L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02

by Nagasaki Vector

  “Thanks for nothin’! I done kept mself pinna Intacta, even when I was a seventeenth-century pirate. ’Sides, I got other problems.” Which I did: the Telecom was filled with shiftin’ kaleidoscopic patterns. “Georgie, is it really you?” I squeaked.

  As if they hadn’t done enough already, Deejay an’ Ool-oorie were off doin’ more scientific stuff, everything appearin’ under control now at maison Bear. The lady physicist—the human lady physicist’d duly received the equalizer frammis Denny an’ Edna’d been too late cornin’ after. The cavalry’d lost Edna in the construction-mess underground where Win’s Interworld Terminal’s gonna be someday.

  “Gee, Bernie,” a sexy but disembodied voice replied, “who else could it be?”

  I felt real bad about Edna makin’ her escape but was too rushed t’give it much thought. Another ’com screen catty-comer to the first was bein’ occupied by the assistant Deejay’d put in charge of repairin’ my timepiece. He was familiar-lookin’ as all get-out, yet I couldn’t place him. Funny-lookin’ gink—big thick glasses, hairless dome shaped like a lightbulb. Kept askin’ for details about the fission-powered watch.

  Prob’ly coulda figured where I’d seen him before, but the tattered remnants of m’concentration were on this voice claimin’ t’be Georgie, an’ there were wounded t’take care of, as well: me, in a small way; Will Sanders most seriously; Spin. Even Win was carryin’ a red-dyed Kleenex—musta opened up that wine-bottle cut between his fingers again. I saw him lookin’ at the blood an’ shakin’ his head. Prisoners t’think about, too. An’ I had an epistemological puzzle on toppa that.

  Georgie.

  “How do I know it’s you?”

  I hadda ask: the weird-lookin’ assistant watched from one screen as, on the other, colors swirled, coalescin’ into a sunlit grove of trees at the edge of endless meadows, the breezes fresh as they stirred the knee-high grasses. She stood beneath a spreadin’ oak, my beloved, a songbird warblin’ in the leafy—

  “/ believe you, Georgie. Cut it out!" The girla my heretofore very private dreams grinned conspiratorially as the imaginary camera’s viewpoint zoomed toward a face as lovely as any I’d seen in the Confederacy. An’ a whole lot more familiar.

  “It really is me, Bernie!” Her big blue eyes shone ecstatically. “I can hardly believe it myself!” I didn’t like the way Deejay’s bottle-washer ogled her.

  “Neither can I, sugar.” What was that unaccustomed warmth risin’ in m’ears? Musta been Fran’s antiseptic. “But we ain’t got time for philosophizin’ over it now. Tell us where they’re keepin’ ya.”

  That stopped all incidental conversation in the room. Every eye turned toward her screen—’cept for Denny’s. He was in no condition. I tried not t’gloat.

  “It’s horrible, Bernie. I don’t know! A big corrugated metal building. I haven’t had any inertial references since we crashed in those mountains. No windows. Somebody used my Emergency Drive, but I can’t tell how far or in what direction.”

  I turned my attention to the shiny-pated assistant physicist. “Forget that watch a minute, Mac. How come, if we can talk t’Georgie on the ’com, you can’t just triangulate on her signal an’ track her down?”

  “Mac?” he blinked confusedly. I realized suddenly he was the only bald guy—besides m’self—I’d seen here. An’ so damned familiar! “Captain Gruenblum, this question better suited you are than am I to answer. Your vehicle into the lower-probability universe misnomered ‘Little Bang’ her signal radiates. Thus, from all directions propagated it appears, when into this continuum it emerges.”

  Grammatical or not, he was right. Georgie routes her radio communications through subspace t’beat the light barrier. “Y’got me, Mac—whaddya say your name was?” “Was — and still is—Associate Professor Doctor Himschlag von Ochskahrt.”

  “Mother,” I groaned, “I think I need a rest! Himschlag von... well, I reckon if the Confederacy’s got its own John Wayne—pardon me, Mike Morrison an’ Billy Mitchell...” “Bernie.” Now she really sounded scared. "Please tell me what to do!”

  “Bemie’ll come getcha, baby. Relax. What’s happenin’ at your end now?”

  “That awful Heplar is in my workroom building something.”

  “Figures.” Hadda minute’s trouble integratin’ the idea of this cute little wisp of a girl havin’ a machine-shop down inside her. Reality was gettin’ slipperier every time I turned around in this place.

