Space Cadet

XVI P.R.S. ASTARTE

OSCAB WAS SUMMONED again the next day into the presence of the city's chief magistrate and started laying the foundation, in a leisurely, indirect fashion, for formal diplomatic relations in the future. He began by getting her story of the trouble with the Gary and its skipper. It was much as Burke had admitted it to be, although from a different viewpoint.

Oscar had inquired casually as to why the swamp Burke wanted was tabu. He was worried that he might be invading religious matters but he felt that he needed to know it was a dead certainty that others would be along, in due course, to attempt to exploit the trans-uranic" ores; if the Patrol was to prevent further breaches of the peace the matter must be investigated.

The matriarch answered without hesitation; the swamp was tabu because the ore muds were poisonous.

Oscar felt the relief of a man who has just been told that it will not be necessary to lose a leg, after all. The ores were understandably poisonous; it was a matter that the Patrol could undoubtedly negotiate-conditional or practical tabus had been overcome many times with natives. He tabled the matter, as something to be taken up at a later time by the appropriate experts.

In a later interview he sounded her out on the. subject of the Patrol. She had heard of it, in a fashion, apparently - she used the native word given by the polar-region natives to all colonial government, a word meaning "guardians of the customs" or "keepers of the law."

The native meaning was quite useful to Oscar, for he found it impossible to get over to her the idea that the , Patrol was intended to prevent war-"war" was a concept she had never heard of!

But her conservative mind was naturally prejudiced in favor of any organization tagged as "guardians of the customs." Oscar approached it from that viewpoint. He explained to her that more of his own kind would be arriving; therefore the "great mother of many" of his own people had sent them as messengers to propose that a "mother" from Oscar's people be sent to aid her in avoiding friction.

She was receptive to the idea as it fitted her own experience and concepts. The groups of natives near the polar colonies were in the habit of handling their foreign affairs by exchanging "mothers"-actually judges-who ruled on matters arising out of differences in custom; Oscar had! presented the matter in the same terms. ^

He had thus laid the groundwork for a consulate, extraterritorial courts, and an Earthman police force; the mission, as he saw it, was complete- provided he could get back to base and report before other prospectors, mining engineers, and boomers of all sorts started showing up.

Only then had he spoken to her of getting back-to have her suggest that he remain permanently as "mother" for his people. (The root word translated as "mother" is used for every position of authority in the Venerian speech; the modifiers and the context give the word its current meaning-)

The proposal left Oscar temporarily speechless. "I didn't know what to say next," he confessed later. "From her point of view she was honoring me. If I turned it down, it might offend her and crab the whole deal." ';

"Well, how did you talk your way out of it?" Tex wanted j to know. "Or did you?" |

"I think so. I explained as diplomatically as possible that I was too young for the honor and that I was acting as 'mother only because Thurlow was laid up and that, in any case, my 'great mother of many had other work which I was obliged, by custom, to carry out."

"I guess that held her."

"I think she just filed it away as a point to negotiate. The Little People are great negotiators; you'll have to come to New Auckland some time and listen to the proceedings of a mixed court."

"Keep to the point," suggested Matt

"That is to the point-they don't fight; they just argue until somebody gives in. Anyhow, I told her that we had to get Thurlow back where he could get surgical attention. She understood that all right and expressed regret for the tenth time that her own little girls couldn't do the trick. But she had a suggestion for curing the boss."

"Yes?" demanded Matt. "What was it?" Matt had appointed himself Thurlow's caretaker, working with the amphibian healers who now had him as a professional responsibility. He had taught them to take his pulse and to watch his respiration; now there was always one of the gentle creatures x squatting on the end of Thurlow's couch, watching him with grave eyes. They seemed genuinely distressed at not being able to help him; the lieutenant had remained in a semi-coma, coming out of it enough occasionally that it had been possible to feed him and give him water, but never saying anything that the cadets could understand. Matt found that the little nurses were quite unsqueamish about feeding a helpless person; they accepted offensive necessities with the same gallantry as a human nurse.

But Thurlow, while he did not die, did not get any better.

"The old girl's suggestion was sort of radical, but logical. She suggested that her healers take Burke's head apart first, to see how it was made. Then they could operate on the boss and fix him."

"What?" said Matt.

