“The whiz kids and computers back on Earth say that there’s at least a nineteen percent chance,” Crenshaw said jovially. “Bunch of wishful thinkers, aren’t they? Concentrate on getting Blok out. Any other havoc you cause while you’re there is pure profit. Given your talent for creating mayhem, I figure you’ll convince the Macdonalds that if there is a Vampire Master Race, it’s nothing to mess with.”
I asked Catarina, “You have any idea how we’re going to get out of this alive?”
“Just remember, shorty,” Crenshaw cautioned, “you’re doing this for truth, for justice, for peace and eternal fellowship in the galaxy, and I forget how the rest of it goes.”
“Why do I feel like this is PBS pledge week?” I thought for a minute. “What can I tell my crew?”
“Nothing. They’re not cleared for it.”
“That settles it.” I decided to see what would happen if I tried to avoid getting killed for a change. “Catarina and I may have volunteered to go off on suicide missions, but I can’t drag my crew into this blind. Count me out.”
“Ken—” Catarina said.
I didn’t wait for her to finish. I’ve learned to move quickly when the situation demands it, and I headed for the door before Crenshaw could twist my arm, either figuratively or literally. As I emerged into the saloon, the bartender caught me by the elbow. “Senhor, I am so very sorry. We have not a single bottle of mineral water in the house with a cap on. Have a beer instead.” He grimaced as if the words were being pulled out of him with tongs. “On the house.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but I’m in a hurry and-—”
His eyes narrowed. “You refuse my kind offer. You disdain my kind offer.” He raised his voice. “You perhaps don’t like our beer, senhor?” Several persons in the vicinity began eyeing me.
“Well, it’s not that I don’t like beer—”
“Then you will drink!” He raised his fist. “To Brasilia Nuevo!”
The crowd repeated it. Like a lot of colonial worlds, Brasilia Nuevo would be severely underpopulated if they made potential immigrants pass intelligence tests. It’s also one of those places where Diogenes would have been well-advised to ditch his lamp and walk around with a floodlight chained to his wrist. Smiling cordially, I drank.
Discovering I was allergic to something or other in the beer, I promptly threw up. I gather it would have been safer to spit on the local flag.
Next to Detroit, Newark, and Washington, D.C., Brasilia Nuevo is the most heavily armed society in the galaxy, and people here have the habit of firing guns in the air to celebrate special occasions like birthdays, funerals, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Fortunately, the police arrived within four or five minutes to form a human wall and escort me off into protective custody.
Unfortunately, my stock plummeted when they found Catarina’s spray paint in my pocket. Rio’s hoosegow proved to be less than desirable; having been in several jails since becoming acquainted with Catarina, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. The local vermin weren’t nearly as cute as the rats you find most places, and the little red eyes glaring out at me made me feel unwelcome. Catarina appeared about an hour later.
“Is this one of those good news, bad news sorts of things?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What’s it going to cost to get me out of here?”
“That’s the bad news, I’m afraid. One of the people you threw up on was an alderman. Also, the locals have a well-developed and possibly well-deserved inferiority complex. The local beer is about the only thing they have to be proud of, so it assumes religious significance in the local culture.”
She paused to allow me to digest this. Colonial planets tend to be provincial. On many of them, drinking beer is the most popular form of recreational activity. On some of them, it’s the only form of activity.
“After the police took you away, the crowd in the bar formed themselves up into a lynch mob.” She shrugged. “I bought a few rounds, so it’s likely to be three or four days before they navigate from there to here, but I don’t think the municipal government is going to let me bail you out.”
“Hmmm,” I said.
She looked around my cell. “The place could use some wallpaper. Lots of company?”
“The constabulary mentioned that they like to nibble on your toes if you fall asleep, but otherwise they’re fairly harmless.” I asked hesitantly, “What was the good news?”
“Lydia and I followed you out, and after she finished chortling, I talked her out of court-martialing you. She offered her good offices in getting you sprung, although she recalled both of us to active duty and made me promise to keelhaul you if you act up again. She says we can tell our crew everything except Dr. Blok. Would you consider reconsidering?”
