The Star Beast

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “So Lummox is still in the reservoir, waiting for us to act, eh?”

  “I believe so, sir. He was yesterday.”

  “Well, be can wait there, I suppose, until other action can be taken.” Mr. Kiku picked up Greenberg’s shortform report and recommendation.

  Greenberg said, “I take it that you are overruling me, sir?”

  “No. What gave you that idea?” He signed the order permitting the destruction of Lummox and let it be swallowed by the outgoing basket. “I don’t reverse a man’s decision without firing him…and I have another job for you.”

  “Oh.” Greenberg felt a twinge of compassion; he had been expecting, with relief, that the chief would reprieve Lummox’s death sentence. Well…too bad…but the beast was dangerous.

  Mr. Kiku went on, “Are you afraid of snakes?”

  “No. I rather like them.”

  “Excellent! Though it’s a feeling I can’t imagine. I’ve always been deathly afraid of them. Once when I was a boy in Africa…never mind. Have you ever worked closely with Rargyllians? I don’t recall.”

  Greenberg suddenly understood. “I used a Rargyllian interpreter in the Vega-VI affair. I get along all right with Rargyllians.”

  “I wish I did. Sergei, I have some business which involves a Rargyllian interpreter, a Dr. Ftaeml. You may have heard of him.”

  “Yes, of course, sir.”

  “I’ll admit that, as Rargyllians go…” He made the noun sound like a swear word. “…Ftaeml is all right. But this involvement has the odor of trouble…and I find my own nose for trouble blanked out by this phobia of mine. So I’m putting you on as my assistant to sniff for me.”

  “I thought you didn’t trust my nose, boss?”

  “We’ll let the blind lead the blind, if you’ll forgive a switch in metaphor. Perhaps between us we’ll sniff it out.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask the nature of the assignment?”

  “Well…” Before Mr. Kiku could answer, his secretary’s light flashed and her voice stated, “Your hypnotherapist is here, sir.”

  The Under Secretary glanced at his clock and said, “Where does the time go?”…then to the communicator: “Put him in my dressing room. I’ll be in.” He continued to Greenberg, “Ftaeml will be here in thirty minutes. I can’t stop to talk, I’ve got to get braced for it. You’ll find what there is…little enough!…in my ‘pending-urgent’ file.” Mr. Kiku glanced at his incoming basket, which had filled to overflowing while they talked. “It won’t take five minutes. Spend the rest of the time clearing up that stack of waste paper. Sign my name and hold anything that you think I must see…but it had better be no more than half a dozen items, or I’ll send you back to Harvard!”

  He got up hurriedly, while making a mental note to tell his secretary, from his dressing room, to note everything that went through in the next half hour and let him see it later…he wanted to see how the lad worked. Mr. Kiku was aware that he would die someday and he intended to see to it that Greenberg replaced him. In the meantime life should be as tough for the boy as possible.

  The Under Secretary headed for his dressing room, the door ducked aside, contracted behind him; Greenberg was left alone. He was reaching for the pending urgent file when a paper dropped into the incoming basket just as the light on it blinked red and a buzzer sounded.

  He picked up the paper, ran his eye down the middle and had just realized that it really was urgent when a similar light-and-buzzer combination showed at the interoffice communicator and its screen came to life; Greenberg recognized the chief of the bureau of system liaison. “Boss?” the image said excitedly.

  Greenberg touched the two-way switch. “Greenberg here,” he answered. “I’m keeping the chief’s chair warm for him. Your memo just came in, Stan. I’m reading it.”

  Ibañez looked annoyed. “Never mind that. Get me the boss.”

  Greenberg hesitated. Ibañez’s problem was simple, but sticky. Ships from Venus were regularly granted pratique without delay, each ship’s doctor being a public health deputy. But the Ariel, already due at Port Libya, had suddenly been placed under quarantine by her doctor and was now waiting in a parking orbit. The Venerian foreign minister was aboard…most unfortunately, as Venus was expected to support Terra’s position against Mars in the impending triangular conference.

