Margaret St. Clair (7 page)

All the pictographs in the announcement have a frowning look, and the one for “Atonement” in particular is a threatening thing. The pictographs are all painted in pale leaf green.

But Hobbs had the vinegary insolence of the promoted bureaucrat. He saw that he had s hocked Reinald, the little Cassidan major who had been delegated his escort, by even entering the sacred grove. He felt a coldly exhibitionistic wish to shock him further.

Down the aisle of trees Hobbs stalked while the tender green leaves murmured above his head. Then he took hold of the trunk of the youngest of the Butandras, a slender white-barked thing, hardly more than a sapling.

“Too close to the others,” Hobbs said sharply. “Needs thinning.” While Reinald watched helplessly, he got out the little hand axe which hung suspended by his side. Chop —chop —chop. With a gush of sap the little tree was severed. Hobbs held it in his hand.

“It will make me a nice walking stick,” he said.

Reinald’s coffee-colored skin turned a wretched nephrite green b ut he said nothing at all. Rather shakily he scrambled back into the ‘copter and waited while Hobbs completed his inspection of the grove. It was not until they had flown almost back to Genlis that he made a remark.

“You should not have done that, sir,” he said. He ran a finger around his tunic collar uneasily.

Hobbs snorted. He looked down at the lopped-off stem of the Butandra, resting between his knees. “Why not?” he demanded. “I have full authority to order plantations thinned or pruned.”

“Yes, sir. But that was a Butandra tree.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“There have always been fifty Butandra trees on Cassid. Always, for all our history. We call them ‘Cassid’s Luck ‘.”

Reinald licked his lips. “The tree you cut down will not grow again. I do not know what will happen if there are only forty-nine.

“Besides that, what you did is dangerous. Dangerous, I mean, sir, to you.”

Hobbs laughed harshly. “You’re forgetting my position,” he answered. “Even if they wanted to, the civil authorities couldn’t do anything to me.”

Reinald gave a very faint smile. “Oh, I don’t mean the
civil authorities, sir,” he said in a gentle voice. “They wouldn’t be the ones.” He seemed, somehow, to have recovered his spirits.

He set the ‘copter down neatly on the roof of the Administration Building, and he and his passenger got out. Back in the grove near the stump of the sapling Butandra, something was burrowing up rapidly through the soil.

Hobbs left Cassid the next day on the first leg of the long journey back to earth. In his baggage was the piece of Butandra wood. He was taking particular care of it since one of the room maids at his hotel in Genlis had tried to throw it out. But for the f irst few days of his trip he was altogether too occupied with filling out forms and drafting reports to do anything with it.

About this same time, on Cassid, a conversation was going on in the Hotel Genlis dining room.

“Tell us what you thought it was when you first saw it,” Berta, the room maid for the odd-numbered levels in the hotel, urged. “Go on!”

Marie, the chief room maid, selected a piece of mangosteen torte from the food belt as it went by. “Well,” she said, “I was, checking the rooms on the level to be sure the robot help had cleaned up properly and when I saw that big brown spot on the floor my first thought was, one of them’s spilled something. Robots are such fools.

“Then it moved, and I saw it wasn’t a stain at all, but a big brown thin g snuffling around on the eutex like a dog after something. Then it stood up. That was when I screamed.”

“Yes, but what did it look like? Go on, Marie! You never want to tell this part.”

“It was a big, tall lanky thing,” Marie said reluctantly, “with a rough brown skin like a potato. It had two little pink mole hands. And it had an awfully, awfully kind face.”

“If it had such a kind face I don’t see why you were so scared of it,” Berta said. She always said that at this point.

Marie took a bite out of her mangosteen torte. She ate it slowly, considering. It was not that the emotion she had experienced at the sight of the face was at all dim in her mind. It was that embodying it in words was difficult.

“Well,” she said, “maybe it wasn’t really kind. Or —wait now, Berta, I’ve got it —it was a kind face but not for people. For human beings it wasn’t at all a kind face.”

“Guess what room this happened in,” Berta said, turning to Rose, the even-numbered room maid.

“I don’t need to guess, I know,” Rose drawled. “One thousand one hundred and eighty-five, the room that Earthman had. The man that didn’t leave any tip and gave you such a bawling-out for touching you-know-what.”

