Pan Satyrus

by Richard Wormser

  "Don't call him mister."

  "He's a pilot, ain't he? Ill stand guard an' see nobody talks to him till the security guys get here from shore."

  Pan Satyrus rocked on his knuckles, lifting his feet up from the deck. He really didn't care how long this went on. It was a lot more pleasant here than back at Cape Canaveral.

  The admiral said, "How did you know the security men were coming, Chief?"

  Pan sympathized with Ape Bates, who looked as though he would like to scratch his head, a feeling Pan knew quite well, from being tied down in space capsules and pressure chambers and speed sleds. The Chief was clumsy answering. He said, finally, "Well, at lu — at dinner, Pan said he fixed his spaceship so's it would go faster'n light. I figgered that signal you got said about that, and to keep guys away from the spaceship. And not to let no one talk to Mr. Satyrus.

  That'd be a pretty good secret weapon, going faster than light."

  The admiral nodded. His face was just a normal red now. "Trust an old chief," he said. He cleared his throat. He said to the lieutenant, "It's your vessel, Captain."

  The lieutenant said quickly, Take another volunteer with you, Chief. Admiral, we have coffee in the wardroom."

  "Radioman First Class Bronstein, volunteer," Chief Bates said.

  As Happy and Ape walked towards him, their faces very serious, the admiral and the skipper and the doctor went inside or below, or wherever men go on a ship.

  The j.g. was dismissing the parade.

  The two keepers tossed the strait jacket into the helicopter and went in after it and shut the door.

  "Let's all go down to Ape's quarters, Pan," Happy said. "I couldn't promote anything to drink, but I got some lemonade and cookies up in the radio shack."

  They strolled across the emptying deck. Pan said, "That will do very nicely. Is that admiral crazy, Ape?"

  "If he wasn't before, he's a step closer now. How'd you like that crack about calling you mister cause you was a pilot? You gotta go to college to steer a plane in this lashup."

  "I don't think I like the admiral at all."

  "Pay it no heed, pal. It's the chiefs run the Navy."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Security: (3)…a document giving the holder the right to demand and receive property not in his possession…

  Webster's New International Dictionary, 1920

  They were very happy in Chief Bates's quarters. Pan was learning that there was a funny thing about talking; when you got into conversation with a man, you forgot, after a while, how very different and peculiar looking men were, and they began to look like chimpanzees to you.

  Of course, Ape Bates had had a good start, though he really looked a little more like a gorilla, a very young gorilla.

  They didn't talk about the spaceship and the adjustments Pan had made in it. They steered way away from security matters. Ape told about how drunk he got once in China, and Happy told about a girl he had known in Villefranche, and Pan told them about the time a cageful of rhesus monkeys back at the zoo got into the keeper's whiskey bottle.

  "Really, you know, the sex life of the rhesus monkey is enough to empty the primate house on a good Sunday," he said. "Or fill it, depending on the kind of crowd you're getting. But you ought to see them when they're drunk. My goodness."

  "Like seamen in San Diego after a long cruise," Happy Bronstein said.

  "I've never seen that," Pan admitted. "Maybe I will, if I ever get out of government service. There's a very nice zoo in San Diego."

  "I never got four blocks off the waterfront there," Ape said. "I missed a lotta opportunities in my time."

  "And you always will," Happy Bronstein put in. "You've been a sailor too long, You could put into any port in the world, and never get three blocks off the farm. That's what we call the stretch along the docks," he added to Pan.

  Ape said, "Well, yeah, chiefs lead a funny life-Taking orders from any guy with the right ring on his finger. And, you know, I never met a chimp before, but I thought about 'em, believe it or not. I mean, there's something lousy about strapping a guy on a sled and seeing how fast he can go before he busts a blood vessel. Or like they, did to you this morning. That stinks."

  Happy Bronstein opened the door of Ape Bates's cabin and bawled, "Pass the word for yeoman!" His voice echoed down through the ship. "I got an idea."

  Yeoman First Class Dilling must have run all the way. The other petty officers so seldom wanted to talk to him that he felt as though he'd been in orbit himself. He burst in, "Yeah, Happy, Ape?"

  "What's the book on keeping a mascot?" Happy asked.

