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All the world knew them as the loverbirds, though they were certainly
not birds, but humans. Well, say humanoids. Featherless bipeds. Their
stay on earth was brief, a nine-day wonder. Any wonder that lasts
nine days on an earth of orgasmic trideo shows; time-freezing pills;
synapse-inverter fields which make it possible for a man to turn a
sunset to perfumes, a masochist to a fur-feeler; and a thousand other
euphorics--why, on such an earth, a nine-day wonder is a wonder
indeed.
Like a sudden bloom across the face of the world came the peculiar
magic of the loverbirds. There were loverbird songs and loverbird
trinkets, loverbird hats and pins, bangles and baubles, coins and
quaffs and tidbits. For there was that about the loverbirds which
made a deep enchantment. No one can be told about a loverbird and
feel this curious delight. Many are immune even to a solidograph. But
watch loverbirds, only for a moment, and see what happens. It's the
feeling you had when you were twelve, and summer-drenched, and you
kissed a girl for the very first time and knew a breathlessness you
were sure could never happen again. And indeed it never could unless
you watched loverbirds. Then you are spellbound for four quiet
seconds, and suddenly your very heart twists, and incredulous tears
sting and stay; and the very first move you make afterward, you make
on tiptoe, and your first word is a whisper.
This magic came over very well on trideo, and everyone had trideo;
so for a brief while the earth was enchanted.
There were only two loverbirds. They came down out of the sky in a
single brassy flash, and stepped out of their ship, hand in hand.
Their eyes were full of wonder, each at the other, and together at
the world. They seemed frozen in a full-to-bursting moment of
discovery; they made way for one another gravely and with courtesy,
they looked about them and in the very looking gave each other
gifts--the color of the sky, the taste of the air, the pressures of
things growing and meeting and changing. They never spoke. They
simply were together. To watch them was to know of their awestruck
mounting of staircases of bird notes, of how each knew the warmth of
the other as their flesh supped silently on sunlight.
They stepped from their ship, and the tall one threw a yellow powder
back to it. The ship fell in upon itself and became a pile of rubble,
which collapsed into a pile of gleaming sand, which slumped compactly
down to dust and then to an airblown emulsion so fine that Brownian
movement itself hammered it up and out and away. Anyone could see
that they intended to stay. Anyone could know by simply watching them
that next to their wondrous delight in each other came their
delighted wonder at earth itself, everything and everybody about it.
Now, if terrestrial culture were a pyramid, at the apex (where the
power is) would sit a blind man, for so constituted are we that only
by blinding ourselves, bit by bit, may we rise above our fellows. The
man at the apex has an immense preoccupation with the welfare of the
whole, because he regards it as the source and structure of his
elevation, which it is, and as an extension of himself, which it is
not. It was such a man who, in the face of immeasurable evidence,
chose to find a defense against loverbirds, and fed the matrices and
coordinates of the loverbird image into the most marvelous calculator
that had ever been built.
The machine sucked in symbols and raced them about, compared and
waited and matched and sat still while its bulging memory, cell by
cell, was silent, was silent--and suddenly, in a far corner,
resonated. It grasped this resonance in forceps made of mathematics,
snatched it out (translating furiously as it snatched) and put out a
fevered tongue of paper on which was typed: DIRBANU
Now this utterly changed the complexion of things. For earth ships
had ranged the cosmos far and wide, with few hindrances. Of these
hindrances, all could be understood but one, and that one was
Dirbanu, a transgalactic planet which shrouded itself in impenetrable
fields of force whenever an earthship approached. There were other
worlds which could do this, but in each case the crews knew why it
was done. Dirbanu, upon discovery, had prohibited landings from the
very first until an ambassador could be sent to Terra. In due time
one did arrive (so reported the calculator, which was the only entity
that remembered the episode) and it was obvious that Earth and
Dirbanu had much in common. The ambassador, however, showed a most
uncommon disdain of Earth and all its works, curled his lip and went
wordlessly home, and ever since then Dirbanu had locked itself tight
away from the questing Terrans.
Dirbanu thereby became of value, and fair game, but we could do
nothing to ripple the bland face of her defenses. As this
impregnability repeatedly proved itself, Dirbanu evolved in our group
mind through the usual stages of being: the Curiosity, the Mystery,
the Challenge, the Enemy, the Enemy, the Enemy, the Mystery, the
Curiosity, and finally That-which-is-too-far-away-to-bother-with, or
the Forgotten.
