The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  “I’m beginning to be very interested in what you tell me,” Jepson said. “So say some more.”

  “You’re not mad any more, Jep?”

  “I’ve said unkind words. So? Maybe I’m entitled. Let us now say that interest has overcome my unhappiness. You sure your uncle didn’t plan this little job?”

  Swimmer shook his head. “Uncle Amino wouldn’t take any part of action like this. He’s cubed. No, this was mine. After our—you know—I was on the shorts. I figured to do this one for the ready and cut you in because … well I owe it to you. You’ll get your bundle back with interest. And this is a job with style, Jep. The Mars diamond—impossible to cut. But we cut it.”

  “And who’s to believe?” Jepson said. He nodded. “You think this gal of your Uncle Professor’s can do it?”

  “I ran into Uncle Amino up in Long Beach. He was there buying equipment when the Russian ship made port and the Mars diamond was big news. Uncle Amino read this part about it being impossible to cut and he laughed. He said his gal could cut it into a watch fob for Premier Sherdakov if she wanted. That’s the first I knew about the gal and about the machine working. He’s been keeping it pretty secret, as I explained. Well … what he said, I questioned my uncle; he was serious. This stone-age gal can do it. He insists she can.”

  Jepson nodded. “If he says this cutter can do it, perhaps … just perhaps, mind you, we could do business. It don’t go until I see for myself, though.”

  Swimmer allowed himself a deep sigh. “Well, naturally, Jep.”

  Jepson pursed his lips. “I tell you a thing, Swimmer. You ain’t done this entirely outa kindness for me. You heist this rock, you maybe start an international incident, but you ain’t got no way to get the rock outa Mexico.”

  Swimmer stared at his feet, suppressed a smile. “I guess I didn’t fool you a bit, Jep. I have to get the rock up north. I have to get the cutter away from my uncle and I need a place where she can work. I need organization. You have organization.”

  “Organization is expensive,” Jepson said.

  Swimmer looked up. “We deal?”

  “Seventy-five and twenty-five,” Jepson said.

  “Ahhh, Jep! I was thinking fifty-five, forty-five.” At the look in Jepson’s eyes, he said: “Sixty-forty?”

  “Sharrup before I make it eighty-twenty,” Jepson said. “Just be glad you got a friend like me who’ll help when you need.”

  “There’s a few million bucks in this thing,” Swimmer said, fighting to keep the hurt and anger from his voice. “The split’s—”

  “The split stands,” Jepson said. “Seventy-five and twenty-five. We don’t argue. Besides, I’m nuts even to listen to you. Every time you say dough I buy trouble. This time, I better get some of my investment back. Now, you go out and tell Harpsy to slip the dolls some coin and send ’em packing. We gotta concentrate on getting this rock over the border. And that is gonna take some doing.”

  II

  The chalet nestled furtively wren-brown within the morning shadows of pines and hemlocks on a lake island. The lake itself was a sheet of silvered glass reflecting upside down images of the island and a dock on its south shore. Two airboats had been brought up under the trees and hidden beneath instiflage netting.

  Seated in shadows above the dock, a man with a blast-pellet swagrifle puffed nervously on an alerto cigaret. Two other men, similarly armed and similarly drugged to eye-darting sensitivity, patrolled the island’s opposite shore.

  The sounds of an argument could be heard coming from within what had been the chalet’s dining room and now was a jury-rigged workshop. It was only one of many arguments that had consumed considerable time during the past five days of harried flight northward from Mazatlan.

  Swimmer, for one, was sick of the arguing, but he knew of no non-violent way to silence his uncle. Things were not going at all as he had planned. First, there had been the disconcerting discovery that a Mexican boy had identified him from mug files as the man who had walked out of the water wearing a normal business suit (permadry) and gill mask and carrying a “white rock.”

  Jepson’s organization had smuggled Swimmer over the border concealed in a freight load of canteloupes. One of the canteloupes had been hollowed out to hold the diamond.

  Next, Swimmer’s uncle—alerted by the front-page hullabaloo—had absolutely balked at cooperating in anything his wayward nephew wanted.

