Reward for Retief (34 page)

            "Then perhaps I'm
not
going dotty," Magnan groaned. "And I still haven't actually
rescued poor Gaby from this den of vice."

            Retief strolled across to
Boss, who was still holding his head and moaning softly.

            "Where's the
lady?" Retief asked quietly.

            Boss looked up, miming
indignation. "What dame's that?" he yelped. "I keep no dames in
my office! Got a couple out on the floor to hustle the marks, but I don't
hardly never see 'em."

            "I'm interested in one
named Gaby," Retief told him. "She was here just a moment ago."

            "Oh, her," Boss
groaned. "Tryda make friends with her once—a long time ago—and she like
rebuffed my kindly overtures and I hadda exile the broad. Run her off and tole
her not to never come around no more. Don't know how she got in here. Whatta
you
know about old Gaby, anyways?"

            "She left here only a
moment ago," Magnan supplied, having come up beside Retief. "Before
that, she was helping me extricate myself, then I heard her scream—and now
where is she?"

            "Must be a different
Gaby," Boss said indifferently. "Onney dame around here today is a
dice-girl they call 'the Glutton.' She come in to get a new supply of dominoes,
tole her I was busy and she left in one o' them huffs—into the John,
there." He indicated a discreet door adjacent to the storage closet.
"Must still be in there; I locked it, and it got no winder nor no back
door. Take a look."

            "But," Magnan
objected, "one can hardly invade the 'Ladies'; do summon a female
employee."

            "I tole you, no dames
is allowed in my office!" Boss growled.

            "Except La Goulue
(that's 'glutton' in French)," Magnan snapped back.

            "I never ast for no
Frog lessons," Boss grumped. "OK, I guess you ain't going to let up
until I check." He strode to the door, and pushed the latch button
savagely; the door swung inward and Gaby stepped into the room. She saw Magnan
immediately and rushed across to hurl herself at him. Magnan patted her on the
back, and over her shapely shoulder eyed Retief wildly.

            "Really, my
child," he rebuked the now-tearful girl, "such a display in public is
likely to give rise to rumors as to our relationship!" He managed to
disengage himself, and holding her at arm's length, looked uncertainly at her.

            "What
relationship?" she demanded. "You don't like me ..." The words
dissolved into a wail.

            "See here, my
girl," Magnan started sternly.

            "Wrong play, Mr.
Magnan," Retief put in. "This is where you kiss her. Go ahead, I
won't look."

            "It's not a matter of
looking," Magnan objected, then, addressing the tearful woman: "Where
have you been, dear? This boss person said he locked you in the Ladies!"

            "I wasn't in no
ladies," Gaby dismissed the idea. "What I was, I was lost in the Gray
Place—and it's
his
doing!" She stabbed an accusatory finger in
Boss's direction. "He's a bad 'un," she concluded. "What you
going to do with him, Benny?"

            "Why, just now I'm
going to use him to get us out of this den of iniquity," Magnan stated, in
the tone of an adman presenting a promotional campaign to a demanding client.

            "Before we go," Retief
put in, "we need to find the real Junior."

            "I suggest you forget
that silly idea, Retief," Magnan said loftily. He offered an arm to Gaby,
who took it tenderly in both hands. "Oh, Ben, you're so masterful,"
she breathed.

            "If you insist,"
Magnan acknowledged, then to Retief: "Just how do you plan to negotiate
our escape route through this bewildering maze of
now-you-see-it-now-you-don'ts?"

           
you find it all quite simple, once you have redefined your prime
postulates
,
the Big Voice boomed out.

            "I suppose that has to
do with the Vuggish aspects of the contretemps," Magnan commented
dubiously.

           
what else?
was
the curt reply. Magnan looked pleadingly at Retief, trying to avoid Gaby's
appealing look.

            "That wasn't me,"
Retief assured his supervisor.

            "T-then ..."
Magnan stammered. "Then,
it's
listening! It can help us!"

           
unfortunately
, Big Voice replied,
so long as the tricky captain holds in thrall
my sole genetic legatee, I can do nothing.

           
"But that's
impossible!" Magnan objected. "Voice is virtually omnipotent! How
could this mere tramp skipper exercise any restraint over him?"

           
my junior is but young. as for his 'omnipotence, he is at best a
journeyman trickster; and this goldblatt entity is capable of a guile beyond
the expectations even of a sophisticated being. free junior to receive his
legacy and you will find me not ungrateful. fail, and I shall be forced to
unleash destructive forces of the eiGhth order to accomplish the chore myself.
this galaxy would find that regrettable. act promptly, before junior's
latencies are forever curtailed. this is the critical stage of his evolution,
and to start anew now with another eater less bountifully endowed would likely constitute
an enterprise extending beyond my scope, vugwise.

           
"Retief,"
Magnan whimpered, tugging at his subordinate's sleeve. "What are we to do?
Clearly, we need to do it at once, but one might as well call on us to levitate
as to take effective action anent this contretemps. Did it say 'Eighth order'?
Gracious, I'm beside myself. Although one
could
whaffle, I suppose. But
to what end?"

            "Is everybody around
here going nuts, or what?" Gaby demanded, giving Magnan's arm a
proprietary yank. "A minute ago you were ready to conquer the world for
me; now you're crying the blues!"

