Lester del Rey - The Mysterious Planet

That bothered him, too. There was no sign that they ever noticed anything wrong. He couldn’t make up his mind whether he should take them at their face value as polite, considerate and civilized human beings, or whether Jakes was right, and they were completely untrustworthy, masking all their hidden plans to ruin the Solar System by false action, meant only to convince him.

On one point both Jakes and Bob agreed wholeheartedly, and Juan was in violent disagreement. They accepted Valin’s suggestion that they might like some music and had one of the little tape machines delivered, with a few hundred pieces of the most carefully selected music.

It came while they were out. They got back to hear something that was a cross between an anguished cat and a tin can being battered around by a stumble-footed mule. In between sections, for no reason, a female voice would come on in a high, nasal singsong.

If there was any rhythm to it, it couldn’t be found, except for a few sections where there was obviously studied effort to make a pattern.

When they threw the door open and rushed in to shut off the racket, Juan was lying there with a smile of sheer pleasure on his face, beating his hand up and down as crazily as the beat of the so-called music. He let out a squawk when they cut it off.

“Hey, I want to hear all of how it goes,” he cried. “This is interesting music.”

“This,” Jakes stated flatly, “is what happens when a banshee goes crazy. Uh-uh. Not in any place I’m living. Even my Dad couldn’t take that, and he has a tin ear.”

“You probably don’t like your music well separated,” Juan stated. “You like it all mashed together like potatoes in a pot, all going all of the time, oomp-pah-pah, oomp-pah-pah.”

“I don’t know what I like,” Jakes said. “This ain’t it Listen if you like, but not when we’re around.”

Juan looked up appealingly at Bob, but he shook his head firmly.

“The next time we hear this thing, Juan, it goes out in the hall.”

Some people even liked Chinese music, Bob thought. Maybe Juan was one of them. A man’s taste was his own business—but not when he tried to force others to share it.

They found out the next day that there were schools of music, even here. Emo brought down his own favorite tape. Juan fled the room in horror together with Jakes and Bob. Even Valin shook his head sadly as he went in to turn it off. It was a monotonous up and down screeching on a single string, punctuated by sudden loud rumbles that came irregularly enough to be shocking whenever they reached the ears. Emo informed them that it was pure ear-beat, but they didn’t care what he called it

But the incident added some variety to their life, and it was reaching the stage where they needed it. Thule was too well oiled and too smooth. Everything was available for the asking, which made nothing worth bothering with. They had seen the town, and had met all the people they cared to meet

And again, they were simply bored with it all.

The trouble came to Jakes’s attention first. “Aren’t there any female Thulians?” he asked.

Bob thought it over. He hadn’t seen one since they arrived, though there were enough pictures about to show that Thulian girls must have existed once—and rather pretty ones, at that.

Valin answered the question when they put it to him, with the statement they would have expected to hear. “No, the women have not been awakened. When there is war, why bother them. War is for men.”

Bob remembered his mother, who had served eight years as a nurse on one of the ships before she met his father. And he remembered all the other women who were working in the shops on Outpost.

“I thought in a culture as well developed as yours, you’d have complete equality between men and women.”

Valin was horrified. “We’re not barbarians, Bob. We don’t expect our women to fight the way the savages used to. Do you mean to say the Federation has females in its forces?”

“It certainly has. And volunteers too! What would you do if a woman wanted to join your military group?”

“It has happened,” Valin answered slowly. “But we usually cured their minds.”

Things like that would be no help in bringing peace about, Bob knew. Each side would continue to regard the other as technically well developed, but culturally savage. And neither would understand the other. He couldn’t see how they got that way, himself, and he’d been trying hard.

He went back to his room to try to think of something to do that might be useful and interesting, and finally fell asleep. When he awoke, there was a buzzing that sounded like a mosquito. He sat up to look for it, before he remembered that there were no insects on Thule. They had been killed off thousands of years before.

But the buzzing persisted. He turned over, and noticed that the sound was coming from the table beside the bed. Then he realized that it must be his little radio.

When he picked it up, the buzzing became a frantic shouting of words—and in his father’s voice!

“Bobbie,” it was saying over and over. Then: “Bobby, here’s daddikins. Keepum ear peeled. Eway ar-yay umingkay….”

It went on in a mixture of Pig Latin, baby talk and slang. Translated, Bob gathered that his father had somehow gotten permission to take one ship alone and come looking for him.

He’d managed with a newly improved radar to avoid the warning buoys sowed in space, and had come in close enough to study the ground. He’d even spotted the Icarius in Center Park, so he was pretty sure where they were. But he hadn’t gotten much more on that first trip.

Now he was coming back.

“Get out by that long S-shaped park at the end of the city—the far end,” his message went on in its crazy mixture of words. “There’s an open spot there big enough for me to land. If you see me, come running, because I’ll be blasting off at once. And if you’ve got any information, bring it with you.”

The message repeated again and again, then cut off. Bob knew that it must have taken almost fantastic power to blast it all the way through space on that frequency and deliver so much volume on the little set. But it didn’t puzzle him as much as the reasons for letting his father come for him. Wallingford must think he needed a lot more information on Thule than Bob had put into the simple letter to his father.

But it was no trick, he was sure. It had been his father’s voice, and the silly jumble of words were just the ones which would carry meaning to him, but wouldn’t make sense to a Thulian, even though English was understood by some of them.

He looked at his watch, and hoped that it was somewhere near right. The best time to land would be during the brief hour when Thule cut down the amount of light in the air to encourage the plants, which needed some rest apparently.

Even at best, there wasn’t one chance in a thousand that the plan would succeed. But Bob had to try to take advantage of what chance there was.

JAKES LISTENED TO THE PLAN, and shook his head. “It must be a fake, Bob. I don’t care how convincing it was. Look, do you think Wallingford’s dumb enough to send one man here when he’s busy trying to build up a fleet for an all-out invasion. And with an improved radar screen!”

“I know Dad’s voice!” Bob insisted.

“All right, so you know his voice. But do you know he is going to do what the message says? Do you even know that we’re not the only captives on this planet?”

Juan sat up abruptly. “What? How did you learn this, Simon?”

“I got it out of Emo, of course. The kid will do anything I ask—he thinks I’m his own personal freak.” Jakes lay back, watching the effect, and enjoying their faces. “All right, here’s the dope—and don’t go calling me a dumb spy from now on. Thule has a whole bunch of prisoners. They copped a whole freighter and a passenger ship. They’ve also picked up a couple of the men from Wing Nine who managed to live, and they put them back together.