Pan Satyrus

CHAPTER TWO

They were very happy in Chief Bates's quarters. Pan was learning that there was a funny thing about talking; when you got into conversation with a man, you forgot, after a while, how very different and peculiar looking men were, and they began to look like chimpanzees to you.

Of course, Ape Bates had had a good start, though he really looked a little more like a gorilla, a very young gorilla.

They didn't talk about the spaceship and the adjustments Pan had made in it. They steered way away from security matters. Ape told about how drunk he got once in China, and Happy told about a girl he had known in Villefranche, and Pan told them about the time a cageful of rhesus monkeys back at the zoo got into the keeper's whiskey bottle.

"Really, you know, the sex life of the rhesus monkey is enough to empty the primate house on a good Sunday," he said. "Or fill it, depending on the kind of crowd you're getting. But you ought to see them when they're drunk. My goodness."

"Like seamen in San Diego after a long cruise," Happy Bronstein said.

"I've never seen that," Pan admitted. "Maybe I will, if I ever get out of government service. There's a very nice zoo in San Diego."

"I never got four blocks off the waterfront there," Ape said. "I missed a lotta opportunities in my time."

"And you always will," Happy Bronstein put in. "You've been a sailor too long, You could put into any port in the world, and never get three blocks off the farm. That's what we call the stretch along the docks," he added to Pan.

Ape said, "Well, yeah, chiefs lead a funny life-Taking orders from any guy with the right ring on his finger. And, you know, I never met a chimp before, but I thought about 'em, believe it or not. I mean, there's something lousy about strapping a guy on a sled and seeing how fast he can go before he busts a blood vessel. Or like they, did to you this morning. That stinks."

Happy Bronstein opened the door of Ape Bates's cabin and bawled, "Pass the word for yeoman!" His voice echoed down through the ship. "I got an idea."

Yeoman First Class Dilling must have run all the way. The other petty officers so seldom wanted to talk to him that he felt as though he'd been in orbit himself. He burst in, "Yeah, Happy, Ape?"

"What's the book on keeping a mascot?" Happy asked.

"Discretion of the skipper," Dilling said, and stood there.

"Thanks," Ape said. And when nobody said anything more, the yeoman's face fell and he went away again. When the door was closed — secured — Ape said, "It might work."

"You're bloody right," Happy said. "You ever know a skipper to turn down any reasonable request from the Chiefs' Mess?" Then he cleared his throat. "We wouldn't treat you like a mascot, Pan. But you can't enlist. They let you in, the first thing you know, the Navy'd be crawling with seven-and-a-half year olds."

"Caroline Kennedy'd be a WAVE," Ape said.

"Nice little girl," Pan said. "I met her once."

"No foolin'," Ape said. "Yeah, I guess a guy in your position gets to meet all kinds of famous people. You wouldn't want to ship out on a DAC."

"Is that what this ship is?" Pan asked.

"Oh, Jesus," Happy said.

The other two looked at him. "DAC's are secret," be said. "This is the prototype of the first one. They'd never have let Pan land here if they knew he could talk. Or have you been cleared and taken the loyalty oath and all?"

The chimpanzee shook his head. "There really was never any opportunity."

"Yeah. I can see that," Ape said.

Feet beat a steel tattoo in the companionway; there was an official rap on the door. "The joint is raided," Happy said. "I can smell copper through a steel bulkhead."

"You got the eddication," Ape said. He heaved himself off his bunk — he had given the two chairs which, as Master Chief Petty Officer he rated, to his visitors, and went to the door. "This cabin's under guard," he said.

"FBI," a voice came back.

Ape opened the door cautiously. A hand came through, holding a card; Ape bent and read it, and opened the door.

Not one, but three cops came in. They all had cards in their left hands, guns in their right. They all wore tropical weight blue suits. They all looked pretty silly.

The one from the FBI said, "I am Mr. Mac-Mahon. This is Mr. Crawford from NASA and this is Lieutenant Piquin from Naval Intelligence. If you men would leave us alone, we want to question this. this. Do you mind being called a chimpanzee?"

"Certainly not," Pan Satyrus said.

"If you'd rather be called a man—"

"By no means."

Special Agent MacMahon got a little red in the face. He looked from Happy to Ape and back again.

"Sorry, mister," Ape said. "The skipper said we was to guard Mr. Satyrus here, and he's the boss on this ship."

"That is correct," Lieutenant Piquin said, looking very efficient in his tropical weight suit.

The NASA man, Crawford, said, "Well, Piquin, go see the captain and get him to countermand his orders. This is very high security."

"These are not only my guards, but my friends," Pan said. "I don't know that I wish to talk to policemen, anyway. I'm not very fond of the law. When I was a very little chimp, not more than a year old, the police came and took away one of my very favorite keepers. He had been training the rhesus monkeys to distract the crowd on Sunday, so he could pick the men's pockets."

"No matter how far uptown it is, rhesuses I gotta see," Ape said.

