The Third Science Fiction Megapack Page 7

  * * * *

  Bill felt his face go warm. He sat up, glared at the big Garthian sprawled on the pillows beside him. “Now look, none of you guys…people…knew about the way your sexes and things worked then either.”

  “Two genders and three sexes?” The Garthian twitched his eyebrows lazily.

  “And…and I don’t quite understand it even yet,” Bill said. “Could you—?”

  “Your ancestor had all the facts himself. He visited the Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl shortly after he—your ancestor—began his crusade for procreative propriety, and while Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl was even then puzzling over the results of his day-bat breeding…”

  * * * *

  “Perhaps,” the hereditary-bridgekeeper had said, “animals do not inherit characteristics in the same clear way that plants do. I have not yet found out, because of the other problem, which seems to be even more interesting than the first.” He had gestured at a tidy row of wicker cages, each containing from two to a half dozen furry day-bats.

  The engineer of the first expedition, one of three Earthmen visiting the bridgekeeper, had been itching to ask about the bridge itself, for he’d never seen a warren truss executed entirely in wood with bronze fastenings before; but the bridgekeeper spoke no Terran, and the engineer had to depend on Dr. Wilkes for translation into the local language. The expedition’s botanist had asked for more details, through Dr. Wilkes, of the Garthian’s hobby, before the engineer changed the topic.

  “Yes, yes,” the hereditary-bridgekeeper had said, “it is that the number of males so affects whether there are day-bat pups. One male, any number of females, no pups. Two males, and in fourteen out of thirty cages, none of the females had pups, not counting, of course, two cages that my third son dropped and broke, and three more where one of the males died. After that, I decided the number of females in the cage be immaterial; either none had pups, or all, always excepting one or two who didn’t like their mates or something.” He had twitched his eyebrows then. “Day-bat females are like all women. Contrary. Howsoever, we had then ten man-bodylengths of decking of the bridge to replace before the seed-shipping season. My third son and my second daughter took over the day-bat breeding then, and did almost as well as I.

  “Let’s see now; with three males in a cage, but five of eighteen cages were without pups, again not counting cages with escaped or sick day-bats.” He had sighed then. “It is not a simple, done-again-easily trial, like the famous Wilj and his measurement of the increase of speed of down-dropping weights from whence he called out the number-rule that all weights—but you Terrans be far beyond our feeble efforts in the study of non-alive things.”

  The engineer had demanded Dr. Wilkes get more details from the bridgekeeper, saying this Wilj sounded like a Garthian Galileo or Newton, but Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl had resumed his account before the psychologist could translate the Terran engineer’s question.

  “Then,” the Garthian had said, “with four males in each cage, we have two out of fourteen cages without pups, leaving out the three cages that my fourth son’s pet fnurr got into. I cannot yet decide if the rule underlying is one half, one third, one fourth; or if it is one half, one fourth, one eighth; with two, then three, then four males.” The native had shaken his head slowly. “It would be much easier if I knew if number-rules in animal-study be simple numbers or messy ones. Or, maybe, I do no better than measure the mood of the lady day-bats, and you know what the mood of any female can be.” He had twitched one eyebrow then…“Now, for the other Terran visitor, I show the bridge and his questions answer.” The botanist had followed the bridgekeeper’s second son back to the wicker cages of lively day-bats, while the other two Terrans followed the bridgekeeper up the abutment of the bridge.

  * * * *

  “…And your ancestor,” the Garthian Immigration official asked Bill, “did his diary hold comment on the bridgekeeper’s work?”

  Bill shook his head. “He didn’t think much…uh—”

  “Go on, speak fact; it be safe.”

  “Yeah…uh…well, Dr. Wilkes…Grandfather didn’t think much of whatever the bridgekeeper was computing on, but he did get all excited about his doing anything scientific since he—the bridge keeper lived alone with his woman and their kids. He figured this proved his argument about monogamy and monotheism and modern technology.” He paused, frowned at the big Garthian, who seemed about to go into convulsions. “But when he tried this in his speech on giving up orgies, at the next village, the…the audience…hey!”

