“No. At the close of last month, we had, net, one thousand two hundred twelve point seven more grams of gold than when we got here. Plus this place, free and clear. Plus household chattels, machinery, and T. Kettle Bubbles the Second—and four bicycles. Accrued taxes I’ve offset.”
“Sounds like a good balance sheet and a solid middle-class family.”
“Hilda, is that all you want? A good balance sheet?”
“Deety, while I get this pie into the oven, pour us some hard cider—there’s a quart in the fridge. Then we’ll sit down and find out what you want.”
Soon we settled down. Deety approached the matter obliquely. “Hilda, can you still spot Panki at a distance?’
“Using the perceptron?” I closed my eyes and thought about it. “I think so. Yes, I can. Why?”
“Uh, do you remember the toast we used to have at dinner every night?”
“The one to Hilda Jane and J. Z.?”
“No, no! Earlier than that.”
“Oh, the one in which Zebbie misquotes Cato.”
“Yes. Zebadiah used to say, ‘Panki’ must be destroyed!’ Pop would answer, ‘We shall return!’ You and I would say, ‘Hear, hear!’ How long’s it been since they’ve used that toast?”
“About a year, possibly more.”
“Four hundred seventy-two days. The day our tests came back positive they started toasting our new babies. We haven’t drunk to killing Panki since that day. They don’t mention the subject. Or does Pop talk about it to you?”
“No. But he thinks about it.”
“I feel sure Zebadiah does, too. Hillbilly, someday soon our menfolk are going to want to leave on a Panki hunt.”
“Deety, do you expect me to stop them?”
“No, no! But I’m going along, I am!”
“Are you expecting me to babysit our kids?”
“Why, Aunt Hilda! Do you think I’d do that to you? Why do you think I asked whether or not you could still spot Panki? But you’re out of practice; I think we should go to Prime Base so that Worsel can give you a refresher. But I wouldn’t put up with your being left behind! If you really want to go, I mean; I’m not trying to persuade you. But I’m going, I am!”
“Deety, you know what they’re going to say.”
“Certainly I know! Zebadiah will look solemn and Pop will shake his head sadly and Zebadiah will say sternly that you and I can’t go … because we have babies to take care of. Nevertheless I’m going—I’m going to kill Panki!”
“Deety, I’m not trying to dissuade you. But what do you plan to say when I say that I’m going, too? Who does take care of our kids?
“You and I.”
That was the right answer but Deety girl startled me with it; I hadn’t realized that she had thought it through. “Good! Hon, I said a long time ago that I am no more willing to walk the widow’s walk than you are. I’m glad to learn that you see where that leads … for I am no more willing to have our kids orphaned than you are. All right, when we go—if our men agree and I expect them to be stubborn—all of us go. We live or die together. You and I can expect to change diapers every hour on the hour. But that’s not hard. Just bounce high enough, or even put down on our picnic island. However—I think our men are going to balk. You can expect a massive case of sulks while they try to wear us down.”
“Aunt Hilda, how much do DeLameters weigh?”
She had startled me again. “I don’t know, I’ve never had one in my hand.”
“I’m as big as some Galactic Patrolmen and I’m a pretty good shot. If the grip of a DeLameter is too big for my hand, I’m sure LaVerne can modify one for me. Aunt Hilda, if you’ll spot Panki, I’ll kill them. I hate them. They bombed our pretty mountain home, they stripped all of us of everything we owned except what we could pack into Gay Deceiver, and five times they tried to kill us—when we hadn’t done anything! I’ve never forgotten it—I never shall! If I could see a way to do it, I would exterminate them, throughout the universes, to the last filthy Pankera. I can’t … but I can kill some of them … if you’ll help. You spot one, I’ll kill it!”
I can always tell whether Deety is happy or unhappy—but I sometimes guess wrong as to why; she’s a deep one. I had thought she was simply grimly determined not to be left behind. But during this fiery speech her nipples erected. Gentle Deety—possessed by blood lust … for green blood. I knew I felt that way—I hadn’t suspected that she did. I had thought she simply feared them.
I answered rather inanely, “Five times: not four?”
