Chapter 12
______VESTA PRACTICES SPACEAL
THE CONNECTION was made and he brought Lensman Strong up to date, concluding: “So will you please get hold of Planetography with a crash priority on anything they know about that point?”
“I’ll do that, Storm. I’ll call you back.”
Since Lensmen are potent beings, the call came soon.
“There’s one sun there,” Strong reported, “but it doesn’t amount to much. A red dwarf—it may or may not be a single. Unexplored. Astronomical data only.”
“How close did I come to it?”
“Allowing for proper motion, you speared it. Less than two hundredths of a parsec off. And there’s nothing else within twelve parsecs—stars are mighty thin out beyond the Rim, you know.”
“I know. That nails it, Phil. They don’t know, of course, whether it has any planets or not?”
“No . . . I see what you mean . . . shall I get a special on it for you?”
“I wish you would. It’d be worth while, I think.”
“So do I. I’ll call Haynes and ask him to rush a ship out there to get us a fine-tooth on it.”
“Thanks, Phil.”
“And there was something else. . . . Oh yes, your friend Fairchild. Narcotics wants him, badly.”
“I’m not surprised. Alive? That might take some doing.”
“Or dead. No difference, as long as they have his head for positive identification,” and at Cloud’s surprised expression Strong went on: “They don’t want him planting any more Trenconian broadleaf, is all, which he’ll keep on doing as long as he’s alive and loose.”
“I see. Wish I’d known sooner; we probably could have caught him on Tominga.”
“I doubt it. They’ve been checking back on him, and he’s a very, very sharp operator. He makes long flits, fast . . . in peculiar directions. But if you stumble across him again, grab him or blast. . . .”
“Just a minute, chief. You mean to say the Patrol can’t find him?”
“Just that. He’s in with a big, strong mob; probably heads it. They’ve been looking for him ever since you found out that he wasn’t killed on Deka.”
“I’m . . . I’m speechless. But Graves . . . but Graves was dead, of course . . . didn’t anybody know Fairchild’s personal pattern?”
“That’s exactly it; nobody that they could get hold of knows his real pattern at all. All we’ve got that we can depend on are his retinals. That shows the kind of operator he is. So if you get a chance, blast him, but leave at least one eye whole and bring it in, in deep-freeze. Nothing else at the moment, is there?”
“Not that I know of. Clear ether, Phil!”
“Clear ether, Storm!”
The plate went black and Cloud turned soberly to Joan.
“Well, that clears Fairchild up, but doesn’t help with the real mystery. So, unless we can dig some more dope out of this stuff on the chart, we can’t do much until we get that finetooth.”
Joan left the room, and Cloud, after racking his brain for an hour, got up, shook himself, and went down the corridor to his “private” office—which had long since ceased to be private, as far as his friends were concerned—where he found Vesta and Thlaskin talking busily in spaceal. Or, rather, the Vegian was talking; the pilot was listening attentively.
“. . . think I’m built, you ought to’ve seen this tomato,” Vesta was narrating blithely. “What I mean, she’s a dish!” She went into a wrigglesome rhythm which, starting at the neck, flowed smoothly down her splendidly-modeled body to the ankles. “Stacked? She’s stacked like Gilroy’s Tower, Buster—an honest-to-god DISH, believe me, and raring to go. We were on one of those long-week-end jaunts around the system—you know, one of those deals where things are pretty apt to get just a hair off the green at times. . . .”
“But hey!” Thlaskin protested. “You said yourself a while back you wasn’t old enough for that kind of monkey-business!”
“Oh, I wasn’t,” Vesta agreed, candidly enough. “I still ain’t. I just went along for the ride.”
“And your folks let you?” Thlaskin was shocked.
“Natch.” Vesta was surprised. “Why not? If a tomato don’t learn the facts of life while she’s young how’s she going to decide what’s good for her when she grows up?”
“With or without a license, I got to butt into this,” Cloud announced, also in spaceal; seating himself on a couch and crossing his legs. He, too, was shocked; but he was also intensely curious. “Did you decide, Vesta?”
Before the girl could answer, however, Joan Janowick came strolling in.
“Is this a private brawl, or can anybody get in on it?” she asked, gaily.
“I invited myself in, so I’ll invite you, too. Come in and sit down.” He made room for her beside him and went on in English, speaking for her ear alone: “Just as well you don’t know spaceal. This story Vesta is telling would curl your hair.”
“Wake up, Junior.” Joan did not speak, but poured the thought directly into his mind. “D’you think that cat-girl—that kitten—can block me out of her mind?”
“Oick! What a whiff! ’Scuse, please; my brain was out to lunch. But you’ll get an earful, sister Janowick.”
“It’ll be interesting in a way you haven’t thought of, too,” Joan went on. “Vegians are essentially feline, you know, and cats as a race are both fastidious and promiscuous. Thus, conflict. Is that what this is about?”
“Could be—I haven’t tried to read her.” Then, aloud:
“Go ahead, Vesta. Did the experience help you decide?”
“Oh, yes. I’m too finicky to be a very good mixer. There’s just too damn many people I simply can’t stand the smell of.”
“There’s that smell thing again,” Thlaskin said. “You’ve harped on it before. You mean to say you people’s noses are that sensitive?”
“Absolutely. No two people smell alike, you know. Some smell nice and some just plain stink. F’rinstance, the boss here smells just wonderful—I could hug him all day and love it. Doctor Janowick, too, she smells almost like the skipper. You’re nice, too, Thlaskin, and so is Maluleme, and Nadine. And Tommie ain’t bad; but a lot of the others are just too srizonified much for my stomach.”
