“I’m very glad to know you, Alice,’’ he stammered. “I—ah—in a couple weeks, I hope to show you how glad. Only, now—Dad and I have a very pressing matter to take care of instantly, and—I—”
Yeah—right away Alice cut in, protesting, her heart-shaped face going soft and hurt: “Dad! I see you so seldom, and—good night—can’t I at least go along with you in this ‘pressing matter’?”
We didn’t have a half-hour or so to waste in explanations. Terry hadn’t yet learned the difficulties of arguing with a woman, so I cut things short in the only way possible.
“Of course, Alice,” I said. “Pull in your neck, and come on—night-out dress and all. I’d be ashamed to think you’re the wilting kind. We’ll find some old burlap and a space suit for you, some place.”
Don’t ask me how—by what scrapings of the last dregs of saved money, borrowing, and the use of friends for favors—we did what we did. Don’t be kidded—the operation of space craft large and small, will always be expensive, even if atomic power is supposed to be cheap. Anyway, inside of five hours of the landing of the old Searcher, Terry and I had rented a fleet little Warrington Dart, which bore us up through the atmosphere with a smooth acceleration that made even Alice’s eyes shine, though she had seldom been off the Earth before.
I had my calculations all made and checked, and we took the shortest course possible, almost sure that Brunder couldn’t have acquired a craft ahead of us.
But he had! Our radar showed the ghost of another Warrington, a few hundred miles beyond our bows, and sticking right to our intended path.
“The stinker!” Terry growled, his face twisted with strain. “Pour on the coal, Popeye! But not too much so that we have to waste a lot of time decelerating later.”
I’m an old-timer, and he didn’t have to tell me that. From my memory and my calculations, the velocity of objects moving in a planetary orbit at a somewhat more than Earthly distance from the sun, was in my head. About eighteen miles per second. The rest, though, called for skill, something like that of a racetrack driver pitted against opponents; choosing just the proper instant for a controlled burst of speed—not too much or too little—curving in at just the correct angle for proper approach, with as small as possible a margin of error to be compensated for later. Uhuh—and I knew that I could advantageously go quite a bit faster than those eighteen miles per second at times—with good results . . .
Anyway I gained some on Brunder—maybe because he didn’t notice soon enough that he was being followed. Then the two Warringtons stayed even-even, Brunder’s ship reflecting a spark of sunlight up ahead. A few miles difference. So it was for five days. It was a tense time—not so good for young people to take care of love matters. But on a couple of occasions I saw Terry and Alice hand in hand almost absently, while they talked tensely about an unrelated subject.
“There it is—what you and Dad are looking for!” Alice said at last, pointing to a tiny dot on the radar screen. “You have said several times that it is a whiskey demijohn—have I got that straight?” Here her brows persisted in going puzzled and amused, as if Terry and I were an awful pair of screwballs, to be rushing madly across space on such a quest.
Terry nodded and grinned sheepishly. “A whiskey jug world,” he chuckled. “That sounds loony, I know. But it is inhabited by the nicest pair of little people you'll ever want to meet.”
Well, now we were sweating the chase out—with the advantage remaining on the other side. We donned space suits. We had weapons, and presumably Brunder had them, too. I didn't intend to risk Planetary Patrol discipline by using mine, unless provoked. But we had to be ready . . .
My throat was getting raw from trying to swallow my tension, when, peering through my small telescope, I saw the airlock of the Warrington up ahead, open, and an armored figure leap out.
Terry also had a scope. He gave a yell, and scrambled for our own lock, meanwhile explaining: “I see it there—floating free—the jug! Brunder dived for it, drawing a tether cable behind him! He—no—he missed! A burst of speed. Popeye!”
I complied, and we leapt close very fast. Movement, then, was quick indeed. Terry jumped from our lock without a tether. And he missed, too! No—not exactly! He’d missed Blunder and the demijohn, yes—but he’d caught Brunder’s cable, between our enemy and the other Warrington. After that I didn’t see some of what took place, because our ship, moving a little faster, now swept past, and I had to busy myself with the retard jets to get back on the scene.
