Masters of the Galaxy Read online

  “Nice trick,” I said to a human who was walking down the aisle, hawking candies and the wriggling little wormlike things that the Mollutei eat for snacks.

  “That’s no trick,” he said. “Those are real knives. If he throws one into you, you die.”

  “Then why didn’t she die?”

  “Mutant. Her blood coagulates instantly, and her skin heals by the next morning—and he really is a good aim. He always misses her vital organs.”

  “That doesn’t explain why the shock and pain doesn’t kill her.”

  “She had all her pain receptors surgically disconnected.”

  “Are you guessing, or do you know that for a fact?”

  He smiled. “She’s my sister.”

  I bought a candy bar from him to cement our friendship, then asked another question. “I’m looking for a Gromite who might be working here as a juggler. Have you seen one?”

  “Sure. You want Crunchtime.”

  “Crunchtime?” I repeated.

  “That’s not his name, but it’s as close as I can come to pronouncing it, and he answers to it. Most everyone calls him that now.”

  “Is he traveling with a human, a young man maybe 19 or 20 years old, kind of slender, maybe two or three inches over six feet?”

  “Never saw him in the act, and I don’t mix with aliens when I’m on my own time.”

  “When is Crunchtime due to appear?”

  He glanced at the ring, where a Canphorite was putting some huge forty-ton creature through its paces, tossing it a ball, making it stand on its back four legs, climbing into its huge maw.

  “Soon as this guy and his pet are done.”

  “Some pet,” I remarked.

  “Yeah, I know, it looks like it could eat half the audience for breakfast, but it’s really a herbivore. Friendliest damned monster you ever saw. It loves everybody.”

  You live and learn. The deadliest killer I ever came across looked like a milquetoast who’d faint if you just frowned at him.

  I waited until the Canphorite and his pet left the ring, and then a trio of jugglers entered—one human, one Lodinite, and one Gromite. And since the Gromite I sought had been a juggler and a guy who had a difficult time with alien names had dubbed this Gromite Crunchtime, I was pretty sure I’d found Crozchziim.

  I have to admit he was damned good as what he did. He kept six or seven objects of different shapes and weights going at once, then tossed them even higher and got an even dozen in motion. I’d assumed that sooner or later the three of them would start juggling things back and forth, but none of them even acknowledged the others’ existence until they all took their bows a few minutes later.

  When they left the ring I handed the candy bar to a little girl, then walked to the exit they’d used and was soon just a few steps behind the Gromite.

  “Hey, Crunchtime!” I called.

  He stopped and turned to face me.

  “Do I know you?” he asked in perfect Terran.

  “Not yet,” I said. “My name’s Jake Masters.”

  “Mine is Crozchziim.”

  “I know. Will you settle for Crunchtime? It’s a hell of a lot easier for me to pronounce.”

  He nodded his head, which startled me. The way he was put together, it looked like it was about to fall off. “What do you want of me, Mr. Masters?”

  “I just want to ask you a few questions,” I said. “You used to work for Beatrice Vanderwycke, right?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You left in kind of a hurry.”

  “She doesn’t want me back,” he said, “and she is not the type to send you all this way to present me with my vacation pay—so why are you here?”

  I pulled out my card. “Can you read Terran?” He nodded again, and I handed it to him. “I’ve been hired to find her son.”

  “And do what?”

  “Bring him back.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s not my concern,” I said.

  “It should be,” said Crunchtime.

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Before you disrupt an innocent young man’s life, don’t you think you should know why you’re doing it?”

  “She’s his mother and she’s worried about him,” I said.

  He stared at me, and when he was done I knew what a sneer of contempt and disbelief from a Gromite looked like.

  Finally he spoke. “Tell Mrs. Vanderwycke he is safe and healthy and she has nothing to worry about. Now your job is done. Goodbye, Mr. Masters.”

  “Let him tell me,” I said.

  “He has no desire to see anyone connected with his mother,” said the Gromite.

  “His father’s concerned too.”

  “His father had seen him a total of 27 days since he was born. It is difficult to believe that he is suddenly concerned about the boy’s well-being.”

  “So nobody cares about him except you?”

  “Melanie Grimes does,” said Crunchtime. “But you already know that. Who else would have given you my name?”

  “She trusted me enough to tell me that Andy was probably traveling with you. Why can’t you trust me enough to tell me where he is?”

  “I have my reasons, and Andy has his.”

  “Why not make things easy on both of us and cooperate with me?” I said reasonably. “You know I’m going to find him with or without your help.”

  “Without.” He paused and stared at me for a long minute. “You may think you know what this is about, Mr. Masters, but I assure you that you have no idea whatsoever.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Keep out of matters that don’t concern you,” said Crunchtime. “If you find him and take him back before he’s ready, you will be responsible for whatever happens.”

  “Before he’s ready for what?” I demanded. “And what do you expect to happen?”

  “I have said enough. I will speak no further. This interview is over.”

  He turned and walked away. I considered following him, but decided it was a waste of time. The kid had to know his mother would send someone after him; he probably had a prearranged set of signals with Crunchtime to warn him when anyone showed up.

