An uncomfortable comparison. I shook myself to life.
I righted the bird, no small problem, for he weighed almost two hundred pounds.
“Well,” Rene finally said, coming out of his mood, “now that you have this bird, what are you going to do with it?”
“I had thought it might lead us to Uncle Izzy’s fortune,” I explained.
THE bird obviously had no such intention. It was getting ready to take a nap.
“A night bird,” I told it reprovingly, “shouldn’t take a nap in the middle of the night.”
“All you’re proving is that he has no self-respect,” Rene pointed out. “Why don’t you look to see if he’s got a note tagged to his leg or something?”
I did. He didn’t.
“I think this whole thing is crazy,” Rene said, “but since he’s a talking bird, you might ask him a few questions. Maybe he’s trained to say something else.”
“Where is Uncle Izzy’s fortune?” I asked, when I had tugged at the dodo’s feathers until he opened one eye.
He closed it.
“Do you have a message for me?”
He drew away from me irritably and closed the eye again, ruffling down into his feathers.
“He may be keyed to respond to certain phrases. Try your uncle’s name—he obviously knows that,” Rene suggested coldly, wanting no part of this but unable to hold down the suggestion.
“My name,” I screamed at the somnolent dodo, “is Isadore Summers.”
He reared back and pecked the hell out of me.
I picked the book up off the floor and flipped through the bent pages until I found “The Dodo.” Maybe there’d be something in that.
“Listen to this, Rene,” I said, “and see if you catch anything I might have missed.”
Rene looked discomfited, but he didn’t stop up his ears.
When I came to the part, “‘Tell me what thy lordly name is/On the Night’s Plutonian shore . . .’” the dodo looked up and said, “Isadore.”
Clearly, this was it, although I couldn’t recall that any of the questions in the poem were to the point.
I got to, “‘On the morrow he will leave me/As my hopes have flown before.’/Then the bird said . . .”
“Ask me more,” said the dodo without missing a beat.
I read on, getting excited. “‘Quaff, oh, quaff this kind nepenthe,/And forget this lost Lenore.’/Quoth the Dodo . . .”
“Give me more,” he supplied, pointing his beak at the alcohol tap.
I gave him another cup and continued, sure that he must be going to say something relevant to Uncle Izzy’s fortune.
“‘Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—Tell me, tell me, I implore!’ Quoth the Dodo . . .”
“Probably not,” the dodo said, breaking the Grilch Hop rhythm at last, “but there are perfume trees on Alvarla.”
“Perfume trees!” Rene shouted. “That bird’s lying. It’s impossible.”
“Shut up!” I yelled at him. “The poem’s not over.”
I READ on, somewhat ashamed of having to say such inhospitable words to a dodo who had been, after all, cooperating with me.
“ ‘Take thy beak from out my heart,/And take thy form from off my door!’/Quoth the Dodo . . .”
“I was just leaving,” the bird said, and struggled to his feet and went and stood by the door expectantly.
I got up. “Wait!” I commanded the bird, who couldn’t do much else because the door was closed. “Do you know what perfume trees are, Rene?”
“Yeah, I know what they are, and they don’t grow on this planet. You can take my word for it. They need a warm, moist soil to germinate in. They need to have their soil cultivated every day for a year. They die fast on contact with any sort of industrial fumes. They die in captivity, like some wild animals. They die if you sweat on them. They die if you breathe on them. They need to start off warm and get colder every month until they form their flowers. Then they need a frost for the pods to fill with the perfume, along with the seeds.”
“There aren’t any industrial fumes here,” I pointed out, “and they could get plenty of frost.”
“That’s all they’d get. Where’s the warm, moist climate to germinate in? Where’s the parasitical Rhns to cultivate their soil? The Rhns couldn’t exist without their Gleees and the Gleees can’t exist without—never mind. The only place perfume trees can grow is on Odoria and that’s why the perfume is worth two thousand dollars an ounce.”