Well, should I describe that brawl in space—the wide difference in weight—mass, that is, now—of the two opponents? The agility, the skill, the spirit? Let’s skip the buildup. When I could see again what was going on, Brunder and Terry were grappling with each other. Brunder had of course been trying to draw himself back to his ship with his tether cable, for another leap at the jug, while Terry Miklas’ aim was to prevent that. But now it was big muscles against lesser ones—or so I thought with sinking heart. Fighting in space is still fighting, though some points are a bit special. To hit an opponent can be a mistake. He’s armored, and hard to hurt. Besides, he’ll be propelled out of your reach, while, by reaction, you will be driven in the opposite direction.
Brunder did hit Terry—with approximately the above results. Terry’s clear plastic helmet was dented but not broken. He shot away; but instead of floating free he just slid along the now tautened tether cable, letting it slip through his gloved fingers. Then he leapt at Brunder again, jerking the tether to give his body the necessary impulse.
This time he got hold of Brunder’s shoulders from behind—an extremely advantageous position. Because a space suit has a necessary soft spot, where flexibility for bending and sitting down prevents the manufacturers from putting any metal except light wire. Oh, there's ballooning effect from the air-pressure inside; but a metal-shod boot driven with even light force can easily overcome that.
Well, here was where Terry went to work, with a furious and methodical persistence, always hanging onto Brunder’s shoulders. Kicks were followed by more kicks, till I thought it would never end. My peaceable nature had been frustrating Terry Miklas too long.
Alice wouldn’t watch. "You men, Dad!” she complained. “Come on—let me try my spacewoman’s skill at completing this curious comedy—getting the demijohn that we came for, that is . . .”
There was no danger. With a tether, she too jumped from the lock, and like a football player grounding the pigskin, she grabbed the free-floating jug. I drew her back to the Warrington.
Terry and I took Brunder to his own small craft, and left him strapped in the pilot seat, where he sat groaning and cursing. Then we returned to our ship, and began the return trip to Earth, our minds only absently on this objective.
For we had what we had come to get. Maybe an adverse enchantment was ended. I even thought that maybe we would get rich.
The jug was half full of unfrozen water. The radiations of the fierce sun of space had been converted to heat by the dark brown glass. Inside, beyond cloudy masses of algae from Mars, were two small animated shapes that could not be mistaken.
Terry lashed the jug down. In these small craft there was no centrifugal substitute for gravity. We sat looking at the jug. Various factors about it produced a mixed pattern of whimsy, humor, and seriousness. Terry chuckled.
“You can hold it in your hands," he said. “But as poor Brunder first hinted, it has all the attributes of an inhabited planet. It is even vaguely spherical. It has an atmosphere within it, and ample water, and a suitable climate for plants. The algae, with the aid of sunlight, provides both food for animal life, and oxygen to breathe. And it is a peopled world. Its one failure was its short duration as an effective free planet. Only two months in an orbit around the sun! But it was capable of enduring much longer—perhaps as many eons as a major world, even. Perhaps it might have gone on to who knows what great future.”
Terry Miklas was kidding. Still his eyes held a speculative gleam—
almost a sadness for the way we had terminated a possibility.
Alice looked strange, too.
In another moment we heard the tinkle of the elfin xylophone once more—Marty and Martia cupping their flippers against the inner surface of the demijohn, and tapping, and making the glass ring, and modulating the sounds they remembered from Terry’s teaching:
“Hhhelllo-o-o, Tterrreee . . . Ppoppaiee-ee! Weeee arrrr-r awllll ffrrrennnzzz! . . ."
Then, briefly, came the music, eerie and groping and faint, older by far than the human race, and not of human creation.
I glanced at Alice. She looked at the little green-gold figures, bronzed and blurred through the tinted glass. Her gaze, meeting that of beady, intelligent eyes, was awfully soft. It made her beautiful.
"Dad, Terry,” she said uncertainly. "Even from all your talk about Marty and Martia, I didn’t know that they were like this!”
