Ajax Jumped. “What? Is that moose still hanging around here? Why, he’s been nosing around the property for days! If he gets to moosing around in my begonias… Jenkins!”
“Yes, sir?”
“My elephant gun. I’m going to shoot a moose.”
There was a long moment of silence. The benign expression carved on Jenkins’ face did not, of course, change, but you sensed a certain question in the air.
With great dignity, Ajax said carefully, “I don’t have a moose gun, you know.”
Jenkins nodded deferentially. “Very good, sir.” He vanished through the door.
Emily regarded him doubtfully. “Ajax… you’re really going to kill the poor little thing?”
He snorted with fine masculine contempt for typical feminine daintiness. “I certainly am! Surely a monarch has the royal right to protect his begonias from bestial molestation. I’ll show you what good hunters we kings are! Jenkins? Step on the jets with that elephant gun, before the beggar ambles off somewhere into the tundra!”
“Here you are, sir.” Jenkins reappeared, holding a 21st Century needle-beam laser rifle, custom-fitted to resemble an antique African safari-gun out of the days of Allan Quatermain. Hefting it with manly anticipation, Ajax strode out onto the porch, followed by Emily.
“Hah! The great hulking beast hasn’t even got the sense to move along when a hunter hoves into view! Gad, Emily—what a triumph! To cut down a moose right on one’s own veranda! What a trophy!” He leveled the elephant gun; allowing the robot sighting-mechanism to adjust the aiming mechanism automatically. Then a small light flashed amid the scrollwork of curlicues with which the stock was adorned. Ready to fire…
“Oh, Ajax… couldn’t you just shoo him away, or something?”
He fired.
Now moose are not noted for any razor-keen intellect; but this particular moose displayed not only a very un-moose-like curiosity about the doings of humans, but also an incredibly agile instinct for self-preservation. It had been gazing at the two people on the veranda quite intently. As Ajax lifted the rifle to his shoulder, something inside the animal seemed to snap alert. Its eyes dilated with an expression distinctly un-mooselike, and it dodged to one side with a fantastic blur of speed…
But not fast enough to frustrate the radar-guided, computer-linked aiming mechanism with which this rifle had been fitted out. The dazzling needle-beam of ruby fire slashed directly through the central region of the moose.
Its reaction to this was even more un-mooselike.
It exploded with an eye-searing flash of green flame and a clap of thunder that shook the evergreens!
When the smoke had cleared away; Ajax and Emily stood open-mouthed and spellbound.
Emily said firmly, “That was no moose!”
It was the most accurate statement of the day thus far. Ajax closed his mouth, gulped, and agreed in a shaky voice.
“Let’s get over there and take a look at the remains,” Emily suggested.
“Righto!”
Within moments the two, astride a low-flying ground-skimmer, had whistled across the shore and the rows of evergreens that bordered the estate and arrived at the scene of the explosion.
The moose had been a moose only to the unaided eye, as a quick glance at the corpse proved. It was a hollow shell of a moose, in fact, stuffed with machinery. And for the pilot of this weird contraption, they found a now-quiescent mass of what looked like a poor grade of lime gelatine swiftly melting away.
“A… Saturnian,” Ajax said dumbly. He exchanged a long look with the equally flabbergasted Miss Hackenschmidt. And he was right. Over the decomposing Amoeba-Man, they looked at each other with a wild surmise.
The interplanetary war had not waited on Ajax’s royal decision; it had landed smack on his front doorstep.
III
Dinner was a moody, silent Affair. Jenkins had put together a few snacks from the pantry, with the aid of Tompkins the robo-chef: roast brisket of Martian land-eel in sandberry cream sauce, Venusian swamp-cabbage stuffed with chives, the whole washed down with a bottle of antique Taylor’s port of the fabulous 1967 vintage, worth a bureaucrat’s ransom. Despite the elaborate, gourmet-tempting variety of this modest little “snack,” neither Ajax nor Emily did more than pick at their meal. The torrent of questions seething through their minds, distracted them from their appetites.
Why had the Saturnian spy been lurking about the grounds of Ajax Calkins’ country cottage (as he thought of it)?
When had the mechanical moose first begun spying on the wealthy monarch of Ajaxia?
What was this overtly hostile act of electronic espionage a prelude to?
Heaving a heartfelt sigh, Ajax pushed aside the heavily laden plate of now-cooling food, and permitted the solicitous Jenkins to pour him a snifter of after-dinner brandy. He took a heavy gulp of it with no more attention to its tender bouquet than if it had been plain cold water and not a rare vintage of Martian snow-grape brandy, fetched hither at enormous expense from the Calkins’ vineyards in the snowcap region of the South Pole of Mars.
Standing up, he gestured listlessly toward an adjoining room.
“Well… shall we adjourn to the conservatory?”
Emily shrugged, but rose and joined him.
“I still think you…”
“I know, I know.” He nodded wearily. “You think I should videophone the Wuj and ask if everything is all right in my kingdom of Ajaxia.”
“Yes I do,” she bristled. “And I can’t for the life of me understand why you don’t!”
Preceding the girl into the conservatory (a royal prerogative), he collapsed limply in a large contour chair that conformed pneumatically to his position with a wheeze of compressed air. She sat down across from him, setting her crystal brandy goblet down on the bench with an angry little clack.
“My dear Miss Hackenschmidt…” he began.
“A-jax! I warned you not to call me that. I am your fiancee, you know.”
“Miss Hackenschmidt, my dear,” he corrected with vast aplomb, “in my absence, the Wuj is acting Prime Minister of the kingdom and perfectly capable of making all decisions of state needed in such small matters as may arise.”
“But… !”
“But,” he added amiably, “it behooves me, as his beloved leader and sovereign, to bestow my trust in the Wuj. It is the first duty of a monarch to permit his ministers to perform their duties without constant supervision. How can I encourage the executive abilities of my underlings, if I constantly peer over his—over their—shoulders every moment?”
She stamped a small booted foot angrily.
“Ajax, you are just impossible! You live in this dreamworld where you are some kind of latter-day Kublai Khan… At first, I thought it was just a gag, but I’m beginning to think you’re really serious. You really believe in this guff about owning a kingdom, don’t you?”
Shocked from his reverie, he flashed her a wrathful look.
“Believe in it? Of course I believe in it—the EMSA-Ajaxian Treaty…”
She waved a hand as if to clear the air.
“Oh, stop. Of course—legally, technically—you are a king. But I’m talking about facts! This kingdom of yours is nothing more than a big, fat antique spaceship left over from pre-explosion days—the largest surviving artifact of the unknown Asteroidal civilization that was destroyed when the fifth planet was exploded aeons ago and its pieces formed the asteroids. And these ‘underlings’ and ‘ministers’ you keep yammering on about just—don’t—exist! There’s nothing to your flacking ‘royal kingdom’ but one forlorn little spiderman sitting up there all alone. Come down to Earth, Ajax, and talk facts.”