So—slow and cautious was the order. Find out everything possible. Gather data, correlate, interpret. Before beginning Project Ozagenocide, make sure that retaliation is impossible. Make sure.
Thus it was that four months after the appearance of the Gabriel above Siddo, two presumably friendly (to wogs) Terrans set out on a trip with two presumably friendly (to Terrans) wogglebugs. They were going to investigate the ruins of a city built two thousand years ago by now nearly extinct humanoids. They were inspired by a dream that had been dreamed on the planet Earth years before and light-years distant.
They rode in a vehicle fantastic to the human beings.
6
The motor hiccoughed, and the car jerked. The Ozagenian sitting on the right side of the rear seat leaned over and shouted something.
Hal Yarrow turned his head and yelled, ‘What?’
He repeated in Siddo,’ “Abhudai’akhu?”’
Fobo, sitting directly behind Hal, stuck his mouth against the Earthman’s ear. He translated for Zugu, though his American sounded weird with its underlying trill and resonant approximations.
‘Zugu says and emphasizes that you should pump that little rod to your right. It gives the … carburetor … more alcohol.’
The antennae on Fobo’s skullcap tickled Hal’s ears. Hal spoke a word-sentence consisting of thirty syllables. This meant, roughly, ‘I thank you.’ It consisted initially of the verb used in the present masculine animate singular first person form. Attached to the verb was a syllable indicating freedom from obligation on the part of either the speaker or hearer, the inflected first person pronoun, another syllable indicating that the speaker acknowledged the hearer as most knowledgeable of the two, the third person masculine animate singular pronoun, and two syllables which, in their order of sequence, classified the whole present situation as semi-humorous. Reversed in sequence, the classifier would indicate that the situation was serious.
‘What did you say?’ shouted Fobo, and Hal shrugged. He suddenly realized that he had forgotten a palatal click, the lack of which either changed the meaning of the phrase or else made it completely meaningless. In either case, he did not have the time or the will to repeat.
Instead, he worked the throttle as Fobo had directed. To do so, he had to lean across the gapt, sitting at his right.
‘A thousand pardons!’ Hal bellowed.
Pornsen did not look at Yarrow. His hands, lying on his lap, were locked together. The knuckles were white. Like his ward, he was having his first experience with an internal combustion motor. Unlike Hal, he was scared by the loud noise, the fumes, the bumps and bangs, and the idea of riding in a manually controlled ground vehicle.
Hal grinned. He loved this quaint car, which reminded him of the pictures in the history books of Earth’s automobiles during the second decade of the twentieth century. It thrilled him to be able to twist the stiff-acting wheel and feel the heavy body of the vehicle obey his muscles. The banging of the four cylinders and the reek of burning alcohol excited him. As for the rough riding, that was fun. It was romantic, like putting out to sea in a sailboat—something else he hoped to do before he left Ozagen.
Also, though he would not admit it to himself, anything that scared Pornsen pleased him.
His pleasure ended. The cylinders popped, then sputtered. The car bucked and jerked and rolled to a stop. The two wogglebugs hopped over the side of the car (no doors) and raised the hood. Hal followed. Pornsen remained on the seat. He pulled a package of Merciful Seraphim (if angels smoked, they’d prefer Merciful Seraphim) out of his uniform pocket and lit one. His hands shook.
Hal noted it was the fourth he’d seen Pornsen smoking since morning prayers. If Pornsen wasn’t careful, he’d be going over the quota allowed even first-class gapts. That meant that the next time Hal got into trouble, he could ask the gapt for help by reminding him…No! That was too shameful a thought to keep in his head. Definitely unreal, belonging only in a pseudofuture. He loved the gapt as the gapt loved him, and he should not be planning such an un-Sigmenlike path of behavior.
Yet, he thought, judging from the difficulties he’d been in so far, he could use some help from Pornsen.
Hal shook his head to clear himself of such thoughts and bent over the motor to watch Zugu work on it. Zugu seemed to know what he was doing. He should, since he was the inventor and builder of the only—as far as the Terrans knew—Ozagenian vehicle driven by an internal combustion motor.