Tex was having trouble controlling himself. He laughed so hard he strangled, then got hiccoughs and had to be pounded on the back. "Oh, boy!" he finally exploded, tears streaming down his cheeks, "this is wonderful. I can't wait to see Stinky's face. You haven't told him, have you?"

"No."

"Then let me. Dibs on the job."

"I don't think we ought to tell him," objected Oscar. "Why kick him when he's down?"

"Oh, don't be so noble! It won't hurt any to let him know that his social rating is 'guinea pig.' "

"She really hates him, doesn't she?" Matt commented.

"Why shouldn't she?" Tex answered. "A dozen or more of her people dead-do you expect her to regard it as a schoolboy prank?"

"You've both got her wrong," Oscar objected. "She doesn't hate him."

"Huh?"

"Could you hate a dog? Or a cat-"

"Sure could," said Tex. "There was an old tomcat we had once-"

"Pipe down and let me finish. Conceding your, point, you can hate, a cat only by placing it on your own social level. She doesn't regard Burke as ... well, as people at all, because he doesn't follow the customs. We're 'people* to her, because we do, even though we look like him. But Burke in her mind is just a dangerous animal, like a wolf or a shark, to be penned up or destroyed-but not hated or punished.

"Anyhow," he went on, "I told her it wouldn't do, because we had an esoteric and unexplainable but unbreakable religious tabu that interfered-that blocked her off from pressing the point. But I told her we'd like to use Burke's ship to get the lieutenant back. She gave it to me. We go out tomorrow to look at it."

"Well, for crying out loud-why didn't you say so, instead of giving all this build-up?"

They had made much the same underwater trip as on entering the city, to be followed by a longish swim and a short trip overland. The city mother herself honored them with her company.

The Gary was everything Burke had claimed for her, modern, atomic- powered, expensively outfitted and beautiful, with sharp wings as graceful as a swallow's.

She was also a hopeless wreck.

Her hull was intact except the ruined door, which appeared to have been subjected to great heat, or an incredible corrosive, or both. Matt wondered how it had been done and noted it as still another indication that the Venerians were not the frog-seal-beaver creatures his Earth-side prejudices had led him to think.,

The inside of the ship had looked fairly well, too, until they started checking over the controls. In searching the ship the amphibians, to whom even a common door latch was a puzzle, had simply burned their way through impediments-including the access hatch to the ship's autopilot and gyro compartment. The circuits of the ship's nervous system were a mass of fused and melted junk.

Nevertheless they spent three hours convincing themselves that it would take the resources of a dockyard to make the ship fly again.. They gave up reluctantly at last and started back, their spirits drooping.

Oscar had at once taken up with the city mother the project of recovering the jeep. He had not mentioned it before as the Gary seemed the better bet. Language difficulties would have hampered him considerably-their hostesses had no word for "vehicle," much less a word for "rocket ship"-but the Gary gave him something to point to wherewith to explain.

When she understood what he was driving at she gave orders which caused the party to swim to the point where the cadets had first been picked up. The cadets made sure of the spot by locating the abandoned litter and from there Oscar had led them back to the sinkhole that was the grave of the jeep. There he acted out what had happened, showing her the scar in the bank where the jeep had balanced and pacing off on the bank the dimensions of the ship.

The mother-of-many discussed the problem with her immediate staff while the cadets waited, ignored rather than excluded. Then she abruptly gave the order to leave; it was getting on in the late afternoon and even the Venerians do not voluntarily remain out in the jungle overnight.

That had ended the matter for several days. Oscar's attempts to find out what, if anything, was being done about the jeep were brushed off as one might snub a persistent brat. It left them with nothing to do. Tex played his harmonica until threatened with a ducking in the room's center pool. Oscar sat around, nursing his arm and brooding. Matt spent much of his time watching over Thurlow and became well acquainted with the nurses who never left him, especially one bright-eyed cheerful little thing who called herself Th'wing."

Th'wing changed his viewpoint about Venerians. At first he regarded her much as he might a good and faithful, and unusually intelligent dog. By degrees he began to think of her as a friend, an interesting companion-and as "people." He had tried to tell her about himself and his own kind and his own world. She had listened with alert interest, but without ever taking her eyes off Thurlow.