  Greenberg could stall the touchy problem until the boss was free; he could break in on the boss; he could go over the boss’s head to the Secretary himself (which meant picking an answer and presenting it so as to get that answer approved); or…he could act, using Mr. Kiku’s authority.

  Mr. Kiku could not have predicted the emergency…but the boss had a pesky habit of pushing people off the deep end.

  Greenberg’s summing up had been quick. He answered, “Sorry, Stan, you can’t talk to the boss. I am acting for him.”

  “Eh? Since when?”

  “Just temporarily, but I am.”

  Ibañez frowned. “Look, chum, you had better find the boss. Maybe you are signing his name on routine matters…but this is not routine. We’ve got to bring that ship down in a hurry. Your neck would be out a yard if you took it upon yourself to authorize me to overlook a basic rule like quarantine. Use your head.”

  Break quarantine? Greenberg recalled the Great Plague of ’51, back in the days when the biologist serenely believed that each planetary life group was immune to the ills of other planets. “We won’t break quarantine.”

  Ibañez looked pained. “Sergei, we can jeopardize this conference…‘jeopardize?’ What am I saying? We can’t toss away ten years’ work because some crewman has a slight fever. The quarantine must be broken. But I don’t expect you to do it.”

  Greenberg hesitated. “He’s under hypnosis, for a tough job coming up. It may be a couple of hours before you can see him.”

  Ibañez looked blank. “I’ll have to tackle the Secretary. I don’t dare wait two hours. That sacred cow from Venus is like as not to order his skipper to head home…we can’t risk that.”

  “And we can’t risk bringing in an epidemic, either. Here’s what you do. Call him and tell him you are coming to get him in person. Use a fast scout. Get him aboard and leave the Ariel in quarantine orbit. Once you get him aboard the scout…and not before…tell him that both you and he will attend the conference in isolation suits.” The isolation suit was a sealed pressure suit; its primary use was to visit planets whose disease hazards had not yet been learned. “The scout ship and crew will have to go into quarantine, too, of course.”

  “Isolation suit! Oh, he’ll love that. Sergei, it would be less damaging to call off the conference. An indignity like that would put him against us for certain. The jerk is poisonously proud.”

  “Sure he’ll love it,” Greenberg explained, “once you suggest how to play it. ‘Great personal self-sacrifice’…‘unwilling to risk the welfare of our beloved sister planet’…‘the call of duty takes precedence over any et cetera.’ If you don’t feel sure of it, take one of the public relations boys along. And look, all through the conference he must be attended by a physician…in a white suit…and a couple of nurses. The conference must stop every now and then while he rests…put a cot and hospital screens in the Hall of Heroes near the conference table. The idea is that he’s come down with it himself but is carrying on as his dying act. Get it? Tell him before you land the scout ship…indirectly, of course.”

  Ibañez looked perturbed. “Do you think that will work?”

  “It’s up to you to make it work. I’m sending down your memo, ordering quarantine to continue but telling you to use your initiative to insure his presence at the conference.”

  “Well…all right.” Ibañez suddenly grinned. “Never mind the memo. I’m on my way.” He switched off.

  Greenberg turned back to the desk, feeling exhilarated by the sensation of playing God. He wondered what the boss would have done?…but did not care. There might be many correct solutions, but this was one; it felt right. He reached again for the p
ending-urgent file.

  He stopped. Something was gnawing at the back of his mind. The boss had not wanted to approve that death sentence; he had felt it. Shucks, the boss had told him that he was wrong; the proper action was a full investigation. But the boss, as a matter of loyalty to his subordinates, had not reversed him.

  But he himself was sitting in the boss’s chair at the moment. Well?

  Was that why the boss had placed him there? To let him correct his own mistake? No, the boss was subtle but not omniscient; he could not have predicted that Greenberg would consider reopening the matter.

  Still… He called the boss’s private secretary. “Mildred?”

  “Yes, Mr. Greenberg?”

  “That brief-and-rec on that intervention I carried out…Rt0411, it was. It went out fifteen minutes ago. I want it back.”

