Part 6 (1/2)

”Isn't that just what we thought about ourselves-until they landed?”

George's tired eyelids came open wide.

”Are you thinking what I-”

”We've got Tillie. Mavrua probably knows enough to noodle their input indicators. It wouldn't take much. What is to Tillie as a Capellan is to us?”

”Bobo!” put in Mrs. Peabody, from some ambush.

”Bobo will do nicely,” I went on. ”Now we work up the exact scenery-”

”But, Jesus, Max! Talk about forlorn chances-” protested George.

”Any chance beats no chance. Besides, it's a better chance than you think. Some day I'll tell you about irrational s.e.x phobias, I've had some unique data. Right now we've got to get this perfect, that's all. No slips. You cook it and I'm going to vet every millimeter of every frame. Twice.”

But I didn't. My fever went up, and they put me back in the cooler. Every now and then Tillie dropped in to tell me things like the ore piles on Luna had quit growing, and the crew was evidently busy air-sealing the hold. How was George doing? Great. Mavrua had transmitted the crucial frames. In my more lucid moments I realized George probably didn't need any riding-after all, he'd trained on those Mongolian yak parties.

If this were public history I'd give you the big drama of those nine days, the technical problems that got licked, the human foul-ups that squeaked by. Like the twenty-four hours in which the Joint Chiefs were insisting on monitoring the show through a channel that would have generated an echo-their scientists said no, but the President finally trusted ours and killed that. Or the uproar when we found out, about Day Five, that the French had independently come up with a scheme of their own, and were trying to talk privately to Mavrua-at a time when his Capellan chief was around, too. The President had to get the U.N. Secretary and the French Premier's mother-in-law to hold that.

That let the cat out of the first bag; the high-level push to get in the act began. And there was the persistent intrusion from our own Security side, who wanted to hitch Mavrua up to some kind of interstellar polygraph to check him out. And the discovery at the last minute, of a flaw in our scanningpulse which would have left a fatal trace, so that new equipment had to be a.s.sembled and lofted to the satellite relay all one sleepless night. Oh, there was drama, all right. George got quite familiar with the sight of the President pulling on his pants.

Or I could paint you the horror visions now growing in all our minds, of snow that never stopped, of glaciers forming and grinding down from the poles across the world's arable land. Of eight billion people ultimately trying to jam themselves into the shrinking, foodless equatorial belt. Of how few would survive.

A great and dramatic week in world history-during which our hero, in actual fact, was worrying mostly about an uncontrolled staph colony in his cracked pelvis and dreaming of dragging seals home to his igloo off Key West.

”How're your teeth, baby?” I asked what seemed to be a solid version of Tillie, swimming in the antibiotic fogs. I'd been dreaming that her head had been resting on my arm cast.

”Teeth. Like for chewing blubber. That's what Eskimo women do.”

She drew back primly, seeing I was conscious.

”It's getting out, Max. The wise money is starting to slip south.”

”Best stick with me, baby. I have a complete arctic camping outfit.”

She put her hand on my head then. Nice hand.

”s.e.x will get you nowhere,” I told her. ”In times to come it's the girls who can chew hides who'll get the men.”

She blew smoke in my face and left.

On Day Minus Four there was a diversion. The Capellan party who had landed in Africa were now partying around the Pacific on their way to pick up the VTO launch in Mexico. Since Authority was still sitting on all the vital information, the new batch of Girls from Capella were as popular as ever with the public. Behind the scenes there was a hot debate in progress about how they could be used as hostages.

To me this was futile-what could we even hope to get?

Meanwhile their launch was sitting unattended at Mexico City, showing no signs of the various cosmic can-openers we had tried. All the united military could do was to englobe it with guard devices and a mob of a.s.sorted special troops.

On Day Minus Four the three Girls went fis.h.i.+ng off a Hawaiian atoll, in a catamaran. They were insh.o.r.e of their naval escort. One of them yawned, said something.

At that moment the VTO boat in Mexico went whirr, let out a blast that incinerated a platoon of Marines and took off. A j.a.p pilot earned his family a pension by cras.h.i.+ng it at 90,000 feet with his atomic warheads armed. As far as we could find out, he never even caused a course correction.

The VTO came scorching down on the atoll just as the Girls drifted up to the beach. They sauntered over and were inside before the naval watchdogs got their heads out of their radar hoods. Two minutes later they were out of atmosphere. So much for the great hostage plan.

After this I kept dreaming it was getting colder. On Day Minus Three I thought I saw rhododendron leaves outside my window hanging straight down, which they do at 46 degrees Fahrenheit. Mrs.

Peabody had to come over to tell me the s.h.i.+p was still on Luna, and it was 82 outside.

