Reward for Retief (39 page)

            "You keep taking in
even more and more territory," Gaby charged sadly. "I wanna believe
in you, Benny, but how can I?" She looked up beguilingly at him with large
violet eyes from which tears had washed the paint. He grabbed her and kissed
her. She sighed and snuggled up to his arm, which she clutched possessively.
"OK, Benny," she murmured. "I'll take what I can get, even if
you ain't real."

            "B-but," he
started, then wisdom belatedly prevailed and he fell silent.

            "C'mon," she
urged, "let's get outa this loose nation." He followed uncertainly as
she tugged him toward an azalea in full flower. She led him around behind it to
a patch of velvety grass, and just as Magnan was readying a shocked protest,
Retief came around the bush and said:

            "We don't have much
time. The Vug flux is approaching critical density for a phase-change."

            "Hello, Jim,"
Magnan greeted his colleague. "I won't bore you by asking where you've
been—or where
I've
been, but please indulge me by saying something
comprehensible." He paused to fan himself with his hand. "I must say
I'm quite undone by all this. Do you happen to know the way back to the
cave?"

            "Steady, Ben,"
Retief counseled. "This is a little heavy, I know, but we're
in
the
cave. It's just a matter of focusing your awareness on the correct level of
vibrational phenomena."

            "You did it
again!" Magnan charged. "I specifically asked you to say something
comprehensible!" He looked around wildly. "Where's Gaby?" he
demanded. "Indeed, where are
you?"

           
"Look
behind you," Retief suggested. Magnan spun and saw, a few feet away, a
small-white-painted booth— one which he had seen before. He dashed to it,
rounded the side and saw Gaby behind the counter of the icecream stand, just as
he had first seen her: middle-aged, work-worn, coarse-featured. She looked at
him in astonishment.

            "Hold on, dearie,"
she said quickly and turned her back. "I got to fix my face."

            "Gaby! It
is
you!"
Magnan blurted, "but—but what's happened?"

            "It's what
hasn't
happened,"
the woman corrected, and turned to face him. To his astonishment, the work-and
time-worn look was gone.

            "Gaby!" Magnan
blurted. She recoiled. "You was going to take me out of all this!"
she reproved sadly. "We was to of wed, respectable, and settle down!"

            "Gabrielle, my
dear," Magnan said in a shaken tone, "you appear to have somehow
gained an erroneous impression. I am hardly ready to retire to a
life-of-wedded-bliss-in-a-rose-covered-cottage, or any other form of
domicile!"

            "Why not?" Gaby
demanded. "I guess I ain't enough of a lady fer ya," she tried vainly
to hold her delicate features in an expression of contemptuous fury, but to her
own obvious annoyance, a tear dribbled down from one large violet eye to the
top of her turned-up nose.

            Magnan was quick to produce
a monogrammed hanky to wipe it away. "Really, my child, I didn't
mean—" he stammered. Then she was hugging his arm in her usual possessive
manner.

            "Tell me one thing,
Benny," she cooed. "How'ed you know about the rose-covered cottage?
Took a deal o' horse-manure to grow them flars in this here lousy soil,
too."

            Magnan leaned back to stare
at her. "Y-you mean ...?" She tugged at his arm. "Right over
here," she said over her shoulder.

2

           
Retief was
standing beside Magnan in the whirling, multi-colored, but gnat free fog
listening to the Voice saying
we can
apparently change the ostensible future by our latent actions
.
Magnan, beside him, said something and abruptly Retief found himself immersed
in a dense billow of smog.

            "Stand fast, Ben,"
Retief called. Magnan replied, and they chatted for a few moments; then the
Voice spoke up again:

           
i suggest you rematch paradigms, quickly,
it said, in a tone of urgency,
it would be unwise to continue in this
unsymmetrical mode.

           
"Oh, we're
getting close to something, eh?" Retief replied, and focused his attention
on detecting the direction from which the Voice emanated.

           
here now, no meddling of that sort!
the silent presense reprimanded
sharply.

            "Retief!" Magnan's
voice was a wail, receding in the distance.

            "Right here, sir,"
Retief called. He took a step toward the reedy voice, and the surface underfoot
seemed to dissolve into a heaving layer of golf-ball-sized pebbles, into which
he sank to the waist.

            "Wrong scale." He
directed the thought toward the sense of the Voice. "You can't drown me in
golf balls."

           
those are hydrogen atoms
!
the silent Voice
corrected sharply.

            The consistency of the
entrapping mass changed, became gravel-like. Retief disengaged his feet from
the loose material, climbed a low slope to emerge in sunlight. When he looked
back, the wisps of luminous fog were drifting away, dispersing, to reveal a shadowy
hollow. Far below, there was a flicker of movement, as a large slug-like
creature scuttled for concealment. Retief picked a shallow gulley as the most
navigable route, went across the grass arid descended into the shadows where
the thing had disappeared. Barely visible under a slaty overhang was a black
opening. Once again, the persistent gnats swarmed about him.

           
don't you dare
!
came the sharp warning. Retief
sensed that its source was close—dead ahead, inside the tunnel. He picked up an
apple-sized rock and threw it into the recess, eliciting a meaty
whap!
and
a low grunt, followed by scuffling sounds. He selected a larger missile and
pegged it after the first. This time, the unhandsome triangular head of Chief
Smeer emerged, marred by a greenish contusion below one yellow eye.