  "Discretion of the skipper," Dilling said, and stood there.

  "Thanks," Ape said. And when nobody said anything more, the yeoman's face fell and he went away again. When the door was closed — secured — Ape said, "It might work."

  "You're bloody right," Happy said. "You ever know a skipper to turn down any reasonable request from the Chiefs' Mess?" Then he cleared his throat. "We wouldn't treat you like a mascot, Pan. But you can't enlist. They let you in, the first thing you know, the Navy'd be crawling with seven-and-a-half year olds."

  "Caroline Kennedy'd be a WAVE," Ape said.

  "Nice little girl," Pan said. "I met her once."

  "No foolin'," Ape said. "Yeah, I guess a guy in your position gets to meet all kinds of famous people. You wouldn't want to ship out on a DAC."

  "Is that what this ship is?" Pan asked.

  "Oh, Jesus," Happy said.

  The other two looked at him. "DAC's are secret," be said. "This is the prototype of the first one. They'd never have let Pan land here if they knew he could talk. Or have you been cleared and taken the loyalty oath and all?"

  The chimpanzee shook his head. "There really was never any opportunity."

  "Yeah. I can see that," Ape said.

  Feet beat a steel tattoo in the companionway; there was an official rap on the door. "The joint is raided," Happy said. "I can smell copper through a steel bulkhead."

  "You got the eddication," Ape said. He heaved himself off his bunk — he had given the two chairs which, as Master Chief Petty Officer he rated, to his visitors, and went to the door. "This cabin's under guard," he said.

  "FBI," a voice came back.

  Ape opened the door cautiously. A hand came through, holding a card; Ape bent and read it, and opened the door.

  Not one, but three cops came in. They all had cards in their left hands, guns in their right. They all wore tropical weight blue suits. They all looked pretty silly.

  The one from the FBI said, "I am Mr. Mac-Mahon. This is Mr. Crawford from NASA and this is Lieutenant Piquin from Naval Intelligence. If you men would leave us alone, we want to question this. this. Do you mind being called a chimpanzee?"

  "Certainly not," Pan Satyrus said.

  "If you'd rather be called a man—"

  "By no means."

  Special Agent MacMahon got a little red in the face. He looked from Happy to Ape and back again.

  "Sorry, mister," Ape said. "The skipper said we was to guard Mr. Satyrus here, and he's the boss on this ship."

  "That is correct," Lieutenant Piquin said, looking very efficient in his tropical weight suit.

  The NASA man, Crawford, said, "Well, Piquin, go see the captain and get him to countermand his orders. This is very high security."

  "These are not only my guards, but my friends," Pan said. "I don't know that I wish to talk to policemen, anyway. I'm not very fond of the law. When I was a very little chimp, not more than a year old, the police came and took away one of my very favorite keepers. He had been training the rhesus monkeys to distract the crowd on Sunday, so he could pick the men's pockets."

  "No matter how far uptown it is, rhesuses I gotta see," Ape said.

  Though Piquin had gone, the cabin was very crowded. Pan said, "I don't know too much about firearms, gentlemen, but I do wish you'd stop waving those around. For one thing, we'd all have more room if you'd put your hands in your pockets." He smiled, and
added, "Or I could swing from that pipe up there and give the floor space up to you."

  "Better not, Mr. Satyrus," Happy said. "That's a steampipe."

  "Thank you, Radioman First Class."

  Happy Bronstein smiled, too. It didn't alarm the security men nearly as much as Pan's smile had.

  Pan said, "Chief, offer your guests a seat, why don't you?"

  MacMahon and Crawford put their.38s away and sat down on the bunk. Piquin came back then. "The captain has given me the duty. The admiral concurs."

  "The duty?" Crawford asked.

  "The ape duty," Piquin said.

  "Chimpanzee," Pan Satyrus corrected, gently. "You wouldn't like to be called a mammal or a vertebrate, would you? Neither should I, and yet we all are, aren't we?"

  Piquin said, "All right, Chief, you and the radioman here are dismissed. Carry on."

  Pan Satyrus decided to roar. He did the one he had learned from television, the man-acted gorilla roar.

