LITMIR.BIZ

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Chon said, “and humanoids are my specialty. I know.”

      “The fourth one doesn’t look much better.”

      “His features are slack and his jaw is loose, all right, but they aren’t made that way. It’s an expression he could change. His head isn’t shaped like that.”

      “Um. The man in the chair is a striking specimen. No cerebral damage in him.”

      “I don’t think the answer is brain damage. If the ‘noble’ trusts those four to carry him, their actions and reflexes must be pretty well coordinated. They can’t have anything like palsy or epilepsy.”

      “They must breed a special type of slave for the job,” Ellik suggested.

      “They aren’t slaves, Mike,” I told him.

      “No?” Ellik said, like talking to a kid. “And what are they, Mike?”

      *

      I breathed out hard, a little disgusted that big brains like Ellik and Chon couldn’t see the translucent truth. “They are just four dumb slobs who can’t get a better job, so they are hauling His Highness around because they have to make a living the hard way.”

      “That doesn’t quite cover it, Johnny,” Chon said. “The carriers are a completely different race.”

      “What’s different about them?” I asked. “They’ve got hands to work with, eyes to see with, noses to smell with. If you kick one of them, I bet he’ll hurt. It’s just their bad luck to be dumb slobs.”

      Ellik grunted. “Unfortunately, Johnny, there are subtler differences. The darker aliens, the indigo-colored ones, seem to be definitely down further on the scale of local evolution. They must be an inferior race to the lighter, azure species.”

      Chon had been looking at us and listening to everything. Finally he said, “You can’t be sure of that, Mike. You haven’t seen all of the Indigos. Some of them may not be as far down as the common carriers.”

      Ellik sighed. “Explorers have to make snap decisions on insufficient data. We don’t have time to see the whole damned planet before we write up a report.”

      “Yes, explorers have to make snap decisions,” Chon repeated to himself. “Are you going to take a look at those buildings, see if it’s a village?”

      “I thought I’d see if our blueblood friend out there wants to show it to me,” said Mike Ellik.

      “He won’t,” I said.

      They both looked at me.

      “You don’t have any chair and nobody to carry you,” I went on. “He’ll think you’re just a slob.”

      “Jonathan,” Ellik said, “you show occasional flashes of genius.”

      I smiled and shrugged it off. “I know I’m not nearly as smart as you boys. But that doesn’t mean I can’t think at all.”

      Ellik clapped me on the shoulder. “Of course it doesn’t.”

      But his grip was too strong.

      “Johnny,” Ellik said gravely, “do you think you could carry me?”

      “Wait a minute. You want me to act like one of those slobs? That’s asking a lot.”

      “But could you?”

      “Not all the way to those buildings. What was the gravity reading, Lee?”

      *

      Chon closed his eyes a second. “Point nine seven three.”

      “There!” I said. “I couldn’t tote you three or four miles piggy-back.”

      “Look,” Chon said, “we can strip down a magnetic flyer and you can ride the seat, Mike. Johnny can pretend to carry you, like on a platter. It’ll impress the yokels with the strength of our flunkies.”

      “Mike could carry me,” I pointed out.

      Chon laid a delicate hand on my back. “But, buddy, Mike outranks you.”

      I shook my head. “Not that way, he doesn’t.”

      “We may be going to a lot of trouble for nothing,” Mike said. “That gang may jump us as soon as we decant and try to have us for dinner.”

      “There’s always that risk,” Chon agreed solemnly, “but naturally I will remain on duty at the controls of the stun cannon.”

      “Securely inside,” Ellik added.

      “Always on duty,” Chon said.

      “Always inside,” Ellik said.

      “It’s in the records, Ellik. I took the last one.” Lee said it a little too sharp and it cut the kidding.

      “Go soak your soft head in brine,” Ellik said, disgruntled.

      “Wait a minute,” Chon called.

      Ellik turned back. “Yeah?”

      “Don’t forget to take your communicator with you.” Chon’s voice was choked. “You may get out of line of sight if you go off with that troupe.”

      “I know this business,” Ellik said, turning away.

      “Mike, I’m sorry if I offended you. Shake, huh?”

      Ellik smiled sourly. “Forget it.”

      “Come on, shake.”

      “Okay, we’re buddies. Do I actually have to pump your clammy paw?”

      “Please!”

      “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Ellik turned around and kissed Chon on the forehead.

      Ellik was just sore, of course. But the manual warns against that sort of horseplay when you’ve been out a long time.

      “Satisfied now?” Ellik asked.

      “No.” Chon’s voice was strained tight. “It should have been me to kiss you.” Chon turned to me. “Luck out there, Johnny.”

      I grabbed his hand and levered it fast, before he could decide I needed kissing. “Sure thing, Lee. Thanks.”

      *

      The buildings weren’t much to see, but they were a step above primitive huts. They were adobe, or maybe plastic. The aliens understood the stress principles of the dome, Ellik said, because all the buildings had curved roofs. Unbaked pottery was what they looked like to me, and they looked as if they would be brittle as coffee-colored chalk. Actually, their ceramic surfaces were at least as hard as steel.

      The Azure had welcomed Ellik with an outstretched hand. Mike wasn’t one to jump to conclusions, so he just held out his own hand. The native grabbed and let it go after pulling it some.

      The alien saw me apparently carrying Ellik on a seat cushion with one hand, and he kicked me in the leg. To test my muscles, I guess. I managed to keep from yelling or jumping. The Azure looked impressed and the Indigos did a bad job of hiding a lot of envy and hate.

      As the Indigos toted their man along on the litter and I guided Ellik’s seat cushion along the channel of magnetic feedback, the two riders began talking. Ellik’s translator collar broke the language barrier, of course. It was a two-way communicator on a direct hook-up to our cybernetic calculator on the ship. The brain analyzed the phonetic structure of the alien language under various systems of logic or anti-logic and fed the translation into Ellik’s ear. Then it went through its memory banks and played back the right sounds to translate Ellik’s talk into the alien language. I understand things like that. I’m a pretty good mechanic.

      I didn’t have my translator turned on, but it seemed to me that somehow I could understand what the plug-uglies, the Indigos, were saying.

      Ellik

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