            "Really, my dear, you
must excuse me," Magnan babbled. "I'm quite at sea, with all these
disembodied voices, and Retief s burlesque of them, and that closet I seem to
have thought was a pile of rocks, and you, and—and ..." He trailed off.

            "And
me?"
Gaby
echoed, looking discouraged. "What have
I
got to do with you losing
your grip?"

            "Why, when I first saw
you—" Magnan attempted, but gave it up.

            "Never mind sorting it
out now, Mr. Magnan," Retief suggested. "We can do that when we've
cleared things up a little better."

            "But, Retief!"
Magnan objected. "Perhaps you aren't aware of it, but our very own
Counselor of Embassy, in connivance with Fred Underknuckle, the sneak, are involved,
with Chief Smeer, in a diabolical plot to implicate the Mission in actual
warmongering, to say nothing of eliminating you and me—and quite possibly Gaby
and Nudine and Small as well—because we Know Too Much!"

            "I already had a run-in
with that Underknuckle character," Boss spoke up aggrievedly. "He
come in here with some kind of self-appointed local flatfoot, tryna raid the
joint, he says, but I know a muscler-in when I hafta deck him with his own
bodyguard!"

            "Yes, yes, Mr.
Boss," Magnan dismissed the remark, "but you mustn't judge
all
diplomats
by a single backslider! Most of us are dedicated public servants of the highest
character! It is your clear duty to assist us in restoring a modicum of order
to this chaotic situation. You may begin by divulging the wherabouts of the
real Junior—and while you're about it, you may as well describe precisely how
you managed to establish supremacy over an apprentice superbeing, and be brisk
about it!"

            "Well," Boss
started, more calmly, "what I seen, when this here Junior first stuck his
oar in—I seen right away he didn't have it all together, like old Worm; he was
pretty clumsy with his psychojuntures and all—and I bet the kid never hadda
handle a incipient vortex on the Vug level in his whole life! So that makes it
easy for me to slip him a fast one—con him into dipping down below the alpha
and get hisself all bolixed up in that mess down there—so I take over the kid's
prime directive before he knows what hit him, and from there on, he was my
property—hadda follow my lead or lose his grip and spin out along the Vug
coordinate—and you know what that means?"

            "I do?" Magnan
replied dazedly. "It sounds most underhanded, Mr. Boss."

            "Oh, you can call me
'Captain'," Goldblatt suggested. "That Boss stuff is OK for the rubes
and flatlanders, but you and me got to like conduct our negotiation on a little
higher plane and all."

            "What negotiation was
that, Captain?" Magnan wondered aloud.

           
that was a most illuminating disclosure, captain,
the Big Voice
spoke up.
IT
gives me precisely the angle
of impingement I require to extricate junior from involuntary servitude. I am
indeed grateful to you, benmagnan, for teasing the facts out into the open by
your clever simulation of idiocy. neatly done!

           
"Well!"
Magnan said huffily, but Retief caught his eye. "I suggest you pass on
that one, sir," he said. "After all, it
was
intended as a
compliment."

            Magnan seemed to be about to
pursue the point, but instead he winced, and blurted. "Easy! Easy! Look
here, Big Voice, or Worm or whatever you call yourself— that's an actionable
invasion of privacy—one more like that and you could get
me
disoriented
along the Vug axis!" He turned to Retief. "I've been considering our
situation; consider: we perceive the time axis as a substrate, in constant
uniform motion; space is the static substrate against which we ourselves have
some limited power of locomotion. Now, the Vug axis is itself, like time, in
motion, and confers independent motion upon matter—ergo:
if
I should
find myself divorced from the natural one: one relationship therewith, I'd
likely find myself flying off along either the spatial or the temporal axis, or
perhaps both! Since you seem to enjoy a certain influence with Worm,
do
tell
it to stop meddling with my tertiary postulate!"

           
i will respect your wishes in this matter, benmagnan
,
came the prompt response
,
but of
course I have no intention of allowing the destiny of the sole custodian of my
genetic heritage to be aborted by the captainsolgoldblatt entity. will you,
jimretIef, join once more with me in an effort to pry loose the afore-said
entity's illicit grip upon poor junior's psyche?

           
"Sure,"
Retief replied. "But this time let's stay away from the daydreams."

           
as you wish; still the charade did uncover, peripherally, one or two
of your conceptual foundations.

           
This time, the
tiled avenue was thronged with people, a crowd gathering, for what seemed to be
some public event. Over the babble of excited voices, the blare of the ancient
long trumpets echoed; then the crowd parted to reveal a pair of mountainous
beasts brilliantly caprisoned, whose long, recurved tusks were tipped with deep
red core-jewels as big as tennis balls. In a houdah atop one of the tandem
dire-beasts, there sat a man, broad and deep of shoulder and chest, clad in the
Imperial green. As he raised a hand in friendly hail to the population, a bolt
of white fire lanced out from a narrow black-fronted building to his right, to
detonate in a blinding flash which left the dire-beast a tottering ruin of torn
flesh and gouting gore, while the castle and its occupants had disappeared
completely. The cry that went up from the horrified crowd was like the
death-scream of a monster hill-devil. The other dire-beast tottered and
collapsed, blood-splashed but apparently unhurt. Retief, quite involuntarily,
leapt forward, pushed through the press of people, some struggling toward the
scene of carnage, some wildly fleeing. Even as he heard himself scream the
word, 'father!', a big man in the silver and green of the Guard caught his arm
and pulled him aside.