Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 22

  But that was what it was. Though the men who crewed the eight ships bore the people of Noorhut no ill will, hardly anything could have looked less promising for Noorhut than the cargo they had on board.

  Seven of them were armed with a gas which was not often used any more. A highly volatile lethal catalyst, it sank to the solid surface of a world over which it was freed and spread out swiftly there to the point where its presence could no longer be detected by any chemical means. However, its effect of drawing the final breath almost imperceptibly out of all things that were oxygen-breathing was not noticeably reduced by diffusion.

  The eighth ship was equipped with a brace of torpedoes, which were normally released some hours after the gas-carriers dispersed their invisible death. They were quite small torpedoes, since the only task remaining for them would be to ignite the surface of the planet that had been treated with the catalyst.

  All those things might presently happen to Noorhut. But they would happen only if a specific message was flashed from it to the circling squadron—the message that Noorhut already was lost to a deadly foe who must, at any cost now, be prevented from spreading out from it to other inhabited worlds.

  NEXT afternoon, right after school, as Grimp came expectantly around the bend of the road at the edge of the farm, he found the village policeman sitting there on a rock, gazing tearfully down the road.

  “Hello, Runny,” said Grimp, disturbed. Considered in the light of gossip he’d overhead in the village that morning, this didn’t look so good for Grandma. It just didn’t look good.

  The policeman blew his nose on a handkerchief he carried tucked Into the front of his uniform, wiped his eyes, and gave Grimp an annoyed glance.

  “Don’t you call me Runny, Grimp!” he said, replacing the handkerchief. Like Grimp himself and most of the people on Noorhut, the policeman was brown-skinned and dark-eyed, normally a rather good-looking young fellow. But his eyes were swollen and red-rimmed now; and his nose, which was a bit larger than average, anyway, was also red and swollen and undeniably runny. He had hay-fever.

  Grimp apologized and sat down thoughtfully on the rock beside the policeman, who was one of his numerous cousins, most of the families of Noorhut being somehow related. He was about to mention that he had overheard Vellit using the expression when she and the policeman came through the big Leeth-flower orchard above the farm the other evening—at a much less leisurely rate than was their custom there. But he thought better of it. Vellit was the policeman’s girl for most of the year, but she broke their engagement regularly during hay-fever season and called him cousin instead of dearest.

  “What are you doing here?” Grimp asked bluntly instead.

  “Waiting,” said the policeman.

  “For what?” said Grimp, with a sinking heart.

  “Same individual you are, I guess,” the policeman told him, hauling out the handkerchief again.

  He blew. “This year she’s going to go right back where she came from or get pinched.”

  “Who says so?” scowled Grimp. “The Guardian, that’s who,” said the policeman. “That good enough for you?”

  “He can’t do it!” Grimp said hotly. “It’s our farm, and she’s got all her licenses.”

  “He’s had a whole year to think up a new list she’s got to have,” the policeman informed him. He fished in the breast-pocket of his uniform, pulled out a folded paper and opened it. “He put thirty-four items down here I got to check—she’s bound to miss on one of them.”

  “It’s a dirty trick!” said Grimp, rapidly scanning as much as he could see of the list.

  “Let’s us have more respect for the Village Guardian, Grimp!” the policeman said warningly.

  “Uh-huh,” muttered Grimp. “Sure . . .” If Runny would just move his big thumb out of the way. But what a list! Trailer; rhinocerine pony (beast, heavy draft, imported); patent medicines; household utensils; fortune-telling; pets; herbs; miracle-healing—

  The policeman looked down, saw what Grimp was doing and raised the paper out of his line of vision. “That’s an official document,” he said, warding Grimp off with one hand and tucking the paper away with the other. “Let’s us not get our dirty hands on it.”

  Grimp was thinking fast. Grandma Wannattel did have framed licenses for some of the items he’d read hanging around inside the trailer, but certainly not thirty-four of them.

  “Remember that big skinless werret I caught last season?” he asked.

