The M-Ditsch arrived early the day before the historic meeting in a flurry of ceremony that seemed to consist of much hooting and stomping as the coterie of Bros gathered to welcome their illustrious leader, each one holding a ceremonial dagger behind his back while the M-Ditsch crept in cautiously, never taking his eyes off of his staff—aka his possible successors—and keeping his back to the wall.
The M-Ditsch was an imposing figure, clad in shining armor and armed with an arsenal of weapons that turned him into a walking fortress. No sooner had the leader come into the hall than he dropped an enormous pile of documents on the floor. As some of the Bros rushed forward to grab pieces of this largess the M-Ditsch leaped back, letting no Bingnagian get behind him.
One of the more ingratiating members of the group, the ingratiating Bro T, offered the great M-Ditsch a round object that it held in its claw. It appeared to be one of the edible sweets that Bro T constantly consumed. There was a small nibble, hardly noticeable, taken out of one side. The M-Ditsch slapped it away so quickly that Sam wondered if poison was a possibility.
As soon as all the papers had been picked up, the M-Ditsch moved sideways and entered a room with a set of imposing locks on the obviously heavily fortified door. No sooner was he inside than he slammed the door shut.
“We must work on these,” Bro B said as he directed the other Bro boys to various rooms to handle the papers. “We’ve got to get this week’s work out of the way before the signing ceremony.”
“When can I meet with the M-Ditsch?” Sam asked.
“At the ceremony,” Bro B said confidently. “The M-Ditsch is very anxious to get it over with.”
The arrival of the Gormlie leader was somewhat less imposing. A Bingnagian guard and a small party of Adrinns were carrying a transparent tray that appeared to be filled with sand. Small black dots crawled through tunnels behind the glass.
“You mean that the Gormlies are ants!” Sam exclaimed. No wonder that they didn’t want to share the plains with the stomping Bingnagians; one misstep and an entire city could be wiped out. He wondered how many more insectile races there were in the galaxy?
The Adrinns took the Gormlies into the room that had been prepared for them. From the brief glance he had, Sam saw that sand had been spread all over the floor and a blazing lamp bathed the room in a warm, golden glow.
“Tomorrow will be a historic day,” Bro B said. “A day we will surrender our planet to these, these... pests!” There was no doubting the vituperation in his voice. Clearly, Bro B did not like the forced compromise the M-Ditsch was to sign.
Sam sat on the huge chair in his room and went over the long, three-part document that had been prepared for the ceremony. One section was written in standard Glax, a second in the thick Bingnagian script, and finally, one with the tiny, nearly microscopic lines that must be the Gormlies’ writing. Sam thought that if he had a microscope he could examine that section; that is, if he also could read their language.
Deciphering the Glax portion was chore enough, since Glax had seventy-four cases, seventeen tenses, and depended on position to denote whether a word was a noun, adjective, adverb, verb, or tush, this last being rather a weak appellation or strong modifier of whatever preceded it.
There was a knock on the door. When he opened it the Adrinns were standing there, surrounded by their ever-present Bingnagian guards.
“Party, party,” one of the Adrinns barked at Sam. “Celebrate, celebrate!” With those words the little creatures rushed into Sam’s room. One of them ran the water in the pool and they all began splashing around. Despite the playful aspect of what they were doing, the Adrinns seemed not to be having much fun. Each of them was dutifully splashing water on the others, immersing itself and then shaking off, and barking. It was almost as if it were a well-rehearsed performance of aliens enjoying themselves.
One of them picked up Dratte’s gift and began tossing it around as if it were a beach ball. Clearly it was just at the limits of what Sam thought they could handle.
“Our place, our place,” one of them shouted and, in an instant they were all out of the pool and heading for the door. “Come, come,” they yelled and pulled Sam along with them.
The guards plodded along behind. One of them shut Sam’s door.
The party with the quicksilver Adrinns was rather surreal, Sam thought. For one thing the little rascals appeared able to consume great quantities of alcohol, pouring tumblerfuls through several and various holes along their carapaces with much giggling and laughter. Despite their suggestions to the contrary, Sam decided to use only one of his several orifices for ingesting the potent brew the aliens had brought. It had a faint taste of gasoline and spice, but left a rather pleasant afterglow. By the fifth or sixth tumblerful he could hardly taste the gasoline or the spice. By the seventh he couldn’t taste, period.
There was a game, he recalled with some limited clarity, that involved guessing in which hand a stone was hidden. He tended to lose a lot because he had only two hands while his opponents had six. Or twelve, or whatever. The odds stopped mattering after a while.
It was with some effort that the helpful Adrinns assisted Sam back to his room where they dumped him on the bed and left with the Bingnagian guards, all of whom looked rather bored by the human’s limited capacity. But then, none of them had imbibed the Adrinns’ whiskey.
Sam dreamt that he was being pursued by a pack of tiny kittens through a putrid swamp whose air was so pungent that he could hardly breathe. Jumping from hummock to hummock, some of which were huge slugs, Sam managed to stay barely one leap ahead of the pursuing pussies, their slashing whips, and their flaming weapons. If only he could breath some fresh air he could escape them, he thought as he jumped sideways to avoid a large tree that strongly resembled Ahbbbb, and… found himself on the floor beside the plank bed. He was shaking his head to clear it of the residual nightmare when the door burst open and Bro B and an escort of guards stomped in.
Hnffg tka Ghfft? Bro B demanded without preamble. “By the Gods, why is it so damp in here?”
Bits of the nightmare still colored the edges of reality and Sam wondered how the Bros managed to get into his swamp. “Whazzat?” he responded with as much intelligence as he could gather. Something was hammering on his temples with sledgehammer blows. A fire raged in his belly and he felt as if someone had put shovelfuls of the Gormlies’s sand behind his eyelids. “Huh?” he added to clarify his previous confusion at the question.
Bro B continued to hoot as he snatched Sam’s translator and tossed it at him. “A terrible crime has been committed!” the translator roared. “Why did you do it?”
Sam tried to think of what he possibly could have done to give Bro B the impression that he would commit a crime. The only possibly underhanded thing he’d done was to take a small bit of cheese from the food closet the previous day. Surely that wasn’t so terrible that he needed to be awakened in the middle of the night, or was it morning? He was afraid to open his eyes and see. Blindness might be a possibility. Could that cheese have been the M-Ditsch’s midnight snack, a snack that he had mistakenly snatched? That must be it, he concluded.
“I’ll give it back if it means that much,” he mumbled and staggered to the large chair, which danced and bobbed as it tried to evade him. Finally, he cornered the beast, reached up, and pulled down the damp, napkin-wrapped snack. He offered it to Bro B.
The huge Bingnagian looked at the wrapped morsel with a dumbfounded expression in his blue eyes. “Is this a joke?”
“Ish the only thing I’ve took, taken,” Sam said with complete honesty and spread the napkin wide to show that it was just a piece of cheese.