“Perhaps you forgot Logan.”
“No, I counted that. Your car—and Logan—and that ‘ranger’ I dissected—and bombing Snug Harbor.”
“You forgot that phony extradition.”
“Oh! So I did. They thought they had wiped us out. When they learned that Zebbie was still alive they tried to get him that way. Yes. Five separate tries.”
“After you take your refresher course from Worsel, Helium should be our next stop. To find out what happened. Cart may have information we can use.”
“Deety, you speak as though Jacob and Zebbie would agree to this.”
“If they don’t want to risk babies, let them stay home and babysit!”
I gasped, then chortled, and grabbed her. “Oh, Deety, you’re wonderful! Yes, dear, yes! While we’re away, they can join a bridge club—or roll bandages for the Red Cross. And hold a memorial service if we don’t come back.”
“Aunt Hilda, I’m not joking. If we can’t go because of kids, then it follows that they can’t go because they promised to take care of us. But it starts from a false premise. Back on Earth-Zero, it has been more than a century since war came packaged ‘For Men Only.’ Maybe there used to be a time when wars were neat and tidy, and women and children didn’t get hurt. But not in my lifetime, or even Pop’s. I know our husbands want to protect us and the kids at any cost, and I honor them for it. But one generation is as valuable as another, and men are as valuable as women. Oh, it’s different on Barsoom where swords are still real weapons. But change the weapons, and a computer programmer is more use in a war than a sniper is. I’m a programmer. I can shoot, too! I won’t be left out, I won’t!”
“Nor will Sharpie be left out.”
“You’ll do it?”
“We’ll all do it—all of us. But, Deety, let me do the talking. You’re a number-one computer programmer … but men aren’t computers; their minds aren’t logical. I’ll talk. You just agree with me and be stubborn.”
“I do that pretty well, too. ‘I’m stubborn,’ I am!”
That evening I put hard cider on the table. After coffee I raised my glass to Deety. “Panki must be destroyed!”
Deety stood up, clinked her glass to mine, and answered, “We shall return!”
Then the fight began.
XLVII
Zebadiah
Inever will understand women.
(Bless their strange hearts and twisty minds.)
Five years ago Jake and I were discussing, at every opportunity, how—or rather “how soon”—we could get Deety and Sharpie to agree to let Jake and me take another crack at Panki.
They jerked the rug from under us—and I found myself trying to explain why Jake and I couldn’t stay home and take care of our kids while they hunted Panki.
Before we knew it, they had us on the hip. Sharpie is the only one of us trained to sniff out Panki. Deety can do a far better job of teaching Gay a complex program than I can, and can set verniers as accurately as her father and faster.
Jake and I were forced to retreat to a previously unprepared position: all eight of us (now that more children had arrived) would go.
By now Jake and I had long since learned that their compromise with us gave the only satisfactory solution. We work best with all eggs in one basket. If all eight of us get wiped out—the human race goes on. But we are much less likely to get wiped out if we stick together.
But was it a “compromise?” Or did Sharpie hornswog
gle us by setting too high an asking price? I won’t pursue that question. That micro Machiavelli can out-talk me.
In our initial trouble with Panki we were always handicapped. Only good luck and fast footwork kept us alive. Something was trying to kill us; we didn’t know what or why. All we could do was run, abandoning everything we could not carry—bank accounts, homes, machine tools, libraries, established status, incomes, identities, even our home planet; all this was jettisoned to save our necks. We were homeless orphans … with an inflexible deadline and no way to meet it.
We didn’t have time to fight Panki. (But we never forgot!)
But in our return engagement all this was reversed. On New Earth (Analog-Earth-Teh-Axis-Thirty-Nine-Plus is too big a mouthful; in public we call it “Earth” as everyone else does: in private we say “New Earth” to distinguish it from our native planet, Earth-Zero)—on our safe and lovely adopted planet we are again solid citizens, money in the bank, more capital hidden away, a machine shop and lab in which Jake and I can cope with almost anything, from designing a can opener to refitting Gay Deceiver.