And suddenly, after all this time, Earth had two genuine natives of
Dirbanu aboard, entrancing the populace and giving no information.
This intolerable circumstance began to make itself felt throughout
the world--slowly, for this time the blind men's din was cushioned
and soaked by the magic of the loverbirds. It might have taken a very
long time to convince the people of the menace in their midst had
there not been a truly startling development:
A direct message was received from Dirbanu.
The collective impact of loverbird material emanating from
transmitters on Earth had attracted the attention of Dirbanu, which
promptly informed us that the loverbirds were indeed their nationals,
that in addition they were fugitives, that Dirbanu would take it ill
if Earth should regard itself as a sanctuary for the criminals of
Dirbanu but would, on the other hand, find it in its heart to be very
pleased if Earth saw fit to return them.
So from the depths of its enchantment, Terra was able to calculate a
course of action. Here at last was an opportunity to consort with
Dirbanu on a friendly basis--great Dirbanu which, since it had force
fields which Earth could not duplicate, must of necessity have many
other things Earth could use; mighty Dirbanu before whom we could
kneel in supplication (with purely-for-defense bombs hidden in our
pockets) with lowered heads (making invisible the knife in our teeth)
and ask for crumbs from table (in order to extrapolate the location
of their kitchens).
Thus the loverbird episode became another item in the weary
procession of proofs that Terra's most reasonable intolerance can
conquer practically anything, even magic.
Especially magic.
So it was that the loverbirds were arrested, that the Starmite 439
was fitted out as a prison ship, that a most carefully screened crew
was chosen for her, and that she struck starward with the cargo that
would gain us a world.
* * *
Two men were the crew--a colorful little rooster of a man and a great
dun bull of a man. They were, respectively, Rootes, who was Captain
and staff, and Grunty, who was midship and inboard corps. Rootes was
cocky, springy, white and crisp. His hair was auburn and so were his
eyes, and the eyes were hard. Grunty was a shambler with big gentle
hands and heavy shoulders half as wide as Rootes was high. He should
have worn a cowl and rope-belted habit. He should, perhaps, have worn
a burnoose. He did neither, but the effect was there. Known only to
him was the fact that words and pictures, concepts and comparisons
were an endless swirling blizzard inside him. Known only to him and
Rootes was the fact that he had books, and books, and books, and
Rootes did not care if he had or not. Grunty he had been called since
he first learned to talk, and
Grunty was name enough for him. For the words in his head would not
leave him except one or two at a time, with long moments between. So
he had learned to condense his verbal messages to breathy grunts, and
when they wouldn't condense, he said nothing.
They were primitives, both of them, which is to say that they were
doers, while Modern Man is a thinker and/or a feeler. The thinkers
compose new variations and permutations of euphoria, and the feelers
repay the thinkers by responding to their inventions. The ships had
no place for Modern Man, and Modern Man had only the most casual use
for the ships.
Doers can cooperate like cam and pushrod, like ratchet and pawl, and
such linkage creates a powerful bond. But Rootes and Grunty were
unique among crews in that these machine parts were not
interchangeable. Any good captain can command any good crew,
surroundings being equivalent. But Rootes would not and could not
ship out with anyone but Grunty, and Grunty was just that dependent.
Grunty understood this bond, and the fact that the only way it could
conceivably be broken would be to explain it to Rootes. Rootes did
not understand it because it never occurred to him to try, and had he
tried, he would have failed, since he was inherently non-equipped for
the task. Grunty knew that their unique bond was, for him, a survival
matter. Rootes did not know this, and would have rejected the idea
with violence.
So Rootes regarded Grunty with tolerance and a modified amusement.
The modification was an inarticulate realization of Grunty's complete
dependability. Grunty regarded Rootes with... well, with the
ceaseless, silent flurry of words in his mind.
There was, beside the harmony of functions and the other link,
understood only by Grunty, a third adjunct to their phenomenal
efficiency as a crew. It was organic, and it had to do with the
stellar drive.
