Short Fiction, Poul Anderson [simple e reader .TXT] 📗

“and I vill call you Ray, so? I vish only to see Yupiter, though I doubt it vill be as glamorous as Earth.” Her eyes glowed. “You live in a fable. The flyin and travelin machines, auto⁠—automatic kitchens, television, clocks an vatches, exotic dress. Aah, it vas vorth ten years travelin yust to see them.”

Ballantyne reflected on what he knew of Alpha Centauri. Even the fantastically fast new exploratory ships took ten years to cross the interstellar gulf to its wild planets, and there had only been three expeditions so far. The third had brought back a group of curious natives who were to report to their queen what the strangers’ homeland was like.

He imagined that the spacemen had had quite a time, with that score of turbulent barbarians crammed into a narrow hull though of course they’d passed almost the whole voyage in suspended animation. The visitors had spent about a year now on Earth and Luna, staring, asking endless questions, wondering what their hosts did with themselves now that the U.N. had brought the nations together and ended war. There hadn’t been much trouble. Occasionally one of them would get mad and break somebody’s jaw, and then there’d been the one who was invited to speak at a women’s club.⁠ ⁠… He chuckled to himself.

“Are these Yovians humans like you?” asked Dyann.

“Uh-huh,” he nodded. “The moons were colonized from Earth about a hundred and twenty-five years ago. They declared their independence about sixty years past, and nobody thought it was worth the trouble to fight about it. Though maybe we should have.”

“Vy that?”

“Oh well, the colonists were misfits originally, remnants of the old Eurasian militarisms. They did do heroic work in settling and developing the Jovian System, but they live under a dictatorship and make no bones about despising Earth and considering themselves the destined rulers of all the planets. Last year they grabbed the Saturnian colonies on the thinnest of pretexts, and Earth was too chicken-livered to do more than give them a reproachful look. Not that the U.N. has much of a navy these days, compared to theirs.”

Dyann shrugged and went on unpacking. She hung an extra sword on the wall, unshipped her armor and put it up, and slipped into a loose fur-trimmed robe. Urushkidan slithered to the floor and opened his own trunk, pulling out a score of fat books which he placed on the shelf over his bunk and expropriated the little table for his papers, pencils, and humidor.

“You know⁠—ah⁠—Dr. Urushkidan⁠—” said Ballantyne uneasily, “I wish you weren’t going to Jupiter.”

“And why not?” asked the Martian belligerently.

“Well, doesn’t your reformulation of general relativity indicate a way to build a ship which can go faster than light?”

“Among oter tings, yes.” Urushkidan blew a malodorous cloud of smoke.

“Well, I don’t think the Jovians are interested in science for its own sake. I think they want to get you and your knowledge so they can build such ships themselves which would be the last thing they need to take over the Solar System.”

“A Martian,” said Urushkidan condescendingly, “is not concerned wit te squabblings of te lower animals. Noting personal, of course.”

Dyann pulled an idol from her trunk and put it on her shelf. It was a small wooden image, gaudily painted and fiercely tusked, each of its six arms holding some weapon. One, Ballantyne noticed, was a carved Terrestrial tommy-gun. “Qviet, please,” she said, raising one arm. “I am about to pray to Ormun the Terrible.”

“Barbarian,” guffawed Urushkidan.

Dyann took a pillow and stuffed it in his mouth. “Qviet, please, I said.” She smiled gently and prostrated herself before the god.

After a while she got up. Urushkidan was still speechless with rage. She turned to Ballantyne and asked, “Do the ships here carry live animals? I vould like to make a small sacrifice too.”

II

The bulletin board said that in the present orbital positions of the planets, the Jovian Queen would make her voyage at one Earth-gravity acceleration in six days, forty-three minutes, and twelve seconds, plus or minus ten seconds. That might be pure braggadocio, though Ballantyne wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was sober truth. He hoped the time was overestimated. His cabin mates were a little wearing on the nerves. Urushkidan filling the room with smoke, sitting up till all hours covering paper with mathematical symbols and screaming at any interruption. Dyann was nice-looking but rather overwhelming. In some ways she was reminiscent of Catherine Vanbrugh. The Engineer shuddered.

He slouched moodily into the bar and ordered a martini he could ill afford. The place was quiet, discreetly lit, not very full. His eyes fell on the stiff-laced Jovian colonel, still clutching his portfolio like grim death, but talking with unusual animation to a stunning Terrestrial redhead. It was clear that ideas about the purity of the Jovian stock⁠—“hardened in the fire and ice of outer space, tempered and beaten into the new and dominant mankind”⁠—had been temporarily shelved.

If I had some money, thought Ballantyne gloomily, I could detach her from him and enjoy this trip.

The bartender informed him, with some awe, that the man was Colonel Ivan Hosea Domenico Roshevsky-Feldkamp, late military attaché of Jupiter’s Terrestrial embassy and an officer who had served with distinction in suppressing the Ionian revolt and in asserting Jupiter’s rightful claims to Saturn. Ray was more interested in the girl’s name and antecedents. Just as he’d thought, an heiress on a pleasure trip. Expensive.

A couple of genial Earthmen moved up and began talking to him. Before long they suggested a friendly game of poker.

Oh-ho! thought Ray, who knew that sort. “Sure,” he said.

They played most of the time for a couple of days. Luck went back and forth but in general Ray won, and toward the end he was a couple of thousand U.N. credits to the good. He let his eyes glitter with febrile cupidity, and the sharks⁠—there were three of them all told⁠—almost licked their lips.

“Excuse me a minute,” said