Zugu used a wrench to unscrew a long narrow pipe from a round glass case. Hal remembered that this was a gravity feed system. The fuel ran from the tank into the glass case, which was a sediment chamber. From there it ran into the feed pipe, which in turn passed the fuel on to the carburetor.
Pornsen called harshly, ‘Beloved son, are we going to be stuck here all day?’
Though he wore the mask and goggles which the Ozagenians had given him as windbreakers, his tight lips were enough expression. It was evident that unless events improved, the gapt would turn in a report unfavourable to his ward.
The gapt had wanted to wait the two days that would be needed until he could requisition a gig. The trip to the ruins could then have been made in fifteen minutes, a soundless and comfortable ride through the air. Hal had argued that driving would give more valuable espionage in this heavily forested country than surveying from the air. That his superiors had agreed was another thing that had exasperated Pornsen. Where his ward went, he had to go.
So, he had sulked all day while the young Terran, coached by Zugu, wheeled the jalopy down the forest roads. The only time Pornsen spoke was to remind Hal of the sacredness of the human self and to tell him to slow down.
Hal would reply, ‘Forgive me, cherished guardian,’ and would ease his foot off the accelerator. But, after a while, he would slowly press down. Once again, they would roar and leap down the rough dirt road.
Zugu unscrewed both ends of the pipe, stuck one end in his V-shaped mouth, and blew. Nothing, however, came out of the other end. Zugu shut his big blue eyes and puffed his cheeks out again. Nothing happened, except that his lightly tinged green face turned a dark olive. Then, he rapped the copper tubing against the hood and blew once more. Same result.
Fobo reached into a large leather pouch slung from a belt around his big belly. His finger and thumb came out, holding between them a tiny blue insect. Gently, he pushed the creature into one end of the pipe. After five seconds, a small red insect in a hurry dropped out of the other end. Behind it, hungrily crossing its mandibles, came the blue insect. Fobo deftly snared his pet and replaced it in the pouch. Zugu squashed the red bug beneath his sandal.
‘Behold!’ said Fobo. ‘An eater of alcohol! It lives in the fuel tank and imbibes freely and unmolested. It extracts the carbohydrates therein. A swimmer upon the golden seas of alcohol. What a life! But now and then it becomes too adventurous, travels into the sediment chamber, eats and devours the filter, and passes into the feedpipe. See! Zugu is even now replacing the filter. In a moment, we will be on our way down the road.’
Fobo’s breath had a strange and sickening odor. Hal wondered if the wog had been drinking liquor. He had never smelled it on anybody’s breath before, so he had no experience to go on. But even the thought of it made Hal nervous. If the gapt knew a bottle was being passed back and forth in the rear seat, he would not allow Hal out of his sight for a minute.
The wogs climbed into the back of the car. ‘Let’s go and depart!’ said Fobo.
‘Just a minute,’ said Pornsen in a low voice to Hal. ‘I think it’s better that Zugu drive this thing.’
‘If you ask the wog to drive, he’ll know you lack confidence in me, your fellow Terran,’ said Hal. ‘You wouldn’t want him to think it was your belief that a wog is superior to a human being, would you?’
Pornsen coughed as if he had trouble swallowing Hal’s remarks, then sputtered, ‘Of-of-of course not! Sigmen forbid! It was just that I had your welfare in mind. I thought you might be tired after the
strain of piloting this primitive and dangerous contraption all day.’
‘Thank you for your love for me,’ said Hal. He grinned and added, ‘It is comforting to know you are always at my side, ready to direct me away from the peril of pseudofutures.’
Pornsen said, ‘I have sworn by The Western Talmud to guide you through this life.’
Chastened by the mention of the sacred book, Hal started the car. At first, he drove slowly enough to suit the gapt. But, inside five minutes, his foot became heavy, and the trees began whizzing by. He glanced at Pornsen. The gapt’s rigid back and set teeth showed that he was again thinking of the report he would make to the chief Uzzite back in the spaceship. He looked furious enough to demand the ‘Meter of his ward.
