The Vortex Blaster

by Edward E Smith

  Before the girl could answer, however, Joan Janowick came strolling in.

  “Is this a private brawl, or can anybody get in on it?” she asked, gaily.

  “I invited myself in, so I’ll invite you, too. Come in and sit down.” He made room for her beside him and went on in English, speaking for her ear alone: “Just as well you don’t know spaceal. This story Vesta is telling would curl your hair.”

  “Wake up, Junior.” Joan did not speak, but poured the thought directly into his mind. “D’you think that cat-girl—that kitten—can block me out of her mind?”

  “Oick! What a whiff! ’Scuse, please; my brain was out to lunch. But you’ll get an earful, sister Janowick.”

  “It’ll be interesting in a way you haven’t thought of, too,” Joan went on. “Vegians are essentially feline, you know, and cats as a race are both fastidious and promiscuous. Thus, conflict. Is that what this is about?”

  “Could be—I haven’t tried to read her.” Then, aloud:

  “Go ahead, Vesta. Did the experience help you decide?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m too finicky to be a very good mixer. There’s just too damn many people I simply can’t stand the smell of.”

  “There’s that smell thing again.” Thlaskin said. “You’ve harped on it before. You mean to say you people’s noses are that sensitive?”

  “Absolutely. No two people smell alike, you know. Some smell nice and some just plain stink. F’rinstance, the boss here smells just wonderful—I could hug him all day and love it. Doctor Janowick, too, she smells almost like the skipper. You’re nice, too, Thlaskin, and so is Maluleme, and Nadine. And Tommie ain’t bad; but a lot of the others are just too srizonified much for my stomach.”

  “I see,” Cloud said. “You do give some people a lot of room around here.”

  “Yeah, and that’s what got this chick I was telling Thlaskin here about in such a jam. She’s been bending her elbow pretty free, and taking a jab or so of this and that between drinks. But she ain’t sozzled, y’understand, not by many a far piece; just lit up like Nyok spaceport. She’s maybe been a bit on the friendly side with a few of her friends, so this big bruiser—not a Vegian; no tail, even; an Aldebaranian or some-such-like and a Class A-Triple-Prime stinker—gets interested in a big way. Well, he smells just like a Tellurian skunk, so she brushes him off, kind of private-like, a few times, but it don’t take, so she finally has to give him the old heave-ho right out in front of everybody.

  “‘You slimy stinker. I’ve told you a dozen times it’s no dice—you stink!’ she says, loud, clear, and plain. ‘This ship ain’t big enough to let me get far enough away from you to hold my breakfast down.’ she says, and this burns the ape plenty.

  “‘Lookit here, babe,’ he says, coming to a boil. ‘Bend an ear while I tell you something. No klevous Vegian chippie is going to play high and mighty with me, see? I’m fed up to the gozzle. So come down off your high horse right now, or I’ll…’

  “‘You’ll what?’ she snarls, and puts a hand behind her back. She’s seeing red now, and fit to be tied. ‘Make just one pass at me, you kedonolating slime-lizard,’ she says, ‘and I’ll bust your pfztikated skull wide open!’

  “He goes for her then, but, being a Vegian, her footwork’s a lot better than his. She ducks, sidesteps, pulls her sap, and lets him have it, but good, right behind the ear. It takes the ship’s croaker an hour to bring him to, and the skipper’s so scared he blasts right back to Vegia and the croaker calls the hospital and tells ’em to have a meat-wagon standing by when we sit down.”

  “A very interesting and touching tale, Vesta,” Cloud said then, in English, “but pretty rough language for a perfect lady, don’t you think?”

  “How the hell else…” Vesta started to reply in spaceal, then switched effortlessly to English: “How else can a lady, however ladylike she may be, talk in a language which, except for its highly technical aspects, is basically and completely profane, obscene, vulgar, lewd, coarse, and foul? Not that that bothers me, of course…”

  Nor did it, as Cloud well knew. When a Master of Languages studied a language he took it as a whole, no matter what that whole might be. Every nuance, every idiom, every possibility was mastered; and he used the language as it was ordinarily used, without prejudice or favor or emotional bias.