Though Piquin had gone, the cabin was very crowded. Pan said, "I don't know too much about firearms, gentlemen, but I do wish you'd stop waving those around. For one thing, we'd all have more room if you'd put your hands in your pockets." He smiled, and added, "Or I could swing from that pipe up there and give the floor space up to you."

"Better not, Mr. Satyrus," Happy said. "That's a steampipe."

"Thank you, Radioman First Class."

Happy Bronstein smiled, too. It didn't alarm the security men nearly as much as Pan's smile had.

Pan said, "Chief, offer your guests a seat, why don't you?"

MacMahon and Crawford put their.38s away and sat down on the bunk. Piquin came back then. "The captain has given me the duty. The admiral concurs."

"The duty?" Crawford asked.

"The ape duty," Piquin said.

"Chimpanzee," Pan Satyrus corrected, gently. "You wouldn't like to be called a mammal or a vertebrate, would you? Neither should I, and yet we all are, aren't we?"

Piquin said, "All right, Chief, you and the radioman here are dismissed. Carry on."

Pan Satyrus decided to roar. He did the one he had learned from television, the man-acted gorilla roar.

Crawford leaped for the door and would have gotten it open, but it was too crowded in there; he couldn't get it open. Pan Satyrus reached out and picked him up and the tropical weight blue suit split up the back.

"You see, gentlemen, I am a chimpanzee, and you are mere men," Pan said. "I could undoubtedly hug you all to death if I felt like it."

"We have guns," Piquin said.

Before he had finished the speech, Pan Satyrus, who was still holding Crawford by the back of the neck, plucked Crawford's gun from his belt holster with the other hand. He was a little too rough about it; Crawford's belt snapped and his trousers split down the back, just as his coat had. The NASA man looked as if he were going to cry.

Pan Satyrus seemed to hold the gun correctly; he had seen a lot of television while his keepers passed the lonely night watch. Then he tossed the revolver through the open porthole, and said, "You won't shoot me, gentlemen. Not until I tell you how I made that spaceship go faster than light."

Silence in the cabin. The gentle tropical waves lapped at the side of the ship.

'You will go right on doing what I tell you to," Pan Satyrus said. "Isn't that right?"

Not a word.

"Isn't that what you're here for?" Pan Satyrus asked. "You, Crawford. Answer me, and stop trying to pull your clothes together. I'm naked, and I don't mind, why should you?"

"You've got more fur," Crawford said;.

Happy Bronstein strangled a cough. He had not been an enlisted man for as many years as Ape Bates, whose face didn't move a wrinkle.

"That wasn't what I asked you," Pan Satyrus said. "Or, rather it was, but just rhetorically. What are you here for, Crawford?"

"To find out how the Mem-sahib went as far as she did, as fast as she did," Crawford said. He was choking on his words. "When you blew the side-hatch out, you tore the controls loose."

"No," Pan said. "I couldn't count on that. I put all the circuits back the way they were before I pressed the release button."

"Why?" It was Piquin, in a refined wail.

"You see," Pan said, "if men went as fast as I did, only the other way around, they would evolve into chimpanzees, or at least gorillas. And it's not a happy fife, gentlemen. Not at all a happy life in a primate house., You see, the zoo where I was born sold both my mother and me, when I was two and a half. To the government, gentlemen, for which you are happy to work, no doubt."

"We're not here to listen to your life story," Mac-Mahon said. "You think an ape can blackmail the U.S. Government?"

"As my friend, Happy, would say," Pan said, "you're bloody right."

"Who's Happy?" Piquin asked, taking out his notebook. "Another chimp?"

"By choice," Happy Bronstein said, softly.

Ape said, "Gents, excuse me. Pan, where's your mother now?"

"She died on a space sled in New Mexico," Pan said. He looked at Crawford. 'Working for NASA." Crawford dropped his torn trousers and forgot to pull them up again.

They listened to the waves knocking G.I, paint gently off the side of the Cooke.

MacMahon broke the silence. "Let's put it another way, Mr. Satyrus. Let me ask you. You seem to know a lot. From what you've heard, do you favor ' the Russian side of the cold war?"

"Oh, no," Pan Satyrus said. "I don't favor any men at all. So far. Ape and Happy here seem very nice indeed, and Dr. Bedoian isn't half bad. But I'm tentative about men. Wouldn't you be, in my position?"

Piquin put his notebook away.

Pan Satyrus said, "I should like to go ashore. I give you my word as a chimpanzee that I'll go quietly, if my friends Happy and Ape here can go with me in the copter. No strait jackets, no tranquilizer pills."

"Where are you going to find a pilot?" Piquin asked.

MacMahon said, "Maybe one of these sailors can fly a copter."

"Naw," Ape said, "we're enlisted men, not pilots."

Pan Satyrus shrugged. As always, any movement made his muscles ripple rather alarmingly. He sighed, and that was a rather powerful thing, too, in the small, crowded cabin. "Then you'll have to take me in on this DAC," he said.

Piquin came to life. "How did you find out this was a DAC? DAC's are top secret!"

"You may not be a chimpanzee," Pan Satyrus said, "or even a gorilla. But you could try to use the brains that evolution gave you, couldn't you?"

Piquin blushed.