Even were we to lose all that, we still have three places of refuge: Prime Base where we are wealthy pensioners for life and where technology about three centuries ahead of New Earth is at our disposal, Helium where we are treated as visiting royalty and where General-in-Chief Hal Halsa is eager to fight Panki—and the gentle Land of Oz for rest and recreation.
Best of all we have time.
We are no longer running under the whip, no longer under a pressing biological deadline. We have our safe home base, with excellent medical and obstetrical care.
I should explain just how much time we have because it is confusing—even to me, long after it has become a routine fact of my life. All analog Earths out tau-axis and teh-axis experience duration along the t-axis, i.e., for each year spent on New Earth, a year passes on Earth-Zero, and on Earth-Tau-Ten … and on Barsoom, as it is part of Universe-Tau-Ten. These are parallel worlds, each separated from the next by one quantum along tau or teh. Like this: call the ordinates of Earth-Zero x°, y°, z°, and t°, then the coordinates of Tau-Ten (including Barsoom) are x'''''''''', y°, z°, and t°—the same space-time framework save that one spatial coordinate has been translated ten spatial quanta in a “direction” tagged “Tau-Plus.”
By the same notation, the coordinates of New Earth are x°, z°, and t°, but y''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' —or y39+.
Prime Base and the Lands of Oz are not parallel to Earth-Zero and New Earth; they are reached by rotation. They share the same duration coordinate, the one tagged “tau”—nevertheless they are not parallel worlds, as they share only one spatial coordinate.
This could go on through all the permutations of the Number of the Beast; I’ll drop it. The important point is that time spent in Oz or at Prime Base does not show on clocks or calendars at New Earth. One evening when our first babies were small, Hilda was getting dinner while Deety was changing diapers, and Jake and I had just showered and were ready for dinner. Deety finished her chores and said, “Hillbilly, I approve of babies … but unfinished human beings, noisy at one end and wet at the other, get tiresome. Let’s go to Oz.”
“All right. When?”
“Now!”
“I have a roast in the oven, Deety. Tomorrow, perhaps. If that suits our gentlemen.”
“Not me,” Jake answered. “I have a timed experiment running. Not sooner than next Wednesday.”
“Pop! Run that through again. If we leave now and stay three weeks, when do we get back?”
Jake looked thoughtful and blinked. “Hilda my love, get diapers and everything else you need. We’ll leave now. Zeb? Coming? Or do you prefer to stay here and batch it?”
“Do my own cooking when I can sponge on Glinda? Let’s go.”
“I’ll turn off the roast, Jacob. Diapers and baby powder and such I stocked in the car months ago.”
“Don’t turn off the roast. We’ll eat it when we get back.”
When we got back, about a month later—I lost track of the days—the kitchen clock showed that we had been gone four minutes; we had to wait while meat finished roasting. Even that four minutes had been spent on New Earth, manning the car, strapping down—then getting out of it and back into the house on our return.
The same applies to Prime Base. We can leave with breakfast dishes on the table, be gone for months, return and find the coffee still hot. But time spent in Oz counts as duration in Prime Base, and vice versa. If we alternate (are careful to do so), we do not show up either place while goodbyes are still echoing from our last visit.
But time spent in Helium or in hunting Panki along tau-axis shows as duration on New Earth. On our first return to Helium we took everything with us that we could not afford to lose, locked up tight, and arranged for our garden to be watered. A Panki hunt takes no such full planning; we are rarely away more than a few hours. What does take clock and calendar time is planning and preparing for one … unless that time is spent at Prime Base.
Once we spent a long time at Prime Base. I had lost my left arm (and almost my life) in a Panki raid. So I spent the next several weeks in Base Hospital while “Dr. Phillips” regenerated it. I won’t describe that raid; I behaved stupidly and am not proud of it. If Sharpie hadn’t known the pressure points to stop hemorrhage, if Deety hadn’t taken my seat at the controls while Jake handled verniers, if the Patrol had not helped, my stupidity would have cost my neck and possibly others. As it was, we were away from home less than an hour, and I had a brand-new arm.