  The policeman gave him a quick glance, looked away again and wiped his eyes thoughtfully. The season on werrets would open the following week and he was as ardent a fisherman as anyone in the village—and last summer Grimp’s monster werret had broken a twelve-year record in the valley.

  “Some people,” Grimp said idly, staring down the valley road to the point where it turned into the woods, “would sneak after a person for days who’s caught a big werret, hoping he’d be dumb enough to go back to that pool.”

  The policeman flushed and dabbed the handkerchief gingerly at his nose.

  “Some people would even sit in a haystack and use spyglasses, even when the hay made them sneeze like crazy,” continued Grimp quietly.

  The policeman’s flush deepened. He sneezed.

  “But a person isn’t that dumb,” said Grimp. “Not when he knows there’s anyway two werrets there six inches bigger than the one he caught.”

  “Six inches?” the policeman repeated a bit incredulously—eagerly.

  “Easy,” nodded Grimp. “I had a look at them again last week.”

  It was the policeman’s turn to think. Grimp idly hauled out his slingshot, fished a pebble out of his small-pebble pocket and knocked the head off a flower twenty feet away. He yawned negligently.

  “You’re pretty good with that slingshot,” the policeman remarked. “You must be just about as good as the culprit that used a slingshot to ring the fire-alarm signal on the defense unit bell from the top of the schoolhouse last week.”

  “That’d take a pretty good shot,” Grimp admitted.

  “And who then,” continued the policeman, “dropped pepper in his trail, so the pank-hound near coughed off his head when we started to track him. The Guardian,” he added significantly, “would like to have a clue about that culprit, all right.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Grimp, bored. The policeman, the Guardian, and probably even the pank-hound, knew exactly who the culprit was; but they wouldn’t be able to prove it in twenty thousand years. Runny just had to realize first that threats weren’t going to get him anywhere near a record werret.

  Apparently, he had; he was settling back for another bout of thinking. Grimp, interested in what he would produce next, decided just to leave him to it . . .

  Then Grimp jumped up suddenly from the rock.

  “There they are!” he yelled, waving the slingshot.

  A half-mile down the road, Grandma Wannattel’s big, silvery trailer had come swaying out of the woods behind the rhinocerine pony and turned up toward the farm. The pony saw Grimp, lifted its head, which was as long as a tall man, and bawled a thunderous greeting. Grandma Wannattel stood up on the driver’s seat and waved a green silk handkerchief.

  Grimp started sprinting down the road.

  The werrets should turn the trick—but he’d better get Grandma informed, just the same, about recent developments here, before she ran into Runny.

  GRANDMA WANNATTEL flicked the pony’s horny rear with the reins just before they reached the policeman, who was waiting at the side of the road with the Guardian’s check-list unfolded in his hand.

  The pony broke into a lumbering trot, and the trailer swept past Runny and up around the bend of the road, where it stopped well within the boundaries of the farm. They climbed down and Grandma quickly unhitched the pony. It waddled, grunting, off the road and down into the long, marshy meadow above the hollow. It stood still there, cooling its feet.

  Grimp felt a little better. Getting the trailer off community pr
operty gave Grandma a technical advantage. Grimp’s people had a favorable opinion of her, and they were a sturdy lot who enjoyed telling off the Guardian any time he didn’t actually have a law to back up his orders. But on the way to the farm, she had confessed to Grimp that, just as he’d feared, she didn’t have anything like thirty-four licenses. And now the policeman was coming up around the bend of the road after them, blowing his nose and frowning.

  “Just let me handle him alone,” Grandma told Grimp out of the corner of her mouth.

  He nodded and strolled off into the meadow to pass the time with the pony. She’d had a lot of experience in handling policemen.

  “Well, well, young man,” he heard her greeting his cousin behind him. “That looks like a bad cold you’ve got.”

  The policeman sneezed.

  “Wish it were a cold,” he said resignedly. “It’s hay-fever. Can’t do a thing with it. Now I’ve got a list here—”

  “Hay-fever?” said Grandma. “Step up into the trailer a moment. We’ll fix that.”

  “About this list—” began Runny, and stopped. “You think you got something that would fix it?” he asked skeptically. “I’ve been to I don’t know how many doctors and they didn’t help any.”