“I see,” Cloud said. “You do give some people a lot of room around here.”
“Yeah, and that’s what got this chick I was telling Thlaskin here about in such a jam. She’s been bending her elbow pretty free, and taking a jab or so of this and that between drinks. But she ain’t sozzled, y’understand, not by many a far piece; just lit up like Nyok spaceport. She’s maybe been a bit on the friendly side with a few of her friends, so this big bruiser—not a Vegian; no tail, even; an Aldebaranian or some-such-like and a Class A-Triple-Prime stinker—gets interested in a big way. Well, he smells just like a Tellurian skunk, so she brushes him off, kind of private-like, a few times, but it don’t take, so she finally has to give him the old heave-ho right out in front of everybody.
“ ‘You slimy stinker, I’ve told you a dozen times it’s no dice—you stink!’ she says, loud, clear, and plain. ‘This ship ain’t big enough to let me get far enough away from you to hold my breakfast down,’ she says, and this burns the ape plenty.
“ ‘Lookit here, babe,’ he says, coming to a boil, ‘Bend an ear while I tell you something. No klevous Vegian chippie is going to play high and mighty with me, see? I’m fed up to the gozzle. So come down off your high horse right now, or I’ll. . . .’
“ ‘You’ll what?’ she snarls, and puts a hand behind her back. She’s seeing red now, and fit to be tied. ‘Make just one pass at me, you kedonolating slime-lizard,’ she says, ‘and I’ll bust your pfztikated skull wide open!’
“He goes for her then, but, being a Vegian, her footwork’s a lot better than his. She ducks, sidesteps, pulls her sap, and lets him have it, but good, right behind the ear. It takes the ship’s croaker an hour to bring him to, and the skipper’s so scared he blasts right back to Vegia and the croaker calls the hospital and tells ’em to have a meat-wagon standing by when we sit down.”
“A very interesting and touching tale, Vesta,” Cloud said then, in English, “but pretty rough language for a perfect lady, don’t you think?”
“How the hell else. . . .” Vesta started to reply in spaceal, then switched effortlessly to English: “How else can a lady, however ladylike she may be, talk in a language which, except for its highly technical aspects, is basically and completely profane, obscene, vulgar, lewd, coarse, and foul? Not that that bothers me, of course. . . .”
Nor did it, as Cloud well knew. When a Master of Languages studied a language he took it as a whole, no matter what that whole might be. Every nuance, every idiom, every possibility was mastered; and he used the language as it was ordinarily used, without prejudice or favor or motional bias.
“. . . but it’s so pitifully inadequate—there’s so much that’s completely missing! Thlaskin objected before, remember, that there wasn’t any word in spaceal he could use—would use, I mean—to describe Maluleme as his wife. And my brother—Zambkptkn—I’ve mentioned him?”
“Once or twice,” Cloud said, dryly. This was the understatement of the trip.
“He’s a police officer. Not exactly like one of your Commissioners of Police, or Detective Inspector, but something like both. And in spaceal I can call him only one of four things, the English equivalents of which are ‘cop,’ ‘lawman,’ ‘flatfoot,’ and ‘bull.’ What a language! But I started to tell his story in spaceal and I’m going to finish it in spaceal. It’ll be fun, in a way, to see how close I can come to saying what I want to say.”
Then, switching back to the lingua franca of deep space;
“So that’s how come my brother got into the act. The hospital called the cops, of course, so he was there with the meat-wagon and climbed aboard. He was all set to pinch the jane and throw her in the can, but when he got the whole story, and especially when she says she’s changed her mind about circulating around so much—it ain’t worth it, she says, she’d rather be an out-and-out hermit than have to have even one more fight with anybody who smelled like that—of course he let her go.”
“Let her go!” Cloud exclaimed. “How could he?”
“Why, sure, boss.” Vesta, wide-eyed, gazed innocently at her captain. “The ape didn’t die, you know, and she wasn’t going to do it again, and he wasn’t a Vegian, so didn’t have any relatives or friends to go to the mat for him, and besides, anybody with one-tenth of one percent of a brain would know better than to keep on making passes at a frail after she warned him how bad he stunk. What else could he do, chief?”
“What else, indeed?” Cloud said, in English. “I live; and—occasionally—I learn. Come on, Joan, let’s go and devote the imponderable force of our massed intellects to the multifarious problems of loose atomic vortices.”
On the way, Joan asked: “Our little Vesta surprised you, Storm?”
“Didn’t she you? She had me gasping like a fish.”
“Not so much. I know them pretty well and I used to breed cats. Scent: hearing—they can hear forty thousand cycles: the fact that they mature both mentally and physically long before they do sexually: some of their utterly barbarous customs: it’s quite a shock to learn how—‘queer,’ shall I say?—some of the Vegian mores are to us of other worlds.”
“ ‘Queer’ is certainly the word—as queer as a nine-credit bill. But confound it, Joan, I like ’em!”
“So do I, Storm,” she replied quietly. “They aren’t human, you know, and by Galactic standards they qualify. And now we’ll go and whack those vortices right on their center of impact.”
“We’ll do that, chum,” he said. Then, in perfect silence he went on in thought: “Chum? Sweetheart, I meant. . . . My God, what a sweetheart you’d. . . .”
“Storm!” Joan half-shrieked, eyes wide in astonishment. “You’re sending!”
“I’m not either!” he declared, blushing furiously. “I can’t—you’re snooping!”
“I’m not snooping—I haven’t snooped a lick since I started talking. You got it back there, Storm!” She seized both his hands and squeezed. “You did it, and neither of us realized it ’til just this minute!”