Other people, of course, like the Village Guardian, might have a poor opinion of Grandma, but just hanging around her and the trailer and the gigantic, exotic-looking rhinocerine pony that pulled it was, in Grimp’s opinion, a lot better even than going to the circus.
And vacations started the day after tomorrow! The whole future just now, in fact, looked like one good thing after another, extending through a vista of summery infinities.
Grimp went to sleep happily.
* * *
At about the same hour, though at a distance greater than Grimp’s imagination had stretched as yet, eight large ships came individually out of the darkness between the stars that was their sea, and began to move about Noorhut in a carefully timed pattern of orbits. They stayed much too far out to permit any instrument of space-detection to suspect that Noorhut might be their common center of interest.
But that was what it was. Though the men who crewed the eight ships bore the people of Noorhut no ill will, hardly anything could have looked less promising for Noorhut than the cargo they had on board.
Seven of them were armed with a gas which was not often used any more. A highly volatile lethal catalyst, it sank to the solid surface of a world over which it was freed and spread out swiftly there to the point where its presence could no longer be detected by any chemical means. However, its effect of drawing the final breath almost imperceptibly out of all things that were oxygen-breathing was not noticeably reduced by diffusion.
The eighth ship was equipped with a brace of torpedoes, which were normally released some hours after the gas-carriers dispersed their invisible death. They were quite small torpedoes, since the only task remaining for them would be to ignite the surface of the planet that had been treated with the catalyst.
All those things might presently happen to Noorhut. But they would happen only if a specific message was flashed from it to the circling squadron—the message that Noorhut already was lost to a deadly foe who must, at any cost now, be prevented from spreading out from it to other inhabited worlds.
* * *
Next afternoon, right after school, as Grimp came expectantly around the bend of the road at the edge of the farm, he found the village policeman sitting there on a rock, gazing tearfully down the road.
“Hello, Runny,” said Grimp, disturbed. Considered in the light of gossip he’d overheard in the village that morning, this didn’t look so good for Grandma. It just didn’t look good.
The policeman blew his nose on a handkerchief he carried tucked into the front of his uniform, wiped his eyes, and gave Grimp an annoyed glance.
“Don’t you call me Runny, Grimp!” he said, replacing the handkerchief. Like Grimp himself and most of the people on Noorhut, the policeman was brown-skinned and dark-eyed, normally a rather good looking young fellow. But his eyes were swollen and red-rimmed now; and his nose, which was a bit larger than average, anyway, was also red and swollen and undeniably runny. He had hay-fever bad.
Grimp apologized and sat down thoughtfully on the rock beside the policeman, who was one of his numerous cousins. He was about to mention that he had overheard Vellit using the expression when she and the policeman came through the big Leeth-flower orchard above the farm the other evening—at a much less leisurely rate than was their custom there. But he thought better of it. Vellit was the policeman’s girl for most of the year, but she broke their engagement regularly during hay-fever season and called him cousin instead of dearest.
“What are you doing here?” Grimp asked bluntly instead.
“Waiting,” said the policeman.
“For what?” said Grimp, with a sinking heart.
“Same individual you are, I guess,” the policeman told him, hauling out the handkerchief again. He blew. “This year she’s going to go right back where she came from or get pinched.”
“Who says so?” scowled Grimp.
“The Guardian, that’s who,” said the policeman. “That good enough for you?”
“He can’t do it!” Grimp said hotly. “It’s our farm, and she’s got all her licenses.”
“He’s had a whole year to think up a new list she’s got to have,” the policeman informed him. He fished in the breast-pocket of his uniform, pulled out a folded paper, and opened it. “He put thirty-four items down here I got to check—she’s bound to miss on one of them.”
“It’s a dirty trick!” said Grimp, rapidly scanning as much as he could see of the list.
“Let’s us have more respect for the Village Guardian, Grimp!” the policeman said warningly.