  The muscular Garthian rolled off the pillows, jerking and squirming, yelping and wheezing. Bill scrambled to his feet, wide-eyed with bewilderment, then suddenly realized the Garthian was laughing. He slumped back on the pillows and sat, scowling while the Garthian rolled on the floor.

  “I be sorry, young Wilkes,” the Immigration official finally gasped. He stood up, eyebrows still twitching, brushed himself off, and then stretched his big body on the pillows beside Bill again. “The listeners, ’s fact they would laugh and be thinking he be telling a joke. Hereditary-bridgekeepers be in our jokes as traveling salesmen in yours.”

  “Oh.” Bill started to relax, then frowned in puzzlement. “But how? If they’re off by themselves—”

  “With all the traffic to market and back over the bridge for him to see over and pick from?”

  “Oh.” Bill grinned slowly. “I see. Anyway, Grandfather…uh…went along with the joke, even put it in as a joke on himself, from then on. He must have had a way of talking, getting people—Garthians—all enthusiastic about something. He kept getting guys so sold on his idea that they’d join him and then go out and preach on their own. Of course, not having Earth gadgets and things to show off put the Garthian…uh…assistants back a bit, but they did know the language better. I think he had about ten of them when…when the trouble started.”

  “But about the day-bat breeding?”

  “No pups unless there are two males, and then only half the time?” Bill looked thoughtfully at the native sprawled comfortably beside him. “You’re trying to find out if I can figure it out?”

  The Garthian nodded, face suddenly serious. “Your ancestor did not; it was Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl who found out why, for villages and villages around the Terran landing site, women stopped becoming predicate…no, that is not the word…pregnant.”

  Bill chewed his lip. “Three sexes and two genders. If there were two kinds of males, and you had to have the right one…no, that’s not it, since with one male there were never any pups. And with two…hey, it’s like going to a bureau drawer for socks in the dark, and if there’re two kinds and you want a pair…no, that’s not it either; with three, you always got a pair.” He glanced at the Garthian, grinned at his bewildered expression, and explained.

  “Two kinds of socks in a drawer. You can’t tell which is which when you pick them out. If you take three, you’re sure to have a pair, because if one’s black and the other’s, say, white, then the third one’s got to be either black or white and you’ve got a pair…pair! That’s it.”

  “Pair?” asked the big native, sitting up.

  “With socks, you gotta have two of the same kind. But for…uh breeding, you gotta have opposite kinds, so if you got three, then let’s see, you’d get a fifty-fifty chance that the first two turn out to be the same, so there’s half that chance that the third is like the first two. But that would make it a quarter—one fourth—of the cages without pups, not two out of fourteen, or whatever it was.”

  “Real number-results do be messy, ’s fact,” said the big Garthian. “Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl came to the same thinking you do now.” He twitched his eyebrows once. “But without the trips to the clothes-bucket to get socks. It outcomes as you think, that we be of two genders, male and female; but three sexes, female, one kind of male, other kind of male. Germ cells from all three be necessary for conceptions.”

  “Two kinds of males.” Bill stared at the Garthian for a
moment. “Uh which kind are you?”

  “No usable way to tell. Only difference is which kind of germ cells I make. And it be that we change, now and then, from one male sex to the other.”

  “Damn. No wonder you guys have orgies,” said Bill, shaking his head. “Or at least enough of an orgy for your women to…uh…meet one of each kind of male. But that monogamy crusade Grandfather was on—”

  “Without that, Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl would not easily have persuaded folk of his discovery, so it was not all bad. At the time, however…”

  * * * *

  “Well,” Dr. Wilkes had snapped, “I hope it’s important. Your ’copter landed in the middle of one of the biggest crowds I’ve had yet. I’ll take hours to get them back out of the woods and settled—”

  “It’s important, Doctor. What’s more, you aren’t about to collect your audience again, today or ever. This foolishness has—”

  “Sir! This is unheard of! I am conducting a—”

  “You have been conducting a genocidal pogrom. There hasn’t been a Garthian woman got with child since you started your blasted preaching in the villages, and it’s been spreading, as far as the natives can tell, as fast as your prudery crusade, for the past three months.”

