The Science Fiction anthology - Andre Norton

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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 enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list.”

      He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.

      Hill watched him curiously. “What are you taking the furs for? This isn’t the trading rocket.”

      “I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she’ll appreciate the coverings then.”

      “You never would have thought of it yourself,” Hill grunted. “Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they’ll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they’ll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself.”

      “You didn’t have to sign up,” Karl pointed out. “You could have applied for a wife from some different planet.”

      “One’s probably just as good as another. They’ll all have to work the farms and raise families.”

      Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.

      It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return

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