‘He goes for her then, but, being a Vegian, her footwork’s a lot better than his. She ducks, sidesteps, pulls her sap, and lets him have it, but good, right behind the ear. It takes the ship’s croaker an hour to bring him to, and the skipper’s so scared he blasts right back to Vegia and the croaker calls the hospital and tells ’em to have a meat-wagon standing by when we sit down.’
‘A very interesting and touching tale, Vesta,’ Cloud said then, in English, ‘but pretty rough language for a perfect lady, don’t you think?’
‘How the hell else …’ Vesta started to reply in spaceal, then switched effortlessly to English: ‘How else can a lady, however ladylike she may be, talk in a language which, except for its highly technical aspects, is basically and completely profane, obscene, vulgar, lewd, coarse, and foul? Not that that bothers me, of course …’
Nor did it, as Cloud well knew. When a Master of Languages studied a language he took it as a whole, no matter what that whole might be. Every nuance, every idiom, every possibility was mastered; and he used the language as it was ordinarily used, without prejudice or favor or motional bias.
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‘… but it’s so pitifully inadequate—there’s so much that’s completely missing! Thlaskin objected before, remember, that there wasn’t any word in spaceal he could use—would use, I mean—to describe Maluleme as his wife. And my brother— Zambkptkn—I’ve mentioned him?’
‘Once or twice,’ Cloud said, dryly. This was the understatement of the trip.
‘He’s a police officer. Not exactly like one of your Commissioners of Police, or Detective Inspector, but something like both. And in spaceal I can call him only one of four things, the English equivalents of which are “cop”, “lawman”, “flatfoot”, and “bull”. What a language! But I started to tell his story in spaceal and I’m going to finish it in spaceal. It’ll be fun, in a way, to see how close I can come to saying what I want to say.’
Then, switching back to the lingua franca of deep space;
‘So that’s how come my brother got into the act. The hospital called the cops of course, so he was there with the meat wagon and climbed aboard. He was all set to pinch the jane and throw her in the can, but when he got the whole story, and especially when she say’s she’s changed her mind about circulating around so much—it ain’t worth it, she says, she’d rather be an out-and-out hermit than have to have even one more fight with anybody who smelled like that—of course he let her go.’
‘Let her go!’ Cloud exclaimed. ‘How could he?’
‘Why, sure, boss.’ Vesta, wide-eyed, gazed innocently at her captain. ‘The ape didn’t die, you know, and she wasn’t going to do it again, and he wasn’t a Vegian, so didn’t have any relatives or friends to go to the mat for him, and besides, anybody with one tenth of one percent of a brain would know better than to keep on making passes at a frail after she warned him how bad he stunk. What else could he do, chief?’
‘What else, indeed?’ Cloud said, in English. ‘I live; and— occasionally—I learn. Come on Joan, let’s go and devote the imponderable force of our massed intellects to the multifarious problems of loose atomic vortices.’
On the way, Joan asked: ‘Our little Vesta surprised you, Storm?’
‘Didn’t she you? She had me gasping like a fish.’
‘Not so much. I know them pretty well and I used to breed cats. Scent: hearing—they can hear forty thousand cycles: the fact that they mature both mentally and physically long before
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they do sexually: some of their utterly barbarous customs: it’s quite a shock to learn how—”queer”, shall I say—some of the Vegian mores are to us of other worlds.’
‘ “Queer” is certainly the word—as queer as a nine-credit bill. But confound it, Joan, I like ’em!’
‘So do I, Storm,’ she replied quietly. ‘They aren’t human, you know, and by Galactic standards they qualify. And now we’ll go and whack those vortices right on their center of impact.”
‘We’ll do that, chum,’ he said. Then, in perfect silence he went on in thought: ‘Chum? Sweetheart, I mean … My God, what a sweetheart you’d …’
‘Storm!’ Joan half-shrieked, eyes wide in astonishment. “You’re sending.”
