“Now how do we get out of here?” The First Captain asked the fat man.
“If you promise me my life, I will help you leave.” The fat man said. “Otherwise, why should I help you? No one besides me knows how to open the cover to the cavern. And its made of such strong stone that you couldn’t open it even with gravity bombs.”
“If you don’t want to talk, don’t..” The First Captain laughed. “We can wait until hour friend Krys awakens and I have no doubt he will be delighted to help us.”
The two Captains stood side by side, one of them sunburned and healthy and dressed in a new space suit, the other worn, exhausted, and thin, but they still looked like they could have been brothers, and I was starting to like them. In the flesh they were far better than as stone monuments on the Three Captain’s World. The First Captain had his arm around his friend’s shoulder, and the two of them stood over the fat man as though he were a large toad.
“No.” The fat man said. “No way I’ll help you. You can die here!”
“We’re certainly not going to die.” The Second Captain said. “Now, I and my friends…” He waved his arm to include all of us, not just the First Captain and Doctor Verkhovtseff, but me and Poloskov and Zeleny and Alice from the Pegasus, because we had also come to help him alothough we had never met him before, “have no fear from any pirates any longer. If we have to we can depart in the First Captain’s ship and return later to retrieve our ships.”
Veselchak U had started to bend. He had come to under5stand taht they did not have to deal with him, and was about to begin to talk, when Zeleny ruined it all.
“No.” Zeleny said. “First of all I am not going to just abandon my ship. If I have to I’ll just stay here and wait. And anyway someone has to feed the animals. Just tell us how to open the blasted lock!”.
That was just not the way to talk to the fat man, the way Zeleny did. You can’t ask anything from pirates; they’ll just become insolent and demand more and more.
When the fat man heard Zeleny’s words he grew emboldened. “No,” he said, “give me written assurances that I will remain alive, then I will let everyone out of here.
The Captain’s just looked at Zeleny, but no one said anything.
“Too bad.” The Frist Captain said. “Then we wait. We’ll give you ten minutes, Veselchak U; think it over. We’re the ones with the time.
“He’s right.” The Second Captain spoke up. “But in the meantime you can tell us how you found us, First. I take it the Blabberyap bird never reached you”
“While you talk I’ll make some sandwiches.” Zeleny said in a guilty voice. “I take it we’re all starving.”
“Fine.” One of the Captains said.
“I’d help you, Zeleny.” Alice said. “But I really am too interested to hear what the First Captain has to say to tear myself away from here.”
“Stay if you want, Alice.” The First Captain said. “Without you we could never have saved our friends.”
“I couldn’t have done anything without you.” Alice said and turned red from pride.
“Alice,” I said severely, “go wash you hands and straighten yourself out. “You’re as dirty as a swamp mole from the planet Vukanata.”
“You don’t have to blame me for it.” Alice did not quite argue with me. “A mole does what a mole has to do.”
She hurried off to the ship, shouting as she went:
“Just don’t start the story without me!”
The First Captain turned to Veselchak U and asked him ravnodushno:
“Have you thought it over yet?”
The pirate laughed fawningly. His eyes had sunk back into the folds of skin on his head.
“Let’s make a deal, Captain.” He said. “We’re both business people.”
The Captain ignored him.
Alice returned in two minutes. I noted that here hands were only washed so so, but she had replaced the filthy yellow jumpsuit with another one, a blue one.
Alice was followed by a very timid and hesitant emoticator. On pryamo razryvalsya na chasti, tak emu hotelos’ povsyudu uspet’. He was not so much an animal as a living rainbow. After him waddled the always busy Sewing Spider. At the moment he was completing three mittens, although each of them was right handed.
“Everyone here?” The First Captain laughed, looking over the odd parade. “Well, then I have to begin right at the very begining, although my role in this tale is rather meager. I’ve spent the last four years on Venus; it turns out that it is almost impossible to turn a large planet into a space ship and move it to a different orbit; please, I said almost, because we’re certainly going to do it.”
“That’s right.” Alice said. “It’s very sad that I don’t have such a strong character.”
“Character is obtained through education.” The Captain smiled. “Look at the Sewing Spider, at his enviable persistence! Now, if he could just learn to tell the difference between right and left he would be priceless.”
“Now that’s a great example for me!” Alice brushed aside the Sewing Spider. “He’s really stupid!”
“Well, the fact is, so far no one has mentioned simple persistence. For the four years that I was there Venus hadn’t been moved a centimeter off its old orbit, and we had been working for it, planning, setting he plans in motion, arguing back and forth all the time endlessly I had been hoping I’d get back to see the start of Venus’s orbital shift. There really wasn’t long to go.”
“And then the climate of Venus is going to change?”
“In a big way. So much that after a few decades people will be able to live there, just as they do on Earth.”
“Then we should call it Earth-2.” Alice said.
“Whatever for. It will remain Venus. Why do you think there’s anything wrong with that name?”
Alice did not answer, but I would say she did not like Venus’s old name very much at all. She had once told me we shouldn’t go around giving bestowing planets with the names of defunct gods that had done nothing to earn the honor.
“I was so busy with my work that I did not even notice the four years passing.” The First Captain continued with his story. I have to admit that I was not very worried about my friends, because I knew just how far the fates had taken them from me. The Third Captain would be years more in returning from Andromeda, and you, Second, had told me not to bother you for four years.”
“But didn’t you get bored sitting on just once planet,” Alice aasked, “and not flying to other star systems?”
“It’s a complicated question, Alice.” The First Captain answered seriously. “Yes, I do want to stand on the bridge of a starship as captain and land on unknown planets again. But I knew that my experience would be very useful in the Sol System. And I really must tell you that I love unsolved questions and unfinished projects.”
“And your wife,” Alice continued her questioning, giving the Captain no rest. “in the mean time she’s been flying all over the Galaxy looking for a living nebula. You must have envied her furiously.”
“I certainly did.” The Captain admitted. “And I’ll envy her even more when she finds it.”
“That you will not have to worry about.” I got involved in the conversation. “There are no such things as living interstellar gaseous nebulae. No more than there are living, sentient planets.”
“Now in that you are quite mistaken, Professor.” The Second Captain said. “I once had the chance to see a living planet. I almost didn’t get away. It feeds on whatever it drags down from space. Lucky for me the Blue Gull had such powerful engines.”
“Very curious.” I said. “We’ll speak about that later, but in the meantime I am uninformed about that particular wonder.”