            "That done it!"
the cop barked. "Yer unner arrest!" He hauled his ungainly length out
into the open, awkwardly attempting to assume a look of dignity while at the
same time brushing mud and debris from his cop-blue harness with two large,
multi-fingered hands.

            Retief expanded his
telepathic sensitivity in the way he had mastered by conversations with the
Voice, and at once picked up sub-vocalization:

           
... let this outlaw give
me the slip now. Old Fussbritches wouldn't like that. And I guess I got a score
or two to settle my ownself...

           
As the slug-like
cop leaped at him, twisting onto its back as Retief stepped aside, he looked
down at the long, armor-plated underside of the creature, located the ochre
patch just aft of the third pair of short, scuttling legs, and delivered a
jack-hammer kick to the leathery hide. In instant reflex, the long torso
whipped itself into a tight ball, the projecting legs no longer able to reach
the rocky ground. Smeer's bug-like face looked at Retief with what he
interpreted as a despairing expression.

            "Dirty pool,
Retief," Smeer said mournfully. "I bet you looked up Sardonic
physiology in a book or like that."

            "On the trip out,"
Retief conceded, "I did happen to glance through an article on exobiology."

            "Oh, you come here
planning
to attack us kindly locals," Smeer commented as if granting an
interview to a Groaci sob-sister.

            "I learned a number of
other interesting things, too," Retief told him.

            "That's
ridiculous," Smeer dismissed the idea. "I've protected all sensitive
data under four levels of obfuscation—which reminds me: how is it you're not
still spinning your wheels in that lovely null-entropic pseudo-environment I
evoked just for you?"

            "You work on
that," Retief suggested. "In the meantime, I
might
consider
not knocking your IQ back down to the pre-goldblatt level, if you just drop the
whole scam right here."

            "What? And disappoint
poor Sid?"

            "Sid will survive to
hang," Retief assured the unhappy creature. At the same time, he extended
his awareness in a fine-focused tendril with which he lightly brushed the
surface of the alien consciousness, noting the weak suture lines.

            "Really!" Smeer
objected, simultaneously beginning to waggle his antennae in an uncontrollable
reflexive search for the source of his discomfort. "Drat it!" he
carped, at last stilling the primitive snoof organs, except for a residual
twitching.

            "I haven't done
that
since I was a
very
small eater," he commented, as if confiding
in a sympathetic interviewer. Then he fixed a baleful eye on Retief.
"Alas, you force me to unleash my big guns, unhappy meddler!" he
intoned, the impressiveness of his pronouncement somewhat marred by his awkward
curled position, peering out from under his own appetite. "Just wait'll I
get uncurled here, fellow, and I'll show you a few tricks you ain't seen
yet!" he concluded.

            "That might be a
while," Retief told him. "I took the time to fuse your primary motor
ganglion in that position.

           
have a care, rash terran
!
the Voice warned,
somewhat muffled,
would you attempt
to defy the ssp?

           
"Oh, I
already did that," Retief replied cooly. "You gave yourself away,
back in the entropic vacuole."

           
to be sure
,
Voice conceded,
you duped me. but even that apparent kink in
the harmonious unfolding of destiny can, with a trifling adjustment to one's world
view, be subsumed within the ssp. one of the chief virtues, really, of the
concept.

           
"I'm
talking SAP," Retief informed the gabby alien with finality. "As
principle which required Mr. Magnan's gestalt and mine re-converge now!"

            "Oh, dear,"
Magnan's voice groaned from near at hand. Retief turned to see his colleague
hurrying past, his back to Retief.

            "Hold on, Ben,"
Retief called after him. Magnan hesitated, half-turned, stammering: "B-but
Gaby is just—oh, it's
you,
Retief: Gracious, I hardly know where to
begin. Where have you been?"

            "Right here, sir,"
Retief reassured the agitated First Secretary. "It's just a matter of
viewpoint."

            "Viewpoint?"
Magnan yelled. "While I was being set upon by metallic monsters—"

            "Just one, Benny,"
Gaby murmured coming up behind him. He leapt as if jabbed by a sharp stick.

            "Gaby!" he choked.
"Don't
ever
creep up on me like that!"

            "I never crept,"
she objected. "Oh, hi, Jimmy." She wisely dropped the subject.
"What's next?"

            "I was hoping,"
Magnan blurted before Retief could speak, "that
you
could tell
me
—or
us, that is, child. You said something about Transfer Point Sixteen, I believe:
you seem to know your way around this maze. So, shall we be off?"

            "What about the
rose-covered cottage and all?" Gaby protested. "You ain't changed yer
mind?"

            "Mind?" Magnan
echoed. "I feel as if I've lost it."