Reward for Retief (5 page)

            "Leave yer meat-hooks
offa my stuff," Hy commanded.

            "Hyman,"
Ambassador Shortfall cautioned. "Do mind your tone, lest these simple
people misinterpret your enthusiasm as hostility."

            "Enthusiasm?" Hy
echoed. "Which this crudbum is tryna swipe my Mark 19, which I've signed
fer it, and besides I'll need it to record those close-ups of the inoffensive
ladies and gents of the Embassy staff being throttled, or gutted, or otherwise
unlawfully kilt in the performance of our duties and all!"

            "Surely you exaggerate,
Hyman," Shortfall expostulated mildly. "Where's that Retief fellow? I
understood he was sometimes rather effective in pacifying throngs of this sort,
correcting misunderstandings and all that."

            "He's right here,
sir," Magnan supplied, indicating his subordinate who had now grabbed two
pillars at once; he hauled them close and threw them down across the counter on
their backs, and planted a foot on each one. He glanced up and caught Magnan's
eye.

            "Ben," he said,
"if you'll use your umbrella to poke the yellow spot on each of these
fellows ..." He indicated with his chin a sallow patch at the center of
the ranked shredding hooks.

            "What's that?"
Magnan yelped. "Poke them with my umbrella, you say?" He clutched his
rolled brolly to him as if to protect it from involvement in such goings-on.

            "Hurry, sir,"
Retief urged, "before it dawns on them that I can't hold both of them down
with a foot each and have anything left to stand on."

            As one hypnotized, Magnan
extended his weapon and in gingerly fashion poked one supine pillar, as
directed. The creature responded by rolling up into a two-foot sphere, which
Retief sent rolling with a well-placed kick. Astonished, Magnan poked the other
and looked about for new targets, as Retief sent the second tightly-curled
pillar after its partner.

            "Capital, Jim!" Magnan
cried. "Do arrange some more. Heavens, I'd no idea I was so formidable a
warrior, actually!"

            "Did you say 'warrior,'
or 'worrier,' Ben?" Felix inquired in his cynical fashion.

            "I realize, Hy,"
Magnan replied loftily, "that by your remark you intend to reflect
discredit on the latter activity. However, the role of constructive worrying in
the successful conduct of interplanetary affairs is not in so cavalier a
fashion to be dismissed."

            "Well, par me,
sir," Felix returned, still playing to a hypothetical grandstand. "If
that's how it is, you better get busy worrying our way out of this one; it was
bad enough having his Ex's 'throng' warming up to dismember us, but now you got
the cops on our back, too. So worry good, Ben. I'm pulling for you."

            "Your remarks,
Hyman," the Ambassador put in, "are uncalled-for. This is not a
matter for constructive or even creative worrying. This is a time for prompt,
effective
action!
Ben already has his instructions, you may inform the
Agency, should you survive this affair."

            "Yeah, Boss," Hy
acknowledged. "I heard the instructions: 'take the necessary action,' you
said. What's that supposed to mean?"

            "Calmly, Hyman,"
Shortfall admonished the agitated newsman. "Rest assured that the
Department requires no action of Agency personnel at this time."

            " 'Terran Information
Agency slandered by Ambassador Clyde Shortfall with dying breath'," Felix
intoned, as if dictating a fast-breaking headline over the din of the city-room
at Sector.

            "Take no hasty action,
despatch-wise, Hy," Shortfall advised. "Lest I be forced to reflect
your negative attitudes on your upcoming ER. And what do you mean, 'dying
breath'?"

            "Well, Mr.
Ambluster," Hy responded apologetically, "it ain't likely yer Ex will
be doing a whole lot more breathing after that fella behind you knocks yer
brains out. Right, chief?"

            "It appears also that
certain succinct comments in the Reverence for Superiors column would not be
amiss," Shortfall came back smartly, ignoring Hy's remark except to step
aside in time to see yet another locking-bar impact on the Customs Counter
beside him.

            "Still on the old ER
gambit, eh, Mr. Ambluster?" Felix challenged, "which I guess I saved
yer skull that time."

            "Oh, Hy," Magnan
interjected sweetly. "Would you just take my brolly and poke that fellow
Retief is holding upside down? Right on that saffron-hued spot. My hands are
occupied keeping the looters out of our baggage."

            Felix complied, and
exclaimed happily when the object of his thrust promptly curled up and was sent
rolling along the baggage chute by another of Retief s well-placed kicks.

            "Wow!" Hy yelped.
"Where'd you learn that one, Ben?" He leaped at another exposed
Zotz-patch, then another.

            "Retief tipped me
off," Magnan explained. "I understand he picked it up from some
illicit publication or other, actually quite contrary to the Manual."

            "Good thing!" Hy
returned. "Prolly the
Journal of Isolationism Today,
a yellow sheet
if there ever was one, but handy sometimes." He lent substance to the
latter comment by dispatching two pillars in quick succession.

            "—and do like me!"
Hy finished sending yet another tightly-curled local off to the baggage
carousel.

            "Gentlemen!"
Shortfall's voice sounded, almost lost against the general outcry. "Let us
not escalate this trifling incident into a pitched battle! Nice work,
Ben," he added in a lower tone. "Keep 'em back, but don't do anything
that could be interpreted as overreaction, or even aggression on our
part."