  Crawford leaped for the door and would have gotten it open, but it was too crowded in there; he couldn't get it open. Pan Satyrus reached out and picked him up and the tropical weight blue suit split up the back.

  "You see, gentlemen, I am a chimpanzee, and you are mere men," Pan said. "I could undoubtedly hug you all to death if I felt like it."

  "We have guns," Piquin said.

  Before he had finished the speech, Pan Satyrus, who was still holding Crawford by the back of the neck, plucked Crawford's gun from his belt holster with the other hand. He was a little too rough about it; Crawford's belt snapped and his trousers split down the back, just as his coat had. The NASA man looked as if he were going to cry.

  Pan Satyrus seemed to hold the gun correctly; he had seen a lot of television while his keepers passed the lonely night watch. Then he tossed the revolver through the open porthole, and said, "You won't shoot me, gentlemen. Not until I tell you how I made that spaceship go faster than light."

  Silence in the cabin. The gentle tropical waves lapped at the side of the ship.

  'You will go right on doing what I tell you to," Pan Satyrus said. "Isn't that right?"

  Not a word.

  "Isn't that what you're here for?" Pan Satyrus asked. "You, Crawford. Answer me, and stop trying to pull your clothes together. I'm naked, and I don't mind, why should you?"

  "You've got more fur," Crawford said;.

  Happy Bronstein strangled a cough. He had not been an enlisted man for as many years as Ape Bates, whose face didn't move a wrinkle.

  "That wasn't what I asked you," Pan Satyrus said. "Or, rather it was, but just rhetorically. What are you here for, Crawford?"

  "To find out how the Mem-sahib went as far as she did, as fast as she did," Crawford said. He was choking on his words. "When you blew the side-hatch out, you tore the controls loose."

  "No," Pan said. "I couldn't count on that. I put all the circuits back the way they were before I pressed the release button."

  "Why?" It was Piquin, in a refined wail.

  "You see," Pan said, "if men went as fast as I did, only the other way around, they would evolve into chimpanzees, or at least gorillas. And it's not a happy fife, gentlemen. Not at all a happy life in a primate house., You see, the zoo where I was born sold both my mother and me, when I was two and a half. To the government, gentlemen, for which you are happy to work, no doubt."

  "We're not here to listen to your life story," Mac-Mahon said. "You think an ape can blackmail the U.S. Government?"

  "As my friend, Happy, would say," Pan said, "you're bloody right."

  "Who's Happy?" Piquin asked, taking out his notebook. "Another chimp?"

  "By choice," Happy Bronstein said, softly.

  Ape said, "Gents, excuse me. Pan, where's your mother now?"

  "She died on a space sled in New Mexico," Pan said. He looked at Crawford. 'Working for NASA." Crawford dropped his torn trousers and forgot to pull them up again.

  They listened to the waves knocking G.I, paint gently off the side of the Cooke.

  MacMahon broke the silence. "Let's put it another way, Mr. Satyrus. Let me ask you. You seem to know a lot. From what you've heard, do you favor ' the Russian side of the cold war?"

  "Oh, no," Pan Satyrus said. "I don't favor any men at all. So far. Ape and Happy here seem very nice indeed, and Dr. Bedoian isn't half bad. But I'm tentative about men. Wouldn't you be, in my position?"

  Piquin put his notebook away.

  Pan Satyrus said, "I should like to go ashore. I give you my word as a chimpanzee that I'll go quietly, if my friends Happy and Ape here can go with me in the copter. No strait jackets, no tranquilizer pills."

  "Where are you going to find a pilot?" Piquin asked.

  MacMahon said, "Maybe one of these sailors can fly a copter."

  "Naw," Ape said, "we're enlisted men, not pilots."

  Pan Satyrus shrugged. As always, any movement made his muscles ripple rather alarmingly. He sighed, and that was a rather powerful thing, too, in the small, crowded cabin. "Then you'll have to take me in on this DAC," he said.

  Piquin came to life. "How did you find out this was a DAC? DAC's are top secret!"

  "You may not be a chimpanzee," Pan Satyrus said, "or even a gorilla. But you could try to use the brains that evolution gave you, couldn't you?"

  Piquin blushed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Distinct species present analogous variations.