Hal Yarrow breathed deeply of the wind battering his face mask. To H with Pornsen! To H with the ‘Meter! The blood lurched in his veins. The air of this planet was not the stuffy air of Earth. His lungs sucked it in like a happy bellows. At that moment, he felt as if he could have snapped his fingers under the nose of the Archurielite himself.
‘Look out!’ screamed Pornsen.
Hal, out of the corners of his eyes, glimpsed the large ‘ antelope-like beast that leaped from the forest onto the road just ahead of the right side of the car. At the same time, he twisted the wheel to swing the vehicle away from it. The vehicle skidded on the dirt. Its rear swung around. And Hal was not grounded enough in the elements of driving to know that he should turn the wheels in the direction of the skid to straighten the car out.
His lack of knowledge was not fatal, except to the beast, for its bulk struck the vehicle’s right side. Its long horns caught in Pornsen’s jacket and ripped open the sleeve on his right arm.
The car, its skid checked by the big bulk of the antelope, straightened out. But it was going in a straight line that angled off the road and led it up a sloping ridge of earth. Reaching the end of the ridge, it leaped out into the air and landed with an all-at-once bang of four tires blowing.
Even that impact did not halt it. A big bush loomed before Hal. He jerked on the wheel. Too late.
His chest pushed hard against the wheel as if it were trying to telescope the steering shaft against the dashboard. Fobo slammed into Hal’s back, increasing the weight on his chest. Both cried out, and the wog fell away.
Then, except for a hissing, there was silence. A pillar of steam from the broken radiator shot through the branches that held Hal’s face in a rough, barky embrace.
Hal Yarrow stared through steamshapes into big brown eyes. He shook his head. Eyes? And arms like branches? Or branches like arms? He thought he was in the grip of a brown-eyed nymph. Or were they called dryads? He couldn’t ask anybody. They weren’t supposed to know about such creatures. Nymph and dryad had been deleted from all books including Hack’s edition of the Revised and Real Milton. Only because Hal was a linguist had he had the chance to read an unexpurgated Paradise Lost and thus learn of classical Greek mythology.
Thoughts flashed off and on like lights on a spaceship’s control board. Nymphs sometimes turned into trees to escape their pursuers. Was this one of the fabled forest women staring at him with large and beautiful eyes through the longest lashes he’d ever seen?
He shut his eyes and wondered if a head injury was responsible for the vision and, if so, if it would be permanent. Hallucinations like that were worth keeping. He didn’t care if they conformed to reality or not.
He opened his eyes. The hallucination was gone.
He thought, It was that antelope looking at me. It got away after all. It ran around the bush and looked back. Antelope eyes. And my dark self formed the head around the eyes, the long black hair, the slender white neck, the swelling breasts … No! Unreal! It was my diseased mind, stunned by the shock, momentarily opened to that which has been festering, seething all that time on the ship without ever seeing a woman, even on the tapes…
He forgot about the eyes. He was choking. A heavy nauseating odor hung over the car. The crash must have frightened the wogs very much. Otherwise, they would not have involuntarily relaxed the sphincter muscles which controlled the neck of the ‘madbag.’ This organ, a bladder located near the small of the back, had been used by the presentient ancestors of the Ozagenians as a powerful defensive weapon, much like that of the bombardier beetle. Now an almost vestigial organ, the mad-bag served as a means of relieving extreme nervous tension. Its function was effective, but its use presented problems. The wog psychiatrists, for instance, either had to keep their windows wide open during therapy or else wear gas masks.
Keoki Amiel Pornsen, assisted by Zugu, crawled out from under the bush into which he had been thrown. His big paunch, the azure color of his uniform, and the white nylon angel’s wings sewn on the back of his jacket made him resemble a fat blue bug. He stood up and removed his windmask, showing a bloodless face. His shaking fingers fumbled over the crossed hourglass and sword, symbol of the Haijac Union. Finally, they found the flap for which he was searching. He pulled the magnetic lips of the pocket loose and took out a pack of Merciful Seraphim. Once the cigarette was in his lips, he had a shaky time holding his lighter to it.
Hal held the glowing coil of his own lighter to the tip of Pornsen’s cigarette. His hand was steady.