  “Sir! I will not stand here—”

  “You, Doctor, will get in that ’copter or be carried there.”

  Dr. Wilkes got.

  * * * *

  Back at the expedition’s base camp, they had landed to find High-Chief-by-Election Rhyl—High-Chief-by-Election Khlaj having been impeached—and a half-dozen other Garthians waiting for them.

  “What’s this?” the expedition’s captain had demanded.

  “Trial,” the expedition’s botanist had explained. He had become pretty fluent in the local dialects in the past three months, while Wilkes was away on crusade. “Judge, jury, the works.” He had smirked then. “And an indictment, even if it is written on a sheet of bark.”

  “Indictment? Now look here,” Dr. Wilkes had shouted, shifting to the local dialect of Garthian. “Are you blaming me for this supposed infertility of your women?” He had gone on at some length, pointing out that he was hardly expected to know the details of Garthian genetics; diagnosing the sudden lack of pregnancies in the regions he’d been preaching to as a psychosomatic, to be combated by closer adherence to the principles of private, proper procreative practices; and denouncing any theories that might be advanced by anyone of loose morals, such as hereditary-bridgetenders.

  He had stopped for breath at last, whereupon Chief Rhyl announced that he and the jury would withdraw to consider sentence.

  “SENTENCE? Now? When they haven’t even—” Dr. Wilkes turned to the captain: “Are you going to put up with this…this—Why the prosecution hasn’t even stated—”

  “Don’t need to,” the botanist had said, dryly. “Not after that confession of yours.”

  “Confession?” the captain had asked. “But he hadn’t even heard the charge.”

  “Well, seeing that he didn’t wait to hear what it was before he started yelling, that rather confirms it.”

  The captain had grinned, started to snicker. Dr. Wilkes had demanded, “Just what in Space am I charged with, then? I told them I didn’t understand their genetics, but—”

  “Exactly. And the indictment was for the crime of stupidity.”

  “Stupidity?” Bill Wilkes asked. “In the diary—” He frowned. “But stupidity? But if he didn’t know—”

  The muscular native sat up suddenly, face serious. “I know. You Earthmen do not count stupidity among the crimes. But things do.” He pulled from his belt the bronze-headed ax and held it out to Bill. “If you run your hand over the edge, hard, ax will cut. It makes no difference if you didn’t know, or meant well. The ax does not care. Be stupid, get cut. ’S fact?”

  Bill nodded slowly. “Uh…yeah. It…it is fact, O.K. So that’s why the expedition got cut short—the diary didn’t say, and the official report just talked around it, but—”

  “But your ancestor was expelled from Garth for extreme stupidity.”

  “Yeah.” Bill sighed. “I sort of suspect the captain was glad to get away before your people thought of raising a charge of Genocide or Indigenous Interference.”

  The big Garthian twitched his eyebrows a few times as he put away his ax, then lay back on the pillows again. “Why should we? We were being stupid, too—following your ancestor. And as for the stop of pregnancies, that was easy to fix. Fun, too.”

  Bill grinned. “Then…hey, that’s the thing Grandfather never could understand—how you guys managed to get anything done without intraspecific competition…uh…you know, competing for wives and stuff. Instead, you just invite in the neighbors and…you know.”

  “So? We be puzzled about how you manage with so much competition. ’S fact, though, that with you, take the job of immigrations. You would have a clerk, and a high clerk to be bossy to him, and a higher clerk over him, and then a committee to be boss over them, all because of your competition-drive. Here, I be in charge. If I do well, other Garthians leave my job alone. If I do badly, I get expelled from job. You see? Low drive to be bossy, low drive to keep other person from interfering. Works out almost the same, both ways.”

  “And so, you’re the…the only one to decide I’ll get onto the planet? I suppose, because Grandfather was so stupid, you’re afraid that…hey, what about the statues? Or—”

  “Statues we be putting up of your ancestor?” He looked somehow embarrassed for a moment as he went on, “Look at it from the Garthian position, be Garthian for a short time. Earthmen arrive out of the sky, with flying machines, overwhelming powers, great wisdom, everything. All suddenly, we be stupid, weak, nothing. And your ancestor told us we were even wrong in our way of reproducing, in groups; and if we changed, we could be like Earthmen. Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl said no, we must reproduce our way. So: your ancestor was wrong and Hereditary-Bridgekeeper Tjarl was right.”