Reaction engines were long forgotten. The so-called "warp" drive was
used only experimentally and on certain crash-priority war-craft
where operating costs were not a factor. The Starmite 439 was, like
most interstellar craft, powered by an RS plant. Like the transistor,
the Referential Stasis generator is extremely simple to construct and
very difficult indeed to explain. Its mathematics approaches
mysticism and its theory contains certain impossibilities which are
ignored in practice. Its effect is to shift the area of stasis of the
ship and everything in it from one point of reference to another. For
example, the ship at rest on the Earth's surface is in stasis in
reference to the ground on which it rests. Throwing the ship into
stasis in reference to the center of the earth gives it instantly an
effective speed equal to the surface velocity of the planet around
its core--some one thousand miles per hour. Stasis referential to the
sun moves the Earth out from under the ship at the Earth's orbital
velocity. GH stasis "moves" the ship at the angular velocity of the
sun about the Galactic Hub. The galactic drift can be used, as can
any simple or complex mass center in this expanding universe. There
are resultants and there are multipliers, and effective velocities
can be enormous. Yet the ship is constantly in stasis, so that there
is never an inertia factor.
The one inconvenience of the RS drive is that shifts from one
referent to another invariably black the crew out, for psychoneural
reasons. The blackout period varies slightly between individuals,
from one to two and a half hours. But some anomaly in Grunty's
gigantic frame kept his blackout periods down to thirty or forty
minutes, while Rootes was always out for two hours or more. There was
that about Grunty which made moments of isolation a vital necessity,
for a man must occasionally be himself, which in anyone's company
Grunty was not. But after stasis shifts Grunty had an hour or so to
himself while his commander lay numbly spread-eagled on the blackout
couch, and he spent these in communions of his own devising.
Sometimes this meant only a good book.
This, then, was the crew picked to man the prison ship. It had been
together longer than any other crew in the Space Service. Its record
showed a metrical efficiency and a resistance to physical and psychic
debilitations previously unheard of in a trade where close
confinement on long voyages had come to be regarded as hazards. In
space, shift followed shift uneventfully, and planetfall was made on
schedule and without incident. In port Rootes would roar off to the
fleshpots, in which he would wallow noisily until an hour before
takeoff, while Grunty found, first, the business office, and next, a
bookstore.
They were pleased to be chosen for the Dirbanu trip. Rootes felt no
remorse at taking away Earth's new delight, since he was one of the
very few who was immune to it. ("Pretty," he said at his first
encounter.) Grunty simply grunted, but then, so did everyone else.
Rootes did not notice, and Grunty did not remark upon the obvious
fact that though the loverbirds' expression of awestruck wonderment
in each other's presence had, if anything, intensified, their extreme
pleasure in Earth and the things of Earth had vanished. They were
locked, securely but comfortably, in the after cabin behind a new
transparent door, so that their every move could be watched from the
main cabin and control console. They sat close, with their arms about
one another, and though their radiant joy in the contact never
lessened, it was a shadowed pleasure, a lachrymose beauty like the
wrenching music of the wailing wall.
The RS drive laid its hand on moon and they vaulted away. Grunty came
up from blackout to find it very quiet. The loverbirds lay still in
each other's arms, looking very human except for the high joining of
their closed eyelids, which nictated upward rather than downward like
a Terran's. Rootes sprawled limply on the other couch, and Grunty
nodded at the sight. He deeply appreciated the silence, since Rootes
had filled the small cabin with earthy chatter about his conquests in
port, detail by hairy detail, for two solid hours preceding their
departure. It was a routine which Grunty found particularly wearing,
partly for its content, which interested him not at all, but mostly
for its inevitability. Grunty had long ago noted that these
recitations, for all their detail, carried the tones of thirst rather
than of satiety. He had his own conclusions about it, and,
characteristically, kept them to himself. But inside, his spinning
gusts of words could shape themselves well toit, and they did. "And
man, she moaned!" Rootes would chant. "And take money? She /gave/ me
money. And what did I do with it? Why, I bought up some more of the
same." /And what you could buy with a shekel's worth of tenderness my
prince!/ his silent words sang. "...across the floor and around the
rug until, by damn, I thought we're about to climb the wall. Loaded,
Grunty-boy, I tell you, I was loaded!" /Poor little one/ ran the
hushed susurrus, /thy poverty is as great as thy joy and a tenth as
great as thine empty noise./ One of Grunty's greatest pleasures was
taken in the fact that this kind of chuntering was limited to the
first day out, with barely another word on the varied theme until the
next departure, no matter how many months away that might be. /Squeak
to me of love dear mouse/, his words would chuckle. /Stand up on your
cheese and nibble away at your dream. Then, wearily, But oh, this
treasure I carry is too heavy a burden, in all its fullness, to be so
tugged at by your clattering vacuum!/
Grunty left the couch and went to the controls. The preset courses
checked against the indicators. He logged them and fixed the finder
control to locate a certain mass-nexus in the Crab Nebula. It would
chime when it was ready. He set the switch for final closing by the
push-button beside his couch, and went aft to wait.
