O Pioneer!

XIX

Giyt didn’t want to talk to Hoak Hagbarth. Given a choice, he would have cut the man out of his life entirely, but the mess in his backyard left him little choice. Something had to be done.

When he tried to call Hagbarth about getting it fixed, the man didn’t answer his personal communicator; when he called the Hagbarth house, only Olse Hagbarth was there. “You say they dug up your backyard? Really? Well, I did hear something or other about a complaint of stopped-up drains a while back, but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention.”

When Giyt asked who had made the complaint she only shrugged. “I guess you’d have to ask Hoak about that. Well, no, he isn’t here right now. He’s in a major meeting—you know, getting ready for the six-planet congress—and I can’t interrupt him. Anyway, the sewers are Slug business, you know. Why don’t you file a requisition? Although they’re so backed up with the congress coming heaven knows when they’d be able to get around to it.”

She was right about that. The Slugs were so busy getting ready for their VIPs to visit that there wasn’t a single Slug in the waterworks office. In fact, there was only one person there, and that person—oh, when your luck was bad, it was bad all the way—was a female Kalkaboo.

When she saw Giyt coming, she raced him to the door, but he got inside the office before she could lock him out. Sulkily she retired to her desk.

At first Giyt thought she wasn’t going to talk to him at all, but evidently her sense of duty overcame her revulsion. “Have no authority accept requisition,” she told the air, unwilling to look Giyt in the face. “Slugs all in Slugtown, performing extremely great group sing for safety of soon-arriving leaders. Go away.”

“But it’s an emergency,” Giyt protested.

“Yes, of course emergency, what difference? This work you are complaining not done by Slugs anyway. No work order in file. No progress report. So not Slug, so Slugs probably not going fix anyway. You don’t like? You ask head Slug about same at commission meeting of joint governance, see how much good that do you. Go away.”

The visit to the waterworks office wasn’t quite a total loss. At least he had found out that the ruin in his backyard wasn’t part of some official maintenance program. Which left only one possibility: it was more of Hoak Hagbarth’s teaching Giyt a lesson.

The ameliorating fact was that the lack of waste-water disposal wasn’t a desperate emergency. The de Mirs had offered them the use of their own facilities at any hour of the day or night. Then when Giyt got back from the waterworks office, he inexpertly managed to hook up a hose drain to the kitchen sink. It took an hour of swearing and getting wet, but when he was finished, Rina could at least cook, the waste spilling out onto what passed for their lawn.

None of that helped to alleviate the smell from the backyard.

Smoldering, Giyt snapped on the human-language broadcast to take his mind off Hagbarth’s malice. What was on was a delayed broadcast of an Earthly hockey game. He watched it unseeingly until Rina called to him. “Hon? You haven’t forgotten you’ve got a commission meeting coming up?”

He had. What’s more, he had also completely forgotten about Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s promise to mend matters with the Kalkaboos.

Mrs. Brownbenttalon hadn’t, though. By the time Giyt got more or less cleaned up from his exploits with the kitchen drain, there the Centaurian was, leaning out of a cart before his door and calling to him. “What you do,” she instructed as soon as he was inside, “is totally prepared by me. You perform return bout with new High Champion, okay? Nothing serious, you understand. No maiming. But element of paramount importance you must remember is you positively must not this time win.” She bobbed her long nose at him for emphasis. “No more discuss this, please. What is terrible smell?”

And when Giyt told her about his troubles with the Slug repair crews she sighed. “Slugs,” she said mournfully. “Who can do anything with Slugs? Perhaps you do like Kalkaboo lady say and ask head Slug at commission meeting, maybe he in good mood. Usually not. Now we have conversation of trivial matters so you compose yourself. You like this fine weather we having now, temporarily?”

There were a dozen or more persons milling around outside the door of the Hexagon, humans and eeties mixed. Giyt eyed them warily, but there did not seem to be any Kalkaboos among them. As Giyt entered, one of the men caught his arm. “Where the hell are we supposed to sit, Giyt?” he demanded.

