The Seventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack Page 6

  “You mean,” muttered Smith after a few moments of silence, “how can we get a direction fix on a thought?”

  “Something like that,” said Parrish. “I suppose they have bases, where they keep permanent manufacturing facilities. Probably set up at points where they have access to min­erals—unless they know how to extract what they need from the water itself.”

  “Nothing hard about that,” agreed Smith. “I’ll have to send out a few more questions. Of course, they’ll take the attitude that I should be doing something instead of asking about irrelevant subjects…”

  “We’re used to that,” smiled Parrish, showing his beauti­ful teeth.

  Westervelt wondered how broadly he would smile if it were his own responsibility. He had an idea that Parrish might be rather less than half as charming if he were running the operation and not getting much help from the others in solving the problem. He had to admit, however, that the man had a knack for spotting alien culture patterns. When he had asked his question about the cities, it was merely be­cause he had half-pictured some Terran-style dome under­water and knew that that image was unlikely.

  “Anyway,” Parrish was going on, “we should probably think of them as being free as birds to go where they like. Even before they developed machines, they probably migrated about their world by swimming. I gather that these other…fish, I suppose we’ll have to call them…”

  “Thinking fish!” murmured Smith sadly. He ran his hand through his hair again.

  “I suppose those things still do, besides other types we still haven’t heard of, which would fill the place of Terran animals. So, then—we’ll have to look for temporary locations and think in terms of a fast raid rather than a careful penetration.”

  “If we could find them, there must be some way we could armor a few spacesuits against pressure and drop down on them,” said Lydman. “I think I can dig up a weapon or two that will work underwater in a way these clams never thought of.”

  “Maybe we could do better to have Swishy the thinking fish hypnotize them into bringing Harris back,” said Wester­velt.

  They looked at him thoughtfully, and he was horrified to see his joke being taken seriously. He squirmed in his chair by the window, wishing he had kept his mouth shut.

  “I wonder…” mused Smith. “If they can actually ex­change thoughts…”

  “They might have natural defenses,” said Parrish tenta­tively.

  “What could we bribe a fish with?” asked Lydman, but hopefully rather than derisively.

  Smith made another note, then drummed his fingers on his desk top. The four of them sat in silence. Westervelt hoped that the others were engaged in more productive thoughts than his own. It was nice to have their attention, and get the reputation of a bright young man who came up with sug­gestions; but when they decided upon some reasonable course of action they might remember him for making a foolish remark.

  “Willie,” said Smith, coming to a decision, “circulate around and ask the others if they can stick it out a couple of hours tonight. Maybe there’s time to pry some useful information out of Trident, and at least get something started before we close down. If I know some guy out in space is working on it, I can sleep anyway.”

  Westervelt left his place by the window and went into the outer office. He told Simonetta and Beryl. The latter acted less than thrilled. Westervelt wondered jealously what kind of date she had scheduled for the evening. He stopped at the window of the switchboard cubbyhole.

  “Oh, it’s you, Willie!” exclaimed Pauline.

  “Yeah, you can turn on the projector again,” he grinned. “What is it, a love movie?”

  Pauline edged a small tape projector out from behind the side of her board.

  “It’s homework, if you have to know,” she told him.

  “That’s right, you still go to college,” Westervelt re­called. “Why don’t you switch to alien psychology? Then you could qualify for office manager around here.”

  “When do we have alien visitors here? Once in a ringed moon!”

  “Who is to say which are the aliens?” said Westervelt. “There are days when I think I could feel more under­standing to something with twelve tentacles and a tank of chlorine than to a lot of the mentalities that get loose right in this office. There’s a crash program on for the evening, by the way, and Smitty wants the staff to hang on a while.”

  A look of dismay flashed over Pauline’s youthful features.

  “I know; you have a class tonight,” Westervelt deduced. “Chuck it all. Stay in the file room with Mr. Parrish and you’ll learn twice as much.”

  Pauline offered to throw the projector at him, but laughed. Westervelt told her that no one would miss her if she con­nected a few of the main office phones to outside lines and hooked up the communications room with Smith’s desk.

  He left her wondering if she ought to stay anyhow, and headed for the hall. Halfway along to the communications room, he heard the elevator doors open and close. He stopped and looked back.

  Around the corner strolled one of the TV men, Joe Rosen­krantz. Westervelt looked at his watch and realized that it was a shift change for the communications personnel, who kept touch with the universe twenty-four hours a day.

  In case someone somewhere makes a dumb mistake like Harris, thought Westervelt. They overdo it a little, I think. I suppose it’s the typical pride and joy of Terran technical culture to signal halfway across the galaxy to fix something that might have been cured beforehand when Harris was a little boy. I wonder what the psychologists should have done about me to keep me out of a place like this?”

  “Hello, Willie,” said Rosenkrantz, catching up. “Going to the com room?”

  Westervelt admitted as much, and gave the operator a brief outline of the afternoon’s developments. Rosenkrantz re­mained unperturbed.

  “Hope they don’t get intoxicated with ingenuity, and insist on sending messages all over,” he grunted. “I was look­ing forward to a quiet night shift.”