He stood watching the loverbirds because there was nothing else for
him to do.
They lay quite still, but love so permeated them that their very
poses expressed it. Their lax bodies yearned each to each, and the
tall one's hand seemed to stream toward the fingers of his beloved,
and then back again, like the riven tatters of a torn fabric
straining toward oneness again. And as their mood was a sadness too,
so their pose, each and both, together and singly expressed it, and
singly each through the other silently spoke of the loss they had
suffered, and how it ensured greater losses to come. Slowly the
picture suffused Grunty's thinking, and his words picked and pieced
and smoothed it down, and murmured finally, /Brush away the dusting
of sadness from the future, bright ones. You've sadness enough for
now. Grief should live only after it is truly born, and not before./
His words sang,
/Come fill the cup and in the fire of spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling.
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter--and the bird is on the wing./
and added /Omar Khayyam, born circa 1073,/ for this, too, was one of
the words' functions.
And then he stiffened in horror; his great hands came up convulsively
and clawed the imprisoning glass...
They were smiling at him.
They were smiling, and on their faces and on and about their bodies
there was no sadness.
They had /heard/ him!
He glanced convulsively around at the Captain's unconscious form,
then back to the loverbirds.
That they should recover so swiftly from blackout was, to say the
least, an intrusion; for his moments of aloneness were precious and
more than precious to Grunty, and would be useless to him under the
scrutiny of those jewelled eyes. But that was a minor matter
compared to this other thing, this terrible fact that they heard.
Telepathic races were not common, but they did exist. And what he
was now experiencing was what invariably happened when humans
encountered one. He could only send; the loverbirds could only
receive. And they must not receive him! No one must. No one must know
what he was, what he thought. If anyone did, it would be a disaster
beyond bearing. It would mean no more flights with Rootes. Which, of
course, meant no flights with anyone. And how could he live--where
could he go?
He turned back to the loverbirds. His lips were white and drawn back
in a snarl of panic and fury. For a blood-thick moment he held their
eyes. They drew closer to one another, and together sent him a
radiant, anxious, friendly look that made him grind his teeth.
Then, at the console, the finder chimed.
Grunty turned slowly from the transparent door and went to his couch.
He lay down and poised his thumb over the push-button.
He /hated/ the loverbirds, and there was no joy in him. He pressed
the button, the ship slid into a new stasis, and he blacked out.
* * *
The time passed.
"Grunty!"
"Nuh."
"You feed them this shift?"
"Nuh."
"Last shift?"
"Nuh."
"What the hell's the matter with you, y'big dumb bastich? What you
expect them to live on?"
Grunty sent a look of roiling hatred aft. "Love," he said.
"Feed 'em," snapped Rootes.
Wordlessly Grunty went about preparing a meal for the prisoners.
Rootes stood in the middle of the cabin, his hard small fists on his
hips, his gleaming auburn head tilted to one side, and watched every
move. "I didn't used to have to tell you anything," he growled, half
pugnaciously, half worriedly. "You sick?"
Grunty shook his head. He twisted the tops of two cans and set them
aside to heat themselves, and took down the water suckers.
"You got it in for these honeymooners or something?"
Grunty averted his face.
"We get them to Dirbanu alive and healthy, hear me? They get sick,
you get sick, by God. I'll see to. that. Don't give me trouble,
Grunty. I'll take it out on you. I never whipped you yet, but I
will."
Grunty carried the tray aft.
"You hear me?" Rootes yelled.
Grunty nodded without looking at him. He touched the control and a
small communication slid open in the glass wall. He slid the tray
through. The taller loverbird stepped forward and took it eagerly,
gracefully, and gave him a dazzling smile of thanks. Grunty growled
low in his throat like a carnivore. The loverbird carried the food
back to the couch and they began to eat, feeding each other little
morsels.