Actually it was a fair question. Inside the building Delt and human crews were ripping out most of the seats usually supplied for the audience. New and obviously a good deal more comfortable chair equivalents were stacked along the wall, ready to be installed for the comfort of the delegations. Giyt gave the man a helpless shrug and entered cautiously.

All the other members were already in their places, even the Kalkaboo High Champion, who did not even look at Giyt. Mrs. Brownbenttalon piped to the room in general, “Sorrow for lateness. I and Earth human had business of nonpublic nature. Please begin.”

And the Principal Slug, acting as chair for the day, slapped the desktop with one extruded member for order, commanded the work crews to stop their noisy activities, and began the meeting.

It was not a peaceful one. It seemed that every member of the commission had a complaint to make or a demand to register. The Principal Slug was first, usurping the privilege of the chair to point out that there were not enough damp-conditioned carts available in working order for the use of their delegation from the Slug home planet. Then the Petty-Primes’ Responsible One protested that the traffic involved in preparing for the meeting was so heavy that their small carts were at risk of being run over in the streets, and then the Delts weighed in by announcing that the other members of the commission were taking up time on frivolous matters when they should have ratified the seat assignments on the suborbital polar rocket and, really, they should move along so the work crews could finish preparing the hall for the six-planet meeting. Even Mrs. Brownbenttalon indignantly proclaimed that all that work should have been completed long ago, because more staff members for the six-planet meeting would be arriving very soon, and the accommodations for the Centaurians were not ready.

It did not take Giyt long to figure out what was motivating them all. The audience was much larger than usual, uncomfortably perched on whatever surfaces were left for them. Most of them were eeties—Giyt even saw the female Kalkaboo from the waterworks office—and among them were a number he had never seen before.

Those newcomers, he realized, had to be advance staff members for the delegations from the home planets. What the mayors were doing was showing off for the high brass. Only the new Kalkaboo High Champion was silent. He did not speak, did not look at Giyt, hardly moved at all except for the flapping of his huge ears. The only time he paid any attention at all was when Giyt found an opening to bring up his own business with the Principal Slug. Then the Kalkaboo conspicuously turned his back, while the Slug in the chair slobbered reprovingly, “These smelly drains leak purely unofficial personal matter, Mayor Giyt. Not to come before this body never. No other proper business? Good. Meeting I now adjourn.”

Well, Giyt thought, he hadn’t really expected any more. Meanwhile, what about this other matter? He started over to ask Mrs. Brownbenttalon what had gone wrong with her arrangements with the Kalkaboos.

That was when he found out that nothing had gone wrong at all.

He had incautiously turned his back on the High Champion. Before Giyt knew what was happening, the Kalkaboo leaped off his platform and bore him to the ground. “Die in wretched agony, vicious murdering person!” he shrieked, pounding Giyt’s head against the floor. But not really very hard, and not for more than a moment. Then the Kalkaboo rose and said politely, “Thank you. Vengeance is now complete. Expect you recover from this beating soon.”

When vengeance was complete, it seemed, it was complete, and it produced some unexpected dividends. The High Champion of the Kalkaboos did not become friendly, exactly—friendliness did not seem to be among the behaviors in the Kalkaboo repertory—but he did something better than that. He beckoned to the female Kalkaboo from the Slug office and whispered into her great ear. She in turn spoke to the Principal Slug, who listened for a moment, then called to Giyt. “Am informed repair requisition of you on file, so work will be done. Is quite irregular. Slugs, however, always cooperate reliably, this our nature.”

And then the next morning, as he was breakfasting with Rina at daybreak, they heard the pop of an explosion outside their own door. When they peered out they found it was pouring, but they caught a glimpse of a Kalkaboo running away in the rain. “I guess they didn’t trust you to set off your own firecracker, Shammy,” Rina said. “Anyway, it’s all straightened out now, right?”

“Looks that way,” he said, and returned to his pancakes, more cheerful than he had been in days. At least the problems with the extraterrestrials on Tupelo seemed to be healing themselves.

The humans, however, were a different matter. The stresses there were not healing themselves. They were getting worse.