            "Who's to
interpret?" Felix demanded, poking on with undiminished enthusiasm. "
'Enbattled Terrans Defend Position Against All Odds', " he quoted from his
soon-to-be-filed Pulitzer Prize-winning story.

            Having, with Hy's help,
cleared the route to the ramp doors, Retief caught Magnan's eye. "Time to
evacuate all personnel, sir," he suggested. "Get 'em together and
lead 'em in a rush and you'll make it." He pivoted one counter aside, to
open a lane to the rear.

            Magnan looked dubious, but
complied, herding his charges through the improvised opening in the enclosing
barrier and across the littered floor to the portal normally used by the
baggage carts, and out onto the dusty tarmac, where a fitful wind blew grit
into their faces.

            "It seems to me,"
Magnan commented, waving away an insistent cloud of gnats, "that these
confounded midges are as excited by this outrage as are we ourselves."

            After sending off a final
determined pillar, Retief joined the rest, followed at once by Chief Smeer, who
pointed at him accusingly and yelled.

            "This here one's the
ringleader! I seen him! Grab him, boys, which after a couple years in a
Zanny-du jail waiting to be squashed, he'll show a little restraint before he
goes using them tactics he got outa that there bootleg book Ben Magnan was
bragging about!"

            His troops, hardly
distinguishable from the noisy local trash element from which they had been
recruited, moved up purposefully, while Shortfall bustled over to confront the
chief.

            "See here, Chief,"
His Ex barked. "The principle of diplomatic immunity, once breached, will
lose all force, an eventuality with which I do not intend to have my name
associated! It's your clear duty to restrain this, ah, throng and to escort me
and my people in safety to our quarters!"

            "Oh, yeah?" Smeer
riposted. "Who's gonna make me?"

           
i am,
a silent voice cut across the ramp. Smeer responded by
becoming interested, quite suddenly, in the ceiling structure far above. He
gazed up at it apparently lost in awe, while the Terrans stared at each other
in astonishment.

            "There!" Magnan
exclaimed. "It's that Voice again! You heard it, too, didn't you,
Hy?" he appealed to the saturnine Agency rep.

            "No comment, Ben,"
Hy replied stonily.

            "We all heard it, Mr.
Magnan," Marvin Lacklustre confirmed. "It said, T am,' in an archaic
dialect of Standard, but it was clear enough!"

            "This is no time for
wool-gathering, Chief!" Shortfall rebuked the musing cop.

            Chief Smeer returned his
attention to the crisis at hand, assumed a more conciliatory, or at least less
aggressive expression and made 'all right, folks, take it easy' gestures.

            "Am I to understand,
Chief," Shortfall demanded, "that you are now ready to provide an
appropriate escort for my Mission to the quarters I am assured have been
reserved for us in the city?"

            "Well, yeah, OK, I
guess," Smeer muttered, as if wishing to avoid overhearing what he was
saying. "Come on, I got a couple paddy wagons'll save youse the walk. It's
only a couple miles, but I guess you boys are tired, after starting a riot and
all—"

            "It was hardly us, or
we, who precipitated the disorder!" Shortfall challenged, and the two went
off together, disputing technicalities, while the other cops directed the staff
toward a row of dilapidated vehicles with faded logos reading '
salvaged by hong kong sanitary department',
or
ex-bolivian home defense forces',
and
even '
gift of the groacian autonomy to
the people of fust'
, into which the Terrans were unceremoniously
hustled.

            Magnan peered anxiously out
the smeared window of the rude van into which the Terrans had been thrust by the
cops, as it bumped over a cobbled street like the bottom of a narrow ravine. He
winced at each jolt, but exclaimed, "Why, it's quite charming! Looks
exactly like the Place de l'Opera as painted by Pissaro or somebody! All these
messy facades, mere blobs of color, and windows that aren't square and don't
line up! The only thing is," he added, "they look the same close up.
They really
are
just sort of slopped together!"

            "Doubtless an optical
illusion, Ben," Stan Bracegirdle, the Assistant Cultural Attache remarked.
"I was Art and Revolution critic for the Activist Press for years, you
know," he went on, redundantly, as it happened, since he had individually
informed everyone on the staff of his impressive artistic credentials at first
meeting.

            "Yes, I know,
Stan," Magnan muttered. "But I hardly see what that has to do with
the fact that this city appears to have been designed to be viewed from a
distance, a sort of Impressionist Architecture, if you will. But what are all
those cables strung between the buildings?"

            "You imply that such an
architecture is in some way objectionable?" Stan inquired sternly.

            "I
said
it was
charming," Magnan reminded the attache. "It's just that it looks like
it might all fall down. Look at that roofline! It sags like wet cardboard!"

            "A most sensitive
assessment I'm sure, of a remarkable subtlety of line," Stan dismissed the
remark.

            "And we're supposed to
be assigned apartments in one of these collapsing structures!" Magnan
blurted. But he made no further protest when the vehicle halted and a surly cop
thrust his head and forequarters inside and told him bluntly that he "and
the trouble-maker" were to enter a particularly shabby structure, where,
on the second floor, he showed them to a suite featuring an uneven floor and
walls covered in scabrous lichen-

            like encrustations in shades
of puce, magenta, and cyrhotic yellow.

            "My word, Retief,"
Magnan muttered indignantly when they were alone. "This is appalling! But
after that boisterous reception at the port, I suppose I should have expected
that we would be spared nothing."