'Then why didn't they just ... eliminate Pzilimin and -'
'Why didn't Pzilimin simply eliminate those who opposed him?' Smeg asked. 'Violence begets violence, Rick. This is a lesson many sentient beings have learned. They had their own good reasons for handling it this way.'
'What'll we do?' Rick asked.
'We'll go to earth, like foxes, Rick. We will employ the utmost caution and investigate this situation. That is what we'll do.'
'Don't they know that ... back there?'
'Indeed, they must. This should be very interesting.'
* * * *
Painter stood in the street staring after the retreating car until it was lost in a dust cloud. He nodded to himself once.
A tall fat man came up beside him, said: 'Well, Josh, it worked.'
'Told you it would,' Painter said. 'I knew dang well another capsule of them Slorin got away from us when we took their ship.'
The blond young woman moved around in front of them, said: 'My dad sure is smart.'
'You listen to me now, Barton Marie,' Painter said. 'Next time you find a blob of something jes' lyin' in a field, you leave it alone, hear?'
'How was I to know it'd be so strong?' she asked.
'That's jes' it!' Painter snapped. 'You never know. That's why you leaves such things alone. It was you made him so dang strong, pokin' him that way. Slorin aren't all that strong 'less'n you ignite'em, hear?'
'Yes, Dad.'
'Dang near five years of him,' the fat man said. 'I don't think I coulda stood another year. He was gettin' worse all the time.'
'They always do,' Painter said.
'What about that Smeg?' the fat man asked.
'That was a wise ol' Slorin,' Painter agreed. 'Seven syllables if I heard his full name rightly.'
'Think he suspects?'
'Pretty sure he does.'
'What we gonna do?'
'What we allus do. We got their ship. We're gonna move out for a spell.'
'Oh-h-h, not again!' the fat man complained.
Painter slapped the man's paunch. 'What you howling about, Jim? You changed from McNabry into this when you had to. That's the way life is. You change when you have to.'
'I was just beginning to get used to this place.'
Barton Marie stamped her foot. 'But this is such a nice body!'
'There's other bodies, child,' Painter said. 'Jes' as nice.'
'How long you think we got?' Jim asked.
'Oh, we got us several months. One thing you can depend on with Slorin, they are cautious. They don't do much of anything very fast.'
'I don't want to leave,' Barton Marie said.
'It won't be forever, child,' Painter said. 'Once they give up hunting for us, we'll come back. Slorin make a planet pretty nice for our kind. That's why we tolerates 'em. Course, they're pretty stupid. They work too hard. Even make their own ships ... for which we can be thankful. They haven't learned how to blend into anything but a bureaucratic society. But that's their misfortune and none of our own.'
* * * *
'What did you do about the government survey people?' Smeg asked Pzilimin, bracing himself as the car lurched in a particularly deep rut.
'I interviewed them in my office, kept it pretty shadowy, wore dark glasses,' Pzlimin said. 'Didn't use the ... mindcloud.'
'That's a blessing,' Smeg said. He fell silent for a space, then: 'A damn poem keeps going through my head. Over and over, it just keeps going around in my head.'
'A poem, you said?' Rick asked.
'Yes. It's by a native wit ... Jonathan Swift, I believe his name was. Read it during my first studies of their literature. It goes something like this - 'A flea hath smaller fleas that on him prey; and these have smaller still to bite 'em; and so proceed ad infinitum'.'
* * * *
Old Rambling House
Frank Herbert, 1958
* * * *
On his last night on Earth, Ted Graham stepped out of a glass-walled telephone booth, ducked to avoid a swooping moth that battered itself in a frenzy against a bare globe above the booth.
Ted Graham was a long-necked man with a head of pronounced egg shape topped by prematurely balding sandy hair. Something about his lanky, intense appearance suggested his occupation: certified public accountant.
He stopped behind his wife, who was studying a newspaper classified page, and frowned. 'They said to wait here. They'll come get us. Said the place is hard to find at night.'
Martha Graham looked up from the newspaper. She was a doll-faced woman, heavily pregnant, a kind of, pink prettiness about her. The yellow glow from the light above the booth subdued the red-auburn cast of her ponytail hair.
'I just have to be in a house when the baby's born,' she said. 'What'd they sound like?'
'I dunno. There was a funny kind of interruption - like an argument in some foreign language.'
'Did they sound foreign?'
'In a way.' He motioned along the night-shrouded line of trailers toward one with two windows glowing amber. 'Let's wait inside. These bugs out here are fierce.'
'Did you tell them which trailer is ours?'
'Yes. They didn't sound at all anxious to look at it. That's odd - them wanting to trade their house for a trailer.'
'There's nothing odd about it. They've probably just got itchy feet like we did.'