“I assume you’ve already briefed and polled our shipmates. How many of them voted to come along?”
“All of them, although Wyma Jean’s cat deserted.”
I exploded. “They all want to come? For heaven’s sake, what a bunch of idiots! Of course, they’d have to be to work for us.”
“True. Most spacers don’t like to work for people with communicable diseases, like difficulty with cash flow. Anyway, we’ve already received an offer through the Macdonald consulate, and Bunkie jacked them up to twice standard rates in real money, half in advance. We can sign the contract and start loading whenever you want.”
“Okay. When can I get out of here?”
Catarina pulled a chocolate bar out of her purse and handed it to me through the bars. “You’ll be out in no time.”
Observing the guards nudging each other, I was not unduly surprised to find a hacksaw blade stuffed inside the wrapper.
We caught a shuttle, thoughtfully laid on by Lydia, up to Rio’s little space platform, where my purser, Bunkie Bunker, and my supercargo, Harry Halsey, were scurrying trying to load the stuff the Macdonalds wanted shipped and locate things that might pay for us to carry on our own account.
Bunkie is a diminutive ex-yeoman we stole from the navy who will undoubtedly end up as CEO of a very large company if she ever gets serious about a career and quits hanging around Catarina and me. Harry, who could pass as the “after” photo in a steroid commercial, is also ex-navy, but the navy asked him to leave. He usually tells people that a supercargo is a kind of space cadet, and they believe him. He sold his bar on Schuyler’s World to give me some much needed working capital, and on Schuyler’s World, where bouncing drunks is considered an art form, I’ve been told by people interested in that sort of thing that he practically invented the cross-body headlock toss, which makes him very good at helping Bunkie negotiate contracts on planets like Brasilia Nuevo.
After signing where Bunkie told me to sign, I went back to check on the cargo the Macdonalds had waiting. Finding that they hadn’t committed any overt violations of Confederation law, we took on seventy pallets and about a hundred tons of industrial solvent through the four-centimeter tubing that extends from Brasilia Nuevo’s space platform to a ground station just outside Rio. Because it’s bad luck to have industrial solvent sloshing around trying to dissolve the hull, we did so carefully, and I hoped that Rio’s station master would remember to clean out the hose before somebody tried shipping flour.
This accomplished, I went back to see how Catarina was making out back in Stores. “How are we doing?”
“We’re stocked up and almost ready to roll.” She smiled impishly. “I bought some fresh fish for dinner tonight.”
I stopped to peer into a little tank where Mr. Fish and several family members were lethargically swimming around. “How do you plan on fixing it?” I asked, tumbling into her trap.
“You like tempura. How about some battered cod?”
“Sure,” I said thoughtlessly.
“Okay.” She pulled out a fish and tossed him into my arms. “Smack him around.” It took several seconds to register, after which the fish and I both started gasping for oxygen.,
“I know I shouldn
’t bait you, but think of it as my squid pro quo for getting you out of jail,” she explained.
“I’m eel-equipped to handle this sort of thing,” I countered, hoping that somebody would suspend her poetic license.
“Reel-ly, Ken. You’re floundering.”
Minnie, one of our two Rodent watch-standers, appeared, sparing me further piscatorial torment. Minnie is an attractive young member of her species, which means she looks something like an upright schnauzer. “Friend Ken, sir, the manifest checks, payment cleared, and Rosalee says we’re ready to rock and roll.”
Generally speaking, IPlixxi* are friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful, thrifty, less than completely truthful, and thoroughly irreverent. They resemble furry bowling pins, and they shed, which is hell on drains aboard ship. The ones who deal with humans adopt human names. Our friend, Bucky Beaver, the current Poobah occupying !Plixxi*’s Semi-Sacred Cushion, named himself after the principal character in a popular set of children’s stories, while our two, who were selected from among his nieces and nephews and stand about twentieth in the line of succession, picked “Minnie” and “Mickey.” While no one is quite sure what the IPlixxi* did for amusement before they encountered mankind, I for one would be very interested in finding out.
“Uh, thanks, Minnie. Ask the port master if we can shove off in half an hour.”
