As Elspeth took the purple thing from Quat’s hand, the waterguy said, “I offered it to you first because in our culture the youngest female in a group is always given great honor.”
You could tell Elspeth liked that idea. She lifted the purple thing to her lips and took a bite. “Man, that’s great!” she said. Then she crammed most of the rest of it into her mouth.
Madame Pong sighed.
Quat stayed for another couple of hours, though every twenty minutes or so he would go down and take a dip in the pond to get himself wet again. He even told a story or two himself—including a long one that turned out to be an underwater version of “Cinderella.”
After he had left, Madame Pong said, “With luck, perhaps this experience will also be a story someday. I don’t mean just our visit with Quat. I mean our entire stay on Kryndamar. A story with a happy ending.”
We can call it “Madame Pong and the Exiles,” I thought.
Snout spoke the words out loud for me.
“Sounds like a rock group,” said Elspeth. She jumped to her feet and started playing air guitar.
“Earthlings truly are a strange people,” said Snout, folding his spindly fingers over his long face.
* * *
When Snout and I began our exercises the next day, he asked, Have you noticed anything about our ability to speak to each other mentally?
Only that we can do it, I replied. A good thing, too, or I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to but Seymour.
Something wrong with talking to me? asked Seymour huffily.
Think about it a little more, Rod, persisted Snout.
Suddenly I realized he was talking about the thing that had been bothering me all along. You can contact me, but I can’t contact you. So the only way I can talk to you is if you contact me first. Frankly, it’s pretty annoying.
Then I think it’s time we worked on it.
This was good news. I had been wildly frustrated at having to wait for Snout to contact me before we could have a discussion.
I am now going to break our connection, thought Snout. Let’s see if you can re-establish it.
I couldn’t. I stood there, looking right at him and thinking, Snout. Oh, Snout. Can you hear me, Snout?
I got no response at all.
Come in, Snout. This is Rod calling. I want to talk to you.
I might as well have been thinking at a wall.
SNOUT! I thought, and suddenly the connection did open. Unfortunately, it was because Snout had opened it, not because I had gotten through to him.
We’re going to try again in a second, he thought. This time I want you to close your eye and try to see me in your mind. See me getting your message.
Then he broke the connection again.
I did as he asked, concentrating so hard that our body started to shake. I imagined him getting the message. I pictured his eyes going wide in astonishment at how clearly it came through. I visualized him jumping in shock and falling over at the strength of our sending.
Still no connection.
We went on that way for another hour.
Don’t be frustrated, Rod, said Snout at last. Mindspeak is an advanced technique. Most people can’t even receive a connection without a lot of training, much less open one. So you’re already ahead of the game. It’s only because you have so much more need of the ability than most that I’m trying to move you forward faster than normal. I had hoped that the fact that we are so tightly connected—I’m sure it’s because of that interrupted training transfer we experienced back when I first met you—would make it possible for you to reach me. We’ll keep trying.
And try we did. Every day. But no matter how hard I concentrated, I wasn’t able to get through to him.
Fortunately, I was making progress with some of Snout’s other lessons: How to remember things better. How to control fear. How to control my sense of time.
But I still couldn’t make that contact with Snout.
Perhaps you are generating negatrons, suggested Snout one afternoon.
Negatrons? Seymour and I asked simultaneously.
They are a powerful force created by negative thinking. The flow of negatrons has a subtle but deeply destructive effect on everything around it. Very destructive. One of the first things you have to learn as a Mental Master is how to keep from generating negatrons, and how to prevent other people’s negatrons from affecting your work and well-being. They weaken the mind terribly.
Seymour and I put our front paws to our head. Sorry! we thought. We didn’t mean to!
Oh, almost everyone does it sometimes, said Snout. I heard once that BKR was working on a way to channel them into a weapon.
To blow things up? I asked.
No, to tear them down. That’s how negatrons work. It’s like erosion. They slowly chip away at things. If BKR could find a way to focus them, he might be able to beam them at something good—like a family, for example—and destroy it in a matter of days. It’s exactly the kind of thing he likes to do. Now, let’s try again. And think positive this time!
I’m positive this is all a lot of hooey! put in Seymour.
Quiet! I replied. You’re generating negatrons.
Well, pardon me for speaking up inside my own brain. Do you want me to go for a walk while you two play!
Will you just shut up? I thought desperately. I’m trying to contact Snout.
But it was no good. I still couldn’t get through to him.
“I want to try something different,” said Snout, the next afternoon, speaking out loud. “It may be that our physical closeness is interfering somehow. I want you to walk over that way until you can’t see me anymore. Then we’ll give it another try. Remember, no negative thoughts!”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, thought Seymour.
Leaving Edgar sitting on a rock in the sunshine, we trotted off in the direction Snout had indicated. It took a while before we were out of sight—partly because Seymour’s eyesight was so good that we had to go much farther away than we would have if I were in my old body. Finally we went over the top of a small, tree-covered hill that blocked Snout from our view.
Again, I tried to contact him. But even concentrating with all my might, I couldn’t do it. After fifteen or twenty minutes we decided to give up and head back.
