Authors: Keith Laumer
“Yes, yes, a penetrating observation, Mr. Wimperton.” The
Consul-General tilted two eye-stalks toward Retief. “If you’d step inside a
moment, Mr. Retief . . . ?” He held the curtain aside, let
it drop behind Retief.
Late sunlight filtering through the open-work walls of the
consulate splashed a checkered pattern across colorful rugs of kelp fibre, low
couches, desks, and chairs of woven wickerwork. Consul-General Dools looked at
Retief nervously.
“Mr. Retief,” he said in his faint voice. “Now that our
previous chief, Mr. Magnan, has departed, I, of course, find myself in
charge . . .” He paused while the floor lifted and sank; his
eye-stalks waved sickeningly.
“As a newcomer, perhaps you’ve
noticed . . . ah . . . irregularities in
our little organization here . . .” Four of his eyes studied
different corners of the room. Retief said nothing.
“I wished merely to caution you: It would be unwise to evince
excessive curiosity . . .”
Retief waited. The tower leaned to the steady pressure of the
rising gale. The floor slanted. Consul-General Dools clung to a desk, his
throat-sacs vibrating.
“There are many ways,” he started, “in which accidents could
befall one here . . .”
The floor sagged, rose abruptly. Dools gulped, threw Retief a
last despairing glance and fled as Wimperton came in, still muttering. He
looked after the departing Groaci.
“Consul-General Dools isn’t a very good sailor,” he
commented. “Of course, in the week you’ve been here, you haven’t seen a real
blow yet—”
The native peddler poked his round head through the door
hanging, padded across the room on large, bare webbed feet, paused before
Retief.
“You want um basket?” The round, amber-and-olive patterned
face gazed hopefully at him.
“I’ll take that one,” Retief said in the native language,
pointing.
The lipless mouth stretched wide in the local equivalent of a
delighted grin.
“A sale! I was beginning to think you High-Pockets—excuse me,
sir—you Terries were tighter than weed-ticks in a belly-button.” He lowered his
wares, extracted the basket.
“You shouldn’t encourage him,” Wimperton said snappishly.
“For months I’ve been indoctrinating him to bring in some gold nuggets; the
land-masses are practically solid with them—but no, they build their town on a
raft of seaweed in mid-ocean and weave baskets!”
“They evolved in the weed,” Retief said mildly. “And if they
lifted the embargo on gold, in six months the planet would be swarming with
prospectors, dumping their tailings into the ocean. They like it the way it
is.”
The Poon caught Retief’s eyes, jerked his head toward the
doorway, then ducked out through the door hanging.
Retief waited half a minute, then rose lazily, stepped out on
the wide observation deck. All around, lesser towers, intricately patterned,
rose from the miles-long mat of yellow-green seaweed far below, moving
restlessly with the long ocean swells. Sea fowl with weed-colored backs and
sky-blue undersides wheeled and screamed. Between the swaying pinnacles, a
spider-web complex of catwalks swung in hundred-yard festoons. A continuous
creaking of rattan filled the air. Far away, the white-flecked surface of the
open sea was visible.
Retief crossed to where the Poon waited by the stairwell
entry.
“You seem like a good fellow,” the native said as Retief came
up. “So I’ll give you some free advice.” He glanced around at the
color-drenched sky. “There’ll be a Big Blow tonight. Get down below—don’t waste
any time.” He hitched at his load of baskets, turned to the stairs. “And don’t
bother to tell those clowns—” he jerked his head toward the consular offices.
“They’re bad medicine.” He bobbed his head and was gone.
Retief threw a sharp glance at the clouds, got out a cigar
and lit up, turned from the rail.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in a somber uniform stood by the
catwalk mouth. He looked Retief over casually, then came across the close-woven
deck, thrust out a large, well-tanned hand.
“My name’s Klamper, Planetary Monitor Service. I guess you’re
the new man.”
Retief nodded.
“Let
me give you some advice: watch out for the natives. They’re sly, tricky
devils . . .” He paused. “You were talking to one just now.
Don’t let him lure you into going down into the native quarter. Nothing down
there but natives and dark holes to fall into. A helluva place for a Terry.