  “…but it’s so pitifully inadequate—there’s so much that’s completely missing! Thlaskin objected before, remember, that there wasn’t any word in spaceal he could use—would use, I mean—to describe Maluleme as his wife. And my brother—Zambkptkn—I’ve mentioned him?”

  “Once or twice,” Cloud said, dryly. This was the understatement of the trip.

  “He’s a police officer. Not exactly like one of your Commissioners of Police, or Detective Inspector, but something like both. And in spaceal I can call him only one of four things, the English equivalents of which are ‘cop,’ ‘lawman,’ ‘flatfoot,’ and ‘bull.’ What a language! But I started to tell this story in spaceal and I’m going to finish it in spaceal. It’ll be fun, in a way, to see how close I can come to saying what I want to say.”

  Then, switching back to the lingua franca of deep space;

  “So that’s how come my brother got into the act. The hospital called the cops, of course, so he was there with the meat wagon and climbed aboard. He was all set to pinch the jane and throw her in the can, but when he got the whole story, and especially when she says she’s changed her mind about circulating around so much—it ain’t worth it, she says, she’d rather be an out-and-out hermit than have to have even one more fight with anybody who smelled like that—of course he let her go.”

  “Let her go!” Cloud exclaimed. “How could he?”

  “Why, sure, boss.” Vesta, wide-eyed, gazed innocently at her captain. “The ape didn’t die, you know, and she wasn’t going to do it again, and he wasn’t a Vegian, so didn’t have any relatives or friends to go to the mat for him, and besides, anybody with one tenth of one percent of a brain would know better than to keep on making passes at a frail after she warned him how bad he stunk. What else could he do, chief?”

  “What else, indeed?” Cloud said, in English. “I live; and—occasionally—I learn. Come on, Joan, let’s go and devote the imponderable force of our massed intellects to the multifarious problems of loose atomic vortices.”

  On the way, Joan asked: “Our little Vesta surprised you, Storm?”

  “Didn’t she you? She had me gasping like a fish.”

  “Not so much. I know them pretty well and I used to breed cats. Scent: hearing—they can hear forty thousand cycles: the fact that they mature both mentally and physically long before they do sexually: some of their utterly barbarous customs: it’s quite a shock to learn how—‘queer,’ shall I say?—some of the Vegian mores are to us of other worlds.”

  “‘Queer’ is certainly the word—as queer as a nine-credit bill. But confound it, Joan, I like ’em!”

  “So do I, Storm,” she replied, quietly. “They aren’t human, you know, and by Galactic standards they qualify. And now we’ll go and whack those vortices right on their center of impact.”

  “We’ll do that, chum,” he said. Then, in perfect silence he went on in thought: “Chum? Sweetheart, I meant… My God, what a sweetheart you’d…”

  “Storm!” Joan half-shrieked, eyes wide in astonishment. “You’re sending!”

  “I’m not either!” be declared, blushing furiously. “I can’t—you’re snooping!”

  “I’m not snooping—I haven’t snooped a lick since I started talking. You got it back there, Storm!” She seized both his hands and squeezed. “You did it, and neither of us realized it ’til just this minute!”

  Chapter XIII

  GAMES WITHIN GAMES

  THE METHODS of operation of the Vortex Blaster II had long since been worked out in detail. Approaching any planet Captain Ross, through channels, would ask permission of the various governments to fly in atmosphere, permission to use high explosive, perm
ission to land and be serviced, and permission—after standard precautions—to grant planetary leave to his ship’s personnel. All this asking was not, of course, strictly necessary in his case, since every world having even one loose atomic vortex had been demanding long and insistently that Neal Cloud visit it next, but it was strictly according to protocol.

  Astrogators had long since plotted the course through planetary atmosphere; not by the demands of the governments concerned and not by any ascending or descending order of violence of the vortices to be extinguished, but by the simple criterion of minimum night-time ending at the pre-selected point of entry to the planet.

  Thus neither Joan nor Cloud had anything much to do with planetary affairs until the chief pilot notified Joan that he was relinquishing control to her—which never happened until the vessel lay motionless with respect to the planet’s surface and with the tip of her nose three two zero zero point zero meters distant, from the center of activity of the vortex.