Except when we did, we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, because we couldn’t find him.
Now look what you’ve done, Uncle Rod, thought Seymour. We’re lost!
We are not, I replied.
But I was wrong. Not only could we not find Snout, we couldn’t even find our way back to where we had been standing while we tried to contact him. We began trotting back and forth, looking for any familiar landmark. Soon we were running.
Panic seized us. We ran until our skin burned with the effort of breathing, looking for any sign of Snout, or any clue to the location of our camp.
Finally we had to face the terrible truth.
We were lost on an alien planet.
And we didn’t even have a mouth to yell for help.
CHAPTER
10
Pet, Peeved
SICK WITH FEAR, SEYMOUR AND I wandered around for at least an hour trying to find our way back to the camp.
No place we went looked familiar, and we were getting more terrified by the moment. Everything Snout had taught me about staying calm seemed to have flown out of my head.
I can’t tell you what a relief it was when we stumbled into a clearing and discovered a group of beings having a picnic. There were three of them, two adults and a female child. They were pretty much standard size, with large, intelligent-looking yellow eyes and high foreheads. They had lavender skin, flowing silver hair, and noses like bananas.
But hey, who was I to think that someone else looked weird?
They were laughing and having a good time, and you could tell they really liked each other.
We watched for a while from behind a tree. Finally Seymour thought, What do you think, Uncle Rod—shal
l we go over and see if they can help us?
I don’t know . . . I replied, still nervous about exposing ourselves.
You got a better idea? asked Seymour impatiently.
At the moment I didn’t have any ideas at all. So we trotted over on our little blue feet, hoping the picnickers were as friendly as they looked, and that maybe we could figure out a way to communicate with them.
“Look, Mommy,” said the girl, jumping up and wrapping her arm around our neck. “It’s a weird little critter. Isn’t he cute? Can I keep him? Please? Oh please oh please oh please say yes. Please, Mommy?”
Run for our lives! thought Seymour.
I agreed completely.
Unfortunately, the minute the girl felt us start to move, she tightened her grip on our neck.
The little dickens was stronger than she looked. Seymour and I struggled like crazy, but it didn’t do much good. After all, we didn’t have any teeth, so it wasn’t like we could bite her. We didn’t have much in the line of claws, either.
How do you protect yourself at home? I thought testily.
Never mind that now! replied Seymour. Let’s get out of here!
But even when we doubled our effort to break free, we weren’t much more effective than a squirming teddy bear.
“Daddy, Daddy,” squealed the girl. “Mr. Eyeball Guy is trying to get away! Stop him! Stop him!”
Suddenly we felt something clamp around our neck. “There,” said a deep voice. “That ought to take care of him.”
A collar! wailed Seymour.
A wave of terror shivered through me. Finally remembering that “Stay calm” was the total content of the first chapter of Secrets of the Mental Masters, I tried to push the fear away. It wasn’t easy. No one from our group knew where we were. And the people who had captured us thought we were some kind of animal; they had no idea there were not one but two intelligent creatures living in this body. Even worse, if our captors were illegal vacationers, they might leave the planet at any time, dragging us halfway across the galaxy.
At the moment it seemed entirely possible we might spend the rest of our lives as someone’s pet.
Under the circumstances, staying calm wasn’t all that easy.
“What a cute critter,” cooed the girl, stroking our long blue neck. “I want him to be mine forever, Daddy.”
“We’ll have to wait and see, Krixna,” said the same deep voice. “He’s an unusual specimen. I may be able to get a lot of energy credits from one of our customers for a creature like this.”
Worse and worse! The girl’s father was some kind of interstellar animal dealer. Well, that explained why he had had the collar so handy. He probably had cages around somewhere, too.
I wondered if we were going to have to spend the rest of our lives in a zoo. Suddenly, being someone’s pet didn’t seem such a bad option.
The guy circled us, eyeing us from all angles. The adult female came over to join him. “What is it, Mir-van?” she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder.
He shook his head. “I’m going to have to consult my reference files for this one, Nanda. It wasn’t on the bio-list for this planet, so it must be an import. If so, it’s just as well we take it away, before it messes up the ecosystem. The thing is, I can’t recall having seen anything like it on any bio-list before.”
“Well, you haven’t studied all of them, silly,” said Nanda. “The galaxy’s too big for even you to do that.”
“I know,” said Mir-van. “But what if it is an undiscovered species?”
If I could only have spoken to him, I would have been glad to explain that since Seymour was actually from Dimension X, odds were good that no planet in our galaxy did have a creature quite like him. At least, I would have, until he said, “Think of the price we could get for it then!”
“Doesn’t he look funny with only that one big eye in his head?” asked the little girl, Krixna. “How do you suppose he eats, Daddy?”
I don’t eat, you little idiot, thought Seymour crankily. My other half does the eating. Then he beams energy . . .
The thought trailed off, as the terrible truth crashed in on both of us at once.
We had been captured without Edgar!
“Oh, I’m sure he has some way of getting food,” said the father with a laugh, not realizing that that was exactly our problem now. “After all, without one, he’d starve to death.”
