Kir Bulychev - Alice - The Girl From Earth

“All right then. Second, if there’s trouble, don’t hesitate to call on me.’

“If I can.”

“Take the Blabberyap bird. You can tell him everything. I know how to get him to repeat it. Give the bird all the details.”

“Until we meet again, then.”

“Until we meet again.”

The Blabberyap bird grew silent.

“Well, you heard it, Poloskov?” Alice asked.

“Of course I heard it; don’t shout,” Poloskov answered and started to think.

The Blabberyap bird nodded its golden crown, as though considering whether it should continue or not. Abruptly it spoke very slowly in the Second Captain’s voice:

“Set course for the Medusa system.”

We waited in the expectation that the bird might speak again, but the Blabberyap bird closed its eyes and tucked its head beneath its wing.

“So, the Second Captain got into trouble and sent the Blabberyap bird for help,” Alice said. “Now how can we get it to tell us more?”

“Hold on,” I spoke up. “Just what is it you’ve decided? Remember, the Blabberyap bird did not fly to Venus where the First Captain is working, but returned to its home planet. That means that no one sent it anywhere. The Second Captain might have just died, and the bird went home.”

“It really could have been anything,” Poloskov said, and got up from behind the table.

He left the crew’s lounge and returned in five minutes, carrying with him the Galactic Map. He placed it on the table, pushing aside some tea cups, and pressed the control. The holographic image sprang into existence above the table. He pointed to the edge of the map.

“Here.” he said, “this is the Medusa system. Completely unexplored. The star has planets. I propose we fly there. If the Captain is alive, we may be able to help him. If he has died, at the very least we will find out what happened! And where.”

“But he could very well have perished in space.” I objected.

“And just what could have happened to the great Captain in space?”

“His ship could have exploded, for example.”

“And would not the Blabberyap bird have exploded with it?”

“Well, anything at all could have happened!”

I fell silent. In the final analysis, the expedition had its own questions, and it was totally unknown if the planets of the Medusa system had any sort of life forms at all. The flight to the star and our return would take up most of the time allotted to the expedition. And we really did not know anything other than what we had heard the bird say. What if the Captain had spent some time there, and then gone off to another part of the Galaxy and perished there? I mentioned this to my colleagues, but the longer I spoke the less convinced I was of the rightness of my arguments, and the more I knew that I had failed to convince either Poloskov or Alice. “Fine,” I said finally. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Just let’s make a stop at Sheshineru first. We really have to find out what a Skliss is.”

“Agreed.” Poloskov moved his finger through the map. “This is our route, then; along the way we should be able to stop on various planets and search for rare animals for the Zoo.”

“And now it’s time to sleep.” I said. “We’ll depart tomorrow morning. Are all the animals fed and watered?”

“A-Okay Boss Expedition Leader Sir,” Alice, who was responsible for the feeding of the animals, answered.

“And where is the diamond-backed turtle?” I asked.”

“It was here just a moment ago.” Poloskov said. “Where is it now?”

We wasted an entire hour crawling all over the ship and only found the diamond-backed turtle with the aid of the Empathicator, who had hunted it down right in the air lock.

“It’s obvious it wants to run away.” Zeleny said. “Just like I warned. We’ll have to keep a constant eye on this turtle.”

The Empathicator became a bright yellow.

I dug out the table listing the Empathicator’s colors and feelings they indicated which the two-headed snake gave me, and said:

“A yellow color indicates distrust.”

“Don’t believe the turtle?” Zeleny asked the Empathicator. “Neither do I.”

The Empathicator became so yellow it outshone even the light of the lamp.

“Oh well,” I said then. “I’ll confine him in his cage.”

The Empathicator remained just as yellow, but black bands ran up and down its spine. The table advised us that black bands on a yellow background indicated disagreement.

“Oh, all right.” I said. “If you distrust it that much we’ll lock it in the safe for the night.”

When I spoke the Empathicator turned a delighted dark green.

By the time the Pegasus arrived at the planet Sheshineru the gifts and cargo that had filled its holds had for the most part found their way to their diverse destinations. You could finally walk down the corridors and not bump into packages, bags and containers.

We had crossed about a third of the Galaxy already and found ourselves in regions where scheduled freighters and liners from Earth never ventured.

The planet Sheshineru lays far from any of the great commerce routes. It’s natural world is notably poor; it’s only been three hundred years now since it was empty and uninhabited, but then colonists came from Rozodor, established oceans and an atmosphere, planted forests and lawns.

We would not even have bothered wasting time with a landing but Doctor Verkhovtseff had told us, back on the Three Captains World, that he had heard about an animal on the planet called a Skliss.

The Pegasus landed on the planet in the dead of night, in a field not far from the flickering lights of a medium sized city. We landed silently so as not to awaken the citizens and not to frighten them; very few ships ever reach Sheshineru and only a few of its citizens have ever seen aliens.

The engines were turned off, the engineer Zeleny stroked his beard and lay down to get some sleep; Captain Poloskov remained on the bridge to make some corrections in navigation charts that were long out of date. Alice began to write a letter to her grandmother, planning to transmit it from Sheshineru, and I went down to the first hold to choose an empty cage for the Skliss and feed the animals we already had aboard.

The ship was quiet and dark; I hardly made a sound as I walked on the soft carpet and thought about how we had to restock our water supplies on Sheshineru and obtain silk for the Sewing Spider. One of the wander bushes approached me from behind one corner and I told it:

“Go to sleep right away! Or I will not water you tomorrow.”

The wander bush waved and rustled its leaves in horror and drew back into its own section.

Suddenly I heard the sound of someone chewing food. Someone something had crept into the store room where we were keeping the remaining gifts. I stopped and listened carefully. I couldn’t tell which of the animals had gotten out of its cage, and not all of them were the sort I would want to approach with empty hands.

I very carefully looked into the store room’s open door. The room was empty. But the chewing became all the louder. I went inside. The chewing came from the closed door of the refrigerator where we were keeping the pineapples.

My eyes widened when I saw that the key to the refrigerator was hanging in its spot on the outside and no one could have gotten into the refrigerator and then closed it behind them without the key.

Slowly I extended my hand to the latch, turned it and pulled the door open.

On one of the shelves, shivering from the cold, sat a little green man, his long thin teeth gnawing one of the pineapples.

In terror the little person raised his eyes and clutched the pineapple to his chest.