  I spent the rest of the night wandering through the sideshows, searching for Andy Vanderwycke. I had his holo with me, but I never had a chance to use it, because I never saw a young man of his height and build. As the crowds thinned out I began looking behind the kiosks. I turned up a couple half my age having sex behind a shooting gallery, three men and two aliens who were so zoned out on booze or drugs that nothing was going to wake them before morning, and ten or twelve hucksters of all races selling contraband items, some of which made no sense to me.

  One bedraggled man approached me with some truly unique pornography—an animated deck of cards with a queen of hearts I still dream about—and another tried to sell me a pair of hallucinogenic alphanella seeds, which are illegal on just about every world in the Democracy. I asked each of them if they had seen anyone answering to Andy’s description, but once they saw I wasn’t about to buy their goods they muttered their negatives and went looking for some other sucker.

  When an Andrican hooker who looked like a four-foot tall Tinker Bell, complete with wings and a voice that sounded like gentle chimes, hinted at what she would like to do for or to me, I pulled out a fifty-credit note and told her I wasn’t interested in what she was selling but I’d give her the money if she could tell me where to find Andy Vanderwycke. She explained that she didn’t know any human male called Andy, but if I was after male companionship her uncle was available.

  Finally I stumbled upon Prospero the Living Encyclopedia, a humanoid alien. To this day I don’t know what race he belonged to; from a distance he could pass for a man, but when you got close to him you noticed the lidless eyes with the slit pupils, the third nostril, and the hair that was constantly weaving itself into new patterns.

  Prospero’s booth was at the far end of the midway, and he offered a prize of one hund
red New Rhodesia shillings to anyone who asked him a question that he couldn’t answer. He was really remarkable: he knew the time for the fastest mile ever run on Greenveldt, the gross planetary product of Far London, and the copyright date of the Canphorite poet Tanblixt’s first book.

  Finally I stepped up and faced him.

  “Greetings, my good sir,” he said in sibilant Terran, and now that I was standing right in front of him I saw that his tongue was forked, not like a snake’s but like a real fork, with four distinct tines. “And what question do you wish the magnificent Prospero to answer?”

  “I’m looking for a human named Andy Vanderwycke,” I said. “Is he with the carnival?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Only one question to a customer, good sir,” said Prospero with a very alien smile.

  “I’ll just get back in line and ask again,” I told him.

  “That is your privilege.”

  So I went to the back of the line, waited half an hour to reach the front again, and walked up to him.

  “Remember me?” I said.

  “The all-seeing and all-knowing Prospero remembers everything. What is your question, good sir?”

  “Where can I find Andy Vanderwycke?”

  “At the Benzagari Carnival and Sideshow.”

  “Where at the carnival?”

  “I’m sorry, good sir, but each patron is limited to only one question.”

  “I can keep this up as long as you can,” I said irritably. “And I can get a lot nastier about it. Why don’t you make it easy on both of us?”

  “Good sir, you are causing a disturbance,” said Prospero. “Please do not force me to call for Security.”

  The line was shorter this time, and I was facing him again in another seven or eight minutes.

  “Consider your question very carefully, good sir,” he said when I confronted him. “The show will be shutting down in another five minutes.”

  “Okay, this is my question: No matter how often I ask or how I word it, you’re not going to tell me what I want to know, are you?”

  “No, good sir, I am not. Next?”

  I stepped aside, considered waiting for him to leave his booth, and decided against it. Carnies always stuck together against outsiders. It was possible that I could beat the information out of him—but if I couldn’t, then by morning not a single member of the carnival would ever speak to me again, and that’s assuming I wasn’t arrested for assault.

  Within half an hour the entire show was shut down. I was about to hunt up someplace to spend the night when I saw them starting to break down the tents.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the insectoid alien who seemed to be in charge of the work crew.

  “We open on Aristides IV in two days, and it will take a day to set up there,” he squeaked at me.

  “But you’ve only been on New Rhodesia for two nights,” I said.

  “We’re only here because we were thrown off of Brutus II,” was his answer. “Our next scheduled playdate is Aristides.”

  I considered trying to hitch a ride with the carny, but I knew Crunchtime would have alerted Benzagari about my snooping around, and there was no way I could go with them except as a stowaway. So, since all my expenses were being paid, I went back to the spaceport and booked passage to Aristides IV, then rented a room at the spaceport hotel. The ship didn’t leave until midday, and when I showed up they told me that the carny’s chartered ship left at dawn, so Andy Vanderwycke was going to have half a day to hide before I got there.

  When the ship touched down and I’d cleared Customs, I asked an information computer where the carnival was setting up shop, and was informed that they’d be playing at the local indoor stadium.

  I didn’t like that at all. If they’d taken their tents out into the countryside, the crew would be staying with the show, and I’d at least know where to start looking. But if they hadn’t unpacked the tents, that meant they’d be staying in hotels.