“I have never heard of anything,” I informed him, “that spelled ‘Uncle Isadore’ so exactly. He always said, ‘If it can’t be done, I can do it.’ Well, there’s only one way to find out. Surely there’s something on the ship I can wear.”
“You mean you’re going out into that frozen inkpot after that idiotic bird?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“For Pete’s sake! You’re as brainless as the bird is!” But I think, for all his attitude, he was curious, too.
HE began to spray me with something. “Close your eyes and mouth. If you don’t wash this off with soap and water in twenty-four hours, you’ll die. But it sure keeps in the body heat.”
I stuck the book in my pocket for good luck, and Rene handed me a gun, some lunch packages, an antibiotic kit and a water purification kit.
“All right,” I said, pocketing them, “but it can’t be far. Uncle Izzy wouldn’t have gone more than a day’s journey.”
“Then why haven’t we smelled the perfume? And why would he have gone through all this rigmarole when he must have known you’d search that far?”
I didn’t know why.
I pushed the door open. The bird hopped out and I realized how easy it would be to lose him from the small, round glow of my flash.
He looked curiously at me, as though expecting something further.
I looked curiously at him, wondering where he would lead to.
Then he was off. There was no question of following him. That big, awkward bird ran so fast that in a few minutes we could no longer hear the beat of his huge claws on the rocks, even in the perfectly still, dry air.
“How fast do you figure he’s going?” I asked Rene.
“How the hell would I know?”
“Roughly.”
“Roughly? Maybe fifty miles an hour.”
“But that’s incredible!”
“The big point-tails on Aldebaran kappa can do eighty with a native on their backs.”
“Ah!” I said. “So that’s it! Maybe tomorrow night . . .”
But we could hear the drumming of the returning dodo.
“Don’t be stupid,” Rene said. “He can’t carry both of us and you’d be a fool either to go alone or stay here alone.”
“As a tribute to my deceased uncle, I’m going to be a fool.”
I stuck my flashlight into one of my many pockets and climbed onto the huge bird’s back. The down beneath his outer feathers was as soft and strong as heavy fur. I dug in with my hands and feet, my head braced against the thickened part of his neck.
He started off with a lurch that brought my stomach out of hiding. I kept my eyes squeezed closed. I couldn’t have seen anything, anyway. Not even the impossible creature that was rushing through the darkness carrying me, for all I knew, straight to damnation.
The night rushed past my ears in a wild keening and it crossed my mind to wonder what Mr. Picks, my supervisor, would say if he saw me now.
I had a sudden vision of Mr. Picks, even more neatly dressed than I always was, with middle-cost neck clasp and stud discreetly shining from a plain, square-edged bag shirt and dun suit. I pictured him opening a refined little box and holding it two feet under the customer’s eyes with a gesture of faint, unconscious supplication. A comfortable, warm, happy picture in which my place, one counter behind Mr. Picks, was reassuringly assured.
Then, out of nowhere, into the picture galloped a yellow-skinned monster astride a huge, white bird. It turned out to be me and I tumbled off th
e bird, crying, “Mr. Picks! I don’t know what came over me!”
But I was answered only by a multitude of squawks, rustles and scratchings.
The bird was home.
I COULD almost see vague forms. The darkness was beginning to give a little. I was warm, itchy and uncomfortable under whatever it was that Rene had sprayed on me.
Warm?
Perfume trees?
All I could smell were bird roosts.
I stood up, finding my limbs weak, trembling and painful. First, I glanced at my watch. Five hours terran time since we left the ship. At fifty miles per hour, we’d have gone two hundred and fifty miles.
If we’d gone due north, as the bird started out, we must be in the snow zone. And I was warm!
I switched my flash around. All I could see were birds. There seemed to be hundreds of them. I couldn’t tell which one was my bearer.
“Where is the perfume?” I bawled.
All I got was squawks. Some of the birds were, in fact, standing on one foot and tucking their heads away.
It was growing lighter. The birds were going to bed.
Feverishly, I pulled out Uncle Izzy’s old volume of poetry.