Knifings, poisonings—Nothing there worth climbing down thirty flights of wicker
steps to look at.”
Retief puffed at his dope-stick. The wind swirled the smoke
away.
“Sounds interesting,” he said. “I’ll think it over.”
“Plenty to do right up here in the consulate tower,” Klamper
said. “I guess you’ve seen the Tri-D tank—a twenty-footer—and the sublimation
chamber—and there’s a pretty good auto-banquet. And don’t overlook the library.
They’ve got a few dandy sense-tapes there; I confiscated them from a Joy-boat
in a twelve-mile orbit off Callisto last year.” The Constable got out a
dope-stick, cocked an eye at Retief.
“What do you think of your Groaci boss, Consul-General Jack
Dools?”
“I haven’t seen much of him, he’s been seasick ever since I
got here.”
“First time I ever ran into a Groaci in the CDT,” Klamper
said. “A naturalized Terry, I hear. Well, maybe he hasn’t got all five eyes on
an angle—but I’d say watch him.” Klamper hitched up his gun belt. “Well, I’ll
be shoving off.” He glanced at the stormy sky. “Looks like I’ve got a busy
night ahead tonight . . .”
Retief stepped back into the office. A small, round man with
pale hair and eyebrows looked up from the chair by Wimperton’s desk.
“Oh,” Wimperton blinked at Retief. “I thought you’d gone for
the day . . .” He folded a sheaf of papers hurriedly, snapped a
rubber band around them, turned and dropped them in the drawer of the filing
cabinet. The round man hooked a small, glassy smile in position.
Wimperton rose. “Well, I’ll be nipping along to dorm tower, I
believe, before the wind gets any worse. This breeze is nothing to what we get
sometimes. I’d suggest you take care crossing the catwalk, Mr. Retief. It can
be dangerous. In a cross-wind, it sets up a steady ripple . . .”
His limber hands demonstrated a steady ripple. “Other times it seems to float
up and down.” He eyed Retief. “I hope the motion isn’t bothering
you . . . ?”
“I like it,” Retief said. “As a boy, I had a habit of eating
candy bars—you know, the sticky kind—while standing on my head on a
merry-go-round.”
Wimperton’s eyes stared fixedly at Retief. A fine sweat
popped out on his forehead.
“Feels like it’s building up, all right,” Retief said genially.
“Feel that one?”
A distant, thoughtful look crept over Wimperton’s face.
“It’s good and hot in here, too,” Retief went on. “And
there’s that slight odor of fish, or octopus, or whatever it
is . . .”
“Uh . . . I’d better see to the
goldfish,” Wimperton gasped. He rushed away.
Retief turned to the round-faced man. “How was your trip, Mr.
Pird?”
“Ghastly,” Pird piped. His voice sounded like a rubber doll.
“I visited continents One and Two. Bare rock. No life higher than insects, but
plenty of those. You know, it never rains on Poon. All five continents are
deserts, and the heat—”
“I understood the Zoological Investigation and Liaison
Council Headquarters had financed a couple of wildlife census stations over
there,” Retief said.
“To be sure, facilities were provided by ZILCH, but,
unhappily, no volunteers have come forward to man them.” Pird smiled sourly. “A
pity; Consul-General Dools has expressed a passionate interest in wildlife.”
Pird grabbed at a paperweight as it slid across the desk-top. The walls
creaked; wind shrilled, flapping the door hanging. The floor heaved, settled
back. Pird swallowed, looking pale.
“I believe I’d best be going.” He started toward the door.
“Hold it,” Retief called. Pird jerked. His eyes blinked.
“Aren’t you going to warn me about anything?”
Pird stared for a moment, then scurried off.
Alone, Retief stood with braced feet in the consular office,
gloomy now in the eerie light of the stormy sunset. He crossed to the filing
cabinet, took a small instrument from a leather case, went to work on the lock.
After five minutes’ work, the top drawer popped out half an inch.