‘I’m not either!’ he declared, blushing furiously. ‘I can’t— you’re snooping.1’
‘I’m not snooping—I haven’t snooped a lick since I started talking. You got it back there, Storm!’ She seized both his hands and squeezed. ‘You did it, and neither of us realized it “til just this minute!’
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13: Games Within Games
The methods of operation of the Vortex Blaster II had long since been worked out in detail. Approaching any planet Captain Ross, through channels, would ask permission of the various governments to fly in atmosphere, permission to use high explosive, permission to land and be serviced, and permission— after standard precautions—to grant planetary leave to his ship’s personnel. All this asking was not, of course, strictly necessary in his case, since every world having even one loose atomic vortex had been demanding long and insistently that Neal Cloud visit it next, but it was strictly according to protocol.
Astrogators had long since plotted the course through planetary atmosphere; not by the demands of the governments concerned and not by any ascending or descending order of violence of the vortices to be extinguished, but by the simple criterion of minimum flight-time ending at the pre-selected point of entry to the planet.
Thus neither Joan nor Cloud had anything much to do with planetary affairs until the chief pilot notified Joan that he was relinquishing control to her—which never happened until the vessel lay motionless with respect to the planet’s surface and with the tip of her nose three two zero zero point zero meters distant from the center of activity of the vortex.
Approaching Chickladoria, the routine was followed precisely up to the point where Joan’s mechanical brain took over. This time, however, the brain was not working, since Joan was in the throes of rebuilding ‘Lulu’ into ‘Margie’. On Chickladoria, then, the chief pilot did the piloting and ‘Storm’ Cloud did the blasting, and everything ran like clockwork. The ship landed at Malthester spaceport and everyone who could possibly be spared disembarked.
Ready to leave the ship, Cloud went to the computer room to make one last try. There, seated at desks, Joan and her four top experts were each completely surrounded by welters of reference books, pamphlets, wadded-up scratch-paper, tapes, and punched cards.
‘Hi, Joan—Hi, fellows and gals—why don’t you break down and come on out and get some fresh air?’
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‘Sorry, Storm, but the answer is still “no”. We’ll need all this week, and probably more …’ Joan looked up at him and broke off. Her eyes widened and she whistled expressively. ‘Myohmy, ain’t he the handsomest thing, though? I wish I could go along, Storm, if only to see you lay ’em out in rows!’
For, since Chickladoria was a very warm planet—fully as hot as Tominga had been—Cloud was dressed even more lightly than he had been there; in sandals, breech-clout, and De-Lameter harness, the shoulder-strap of the last-named bearing the three silver bars of a commander of the Galactic Patrol. He was not muscled like a gladiator, but his bearing was springily erect, his belly hard and flat, his shoulders were wide, his hips were narrow, and his skin was tanned to a smooth and even richness of brown.
‘Wellwell! Not bad, Storm; not bad at all.’ One of the men got up and looked him over carefully. ‘If I looked like that, Joan, I’d play hookey for a couple of days myself. But I wouldn’t dare to—in that kind of a get-up I’d look like something that had crawled out from under a rock and I’d get sunburned from here to there.’
‘That’s your own fault, Joe,’ a tall lissom, brunette lieutenant chipped in. ‘You could have the radiants on while you do your daily dozens, you know. Me, I’m mighty glad that some of the men, and not only us women, like to look nice.’
‘Wait a minute, Helen!’ Cloud protested, blushing. ‘That’s not it, and you know it. These fellows don’t have to mix socially with people who run around naked, and I do.’
‘And how you hate it.’ The other man offered mock sympathy, with a wide and cheerful grin. ‘How you suffer—I don’t think. But that holster-harness. It looks regulation enough, but isn’t there something a little different about it?’
‘Yes. Two things.’ Cloud grinned back. ‘Left-handed and the holster’s anchored so it can’t flop around. Don’t know as I ever told you, but ever since that alleged pirate burned my arm off I’ve been practising the gun-slick’s draw.’
‘Did you get it?’ Joan asked impishly. ‘How good are you?’