  Aristides IV was like most Democracy worlds—Men lived where they wanted, and all the other races were confined to the Alien Quarter. Maybe Andy was new at being on the run but most members of a carny have spent their entire lives avoiding spouses, bill collectors, or the police, and they’d have given him a quick education in laying low. And the first thing they’d have told him was not to stay where they stayed. They could misdirect me and protect him out in the countryside, but not in a hotel on a strange world. It would be too easy for me to bribe a desk clerk or bartender, too easy for an experienced detective to crack any computer lock on any door.

  So if he had half a brain, he wouldn’t be where I could pay a few credits or let myself into a few rooms to find him. If it was me and I was traveling with a Gromite, I’d be hiding with him in the Alien Quarter until I had to show up for work, and I granted the kid enough smarts or access to enough advice to do the same.

  In one way, it made my job more difficult, because aliens stick together the way carnies do, and they don’t like Men walking through the little piece of each city that’s reserved for them. On the other hand, a six-foot three-inch human would be a lot easier to spot in the Alien Quarter than in a string of hotels and restaurants populated by nothing but Men.

  I took the slidewalk out of the spaceport, moved over to the expresswalk, and found myself at the edge of the Quarter a few minutes later. A Lodinite patrolled the gate, and gave me the standard warning about how no one could be held responsible for anything that happened to me once I left the human section of the city and entered the Alien Quarter. He recited the usual liturgy about how aliens were justifiably resentful of their status on human worlds, and that even though I was doubtless in no way responsible I nonetheless represented the race of Man and they might be inclined to take out their frustration on me. When I answered that I knew all that and told him to cut the lecture short, he glared at me and then announced that the gate’s sensors had detected a weapon that was hidden from sight.

  I pulled my burner out and showed it to him.

  “This is a Stern and Mason laser pistol, Model ZQ, purchased on Odysseus, registration number 362LV5413. If you’ll check my passport, you’ll see that I’m licensed to carry it.”

  He ran a micro-scanner across my passport disk, then deactivated it.

  “I would recommend that you keep it concealed,” he said stiffly. “No other race is allowed to own or carry weapons on Aristides, and displaying it would just increase resentment, which is present already.”

  “I wasn’t displaying it when your sensor spotted it,” I pointed out.

  He had no response to that, so he waited another minute just to annoy me and then let me pass through the gate.

  I was a block into the Alien Quarter before the smell hit me. It was kind of a cross between rotting flesh and raw sewage, and it got stronger the farther I proceeded.

  The squalor was almost unbelievable. Alien waste washed slowly along the street gutters, exposed to the air, going God knew where. Everything was in a state of decay, doors and windows were rotting or missing, dead animals and the occasional dead alien lay on the streets and slidewalks. Here and there undernourished alien children, most of them naked or nearly so, played incomprehensible games. When they saw me every last one of them rushed up, hand or paw or tentacle extended, begging for food or money.

  I tried to ignore them, but they wouldn’t go away and fell into step behind me. Finally I figured I might as well see if I could make some use of them, so I stopped, turned, and asked if any of them knew where the performers from the carnival were staying. I got nothing but blank looks, and I realized that none of them were wearing t-packs, so they couldn’t understand me.

  After another block I came upon an ancient Triskargi who had a tarnished t-pack hung around his neck. He looked like he wanted to hop away on his froglike legs as I approached him, but when he saw all the children he seemed reassured that I wasn’t out to harm him and he stayed where he was.


  “Hi,” I said. “None of the kids can understand me.”

  “They have no t-packs,” he said.

  “I know. But there are a couple of Triskargi kids among them. You can speak to them, and most of them seem to understand each other, so they’ve probably developed some sort of lingua franca to communicate among themselves. I want you to ask them if they know where the carnival performers are staying.”

  It took a few minutes, because the old Triskargi had no idea what a carnival was, but finally he understood and relayed the question. One of the Canphorite kids—I never remember which ones come from Canphor VI and which from Canphor VII—said he could lead me to some of them. He wanted seventeen trillion credits for his services. We negotiated, and I talked him down to twenty credits.

  “Have him tell his friends not to follow us,” I told the Triskargi. “If they hear us all coming, they’ll have time to hide.”

  “They are entertainers,” he said. “Why should they hide?”

  “Just tell him.”

  He did as I asked, and the Canphorite child and I set out to the west. The planet’s four moons were all out in midafternoon, casting strange flickering shadows across the Quarter. I was going to ask my guide for the names of the moons, but then I remembered he couldn’t understand me, so I just followed him in silence.

  Finally we stopped at a deep burrow, and the child turned and looked at me.

  “Is this it?” I asked.

  He couldn’t understand my words, but he knew what I was asking. He pointed into the burrow.

  I thanked him, tipped him another ten credits, watched him race back toward his playmates, and then I entered the burrow. The tunnels, which were about ten feet high and almost as wide, descended at about a twenty-degree angle, twisting and winding, occasionally broadening into what passed for a room. It was almost an underground city. A number of aliens saw me, but no one greeted me or tried to stop me. They simply stared in silence, as if this intrusion was just one more humiliation they were being forced to suffer.

  At last the ground began to level out, and I came to a tall, heavily-muscled Sett who was wearing a t-pack.