“Myob!”
Taking a deep breath, Bidworthy said to nobody in particular, “Every so often I hear of some guy running amok and laying ’em out by the dozens. I always wonder why—but now I know.” He gnawed his knuckles, then added to Gleed, “We can’t run this contraption to the ship with that dummy blocking the driver’s seat. Either we must find the keys or get tools and cut them loose.”
“Or you could wave us on our way and go take a pill,” offered the driver.
“Shut up! If I’m stuck here another million years I’ll see to it that —”
“The colonel’s coming,” muttered Gleed, giving him a nudge.
Colonel Shelton arrived, walked once slowly and officiously around the outside of the coach, examining its construction and its occupants. He flinched at the striped hat whose owner leered at him through the glass. Then he came over to the disgruntled group.
“What’s the trouble this time, sergeant major?”
“They’re as crazy as the others, sir. They give a lot of lip and say, ‘Myob!’ and couldn’t care less about His Excellency. They don’t want to come out and we can’t get them out because they’re chained to their seats.”
“Chained?” Shelton’s eyebrows shot upward. “What for?”
“I don’t know, sir. They’re linked in like a load of lifers making for the pen, and—”
Shelton moved off without waiting to hear the rest. He had a look for himself, came back.
“You may have something there, sergeant major. But I don’t think they are criminals.”
“No, sir?”
“No.” He threw a significant glance toward the colorful headgear and several other sartorial eccentricities, including a ginger-haired man’s foot-wide polka-dotted bow. ‘It is more likely that they’re a bunch of whacks being taken to a giggle emporium. I’ll ask the driver.” Going to the cab, he said, “Do you mind telling me your destination?”
“Yes,” responded the other.
“Very well, where is it?”
“Look,” said the driver, “are we talking the same language?”
“Huh?”
“You asked me if I minded and I said yes.” He made a gesture. “I do mind.”
“You refuse to tell?”
“Your aim’s improving, sonny.”
“Sonny?” put in Bidworthy, vibrant with outrage. “Do you realize you are speaking to a colonel?”
“Leave this to me,” insisted Shelton, waving him down. His expression was cold as he returned his attention to the driver. “On your way. I’m sorry you’ve been detained.” .
“Think nothing of it,” said the driver, with exaggerated politeness. “I’ll do as much for you some day.”
With that enigmatic remark, he let his machine roll forward. The patrol parted to make room. The coach built up its whine to top note, sped down the road, diminished into the distance.
“By the Black Sack!” swore Bidworthy, staring purple-faced after it. “This planet has got more punks in need of discipline than any this side of —”
“Calm yourself, sergeant major,” advised Shelton. “I feel the same way as you—but I’m taking care of my arteries. Blowing them full of bumps like seaweed won’t solve any problems.”
“Maybe so, sir, but—”
“We’re up against something mighty funny here,” Shelton went on. “We’ve got to find out exactiy what it is and how best to cope with it. That will probably mean new tactics. So far, the patrol has achieved nothing. It is wasting its time. We’ll have to devise some other and more effective method of making contact with the powers-that-be. March the men back to the ship, sergeant major.”
“Very well, sir.” Bidworthy saluted, swung around, clicked his heels, opened a cavernous mouth. “Patro-o-ol!…right form!”
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.”