  They went in to tell Colborn, who took it well. He pointed out to Westervelt that he would in no case have been con­cerned with the overtime operation. When he was relieved, he was relieved—period.

  “I forget this crazy place the minute the elevator door closes behind me,” he said grinning, having handed over to Rosenkrantz his log and a few unofficial comments about traffic he had heard during recent hours. “There are some who wait till they hit the street, but I believe in a clean cut. I walk in, push ‘Main Floor,’ and everything else goes blank.”

  He went out the door, refusing to dignify their jeers by any defense, and made for the elevators. By the time he reached the corner of the hall, he had slipped into his topcoat. He pushed the button to call the elevator.

  When it arrived, Colborn stepped inside and rode down to the ninety-fifth floor. He switched to a public express elevator, which picked up several other people before becoming an express at the seventy-fifth floor.

  “Lived through it again,” he muttered to a man next to him as they reached the main floor.

  He joined the growing stream of office workers flowing through the lobby of the building, taking for granted the kaleidoscopic play of decorative lights on the translucent ceiling. He noticed them when they suddenly went out.

  There was first silence, then a babble of voices until small emergency lights went on. Someone spoke of a fuse blow­ing. Colborn looked outside, and saw no street lights or il­luminated signs. His first thought was power for his set up­stairs.

  “No, that’s special,” he told himself, “but I’d better call and see if the elevators are working.”

  SIX

  For a jail cell, the chamber was quite commodious. The walls were of bare stone, like most of the buildings on Greenhaven which Maria Ringstad had visited during her short period of sightseeing. She thought that it must have e
ntailed a great deal of extra labor to provide such large rooms in a stone building, especially when the materials had to be quarried by relatively primitive means.

  On Greenhaven, everything had evidently been done the hard way. She had heard about that facet of the Greenie character before leaving the ship, and she now wished that she had listened more carefully. It was difficult to picture in her mind just how far away that spaceship was by this time.

  That had been the worst, the feeling of having been abandoned.

  Meanwhile, having turned up her nose at the sewing chores they had assigned to her but having nothing else to occupy her, she sat on the edge of the austere wooden shelf that doubled as a bed and a bench. The Greenie guard standing in the doorway looked as if he had expected to find the sewing done.

  “Can’t you understand, honey?” said Maria lightly. “You can cart that basket of rags away. I have no intention of sticking my fingers with those crude needles you people use.”

  The Greenie was a short, sturdy young man, uniformed in the drabbest of dun-colored clothing. A shirt with a high, tight collar starched like cardboard held his chin at a dig­nified elevation. It also seemed to keep his eyes wide open, Maria thought, unless that was his naturally naive expression.

  “Did anyone ever tell you those hats would make good spittoons?” she asked.

  “It is forbidden to speak vainly of any correction official,” said the young man stiffly.

  “Correction official!” echoed Maria. “Look, honey, don’t kid with me! I bet you’re just a janitor here. If I thought you were a real official, who might be cuddled into letting me out of this cage, I’d be a lot more friendly.”

  She gave him an amiable grin. It was not returned.

  The Greenie stood gripping the thick edge of the blank wooden door until his knuckles whitened. He looked like a man who had just discovered a worm in his apple. Half a worm, in fact.

  “Now, I may be pushing thirty-five,” said Maria, “but I know I don’t look that bad. Actually, alongside your Greenie girls, I stack up pretty well, don’t you think? For one thing, I’m shorter than you are. For another, I fill out my clothes and don’t look like a skinny old horse.”

  “You…you…are not…dressed as an honest woman,” the guard got out.

  Sitting on the edge of the wooden bunk, Maria crossed her knees—and thought he would choke. She tugged slightly at the short skirt that had attracted so many lowering stares when she had strolled down the main street of First Haven. She was used to being among men, but this poor soul was outside her experience.

  Maria Ringstad was aware of both her visual shortcomings and attractions. After a month here, her hair was beginning to grow in darker and less auburn. She was a trifle solid for her five-feet-four, but that came of having a durable frame. Her face was squarish, with a determined nose, and her hazel eyes looked green in some lights. On the other hand, she had a nice smile, and she had spent much time in places where few women went. She was used to being popular with the opposite sex, even in face of competition from members of her own. In the Greenie women, with their voluminous, drab dresses and hangdog expressions de­void of the least make-up, she saw little competition.

  “Really,” she said, “no one else would think of me as a criminal. I just tried to buy a picture in that little shop. Then the heavens fell in on me.”

  “The heavens do not fall on Greenhaven,” said the guard firmly.

  “Well, anyway, some very sour characters trumped up all sorts of charges against me, and here I am. But I didn’t do anything!”

  “The attempt is equal to the deed!”

  Maria shook her head and sighed. She stood up and took a few steps toward him.

  “You must keep your place,” ordered the young man, with an undercurrent of panic in his tone. “I have not come to debate justice with you. You have sinned and you have been sentenced.”

  I bet he’d faint if I threw my arms around him, thought Maria.

  “But what was the sin, honey?” she demanded. “You’d think I’d written a bad article about Greenhaven for my syndicate. Honestly, I didn’t even have time to see the place.”

  The young man released the edge of the door, but still looked worried.