Berta nodded. “If I’d
known —” she said with a slight shudder. “If I’d guessed !
I mean, I’d rather have touched a snake ! Anyhow, Marie, tell Rose what you think the brown thing was.”

“As Rose says, I don’t need to guess, I know,” Marie replied. She pushed the empty dessert plate aw ay from her. “When a man cuts down one of our Butandra trees —- that thing in the room was a Gardener.”

The Gardener left the soil of Cassid with a minimum of fuss. Not for it the full thunder of rockets, the formalized pageantry of the spaceport. It gav e a slight push with its feet and the soil receded. There was an almost imperceptible jetting of fire. Faster and faster the Gardener went. It left behind first the atmosphere of Cassid and then, much later, that planet’s gravitational field. And still it shot on, out into the star-flecked dark.

On his fourth day in space Hobbs got out the Butandra stick. Its heavy, white, close-grained wood pleased him. It would, as he had told Reinald, make a fine walking stick. Hobbs got a knife from his pocket and car efully began to peel off the tough white bark.

The bark came off as neatly as a rabbit’s skin. Hobbs pursed his lips in what, for him, was a smile. He studied the contours of the wood and then started to whittle out a knob.

The wood was hard. The work went slowly. Hobbs was almost ready to put it aside and go down to the ship’s bar for a nightcap when there came a light tapping at his cabin’s exterior viewing pane.

When a ship is in deep space the sense of isolation becomes almost tangible. It seeps i nto every pore of every passenger. The ship floats in ghostly fashion through an uncreated void in which there is nothing —can be nothing —except the tiny world enclosed by the curving beryllium hull. And now something —something outside the ship —was rapping on Hobbs’ viewing plane.

For a moment Hobbs sat paralyzed, as near to stone as a man can be and still breathe. Then he dropped the Butandra stick and turned to the viewing pane. There was nothing there, of course —nothing but the black, the blac k.

Hobbs bit his lips. With slightly unsteady fingers he picked up the stick from the floor and locked it away in his valise. Then he tightened his belt around his paunch, buttoned up his coat, and went down to the bar.

He found the second officer there. McPherson was drinking pomelo juice and eating a bosula tongue sandwich. A plump good-natured man, he always liked a little something to eat before he hit the sack. After his own drink had been brought Hobbs got into conversation with the second office r . A possible explanation for the noise he had heard had come to him.

“Something gone wrong with the ship?” he asked. “Is that why you’ve got a repair crew out on the hull?”

McPherson looked surprised. “Repair crew?” he echoed. “Why no, nothing’s wrong. Captain Thorwald hates making repairs in deep space —always something faulty in them —and he wouldn’t order repairs here unless the situation were really emergent. There’s no crew out. What makes you ask that?”

“I — tho ught I heard something rapping on my viewing pane.”

The second officer smiled. He decided to make a joke. “Been doing something you shouldn’t, sir?” he said.

Hobbs put down his glass. “I beg your pardon?” he said icily.

The second officer grew sober. Hobbs, while not coming under the heading of VIP, was fairly important all the same.

“No offense meant, sir,” he said. “Just a little joke. Don’t you know how, in the stories spacemen tell, the curse or doom or whatever it is always shows itself to its victim in space by tapping on his viewing pane? When a man’s broken a taboo on one of the planets, I mean. That was what I was referring to. Just a little joke.”

“Oh.” Hobbs swallowed. He held out his glass to the barman. “Another of the same,” he said i n a rather hoarse voice. “Make it a double.”

, Tiglath Hobbs was an extremely stubborn man. This quality, in some situations, is hardly to be distinguished from courage. Next wake-period he got out the Butandra stick again. With cold, unsteady fingers he worked on the knob. He had stationed himself close to the viewing plate.

There was no rapping this time. Hobbs did not know what it was that made him look up. Look up at last he did. And there, bobbing about in the tiny spot of light which seeped out th rough his viewing pane, was the smiling face the room maid in Genlis had seen. Brown and rough, it was regarding Hobbs with incredible, with indescribable benignity.

Hobbs uttered a cry. He pressed the button which sent the pane shutter flying into place . And the next moment he was standing by his cabin door, as far away from the pane as he could get, his fingers pressed over his eyes. When he stopped shuddering he decided to go see Captain Thorwald.