Retief pulled it open; it was empty. The second contained a
dry sandwich and a small green flask of blended whiskey. In the bottom drawer
were four dog-eared copies of
Saucy Stories
, a prospectus in
full-dimensional color illustrating Playtime on Paradise, the Planet with a
Past, glossy catalogs describing the latest in two-seater sport helis, and a
fat document secured by a wide rubber band.
Retief extracted the latter, opened the stiff paper. It was
an elaborately worded legal instrument. In the fifth paragraph, he read:
“
. . . whereas
such body is otherwise uninhabited, unimproved and subject to no prior claim
filed with the proper authorities as specified in paragraph 2A (3) d and;
Whereas claimant has duly established, by personal occupancy
for a period of not less than six Standard Months, or by improvement to a value
of . . .
”
Retief read on, then removed the elaborately engraved cover
sheet of the document, folded the rest and fitted it into an inside pocket.
Outside, the wind rose to a howling crescendo; the floor shuddered, the walls
tilted precariously. Retief took a magazine from the drawer, fitted the
document cover over it, folded it and snapped the red rubber band in place,
then replaced it in the drawer and closed it. The lock seated with a snick. He
left the consulate and crossed the swaying catwalk to the next tower.
Retief stood in the doorway of his room, smoking a cigar.
Pird, just starting down the stairway, clucked. “Better hurry, sir. Everyone
else has gone down. The wind is rising very rapidly.”
“I’ll be along,” Retief looked down the empty corridor,
undulating in the dim late-evening light, then went along to a curtain-hung
doorway, stepped out onto a windswept balcony from which a swaying wicker
catwalk launched itself in a dizzy span to the consulate tower, a hundred yards
distant. A dim light winked on in the consular offices, moved above slowly.
Retief watched for a moment, then turned up the collar of his windbreaker,
stepped off into the dark tunnel of the wildly swinging passage. The gale
buffeted at it with a ferocity that had increased even in the quarter-hour he
had spent in the dorm tower. The sky had darkened to an ominous mauve, streaked
with fiery crimson. Below, lights sparkled all across the lower levels.
Abruptly,
the catwalk dropped three feet, came to a stop with its floor canted at a sharp
angle. Retief steadied himself, then went on, climbing now. Ten feet ahead, the
yellow and blue hanging at the end of the passage was visible. It moved. The
slight figure of Consul Dools appeared for a moment, wrapped in a dark poncho,
then whisked back out of view.
Retief made another two yards against the bucking of the
sloping passage. He could hear a rasping now, a harsh sawing sound. A wedge of
electric-purple sky appeared through the wicker roof ahead,
widened . . .
With an abrupt crackling of breaking fibers, the end of the
catwalk broke free and dropped like an express elevator. Retief locked his
fingers in the twisted rattan and held on. The face of the tower flashed past;
then the end of the catwalk whipped aside; Retief slid two feet, caught himself
with his torso half out the open end. Air shrieked past his face. A foot from his
eyes, the severed end of the supporting cable whipped in the wind—cut clean.
Retief
looked down, saw the massed lights of the native section swooping up to meet
him. A wall rushed close; Retief felt the whistle of air as he brushed it; then
he was hurtling past low towers with lighted windows behind which alien faces
gaped briefly. He swept low over a narrow street ablaze with colored lights,
felt a shock as the catwalk brushed a building somewhere above; then the street
was falling away below as the free-swinging catwalk cracked-the-whip, soaring
upward, slowing now . . .
A
wall loomed before him with a narrow balcony before lighted windows. For an
instant, it seemed to hang before his face—and Retief lunged, kicked his legs
free of the twisted wicker—and caught the heavy rattan guard rail. He hung on,
groping with his feet, with the gale tearing at, shrieking in his
ears . . .
Hands gripped him, hauling him up. He shook his head to clear
it, felt a heavy hanging brush his face. Then he was standing on a yielding
floor, blinking in the soft light of a primitive incandescent lamp, feeling the
warmth and strange, spicy odor of an alien room.
A five-foot native stood before him, staring up anxiously
with large protruding green eyes in a smooth, olive-colored face. A wide,
almost human mouth opened, showing a flash of pink interior.
“Are you all right, buddy?” a strangely resonant voice
inquired in the bubbly local tongue.