  Jepson had lost his temper, had given terse orders to his boys and here they all were now—somewhere in Canada or northern Minnesota.

  Arguing.

  Only one of the dining room’s occupants had failed to participate in the arguments. She answered to the name of Ob (although her own people had called her Kiunlan, which translated as Graceful Shape).

  * * *

  Kiunlan-Ob stood five feet one inch tall. Professor Amino Rumel’s lab scales had placed her weight at one hundred twenty-seven pounds nine ounces. Her blue-black hair had been drawn back and tied with a red ribbon. She had a low forehead and large, wide-set blue-gray eyes. Her nose was flat and with large nostrils. Both chin and mouth were broad, the lips thick. Fifteen welted red scars down the left side of her face told the initiated that she had seen fifteen summers and had not yet littered. A simple brown pullover dress belted at the waist covered her heavy-legged body, but failed to conceal the fact that she had four breasts.

  This feature had first attracted Swimmer’s fascinated attention. He had then noted her hands. These bore thick horn callouses over palms and fingers and along the inner edges of the fingers—even occasionally on the backs of the fingers, especially around the nails.

  Ob stood now beside a bench that had replaced the chalet dining room’s table. One of her hands rested on the back of a high stool drawn up to the bench. The Mars diamond lay on a cushioned square of black velvet atop the bench. The stone’s milky surface reflected a faint yellow from the spotlight hanging close to it on a gooseneck.

  As the argument progressed, Ob’s attention shifted fearfully from speaker to speaker. First, there were many angry noises from Gruaack, the super devil-god who was called Proff Ess Orr. Then came equally loud and angry noises from the big stout devil-god called Jepp, the one whose eyes blazed with the threat of unknown terrors and who obviously was superior over all the others in this place.

  Sometimes there were softer sounds from the smaller creature who had accompanied the devil-god Jepp. The status of this creature was not at all clear. He appeared to Ob to be vaguely human. The face was not at all unpleasant. And he seemed to share some of Ob’s fears. She thought perhaps the other creature was a human snared like herself by these terrible beings.

  “Yes, she’s a genius at shaping stones!” Uncle Professor blared. “Yes! Yes! But she’s still a primitive creature whose understanding of what we want is definitely limited.”

  He paced back and forth in front of Ob and the bench, a bald, skinny little man trembling with indignation.

  Thieves, assassins, kidnappers, he thought. How could Conrad have become associated with such a crew? Coming on him in his lab that way, crating his equipment without a by-your-leave and spiriting him off to this remote place.

  “You through yakking?” Jepson asked.

  “No, I am not,” Uncle Professor said. He pointed to the diamond on the bench. “That … that is no ordinary diamond. That is the Mars diamond. Turning such a priceless stone over to…”

  “Sharrup!” Jepson said.

  Creeps with their stupid arguments, he thought.

  * * *

  Uncle Professor glanced at his nephew. There’d been some bad moments during the past few days of their furtive journey. Again, the Professor wondered about nephew Conrad. Could the boy have been deceived by Jepson? The man was a criminal and that obviously was where all his money came from—all the money provided to develop the time machine. Was it possible this Jepson had dragged poor Conrad into this nefarious scheme through some terrible threat?

  In a quiet voice, Je
pson said: “Did you or didn’t you tell your nephew the Swimmer here that your gal could cut this Mars rock?”

  “Yes, I said that; I said she could cut any stone, but…”

  “So awright. I want she should cut.”

  “Will you please try to understand?” the Professor pleaded. “Ob undoubtedly can cut your stone. But any idea of facets and deriving the maximum brilliance from a given gem—this probably is outside her understanding. She’s accustomed to functional artifacts, to simpler purposes in her…”

  “Simple, Schmimple!” Jepson snarled. “You’re stalling. What’s it, huh? D’you lie about this dame? Alla stories I ever see ’bout creeps like her, the guys did the stone cutting and the dames sat around caves hiding from tigers they got teeth six feet long.”