“Sure thing.”
As she waddled off, I complained to Catarina, “What happened to a brisk salute and ‘Aye-aye, captain, we’re ready to lift ship’?”
Catarina wiggled her nose. “I think it stopped about the time they took ‘Tere Simms: Queen of the Space-ways’ off the air.” The fish was adjusting to the situation better than I was, so she popped him back in the tank and we went forward.
I sent off a quick message to Catarina’s friend, Father Yakub, on Schuyler’s World. If anyone has a private pipeline to the Big Guy in the Sky, it’s Father Yakub, who runs a surprisingly successful mission to Schuyler’s World’s numerous feebleminded. Father Yakub has done some heavy-duty praying on our behalf in the past, and I figured a little more might not hurt. Then I joined my other three watch-standers, Rosalee Dykstra, Clyde Witherspoon, and Wyma Jean Spooner, on the bridge.
Rosalee, a journeyman spacer, is a large woman who reads Kant and Hegel for pleasure and wrestles cops and medium-sized crocodilians for fun. Clyde and Wyma Jean are still apprentices. Clyde is a former navy criminal investigation undercover agent with an undercover agent’s taste in clothing, while Wyma Jean, blond and buxom, has been making up for an underloved and unhappy childhood with a vengeance.
As we watched Brasilia Nuevo fade into the distance, Wyma Jean observed, “If ships like ours stopped operating, planets like this would be cut off from civilization. Of course, it might be a while before people here noticed.”
Catarina had the second watch, and I had the third. Minnie and Mickey were still fairly new on board. As we approached our black hole for the run to Alt Bauemhof, Catarina and I introduced the two of them to the joys of high-speed maneuvering in a lumbering old freighter, just in case.’
Mickey proved an apt pupil. “Friend Ken, Minnie and I greatly appreciate the honor you have done us by consenting to make us part of your crew,” he commented as he practiced cutting power in to the side impellers.
“Uh, sure.” The fact that his uncle Bucky was footing his salary out of the Royal Privy Purse may have influenced my decision just a little. “How did you guys pick the names Minnie and Mickey anyway?”
“After careful consideration, we concluded that the names ‘Florence Nightingale’ and ‘Horatio Nelson’ were a trifle pretentious. As Bucky says, ‘When the humble and lowly cry out for bread, give them cake to eat.’ “ “Uh, right. Uh, how is the cabin working out?”
“We are very happy with our accommodations. You should not worry so, friend Ken.”
The Scupper’s eight cabins are laid out in pairs separated by a central living area. Rosalee Dykstra had installed them in the cabin opposite hers, which left the other six cabins for me and Catarina, Harry and Wyma Jean, and Bunkie and Clyde. Two humans cooped up together like that would have killed each other in about a week, but Minnie and Mickey seemed to be doing fine.
“You two spot any new surprises from the rebuild team?” The Rodent engineers who fixed up the Scupper, bless their furry little hearts, thought of spaceships as big toys that people let them play with.
“No, friend Ken. The gold-plated shower heads seem to be the last such extravagance, although admittedly they have a pleasing aspect which helps to assuage the monotony of space. Do you know, friend Ken,” he said, looking straight at me, “when I was a mere pouchling looking up at the stars at night, I would often dream of traveling among them. I find that actually fulfilling this dream intoxicates me with joy.”
“Uh, right.”
Mickey’s delicate muzzle quivered. “Perhaps I should not say this, but it has always been a goal of our species to prove ourselves worthy junior partners of humanity in its quest to bring enlightenment to the universe. I earnestly hope that Minnie and I will meet with your full approbation in this endeavor.”
“Uh, right.”
When the Contact/Survey Corps reached IPlixxi*, Mickey’s great-grandfather was the semi-hereditary ruler of a medium-sized principality. A budding John Rockefeller, he quickly learned enough English to flimflam the Contact boys out of a “small” industrial development loan which enabled him to unify the planet by buying out the competition. The rest, as they say, was history. Since then, the brighter members of the family have gone into politics, while their less gifted brethren have mostly stuck to ordinary piracy.