  “So the statues are to…to remind you guys how dense Terrans can be? And you’re worried that I’m not smart enough to allow onto your planet?”

  “Partly fact, partly not,” said the big Garthian. “’S fact we be careful who we let onto planet now. And ’s fact your ancestor be…well, the standard of stupidity on Garth. He be very useful, telling us always that Earthmen are not all smarter, just started sooner, telling us we can catch up in our own way.” He sat up beside Bill, put a thick arm across the young man’s shoulders. “You be not stupid, young Wilkes. It is the other way around, with the importance of keeping…how you say…down your ancestor’s reputation.”

  “You mean?” Bill grinned.

  “’S fact. You’re not stupid enough to run around loose on Garth.”

  JACKPOT, by E. C. Tubb

  The sphere was two inches in diameter and of a blackness so intense it appeared a two-dimensional circle against the gray, crackle-finish of the test bench.

  “Something new?”

  McCarty crossed the compartment in three easy strides. He eased the pack from broad shoulders took the pipe from his mouth and poked the sphere with the stem. The thing was solid but light; the thrust of the pipe sent it rolling across the bench.

  “Careful!”

  Larman reached out a hand to form a barrier The sphere came to a halt. McCarty raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “Dangerous?”

  It was, Larman knew, a question tantamount to an insult. McCarty knew that Larman had better sense than to introduce anything dangerous into the ship. Only an idiot would deliberately court disaster and Larman was far from that.

  “Not dangerous,” he said stiffly. “Only curious.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  McCarty squatted and examined the sphere, sucking at his pipe as he did so. He never smoked it, only sucked it, and it was a habit which grated on his companion’s nerves. It was odd, thought Larman, how hateful that pipe made McCarty. His own habit, that of chewing gum was, of co
urse nothing in comparison.

  “I’ve tested it,” said Larman. He stilled the unspoken protest. “Not in the ship. I assembled a test-rig outside and gave it the works. It’s as dangerous as putty…”

  McCarty twitched his eyebrows.

  “A native brought it,” explained Larman. He had grown used to the others signals. “While you were away. How did you make out?”

  “Nothing worth the trouble of hauling. Well?”

  “He came about an hour after you’d gone. I took a chance and gave him a handful of beads for it.” Larman drew a deep breath. This was his moment.

  “A handful of beads!” McCarty almost exploded “For something as valuable as putty!”

  “No. For the Jackpot!”

  * * * *

  Every trader dreamed of the Jackpot. Hard-bitten wanderers woke in their patched- up cans smiling like babies at the thought of it. Burned-out wrecks wept m their liquor and dragged themselves out for one more try at finding it. A few, a very few, found it. The Jackpot! The thing that spelt fortune.

  Glusky had found it on Eridani IV, a weed he had smoked in lieu of tobacco—and found he had stumbled on the secret of doubling the life-span. Hilbrain had, literally, fallen over it on Rigel VII, the ore he had sworn at now lined half the rocket tubes in the galaxy. Bensen, Kildare, a handful of others, all keeping alive the legend. One for ten thousand traders who died broke or simply vanished. It was enough.

  “Are you sure?” McCarty didn’t raise his voice but muscle made ridges along the line of his jaw. It was no time for joking.

  “I’m sure.” Larman reached out and picked up the sphere. He rolled it between his palms then threw it at the other man. “Catch!”

  McCarty caught. He stared down at the pool of utter blackness cradled in his hands, then at Larman, then at the sphere again. When he put it down he was frowning.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know!”

  McCarty was tired. He’d had a hard three days trading with the natives without financial success and his nerves were ragged with the effort of adhering to the complicated ritual governing such operations. His head ached, too, from the weight of the translator and he wanted a shower. With a visible effort he controlled himself.