  Approaching Chickladoria, the routine was followed precisely up to the point where Joan’s mechanical brain took over. This time, however, the brain was not working, since Joan was in the throes of rebuilding “Lulu” into “Margie.” On Chickladoria, then, the chief pilot did the piloting and “Storm” Cloud did the blasting, and everything ran like clockwork. The ship landed at Malthester spaceport and everyone who could possibly be spared disembarked.

  Ready to leave the ship, Cloud went to the computer room to make one last try. There, seated at desks, Joan and her four top experts were each completely surrounded by welters of reference books, pamphlets, wadded-up scratch-paper, tapes, and punched cards.

  “Hi, Joan—Hi, fellows and gals—why don’t you break down and come on out and get some fresh air?”

  “Sorry, Storm, but the answer is still ‘no’. We’ll need all this week, and probably more…” Joan looked up at him and broke off. Her eyes widened and she whistled expressively. “Myohmy, ain’t he the handsomest thing, though? I wish I could go along, Storm, if only to see you lay ’em out in rows!”

  For, since Chickladoria was a very warm planet—fully as hot as Tominga had been—Cloud was dressed even more lightly than he had been there; in sandals, breechclout, and DeLameter harness, the shoulder-strap of the last-named bearing the three silver bars of a commander of the Galactic Patrol. He was not muscled like a gladiator, but his bearing was springily erect, his belly hard and flat, his shoulders were wide, his hips were narrow, and his skin was tanned to a smooth and even richness of brown.

  “Wellwell! Not bad, Storm; not bad at all.” One of the men got up and looked him over carefully. “If I looked like that, Joan, I’d play hookey for a couple of days myself. But I wouldn’t dare to—in that kind of a get-up I’d look like something that had crawled out from under a rock and I’d get sunburned from here to there.”

  “That’s your own fault, Joe,” a tall, lissom, brunette lieutenant chipped in. “You could have the radiants on while you do your daily dozens, you know. Me, I’m mighty glad that some of the men, and not only us women, like to look nice.”

  “Wait a minute, Helen!” Cloud protested, blushing. “That’s not it, and you know it. These fellows don’t have to mix socially with people who run around naked, and I do.”

  “And how you hate it.” The other man offered mock sympathy, with a wide and cheerful grin. “How you suffer—I don’t think. But that holster-harness. It looks regulation enough, but isn’t there something a little different about it?”

  “Yes. Two things.” Cloud grinned back. “Left-handed, and the holster’s anchored so it can’t flop around. Don’t know as I ever told you, but ever since that alleged pirate burned my arm off I’ve been practising the gun-slick’s draw.”

  “Did you get it?” Joan asked impishly. “How good are you?”

  “Not bad—in fact, I’m getting plenty good,” Cloud admitted. “Come on up to the range sometime with a stop-watch and I’ll show you.”

  “I’ll do that. Right now—shall we?”

  “Uh-uh. Can’t. I’m due at the High Mayor’s Reception in twenty minutes, and besides, I want to breathe some air that hasn’t been rehabilitated, rejuvenated, recirculated, reprocessed, repurified, and rebreathed until it’s all worn out. Happy landings, gang—I’ll be thinking of you while I’m absorbing all that nice new oxygen and stuff.”

  “Particularly the stuff—and especially the liquid stuff!” Joe called after him just before he shut the door on his way out to join Thlaskin and Maluleme.

  Going through customs was of course the merest formality, and an aircab whisked them into the city proper. Cloud really did enjoy himself as he strode along the walkway from the cab-park toward the Mayor’s…well, if not exactly a palace, it was close enough so as to make no difference. And he did attract plenty of attention. Not because of his dress or his build—most of the men on the street wore less than he did and many of them were just as trim and as fit—but because of the nature and variety of his bodily colors, which were literally astounding to these people, not one in twenty of whom had ever before seen a Tellurian in person.

  For Chickladorians are pink; pink all over. Teeth, hair, skin, and nails; all pink. Not the pink of red blood showing through translucency, but that of opaque pigment. Most of their eyes, even—queerly triangular eyes with three lids instead of two—are of that same brick-reddish pink; although a few of the women have eyes of a dark and dusky green.