* * *
A new stasis, and Grunty came fighting up out of blackness. He sat up
abruptly, glanced around the ship. The Captain was sprawled out
across the cushions, his compact body and outflung arm forming the
poured-out, spring-steel laxness usually seen only in sleeping cats.
The loverbirds, even in deep unconsciousness, lay like hardly
separate parts of something whole, the small one on the couch, the
tall one on the deck, prone, reaching, supplicating.
Grunty snorted and hove to his feet. He crossed the cabin and stood
looking down on Rootes.
/The hummingbird is a yellowjacket/ said his words. /Buzz and dart,
hiss and flash away. Swift and hurtful, hurtful.../
He stood for a long moment, his great shoulder muscles working one
against the other, and his mouth trembled.
He looked at the loverbirds, who were still motionless. His eyes
slowly narrowed.
His words tumbled and climbed, and ordered themselves:
/I through love have learned three things,
Sorrow, sin and death it brings.
Yet day by day my heart within
Dares shame and sorrow, death and sin.../
And dutifully he added /Samuel Ferguson, born 1810./ He glared at the
loverbirds, and brought his fist into his palm with a sound like a
club on an anthill. They had heard him again, and this time they did
not smile, but looked into each other's eyes and then turned together
to regard him, nodding gravely.
* * *
Rootes went through Grunty's books, leafing and casting aside. He had
never touched them before. "Buncha crap," he jeered. "Garden of the
Plynck. Wind in the Willows. Worm Ouroborous. Kid stuff."
Grunty lumbered across and patiently gathered up the books the
Captain had flung aside, putting them one by one back into their
places, stroking them as if they had been bruised.
"Isn't there nothing in here with pictures?"
Grunty regarded him silently for a moment and then took down a tall
volume. The Captain snatched it, leafed through it. "Mountains," he
growled. "Old houses." He leafed. "Damn boats." He smashed the book
to the deck. "Haven't you got /any/ of what I want?"
Grunty waited attentively.
"Do I have to draw a diagram?" the Captain roared. "Got that ol'
itch, Grunty. You wouldn't know. I feel like looking at pictures, get
what I mean?"
Grunty stared at him, utterly without expression, but deep within him
a panic squirmed. The Captain never, never behaved like this in
mid-voyage. It was going to get worse, he realized. Much worse. And
quickly.
He shot the loverbirds a vicious, hate-filled glance. If they weren't
aboard...
There could be no waiting. Not now. Something had to be done.
Something...
"Come on, come on," said Rootes. "Goddlemighty Godfrey, even a
deadbutt like you must have something for kicks."
Grunty turned away from him, squeezed his eyes closed for a tortured
second, then pulled himself together. He ran his hand over the books,
hesitated, and finally brought out a large, heavy one. He handed it
to the Captain and went forward to the console. He slumped down there
over the file of computer tapes, pretending to be busy.
The Captain sprawled onto Grunty's couch and opened the book.
"Michelangelo, what the hell," he growled. He grunted, almost like
his shipmate. "Statues," he half-whispered, in withering scorn. But
he ogled and leafed at last, and was quiet.
The loverbirds looked at him with a sad tenderness, and then together
sent beseeching glances at Grunty's angry back.
The matrix-pattern for Terra slipped through Grunty's fingers, and he
suddenly tore the tape across, and across again. A filthy place,
Terra. /There is nothing,/ he thought, /like the conservatism of
license./ Given a culture of sybaritics, with an endless choice of
mechanical titillations, and you have a people of unbreakable and
hidebound formality, a people with few but massive taboos, a
shockable, narrow, prissy people obeying the rules--even the rules of
their calculated depravities--and protecting their treasured,
specialized pruderies. In such a group there are words one may not
use for fear of their fanged laughter, colors one may not wear,
gestures and intonations one must forego, on pain of being torn to
pieces. The rules are complex and absolute, and in such a place one's
heart may not sing lest, through its warm free joyousness, it betrays
one.
And you must have joy of such a nature, if you must be free to be
your pressured self, then off to space... off to the glittering black
lonelinesses. And let the days go by, and let the time pass, and
huddle beneath your impenetrable integument, and wait, and wait, and
every once in a long while you will have that moment of lonely
consciousness when there is no one around to see; and then it may
burst from you and you may dance, or cry, or twist the hair on your
head till your eyeballs blaze, or do any of the other things your so
unfashionable nature thirstily demands.
