The conference lasted well into the night and halfway through the following morning. During these argumentative hours various oddments of traffic, mostly vehicular, passed along the road, but nothing paused to view the monster spaceship, nobody approached for a friendly word with its crew. The strange inhabitants of this world seemed to be afflicted with a peculiar form of mental blindness, unable to see a thing until it was thrust into their faces and then surveying it squint-eyed.
One passer-by in midmorning was a truck whining on two dozen rubber balls and loaded with girls wearing colorful head-scarves. The girls were singing something about one little kiss before we part, dear. Half a dozen troops lounging near the gangway came eagerly to life, waved, whistled and yoohooed. The effort was wasted, for the singing continued without break or pause and nobody waved back.
To add to the discomfiture of the love-hungry, Bidworthy stuck his bead out of the lock and rasped, “If you monkeys are bursting with surplus energy, I can find a few jobs for you to do—nice dirty ones.” He seared them one at a time before he withdrew.
Inside, the top brass sat around a horseshoe table in the chartroom near the bow and debated the situation. Most of them were content to repeat with extra emphasis what they had said the previous evening, there being no new points to bring up.
“Are you certain,” the Earth Ambassador asked Captain Grayder, “that this planet has not been visited since the last emigration transport dumped the final load three hundred years back?”
“Positive, your excellency. Any such visit would have been recorded.”
“If made by an Earth ship. But what about others? I feel it in my bones that at sometime or other these people have fallen foul of one or more vessels calling unofficially and have been leery of spaceships ever since. Perhaps somebody got tough with them, tried to muscle in where he wasn’t wanted. Or they’ve had to beat off a gang of pirates. Or they were swindled by some unscrupulous fleet of traders.”
“Quite impossible, your excellency,” declared Grayder. “Emigration was so scattered over so large a number of worlds that even today every one of them is under-populated, only one-hundredth developed, and utterly unable to build spaceships of any kind, even rudimentary ones. Some may have the techniques but not the facilities, of which they need plenty.”
“Yes, that’s what I’ve always understood.”
“All Blieder-drive vessels are built in the Sol system, registered as Earth ships and their whereabouts known. The only other ships in existence are eighty or ninety antiquated rocket jobs bought at scrap price by the Epsilon system for haulage work between their fourteen closely-planned planets. An old-fashioned rocket job couldn’t reach this place in a hundred years.”
“No, of course not.”
“Unofficial boats capable of this range just don’t exist,” Grayder assured. “Neither do space buccaneers, for the same reason. A Blieder-job takes so much that a would-be pirate has to become a billionaire to become a pirate.”
“Then,” said the ambassador, heavily, “back we go to my original theory—that something peculiar to this world plus a lot of inbreeding has made them nutty.”
“There’s plenty to he said for that notion,” put in Colonel Shelton.
“You should have seen the coachload I looked over. There was a mortician wearing odd shoes, one brown, one yellow. And a moonfaced gump sporting a hat made from the skin of a barber’s pole, all stripy. Only thing missing was his bubble pipe—and probably he’ll be given that where he was going.”
“Where was he going?”
“I don’t know, your excellency. They refused to say.”
Giving him a satirical look, the ambassador remarked, “Well, that is a valuable addition to the sum total of our knowledge. Our minds are now enriched by the thought that an anonymous individual may be presented with a futile object for an indefinable purpose when he reaches his unknown destination.”
Shelton subsided, wishing that he had never seen the fat man or, for that matter, the fat man’s cockeyed world.
“Somewhere they’ve got a capitol, a civic seat, a center of government wherein function the people who hold the strings,” the ambassador asserted. “We’ve got to find that place before we can take over and reorganize on up-to-date lines whatever setup they’ve got.’ A capitol is big by the standards of its own administrative area. It’s never an ordinary, nondescript place. It has certain physical features lending it importance above the average. It should be easily visible from the air. We must make a search for it—in fact, that’s what we ought to have done in the first place. Other planets’ capitol cities have been found without trouble. What’s the hoodoo on this one?”