Brushing from my mind a vision of Mr. Picks in a state of shock and another picture of Uncle Isadore snickering triumphantly, I stood on that desert land enchanted—on that home by horror haunted, and solemnly read “The Dodo” to a colony of wingless birds.
My dodo identified himself at the proper place, but I kept on, waiting for something to show me my inheritance.
“Then methought the air grew denser,” I read.
“Perfume from an unseen censor!” a bird croaked from the back row.
“Where?” I cried, pushing my way through the birds crowding around me in various stages of roost and curiosity.
“Then,” I repeated, “the air grew denser.”
“Perfume,” the bird now in front of me said, “from an unseen censor.”
He began to scratch at the ground assiduously under one of four dim shapes about the level of my eyes. Then he yawned gapingly, gave up and went to sleep.
I sat down to wait, because it was almost dawn and the last dodo had tucked his head into his feathers.
Daylight showed me four little trees, nothing like the usual scraggy vegetation of Alvarla. They must be perfume trees, I thought. But they were too young to have blossoms or pods.
I didn’t go too near them, remembering what Rene had said.
And, remembering that, I began to figure out how they grew here.
THIS place was a little valley. No, a crater. Several feet deeper than my height, with sloping sides. The birds apparently kept it warm with their body heat, plus the heat the rocky sides would store. Since it was a crater, the winds wouldn’t reach it. The crater made a basin to catch the snow which I could see beginning to melt at the edges and ooze down the slope.
The birds provided more than ample fertilizer and Uncle Izzy had apparently trained at least one of them to cultivate the soil under the trees.
I climbed out of the crater to see that I was indeed in the regions of snow. To the north were huge drifts, and far off loomed towering glaciers.
To the south, the hills tapered off from white to spotted brown.
That was the reason for Uncle Izzy’s crazy setup. Rene and I would never have come across this crater in an ordinary search. Of course, the setup needn’t have been quite so crazy. That was the personal equation of which Uncle Izzy was so fond.
The trees would, I assumed, poke their heads up over the crater as they grew, reaching toward the cold, and finally getting the frostbite to fill their pods properly.
At two thousand dollars an ounce.
I had neglected to ask Rene how many pods a tree could be expected to produce or how big the pods were. But, say, half an ounce in each pod and a conservative fifty pods on each tree.
A hundred thousand dollars.
I slid back into the crater, sat leaning against a somnolent dodo and ate a lunch package with a cupful of melted snow.
All sorts of thoughts were jostling my brain.
But I was bone-weary. I hadn’t slept since we hit Alvarla and the ride last night had been a tremendous strain, because I wasn’t in the habit of getting any exercise at all.
Therefore, I fell asleep in mid-thought.
It was the noon sun that woke me. I wasn’t just warm. I was hot.
And I was very reluctant to let go of my dream; I kept grabbing at the tag ends of it with both hands. It was the most exciting dream I’d had since the one about succeeding Mr. Picks. Only very different.
I’d made a fortune cultivating perfume trees. My dream was full of perfume. Some of it came from the exotic plants of my African estate. Some of it was from a long-legged, pink-haired girl, the kind African millionaires have.
It was the sort of dream, I mused, unable to keep it in mood any longer, as large-minded men have. Men like—Uncle Isadore!
I sat up suddenly. Uncle Isadore—large-minded? Why hadn’t he had the avuncular decency to leave me his fortune the usual way?
Why?
BECAUSE then he wouldn’t be able to play penny-ante psychology and get me dreaming about wild schemes with perfume trees and African estates. That’s why.
Or maybe there wasn’t any fortune! Suddenly I understood why people smoke. It gives them something to do when they feel helpless.
If there wasn’t any fortune, then I was hopelessly tied to the perfume trees. If Uncle Izzy had lost his last cent, it would be very like him to borrow enough from friends to finance a perfume tree scheme. And if he didn’t make it to the planet he had in mind—why, he’d make the planet he’d crashed on do.