Precisely!
Mir-van snapped a lead line onto our collar. “Come on, boy,” he said, starting forward.
We dug in all six heels and refused to move. We shook our eye stalk wildly. All in silence, of course.
“Oh, a stubborn one, eh? Well, I’ve got ways of dealing with your kind.” He bent down and did something to the collar. We felt a strange tingle, then a kind of grogginess that made it hard to think. “Come on, boy,” he said again.
It was too much trouble to resist. We went trotting along behind him.
* * *
Krixna and her family had camped just outside a grove of weeping trees—close enough so they could hear them, but not so close that the mournful sounds were overwhelming. Next to their camp was a sleek, silver ship, shaped quite a bit like my father’s.
“Welcome back!” called a voice. For a moment I thought it was the ship speaking. Then someone waddled around from the far side. He was tall, for an alien, extraordinarily fat, and almost pure white—except for his hair, which was bright green. His face split into a wide grin, displaying several dozen needle-like red teeth. “Ah, I see you’ve found a new specimen. Strange-looking thing.”
Look who’s talking, thought Seymour lazily, his mood still affected by the collar.
The fat guy came over to where we stood. Squatting beside us, he ran his hands, which were cool and clammy, over our sides and down our legs. “Feels solid and healthy,” he announced. “How does it eat?”
“Don’t have the slightest idea,” said Mir-van. “But we figure it must have some way.”
“I found him,” put in Krixna proudly. “He’s going to be my pet!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t count on that, little one,” said the white guy, patting her on the head. “The price this one is likely to fetch is too high for us to let him stay a pet.”
“He’s mine, Grumbo!” screamed Krixna. “He’s mine, he’s mine, he’s mine!” She threw herself to the ground and began flailing at it with her hands and feet.
Ah, it’s “Elspeth: the Sequel”, thought Seymour.
Nanda threw a yellow blanket over her daughter. “Pretend she’s not there,” she said.
“I’ll be glad to,” said Grumbo, rolling his eyes.
Krixna continued to scream. Everyone ignored her.
Nanda put a hand on her husband’s arm. “Are you sure we should keep the creature, Mir-van? I fear it will die if we can’t figure out how to feed it.”
He shrugged. “If it dies, we’ll simply preserve it. Even dead, a specimen this unusual is going to fetch a fabulous price. Alive is better, of course. But—”
“But we’ll take what we can get,” said Grumbo.
“Precisely,” said Mir-van.
CHAPTER
11
“I Still Live!”
GRUMBO TIED OUR LEAD CORD to a stake in the ground. Eventually they all went off to do other things. Even Krixna got tired of screaming and climbed out from under the blanket. “See you later, Mr. Eyeball Guy,” she said, giving us a kiss on top of our eyestalk. Then she went skipping off, crying, “Mommy! Mommy, I’m hungry. I wanna eat NOW!”
This won’t be such a problem after all, thought Seymour, looking at the stake. We’ll just dig that thing up and be on our way.
I figured he was right, until we actually tried to get near it.
Yow! thought Seymour as we moved toward the stake. What’s going on?
Our collar was vibrating and getting hot.
The closer we got to the stake, the worse it felt.
Ignore it! I ordered. It must be some sort of signa
l coming from the stake that makes the collar do that.
But ignoring the heat and vibrations was easier thought than done; by the time we were about five feet from the stake, the pain was so intense that we had to turn back.
When we turned around, we saw Grumbo grinning at us. “Not bad, little one,” he said. “Most creatures who manage to get that close to the transmitter simply pass out.”
Then he chuckled and walked away again.
It looks like we’re really in for it this time, Uncle Rod, thought Seymour mournfully.
We still live! I replied defiantly. I was quoting, sort of, John Carter of Mars. John Carter is the hero of a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the same guy who invented Tarzan. Only I like the John Carter books better. Anyway, no matter how bad things got for John Carter he always said, “I still live!”
It seemed like a good motto to keep in mind at a moment like this.
Of course, the John Carter books were just stories. Seymour and I were in real-life trouble.
Maybe we can scratch a message on the ground! I thought suddenly.
I don’t know how to write, replied Seymour.
Well, I do!
I wasn’t sure if the translation program that made it possible for me to understand the aliens would also let me write their language. Maybe I could only write in English. On the other paw, even if they couldn’t read what I wrote, the fact that I was trying to write anything at all ought to prove that Seymour and I weren’t just an animal.
It seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, the ground where we were staked out was covered with about six inches of leaves—not the best surface for scratching out a message. And when we dug a pile of them away, it turned out that the soil was laced over with stiff and wiry roots. Our clawless paw couldn’t even make a decent letter, much less a whole word.
Krixna, noticing us, said, “Oh, Mommy! Look how funny Mr. Eyeball Guy is when he digs!”
Yeah, I’m a laugh riot, thought Seymour gloomily.
* * *
Later that evening Krixna came over and started petting us. “I love you, Mr. Eyeball Guy,” she whispered. “And I’m going to make my daddy let me keep you. I won’t let that stupid Grumbo take you away. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
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