“See for yourself, your excellency.” Captain Grayder poked a couple of photographs across the table. “There are the two hemispheres as recorded by us when coming in. They reveal nothing resembling a superior city. There isn’t even a town conspicuously larger than its fellows or possessing outstanding features setting it apart from the others.”
“I don’t place great faith in pictures, particularly when taken at long distance. The naked eye sees more. We have got four lifeboats capable of scouring the place from pole to pole. Why not use them?”
“Because, your excellency, they were not designed for such a purpose.”
“Does that matter so long as they get results?”
Grayder said, patiently, “They were designed to be launched in space and hit up to forty thousand. They are ordinary, old-style rocket jobs, for emergencies only. You could not make efficient ground-survey at any speed in excess of four hundred miles per hour. Keep the boats down to that and you’re trying to run them at landing-speed, muffling the tubes, balling up their efficiency, creating a terrible waste of fuel, and inviting a crash which you’re likely to get before you’re through.”
“Then it’s high time we had Blieder-drive lifeboats on Blieder-drive ships.”
“I agree, your excellency. But the smallest Blieder engine has an Earth mass of more than three hundred tons—far too much for little boats.” Picking up the photographs, Grayder slid them into a drawer. “What we need is an ancient, propeller-driven airplane. They could do something we can’t do—they could go slow.”
“You might as well yearn for a bicycle,” scoffed the ambassador, feeling thwarted.
“We have a bicycle,” Grayder informed. “Tenth Engineer Harrison owns one.”
“And he has brought it with him?”
“It goes everywhere with him. There is a rumor that he sleeps with it.”
“A spaceman toting a bicycle!” The ambassador blew his nose with a loud honk. “I take it that he is thrilled by the sense of immense velocity it gives him, an ecstatic feeling of rushing headlong through space?”
“I wouldn’t know, your excellency.”
“Hm-m-m! Bring this Harrison in to me. We’ll set a nut to catch a nut.”
Grayder blinked, went to the caller board, spoke over the ship’s system. “Tenth Engineer Harrison wanted in the chartroom immediately.”
Within ten minutes Harrison appeared. He had walked fast three-quarters of a mile from the Blieder room. He was thin and wiry, with dark, monkeylike eyes, and a pair of ears that cut out the pedaling with the wind behind him. The ambassador examined him curiously, much as a zoologist would inspect a pink giraffe.
“Mister, I understand that you possess a bicycle.”
Becoming wary, Harrison said, “There’s nothing against it in the regulations, sir, and therefore—”
“Darn the regulations!” The ambassador made an impatient gesture. “We’re stalled in the middle of a crazy situation and we’re turning to crazy methods to get moving.”
“I see, sir.”
“So I want you to do a job for me. Get out your bicycle, ride down to town, find the mayor, sheriff, grand panjandrum, supreme galootie, or whatever he’s called, and tell him he’s officially invited to evening dinner along with any other civic dignitaries he cares to bring and, of course, their wives.”
“Very well, sir.”
“Informal attire,” added the ambassador.
Harrison jerked up one ear, drooped the other, and said, “Beg pardon, sir?”
“They can dress how they like.”
“I get it. Do I go right now, sir?”
“At once. Return as quickly as you can and bring me the reply.”
Saluting sloppily, Harrison went out. His Excellency found an easy-chair, reposed in it at full length and ignored the others’ stares.
“As easy as that!” He pulled out a long cigar, carefully bit off its end. “If we can’t touch their minds, we’ll appeal to their bellies.” He cocked a knowing eye at Grayder. “Captain, see that there is plenty to drink. Strong stuff. Venusian cognac or something equally potent. Give them an hour at a well-filled table and they’ll talk plenty. We won’t be able to shut them up all night.” He lit the cigar, puffed luxuriously. “That is the tried and trusted technique of diplomacy—the insidious seduction of the distended gut. It always works—you’ll see.”
Pedaling briskly down the road, Tenth Engineer Harrison reached the first street on either side of which were small detached houses with neat gardens front and back. A plump, amiable looking woman was dipping a hedge halfway along. He pulled up near to her, politely touched his cap.
