Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

Frome caught the edge of the buckler with his left hand, pulled it down, and hacked again and again until the brass was torn from his grip by the fall of his foe.

The others were still coming. Looking back, Frome saw that they halted when they came to their fallen leader.

Frome pulled on his reins. The best defense is a bloody strong attack.

If he charged them now ... He wheeled the zebra and went for them at a run, screeching and whirling his bloody blade.

Before he could reach them, they scattered into the woods with cries of despair. He kept right on through the midst of them and up the long slope until they were far behind and the exhaustion of his mount forced him to slow down.

When he finally caught up with Elena MillSn, she looked at him with horror. He wondered why until he realized that with blood all over he must be quite a sight.

They made the last few kilometers on foot, leading their zebras zigzag among the immense boulders that crested the peak and beating the beasts to make them buck-jump up the steep slopes. When they arrived at the top, they tied the beasts to bushes and threw themselves down to rest.

Elena said: “Thank the Cosmos that’s over! I could not have gone on much further.”

“We’re not done yet,” said Frome. “when we get our breath we’ll have to set up the target.”

“Are we safe here?”

“By no means. Those Dzlieri will go back to Amnairad and fetch the whole tribe, then they’ll throw a cordon around the mountain to make sure we shall’t escape. We can only hope the target brings a rescue in time.”

Presently he forced himself to get up and go to work again. In half an hour, with Elena’s help, the radar target was up on its pole, safely guyed against the gusts.

Then Adrian Frome flopped down again. Elena said: “You poor creature!

You’re all over bruises.”

“Don’t I know it! But it might have been a sight worse.”

“Let me at least wash those scratches, lest you get infected.”

“That’s all right; Vishnuvan germs don’t bother Earthfolk. Oh, well, if you insist ...” His voice trailed off sleepily.

He woke up some hours later to find that Elena had gotten a fire going despite the drizzle and had a meal laid out.

“Blind me, what have we here?” he exclaimed. “I say, you’re the sort of trail-mate to have!”

“That is nothing. It’s you who are wonderful. And to think I’ve always been prejudiced against blond men, because in Spanish novels the villain is always pictured as a blond!”

Frome’s heart, never so hard as he made it out to be, was full to overflowing. “Perhaps this isn’t the time to say this but—uh—I’m not a very spiritual sort of bloke, but I rather love you, you know.”

“I love you too. The Cosmos has sent a love-ray ...”

“Oi!” It was a jarring reminder of that other Elena. “That’s enough of that, my girl. Come here.”

She came.

When Peter Quinlan got back to Bembom with the convalescing Hayataka, Comandante Silva listened eagerly to Quinlan’s story until he came to his flight from Mishinatven’s territory.

“... after we started,” said Quinlan, “while Hayataka was still out, they attacked again. I got three, but not before they had killed Frome with javelins. After we beat them off I buried—”

“Wait! You say Frome was killed?”

“Pois sim.”

“And you came right back here, without going to Ertma?”

“Naturally. What else could I do?”

“Then who set up the radar target on the mountain?”

“What?”

“Why yes. We sent up our radars on the ends of the base-line yesterday, and the target showed clearly on the scopes.”

“I don’t understand,” said Quinlan.

“Neither do I, but we’ll soon find out. Amigo,” he said to the sergeant Martins, “tell the aviation group to get the helicopter ready to fly to Mount Ertma, at once.”

When the pilot homed on the radar target, he came out of the clouds to see a kite-like polygonal structure gleaming with a dull gray aluminum finish on top ora pole on the highest peak of Mount Eruna. Beside the pole were two human beings sitting on a rock and three tethered zebras munching the herbage.

The human beings leaped to their feet and waved wildly. The pilot brought his aircraft around, tensely guiding it through gusts that threatened to dash it against the rocks, and let the rope-ladder uncoil through the trapdoor. The man leaped this way and that, like a fish jumping for a fly as the ladder whipped about him. Finally he caught it.

Just then a group of Dzlieri came out of the trees. They pointed and jabbered and ran towards the people whipping out javelins.

The smaller of the two figures was several rungs up the ladder when the larger one, who had just begun his ascent, screamed up over the whirr of the rotor-blades and the roar of the wind: “Straight up! Quick!”

More Dzlieri appeared—scores of them—and somewhere a rifle barked.

The pilot (just as glad it was not he dangling from an aircraft bucking through a turbulent overcast) canted his blades and rose until the clouds closed in below.

The human beings presently popped into the cabin, gasping from their climb. They were a small dark young woman and a tall man with a centimeter of butter-colored beard matted with dried blood. Both were nearly naked save for tattered canvas boots and a rag or two elsewhere, and were splashed with half-dried mud. The pilot recognized Adrian Frome, the surveyor.

“Home, Jayme,” said Frome.

Frome, cleaned, shaved and looking his normal self once more except for a notch in his left ear, sat down across the desk from Silva, who said: “I cannot understand why you ask for a transfer to Ganesha now of all times. You’re the hero of Bembom. I can get you a permanent P-5 appointment; perhaps even a P-6. Quinlan will be taken to Krishna for trial; Hayataka is retiring on his pension; and I shall be hard up for surveyors. So why must you leave?”

Frome smiled a wry, embarrassed smile. “You’ll manage, chefe. You still have Van der Gracht and Mehtalal, both good men. But I’m quite determined, and I’ll tell you why. When Elena and I got to the top of that mountain we were in a pretty emotional state , and what with one thing and another, and not having seen another human female for weeks, I asked her to marry me and she accepted.”

Silva’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed! My heartiest congratulations! But what has that to do with—”

“Wait till you hear the rest! At first everything was right as rain. She claimed it was the first time she’d been kissed, and speaking as a man of some experience I suppose it was.

However, she soon began telling me her ideas. In the first place this was to be a purely spiritual marriage, the purpose of which was to put my feet on the sevenfold path of enlightenment so I could be something better than a mere civil engineer in my next incarnation—a Cosmotheist missionary, for example. Now I ask you!

“Well, at first I thought that was just a crochet I’d get her over in time; after all we don’t let our women walk over us the way the Americans do. But then she started preaching Cosmotheism to me. And during the two and a half days we were up there, I’ll swear she didn’t stop talking five minutes except when she was asleep. The damndest rot you ever heard—rays and cosmic love and vibrations and astral planes and so on. I was never so bored in my life.”

“I know,” said Silva. He too had suffered.

“So,” concluded Frome, “about that time I began wishing I could give her back to Sirat Mongkut. I was even sorry I’d killed the blighter.

Although he’d have caused no end of trouble if he’d lived, he was a likeable sort of scoundrel at that. So here I am with one unwanted fiancee, and I just can’t explain the facts of life to her. She once said as a joke that I’d be better off on Ganesha, and damned if I don’t think she was right. Now if you’ll just indorse that application ...