  The Origin of the Species

  Charles Darwin, 1859

  The waterfront at Floridaville was crowded. For three hours the Cooke had been maneuvering, feinting for Miami first and then for Key West, and NBC and ABC and CBS were whooping it up in those cities, dodging from dock to dock, but me, Bill Dunham, I had been in the trade a long, long time, and I saved my mileage and used the money for a helicopter, and here I was at Floridaville, the only TV man on the spot, complete with my crew, and ready to go.

  Oh, there were a couple of newsmen, a local and an AP guy there, but let them have it. With any luck, I would be the first man ever to get a chimp to talk through his mike, and mister, that was money in my pocket. Let the other guys get the Emmies and the Peabodys; I love that cash.

  One of my crew had an ultra short wave radio and the other had a broadcast band, so we could hear what the opposition was up to. NBC had hit three bars, they had the admiral on, the one who had flown out to talk to the monkey and then had flown back again. CBS was kind of badly scooped; all they had was Brigadier General Billy Maguire saying nothing because he didn't know anything since the rocket had gone up. ABC had a good radio story, but no video; they had a man aboard the plane that was flying Dr, Aram Bedoian down to his favorite patient in Floridaville.

  So now the opposition knew where the story was. I guess they knew where I was, too, because our boy Tom Leiberg was filming the helicopter pilot I had hired; he'd gone back to Miami when I was through with him. The pilot said he saw the glint of gun barrels when he flew over the USS Cooke, but nobody had fired on him. What did he expect on the deck of a Navy ship, the rustle of triplicates?

  The Cooke didn't tie up at Floridaville. She was a long, rangy looking ship with a flight deck bulging her out like a thin woman in her eighth month. I don't see how she ever tied up to anything that didn't have a hole in the middle.

  I directed my cameraman to get every foot of the Cooke he could, and went on the air, interrupting Tom Leiberg's interview, which was getting pretty thin, anyway; the pilot hadn't even seen the monkey.

  So I described the Cooke, and then I got to tell how they were putting a motorboat over the side, and I found a cracker from Floridaville — the whole town had come down to the water when our mobile unit rolled in — who had been in the Navy, and he told me that was a whaleboat they were launching. So the Navy hunts whales on our taxes?

  "Three men are going over the side and down the rope ladder to the whaleboat," I told my breathless audience. "No, no folks. I'm wrong. Two men, and— whatya know — it's old Mem, the chimpona
ut himself, coming ashore."

  I thought that "chimponaut" was pretty good stuff. I've heard it since, and it makes me proud to know I added a good word like that to the English language.

  All the time I was talking, my cameraman held the whaleboat in his telephoto lens, and she came in fast. Then another boat was put over — the local Neptune said it was a workboat, which sounds better from the taxpayers' point of view — and a couple of sailors and two civilians and one guy I wasn't too sure of got in. I mean, I wasn't too sure of this guy, because he had on those light blue Navy dungarees, but no cap. You can't tell the armed services without their hats.

  The whaleboat came in and then turned and right angled to us and cut its speed, and we got a beautiful shot of the chimponaut trailing his hand in the water, like an old-fashioned picture of a lady in a canoe.

  So the workboat came in first, and one of the sailors threw a rope up around a gizmo on the dock, and jumped up, and helped the three passengers up. They all pulled guns when they got on the dock, and one of them yelled, "Are the local police here?"

  We got that, and we got a shot of a chubby Florida cracker showing a badge pinned to his suntan shirt and saying, "I'm them," and then the guy who had spoken showed a card, and said, "I want all these people cleared away."

  The workboat was going back to the ship.

  The chimp had pulled his hand in and was wiping off the salt water on the fur on his chest. He hadn't gotten in for a close shot yet, moreover a close-up, but I'd caught him at the Cape that morning, getting into his capsule, and shaking hands with his doctor — those monkeys are all hams — and I knew what he'd look like. Which is not much, you ask me. There's not enough contrast in a chimp's face to make him photogenic, for my money.

  I know Hollywood uses them, but I'll bet they make them up. When the doctor got there, this Bedoian, I'd ask him if he'd put makeup on old Mem's kisser. I wasn't going to do it myself. I'd seen those arms and those teeth.