A mood came over me, too. I thought of another Alice—in a book—in Wonderland. Kid stuff? Lots of big, capable men I can think of, would disagree. Ah, yes—whimsy. The refreshing pause to find relief from the humdrum in charming nonsense;
"The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things—
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax
And cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings . . "
In another way the feel of all was here, too.
Through the sides of the demijohn, I saw evidence of articraft on Marty’s and Martin’s part. There was a screen of algae fibre, woven as humans weave cloth or mats—warp and woof in an over-under pattern. The screen was probably designed to provide shade from the sun, which I guess could get fairly strong, even inside the dark glass. The screen was held at the ends by an arrangement of copper wire—the same wire, doubtless, that Terry had once dumped into our washbasin aboard the Searcher. Old Brunder, with some thought of his own, had put it into the jug. And our friends had used it, demonstrating a primitive culture, beyond which they had no reason to go, except in music.
Now Terry Miklas gave a low, short whistle. Then his talk went rambling, again: “How was it like out here in space, in a world of your own, Marty and Martia? Was it hard to take, or was it peace? And did we just now spoil that? Do you want to return to Mars, or do you want to go much farther? Maybe someday we’ll be really able to converse, and you’ll be able to tell me how it is with yourself—if you know, as sometimes I think I don’t quite know, about me. . . . Music is restless stuff.”
“Go get your harmonica, Terry,” Alice urged. “Play something for them. . . .”
Yeah—here was a nice dreamy young fella, born of various parentage in New York City. And here was my daughter, not too unlike him in background. She had no superlative talent, though she was good at the piano. But then, here were a pair of mites, different from them about as completely as was possible—in size, structure, origin; maybe even in basic protoplasm. But between the two halves of this foursome with almost no other language at all, yet, there was a bond of likeness and understanding.
So I guess that the pattern for the immediate future was already pretty well set, during those few days of returning to Earth. I had to guide the Warrington, being the only one who could still think of routine matters. Terry would be tooting on his mouth organ; then Alice would try it, too. Then Marty or Martia would tinkle a response, sometimes against the sides of the demijohn. Or they’d emerge from it for awhile, and tap against something else; sometimes it was notes that they produced, but as often it was words and phrases that they were learning to repeat.
Yes, in this romantic atmosphere of contrasting cultures and mystery, love bloomed very soon between Alice, my daughter, and Terry Miklas. It was a unity of interest, and of about everything else that counts, I suppose. How would I know? I was just a mildly cynical but sympathetic outsider, whose consent, if it was needed at all, came about as easily and casually as anything could, two days before we got the Warrington back to the White Sands spaceport:
“Why sure, Terry and Alice . . .”
With that much settled, we got down quickly to another problem.
“Just what happens to Marty and Martia, Dad?” Alice asked.
“Umhm-m—what does?” I enquired. “We have an awful lot of expenses to meet, as we all know. It was expected that our small guests from the Red Planet would be instrumental in defraying them.”
“Not if it means selling them, like chattels, into slavery in a zoo or museum, Dad!” Alice warned. “They are sentient beings, and our friends! Anyhow, there’s another way—more lucrative in the long run. Like Terry they’re artists. People will want to see them, and hear them play—in the theatre, on television, everywhere! All we need is a couple of weeks more—to perfect an act and a program for Marty and Martia, and maybe Terry, too—perhaps even me!”
“Lucrative” was the word that got me most. Yeah, money, that means. It was the most reasonable subject that I had heard mentioned in quite a while. And I was proud to know that my daughter had a good, practical head.
Of course there are novelty numbers, and novelty numbers. Some take hold, some don’t. The public can be pretty blase, even when you’re dead certain that you have the best thing in the universe. I was sure we couldn’t miss, yet I didn’t know. Sadly I felt some hopes of at last having a few dollars to rub together, possibly being indefinitely postponed. But with both my daughter and my prospective son-in-law gone against the old plan, and with my own self leaning in that direction also, what could I do but stretch my luck a little further?
Terry and Alice got married in White Sands. Then there was a fast scramble for another loan—fortunately small this time. Included in our luggage when we moved to a couple of adobe shacks out in the desert, was a piano and a custom-made case, like a suitcase, but with a plastic tank inside.