Matt was forced willy-nilly into the concepts of astronomy-and came up against a complete block. To Th'wing there was the world of water and swamp and occasional dry land; above that was the endless cloud. She knew the Sun, for her eyes, perceptive to infrared, could see it, even though Matt could not, but she thought of it as a disc , of light and warmth, not as a star.

As for other stars, none of her people had ever seen them and the idea did not exist. The notion of another planet was not ridiculous; it was simply incomprehensible- Matt got nowhere.

He told Oscar about it. "Well, what did you expect?" Oscar had wanted to know. "All the natives are like that. They're polite but they think you are talking about your religion."

"The natives around the colonies, too?"

"Same deal."

"But they've seen rocket ships, some of 'em, anyhow. Where do they think we come from? They must know we haven't been here always."

"Sure they know that-but the ones at South Pole think we came originally from North Pole and the ones around:

P.R.S. ASTARTE

North Pole are sure we came from South Pole-and it's no use trying to tell them anything different."

The difficulty was not one-sided. Th'wing was continually using words and concepts which Matt could not understand and which could not be straightened out even with Oscar's help. He began to get hazily the idea that Th'wing was the sophisticated one and that he, Matt, was the ignorant outlander. "Sometimes I think," he told Tex, "that Th'wing thinks that I am an idiot studying hard to become a moron-but flunking the course."

"Well, don't let it throw you, kid. You'll be a moron, yet, if you just keep trying."

On the morning fifteen Venus days after their arrival the mother of the city sent for them and had them taken to the site of the jeep. They stood on the same bank where they had climbed ashore from the sinking ship, but the scene had changed. A great hole stretched out at their feet; in it the jeep lay, three-quarters exposed. A swarm of Venerians crawled over it and around it like workmen in a dockyard.

The amphibians had begun by adding something to the thin yellow mud of the sinkhole. Oscar had tried to get the formula for the additive, but even his command of the language was useless-the words were strange. Whatever it was, the effect was to turn the almost-liquid mud into a thick gel which became more and more stiff the longer it was exposed to air. The little folk had carved it away from the top as fast as it consolidated;, the jeep was now surrounded by the sheer walls of a caisson-like pit. A ramp led up on the shoreward side and a stream of the apparently tireless little creatures trotted up it, bearing more jelled blocks of mud.

The cadets had climbed down into the pit to watch, talking in high spirits about the prospects of putting the jeep back into commission and jetting out

again, until the Venerian in charge of the work had urged them emphatically to go up out of the pit and stay out of the way. They joined the city mother and waited.

"Ask her how she expects to get it up out of there, Oz," Tex suggested. Oscar did so.

"Tell thy impatient daughter to chase her fish and I will chase mine."

"No need for her to be rude about it," Tex complained. "What did she say?" inquired the mother-of-many.

" 'She' thanks thee for the lesson," Oscar prevaricated. The Little People worked rapidly. It was evident that the ship would be entirely free before the day was far advanced-and clean as well; the outside shone now and a steady procession of them had been pouring in and out of the door of the ship, bearing cakes of jellied mud. In the last hour the routine had changed; the little workers came out bearing distended bladders. The clean-up squad was J at work. f

Oscar watched them approvingly. "I told you they would 3 lick it clean." :'

Matt looked thoughtful. "I'm worried, Oz, about the possibility that they will mess with something on the control board and get into trouble."

"Why? The leads are all sealed away. They can't hurt anything. You locked the board when you left it, didn't you?"

"Yes, of course."'

"Anyhow, they can't fire the jet when she's in that attitude even if you hadn't."

"That's true. Still, I'm worried."

"Well, let's take a look, then. I want to talk to the fore- '. man in any case. I've got an idea."

"What idea?" asked Tex.

"Maybe they can get her upright in the pit. It seems to me we could take off from there and never have to drag j her out. Might save several days." They went down the| ramp and located the Venerian in charge, then Matt and 1 Tex went inside the ship while Oscar stayed to talk over his idea.

It was hard to believe that the pilot room had lately; been choked with filthy, yellow mud. A few amphibians'

were still working in the after end of the room; elsewhere the compartment was clean.

