Poul Anderson - Poul Anderson - Sci-Fi Boxed Set

He opened his assigned door.

"Put—me—down!"

Ballantyne dropped his suitcase and his jaw. Within the narrow cabin a Martian was struggling in the clutch of a six-foot armored woman.

"Put—me—down!" he spluttered. He coiled his limbs snakelike around the woman's brawny arms, and a Martian's four thick, rubbery walking-tentacles have formidable strength. She didn't seem to notice. She laughed and shook him a bit.

"I—beg your pardon—" gasped Ballantyne, backing away.

"You are forgiven," said the woman. Her voice was a husky contralto, burdened with a rippling, slurring accent he couldn't place. She shot out one Martian-encumbered arm, grabbed him by the coat, and hauled him inside. "You be the yudge, my friend. Is it not yustice that I have the lower berth?"

"It is noting of te sort!" screamed the Martian, fixing Ballantyne with round, bulging, and indignant yellow eyes. "My position, my eminence, clearly entitle me to ebery consideration, and ten tis hulking monster—"

The Earthling let his gaze travel up and down the woman's smooth-muscled form and said in an awed whisper, "I think you'd better accept the lady's generous offer. But—uh—I seem to have the wrong cabin—"

"Are you Ray Ballantyne of Earth?" asked the woman.

He pleaded guilty.

"Then you belon vith us. I have looked at the passenyer lists. You may have the cot."

"Th-thanks," shivered Ballantyne, sitting down on it.

The Martian seemed to give the fight up as a bad job and allowed himself to be placed on the upper bunk. "To tink of it," he squeaked. "Tat I, te great Urushkidan of Ummunashektaru, should be man-handled by a sabage who does not know a logaritm from an exponent!"

Urushkidan. Ballantyne knew the name of the Martian mathematician, the latter-day Gauss or Einstein, and stared as if this were the first Martian he had seen in his life. Urushkidan looked like any other of his race, at least to the inexperienced eye. A great gray-skinned cupola of a body balanced four feet high on the walking-tentacles, with the two slim, three-fingered arm-tentacles writhing from either side of a wide lipless mouth set beneath that torse. Big unwinking eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles, flat nose, elephantine ears—"Not the Urushkidan?" he gasped.

"Tere is only one Urushkidan," said the Martian.

* * * * *

The amazon sat down on her own bunk and laughed, a Homeric shout of laughter ringing between the metal walls and shivering the furniture. "Velcome, little Earthman," she cried. "You are cute, I think I vill like you. I am Dyann Korlas of Kathantuma." She grabbed his hand in a bone-cracking grip.

"One of the Centaurians," said Ballantyne feebly.

"Yes, so you call us." She opened her trunk and began unpacking. Ballantyne watched her with appreciation and some curiosity. He'd only seen the Alpha Centaurian visitors on television before now.

She looked human enough externally, aside from a somewhat different convolution of the ears. Internally there were plenty of peculiarities, among them a skeletal and tissue structure considerably harder and denser than that of Homo Solis. Alpha Centauri III—or Varann, as its more advanced nation had decided to call it after learning from the terrestrial explorers that it was a planet—was Earth-like enough in a cool and bracing way, but it had half again the surface gravity.

Sexual differentiation also varied a bit from the Solar norm. The Centaurian men were somewhat smaller and weaker than the women. They stayed at home and did the housework while their wives conducted the business. In the warlike culture of Kathantuma and its neighbor states that meant going out, cutting the other army into hamburger, and stealing everything which wasn't bolted down.

This—Dyann Korlas—was something to write home about as far as looks went. Her size and the broadsword at her waist were intimidating, but her build was magnificent in a statuesque, tiger-lithe way. She looked young, her skin smooth, and faintly golden, a heavy mass of shining bronze hair coiled about the haughtily lifted head. Her face was close to the ideal of an ancient Hellenic sculptor, clean straight lines, firm jaw, brilliant gray eyes under heavy brows. She wore a light cuirass over her tunic, sandals, a bat-winged helmet on her head.

"It—ah—it's strange they'd put you in the same cabin with me," said Ballantyne hesitantly.

"Oh, you are safe enough," she grinned.

He flushed, reflecting that the ladies from Centauri were in little danger from any Solar man. Very likely it was the other way around. Then he recalled that their native titles translated into things like warrior, district-ruler, chief, and so on. With their arrogant indifference to mere exploration and ethnology, the Jovians had probably assumed that Dyann Korlas was male. Well, he wasn't going to enlighten them.

He looked up to Urushkidan, who was morosely stuffing a big-bowled pipe. "Ah, I know of your work, of course," he said hesitantly. "I am—was—a nuclear engineer, so maybe I even have some appreciation of what it's about."

The Martian preened. "Doubtless you have grasped it bery well," he said generously. "As well as any Eartman could, which is, of course, saying bery little."

"But, if I may ask, sir, what are you doing here?"

"Oh, I have an inbitation from te Jobian Academy of Science to lecture. Tey are commendably interested and seem to realise my fundamental importance. I will be glad to get off Eart. Te air pressure, te gravity, pfui!"

"But a man, uh, Martian of your distinction—traveling third class—"

"Oh, they sent me a first-class ticket, of course. But I turned it in, bought a tird class, and banked te difference." He scowled darkly at Dyann Korlas. "Tough if I must be treated so—Well." He shrugged. A Martian shrugging is quite a sight. "It is of no matter. We of Uttu—Mars as you insist on calling it—are so incomparably far advanced in te philosophic virtues of serenity, generosity, and modesty tat I can accept wit equanimity."

"Oh," said Ballantyne. To the Centaurian, "And may I ask why you are going to Jupiter—ah—Miss Korlas?"

"You may call me Dyann," she said sweetly, "and I vill call you Ray, so? I vish only to see Yupiter, though I doubt it vill be as glamorous as Earth." Her eyes glowed. "You live in a fable. The flyin and travelin machines, auto—automatic kitchens, television, clocks an vatches, exotic dress. Aah, it vas vorth ten years travelin yust to see them."

* * * * *

Ballantyne reflected on what he knew of Alpha Centauri. Even the fantastically fast new exploratory ships took ten years to cross the interstellar gulf to its wild planets, and there had only been three expeditions so far. The third had brought back a group of curious natives who were to report to their queen what the strangers' homeland was like.

He imagined that the spacemen had had quite a time, with that score of turbulent barbarians crammed into a narrow hull though of course they'd passed almost the whole voyage in suspended animation. The visitors had spent about a year now on Earth and Luna, staring, asking endless questions, wondering what their hosts did with themselves now that the U. N. had brought the nations together and ended war. There hadn't been much trouble. Occasionally one of them would get mad and break somebody's jaw, and then there'd been the one who was invited to speak at a women's club.... He chuckled to himself.

"Are these Yovians humans like you?" asked Dyann.

"Uh-huh," he nodded. "The moons were colonized from Earth about a hundred and twenty-five years ago. They declared their independence about sixty years past, and nobody thought it was worth the trouble to fight about it. Though maybe we should have."

"Vy that?"

"Oh well, the colonists were misfits originally, remnants of the old Eurasian militarisms. They did do heroic work in settling and developing the Jovian System, but they live under a dictatorship and make no bones about despising Earth and considering themselves the destined rulers of all the planets. Last year they grabbed the Saturnian colonies on the thinnest of pretexts, and Earth was too chicken-livered to do more than give them a reproachful look. Not that the U. N. has much of a navy these days, compared to theirs."