The Best of Margaret St. Clair Read online

  George handed it to her. She tied it up tightly in her shari. “It’ll go down as it dries out,” she explained. “I wouldn’t want to lose it. It’s a handy sort of thing.”

  The streets were so quiet and dark that George asked whether the Anagetalia was over and learned from Blixa that it had ended at twenty-four that night. “Everybody’s at home,” she said, “getting caught up on his sleep. Say, where are you going? Not that way!” They had come to Ares Avenue and George had turned to the left, thinking they were going to the spaceport. She tugged at his sleeve. “The embassy’s to the right. What do you think I got you out of jail for? We’ve got to get the pig. You promised you’d help me get the pig.”

  “Oh,” George said. It was all he could think of to say. Somehow he had forgotten all about that blasted, blasted pig.

  Blixa looked at him slantingly and laughed. “I’d have got you out anyhow, George,” she said. “You know I would. But the pig was the reason I had to hurry so much. I don’t know how much longer it will be at the embassy. And it means a lot to Mars.”

  “Oh,” George said again. Without his being aware of it, his face relaxed. “You know,” he said after a pause, while they walked steadily along, “I have a feeling that somebody’s following us.”

  Blixa nodded. “So do I,” she confessed. “But I think it must be nerves. I keep looking around, and I never see anyone. Besides, who could it be? The police wouldn’t follow us, they’d just arrest you. And nobody else would be following us.”

  The embassy was quiet, with no light showing in any of the window irises. The building itself, however, was subtly different from the way George remembered it, and he had to study it for a moment before he could be sure what the difference was. That faint uncertainty in the building’s outline, those dim slanting golden lines, like a much attenuated aurora australis—what did they mean? “They’ve put a force field around it!” he announced suddenly.

  Blixa nodded. “They installed it yesterday afternoon,” she said.

  “Well, then, we might as well go home. Down to the ship, I mean. We certainly can’t get through a force field, pig or no Pig-“

  “Who said anything about getting through a force field?” Blixa demanded. “Do be reasonable! Of course we can’t. But there are other ways of handling it. Think! Where are the projectors? I mean, where’s the field coming from?”

  “Around the edge of the roof,” George replied after a moment.

  “That’s right, the top of the building’s clear.” They had come to the statue of Chou Kleor. Blixa, standing first on one foot and then on the other, took off her sandals and tied them to her belt. “You’d better take off your shoes too,” she said softly. “They might slip on the stone.”

  George eyed her speculatively. She had already taken hold of the statue and was pulling herself up by the folds of its basalt cloak. He removed his shoes and followed her.

  They stood at last on the statue’s burly shoulder, not more than half a meter below the level of the embassy roof. The roof itself, however, was an uncomfortable distance away. “How are we going to get over there?” George asked, studying the gap.

  Blixa shook her head. The climb had winded her, and for the moment all she could do was to hold on to Chou Kleor’s basalt ear and pant.

  “Bolt anti,” she whispered as her breath began to come back. “Not much good, but best I could do. Government’s cracked down on all anti sales since the geeksters began using them.” She fumbled with the end of her shari and produced a flat, blunt object like an old-fashioned air automatic. She handed it to George.

  He examined it distrustfully. He had always considered the bolt anti-grav the most unreliable of anti-gravitic devices. The anti-gravs in commercial use (most strictly supervised, since geeksters and raubsters had discovered their value in mass levitation of stolen goods) were perfectly safe. But the bolt anti-grav worked on a different principle. Its “doughnut” discharge produced what non-material physicists called a reversed stasis of the object which it hit. The object in consequence became weightless. The difficulty was that there was no practical way of estim a ting in advance when the stasis would return to normal and the object acquire weight again. And, since stasis reversal was potentially harmful to living tissue, all bolt antis had built-in governors preventing their discharge too frequently. Too dangerous for a children’s toy, too ineffective for genuine use, the bolt anti was the perfect example of ingrown gadgetry.

  “How are you planning to use it?” George asked.