  “Greenhaven was founded by colonists who sought liberty and were willing to create a haven for it by the sweat of their brows,” he informed her. “Conditions were inhospitable. There were plagues to test their faith and ungainly beasts to test their courage. What has been built here has been built by a great communal struggle, and it is not to be hazarded by the sinful attitudes of old Terra, and—you should have paid the listed price.”

  “But he wouldn’t sell me one at that price when I offered it!”

  “Then he did not have one. You attempted to bribe him.”

  “Well, it was just a friendly offer,” said Maria, straighten­ing her skirt. “It didn’t amount to anything.”

  “On the contrary, it amounted to bribery, immorality, and economic subversion. Procedures such as purchase and merchandising must be strictly regulated for the good of the community. We cannot permit chaos to intrude upon the peace of Greenhaven.”

  “You know, honey,” she remarked, studying him with her head cocked to one side, “you talk like a book. A very old book.”

  The guard rolled his eyes toward the hall. He relaxed for the first time, in order to lean back and listen to some­thing in the corridor.

  “I must caution you to cease addressing me as ‘honey,’” he said in a lower voice. “I hear the steps of my superior.”

  Maria laughed, a silvery ripple that made the young man grit his teeth.

  “Maybe he’s jealous,” she suggested. “Or bored. What do you fellows have to do, anyway, except go around hand­ing out cell work and picking it up?”

  “There is no place on Greenhaven for idle hands,” said the young man, eyeing the untouched sewing with disapproval.

  “Isn’t there ever any excitement? How often does someone try to escape?”

  “It is forbidden to escape,” said the guard soberly. He looked as if he wished that he himself could escape.

  Heavy steps halted outside the door of the cell to signal the arrival of the chief warden. The latter turned a severely inquiring stare upon the young man, who hastily stepped aside to admit his chief.

  “Have you been conversing with the prisoner?” asked the older man.

  He was clad in a similar uniform with, perhaps, a slightly higher collar. His dark-browed features reflected greater age and asceticism. Otherwise, Maria thought ruefully, there was little to choose between them. He seemed to have a chilling effect upon the guard.

  “Only in the line of duty, sir,” the young man responded.

  The warden spotted the basket of undone work. He frowned.

  “This should have been attended to long ago,” he said. “What excuse can there be?”

  Maria planted both hands on her hips.

  “Plenty!” she announced. “In the first place, you have no right to hold a Terran citizen in a hole like this. In the second, that ridiculous five year sentence is going to be ap­pealed and cancelled as soon as the Terran consul gets things moving.”

  “That is at least doubtful,” retorted the warden, favoring her with a wintry smile which raised the corners of his mouth an eighth of an inch. “Meanwhile, there are methods we can use to enforce obedience. Would you rather I summon some of the women of the staff?”

  “I’d rather you’d explain to me what was so awful about trying to buy a picture of the city in that little shop? If they weren’t for tourists to buy, why did they have them?”

  “Such nonsensical objects are provided for tourists and others who must from time to time be admitted to Greenhaven. That does not excuse flouting our laws and seeking to cause dissatisfaction through the example of bribery. The city of First Haven h
as been wrung from the wilderness, but the struggle to complete our building of the colony must not be hindered or subverted. It is necessary—”

  “Aw, hell! You talk like a book too!” exclaimed Maria.

  The two men stared at her, silent, wide-eyed, utterly shocked at this open evidence of dementia.

  “The price list is sacred to you,” she snapped, “but it’s all right to put that junk on sale to clip the tourists, isn’t it? Why doesn’t that strike you as being immoral? They’re no good, but their money is, is that it?”

  She turned and stalked back to the shelf-bed, where she sat down and deliberately crossed her legs.

  “You will not be required further,” the warden told the young man. “See that you spread not the plague by re­peating any of this Jezebel’s loose talk!”

  The guard left hurriedly. Maria discovered the warden gaping at her knees, and defiantly tossed her head.

  “You never see a leg before?” she demanded. “Or are all the Greenie girls bowlegged? Is that why they wear those horrible Mother Hubbards?”

  She gave her skirt a malicious twitch, revealing a few more inches of firm thigh. The warden began to turn red. He muttered something that actually sounded closer to a prayer than a curse, and turned his eyes away.

  “I hope those in authority will yield to the importunities of your depraved fellow who calls himself the Terran consul, and sullies the clean air of Greenhaven by his very—I hope they do deport you!”

  “Oh, honey! Could you arrange it?” cried Maria, leaping up and advancing on him.

  She grabbed him just above the elbows, and he broke her hold by sweeping both hands upward and outward. This offered Maria the opportunity to take a double grip upon his belt. When he lowered his hands to free himself, she threw both arms about his neck.

  “I knew someone could fix things up!” she exclaimed. “You’re going to let me out of here until they decide what ship to put me on, aren’t you?”

  The warden’s expression was horror-stricken. With a heavy effort, he got both hands against her and shoved. Maria staggered back all the way to the bunk. The warden, ap­parently not quite sure what he had done, looked down at his hands. He turned them palm up, then, as his gaze met Maria’s, made as if to thrust them behind his back.