  “Doctors!” said Grandma. Grimp heard her heels click up the metal steps that led into the back of the trailer. “Come right in, won’t take a moment.”

  “Well—” said Runny doubtfully, but he followed her inside.

  Grimp winked at the pony. The first round went to Grandma.

  “Hello, pony,” he said.

  His worries couldn’t reduce his appreciation of Grandma’s fabulous draft-animal. Partly, of course, it was just that it was such an enormous beast. The long, round barrel of its body rested on short legs with wide, flat feet which were settled deep in the meadow’s mud by now. At one end was a spiky tail, and at the other a very big, wedge-shaped head, with a blunt, badly chipped horn set between nose and eyes. From nose to tail and all around, it was covered with thick, rectangular, horny plates, a mottled green-brown in color. It weighed as much as a long-extinct terrestrial elephant, but that was because it was only a pony.

  Grimp patted its rocky side affectionately. He loved the pony most for being the ugliest thing that had ever showed up on Noorhut. According to Grandma, she had bought it from a bankrupt circus which had imported it from a planet called Treebel; and Treebel was supposed to be a world full of hot swamps, inexhaustibly explosive volcanoes and sulphurous stenches.

  One might have thought that after wandering around melting lava and under rainfalls of glowing ashes for most of its life, the pony would have considered Noorhut pretty tame. But though there wasn’t much room for expression around the solid slab of bone supporting the horn, which was the front of its face, Grimp thought it looked thoroughly contented with its feet sunk out of sight in Noorhut’s cool mud.

  “You’re a big fat pig!” he told it fondly.

  The pony slobbered out a long, purple tongue and carefully parted his hair.

  “Cut it out!” said Grimp. “Ugh!”

  The pony snorted, pleased, curled its tongue about a huge clump of weeds, pulled them up and flipped them into its mouth, roots, mud and all. It began to chew.

  Grimp glanced at the sun and turned anxiously to study the trailer. If she didn’t get rid of Runny soon, they’d be calling him back to the house for supper before he and Grandma got around to having a good talk. And they weren’t letting him out of doors these evenings, while the shining lights were here.

  He gave the pony a parting whack, returned quietly to the road and sat down out of sight near the back door of the trailer, where he could hear what was going on.

  “. . . so about the only thing the Guardian could tack on you now,” the policeman was saying, “would be a Public Menace charge. If there’s any trouble about the lights this year, he’s likely to try that. He’s not a bad Guardian, you know, but he’s got himself talked into thinking you’re sort of to blame for the lights showing up here every year.”

  Grandma chuckled. “Well, I try to get here in time to see them every summer,” she admitted.”I can see how that might give him the idea.”

  “And of course,” said the policeman, “we’re all trying to keep it quiet about them. If the news got out, we’d be having a lot of people coming here from the city, just to look. No one but the Guardian minds you being here, only you don’t want a lot of city people tramping around your farms.”

  “Of course not,” agreed Grandma. “And I certainly haven’t told anyone about them myself.”

  “Last night,” the policeman added, “everyone was saying there were twice as many lights this year as last summer. That’s what got the Guardian so excited.”

  Chafing more every minute, Grimp had to listen then to an extended polite argument about how much Runny wanted to pay Grandma for her hay-fever medicines, while she insisted he didn’t owe her anything at all. In the end, Grandma lost and the policeman paid up—much too much to take from any friend of Grimp’s folks.

  Grandma protested to the last. And then, finally, that righteous minion of the law came climbing down the trailer steps again, with Grandma following him to the door.

  “How do I look, Grimp?” he beamed cheerfully as Grimp stood up.

  “Like you ought to wash your face sometime,” Grimp said tactlessly, for he was fast losing patience with Runny. But then his eyes widened in surprise.

  Under a coating of yellowish grease, Runny’s nose seemed to have returned almost to the shape it had out of hay-fever season, and his eyelids were hardly puffed at all! Instead of flaming red, those features, furthermore, now were only a delicate pink in shade. Runny, in short, was almost handsome again.