  “I’m going to jump over to the roof,” Blixa said, “Just as I jump I want you to doughnut me with the bolt. I don’t weigh much anyhow, and I’m sure the stasis will stay twisted for that long. After I get on the roof there’s a trap door and steps leading down. The pig is in a room on the second level; I ought to be able to smell it. They’ve got it guarded with a cerberus.”

  “How do you know all this?” George asked a little absently. His mind was still on the bolt anti.

  “Oh… news gets around.” Blixa’s manner was vague. She leaned out from Chou Kleor’s shoulder and braced herself. “Now when I say, ‘Shoot,’ I want you to doughnut me.”

  George looked from Blixa to the bolt anti and back again. She didn’t weigh much, it was true. But… He had a sudden mental picture of her jumping and falling short as the stasis untwisted again. A simple fall would be bad enough, but if she struck against the force field… “I won’t do it,” he said determinedly.

  “Won’t do what? Doughnut me?”

  “That’s right. It’s too dangerous.”

  “No, it isn’t. Anyhow, I’ve got to get the pig.”

  “Give me the egg.” Silently Blixa handed him the end of her shari and let him disentangle the object. “I’m going to try the jump,” George went on. “Do you think you can doughnut me?”

  “Of course. But it’s a silly idea.”

  “Why? I’ve more muscle than you, and I’m used to greater gee, being from Earth. The main thing, though, is that I’ve had training in free jumps. If you’ve never jumped free, you can’t imagine what it’s like.” George did not think it necessary to add that his training consisted of three jumps made one Sunday afternoon at a pastime park.

  Blixa frowned but capitulated. “All right,” she said. “Pharol grant it’s reasonable.” She adjusted the bolt’s safety switch. “Now?” she asked.

  George arranged his feet carefully. “Now!” he said.

  The doughnut hit him amidships just as he jumped. It spread over him in a kind of shudder, a sensation like an intense interior tickling, not painful, but highly disagreeable. Then he was soaring over the roof in a long, long arc, so long that he had time to wonder whether he had miscalculated and was going right over it. At the last moment he slanted down, touched, bounced (“equal and opposite reaction”), and then came down solidly and for good as the stasis reversed itself. He was darned glad he hadn’t let Blixa try the jump.

  He trotted back to the side where Blixa was. He motioned to her to throw the bolt anti, and after a moment it came spinning over to him. Blixa had her faults, but she certainly was quick on the uptake.

  He found the trap door and opened it. The last he saw of Blixa, she was leaning forward anxiously from Chou Kleor’s shoulder, her hands pressed to her breast. He waved to her reassuringly, and then started down.

  The stair was extremely steep and quite dark. George stole down it with his feet turned sideways. At the bottom he found he was in a tiny windowless room with many shelves, probably a janitor’s closet. Sprayers, dusters, grinders and sweepers cluttered the walls. George groped about until he found the door, and slipped out into the hall.

  It was very nearly as dark as the closet had been. The only light came from the fluor strips in the cornice. George tiptoed along, listening to snores (this level seemed to be used for sleeping), sniffing from time to time and looking for the stairs. Martian buildings, even public ones, rarely had levitators or even lifts. The lesser gee made stairclimbi
ng less onerous than on Terra, and Martians of both sexes insisted it wasn’t reasonable to avoid exercise. Stairs were good for the legs. George, thinking of Blixa, and the little dark girl he had danced with at the Anagetalia, grinned. This momentary inattention was no doubt the reason why he whanged into the tabouret.

  It was a spindly thing, loaded with tinkly, janglv, clinky objects, and George’s collision with it produced a whole series of high-pitched crashes. Things bounced and rolled. The noise of frangible objects breaking seemed to spread out into the darkness like circular ripples in a pond. George, pressed against the wall, thought everyone in the embassy must be awake.

  There was a stir in one of the rooms. A man’s voice, thick with sleep, said rumbingly, “What was that?” After a moment a woman’s fuzzy contralto answered, “Just the weetareete, dear. Go on back to sleep.” Somebody turned over in bed. There was a tense silence—and then a gradual resumption of the noises of sleep.

  Blessing the unknown woman, George detoured cautiously about the tabouret. The flank and back of his tunic were wet with sweat.