Day Minus Two was it. They rolled me over to George's projection room for the show. We had one of the two slave-screens, the U.N. had the other. The Chief hadn't wanted that-partly from the risk of detection, but mostly because it was ninety-nine to one the thing would bomb out. But too many nations knew we were trying something.

I was late, due to a flat tire on my motorized coffin. George's masterpiece was already running when they wedged me through the doors. In the dimness I could make out the Chief up front, with a few cabinet types and the President. The rest seemed to be just two-feather Indians like me. I guess the President wanted to be in his own family when it blew.The screen show was pretty impressive. A big Capellan hunched over her console, sweat streaming down her face, yelling a low steely contralto into her mike. I couldn't get the words but I picked up the repet.i.tive cadence. The screen flickered-George had worked authentic interstellar noise into the send-and then it jumped a bit, like an early flick when the s.h.i.+p goes down with Pearl White lashed to a bunk. There were intermittent background crashes, getting louder, and one cut-off screech.

Then the back wall started to quake, and the door went out in a laser flare. Something huge kicked it all the way down, and Bobo came in.

Oh my aunt, he was beautiful. Bobo Upd.y.k.e, the sweetest monster I've known. I heard a chair squeak beside me and there he was, beaming at his image on the screen. They'd fixed him up with love.

Nothing crude-just a bit more browridge on what he had, and the terrible great paws very clean. The uniform-Mau-Mau on a solid base of S.S. Schrechlichheit. Somebody had done something artfully inhuman about the eyes, too. For an instant he just stood there. The crashes quit, like held breath.

There's rape and rape, you know. Most rape has some shred of humanity in it, some acknowledgment of the victim's existence. That kind most women aren't really scared of. But there's another kind. The kind a golem might do, or a torture device. Violation done by a thing to a thing. That's what they'd put into Bobo and that's what the Capellan on the screen turned up her face to look at. All sweet Auschwitz.

Did I say Bobo is seven feet two plus his helmet which brushed the ceiling, and Tillie isn't five feet?

It was something to see. He put out one huge hand. (I heard that footage was reshot twenty-two times.) His other hand was coming toward the camera. More background crash. The last you saw between Bobo's oncoming fingers was her breast ripping naked and more hulking males beyond the open door.

Blackness-a broken shriek and a, well, noise. The screen went dead.

Our lights came on. Bobo giggled shyly. People were getting up. I saw Tillie before the crowd covered her. She had some blue gook on her eyelids and her hair was combed. I decided I'd give her a break on the blubber-chewing.

People moved around, but the tension didn't break. There was nothing to do but wait. In one corner was Harry with a console. Somebody brought in coffee; somebody else brought in a napkin that gurgled into the chiefs' dixie cups. There was a little low talk that stopped whenever Harry twitched.

The world knows what happened, of course. They didn't even stop for their ore. It was 74 minutes later that Harry's read-outs began to purr softly.

Up on Luna, power was being used to close airlocks, s.h.i.+ft busbars. Generators were running up.

The great sensitive ears yearning at them from the Bank quivered. At minute 82.5 the dials started to swing. The big s.h.i.+p was moving. It floated off its dock in the Alps, drifted briefly in an expanding orbit, and then Harry's board went wild as it kicked itself outward. Toward Pluto.

”Roughly one hundred and seventy-nine degrees from the direction of Capella,” said George, as they rolled me out. ”If they took Harry's advice, they're working their way home via the Magellanic Clouds.”

Next day we got the electronic snow as they went into s.p.a.ce drive. To leave us, we may hope, for another couple of millennia.

The official confirmation of their trajectory came on the day they let me try walking. (I told you this was history as I lived it.) I walked out the front door, over a chorus of yowls. Tillie came along to help.

We never did refer to precisely what it was that made her able to grip my waist and let me lean on her shoulder. Or why we were suddenly in Magruder's buying steak and stuff to take to my place. She was distrustful of my claim to own garlic, and insisted on buying fresh. The closest we came-then or ever-to an explanation was over the avocado counter.

”It's all relative, isn't it?” she said to the avocados.

”It is indeed,” I replied.And really, that was it. If the Capellans could bring us the news that we were inferior mutations, somebody could bring them the word that they were inferior mutations. If big, hairy Mamma could come back and surprise her runt relations, a bigger, harrier Papa could appear and surprise Mamma.

-Always provided that you had a half-pint female who could look and talk like a Capellan for seven minutes of tape, and a big boy who could impersonate a walking nightmare, and one disaffected alien to juggle frequencies so a transmission from a nearby planet came through as a send from home base. And a pop genius like George to screen the last stand of the brave Capellan HQ officer, sticking to her mike to warn all s.h.i.+ps to save themselves from the horror overwhelming the home planet.