  “Pretty good, eh?” he said. “Just one shot did it. And I’ve only got to keep the salve on another hour. Isn’t that right, Grandma?”

  “That’s right,” smiled Grandma from the door, clinking Runny’s money gently out of one hand into the other. “You’ll be as good as new then.”

  “Permanent cure, too,” said Runny. He patted Grimp benevolently on the head. “And next week we go werret-fishing, eh, Grimp?” he added greedily.

  “I guess so,” Grimp said, with a trace of coldness. It was his opinion that Runny could have been satisfied with the hay-fever cure and forgotten about the werrets.

  “It’s a date!” nodded Runny happily and took his greasy face whistling down the road. Grimp scowled after him, half-minded to reach for the slingshot then and there and let go with a medium stone at the lower rear of the uniform. But probably he’d better not.

  “Well, that’s that,” Grandma said softly.

  At that moment, up at the farmhouse, a cow horn went “Whoop-whoop!” across the valley.

  “Darn,” said Grimp. “I knew it was getting late, with him doing all that talking! Now they’re calling me to supper.” There were tears of disappointment in his eyes.

  “Don’t let it fuss you, Grimp,” Grandma said consolingly. “Just jump up in here a moment and close your eyes.”

  Grimp jumped up into the trailer and closed his eyes expectantly.

  “Put out your hands,” Grandma’s voice told him.

  He put out his hands, and she pushed them together to form a cup. Then something small and light and furry dropped into them, caught hold of one of Grimp’s thumbs, with tiny, cool fingers, and chittered.

  Grimp’s eyes popped open.

  “It’s a lortel!” he whispered, overwhelmed.

  “It’s for you!” Grandma beamed.

  Grimp couldn’t speak. The lortel looked at him from a tiny, black, human face with large blue eyes set in it, wrapped a long, furry tail twice around his wrist, clung to his thumb with its fingers, and grinned and squeaked.

  “It’s wonderful!” gasped Grimp. “Can you really teach them to talk?”

  “Hello,” said the lortel.

  “That’s all it can say so far,” Grandma said. “But if you’re patient with
it, it’ll learn more.”

  “I’ll be patient,” Grimp promised, dazed. “I saw one at the circus this winter, down the valley at Laggand. They said it could talk, but it never said anything while I was there.”

  “Hello!” said the lortel.

  “Hello!” gulped Grimp.

  The cow horn whoop-whooped again.

  “I guess you’d better run along to supper, or they might get mad,” said Grandma.

  “I know,” said Grimp. “What does it eat?”

  “Bugs and flowers and honey and fruit and eggs, when it’s wild. But you just feed it whatever you eat yourself.”

  “Well, good-by,” said Grimp. “And golly—thanks, Grandma.”

  He jumped out of the trailer. The lortel climbed out of his hand, ran up his arm and sat on his shoulder, wrapping its tail around his neck.

  “It knows you already,” Grandma said. “It won’t run away.”

  Grimp reached up carefully with his other hand and patted the lortel.

  “I’ll be back early tomorrow,” he said. “No school . . . They won’t let me out after supper as long as those lights keep coming around.”

  The cow horn whooped for the third time, very loudly. This time it meant business.

  “Well, good-by,” Grimp repeated hastily. He. ran off, the lortel hanging on to his shirt collar and squeaking.

  Grandma looked after him and then at the sun, which had just touched the tops of the hills with its lower rim.

  “Might as well have some supper myself,” she remarked, apparently to no one in particular. “But after that I’ll have to run out the go-buggy and create a diversion.”

  Lying on its armor-plated belly down in the meadow, the pony swung its big head around toward her. Its small yellow eyes blinked questioningly.

  “What makes you think a diversion will be required?” its voice asked into her ear. The ability to produce such ventriloquial effects was one of the talents that made—the pony well worth its considerable keep to Grandma.

  “Weren’t you listening?” she scolded. “That policeman told me the Guardian’s planning to march the village’s defense unit up to the hollow after supper, and start them shooting at the Halpa detector-globes as soon as they show up.”