The Great Hydration

CHAPTER SIX

There was something about the view that Karl Krabbe saw through the slatted window of his and Boris Bouche’s lodging that was nudging at his memory. Along the main market concourse traders of a dozen races and colours, lizard and humanoid, passed to and fro between airy pavilions constructed of metal and coloured glass. It was kaleidoscopic, but also barbarically warlike. There was no one who did not seem to carry a weapon of some sort, and mostly the various tribesmen were naked except for bracelets, bangles, straps and belts.

The lighter had put Krabbe and Bouche down a few miles out in the desert. They had ridden in on a balloon-tyred vehicle that did not look at all out of place in the market’s parking lot, and had sought out a room in one of the accommodation blocks, transferring their supplies from the dune buggy mostly at night.

No one had taken the least bit of notice of them. In appearance the aliens from another world were apparently not particularly unusual.

Suddenly the comparison that had been niggling at the back of his mind popped into his consciousness. He turned to his partner, a broad grin on his face.

“Eh, Boris! Barsoom!”

Bouche had just finished his daily contact with O’Rourke and was folding up the communicator’s dish aerial. “What?”

“We should have called this world Barsoom! That’s what it’s like.”

Bouche stared blankly.

“You know!” Krabbe urged. “Edgar Rice Burroughs! His name for Mars.”

Krabbe’s preoccupation with the 20th century writer was known to Bouche, but he had never read any of his work himself.

“Is that so? Well, I just told O’Rourke the language is now about adequate. Maybe we should make a move tomorrow.”

Krabbe closed the window slate, shutting out the sunlight, leaving the room illuminated only by the radium-energised fluorescent patch on the ceiling. In the greenish glow their living space was little more than a large cell, meant to accommodate visiting tribesmen to the most perfunctory of standards, and now crammed with stores and equipment.

For the past three local days they had eavesdropped continuously in various parts of the market with directional microphones and hidden cameras. At length the language machine had produced its miracle, comparing sound, gesture and situation to build up a usable vocabulary. Krabbe and Bouche could now wear earplugs which would receive Tenacity speech and convert it into Terra standard. Disks worn at the base of the throat, kept in place by neckbands, likewise converted their speech to that of Tenacity, at the same time damping the original voice with cancelling anti-sound.

Now the time had come to meet with this world’s controllers. Krabbe had to admit he was intrigued.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll find out how to gain an audience with the—the ‘Tlixix’—tomorrow.”

He was interrupted by the slap of bare feet on the metal floor in the corridor. The door was suddenly shoved forcibly inward. Three black, fierce-eyed Gamintes charged into the room. One of them held on a leash a purple salamander-like creature the size of a small dog, but with six scrabbling legs.

Krabbe and Bouche retreated. The salamander creature rushed about the room, towing its keeper after it, uttering sneezing noises and scratching at the food crates. Then it began butting its head against one of the four water drums in the corner.

The Gamintes glared about them, fingering their flingers. Krabbe picked up a translator plug and began fitting it into his ear. One of the Gamintes knocked his arm away, sending the plug flying. But not before he had caught his first few harsh words.

“There is water in this room! You have been stealing water!”

The explanation came to Krabbe. He or Bouche should have thought of it before, he told himself. It was logical that the Tlixix would breed an animal capable of sniffing out the stuff that obsessed them most. The market was probably patrolled by the beasts, to locate any leaks in their system. Their noses were sensitive enough, evidently, to smell the small amount the Earthmen had been using.

A second Gaminte knelt at the water drum and after a few moments succeeded—to Krabbe’s surprise—in fathoming the screw cap. He recoiled as the cap came off, then screwed it on tight.

Bouche edged towards a DE beamer, but he never reached it. There was shouting from the Gaminte. Lean, rubbery, amazingly strong arms seized the Earthmen, who were swiftly propelled from the accommodations house. Standing in the sun was a vehicle that was little more than a platform on fragile caterpillar tracks.

Krabbe and Bouche managed to raise the hoods of their burnouses before, ungraciously, they were heaved aboard it.

The Hydrorium was a large metal building, clad in white glass which made it dazzling to look upon. The Pavilion of Audience that confronted it was, however, the smallest in the Market. Entrance was through a circular doorway which irised open. Not until they were in the short tunnel behind it, and the door had closed, did a second door open ahead of them.

“It’s a vapour lock,” Bouche said admiringly. “They’re taking us to the lobsters. Hell, Karl, do you realize something? This planet is as alien to them as it is to us!”