I lived in the other shack, leaving Alice and Terry and their charges alone a lot. I roamed the nearby hills and kept watch, remembering the recent past. Of course I kept a gun.
Our first try at show business was in Phoenix, Arizona, and all my previous doubts were instantly dissipated. The first agent’s eyes fairly bulged at the demonstration performance, and he cussed in wonder. “Maybe you’re fibbing about where you got these fish,” he said. “But do I care?”
The sound-truck that belonged to a big local theatre of dignity was in the streets twenty minutes later, announcing solemnly: “A special fifteen minute feature will extend our evening program to 11:45 p. m. This is to introduce something sincerely unheard of by us before today. Something utterly charming from another world—Mars, we are told. Beyond this, words may fail us, or seem crudely sensational. Therefore, come and discover for yourselves. . . .”
So, that night, Marty and Martia performed to a packed house, and incidentally, to a far larger television audience.
I guess the basic framework of the program was corny. Terry Miklas was a rather shy and awkward master of ceremonies, keeping his harmonica and guitar with him to draw out and encourage Marty and Martia with his own music. Alice, at the piano, stayed in the background for the same purpose.
When Terry and Alice began to play, the star performers scrambled up a little wooden ladder and out of their tank, which was set on a table, and proceeded to enjoy themselves more or less extemporaneously on all the apparatus that had been arranged for them. Home Sweet Home came out on steel strings stretched over a sounding board, and on a tumbler, in unison, and to the end. But it was the only number that they played that anybody except Alice, Terry, and myself had ever heard before.
Very soon Marty and Martia were performing alone—funny, dainty, intent little monsters, the color of patinaed gild, and as beautiful as a childhood fancy. Now they were at the steel strings and the tumbler; now their claws vibrated a small drum, while they crouched on its head. Now their flippers were cupped against pieces of resonant wood.
Their music was faint and weird and ach
ing, and it seemed to reach out endlessly with its eerie richness. The amplifier system took something away from it, until very soon Terry Miklas turned it off. Then, among those thousands of people in the audience, you could have heard a pin drop. I was out there; I knew.
Marty and Martia played for seven minutes; then they retired independently to their tank, to freshen their gills. But back in the water, they didn’t stop entertaining. They made the sides of the tank vibrate, pronouncing words that they knew:
“Hhelllo-o-o! Wwe-ee arrr-r ffrrom-m Mmarrzz! Yuuu arrr-r owwrr ffrrennzzz! . . .” they buzzed.
Some of this I shouldn’t bother to tell. It is old, now, and everybody heard, at the time. The reports about Marty and Martia, who had no other names that we ever found out, went everywhere. And later performances were no less enthusiastically received than the one of that first night, when at times the audience was as quiet as the dead. At others, it roared with laughter, or brought the house down with applause. Encores extended that first show to fully three times its allotted fifteen minutes. The important play that preceded Marty’s and Martin’s act, was almost forgotten.
As the people got up to leave, I listened to the various comments—pleased, endearing, and comic. A surprising number of folks didn’t believe what they had seen and heard.
“Trick stuff, sure, but I like good tricks,” a fat man announced to a pal. “Ever hear the old joke about the drunk, the mouse pianist, and the miniature piano? . . .”
At supper in our hotel, after the show, Alice’s and Terry’s faces shone like a couple of bright new pennies.
“We made it!” Terry Miklas said jubilantly. “Or rather—they did! It’s an avalanche! I wonder if they appreciate all the flowers they got. . . .”
“What I’m trying to do is pin down exactly the secret of their success,” I offered. “Of course I know—I feel the answer coming to me from all sides. But how do you get all of it into words? Let’s see—well—in the first place their music would still be beautiful even if it was well-known instead of being completely novel. Then they’re the only actual sentient beings—I think we can say that it is proven now that they are that, can’t we?—other than Genus Homo of Earth, that anyone has ever seen. Then, behind them, is the mystic glamor of ancient Mars. A lot of the rest is whimsy. They’re like little characters in a myth or legend which can’t be, but that we all wish for. Yet they are—unbelievably—real. . . .”
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 34