Matt climbed to the pilot's seat and started inspecting. He noticed first that the sponge-rubber eyeguards for the infrared viewer were missing. This was not important, but he wondered what had happened to them-did the little folk have the vice of souvenir snitching? He filed away the suspicion, and attempted a dry run on the controls, without firing the jet.

Nothing operated-nothing at all.

He looked the board over more carefully. To a casual inspection it was clean, bright, in perfect order, but he now perceived many little pits and specks. He dug at one with a fingernail, something came away. He worked at

it a bit more and produced a tiny hole into the interior of the control board. It gave him a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. "Say, Tex-come here a minute. I've got something."

"You think you've got something," Tex answered in muffled tones. "Wait till you've seen this."

He found Tex with a wrench in his hand and a cover plate off the gyro compartment. "After what happened to the Gary I decided to check this first. Did you ever see such a mess?" ~~

The mud had gotten in. The gyros, although shut down, were of course still spinning when the ship had gone into the sink-hole and normally would have coasted for days; they should still have been spinning when Tex removed the cover. Instead they had ground to a stop against the mud- burned to a stop.

"We had better call Oscar," Matt said dully.

With Oscar's help they surveyed the mess. Every instrument, every piece of electronic equipment had been invaded. Non-metallic materials were missing completely; thin metal sheets such as instrument cases were riddled with pinholes. "I can't understand what did it," Oscar protested, almost in tears.

Matt asked the Venerian in charge of the work. She did not understand him at first; he pointed out the pinholes, whereupon she- took a lump of the jelled mud and mash it flat. With a slender finger she carefully separated o what seemed to be a piece of white string, a couple inches long. "This is the source of thy troubles."

"Know what it is, Oz?"

"Some sort of worm. I don't recognize it. But I wouldn’t t expect to; the Polar Regions are nothing like this, thank goodness." "

"I suppose we might as well call off the working party.

"Let's don't jump the gun. There might be some way to salvage the mess. We've got to."

"Not a chance. The gyros alone are enough. You can't raise ship in a wingless job without gyros. It's impossible."

"Maybe we could clean them up and get them to working."

"Maybe you could-I can't. The mud got to the bearings,

Oz."

Jensen agreed regretfully. The gyros, the finest precision equipment in a ship, were no better than their bearings. Even an instrument maker in a properly equipped shop would have thrown up his hands at gyros abused as these had been.

"We've at least got to salvage some electronic equipment and jury-rig some sort .of a sending set. We've got to get a. message through." \|

"You've seen it. What do you think?" I

"Well-we'll pick out the stuff that seems in the best shape| and take it back with us. They'll help us with the stuff."

"What sort of shape will it be in after an hour or so in the water? No, Oz, the thing to do is to lock up the door, once the last of the filth is out and come back and work here."

"Okay, well do that." Oscar called to Tex, who was still snooping around. He arrived swearing.

"What now, Tex?" Oscar asked wearily.

"I thought maybe we could at least take some civilized food back with us, but those confounded worms bored into the cans. Every ration in the ship is spoiled."

"Is that all?"

" 'Is that all? Is that all the man says! What do you want? Flood, pestilence, and earthquakes?"

But it was not all-further inspection showed another thing which would have dismayed them had they not already been as low in spirit as they could get. The jeep's jet ran on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The fuel tanks, insulated and protected from direct radiation, could retain fuel for long periods, but the warm mud had reached them and heated them; the expanding gases had bled out through relief valves. The jeep was out of fuel.

Oscar looked this situation over stonily. "I wish the Gary had been chemically powered," he finally commented.

"What of it?" Matt answered. "We couldn't raise ship if we had all the juice this side of Jupiter."

The mother-of-many had to be shown before she was convinced that there was anything wrong with the ship. Even then, she seemed only half convinced and somehow vexed with the- cadets for being unsatisfied with the gift of their ship back. Oscar spent much of the return journey trying to repair his political fences with her.

Oscar ate no dinner that night. Even Tex only picked at his food and did not touch his harmonica afterwards. Matt spent the evening silently sitting out a watch in Thurlow's room.

The mother-(c)f-many sent for all three of them the next morning. After formal exchange of greetings she commenced, "Little mother, is it true that thy Gary is indeed dead, like the other Gary?"

"It is true, gracious mother."

"Is it true that without a Gary thou canst not find thy way back to thine own people?"