With time to plan, we do. For three months Worsel devoted a part of his great, multiple brain to Hilda, while I discussed tactics with several Lensmen, especially “our” Lensman, Ted Smith, and discussed weapons, gadgets, and instruments with LaVerne and Jake—and Deety became a crack shot with DeLameters, which so surprised her coach (Carlos Fernandez) that he called in Port Admiral Haynes to show her off, let him see what she could do against surprise targets, some of which she was expected to hit, others of which she must instantly spot as “friendly” and not shoot. (Let me add that she surprised her husband. Will I ever really know my wife?)
Our first effort was reconnaissance. After Worsel got Hilda so sensitive that she could spot a Pankera in the dark at a couple of klicks, spot them by perceptron at twenty thousand klicks, search them out by spy ray even inside buildings or underground (tedious, time-consuming, and hard to keep the ray aimed at long range—but sometimes extremely worthwhile), able by direct vision to strip mentally the clothes off a crowd and point out any Panki hiding in it—after Worsel got her tuned to that sense of perception (no matter that Sharpie asserts that she doesn’t have a “true” sense of perception), after LaVerne Thorndyke fitted us out with more gadgets, plus an anti-radar coating ninty-nine percent effective—after all this, we started reconnaissance.
We did not go first to Helium; I ruled against it. “Astrogator honey, we now have the advantage over Panki that they once had over us. They lost track of us years ago. I think we are a forgotten incident, probably one of many, scratched out of their books. They don’t know we’re on the prowl—and we’ll keep it that way as long as possible. Even after we start hitting them, we’ll still keep it that way wherever and whenever possible. Strike by surprise, just as they struck us.”
“Hear, hear!”
“Yes, Sharpie, and you are a key factor. We’re not an invasion force; we mustn’t kid ourselves that we are. So we’ll hit-and-run. When you spot Panki we’re more likely to run without hitting—”
“I want to kill ’em!”
“Calm down, Deety. You will. But we’ll hit them when and where we have the edge. I want them to think that it’s bad luck, disconnected accidents, rather than a campaign. It may go on so long that Jayzee will be sitting where I am and Janie will be sitting where you are. But we aren’t going to go out in a burst of glory, just for the hell of it. Instead, we’ll kill Panki and keep on killing Panki and stay alive ourselv
es.”
“Sounds good,” agreed Sharpie. “I was getting mildly bored with being a middle-aged housewife, watching the mirror for gray hairs. But hunting Panki is far more fun than the parties I used to give. One question, Cap’n—who gets my seat?”
“Sharpie, you’ll stay on the perceptron and the spy ray until you’re senile. That’ll give Worsel time to train Jacqueline as SuperSharpie.”
“I’ll raise her for it.”
“Captain, who mans the verniers when I’m superannuated?”
“Your daughter, Deety. Unless she gets Gay so completely voice-programmed that verniers aren’t needed. If so, Deety can raise peonies while you collect stamps and I lie in the shade.”
“Don’t like peonies!”
“Son, when I’m too old to fight, I’ll go see what more Mobyas can teach me, then argue over it with Cardynge.”
“And when Janie takes my place as astrogator, I’ll become Chief Hatchet Man, who is dropped in at night to kill a key Pankera and make it look like an accident. ‘The Shadow Strikes Again!’ ”
“Deety darling, by then you’ll be through having babies and I will make no objection to any danger you choose to risk. But if you get yourself killed, I’ll be so lonely I’ll remarry at once.”
“Uh … Zebadiah, maybe we could go on such strikes together?”
“Perhaps we will, dear. In the meantime, let’s stop yakking and get to work.”
Our first scouting trip we started with Earth-Analog-Tau-One-Minus, because we knew Earth-Zero was infested and Earth-Tau-Ten-Plus and therefore assumed that Panki were scattered thickly out Ten-Plus; I wanted a bracket on the minus side.
We popped in and bounced high, then cautiously approached the night side, by doctrine. Lighted cities, radio, television signals, and microwave—high technology. I watched the screens and listened—either they weren’t using long-range radar, or LaVerne’s absorption coating was better than he had promised. “Copilot, by doctrine, approach analog New York. Sharpie, it’s yours, dear.”
The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes Page 55