“Uh-huh,” muttered Grimp. “Sure . . .” If Runny would just move his big thumb out of the way. But what a list! Trailer; rhinocerine pony (beast, heavy draft, imported); patent medicines; household utensils; fortunetelling; pets; herbs; miracle-healing—
The policeman looked down, saw what Grimp was doing, and raised the paper out of his line of vision. “That’s an official document,” he said, warding Grimp off with one hand and tucking the paper away with the other. “Let’s us not get our dirty hands on it.”
Grimp was thinking fast. Grandma Wannattel did have framed licenses for some of the items he’d read hanging around inside the trailer, but certainly not thirty-four of them.
“Remember that big skinless werret I caught last season?” he asked.
The policeman gave him a quick glance, looked away again, and wiped his eyes thoughtfully. The season on werrets would open the following week and he was as ardent a fisherman as anyone in the village—and last summer Grimp’s monster werret had broken a twelve-year record in the valley.
“Some people,” Grimp said idly, staring down the valley road to the point where it turned into the woods, “would sneak after a person for days who’s caught a big werret, hoping he’d be dumb enough to go back to that pool.”
The policeman flushed and dabbed the handkerchief gingerly at his nose.
“Some people would even sit in a haystack and use spyglasses, even when the hay made them sneeze like crazy,” continued Grimp quietly.
The policeman’s flush deepened. He sneezed.
“But a person isn’t that dumb,” said Grimp. “Not when he knows there’s anyway two werrets there six inches bigger than the one he caught.”
“Six inches?” the policeman repeated a bit incredulously—eagerly.
“Easy,” nodded Grimp. “I had a look at them again last week.”
It was the policeman’s turn to think. Grimp idly hauled out his slingshot, fished a pebble out of his small-pebble pocket, and knocked the head off a flower twenty feet away. He yawned negligently.
“You’re pretty good with that slingshot,” the policeman remarked. “You must be just about as good as the culprit that used a slingshot to ring the fire-alarm signal on the defense unit bell from the top of the schoolhouse last week.”
“That’d take a pretty good shot,” Grimp admitted.
“And who then,” continued the policeman, “dropped pepper in his trail, so the pank-hound near coughed off his head when we started to track him. The Guardian,” he added significantly, “would like to have a clue about that culprit, all right.”
“Sure, sure,” said Grimp, bored. The policeman, the Guardian, and probably even the pank-hound, knew exactly who the culprit was; but they wouldn’t be able to prove it in twenty thousand years. Runny just had to realize first that threats weren’t going to get him anywhere near a record werret.
Apparently, he had; he was settling back for another bout of thinking. Grimp, interested in what he would produce next, decided just to leave him to it. . . .
Then Grimp jumped up suddenly from the rock.
“There they are!” he yelled, waving the slingshot.
A half-mile down the road, Grandma Wannattel’s big, silvery trailer had come swaying out of the woods behind the rhinocerine pony and turned up toward the farm. The pony saw Grimp, lifted its head, which was as long as a tall man, and bawled a thunderous greeting. Grandma Wannattel stood up on the driver’s seat and waved a green silk handkerchief.
Grimp started sprinting down the road.
The werrets should turn the trick—but he’d better get Grandma informed, just the same, about recent developments here, before she ran into Runny.
* * *
Grandma Wannattel flicked the pony’s horny rear with the reins just before they reached the policeman, who was waiting at the side of the road with the Guardian’s check-list unfolded in his hand.
The pony broke into a lumbering trot, and the trailer swept past Runny and up around the bend of the road, where it stopped well within the boundaries of the farm. They climbed down and Grandma quickly unhitched the pony. It waddled, grunting, off the road and down into the long, marshy meadow above the hollow. It stood still there, cooling its feet.
Grimp felt a little better. Getting the trailer off community property gave Grandma a technical advantage. Grimp’s people had a favorable opinion of her, and they were a sturdy lot who enjoyed telling off the Guardian any time he didn’t actually have a law to back up his orders. But on the way to the farm, she had confessed to Grimp that, just as he’d feared, she didn’t have anything like thirty-four licenses. And now the policeman was coming up around the bend of the road after them, blowing his nose and frowning.