"It is true, wise mother of many; the jungle would destroy us."

She stopped and gestured to one of her court. The "daughter" trotted to her with a bundle half as big as the bearer. The city mother took it and invited, or commanded, the cadets to- join her on the dais. She commenced unwrapping. The object inside seemed to have more bandages than a mummy. At long last she had it uncovered and held out to them. "Is this thine?"

It was a large book. On the cover, in large ornate letters, was:

LOG

of

the

Astarte

Tex looked at it and said, "Great leaping balk of fire! It can't be."

Matt stared and whispered, "It must be. The lost first expedition. They didn't fad-they got here."

Oscar stared and said nothing at all until the city mother repeated her question impatiently. "Is this thine?"

"Huh? What? Oh, sure! Wise and gracious mother, this thing belonged to my 'mother's mother's mother.' We are her 'daughters'"

"Then it is thine."

Oscar took it from, her and gingerly opened the brittle pages. They stared at the original entry for "raise ship"-but most especially at the year entry in the date column-"1971." "Holy Moses!" breathed Tex. "Look at that-just look at it. More than a hundred years ago."

They thumbed through it. There was page after page of one line entries of "free fall, position according to plan" which they skipped over rapidly, except for one: "Christmas day. Carols were sung after the mid-day meal."

It was the entries after grounding they were after. They were forced to skim them as the mother-of-many was beginning to show impatience: "- climate no worse than the most extreme terrestrial tropics in the rainy season, the dominant life form seems to be a large amphibian. This planet is definitely possible of colonization."

"-the amphibians have considerable intelligence and seem to talk with each other. They are friendly and an attempt is being made to bridge the semantic gap."

"Margraves has contracted an infection, apparently fun-goid, which is unpleasantly reminiscent of leprosy. The surgeon is treating it experimentally."

"-after the funeral muster Hargraves' room was sterilized at 400°."

The handwriting changed shortly thereafter. The city mother was growing so obviously discontented that they glanced only at the last two entries: "- Johnson continues to fail, but the natives are very helpful-"

"-my left hand is now useless. I have made up my mind to decommission the ship and take my chances in the hands of the natives. I shall take this log with me and add to it, if possible."

The handwriting was firm and clear; it was their own eyes that blurred it.

The mother-of-many immediately ordered up the party used to ferry the humans in and out of the city. She was not disposed to stop to talk and, once the journey began, there was no opportunity to until they reached dry land.

"Look here, Oz," Tex started in, as soon as he had shaken off the water, "do you really think she's taking us to the Astarte?"

"Could be. Probably is."

"Do you think there is a chance that we will find the ship intact?" asked Matt.

"Not a chance. Not a chance in this world. On one point alone, she couldn't possibly have any fuel left in her tanks. You saw what happened to the jeep. What do you think a century has done to the Astarte?" He paused and looked thoughtful. "Anyhow, I'm not going to get my hopes up, not again. I couldn't stand it, three times. That's too many."

"I guess you're right," agreed Matt. "It won't do to get excited. She's probably a mound of rust under a covering of vines."

"Who said anything about not getting excited?" Oscar answered. "I'm so excited I can hardly talk. But don't think of the Astarte as a possible way to get back; think of her historically."

"Yow think of it that way," said Tex. "I'm a believer and a hoper. I want to get out of this dump."

"Oh, you'll get out! They'll come find us some day-and then they'll finish the mission we flubbed."

"Look," answered Tex, "couldn't we go off duty and not think about the mission just for the next quarter of a mile? These insects are something fierce-you think about Oscar and I'll think about Mother Jarman's favorite son. I wish I was back in the good old Triplex."

"You were the guy that was always beefing that the Triplex was a madhouse."

"So I was wrong. I can be big about it."

They came to one of the rare rises in the level of the ground, all of ten feet above water level. The natives started to whisper and lisp excitedly among themselves. Matt caught the Venerian word for "tabu." "Did you get that, Oz?" he said in Basic. "Tabu."

"Yes. I don't think she told them where she was taking, them."

The column stopped and spread out; the three cadets moved forward, pushing rank growth aside and stepped in a clearing.

In front of them, her rakish wings festooned in vines and her entire hull sheathed in some translucent substance, was the Patrol Rocket Ship Astarte.