  “Cromney’s on the control deck,” she continued. “I’m being real careful so he won’t know.. .but that’s Denny Kent, right there!”

  Her eyes went to the mess on the floor as Mary-Beth sprayed plastic on what little m’.45’d left of its leg. Win leaned back against the coffee table, played out. Georgie mighta been only the figment of a computer’s imagination, but her eyes were wide with real horror. Kent moaned his way back t’semiconsciousness.

  “How about it, you low-life son-of-a-test-tube? Where you hidin’ my, er...ship?” I stepped forward, intendin’ t’put a foot where his knee usta be. Already looked like a broken porcelain crock fulla strawberry jam.

  The Confederate Ochskahrt took one look, turned green, an’ vanished from the screen.

  “Bemie!” Mary-Beth raised a defensive hand. “He’s been hurt badly enough. Broken arm, incompetently set. I don’t know what this bandage across his nose is for. I’m afraid to look. And the ugliest bruise on his chest...” She reached inside his jacket, extractin’ a twenty-third century Perma-Note binder. There was a neat hole halfway through the paper-thin metal plates which served as erasable pages; buried about page 55, a 230-grain .45-caliber bullet, its conical nose blunted by impact. She shook her head. “I wish Clarissa were awake. When is that ambulance coming?”

  Kent groaned again an’ stirred.

  I looked down at him in contempt, thinkin, oddly enough, about Cuthbert. “The one good thing you can say about scum—it keeps worse things from risin’ to the top.” I toed the notebook where Mary-Beth’d laid it on the carpet. “Don’t press your luck, Kent! Tell me where m’Georgie is, right now, or I’ll center my next shot better!”

  “Please don’t... hurt!” He gasped. “Wasn’t my fault ... Edna made me.. .please don’t, please!”

  A cheerful thought occurred t’me: mebbe he had a coupla broken ribs. “I ain’t gonna hurtya, creep. I jus’ think we oughta fix your other knee so’s you’ll match! Win, y’wanna hold him so I don’t muff the shot this time?”

  “Later.” The detective sighed tiredly. He set the broken ’com pad halves on the coffee table behind him. They’d likely saved his life. He leaned over t’make sure little Spin was comfortable on a couch-cushion where the other aliens continued t’commiserate.

  “Ask me!” Will demanded. “I want a piece of this!” Fran grinned savagely.

  “Really!" Mary-Beth stood straddlin’ Kent, put her hands on her hips, an’ somehow looked the bunch of us straight in the eye at the same time. “I resent being forced to defend this... this person; you all know perfectly well you haven’t any real intention of—”

  “Anything!” Kent bleated. “Just don’t.. .please!”

  Will clumped over, took his senior spouse gently by the hand; put a finger to his lips. “Yes, dear, but what good is a bluff if you’re going to spoil it before it pays off? Okay, Denny, nobody’s going to hurt you. Where are you hiding Bemie’s ship? What have you people been up to all this time?”

  Kent moaned painfully. “I was never really cut out for.. .I’ll tell.. .drink, may I?” I hustled him a glass of water, not wantin’ t’cut what I hoped was his dyin’ confession short. “I’m glad—at least for me—it’s over. At last I’m free of her!”

  He weren’t exactly the articulate type, our Denny. But then, he never had been. Cooperatin’ hard as he could, it took all of us a couple hours altogether just t’get a story outa him you coulda told in fifteen minutes. Don’t think he managed t’string together a single whole coherent sentence the entire time.

&nbs
p; Breedin’ will tell.

  “It’s immaterial to me how long the boy goes on malingering.” Ab Cromney scowled. “It was largely his incompetence which brought us to this lamentable condition. Now he’ll pay for it by sleeping on the floor of the lounge with young Heplar!”

  The leader of the would-be hijackers paced back an’ forth, furious. Sourin’ blood an’ vomit-gas—not to mention a paira stiffs he couldn’t get rid of—had made the passenger deck below mostly unusable by now. Too much for Geor-gie's systems to absorb, ’least right away.

  Edna didn’t answer. She coulda pointed out that Denny’d taken a slug which rightfully belonged t’Cromney; that Denny’s bein’ fortuitously in the way when the bulkheads’d slammed shut—an’ receivin’ thereby a busted wing-—had given them access to the weldin’ equipment which’d eventually yielded control of the ship.

