Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

Before it engulfed his head, he screamed, “Don’t, don’t — I’ll cancel—”

An alien lifted the inert object and as the body left the floor, that substance encased his feet as well, met from all sides and sealed itself off.

The silent bundle was already being carried away, when Godwin managed to shut his mouth, simply to open it again, wordless either way. Then he remembered the efficacy of dignified retreat in bringing hostilities to an end. He ordered Harms’ staff to leave.

The largest alien, while making an emphatic, incomprehensible speech, gestured an equal number of Leloc off the scene. His fragmentary English did not serve him in this moment of stress.

Mager listened closely, whistled, and said, “Well, I’ll be — They just pouched him, that’s all. That’s the ultimate version of what they do to disobedient children; pop them back into the pouch and tuck in the flap, so to speak.”

“I take it we all agree that Harms is in their custody now?” said Agnes, with her accustomed briskness. “All right. But we don’t know what the Leloc are going to do next.”

“Since they have captured the bomber,” offered Mager from his meditations over an invisible chess board, “they could stay right here peacefully until we are in full and clear communication.”

The Leloc leader issued another series of sounds. Mager moved in his direction, gesturing busily, and they harangued each other with great earnestness for a while. Godwin examined the situation, feeling that it had got entirely out of hand, and that it might be weeks before he had another idea all his own.

Mager turned back, his cheerful little face somber.

“They’re ready to lift, all right. They want to know if we will now, finally, reveal to them where their colony is.”

Wystan gave Agnes the look of a man who was not about to tell anybody anything, because he just barely knew his own name.

“Let me handle it then,” she said hastily. Sticking as much as possible to concepts she knew to be familiar to the Leloc leader, with frequent pauses for Mager to pour oil on her troubled sentence structure, she said, “Leloc big in knowing. Untailed people still in pouch. We star not; we make no-color maps.”

The Leloc leader offered a remark. “ Some color, he says,” said Mager.

Agnes flourished the Leloc map — one-handed, Godwin noted bitterly. She certainly did keep fit. “All here go there,” she proposed, “to do honor where they lost their lives.”

Mager whispered to her.

“Where they lowered their tails, long ago,” she said dutifully, and the Leloc keened in chorus.

“Bomb-man Leloc capture,” snarled Godwin to Agnes, in private. “Now are you satisfied?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “It was the only thing to do.”

“If they’re not going to pouch us,” he said, “we had best evacuate the Liaison camp — in a hurry.”

“Now we lift ship,” said the Leloc precisely. Wystan’s messenger managed to get through the lock before it closed. The long conference was indubitably over. The spaceship rose, then hovered. The Liaison people left behind struck camp and were clear of the area when the bombs fell, right on schedule. Harms had encircled the site with remote-controlled wheeled platforms, ordinarily used to trundle heavy equipment from one spot to another. The occupants of the spaceship watched from portholes as the dollied bombs converged. Their simultaneous explosions made a charred and smoking ruin of the stretch of ground in the middle of the park that the spaceship had not altered by a grass blade’s bending.

They went to Australia. It was a ritual tour, as Agnes admitted to Godwin her assessment had assured her it would be. “They have known for quite a while now that we can’t show them their colony,” said Mager. “But their customs prescribe that they must ask to see what they know they left. Then we must show them the next best thing, if we can’t produce the original. No difficulty.”

Well, there was no quarreling with an assessment, thought Godwin, and his own brain had been off gibbering somewhere else when Harms had thrown down the gauntlet. But he was having difficulty, whether the Leloc were or not. He was still shaken in his inmost soul by the sudden outbreaks of violence that had marred the peak of his diplomatic career.

He never succeeded in believing one hundred percent in the authenticity of Agnes’ pidgin-Leloc assessment, but — when it came to that — he never expressed his doubts to the Nine Old Men, either. (The computers eventually bore out the decision with a unanimous sane and adequate from all nine. It was their highest possible praise.)

The ritual tour included Kukukukuland, where there were no traces of Leloc settlers. The ship then headed for the little town of Mt. Magnet in the western part of Australia, where they found the site of the original and largest power installation with no difficulty. It was a deeply buried and melted-down hardened puddle of slag, still faintly radioactive.

Thereafter the Leloc made the briefest possible visits to the reservations where the few remaining degenerate kangaroos were kept in protective custody.

And in the afternoon of the eighth day Mager and a dozen aliens came to Godwin, saying that the Leloc were completely satisfied with their investigations — to the point that they were now ready to take over. All the way over. Every human must return on board immediately, because the ship was about to lift for its far home in Ursa Minor.

“Must?”

Mager nodded.

Godwin could not claim surprise — only inattention. He should have foreseen this turn of events from any one of a dozen items of information in the Liaison packet. As, for instance:

“. . little or no competition makes for a naturally conservative life form, too. A glandular setup of reticence and balance is a physiological precondition for the pouch — or perhaps it goes in the other direction.”

It hardly mattered which came first, he thought wryly: the egg laid in Communications Park or Henny Penny Godwin that set out to mother it and promptly laid a few more. The warning had clearly been there in the report:

“. . in any event, the sense of personal property can hardly be distinguished from religion, and there does not so far appear to be any evidence for theism.”

All the experts, including the now omnipresent PIX man (with his wrist camera and the throat mike into which he whispered his incessant and now suddenly tense commentary) were out at the dig, along with Agnes, Tawmison and Godwin. As had become his custom, the Leloc leader propped interestedly between the two Liaison agents. When Mager and the unusually large party of alien crew members approached, Godwin amusedly watched the Leloc straighten into a formal stance with his tail at dignified half-mast.

Once he heard Mager’s announcement, all Godwin’s amusement evaporated. He was very aware of the Leloc presence, and summoned every ounce of dignity he could himself command.

“Do they now consider us hostages?”

“Not hostages, no,” said Mager. “They don’t think that way. We are. . reparations. Or an unexpected harvest. They put certain seed into the ground, so to speak, when they planted a colony. They must take something back.”

“But that’s as if I tended an apple orchard,” cried Wystan with unusual force. “An orchard that a hurricane destroyed. Would I — because of that — feel justified in snatching grapefruit off another’s table, because fruit is fruit, and therefore I’m entitled? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Not to us, perhaps. But with that sense of balance they’ve got, and the sense of numbers having to even out, they really think we’re theirs now. Not hostages, but property. Remember: only a get balances a give.”