He appeared not to hear her. 'Funniest-sounding language you ever heard when that argument started - like a squire of noise.'
* * * *
Inside the trailer, Ted Graham sat down on the green couch that opened into a double bed for company.
'They could use a good tax accountant around here,' he said, 'When I first saw the place, I got that definite feeling. The valley looks prosperous. It's a wonder nobody's opened an office here before.'
His wife took a straight chair by the counter separating kitchen and living area, folded her hands across her heavy stomach.
'I'm just continental tired of wheels going around under me,' she said. 'I want to sit and stare at the same view for the rest of my life. I don't know how a trailer ever seemed glamorous when -'
'It was the inheritance gave us itchy feet,' he said.
Tires gritted on gravel outside.
Martha Graham straightened. 'Could that be them?'
'Awful quick, if it is.' He went to the door, opened it, stared down at the man who was just raising a hand to knock.
'Are you Mr Graham?' asked the man.
'Yes.' He found himself staring at the caller.
'I'm Clint Rush. You called about the house?' The man moved farther into the light. At first, he'd appeared an old man, fine wrinkle lines in his face, a tired leather look to his skin. But as he moved his head in the light, the wrinkles seemed to dissolve - and with them, the years lifted from him.
'Yes, we called,' said Ted Graham. He stood aside. 'Do you want to look at the trailer now?'
Martha Graham crossed to stand beside her husband. 'We've kept it in awfully good shape,' she said. 'We've never let anything get seriously wrong with it.'
She sounds too anxious, thought Ted Graham. I wish she'd let me do the talking for the two of us.
'We can come back and look at your trailer tomorrow in daylight,' said Rush. 'My car's right out here, if you'd like to see our house.'
Ted Graham hesitated. He felt a nagging worry tug at his mind, tried to fix his attention on what bothered him.
'Hadn't we better take our car?' he asked. 'We could follow you.'
'No need,' said Rush. 'We're coming back into town tonight anyway. We can drop you off then.'
Ted Graham nodded. 'Be right with you as soon as I lock up.'
Inside the car, Rush mumbled introductions. His wife was a dark shadow in the front seat, her hair drawn back in a severe bun. Her features suggested gypsy blood. He called her Raimee.
Odd name, thought Ted Graham. And he noticed that she, too, gave that strange first impression of age that melted in a shift of light.
&
nbsp; Mrs Rush turned her gypsy features toward Martha Graham. 'You are going to have a baby?'
It came out as an odd, veiled statement.
Abruptly, the car rolled forward.
Martha Graham said, 'It's supposed to be born in about two months. We hope it's a boy.'
Mrs Rush looked at her husband. 'I have changed my mind,' she said.
Rush spoke without taking his attention from the road. 'It is too ...' He broke off, spoke in a tumble of strange sounds.
Ted Graham recognized it as the language he'd heard on the telephone.
Mrs Rush answered in the same tongue, anger showing in the intensity of her voice. Her husband replied, his voice calmer.
Presently, Mrs Rush fell moodily silent.
Rush tipped his head toward the rear of the car. 'My wife has moments when she does not want to get rid of the old house. It has been with her for many years.'
Ted Graham said, 'Oh.' Then: 'Are you Spanish?'
Rush hesitated. 'No. We are Basque.'
He turned the car down a well-lighted avenue that merged into a highway. They turned onto a side road. There followed more turns - left, right, right.
Ted Graham lost track.
They hit a jolting bump that made Martha gasp.
'I hope that wasn't too rough on you,' said Rush. 'We're almost there.'
* * * *
The car swung into a lane, its lights picking out the skeleton outlines of trees: peculiar trees - tall, gaunt, leafless. They added to Ted Graham's feeling of uneasiness.
The lane dipped, ended at a low wall of a house - red brick with clerestory windows beneath overhanging eaves. The effect of the wall and a wide-beamed door they could see to the left was ultramodern.
Ted Graham helped his wife out of the car, followed the Rushes to the door.
'I thought you told me it was an old house,' he said.
'It was designed by one of the first modernists,' said Rush. He fumbled with an odd curved key. The wide door swung open onto a hallway equally wide, carpeted by a deep pile rug. They could glimpse floor-to-ceiling view windows at the end of the hall, city lights beyond.
Martha Graham gasped, entered the hall as though in a trance. Ted Graham followed, heard the door close behind them.
'It's so-so - so big' exclaimed Martha Graham.
'You want to trade this for our trailer?' asked Ted Graham.
'It's too inconvenient for us,' said Rush. 'My work is over the mountains on the coast.' He shrugged. 'We cannot sell it.'
Ted Graham looked at him sharply. 'Isn't there any money around here?' He had a sudden vision of a tax accountant with no customers.