  “We’re going to have to revise our previous hypotheses about stone-age divisions of labor,” the Professor said. “As nearly as I can make out from Ob, women made the tools and weapons while the men did the hunting. Their society was matriarchal with certain women functioning somewhat like priestesses. Cave Mothers, I believe it would translate.”

  “Yeah? I ain’t so sure. What about them things?”

  “Things?” The Professor peered at Jepson with a puzzled frown.

  “She’s got four of ’em!” Jepson barked. “I think you’re trying to pass off some freak as…”

  “Oh,” the Professor said. “Four, yes. That’s very curious. About one in fourteen million human female births today demonstrate a condition of more than two mammaries. Heretofore, there’ve been three major hypotheses: one, mutation, two, absorbed sibling, and three, ahh … throwback. Ob is living proof of the third case. Multiple births were more frequent in her time, you see? It’s quite simple: females were required to suckle more infants. A survival characteristic that gradually disappeared as multiple births declined.”

  “You don’t say,” Jepson growled.

  “George was particularly elated,” the Professor said, “since he had maintained the third case.”

  “George? Who is George?” Jepson demanded.

  “My associate, Professor George Elwin,” the Professor said.

  “You didn’t tell me about no George,” Jepson said. “When I was sinking all that loot in your stupid machine, there wasn’t no George around. Who’s he, your new mark?”

  “Mark?” The Professor glanced at Swimmer back to Jepson.

  Swimmer tried to swallow in a dry throat, sensing how near Jepson was to a violent explosion of rage. Swimmer found it odd that his uncle couldn’t see the danger.

  “I don’t really see where my associate is any concern of yours,” the Professor said. “But if…”

  “How many people know about that time machine—” Jepson pointed to the large crate in the corner behind him—“and about this Ob dame?”

  “Well you know, of course, and…”

  “Don’t get smart with me, creep! Who knows?”

  * * *

  The Professor stared at him, aware at last of the suppressed rage. Professor Rumel’s mouth felt suddenly dry. Criminals such as this could be most violent—murderously so, at times.

  “Well, aside from those of us here in this room, there are Professor Elwin and very likely two or three of George’s assistants. I didn’t impose any special strictures of secrecy other than to suggest we’d wait for the complete investigation before publishing our…”

  “How come this George?” Jepson demanded.

  “Well, my dear sir, someone with the proper training had to go to Northern France and seek the archeological authentication. Inevitably, there will be cries of fraud, you know.”

  Jepson screwed his face into a puzzled frown. “Archeo … What’s this Northern France bit?”

  The Professor’s face came alight with the glow of a man launched on his favorite subject. “You may not know it, Mr. Jepson, but paleolithic artifacts bear markings that are, in some respects, as distinctive as the brush-strokes of a master painter. Now, under strictly controlled archeological conditions, we’re seeking some of Ob’s work in situ—where she originally made it.”

  “Yeah?” Jepson said.

  “You see, Mr. Jepson, as nearly as we can determine, Ob came from the region just east of Cambrai in Northern France. This is something more than an educated guess. We have several pieces of evidence—a scrap of obsidian which Ob—you see how I got her name … my little joke: Ob for obsidian … well, this piece of obsidian she carried on her when we picked her up is of a type common in the region we’ve selected. There was also plant pollen on her person, types of clay soil in the mud on her feet and a photograph of the background landscape which we took as we snatched Ob from…”

  “Yeah,” Jepson said. “So only a few of us know about her.”

  “Quite,” the Professor said. “I’m sure you can see why we decided to delay any publication and prevent idle speculation. Nothing destroys the essential character of scientific endeavor more than Sunday supplement romanticizing.”

  “Yeah,” Jepson said. “Just like you tol’ me.”

  “And there’s the ethical problem,” the Professor said. “Some people may question the morality of our bringing this human being out of her natural habitat in the past. I, personally, incline to the theory that Ob’s timestream diverted from ours at the moment of her removal from her—and our—personal past. However, if you…”

  “Yeah, yeah!” Jepson barked.

  Keerist! he thought. The old creep could yak all day about nothing. Big words! Big words! Didn’t mean a thing.