  He found the stair, a broad low flight with a resilient surface, in the next moment. On the fifth tread a current of air brought an all too familiar odor to his nose. It was mixed with a more agreeable smell which was probably deodorant. Fortunately for George, the embassy people had underestimated the amount of deodorant needed to keep the pig inodorous.

  By sniffing door after door on the second level, George located the room with the pig. It was closed with one of the usual simple-minded Martian locks, but somebody had slipped a lucidux alarm disk over it. Tampering with the lock was going to be difficult.

  George put his ear to the door panel and listened. Almost immediately he caught the gurgle and slither of a moving cerberus. He jerked his head back from the panel and swallowed. There were not many things he was really afraid of, but a cerberus was certainly one of them. He would almost rather have faced a cage full of cobras. Having the flesh sucked from one’s bones by a cerberus’ corrosive membranes was such a nasty way to pass out of the viewing plate.

  Luckily the window irises in the hall were open and some light was coming in. George studied the door. He couldn’t get in through the lock; how about taking off the hinges? No, the screw-heads had been soldered in. It looked as if he’d have to make an opening high up in the panel, higher than the cerberus could extrude, and figure on jumping over it. Brrrrr.

  He got out the egg. It was a little longer and thinner than it had been, but it went dutifully to work on the panel when he turned its switch. In all too short a time there was a hole in the door big enough for him to get through.

  George hesitated. Moist fetid air (the cerberus was a life-form from the deep Venusian swamps) was coming through the opening. Beneath the hole he could hear the humping noise the creature made as it tried to climb up for him. Then he jumped.

  He landed well beyond the animal. The pig’s carrying case was sitting on a table, surrounded by charged wires. One good grab, George decided, and the pig would be his again. The trouble was that the cerberus, in its uncanny, ameboid way, moved extremely fast. Before he could make the three steps to the table and pick up the pig, it would be glued to him.

  George could feel his brain whizzing like a mechanical astrogator and star positioner. The cerberus had put out a pseudopod and was now about two centimeters distant from the toe of his boot. With no waste motion at all, George pulled out the bolt anti and doughnutted it.

  The result surpassed his expectations. The cerberus shot up in the air and hung there, rotating wildly, in a meter-thick, dull gray ball. Since it had nothing more substantial than air to push against, it was unable to move in any direction. The harder it tried, the more furiously it spun.

  George dashed to the table and snatched up the pig. He got a shock from the wiring that almost made him drop the carrying case, but he hung on doggedly. He rushed back to the door, dodging around the still-suspended cerberus, and began struggling through the hole he had made.

  He had got his torso and his right leg through when, the stasis reversing itself, the cerberus dropped to the floor with a mighty plop. George felt a cold sweat of apprehension break out on him. Almost immediately there was a stab of burning pain in the ankle of his left leg.

  George held on to the door so hard he thought his fingers must be denting the panel, and kicked. He kicked for all he was worth. The sensation in his ankle, which was like that of a burn being held over a flame, was getting worse: George kicked like a maddened zebrule, his eyes bulging out and his heart knocking against his ribs.

  On the fourth or fifth of his desperate lunges the cerberus came loose. It sailed across the room and landed against the far wall with a thud. And George shot out of the hole in the door like a cork out of a champagne bottle. He landed on the small dark tzintz, who had been on his way to get himself a snack out of the coolerator. And from then on things got rather mixed up.

  George later had a dim recollection of banging the tzintz on the skull with the pig’s carrying case, while the pig gave a feeble oink. More vividly in his mind was the gratifying period when he held the tzintz by the ears and whanged his head repeatedly against the hard, unyielding floor. “Steal my pig, will you,” George had muttered grimly, “You little musteline! I’ll teach you to steal my pig!” Thump, thump! Thump! “Ouch!” said the tzintz. “Oink, oink,” went the pig. Thump, thump, thump!

  George enjoyed this period immensely, and was sorry when it came to an end. But all things must pass. He left the semi-conscious tzintz recumbent on the floor, his head propped against the dado, and fled down the stair in three long leaps. Behind him the embassy was buzzing like an overturned skep of bees. George estimated that he had about three seconds before they started shooting at him with stun guns. He halted for a flash by the front door to depress a switch that he hoped shut the force field off. If it didn’t, he was going to die a hero’s death. Then he shot out into the night.