It took him a long time to get to the point. Thorwald listened, drumming with his fingers on his desk, while Hobbs circumlocuted, hesitated, retracted, and corrected himself. What came out eventually was that he wanted Captain Thorwald —just for a moment, just for a fraction of a second —to have the ship’s force field turned on.

Thorwald shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hobbs. It’s impossible. Turning on the field would have to go into the log, you know, and there’s no reason for it.”

Hobbs hesitated. Then he got his wallet out. “I’ll make it worth your while. Five hundred I. U.‘s?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Six hundred? Seven hundred? Money is always useful. You could say you ran into a meteor swarm.”

“I —no.”

“Eight hundred? Look here, I’ll give you a thousand! Surely y ou could fix the log.”

Thorwald’s face wore a faint, sour smile but still he hesitated. “Very well,” he said abruptly. “Let’s say you bet me a thousand I.U.‘s that I can’t turn the ship’s force field on and off again in a sixtieth of a second. Is that it ? I warn you, Mr. Hobbs, you’re sure to lose your bet.”

Hobb’s eyelids flickered. If the captain wanted to save his pride this way —“I don’t believe it!” he said with artificial vehemence. “I don’t believe a field can be turned on and off that fast. I t’s a bet. I’ll leave the stakes on the table, Captain.” From his wallet he drew ten crisp yellow notes.

Thorwald nodded. “Very well,” he said without touching the money. “In half an hour, Mr. Hobbs, you shall have your demonstration. Will that be satisf actory?”

“Quite.”

Thorwald nodded and picked up the notes with his right hand.

Hobbs went back to his cabin, raised the shutter and sat down by the viewing pane. He had keyed himself up to the pitch where it was almost a disappointment to him that th e smiling face did not appear. The moments passed.

Abruptly the ship shook from stem to stern. A billion billion tiny golden needles lanced out into the dark. Then the cascade of glory was gone and the eternal black of space was back.

It had happened so quickly that, except for the pattern of light etched on his retina, Hobbs might have wondered whether he had seen it at all. Thorwald could certainly claim to have won his bet.

But Hobbs was well satisfied with what he had got for his thousand I.U.‘s. In the fraction of a second that the force field had been turned on he had seen, crushed and blackened against the field’s candent radiance, a dead scorched shapeless thing like a burned spider.

The myriad biting fires of the force field must have charred it instantly to the bone. What Hobbs had seen in that instant of incredible illumination was dead beyond a doubt, as dead as the moon.

By now it must be lying thousands upon thousands of kilos to the side of the ship’s course, where th e vast impetus of the field had sent it hurtling. Hobbs drew a deep, deep breath. Relief had made him weak.

When he and Thorwald met at the next meal they maintained a cautious cordiality toward each other. Neither of them, then or at any time thereafter , referred again to the bet.

That sleep-period Hobbs rested well. In the next few days he regained most of his usual aplomb. Leisurely he finished carving the Butandra wood into a walking stick. It made a very nice one. By the time the ship docked at Lle wellyn, an Earth-type planet but with a third less than Earth’s normal gee, he was quite himself again.

-

In the depths of space, uncounted millions of kilometers away, the blackened husk of the Gardener floated weightlessly. It was quite dry and dead. But did it not stir a little from time to time as though a breeze rustled it? And what were those cracks that slowly appeared in it? Were they not like the cracks in a chrysalis?

-

Hobbs was well pleased with the state of the plantations on Llewellyn. He told the young man in charge of the local office so and the young man was gratified. By the end of the third day Hobbs was ready to resume his interrupted voyage toward Earth.

Something he saw in a sheet of stereo-press newsprint changed his mind. “Fiend robs, mutilates liner chief!” the big red scarehead bellowed. And then, in smaller type, the paper went on, “Minus finger and 1,000 I.U.‘s, Captain unable to name assailant. Police make searc h .”

Hobbs — he was at breakfast —looked at the item incuriously until, in the body of the story, his eye caught a familiar name. Then he read with avid interest.

Eins Thorwald, captain of the luxury space liner
Rhea (this was inaccurate —the Rhea was not a luxury liner but a freighter with fairly comfortable accommodation for five or six passengers) was in hospital today minus one thousand I.U.‘s and the index finger of his right hand.