Margaret St. Clair: The Best of Margaret St. Clair

Bill’s eyelids fluttered and sank. George shook him gently without result. He was out like a light.

Daniel opened the door. “Ah, I see he’s quiet now,” he said, coming in. “I trust you agree he should be put in the hospital.”

“Oh, certainly,” George replied. He had picked up the pig’s carrying case and was holding it under one arm as he tried to think. “I quite agree with you.”

Daniel relaxed a little. He called two stewards. Bill was loaded on a stretcher and carried out into the hall. As the stretcher rounded the door post one of the stewards stumbled and Bill got a jar that made the teeth click audibly in his head. His eyes opened. He was looking straight at George. “Pig,” he said insistently, “pig.” He groaned and then lapsed into unconsciousness again.

He’d have to deliver the pig now, George thought. Bill’s last words had been like the injunction of a dying man, impossible to disobey. Besides, they were cousins, Bill’s job depended on it, and there was the not inconsiderable matter of the bonus and Darleen. Professionally speaking, George had noticed a lack of euphoria in himself lately. It must be caused by his frustrated feeling for the girl.

All the same it was a mess. Mars was less than 42 hours away, and Bill might be unconscious until after they landed. In that case, George would have to deliver the pig (at 23, to a man wearing a black camellia) without knowing the countersign. He hated messy things. It was a good thing the pig wasn’t valuable.

He rooted around in Bill’s baggage until he found the deodorant spray and then carried it and the pig to his own cabin. As he opened the door the polka-dotted purple zygodactyl he had bought the last time they touched at Venus opened one eye and stared evilly at him. “You’ll be sorry!” it croaked. “You’ll be sorry!” It was the only thing George had ever been able to teach the bird to say; it had been funny at first, but George was beginning to be tired of it. “You’ll be sorry,” the zygodactyl went on, working itself up into a verbal frenzy, “you’ll be sorry, you’ll be sorry, you’ll be sorry!”

George threw a book at it to make it shut up. Then he pulled out his bunk to its fullest extent, sat down on it, and looked at the pig.

His first impression, that it was alive, seemed to be correct. When he punched it with his finger it made a weak noise, and even moved its mouth at him. But it was a sluggish, low-grade kind of life. The pig appeared to be basically a collection of fatty tissue surrounded with a pale blue skin. Considering its size it might have been an attractive, appealing little animal, but it wasn’t. It had no personality.

It was beginning to smell. George gave it a good spraying and bent to put it in his foot locker. He hesitated. Bill had said it wasn’t valuable, but there was something funny about Bill’s food poisoning, when you considered it. Nobody else on the ship had been affected. You never could tell with religious things.

The cabin was poor in hiding places. In the end George loosened one of the plastitiles of the ceiling with a multi-tool and shoved the pig up in the space behind. It would get plenty of air there, at any rate. He anchored the tile in place again with a sliver of preemex.

He had other patients to see to. He couldn’t spend all day on Bill’s pig. He took one last look at the ceiling and then went out. As he closed the door the zygodactyl croaked, “You’ll be sorry!” at him.

In the forty-one and a third hours before the Cyniscus put in at Marsport, George’s cabin was searched twice without the pig’s, apparently, being discovered. George made attempt after attempt to see Bill, but his cousin was always receiving sedation. It was not until the ship was almost in Mars’ atmosphere that he was admitted to the hospital ward.

Bill, looking extremely wan, was lying on one pillow with a refrigerator pack on the back of his head. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi. You look terrible. Say, what’s the countersign?”

Bill frowned. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’ve tried and tried to think, but somehow I can’t remember.”

“Mental block, caused by anxiety,” George barked professionally. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get it out of you in no time under deep hypnosis.”

The red-headed nurse who had been hovering in the background came up. “You’ll have to go if you excite him,” she said warningly.

Bill waved her aside with one thin hand. “It doesn’t matter, though,” he said. “Give the pig to the man with the black camellia. It’s not valuable.”

“My cabin’s been searched twice.”

“You’re imagining it. Martian cults aren’t important, the way religion is on Earth. You know how Martians are—extremely sane, realistic, unimaginative. Only a little lunatic fringe is interested in their cults. Nobody’s trying to get the pig away from you.” Bill had majored in Martian subjects at the University.

“Well, if it’s so unimportant, why did they send it from Terra with a private courier?”

“Save time, I guess. You know how many complaints there’ve been about the slowness of the regular mail. I don’t think the cult has more than six members all told. But don’t you worry about it. You deliver the pig.”

The nurse came up and took Bill’s circulatory reading. She pursed her lips. “You’ll have to go,” she said to George.

The north side of the spaceport was near the drainage pits. As George approached it through the flickering shadows of the Martian night there seemed to be echoes everywhere. He felt tense and keyed up. Of course Bill was right, and nobody was trying to get the pig. On the other hand, he had always found his cousin’s judgment brash and overconfident. He shifted the pig’s carrying case under his arm, a movement which added a taint of fish to the perfumed Martian breeze, and swallowed. His throat was dry.

The man with the black camellia was waiting about fifty meters further on, in the shadow of one of the triple cranes. George went up to him, his footfalls echoing slowly on the rhodium-colored pave. He cleared his throat. “Perfumed Mars, planet of perfumes,” he said.

“Huh?” the man said after a minute. He was a big man, of a typically somatotonic build, and he put a world of interrogation into the sound.

“Perfumed Mars, planet of perfumes,” George repeated, beginning to grow warm around the ears.

“Run along, sonny,” the man said indulgently. He turned his head to one side for a leisurely expectoration. George saw, in the skipping light of Phobos, that what he had thought was a black camellia was, in fact, one of the half-animal Dryland epiphytes which Martian geeksters liked to wear. “Run along,” the somatotonic type repeated. “You got the wrong tzintz. Do I look like I’d be interested in sightseeing tours?”

His face hot, George beat a retreat. Of all the fool things to have to go up and say to a stranger! “Perfumed Ma rs, planet—” Bah! As far as he was concerned, Mars and the pig both stank.

A good deal farther on he encountered the second man. He was a small, dark tzintz (Martian for “bozo”) with a thin little goatee. George circled around him warily, making sure that he was really wearing a camellia and that it really was black, before he spoke.

“Perfumed Mars, planet of perfumes,” he said. “Rubbledyrubbledryrubbledlyrube,” the stranger said, his head bent.

George paused. A suspicion was stirring in his mind. What the man had answered might have been Old Martian, of course, but surely the countersign would have been in Terrese, like the sign itself. And anyhow, it hadn’t sounded like a language at all, just mumbling.

“Perfumed Mars, planet of perfumes,” he said for the fourth time that night.