Anyone else would have shot the birds for fresh meat. Anyone else would have seen immediately that Alvarla was the last planet in the Galaxy where perfume trees would grow.
Anyone else would have seen immediately that I was one of the minor, comfortable people in the world who likes the happy regularities of a little job and an assured, if limited, future. Anyone else would have seen I had the sort of personality that could not be changed.
But Uncle Izzy wasn’t anyone else.
Why did I keep smelling the perfume from my dream?
I followed my nose out of the crater and found the snow melting around a water tank about four feet long and two feet in diameter—part of the ruined fuel system from Uncle Izzy’s ship.
I dislodged it from the ice beneath and shook it. The perfume was so strong, as it unfroze, that it made me dizzy. And all that smell was coming from a pinhole.
There seemed to be half a gallon in it. Enough to pay off Mother’s bonds and whatever I owed Rene, with a handsome sum left over for me.
I could go home and forget about perfume trees and Alvarla and Uncle Isadore.
But that dream of the African estate kept irritating the back of my mind. And the large, free sky of Alvarla was soothing to the eye, when compared to the little squares of blue I noted occasionally when riding the slidewalks of Brooklyn.
What did I want out of life, anyway? Damn Uncle Isadore. I’d never test 10:9 on job adjustment again.
I was still thinking when evening swept in fast, as it does in dry climates, and the birds began to wake up and climb out of the crater, presumably to forage for food.
“Wait!” I cried. “Isadore!”
I DREW out a lunch package and spread it to attract him. It attracted all of them.
I pulled out “The Dodo.”
“‘Tell me what thy lordly name is/On the Night’s Plutonian shore.’”
“Isadore,” he volunteered, swallowing fast while I climbed aboard him.
“Take me back.”
Then I realized I had made a mistake with the food.
“Go!” I cried. “Spaceship! More food!” He just stood there, his beak poking around the ground for crumbs.
But I had to get that skin spray washed off before twenty-four hours were up.
“Nep
enthe!” I shouted desperately.
The dodo was off like a flash and didn’t stop till we were back at the ship.
“You were gone quite a while,” Rene said nonchalantly. “Find anything?”
“Enough to pay you off,” I said. “And we’ll make it five thousand because I found it. Stow this somewhere. It’s perfume.”
He did. “Find anything else?”
“Nothing that would interest you. I’ll be ready to blast off as soon as I’ve had a shower.”
Rene shrugged.
The perfume, when we returned to Earth, proved to be worth what he’d said it would be. A lot of people wanted to know where I’d gotten it. “The crops on Odoria,” they said, “are entirely sewed up by Odoria, Inc.”
“They certainly are,” I always replied agreeably.
It took all I cleared from the perfume to put a down payment on a ship and hire an expert on fertilizing perfume flowers. But this time I wanted to run the show.
Mr. Picks shook his head sadly when I told him to replace me permanently.
“You have a great future ahead of you in studs and neck clasps,” he said. “Why not take a little time and reconsider your decision? Or—”
“Nevermore,” I answered.
NOT until five years later did I find out what happened to the rest of good old Uncle Algernon’s fortune.
I was stretched out on a gently undulating force-field in my interior patio, a huge, scarlet fan-flower tree sifting in the sunshine. Leda, her pink hair flowing down to her knees, was just emerging from the pool of grilch milk. She bent to an Aphrodite of Cnidos position.
“Perfect!” I said, and threw away my cigarene.
“Depart!” I told the robot, who came rolling in.
“But, master, it’s the Cha’n of Betelgeuse, Lord of the Seven Planets and the Four Hundred Moons.”
“Get dressed, Leda,” I said regretfully. “We have company.”
I’d never met him, but I knew he was one of Uncle Isadore’s best friends and I felt obliged to see him.
The Cha’n had several meals and four cigarenes, maintaining a courteous silence all the while. Then he loosened his belt, reached into his furry pouch and handed me a piece of copper scroll.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 3