  “It may have been dispatched,” she said doubtfully. “The communications desk has been running only about seven minutes behind demand today.”

  “There is such a thing as too much efficiency. If the order has left the building, send a cancellation and a more-to-follow, will you? And get the original document back to me.”

  Finally he got to the pending-urgent file. As Mr. Kiku had said, the jacket marked “Ftaeml” was not large. He found it subtitled: “Beauty & the Beast” and wondered why. The boss had a sense of humor…but it veered so much that other people had a hard time following it.

  Presently his eyebrows lifted. Those tireless interpreters, brokers, go-betweens, and expounders, the Rargyllians, were always popping up in negotiations between diverse races; the presence of Dr. Ftaeml on Earth had tipped Greenberg that something was up with a non-humanoid people…non-human in mentality, creatures so different psychologically that communication was difficult. But he had not expected the learned doctor was representing a race that he had never heard of…something termed “the Hroshii.”

  It was possible that Greenberg had simply forgotten these people with a name like a sneeze; they might be some unimportant breed, at a low cultural level, or economically inconsequential, or not possessing space travel. Or they might have been brought into the Community of Civilizations while Greenberg had been up to his ears in Solar System affairs. Once the human race had made contact with other races having interstellar travel the additions to the family of legal “humans” had come so fast that a man could hardly keep up; the more mankind widened its horizons the harder those horizons were to see.

  Or perhaps he knew of the Hroshii under another name? Greenberg turned to Mr. Kiku’s universal dictionary and keyed in the name.

  The machine considered it, then the reading plate flashed: NO INFORMATION.

  Greenberg tried dropping the aspirate on the assumption that the word might have degenerated in the mouths of non-Hroshii…still the same negative.

  He dropped the matter. The. universal dictionary in the British Museum was not more knowledgeable than the one in the Under Secretary’s office; its working parts occupied an entire building in another part of Capital, and a staff of cyberneticists, semanticians and encyclopedists endlessly fed its hunger for facts. He could be sure that, whatever the “Hroshii” were, the Federation had never heard of them before.

  Which was astounding.

  Having let astonishment persist a full second Greenberg went on reading. He learned that the Hroshii were already here, not landed on Earth but within waving distance…in a parking orbit fifty thousand miles out. He let himself be astonished for two whole seconds before going on to discover that the reason he had not heard of their advent was that Dr. Ftaeml had urgently advised Mr. Kiku to keep patrol ships and such from challenging and attempting to board the stranger.

  He was interrupted by the return of his report of the Lummox matter, bearing on it Mr. Kiku’s confirmation of the sentence. He thought for a moment, then added to the endorsement so that it read: “Recommendation approved…but this action is not to be carried out until after a complete scientific analysis of this creature has been made. Local authorities will surrender custody when required to the Bureau of Xenic Science, which will arrange transportation and select the agency to pursue the evaluation.”

  Greenberg signed Kiku’s name to the change and put it back into the. system. He admitted sheepishly that the order was now weasel-worded…for it was a sure thing that once the xenobiologists got their hands on Lummox they would never let him go. Nevertheless his heart felt suddenly lighter. The other action was wrong; this one was right.

  He turned his attention back to the Hroshii…and again his eyebrows went up. The Hroshii were not here to establish relations with Earth; they were here to rescue one of their own. According to Dr. Ftaeml, they were convinced that Terra was holding this Hroshia and were demanding that she be surrendered.

  Greenberg felt as if he had blundered into a bad melodrama. These people with the asthmatic name had picked the wrong planet for cops-and-robbers nonsense. A non-human on Earth without a passport, without a dossier in the hands of the department, without an approved reason for visiting Earth, would be as helpless as a bride without a ration book. She would be picked up in no time…idiot’s delight! she could not even get through quarantine.

  Why didn’t the boss simply tell them to take their wagon and go home?

  Besides, how did they figure she had reached the surface of Earth? Walked? Or taken a swan dive? Star ships did not land; they were served by shuttles. He could just see her tackling the purser of one of those shuttles: “Excuse me, sir, but I am fleeing from my husband hi a distant part of the Galaxy. Do you mind if I hide under this seat and sneak down to your planet?”