It took Grunty half a lifetime to this freedom. No price would be too
great to keep it. Not lives, nor interplanetary diplomacy, nor Earth
itself were worth such a frightful loss.
He would lose it if anyone knew, and the loverbirds knew.
He pressed his heavy hands together until the knuckles crackled.
Dirbanu, reading it all from the ardent minds of the loverbirds;
Dirbanu flashing the news across the stars; the roar of reaction, and
then Rootes, Rootes, when the huge and ugly impact washed over him...
So let Dirbanu be offended. Let Terra accuse this ship of fumbling,
even of treachery--anything but the withering news the loverbirds had
stolen.
* * *
Another new stasis, and Grunty's first thought as he came alive was
/It has to be soon./
He rolled off the couch and glared at the unconscious loverbirds. The
helpless loverbirds.
Smash their heads in.
Then Rootes... what to tell Rootes?
The loverbirds attacked him, tried to seize the ship?
He shook his head like a bear in a beehive. Rootes would never
believe that. Even if the loverbirds could open the door, which they
could not, it was more than ridiculous to imagine those two bright
and slender things attacking anyone--especially not so rugged and
massive an opponent.
Poison? No--there was nothing in the efficient, unfailingly
beneficial food stores that might help.
His glance strayed to the Captain, and he stopped breathing.
Of course!
He ran to the Captain's personal lockers. He should have known that
such a cocky little hound as Rootes could not live, could not strut
and prance as he did unless he had a weapon. And if it was the kind
of weapon that such a man would characteristically choose--
A movement caught his eye as he searched.
The loverbirds were awake.
That wouldn't matter.
He laughed at them, a flashing, ugly laugh. They cowered close
together and their eyes grew very bright.
They knew.
He was aware that they were suddenly very busy, as busy as he. And
then he found the gun.
It was a snug little thing, smooth and intimate in his hand. It was
exactly what he had guessed, what he had hoped for--just what he
needed. It was silent. It would leave no mark. It need not even be
aimed carefully. Just a touch of its feral radiation and throughout
the body, the axons suddenly refuse to propagate nerve impulses. No
thought leaves the brain, no slightest contraction of heart or lung
occurs again, ever. And afterward, no sign remains that a weapon has
been used.
He went to the serving window with the gun in his hand. /When he
wakes, you will be dead,/ he thought. /Couldn't recover from stasis
blackout. Too bad. But no one's to blame, hm? We never had Dirbanu
passengers before. So how could we know?/
The loverbirds, instead of flinching, were crowding close to the
window, their faces beseeching, their delicate hands signing and
signalling, frantically trying to convey something.
He touched the control, and the panel slid back.
The taller loverbird held up something as if it would shield him. The
other pointed at it, nodded urgently, and gave him one of those
accursed, hauntingly sweet smiles.
Grunty put up his hand to sweep the thing aside, and then checked
himself.
It was only a piece of paper.
All the cruelty of humanity rose up in Grunty. /A species that can't
protect itself doesn't deserve to live./ He raised the gun.
And then he saw the pictures.
Economical and accurate, and, for all their subject, done with the
ineffable grace of the loverbirds themselves, the pictures showed
three figures:
Grunty himself, hulking, impassive, the eyes glowing, the tree-trunk
legs and hunched shoulders.
Rootes, in a pose so characteristic and so cleverly done that Grunty
gasped. Crisp and clean, Rootes' image had one foot up on a chair,
both elbows on the high knee, the head half turned. The eyes fairly
sparkled from the paper.
And a girl.
She was beautiful. She stood with her arms behind her, her feet
slightly apart, her face down a little. She was deep-eyed, pensive,
and to see her was to be silent, to wait for those downcast lids to
lift and break the spell.
Grunty frowned and faltered. He lifted a puzzled gaze from these
exquisite renderings to the loverbirds, and met the appeal, the
earnest, eager, hopeful faces.
The loverbird put a second paper against the glass.
There were the same three figures, identical in every respect to the
previous ones, except for one detail: they were all naked.
He wondered how they knew human anatomy so meticulously.
Before he could react, still another sheet went up.