  III

  Swimmer looked from one to the other and marveled at the low level of communication between his uncle and Jepson. The Professor might just as well be talking to Ob for all the sense he was making. Swimmer fingered the gill mask in his pocket, thinking of it as a back-door way of escape should things get completely out of hand here.

  “As I was about to say,” the Professor said, “if you consider the equation of historical interference as one element of your total…”

  “Yeah!” Jepson exploded. “That’s very interesting. But what I wanna know is why can’t I show this Ob dame a rock and say I want some other rock cut likewise and such and so? She could do the thing like that, ain’t it?”

  The Professor sighed and threw up his hands. He’d thought he’d penetrated Jepson’s strange jargon, conveyed some of the problems to the man, but not a bit of it appeared to have gotten through.

  “Din’t you say she was an expert?” Jepson demanded.

  “Given time,” the Professor said in a patient, long-suffering tone. “I do believe Ob could make one of the finest diamond cutters in the world. We’ve a few industrial diamond chips in the lab and part of our examination of her involved seeing what she could do with them. She needed no more than a glance to see the natural cleavage lines. No fumbling or mistakes. Just one practical glance. But I wish to warn you—the measure of her understanding may be seen in the fact she thought the diamonds too hard for practical purposes.”

  “But she worked them rocks okay?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “Did she have any better tools than we got here?” Jepson motioned to the rack at the rear of the bench, the cutter’s vice clamped to one end.

  “Not as good.”

  “She know how to use them tools?”

  “She has a natural tool sense and she’s quite awed by our equipment. She’s an intuitive worker. You might say she lives the stone. Indeed, she appears to project ideas of life and animism into the stones she works.”

  “Yeah,” Jepson said. “So let’s get busy.” He turned and studied Ob.

  * * *

  She lowered her gaze under the pressure of that stare from the angry devil-god. Ob felt she understood what was wanted of her. She had a much better grasp of the language than she had permitted the devil-gods to suspect. The training imparted by her Cave Mother fitted well here: “When dealing with devil-gods and spirits, give them the obedien
ce and subservience they demand. But dissemble, always dissemble.”

  A pang of homesickness shot through her and her lower lip trembled, but she suppressed the emotion. A female trained to the cave-motherhood and the creation of living tools did not give way, even before devil-gods. And there was work to do here, creation for which she had been trained. Beyond her understanding of the devil-gods’ words, there were much more direct ways of divining their desires. They had brought her into the presence of their wondrous tools and they had set up the stones as for a sacrifice. The stone was one of the difficult, very hard ones, and its grain had been criss-crossed and twisted by unimaginable forces. But Ob could see the points of entry and the manner in which the work should progress.

  “Tell her what she should do,” Jepson said.

  “I refuse to have any more to do with this,” the Professor said.

  Swimmer blanched.

  “Nobody,” Jepson said in a low, cold voice, “but nobody refuses what I say do. You, Uncle Professor, will get across to your cutter dame what it is she should do. You will do this or I will permit you to watch my boys cut up your creep nephew here into exceedingly small pieces. We wouldn’t want the fishes should choke while they are disposing of him. Do I make myself plain?”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” the Professor said. But even as he spoke he sensed that Jepson would indeed dare. The man was a criminal monster … and they were at his mercy.

  Swimmer stood trembling. Now, he regretted ever having started this exploit. The gill mask in his pocket was useless. Jepson would never let him get off this island alive if there were the slightest upset in his plans.

  Grudgingly, the Professor said: “Just what is it you want me to do, Mr. Jepson?”

  “We been through all that!” Jepson snarled. “Get your dame started on this rock. The big-domes say it can’t be cut. So let’s see her cut it.”

  “It’s on your head,” the Professor said.

  “Yeah,” Jepson said. “So do.”

  * * *

  Swimmer took a deep breath as the Professor turned toward Ob. It was obvious to Swimmer now that Jepson had plans of his own concerning the cutter dame. The Mars diamond was merely a preliminary. Swimmer suspected he shortly would have no place in Jepson’s plans. And people who had no place in Jepson’s plans sometimes disappeared.