Kir Bulychev - Alice - The Girl From Earth

“But I can give you whatever you want for the bird! I can get you a whole zoo!”

“No.” I answered firmly. “As far as I understand it, Blabberyaps are almost extinct. This Blabberyap will be safe in the zoo.”

“Give me the bird, or I’ll take it.” The fat man threatened.

“Just try it.”

A pair of two Audity policemen were walking past. I turned toward then to ask for help but the fat man had vanished as though the ground had swallowed him up.

We continued our journey.

“See, Papa. There’s some sort of secret connected with the Blabberyaps.” Alice said. “Just don’t give him up to anyone.

“Don’t worry.” I calmed her down.

We were walking along an empty road. The Bazar was noise and activity on the other side of a low wall. Ahead of us we could see the city of Palaputra and its hotels. Suddenly we heard light footsteps. I turned quickly and froze from surprise.

Running up the road toward us was Doctor Verkhovtseff. His hat was pushed to one side, his suit was rumbled and he looked far thinner than when we had seen him last. He reached us.

“Professor.” He said to me, panting for breath. “You’re in great danger. You’re lucky I managed to reach you in time. What good fortune!”

“What sort of danger?” I asked.

“The danger is the Blabberyap itself. If you don’t part with it immediately, your ship is doomed. I know exactly what I am speaking…”

“Listen, Doctor Verkhovtseff.” I said angrily. “Your behavior goes well beyond strange. You behaved like some thriller novel conspirator back on the Three Captain’s World when you told us you did not know what kind of bird was carved on the monument. Then you came here and tried to destroy all the oxygen in the atmosphere, so they say, by selling white grubs. You behaved like a pig at the hotel, cooking sausages on your bed and breaking the robot attendants. And now you demand that we give you the Blabberyap bird. No, don’t interrupt me. When you’ve thought things over, come visit us in the ship and we can talk about this under calm circumstances.”

“You will come to regret it.” Verkhovtseff said, and reached into his jacket pocket.

The Empathicator turned red from terror. The Sewing Spider started to wave the unfinished scarf in Verkhovtseff’s direction.

“Be careful, papa! He has a gun!” Alice shouted.

“Poloskov.” I spoke into the transmitter that was placed on my chest. “Take down our coordinates. We’re in danger. Emergency!”

On hearing my words Verkhovtseff froze, thinking what to do next. To our good fortune a large crowd of collectors leading an enormous green elephant came onto the road; Verkhovtseff jumped over a fence and vanished.

“Oh, I really like all this!” Alice said. “We’re having a real adventure.”

“Frankly, I don’t like adventures like this at all. We’re here to collect animals for the Zoo, not fight battles with Doctor Verkhovtseff.”

Three minutes later the Pegasus’s landing boat hung over our heads; it was Poloskov on a rescue mission. The boat slowly flew over us all the way back to the ship, which we arrived at without further incident.

As soon as we had settled the animals in their cages and fed them I went up to the bridge and sent a message to the research base on Arcturus Minor. It read:

“Please determine location of Doctor Verkhovtseff. Have reason to believe he is not what he appears to be.”

That evening the answer arrived from Arcturus Minor:

“Doctor Verkhovtseff not on Three Captains’ World. No other information currently available.”

“We’d already found out by ourselves he wasn’t on the Three Captains’ World on our own,” Poloskov said when he read the message. “He’s here.”

We had constructed a large cage for the Blabberyap bird and hung it in the crew’s lounge. The Blabberyap spent the whole day muttering in unknown languages and never came close to uttering anything by one of the Captains, but Poloskov believed Alice and me anyway and said:

“I think this is the very same Blabberyap which belonged to the First Captain and which he gave to the Second when they split up.”

“Could it be that Verkhovtseff was chasing after all the Blabberyaps because he wanted to get his hands specially on this one?” Alice asked.

“But what did he want this Blabberyap bird for?” I asked.

“What else! We know the Second Captain vanished without a trace; no one knows where he is. We know that he had the Blabberyap bird…”

“Of course!” The engineer Zeleny cut in. “That’s it. Our kid’s right on target. There’s no Captain, but the Blabberyap bird is here, and that means the Blabberyap knows where the Captain is. And Verkhovtseff wants to find that out himself.”

“But why make such a mystery of it?” I asked him. “We’d be willing to help him, with pleasure.”

The sound of knocking interrupted us. Someone had come a-visiting.

I went down to the airlock and opened it. The fat man in the black leather suit was standing on the gangway.

“I beg your pardon for this intrusion,” he oozed. “I would like to make amends for my behavior in the market place. I was so desperate to obtain a living Blabberyap bird that I fear I could not contain myself.”

“Quite all right,” I answered. “We weren’t offended. But there is no way we could possibly part with the Blabberyap bird.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t want you to part with it,” the fat man said cheerfully. “But I simply must do something to better the terrible impression I must have made. Please, you cannot refuse to do me the honor of accepting this as a parting gift.”

He held out a very rare animal indeed, a diamond backed turtle from Menata. The turtle’s shell was composed of real diamonds and flashed so brightly it hurt your eyes to look at it.

“Please, accept it,” the Fat Man said. “I still do have three.”

Naturally I was less than eager to take a gift from such a strange individual one really has to show some caution but there wasn’t a single diamond-backed turtle in any of Earth’s zoos! We had been searching for one for five years, and now we had found someone who just gave us one!

“Please do not refuse,” the Fat Man said. “Fare thee well. Perhaps we will meet again. Bear in mind, I am known on a hundred planets. My name is Veselchak U.”

And he stamped his feet on the steps, went down the gangway and jumped up on the moving walkway that led in the direction of Palaputra.

It had already grown dark; both suns had set almost simultaneously, although from different spots on the horizon, and two sunsets fell over the space port, one prettier than the other, and I found myself thinking how pointless it was to think the worst of people. That fat man, for example, was a true amateur biologist, yet he had not hesitated to give us this rare animal as a gift.

So I returned to the crew’s lounge in a very fine mood and showed my friends the gift. The turtle moved from one of my hands to the other, and everyone admired the superb play of light on the diamonds that composed the shell.

“So where do we go from here?” Poloskov asked after dinner.

“For the Sklisses.” Alice said. “On the planet Sheshineru.”

“Why not?” I agreed. “We were planning to go there anyway.”

It was at that moment that the Blabberyap bird, which hitherto had been sitting peacefully in its cage and looking down on us drinking tea, began to speak again.

“You’re planning to leave,” he asked in the First Captain’s voice.

“Yes, I’m flying to meet him,” the Blabberyap bird answered himself in the Second Captain’s voice.