The loverbirds, this time--the tall one, the shorter one, hand in
hand. And next to them a third figure, somewhat similar, but tiny,
very round, and with grotesquely short arms.
Grunty stared at the three sheets, one after the other. There was
something... something...
And then the loverbird put up the fourth sketch, and slowly, slowly,
Grunty began to understand. In the last picture, the loverbirds were
shown exactly as before, except that they were naked, and so was the
small creature beside them. He had never seen loverbirds naked
before. Possibly no one had.
Slowly he lowered the gun. He began to laugh. He reached through the
window and took both the loverbirds' hands in one of his, and they
laughed with him.
* * *
Rootes stretched easily with his eyes closed, pressed his face down
into the couch, and rolled over. He dropped his feet to the deck,
held his head in his hands and yawned. Only then did he realize that
Grunty was standing just before him.
"What's the matter with you?"
He followed Grunty's grim gaze.
The glass door stood open.
Rootes bounced to his feet as if the couch had turned white-hot.
"Where--what--"
Grunty's crag of a face was turned to the starboard bulkhead. Rootes
spun to it, balanced on the balls 'of his feet as if he were boxing.
His smooth face gleamed in the red glow of the light over the
airlock.
"The lifeboat... you mean they took the lifeboat? They got away?"
Grunty nodded.
Rootes held his head. "Oh, fine," he moaned. He whipped around to
Grunty. "And where the hell were you when this happened?"
"Here."
"Well, what in God's name happened?" Rootes was on the trembling edge
of foaming hysteria.
Grunty thumped his chest.
"You're not trying to tell me you let them go?"
Grunty nodded, and waited--not for very long.
"I'm going to burn you down," Rootes raged. "I'm going to break you
so low you'll have to climb for twelve years before you get a
barracks to sweep. And after I get done with you I'll turn you over
to the Service. What do you think they'll do to you? What do you
think they're going to do to me?"
He leapt at Grunty and struck him a hard, cutting blow to the cheek.
Grunty kept his hands down and made no attempt to avoid the fist. He
stood immovable, and waited.
"Maybe those were criminals, but they were Dirbanu nationals," Rootes
roared when he could get his breath. "How are we going to explain
this to Dirbanu? Do you realize this could mean war?"
Grunty shook his head.
"What do you mean? You know something. You better talk while you can.
Come on, bright boy--what are we going to tell Dirbanu?"
Grunty pointed at the empty cell. "Dead," he said.
"What good will it do us to say they're dead? They're not. They'll
show up again some day, and--"
Grunty shook his head. He pointed to the star chart. Dirbanu showed
as the nearest body. There was no livable planet within thousands of
parsecs.
"They didn't go to Dirbanu!"
"Nuh."
"Damn it, it's like pulling rivets to get anything out of you. In
that lifeboat they go to Dirbanu--which they won't--or they head out,
maybe for years, to the Rim stars. That's all they can do!"
Grunty nodded.
"And you think Dirbanu won't track them, won't bring 'em down?"
"No ships."
"They have ships!"
"Nuh."
"The loverbirds told you?"
Grunty agreed.
"You mean their own ship that they destroyed, and the one the
ambassador used were all they had?"
"Yuh."
Rootes strode up and back. "I don't get it. I don't begin to get it.
What did you do it for, Grunty?"
Grunty stood for a moment, watching Rootes' face. Then he went to the
computing desk. Rootes had no choice but to follow. Grunty spread out
the four drawings.
"What's this? Who drew these? /Them?/ What do you know. /Damn!/ Who
is the chick?"
Grunty patiently indicated all of the pictures in one sweep.
Rootes looked at him, puzzled, looked at one of Grunty's eyes, then
the other, shook his head, and applied himself to the pictures again.
"This is more like it," he murmured. "Wish I'd 'a known they could
draw like this." Again Grunty drew his attention to all the pictures
and away from the single drawing that fascinated him.
"There's you, there's me. Right? Then this chick. Now, here we are
again, all buff naked. Damn, what a carcass. All right, all right,
I'm going on. Now, this is the prisoners, right? And who's the little
fat one?"
Grunty pushed the fourth sheet over. "Oh," said Rootes. "Here
everybody's naked too. Hm."
He yelped suddenly and bent close. Then he rapidly eyed all four
sheets in sequence. His face began to get red. He gave the fourth
picture a long, close scrutiny. Finally he put his finger on the
sketch of the round little alien. "This is... a... a Dirbanu--"
Grunty nodded. "Female."