  Credit where credit was due wasn’t little Edna’s department.

  “Naturally, my dear, you may share the pilot’s sleeping compartment with me, if you...well, it was merely a thought.”

  She put away her manicure scissors an’ smiled a smile that woulda shriveled the nads offa the Marquis de Sade.

  “I’m going below to see if there’s something we can make another weapon out of.”

  She glanced significantly at the bandages on Cromney’s shredded hand as if t’say that Denny hadn’t any monopoly on incompetence. “Watch him—I think that arm’s beginning to infect, and we may still need him. Too bad a liberal arts degree doesn’t include first aid.”

  Cromney nodded absent agreement. They needed Denny Kent for exactly the same reason Arab women got t’walk four paces aheada their husbands in wartime—mine fields.

  “I’ll have young Helpar look after him in his copious free time. You’re absolutely certain that the drugs—” “Will burn him out completely if we use them any more!” She had to exert a conscious effort not to scream at the old fool. “I’m going below.”

  Without a further glance at the partially-conscious Kent, Cromney wandered into the control room where Rand Heplar fiddled ineffectually with the panels, as he’d been doing for some hours.

  “Any success, my boy?”

  Heplar turned toward his new-found leader, wondering somewhere deep inside if he hadn’t made a mistake, loy-alties-wise. “Without the field-density equalizer, there is nothing I can do. So many fail-safe circuits..His heavy eyebrows knitted together an’ merged into his hairline. “Why I’d have to dismantle the entire ship to reroute around half of them. Bad engineering, sir, typical. Another fundamental failure of technology. You were right.”

  Well, that felt a little better, both of them thought.

  To Cromney, the bridge was an indecipherable montage of dials an’ gauges. “Perhaps if you were to tell me what does work?”

  “There’s the AutoDestruct,” Heplar said, incapable of the irony those words mighta conveyed cornin’ from somebody else. “Various viewscreens and proximity alarms. And the Emergency Escape Drive. I—”

  “Well, why can’t we use that?"

  “Because it really is for last-ditch emergencies. One brief burst—only a microsecond or so, not long enough for field-integration to become a problem. Spatiotemporal displacement in a totally random direction. And you can only use it once.”

  There was a momentary silence. Belatedly, Heplar snapped the safety-covers back over a dozen arming switches. “I don’t know what to do! I don’t even know where we are!”

  He explained t’Cromney the anomalies involvin’ Georgie' s digital calendar an’ the deserted wilderness which now surrounded them, adding that the astronomical evidence— computer-observed positions of the stars an’ planets—agreed that the ship was right about what time it was.

  “At least,” Cromney observed in a manner he mighta termed “philosophically,” “we’re rid of Gruenblum and those disgusting little—”

  “Don’t count on it, sir. You don’t know how he feels about this collection of nuts and bolts we’re sitting in. A real machine-fetishist, if there ever—sonofabitch!”

  “What is it?” asked Cromney.

  “Look at this screen! Here, I’ll step up the magnification!”

  Outside, high above, a silvery thrummin’ object hovered in the fog an’ rain. It banked steeply; the pair on the control deck below could make out a fur-covered rider, wearin’ a ten-gallon hat an,’ gunbelt.

  “Where in God’s name are we?” Heplar stifled a whimper—an’ the secret wish that his Captain were here t’tell him what t’do.

  “What’re you caterwauling about now, Rand?” Edna stood in the bulkhead doorframe, a rapidly-modified laser-welder clutched in her long-nailed fingers. The edges of her shoes were stained an ugly brownish-red.

  “It would appear we have company,” Cromney answered for the stunned copilot, trying to sound unalarmed. “Take a look at this screen right—”

  “Uh-oh!” interrupted Heplar, borderin’ on hysteria. “The ground, too! We’re surrounded!” Hands unsteady, he played nervously with the switch-cover on the Emergency Escape Drive. He pointed to a dial: “The magnetometers say they’re heavily armed! What should I do?”

  Edna sneered. “Doesn’t this bucket have any firepower of its own?” She held her welding torch more closely, stole a glance back at Denny lying half-conscious by the upstairs airlock door.

  What a shame, she thought, that men were such unreliable tools. Heplar seemed utterly beyond the reach of her usually-dependable sexual allure. This made him uncontrollable, and it frightened her a little.

  Perhaps he was a eunuch.

  Cromney, of course, possessed no such disability, nor immunity, but he was a feeble old man. Worse, he actually seemed to have ideas of his own.

