The Science Fiction Anthology - Andre Norton

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throat. “It will kill you. It’ll kill everybody on the ship—from here. You’re going to put us back down on the planet below.”

      The skipper did not look at the gadget, but at Lon’s face. Then he called. The four men of the crew and the two uneasy scientists came in.

      “We got to persuade,” the skipper said sardonically. “He just told me he’s made a new gadget that’ll kill us all.”

      He moved unhurriedly toward Lon. Lon knew that his bluff was no good. If the thing had actually been a weapon, he’d have been confident and assured. He didn’t feel that way, but he raised the thing menacingly as the skipper approached.

      The skipper took it away, laughing.

      “We’ll tie him in a chair an’ get to work on her. When he’s ready to talk, we’ll stop.” He looked at the object in his hands. It was ridiculous to look at. It was as absurd as the device that extracted power from matter stresses, and the machine that converted one kind of vegetation into another, and the apparatus—partly barn roof—that had short-circuited the ionosphere of Cetis Gamma Two to the planet’s solid surface. It looked very foolish indeed.

      The skipper was amused.

      “Look out, you fellas,” he said humorously. “It’s gonna kill you!”

      He crooked his finger and the knifeblade made a contact. He swept it in mock menace about the saloon. The four crew-members and the two scientists went stiff. He gaped at them, then turned the device to stare at it incredulously. He came within its range.

      He stiffened. Off-balance, he fell on the device, breaking its gimcrack fastenings and the contact which transmitted nothing that Lon Simpson could imagine coming out of it. The others fell, one by one, with peculiarly solid impacts.

      Their flesh was incredibly hard. It was as solid, in fact, as so much mahogany.

      Nodalictha said warmly, “You’re a darling, Rhadampsicus! It was outrageous of those nasty creatures to intend to harm my pets! I’m glad you attended to them!”

      “And I’m glad you’re pleased, my dear,” Rhadampsicus said pleasantly. “Now shall we set out for home?”

      Nodalictha looked about the cosy landscape of the ninth planet of Cetis Gamma. There were jagged peaks of frozen air, and mountain ranges of water, solidified ten thousand aeons ago. There were frost-trees of nitrogen, the elaborate crystal formations of argon, and here a wide sweep of oxygen crystal sward, with tiny peeping wild crystals of deep-blue cyanogen seeming to grow more thickly by the brook of liquid hydrogen. And there was their bower; primitive, but the scene of a true honeymoon idyll.

      “I almost hate to go home, Rhadampsicus,” Nodalictha said. “We’ve been so happy here. Will you remember it for always?”

      “Naturally,” said Rhadampsicus. “I’m glad you’ve been happy.”

      Nodalictha snuggled up to him and twined eye stalks with him.

      “Darling,” she said softly, “you’ve been wonderful, and I’ve been spoiled, and you’ve let me be. But I’m going to be a very dutiful wife from now on, Rhadampsicus. Only it has been fun, having you be so nice to me!”

      “It’s been fun for me, too,” replied Rhadampsicus gallantly.

      Nodalictha took a last glance around, and each of her sixteen eyes glowed sentimentally. Then she scanned the far-distant spaceship in the shadow of the second planet from the now subsiding sun.

      “My pets,” she said tenderly. “But—Rhadampsicus, what are they doing?”

      “They’ve discovered that the crew of their vehicle—they call it a space yacht—aren’t dead, that they’re only in suspended animation. And they’ve decided in some uneasiness that they’d better take them back to Earth to be revived.”

      “How nice! I knew they were sweet little creatures!”

      Rhadampsicus hesitated a moment.

      “From the male’s mind I gather something else. Since the crew of this space yacht was incapacitated, and they were—ah—not employed on it, he and your female will bring it safely to port, and, I gather that they have a claim to great reward. Ah—it is something they call ‘salvage.’ He plans to use it to secure other rewards he calls ‘patents’ and they expect to live happily ever after.”

      “And,” cried Nodalictha gleefully, “from the female’s mind I know that she is very proud of him, because she doesn’t know that you designed all the instruments he made, darling. She’s speaking to him now, telling him she loves him very dearly.”

      Then Nodalictha blushed a little, because in a faraway space yacht Cathy had kissed Lon Simpson. The process seemed highly indecorous to Nodalictha, so recently a bride.

      “Yes,” said Rhadampsicus, drily. “He is returning the compliment. It is quaint to think of such small creatures—Ha! Nodalictha, you should be pleased again. He is telling her that they will be married when they reach Earth, and that she shall have a white dress and a veil and a train. But I am afraid we cannot follow to witness the ceremony.”

      Their tentacles linked and their positron blasts mingling, the two of them soared up from the surface of the ninth planet of Cetis Gamma. They swept away, headed for their home at the extreme outer tip of the most far-flung arm of the spiral outposts of the Galaxy.

      “But still,” said Nodalictha, as they swept through emptiness at a speed unimaginable to humans, “they’re wonderfully cute.”

      “Yes, darling,” Rhadampsicus agreed, unwilling to start an argument so soon after the wedding. “But not as cute as you.”

      On the space yacht, Lon Simpson tried to use his genius to invent a way to get his handcuffs and leg-irons off. He failed completely.

      Cathy had to get the keys out of the skipper’s pocket and unlock them for him.

      I

      “The beasts aren’t much help, are they?”

      Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.

      “No,” he grunted, “they’re not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it’ll be hard work.”

      Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope’s slack around his thick waist.

      “Together now, Karl. One! Two!”

      They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.

      “If we’re late for ship’s landing, Joe, we’ll get crossed off the list.”

      Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.

      “That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” he said, worried.

      They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn’t matter. They’d be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.

      “How much time have we got, Karl?”

      The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.

      “Two hours, maybe a little more,” he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. “Time

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