Barrington Bayley - The Great Hydration

“Don’t be too long about it. We want that work done on time.”

They lurched out of the door, as if on their way to a fancy dress party.

“Better get your radpaint on, Roncie,” Castaneda said.

His voice was laden with gloom.

Half an hour later, painted up, Northrop was surreptitiously sidling from the communications room. He stopped, blinking in embarrassment, on seeing Joanita Serstos turn the corner into the corridor.

“Well, hello, Joanita.”

She halted, confronting him.

He forced a smile. She offered none in return. Instead, her expression was severe.

“What were you doing in the communications room?”

He banged the door shut behind him. “Looking for Spencer. Somebody told me I’d find him here.”

“Neither Spencer nor you are allowed in there. It’s out of bounds to everyone except the partners and O’Rourke. In fact, how did you get in?”

She stepped forward and tugged on the door handle. The door held.

“It was open when I got here,” Roncie said casually. He reached up and touched her hair. “Anyway, I’m glad to run into you. I have to be down on the surface in an hour. How about twenty minutes on my bunk?”

She twisted away from his searching hands. “No way. In any case I’m on duty.”

Joanita’s voice was icy. He fell back. “I get it. And your duties have been changed, eh? I suppose I had Bouche to thank for everything after all.”

“What makes you think I want to make love to someone wearing radpaint?”

Her excuse was unconvincing. The change in her manner was too obvious.

While he was in the brig the thought that she was being sent to him along with the food hadn’t bothered him. Now, for some reason, it did.

“Okay, Joanita. See you when I get back.”

Disgruntled, he made his way towards the bay where the ferry was being loaded up for departure.

There was something about the view that Karl Krabbe saw through the slatted window of his and Boris Bouche’s lodging that was nudging at his memory. Along the main market concourse traders of a dozen races and colours, lizard and humanoid, passed to and fro between airy pavilions constructed of metal and coloured glass. It was kaleidoscopic, but also barbarically warlike. There was no one who did not seem to carry a weapon of some sort, and mostly the various tribesmen were naked except for bracelets, bangles, straps and belts.

The lighter had put Krabbe and Bouche down a few miles out in the desert. They had ridden in on a balloon-tyred vehicle that did not look at all out of place in the market’s parking lot, and had sought out a room in one of the accommodation blocks, transferring their supplies from the dune buggy mostly at night.

No one had taken the least bit of notice of them. In appearance the aliens from another world were apparently not particularly unusual.

Suddenly the comparison that had been niggling at the back of his mind popped into his consciousness. He turned to his partner, a broad grin on his face.

“Eh, Boris! Barsoom!”

Bouche had just finished his daily contact with O’Rourke and was folding up the communicator’s dish aerial. “What?”

“We should have called this world Barsoom! That’s what it’s like.”

Bouche stared blankly.

“You know!” Krabbe urged. “Edgar Rice Burroughs! His name for Mars.”

Krabbe’s preoccupation with the 20th century writer was known to Bouche, but he had never read any of his work himself.

“Is that so? Well, I just told O’Rourke the language is now about adequate. Maybe we should make a move tomorrow.”

Krabbe closed the window slate, shutting out the sunlight, leaving the room illuminated only by the radium-energised fluorescent patch on the ceiling. In the greenish glow their living space was little more than a large cell, meant to accommodate visiting tribesmen to the most perfunctory of standards, and now crammed with stores and equipment.

For the past three local days they had eavesdropped continuously in various parts of the market with directional microphones and hidden cameras. At length the language machine had produced its miracle, comparing sound, gesture and situation to build up a usable vocabulary. Krabbe and Bouche could now wear earplugs which would receive Tenacity speech and convert it into Terra standard. Disks worn at the base of the throat, kept in place by neckbands, likewise converted their speech to that of Tenacity, at the same time damping the original voice with cancelling anti-sound.

Now the time had come to meet with this world’s controllers. Krabbe had to admit he was intrigued.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll find out how to gain an audience with the—the ‘Tlixix’—tomorrow.”

He was interrupted by the slap of bare feet on the metal floor in the corridor. The door was suddenly shoved forcibly inward. Three black, fierce-eyed Gamintes charged into the room. One of them held on a leash a purple salamander-like creature the size of a small dog, but with six scrabbling legs.

Krabbe and Bouche retreated. The salamander creature rushed about the room, towing its keeper after it, uttering sneezing noises and scratching at the food crates. Then it began butting its head against one of the four water drums in the corner.

The Gamintes glared about them, fingering their flingers. Krabbe picked up a translator plug and began fitting it into his ear. One of the Gamintes knocked his arm away, sending the plug flying. But not before he had caught his first few harsh words.

“There is water in this room! You have been stealing water!”

The explanation came to Krabbe. He or Bouche should have thought of it before, he told himself. It was logical that the Tlixix would breed an animal capable of sniffing out the stuff that obsessed them most. The market was probably patrolled by the beasts, to locate any leaks in their system. Their noses were sensitive enough, evidently, to smell the small amount the Earthmen had been using.

A second Gaminte knelt at the water drum and after a few moments succeeded—to Krabbe’s surprise—in fathoming the screw cap. He recoiled as the cap came off, then screwed it on tight.

Bouche edged towards a DE beamer, but he never reached it. There was shouting from the Gaminte. Lean, rubbery, amazingly strong arms seized the Earthmen, who were swiftly propelled from the accommodations house. Standing in the sun was a vehicle that was little more than a platform on fragile caterpillar tracks.

Krabbe and Bouche managed to raise the hoods of their burnouses before, ungraciously, they were heaved aboard it.

The Hydrorium was a large metal building, clad in white glass which made it dazzling to look upon. The Pavilion of Audience that confronted it was, however, the smallest in the Market. Entrance was through a circular doorway which irised open. Not until they were in the short tunnel behind it, and the door had closed, did a second door open ahead of them.

“It’s a vapour lock,” Bouche said admiringly. “They’re taking us to the lobsters. Hell, Karl, do you realize something? This planet is as alien to them as it is to us!”

Krabbe did not answer. They were in a dimly lit hall, the walls running with moisture, the floor wet and slippery. Some distance off, in tented bath-couches, washed by sprays, were two Tlixix.

The Gamintes pushed their prisoners forward. A sharp, salty, seaweed smell wafted from the lobster-creatures, a smell from Tenacity’s remote past, seeming to bring with it images of tidal pools, of surf, of tangy breezes and scudding foam. The tents parted. The Tlixix reared above them.

Feelers quivering, antlers waving in agitation, massive crustacean heads bent in inspection, their faces, if such they could be called, alive with whiskery motion, and framed by the helmet-like upper segments of their body shells, which glistened green and blue.