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

“Is this one of the DruDehar dances?” he asked after they had moved a few steps. The DruDehar dances (Old Martian for “Golden Garden”) were known all over the system as the Mating Cycle.

“Yes, they all are,” the girl replied. “You Earthmen aren’t very good at dancing, are you? Too stiff. When I come forward, you come forward too. Don’t pull away from me! There, that’s better. Much better. You’re doing fine.”

The dance ended with a wild swoop of anzidar strings. Smiling at him, the small dark girl stood on tiptoe and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him several times, affectionately if muzzily. “For an Earthman,” she said, “you’re rather nice, I think.” George was not altogether sorry when her grinning escort whirled the little dark girl away in another dance.

The crowd began to grow thin. Couples disappeared into doorways, around corners, under the shadows of trees. Blixa, flushed and smiling and redolent of perfume, came up and she and George drank more soma together. In a surprisingly short time there was no one left in the street but themselves and a man with wrinkled limbs and thin gray hair who snored happily as he lay upon the pave.

Blixa linked her fingers with George’s and led him into the shadow of the basalt statue of Chou Kleor. Chou Kleor was the greatest of the poets of Mars. His works, perhaps, were not much read nowadays, but every Martian schoolchild knew him as the writer who first spoke of “scented Mars”. His statue was a monumental thing, and the shadow it cast was correspondingly large.

“We’ll wait here,” Blixa breathed. “If they happen to be watching from the embassy, they’ll think we couldn’t be paying any attention to them.” She sat down on the turf and drew George down by her side.

“Have you any plan for getting the pig?” he asked softly.

“Yes. I imagine they’ll just send one man with it, because the fewer people who know about a thing like this, the better it is. When he comes out I’ll walk toward him and pretend to stumble. He’ll come toward me and start to help me up. And then you hit him—hit him hard—and get the pig away from him.”

It sounded O.K. George nodded. It occurred to him that he was going to a great deal of trouble to get his half of Bill’s bonus and marry Darken. If anything went wrong, he’d be in a nasty mess. He hoped Darleen would appreciate it. But Darken—funny, he’d never thought of it before—Darken wasn’t what you’d call a very appreciative girl.

The city was utterly quiet now. Blixa yawned and in the most natural manner in the world rested her head for a moment against George’s chest. He was still trying to decide whether he ought, in simple politeness, to put his arm around her, when she sat up alertly again. “I might go to sleep that way,” she explained.

The sky was growing lighter; it would not be long until the first signs of day. George bit back a yawn, and then another one. Suddenly he leaned forward, transfixed. The embassy door was opening.

Blixa had leaped to her feet. As the door opened wider and a small dark man (the tzintz, George thought with a thrill of recognition, the tzintz who had knocked him out at the drainage pits) slipped out of it, she started across the pavement to him.

She was wobbling a little, in a skillful simulation of drunkenness, and crooning softly as if to herself.

As she came abreast of the tzintz she stumbled and pitched forward on one knee. It was so well done that George watching, was afraid she had really hurt herself. She tried to get up, grimaced. “My knee,” she said plaintively, “my knee.”

The tzintz hesitated. He was carrying in one hand a case that could be nothing but the pig’s. Then he made up his mind. He walked toward Blixa, put his hand under her armpit, and began solicitously helping her to her feet.

George pounded up to him, his long legs putting out a very creditable burst of speed. He hit the tzintz on the point of the chin. He gave the pig’s carrying case a mighty tug.

It was then that the flaw in Blixa’s plan became apparent. The pig was chained to the tzintz’s wrist.

The three began whirling about in an impromptu saraband. Blixa, popping up, was tugging at the tail of the tzintz’s tunic. George, on the other end, was pulling for all he was worth on the carrying case. And the tzintz, in the middle, was uttering shrill cries.

This state of affairs could not continue. Window irises in the embassy opened. I leads popped out. People began yelling at each other. Even the inebriated old man who had been sleeping on the pave was sitting up and looking around him bewilderedly.

Blixa abandoned her enterprise suddenly. Yelling “Run!” at George, she let go her hold on the tzintz so abruptly that George almost fell over backward. She shouted “Run!” once more in warning and then whirled around and darted off into the darkness of a side street.

George decided to follow her advice. He dropped the carrying case. He turned. He ran straight into the arms of two big Plutonians.

And after that, of course, it was only a matter of minutes until the police carts came.

It was hot in the jail. George had a black eye, two loose front teeth, and a fair hangover from the soma he had drunk.

The jailer (George was the only prisoner at the moment) was morose and intractable. George surmised correctly that the man resented his incarceration because it meant that the jailer wouldn’t get enough sleep to let him celebrate the Anagetalia adequately.

Every time the jailer brought him food or came to see how-he was doing, George asked to see a lawyer or somebody from the Terrestrial embassy. The jailer only grunted and went away again. It occurred to George that for a Terrestrial to assault a Plutonian on Martian soil might constitute an interplanetary incident. Perhaps he was being held without bail.

The day passed slowly. George spent most of it pacing around his cell or sitting on his bunk and cursing Blixa mentally. Blast the girl; it was all her fault. From the moment he had seen her she had ordered him around, pushed him from one situation into the next, told him what to do. And this was the result. The Cyniscus was taking off for Terra day after tomorrow; if he wasn’t there, he’d be blacklisted for the rest of his life. It was the kind of a mess he’d spent his existence up till now trying to avoid. Blast the girl. Maybe it wasn’t entirely her fault. Blast her anyhow. If he ever saw her again, he’d give her a piece of his mind.

By the middle of the second day in clink George was down to his last fingernail. Late in the afternoon the jailer came to his cell and grunted that he had a visitor. Visions of liberty began to float through George’s mind. He followed the man eagerly.

It was Blixa. After his first surprise George advanced to the grating with fire in his eye. He was going to tell her what he thought of her.

Blixa beat him to it. “Listen, gesell,” she said in a cold voice, “why didn’t you tell me you were pushing the groot?” Her level eyebrows had drawn together, and even her green shari looked indignant.

“Groot?” George repeated. He didn’t know the word.

“Groot, meema, alaphronein,” the girl answered impatiently. “I’d never have bothered with you if I’d known what kind of man you were.”

George knew what alaphronein was. It would have been hard to find anyone on the Three Plane ts who did not. It was a highly dangerous drug, with a rotting effect on the nervous system, which reduced its victims to scabrous husks. It originated on Venus, was sent to Earth to be processed, and Mars was the center of its illicit distribution. The Martian government had been making an all-out effort to repress the traffic in it.

“I’m not pushing it,” George said weakly. The accusation was so big it was difficult to deny.