'Plenty of money, but no real estate customers.'
They entered the living room. Sectional divans lined the walls. Subdued lighting glowed from the corners. Two paintings hung on the opposite walls - oblongs of odd lines and twists that made Ted Graham dizzy.
Warning bells clamored in his mind.
Martha Graham crossed to the windows, looked at the light far away below. 'I had no idea we'd climbed that far,' she said. 'It's like a fairy city.'
Mrs Rush emitted a short, nervous laugh.
Ted Graham glanced around the room, thought: If the rest of the house is like this, it's worth fifty or sixty thousand. He thought of the trailer: A good one, but not worth more than seven thousand.
Uneasiness was like a neon sign flashing in his mind. 'This seems so ...' He shook his head.
'Would you like to see the rest of the house?' asked Rush.
Martha Graham turned from the window. 'Oh, yes.'
Ted Graham shrugged. No harm in looking, he thought.
When they returned to the living room, Ted Graham had doubled his previous estimate on the house's value. His brain reeled with the summing of it: a solarium with an entire ceiling covered by sun lamps, an automatic laundry where you dropped soiled clothing down a chute, took it washed and ironed from the other end ...
'Perhaps you and your wife would like to discuss it in private,' said Rush. 'We will leave you for a moment.'
And they were gone before Ted Graham could protest.
Martha Graham said, 'Ted, I honestly never in my life dreamed-'
'Something's very wrong, honey.'
'But, Ted -'
'This house is worth at least a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe more. And they want to trade this -' he looked around him - 'for a seven-thousand-dollar trailer?'
'Ted, they're foreigners. And if they're so foolish they don't know the value of this place, then why should -'
'I don't like it,' he said. Again he looked around the room, recalled the fantastic equipment of the house. 'But maybe you're right.'
He stared out at the city lights. They had a lacelike quality: tall buildings linked by lines of flickering incandescence. Something Like a Roman candle shot skyward in the distance.
'Okay!' he said. 'If they want to trade, let's go push the deal ...'
Abruptly, the house shuddered. The city lights blinked out. A humming sound filled the air.
Martha Graham clutched her husband's arm. 'Ted! Wha - what was that?'
'I dunno.' He turned. 'Mr Rush!'
No answer. Only the humming.
The door at the end of the room opened. A strange man came through it. He wore a short toga-like garment of gray, metallic cloth belted at the waist by something that glittered and shimmered through every color of the spectrum. An aura of coldness and power emanated from him - a sense of untouchable hauteur.
He glanced around the room, spoke in the same tongue the Rushes had used.
Ted Graham said, 'I don't understand you, mister.'
The man put a hand to his nickering belt. Both Ted and Martha Graham felt themselves rooted to the floor, a tingling sensation vibrating along every nerve.
Again the strange language rolled from the man's tongue, but now the words were understood.
'Who are you?'
'My name's Graham. This is my wife. What's going -'
'How did you get here?'
'The Rushes - they wanted to trade us this house for our trailer. They brought us. Now look, we -'
'What is your talent - your occupation?'
'Tax accountant. Say! Why all these -'
'That was to be expected,' said the man. 'Clever! Oh, excessively clever!' His hand moved again to the belt. 'Now be very quiet. This may confuse you momentarily.'
Colored lights filled both the Grahams' minds. They staggered.
'You are qualified,' said the man. 'You will serve.'
'Where are we?' demanded Martha Graham.
'The coordinates would not be intelligible to you,' he said. 'I am of the Rojac. It is sufficient for you to know that you are under Rojac sovereignty.'
* * * *
Ted Graham said, 'But -'
'You have, in a way, been kidnapped. And the Raimces have fled to your planet - an unregistered planet.'
'I'm afraid,' Martha Graham said shakily.
'You have nothing to fear,' said the man. 'You are no longer on the planet of your birth - nor even in the same galaxy.' He glanced at Ted Graham's wrist. 'That device on your wrist - it tells your local time?'
'Yes.'
'That will help in the search. And your sun - can you describe its atomic cycle?'
Ted Graham groped in his mind for his science memories from school, from the Sunday supplements. 'I can recall that our galaxy is a spiral like -'
'Most galaxies are spiral.'
'Is this some kind of a practical joke?' asked Ted Graham.
The man smiled, a cold, superior smile. 'It is no joke. Now I will make you a proposition.'
Ted nodded warily. 'All right, let's have the stinger.'
'The people who brought you here were tax collectors we Rojac recruited from a subject planet. They were conditioned to make it impossible for them to leave their job untended. Unfortunately, they were clever enough to realize that if they brought someone else in who could do their job, they we
re released from their mental bonds. Very clever.'