“How bad a mess is it?”
“Vernet said it might take a month to patch up. It wouldn’t have been so bad if somebody hadn’t started the fuel cooking for a moment.”
He swore in horror. “Are you lame-brains trying to blow a hole through the planet?”
“Now, that’s more like it!” Freckles said, satisfied. “They’ve got it all under control, anyhow. But I’ll go down and give them a hand. You’d better take it easy for an hour or so!”
“Hold on, Freck!” he said, as she started for the door.
“Yes?”
“I’d just like to find out how big a liar you are. How many members are there to this Group?”
Freckles looked at him for a moment and then came back and sat down on the couch beside him. She pushed the white hat to the back of her head, indicating completely frank talk.
“Now as to that,” she said frowning, “nobody really ever lied to you about it. You just never asked. Anyway, there’ve been ten ever since we left Rhysgaat.”
Grevan swore again, softly this time. “How did you get her past the CG observers at the spaceport?”
“We detailed Klim and Eliol to distract the observers, and Priderell came in tucked away in a load of supplies. Nothing much to that part of it. The hard part was to make sure first we were right about her. That’s why we had to keep on sabotaging the ship so long.”
“So that’s what— And there I was,” said Grevan grimly, “working and worrying myself to death to get the ship ready to start again. A fine, underhanded lot you turned out to be!”
“We all said it was a shame!” Freckles agreed. “And you almost caught up with us a couple of times, at that. We all felt it was simply superb, the way you went snorting and climbing around everywhere, figuring out all the trouble-spots and what to do about them. But what else could we do? You’d have let the poor girl wait there till you had the Group safely settled somewhere, and then we wouldn’t have let you go back alone anyway. So when Klim finally told us Priderell was just what we’d been looking for all along—well, you know how sensitive Klim is. She couldn’t be mistaken about anything like that!”
“Klim’s usually very discerning,” Grevan admitted carefully. “Just how did you persuade Priderell to come along with us?”
Freckles pulled the hat back down on her forehead, indicating an inner uncertainty.
“We didn’t do it that way exactly; so that’s a point I ought to discuss with you now. As a matter of fact, Priderell was sound asleep when we picked her up at that farm of hers—Weyer had gassed her a little first. And we’ve kept her asleep since—it’s Room Twenty-three, back of my quarters—and took turns taking care of her.”
There was a brief silence while Grevan absorbed the information.
“And now I suppose I’m to wake her up and inform her she’s been kidnaped by a bunch of outlaws and doomed to a life of exile?” he demanded.
“Priderell won’t mind,” Freckles told him encouragingly. “You’ll see! Klim says she’s crazy about you— That’s a very becoming blush you’ve got, Grevan,” she added interestedly. “First time I’ve noticed it, I think.”
“You’re too imaginative, Freck,” Grevan remarked. “As you may have noticed, I heated our Dominator’s little top up almost to the melting point, and it’s still glowing. As a natural result, the temperature of this room has gone up by approximately fifteen degrees. I might, of course, be showing some effects of that . . .”
“You might,” Freckles admitted. “On the other hand, you’re the most heat-adaptive member of the Group, and I haven’t even begun to feel warm. That’s a genuine blush, Grevan. So Klim was exactly right about you, too!”
“I feel,” Grevan remarked, “that the subject has been sufficiently discussed.”
“Just as you say, Commander,” Freckles agreed soothingly.
“And whether or not she objects to having been kidnaped, we’re going to have a little biochemical adaptation problem on our hands for a while—”
“Now there’s an interesting point!” Freckles interrupted. “We’d planned on giving her the full standard CG treatment for colonists, ordinary-human, before she ever woke up. But her reaction check showed she’s had the full equivalent of that, or more! She must have been planning to change over to one of the more extreme colonial-type planets. But, of course, we’ll have to look out for surprises—”
“There’re likely to be a few of those!” Grevan nodded. “Room Twenty-three, did you say?”
“Right through my study and up those little stairs!” She stood up. “I suppose I’d better go help the others with the fuel now.”
“Perhaps you’d better. I’ll just watch the Dominator until it’s cooled off safely, and then I’ll go wake up our guest.”
But he knew he wouldn’t have to wake up Priderell. . . .
* * *
He sat listening to faint crackling sounds from within CG’s machine, while Freckles ran off to the ramp and went out on it. There was a distant, soft thud, indicating she had taken the quick way down, and a sudden, brief mingling of laughing voices. And then stillness again.
As she had been doing for the past five minutes, Priderell remained sitting on the right-hand section of the slowly cooking Dominator, without showing any particular interest in Grevan’s presence. It was a rather good trick, even for a Wild Variant whom CG undoubtedly would have classified as a neuronic monster.
“Thanks for blanking out that compulsion pattern or whatever it was!” he remarked at last, experimentally. “It’s not at all surprising that CG is a little scared of you people.”
Priderell gazed out into the passageway beyond the door with a bored expression.
“You’re not fooling me much,” he informed her. “If you weren’t just an illusion, you’d get yourself singed good sitting up there.”
The green eyes switched haughtily about the room and continued to ignore him.
“It wasn’t even hard to figure out,” Grevan went on doggedly, “as soon as I remembered your dance with those beasts. The fact is, there weren’t any beasts there at all—you just made everybody think there were!”
The eyes turned towards him then, but they only studied him thoughtfully.
He began to feel baffled.
Then the right words came up! Like an inspiration—
“It would be just wild, wishful thinking, of course,” he admitted gloomily, “to imagine that Klim could have been anywhere near as right about you as she was about me! But I can’t help wondering whether possibly—”
He paused hopefully.
The coral-red lips smiled and moved for a few seconds. And, somewhere else, a low voice was saying:
“Well, why don’t you come to Room Twenty-three and find out?”
* * *
The Dominator went on crackling, and hissing, and cooling off, unguarded. . . .
Watch the Sky
Uncle William Boles’ war-battered old Geest gun gave the impression that at some stage of its construction it had been pulled out of shape and then hardened in that form. What remained of it was all of one piece. The scarred and pitted twin barrels were stubby and thick, and the vacant oblong in the frame behind them might have contained standard energy magazines. It was the stock which gave the alien weapon its curious appearance. Almost eighteen inches long, it curved abruptly to the right and was too thin, knobbed and indented to fit comfortably at any point in a human hand. Over half a century had passed since, with the webbed, boneless fingers of its original owner closed about it, it last spat deadly radiation at human foemen. Now it hung among Uncle William’s other collected oddities on the wall above the living room fireplace.
And today, Phil Boles thought, squinting at the gun with reflectively narrowed eyes, some eight years after Uncle William’s death, the old war souvenir would quietly become a key factor in the solution of a colonial planet’s problems. He ran a finger over the dull, roughened frame, bent closer to study the neatly lettered inscription: GUNDERLAND BATTLE TROPHY, ANNO 2172, SGT. WILLIAM G. BOLES. Then, catching a familiar series of clicking noises from the hall, he straightened quickly and turned away. When Aunt Beulah’s go-chair came rolling back into the room, Phil was sitting at the low tea table, his back to the fireplace.
The go-chair’s wide flexible treads carried it smoothly down the three steps to the sunken section of the living room, Beulah sitting jauntily erect in it, for all the ninety-six years which had left her the last survivor of the original group of Earth settlers on the world of Roye. She tapped her fingers here and there on the chair’s armrests, swinging it deftly about, and brought it to a stop beside the tea table.
“That was Susan Feeney calling,” she reported. “And there is somebody else for you who thinks I have to be taken care of! Go ahead and finish the pie, Phil. Can’t hurt a husky man like you. Got a couple more baking for you to take along.”