  Blixa was waiting for him: she always seemed to be waiting for him to escape from something or other. “Get it?” she demanded excitedly.

  Too winded to reply, George waved the pig at her. The long roll of a stun gun trilled wickedly past his ear. Blixa winced and then pulled him into a crouch. “This way,” she said, “hurry! And keep bent!” Doubled over, they pounded off into the darkness, headed, as far as George could judge, for the Grand Canal.

  There were shouts behind them, and a salvo of stun gun shots. One of them came so close that it grazed Blixa’s shoulder and set her to rubbing it to restore the circulation. There was, however, no concerted pursuit.

  “Afraid to chase us,” Blixa panted as they jogged along.

  “Martian citizen— interplanetary incident. And after all, it’s our pig.

  “Let’s slow down. By now we’re fairly safe—nobody after us except the police.”

  George slowed obligingly. He looked at her. Blixa was panting hard, and drops of perspiration sparkled on her round sides. How different she was from Darleen! Darleen’s grooming was always so perfect he couldn’t imagine how she’d look excited and warm. It was rather becoming to Blixa, he thought.

  “Did you get hurt in the embassy?” Blixa asked. “You’re walking with quite a limp.”

  “It’s nothing,” George replied modestly, recalling his thoughts. “The cerberus got after my ankle a bit.”

  “Oh, my!” Frowning, Blixa made him stop and roll up his trouser leg. She drew in her breath at the sight of the raw, bloody blotch the cerberus’ digestive juices had left. Deftly she plastered the wound with unguent from a tiny jar and slapped a bandijeon on it. “There,” she said, “that’ll do until a doctor can look at it. Say, do you still feel like somebody’s following us?”

  George considered. They had reached the Grand Canal by now and were walking out slowly on one of its foot bridges. There was no noise anywhere except the quiet lapping of the dark, slow-flowing water. The streets were utterly empty. Marsport’s gigantic heart had
almost ceased to beat. It was the quietest hour of the twenty-four, the one time when the whole city slept.

  “A little,” he replied. “But I don’t see anyone. It must be nervous imagination. We’ve had a good deal tonight to put us on edge.”

  “I suppose so,” Blixa answered. “Pharol, but it’s quiet!” She rested her elbows on the parapet and leaned over, looking down at the black water. “Give me the pig.”

  George handed the case to her. She opened it, saw that the pig was intact, and shut the case again. Then she dropped it deliberately into the water of the canal.

  For a second George stood and stared at her. Then he jumped in after the pig.

  There was a second almost simultaneous splash. Blixa had jumped in beside him. “You let that pig alone!” she said furiously. George grabbed at the case which, bobbing from the disturbance of the water, was beginning to move slowly downstream. Blixa slapped at his hands. “You let it alone!” she repeated. “What business is it of yours? It’s my pig.”

  “I—”

  “Well, it is. Let it alone.” The case was moving gradually out of reach. George eyed it wistfully, and then turned to Blixa. He had always known she was unreliable, but he had never thought it would reach this pitch.

  “What’s the idea?” he said.

  “About two kilos down the canal,” Blixa said, “there’s an island. Some friends of mine are waiting there, watching for the pig. When it comes past they’ll wade out and get it. And then they’ll make soup out of it. Pharol grant it won’t disagree with them.”

  Blixa turned and began walking upstream, toward the flight of stairs that was built into the canal wall. The water was not much more than waist deep. Utterly befogged, George followed her.

  She climbed the steps with George in the rear. She had a graceful, swaying walk, and in her thin, drenched shari she looked nuder than nude. George found it hard to keep his mind on her hocus-pocus with the pig. Nonetheless, he came to a decision.

  “Listen, Blixa,” he said when they were standing on dry land aga in beside a warehouse, “don’t you think you owe me an explanation? You Martians talk a lot about reasonableness. Do you think it’s reasonable to treat me like this?”