Thirty-one years of discipline shoved back the grin he felt deep inside his face.
Pornsen accepted the light. A second later, a tremor around his lips revealed that he knew he had lost much of his advantage over Yarrow. He realized he couldn’t allow a man to do him a service—even one as slight as this—and then crack the whip on him.
Nevertheless, he began formally, ‘Hal Shamshiel Yarrow …’
‘Shib, abba, I hear and obey,’ replied Hal as formally.
‘Just how do you explain this accident?’
Hal was surprised. Pornsen’s voice was much milder than he had expected. He did not relax, however, for he suspected that Pornsen meant to take him off guard and lash out at him when he was not mentally braced for an attack.
‘I—or, rather, the Backrunner in me—departed from reality. I—my dark self—willfully precipitated a pseudofuture.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Pornsen, quietly but with a note of sarcasm. ‘You say your dark self, the Backrunner in you, did that? That is what you have said ever since you were able to talk. Why must you always blame someone else? You know—you should, for I have been forced to whip you many times—that you and you alone are responsible. When you were taught that it was your dark self that caused departures from reality, you were also taught that the Backrunner could cause nothing unless you—your real self, Hal Yarrow—fully cooperated.’
That is as shib as the Forerunner’s left hand,’ said Hal. ‘But, my beloved gapt, you forgot one thing in that little lecture of yours.’
Now, his voice had a sarcasm to match that in Pornsen’s.
Pornsen, shrilly, said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ said Hal triumphantly, ‘that you were in the accident, too! Therefore, you caused it just as much as I did!’
Pornsen goggled at him. He said, whining, ‘But—but, you were driving the car!’
‘Makes no difference according to what you have always told me!’ said Hal. He was grinning smugly. ‘You agreed to be in the collision. If you had not, we would have missed the beast.’
Pornsen stopped to puff on the cigarette. His hand shook. Yarrow watched the hand that hung free by Pornsen’s side, its fingers twisting the seven leather lashes of the whip handle stuck in his belt.
Pornsen said, ‘You have always shown signs of a regrettable pride and independence. That smacks of behavior that does not conform to the structure of the universe as revealed to mankind by the Forerunner, real be his name.
‘I have [puff]—may the Forerunner forgive them!—sent two dozen men and women to H. I did not like to do that, for I loved them with all my heart and self. I wept when I reported them to the holy hierarchy, for I am a tender-hearted man. [Puff!] But it was my du
ty as a Guardian Angel Pro Tempore to watch out for the loathsome disease of self that may spread and infect the followers of Sigmen. Unreality must not be tolerated. The self is too weak and precious to be subjected to temptation.
‘I have been your gapt since you were born. [Puff!] You always were a disobedient child. But you could be loved into submissiveness and contrition; you felt my love often. [Puff!]’
Yarrow felt his back tingle. He watched the gapt’s hand tighten around the handle of the ‘lover’ projecting from the belt.
‘However, not until you were eighteen did you really depart from the true future and show your weakness for pseudofutures. That was when you decided to become a joat instead of a specialist. I warned you that as a joat you’d get only so far in our society. But you persisted. And since we do have need of joats, and since I was overruled by my superiors, I allowed you to become one.
‘That was [puff] unshib enough. But when I picked out the woman most suitable to be your wife—as was my duty and right—for who but your loving gapt knows the type of woman best suited for you?—I saw just how proud and unreal you were. You argued and protested and tried to go over my head and held out for a year before you consented to marry her. In that year of unreal behavior, you cost the Sturch one self …’
Hal’s face paled, revealing seven thin red marks that raved out from the left corner of his lips and across his cheek to his ear.
‘I cost the Sturch nothing!’ Hal growled. ‘Mary and I were married nine years, but we had no children. Tests showed that neither of us was physically sterile. Therefore, one or both was not thinking fertile. I petitioned for a divorce, even though I knew I might end up in H. Why didn’t you insist on our divorce, as your duty required, instead of pigeonholing my petition?’
Pornsen blew out smoke nonchalantly enough, but he dropped one shoulder lower than the other as if something had caved inside him. Yarrow, seeing this, knew that he had his gapt on the defensive.