"Then those two--they were--"
Grunty nodded.
"So that's it!" Rootes fairly shrieked in fury. "You mean we been
shipped out all this time with a coupla God damned /fairies?/ Why, if
known that I'd a known that I'd a' killed 'em!"
"Yuh."
Rootes looked up at him with a growing respect and considerable
amusement. "So you got rid of 'em so's I wouldn't kill 'em and mess
everything up?" He scratched his head. "Well, I'll be
billy-be-damned. You got a think-tank on you after all. Anything I
can't stand, it's a fruit."
Grunty nodded.
"God," said Rootes, "It figures. It really figures. Their females
don't look anything like the males. Compared with them, our females
are practically identical to us. So the ambassador comes, and sees
what looks like a planet full of queers. He knows better but he can't
stand the sight. So back he goes to Dirbanu, and Earth gets brushed
off."
Grunty nodded.
"Then these pansies here run off to earth, figuring they'll be at
home. They damn near made it, too. But Dirbanu calls 'em back, not
wanting the likes of them representing their planet. I don't blame
'em a bit. How would you feel if the only Terran on Dirbanu was a
fluff? Wouldn't you want him out of there, but quick?"
Grunty said nothing.
"And now," said Rootes, "we better give Dirbanu the good news."
He went forward to the communicator.
It took a surprisingly short time to contact the shrouded planet.
Dirbanu acknowledged and coded out a greeting. The decoder over the
console printed the message for them:
GREETINGS STARMITE 439. ESTABLISH ORBIT. CAN YOU DROP PRISONERS TO
DIRBANU? NEVER MIND PARACHUTE.
"Whew," said Rootes. "Nice people. Hey, you notice they don't say
come on in. They never expected to let us land. Well, what'll we tell
'em about their lavender lads?"
"Dead," said Grunty.
"Yeah," said Rootes. "That's what they want anyway." He sent rapidly.
In a few minutes the response clattered out of the decoder.
STAND BY FOR TELEPATH SWEEP. WE MUST CHECK. PRISONERS MAY BE
PRETENDING DEATH.
"Oh-oh," said the Captain. "This is where the bottom drops out."
"Nuh," said Grunty, calmly.
"But their detector will locate--oh--I see what you're driving at. No
life, no signal. Same as if they weren't here at all."
"Yuh."
The coder clattered.
DIRBANU GRATEFUL. CONSIDER MISSION COMPLETE. DO NOT WANT BODIES. YOU
MAY EAT THEM.
Rootes retched. Grunty said, "Custom."
The decoder kept clattering.
NOW READY FOR RECIPROCAL AGREEMENT WITH TERRA.
"We go home in a blaze of glory," Rootes exulted. He sent,
TERRA ALSO READY. WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST?
The decoder paused, then:
TERRA STAY AWAY FROM DIRBANU AND DIRBANU WILL STAY AWAY FROM TERRA.
THIS IS NOT A SUGGESTION. TAKES EFFECT IMMEDIATELY.
"Why that bunch of bastards!"
Rootes pounded his codewriter, and although they circled the planet
at a respectful distance for nearly four days, they received no
further response.
* * *
The last thing Rootes had said before they established the first
stasis on the way home was: "Well, anyway--it does me good to think
of those two queens crawling away in that lifeboat. Why, they can't
even starve to death. They'll be cooped up there for years before
they get anywhere they can sit down."
It still rang in Grunty's mind as he shook off the blackout. He
glanced aft to the glass partition and smiled reminiscently. "For
years," he murmured. His words curled up and spun, and said,
/... Yes; love requires the focal space
Of recollection or of hope,
Ere it can measure its own scope.
Too soon, too soon comes death to show
We love more deeply than we know!/
Dutifully, then, came the words: /Coventry Patmore, born 1823./
He rose slowly and stretched, revelling in his precious privacy. He
crossed other couch and sat down on the edge of it.
For a time he watched the Captain's unconscious face, reading it with
great tenderness and utmost attention, like a mother with an infant.
His words said, /Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and
not where we choose?/
And they said, /But I'm glad it's you, little prince. I'm glad it's
you./
He put out his huge hand and, with a feather touch, stroked the
sleeping lips.
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