  “No tickee, no washee”…that’s what the purser would say. Those shuttle companies hated deadheads; Greenberg could feel it every time he presented his own diplomatic pass.

  Something was niggling at him…then he remembered the boss’s inquiry; did Lummox have hands? He realized that the boss must have been wondering whether Lummox could be the missing Hroshia, since Hroshii, according to Ftaeml, had eight legs. Greenberg chuckled. Lummox was not the boy to build and operate star ships, not he nor any of his cousins. Of course the boss had not seen Lummox and did not know how preposterous it was.

  And besides that, Lummox had been here more than a hundred years. That would make him very late for supper.

  The real question was what to do with the Hroshii now that we were in contact with them. Anything from “Out There” was interesting, educational, and profitable to mankind, once it was analyzed…and a race that had its own interstellar drive was sure to be all of that, squared and cubed. No doubt the boss was kidding them along while developing permanent relations. Very well, it was up to Greenberg to foster that angle and help the boss get past his emotional handicap in dealing through a Rargyllian.

  He skimmed the rest of the report. What he had learned so far he had gotten from the synopsis; the rest was a transcript of Ftaeml’s flowery circumlocutions. Then he handed the jacket back to the file and tackled the boss’s work.

  Mr. Kiku announced himself by looking over his shoulder and saying, “That basket is as full as ever.”

  “Oh. Howdy, boss. Yes, but think of the shape it would have been in if I hadn’t torn up every second item without reading it.” Greenberg moved from the chair.

  Mr. Kiku nodded. “I know. Sometimes I just check ‘disapproved’ on all the odd-numbered ones.”

  “Feeling better?”

  “Ready to spit in his face. What’s a snake got that I haven’t got more of?”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “Dr. Morgan is very adept. Try him sometime if your nerves ever act up.”

  Greenberg grinned. “Boss, the only thing that bothers me is insomnia during working hours. I can’t sleep at my desk the way I used to.”

  “That’s the earliest symptom. The mind mechanics will get you yet.” Mr. Kiku glanced at the clock. “No word from our friend with the animated hair?”

  “Not yet.” Greenberg told about the qu
arantine for the Ariel and what he had done. Mr. Kiku nodded, which was equivalent to a citation in front of the regiment in some circles; Greenberg felt a warm glow and went on to tell about the revision in the order for Lummox. He sidled up to it self-consciously.

  “Boss, sitting in that chair puts a different slant on things.”

  “So I discovered, years ago.”

  “Um, yes. While I was there I got to thinking about that intervention matter.”

  “Why? We settled it.”

  “So I thought. Nevertheless…well, anyhow…” He blurted out his change in the order and waited.

  Mr. Kiku nodded again. He considered telling Greenberg that it had saved him thinking up a face-saving way of accomplishing the same end, but decided not to. Instead he leaned to his desk, “Mildred? Heard anything from Dr. Ftaeml?”

  “Just arrived, sir.”

  “Good. East conference room, please.” He switched off and turned to Greenberg. “Well, son, now for some snake charming. Got your flute with you?”

  CHAPTER VI

  “Space Is Deep, Excellency”

  “DR. FTAEML, this is my associate, Mr. Greenberg.”

  The Rargyllian bowed low, his double knees and unhuman articulation making it an impressive rite. “I know the distinguished Mr. Greenberg by reputation, through a compatriot who was privileged to work with him. I am honored, sir.”

  Greenberg answered with the same sort of polite amphigory the cosmic linguist had selected. “I have long wished for the boon of experiencing in person the scholarly aura of Dr. Ftaeml, but I had never dared let the wish blossom into hope. Your servant and pupil, sir.”

  “Hrrump!” Mr. Kiku interrupted. “Doctor, this delicate affair you are negotiating is of such importance that I, with my constant housekeeping chores, have not been able to give it the close attention it demands. Mr. Greenberg is ambassador extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the Federation, commanded for this purpose.”