Harry and Wyma Jean materialized on the bridge, arm in arm, and Wyma Jean leaned over the back of my chair. “Ah, Ken—stop tickling, Harry!—Ken, can I, ah—”
“No, I’m not going to trade watches with you. See if Rosalee is willing to switch. She’s probably in the galley.”
“Okay.” She kissed Harry with a loud smacking sound. “While we’re in the galley, do you want a piece of cake, sweet pea?”
“Only if you feed it to me, snookums.”
I coughed politely. “We’re having dinner in about an hour, so don’t spoil your appetites.”
Harry and Wyma Jean giggled and headed aft.
I looked at Mickey. “Why am I saying that? Either one could eat a horse in one sitting and come back for the saddle.”
“Actually, friend Ken, I am not quite sure why you are saying that.” Mickey twitched his whiskers. “Oh, I see, you are asking me a rhetorical question! But actually I thought that horses were quite large, and I understand that they use a great deal of wood and metal in making saddles. Perhaps Mr. Harry could, but I doubt Miss Wyma Jean’s abilities in that regard.”
“Look up ‘hyperbole.’”
“Oh! Certainly.” Mickey pointed his nose at me inquisitively. “Friend Ken, I have been meaning to ask you a question. I have been watching Harry and Wyma Jean for several weeks now without coming to a firm conclusion. Is behavior like that normal for humans?”
“Humans in love sometimes act like that. Of course, I’d be hard-pressed to say that Harry is completely human. Come to think of it, she and Harry have been cooing nonstop for four months now, which is amazing when you consider that Harry thinks an overnight relationship is long-term.”
“Oh.” Mickey paused to consider the implications of this. “What is love, friend Ken? I have read the definition in the dictionary, but it does not seem to apply.”
“That’s a tough one.” I thought for a minute. “When you do stupid things for someone you care about, and you do them anyway, knowing that they’re stupid— then you’re in love.”
“That does not make a great deal of sense.”
I nodded vigorously. “That’s the point.”
Mickey paused to digest this. “Is this more hyperbole, friend Ken?”
“No. Definitely not.”
Mickey let it ride. “Friend Ken, I have b
een meaning to ask why you humans originally decided to move out into space.”
“That’s another tough one. Some people wanted to rekindle the pioneer spirit by exploring strange new worlds—you know, to boldly go where no man has gone before—while other folks wanted to free themselves of the exactions of organized government without moving to a place like Arkansas. The Uniform Ancient Burial Sites Preservation Act probably had as much to do with it as anything.”
“What was this?”
“Well, the World Congress passed it to keep people from accidentally digging up old grave sites, but it’s pretty hard to find a spot on Earth where someone isn’t buried. After folks began filing lawsuits to keep anyone from building anything anywhere, most people said, ‘To hell with paying off Indians, let’s mess up some other planet.’ “
“Is this anything like being in love?”
“It’s similar.”
Mickey’s whiskers twitched. “Friend Ken, what is it like being a vampire?”
I thought hard for a moment. “It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s a strange feeling really—-to think that if you play your cards right, you might be humming along fifty years after most of the people you know are dead, and to know that half the people you run into think that you sleep in a coffin and suck blood out of people’s arteries. You’re constantly aware of a vast gulf that separates you from the rest of humanity.”
“It must be like being admitted to law school,” Mickey observed thoughtfully. “Friend Ken, I was wondering…”
“Yes?”
“As you know, humans brought the priceless boon of civilization to IPlixxi*.” He paused. “After seeing several human worlds now, I was wondering if perhaps we could return the gift by bringing the priceless boon of civilization back to humanity.”
“Let me think about that awhile.”
Clyde Witherspoon showed up a few seconds later to take over the board, so Mickey and I toddled off to Sunday dinner.
Sunday dinner is one of the few times we all get together, so after grace and the obligatory toast to the navy, I rapped the table for silence. “Okay, everybody. In a couple of days we’re due to arrive on Alt Bauemhof. I know there’s an element of danger here, but I also know that you all are dedicated professionals. I just wanted to say—”
The VMR Theory (v1.1) Page 2
