Eric Russell: Next of Kin

Checking the planet was equally easy. He went twice around its equator at altitude sufficiently low to permit swift visual observation. Complete coverage of she sphere was not necessary to gain a shrewd idea of its status, development and potentialities. What he could see in a narrow strip around its belly was enough of a sampling for the purposes of the Terran Intelligence Service.

In short time he spotted three spaceports, two empty, the third holding eight merchant ships of unknown origin and three Combine war vessels. Other evidence showed the world to be heavily populated and well-advanced. He could safely mark it as a pro-Combine planet of considerable military value.

Shooting back into free space, he dialled X, the special long-range frequency, and beamed this information together with the planet’s approximate diameter, mass and spatial co-ordinates.

“I dived in and circumnavigated the dump,” he said, and let go a snigger. He couldn’t help if because he was recalling his careless response to a similar situation set as a test-piece in his first examination.

He had written, “I made cautious approach to the strange planet and then quickly circumcised it.”

The paper had come back marked; “Why?”

He’d replied, “I could get around better by taking short cuts.”

It had cost him ten marks and the dead-pan comment, “This information lacks either accuracy or wit.” But he had passed all the same.

There was no reply to his signal and he did not expect one. He could beam signals outward with impunity but they could not beam back into enemy territory without awakening hostile listening-posts to the fact that someone must be operating in their back areas. Beamed signals were highly directional and the enemy was always on the alert to pick up and decipher anything emanating from the Allied front while ignoring all broadcasts from the rear.

The next twelve worlds were found in substantially the same manner as the first one: by plotting interplanetary and interstellar shipping routes and following them to their termini. He signalled details of each one and each time was rewarded with silence. By this time he found himself deploring the necessary lack of response because he had been going long enough to yearn for the sound of a human voice.

After weeks that stretched to months, enclosed in a thundering metal bottle, he was becoming afflicted with an appalling loneliness. Amid this vast stretch of stars, with seemingly endless planets an which lived not a soul to call him Joe, he could have really enjoyed the arrival from far away or an irate human voice bawling him out good and proper for some error, real or fancied. He’d have sat there and bathed his mind in the stream of abuse. Constant, never-ending silence was the worst of all, the hardest to bear.

Occasionally he tried to break the hex by singing at the top of his voice or by holding heated arguments with himself while the ship howled onward. It was a poor and ineffectual substitute because he was less musical than a tumescent tom-cat a nd he couldn’t win an argument without also losing it.

His sleeps were lousy, too. Sometimes he dreamed that the autopilot had gone haywire and that the ship was heading full-tilt into a blazing sun. Then he’d wake up with his belly jumping and make quick, anxious check of the apparatus before returning to slumber. Other times he awoke heavy-eyed and dry-mouthed feeling that he’d had no sleep at all, but had been lying supine through hours of constant trembling and a long, sustained roar.

Several times he had pursuit dreams in which he was being chased through dark, metallic corridors that bellowed and quivered all around while close behind him sounded the rapid, vengeful tread of feet that were not feet. Invariably he woke up just as he was about to be grabbed by hands that were not hands.

In theory there was no need for him to suffer the wear and tear of long-range reconnaissance. A case full of wonder-drugs had been provided to cope with every conceivable condition of mind or body. The trouble was that they were effective or they were not. If ineffective, the taking of them proved sheer waste of time. If effective, they tended to shove things to the opposite extreme.

Before one sleep-period he had experimented by taking a so-called normalising capsule positively guaranteed to get rid of nightmares and ensure happy, interesting dreams. The result had been ten completely uninhibited hours in a harem. They had been hours so utterly interesting that they’d left him flat out. He never took another capsule.

It was while he was nosing after a merchant convoy, in expectation of tracing a thirteenth planet, that he got some vocal sounds that at least broke the monotony. He was following far behind and high above the group of ships and the, feeling secure in their own backyard, were keeping no detector watch and were unaware of his presence. Fiddling idly with the controls of his receiver, he suddenly hit upon an enemy interfleet frequency and picked up a conversation between ships.

The unknown lifeform manning the vessels had loud, somewhat bellicose voices but spoke a language with sound-forms curiously akin to Terran speech. To Leeming’s ears it came as a stream of cross-talk that his mind instinctively framed in Terran words. It went like this:

First voice: “Mayor Snorkum will lay the cake.”

Second voice: “What for the cake be laid by Snorkum?”

First voice: “He will starch his moustache.”

Second voice: “That is night-gab. How can he starch a tepid mouse?”

They spent the next ten minutes in what sounded like an acrimonious argument about what one repeatedly called a tepid mouse while the other insisted that it was a torpid moose. Leeming found that trying to follow the point and counterpoint of this debate put quite a strain upon the cerebellum. He suffered it until something snapped.

Tuning his transmitter to the same frequency, he bawled, “Mouse or moose, make up your goddam minds!”

This produced a moment of dumbfounded silence before the first voice harshed, “Gnof, can you lap a pie-chain?”

“No, he can’t,” shouted Leeming, giving the unfortunate Gnof no chance to brag of his ability as a pie-chain lapper.

There came another pause, then Gnof resentfully told all and sundry, “I shall lambast my mother.”

“Dirty dog!” said Leeming. “Shame on you!”

The other voice informed, mysteriously, “Mine is a fat one.”

“I can imagine,” Leeming agreed.

“Clam-shack?” demanded Gnof in tones clearly, translatable as, “Who is that?”

“Mayor Snorkum,” Leeming told him.

For some weird reason known only to alien minds this information caused the argument to start all over again. They commenced by debating Mayor Snorkum’s antecedents and future prospects (or so it sounded) and gradually and enthusiastically worked their way along to the tepid mouse (or torpid moose).

There were moments when they became mutually about something or other, possibly Snorkum’s habit of keeping his moose on a pie-chain. Finally they dropped the subject by common consent and switched to the abstruse question of how to paddle a puddle (according to one) or how to peddle a poodle (according to the other).

“Holy cow!” said Leeming fervently.

It must have borne close resemblance to something pretty potent in the hearers’ language because they broke off and again Gnof challenged, “Clam-shack?”

“Go jump, Buster!” Leeming invited.

“Bosta? My ham-plank is Bosta, enk? ” His tones suggested considerable passion about the matter as he repeated, “Bosta, enk? ”

“Yeah,” confirmed Leeming. “ Enk! ”

Apparently this was regarded as the last straw for their voices went off and even the faint hum of the carrier-wave disappeared. It looked as though he had managed to utter something extremely vulgar without having the vaguest notion of what he had said.