  This visitor’s skin, however, was of a color so monstrous it simply had to be seen to be believed. In fact, it wasn’t the same color in any two places—it VARIED! His teeth were white; a horrible, dead-bone color. His lips, hair, and eyes—funny, round, flat-opening things—were of still other sheerly unbelievable colors—there wasn’t a bit of natural, healthy pink about him anywhere!

  Thus the crowds of Chickladorians studied him much more intensively than he studied them; and Maluleme, strutting along at his side, basked visibly in the limelight. And thus, except for the two Chickladorians at his side and except for the unobtrusive but efficient secret-service men who kept the crowding throng in hand, Cloud could very well have been mobbed.

  The walk was very short, and at its end:

  “How long we got to stay, boss?” Thlaskin asked, in spaceal. “As soon as we can get away we want to join our folks and grab a jet for home.”

  “As far as I’m concerned you don’t need to stay at all, or even come. Why?”

  “Just checking, is all. His Nibs sent us a special bid, so we got to at least show up. But he don’t know us from nothing, so after we tell him hello and dance a couple of rounds and slurp a couple of slugs we can scram and nobody’ll know it unless you spill.”

  “No spill,” Cloud assured him. “You dance with Maluleme first. I’ll take the second—that’ll drive it in that she’s here. After that, flit as soon as you like. For the record, you’ll be here until the last gilot is picked clean.”

  “Thanks, boss,” and the three, entering the extravagantly-decorated Grand Ballroom, were escorted ceremoniously up to the Presence and the Notables and their surrounding V.I.P.’s.

  They were welcomed effusively, Cloud being informed through several different interpreters that he was the third-most-important human being who had ever lived. He made—through two interpreters, each checking the other’s accuracy—his usual deprecatory speech concerning the extinguishment of loose atomic vortices. He led the Grand March with the president’s wife, a lady whose name he did not quite catch and who, except for a pound or so of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other baubles, was just as bare as Maluleme was. So was the equally heavily bejeweled mayor’s wife, with whom he had the first dance. She was neither young nor slender, nor was she sexy. Then, as agreed, he danced with Maluleme, who was—but definitely!—all three.

  However, as he circled the floor in time with the really excellent music, he thought, not of the attractive package of femininity in his arms—who was one of his crew and Thlaskin’s wife—but of
Joan. She’d been training down, he’d noticed, and wearing more makeup, since those other girls had come aboard. She was getting to be a regular seven-sector callout—he’d like to dance with Joan this way!

  There were other dances; some with girls like Maluleme, some with women like Madam Mayor, most with in-betweens. There was food, which he enjoyed thoroughly. There were drinks; which, except for ceremonial beakers of fayalin with the president and the mayor, he did not touch. And, finally, there was the very comfortable bed in his special suite at the hotel. Instead of sleep, however, there came a thing he expected least of any—a sharp, carefully-narrowed Lensed thought.

  “This is Tivor Nordquist of Tellus, Commander Cloud, on my Lens,” the thought flowed smoothly in. “I have waited until now so as not to startle you, not to make you show any sign of anything unusual going on. There must be no suspicion whatever that you even know there’s a Lensman on the planet.”

  “I can take care of my part of that. One thing, though; I’ve got exactly one week to work with you. One week from today any possible excuse for me staying on Chickladoria goes p-f-f-t.”

  “I know. One day should button it up, two at most. Here’s the print. I’m a narcotics man, really, but…”

  “Oh—Fairchild, eh?”

  “Yes. Ellington told me you’re quick on the uptake. Well, all leads to him via any drug channels fizzled out flat. So, since all these zwilnik mobs handle all kinds of corruption—racketeering, gambling, vice, and so on, as well as drugs—we decided to take the next-best line, which turned out to be gambling. After a lot of slow digging we found out that Fairchild’s gang controls at least four planets; Tominga, Vegia, Chickladoria, and Palmer III.”

  “What? Why, those planets cover…”

  “Check. That’s what made the digging so tough, and that’s why they did it that way. And you’re scheduled for Vegia next, is why I’m meeting you here. But to get back to the story, we haven’t got dope enough to find Fairchild himself except by pure luck. So we decided to make Fairchild’s mob tell us where he is.”