with him generally, though not too well to make him suspicious; and get set to act fast as soon as we arrive home. Right?”
I nodded.
So it was. The remaining two months of journeying dwindled away, tediously, but without special incident.
When we arrived at the White Sands spaceport, there was a complication. The feminine gender is a sweet nuisance. And Alice, my daughter, was there beyond the safety barrier of the grounding platform, to meet me, and also maybe to satisfy her curiosity concerning some comments about Terry Miklas, that I’d put into letters mailed from Marsport. Also, she had herself all shined up for a big homecoming celebration for me—at some grand restaurant, some place, I suppose.
So it was “Hello, Alice Honey—you look wonderful—this is Terry Miklas—Terry, meet Alice . . .” Yeah—all this from me in one hurried gasp.
I knew by Terry’s expression that he found her even more attractive than he had hoped; but the pressure of haste put him in an awful position.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 33