  She’d just have to hold on to poor Denny a while longer. She sighed, remembering with what served her for sentiment how he’d originally been a dominating figure, accustomed to liking it rough, even reputed to have seriously injured a fragile coed or two-—and covered it up afterward with plenty of his family’s money. Edna liked it rougher—he’d been so appealingly perplexed! Well, he wasn’t much, but he was all she had to work with.

  There was a muted clink as Heplar flipped the switch-cover back. “We have force-fieids and meteor-defenses”— he answered a question Edna had forgotten asking—“but I’m afraid to use them on the ground, because—sweet Jesus, those are gorillas out there, and they’ve got guns!”

  Perhaps it was a lifetime of unconscious slave-holder’s guilt which filled Heplar with mindless terror at the thought of simians without electronic controls-—and armed. The flying-machine made another pass, and then a grim-faced Bemie Gruenblum rose outa the fog like Hamlet's daddy, right in fronta the main video pickups.

  “That’s all!” Heplar screamed three octaves above his normal voice. “I’m going to—”

  "No, Rand!" Edna shouted.

  “Heplar, no!"

  BRRRAAAAMMM-SSSLLLAAAMMM! roared Georgie, an’ when Heplar, Janof, Cromney, an’ the already badly-battered Denny Kent returned to consciousness, the strange wild mountains’d been replaced by an even stranger prairie, rollin’ from horizon to horizon.

  They picked themselves up. They dusted themselves off. Only one casualty this time: Denny had a broken nose.

  Some small amount of time’d passed while Cromney’s crew was enjoyin’ a well-deserved oblivion. Outside, a nasty crowd was gatherin’—half a hundred chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, an’ humans, dressed in a wildly-colored variety of dungarees, armed not only with pistols but with pitchforks, rakes, an’ hoes, an’ buzzin’ like a swarma angry bumblebees.

  Incongruously, the open field Georgie'd landed in was crowded, fence-to-fence, with thousands, mebbe tens of thousands, of antique Early American hardwood rockin’ chairs.

  Rockin’ chairs?

  CLONG! A chimp thumped Georgie with an oddly-shaped cultivator. Through the outside pickups, mention could be heard of lynchin’. An’ not in a nice way.

  Edna l
ooked down at her semiconscious partner.

  “Denny,” she said, starin’ through the airlock bull’s-eye, “Somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  A large white bulbous hovercraft with red markin’s’d pulled up on Win Bear’s rubber-covered driveway. Its several an’ divers doors were open, empty spaces gapin’ on the racks inside where the driver’d grabbed the tools of his trade.

  Inside the house, an orangutan in medical greens, the circled cross on his shoulder matchin’ the enameled ones on his car, had spread instruments an’ supplies all over the livin’-room carpet.

  He scratched his auburn head. “Some pardy youse guys’re t’rowin’. All dis blood an’ gore, an’ not one funny hat, noise-maker, or balloon! Well, it’s a Free System, iddn’t it?”

  The detective wasn’t amused. “Cut the standup routine, will you, Chiang, and get on with the malpractice. I’m in the middle of a case, and I’ve got suspects on the loose.” Weary, he shook his head an’ settled heavily on a sofa while the orang looked t’Denny Kent.

  "Well, Winnie, I’da been here sooner,” the pumpkin-colored simian said, “iffen I hadn’t hadda stop at the comer of Spencer an’ Confederation—some kinda shoot-em-up inna Unnerground. But dem guys from Acme Ambulance beat me to it.”

  So Edna’d carved another notch on her pistol-grip. Probably somebody careless enough to’ve gotten in her line of escape. Despite his diction, the orangutan seemed preter-naturally skillful, his big clumsy-lookin’ fingers flyin’ as they tucked an’ patched an’ stitched.

  It was decided not t’move the would-be hijacker, hospitals bein’ few an’ far between in the Confederacy, owin’ to the advanced state of technology that allowed folks t’get well at home. By mornin’, Kent would be removed t’gaol. Probably the same cell I’d had.

  Win heard the verdict an’ waved a tired hand in assent. Will an’ I got checked out, too. The medico hadn’t the faintest idea what t’do for Spin, but the little guy, backed up by his buddies, insisted he was feelin’ better already. I dunno—when I was a kid in Pecos, I’d had a big pet turtle’d gotten squished that way. Never seemed quite the same after.