Krabbe did not answer. They were in a dimly lit hall, the walls running with moisture, the floor wet and slippery. Some distance off, in tented bath-couches, washed by sprays, were two Tlixix.

The Gamintes pushed their prisoners forward. A sharp, salty, seaweed smell wafted from the lobster-creatures, a smell from Tenacity’s remote past, seeming to bring with it images of tidal pools, of surf, of tangy breezes and scudding foam. The tents parted. The Tlixix reared above them.

Feelers quivering, antlers waving in agitation, massive crustacean heads bent in inspection, their faces, if such they could be called, alive with whiskery motion, and framed by the helmet-like upper segments of their body shells, which glistened green and blue.

For all their alienness there was a cold sense of power about the beasts. It was a feeling Krabbe had expected, and one which he relished.

A voice hoarse and breathless, harsh and clicking came from one of the Tlixix. In reply a Gaminte embarked on a long explanation in guttural tones. Then the Tlixix turned to the Earthmen and spoke again. Bouche raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“We are strangers, Market Master,” he answered in Terra standard. “We cannot understand you.”

There was silence. All the Tenaciteans present, humanoid and crustacean, seemed mystified. It occurred to Krabbe that they might not have such a concept as a foreign language. The Tlixix had imposed their own on the dehydrate species as they evolved.

Behind him the door irised again. Through it poured more Gamintes, this time carrying everything that had been in Krabbe and Bouche’s lodging: water drums, food packs, assorted items including weapons. All this was dumped in front of the Tlixix, who peered at it with their blank, white eyes.

A Gaminte picked up a water drum and shook it. Water sloshed inside.

As he put it down again Bouche bent to the goods. He had spotted the ear and throat translators. Suspiciously the guards lifted their flingers, aiming flenching blades as he handed one set to Krabbe and fitted the other to himself.

The Market Master’s words were now intelligible. “You are in possession of water! All water belongs to the Tlixix! How did you come by it?”

His voice was like the roaring of surf. To fasten on the neckbands, the Earthmen had thrown back the hoods of their burnouses. The Tlixix became still, regarding them intently, as if puzzled.

“What is your tribe? From what part of the world do you come?”

Krabbe spoke, again experiencing the weird sensation of having his words whipped away to emerge from the voice-disk in an alien tongue.

“Our tribe does not exist in this world, Market Master. The water is ours, and nowhere in all the deserts will you find another people like us. We come from the stars.”

The two Tlixix stared at one another then back at Krabbe.

“From the stars? What nonsense is this?”

“We can prove it. We come from the stars, and we are here to trade.”

“And how did you come from the stars?”

Krabbe grinned. Incredulous though the lobsters were of what, after all, must seem a preposterous story, they would soon change their minds when they saw evidence of the technology the firm of Krabbe & Bouche had available.

“We came in a vehicle that is closed up like a barrel, or like this building. It carries its own air, for there is no air in between the stars. It now waits for us in the sky, too high to be seen.”

“Do not waste our time with your ridiculous stories. What is the name of your tribe? Where did you get this water?”

“We can prove what we say, Market Master. If you will allow me to use a device among our goods, I will speak to our comrades aboard the vessel in the sky, and you will hear their voices.”

“Hear their voices?”

“Yes, Market Master.”

There was a pause. “Proceed.”

Krabbe found the communicator and, again under the nervous gaze of flinger-wielding Gamintes, opened up its dish antenna.

Bouche took off his translator. “Here, you’d better let me do that.” He took the handset from Krabbe and touched a tab.

“Are you there, O’Rourke? Come in, please.”

Their most trusted bondman answered almost immediately.

“O’Rourke here, Partner Bouche.”

“We have made contact, O’Rourke. I am demonstrating that we have friends in orbit. That is all.”

“Understood, Partner Bouche.”

“Out.”

The Market Master’s companion uttered an exclamation and jerked his body, sending drops of water shooting off him. “That strange noise comes from a long distance?”

“That’s correct, Market Master,” Krabbe said with satisfaction.

“And it works, perhaps, by sending inaudible radiations? Something similar to light, except it cannot be seen?”

“Well, yes,” Krabbe said slowly, blinking. “That’s a good description.”

“Then it is true. There is such a device!”

The Market Master himself turned this way and that, stalks and feelers in a frenzy. “Seize these two! They have come to the market as liars and thieves. They have stolen our water. They have stolen the invention of the Analane! What else have they stolen? Seize them!”

With gruff cries the terrifying Gamintes rushed forward.