“Aye,” Ramsay said reluctantly. “Ye ken the penalty for murder, Ess Pu? Vurra good. I order ye not to murrder this nae doot deserving miscreant. I am bound to enforce Regulations, so dinna let me catch ye assaulting Macduff within earshot of me or any other officer. Ye ken?”
Ess Pu seemed to ken. He laughed hoarsely, ground a claw at Macduff and stalked out, swaying from side to side. The two crewmen were visible outside the door.
“Here,” Captain Ramsay ordered. “I have a job for ye two. Take this stowaway doon to the Hot Gang and turn him over to the Chief.”
“No, no!” squealed Macduff, retreating. “Don’t you dare lay a finger on me! Put me down!
Outrageous! I won’t go down that ramp! Release me! Captain Ramsay, I demand-Captain Ramsay!”
Days had passed, arbitrarily, of course, aboard the Sutter.
Ao lay curled in her shock hammock, thinking her own dim thoughts and looking at nothing. High up in the wall there was a puffing sound, a scuffle and a grunt. Behind the grille of the ventilating inlet appeared the face of Macduff.
“Ali, my little friend,” he said kindly. “So there you are. Now they have me creeping down the ventilating tubes of this ship like a phagocyte.”
He tested the meshed grille cautiously.
“Sealed, like all the others,” he observed. “However, I assume you’re being well treated, my-dear.”
He glanced greedily at the covered lunch tray on a nearby table. Ao looked dreamily at nothing.
“I have sent a cable,” Macduff announced from the wall. “I bartered some small treasured heirlooms I happened to have with me and raised enough cash to send a cable, by the press rate. Luckily I still have my press card.” Macduff’s vast collection of credentials very likely may have included a membership in the Little Men’s Chowder and Marching Society, to choose the least likely example.
“Moreover, I have just received a reply. Now I must run a grave risk, my dear, a grave risk. Today the conditions of the ship’s pool-a lottery, you know-will be announced in the grand lounge. I must be present, even at the risk of being brigged by Captain Ramsay and savaged by Ess Pu. It will not be easy. I may say I’ve been subjected to every indignity imaginable, my dear, except perhaps-outrageous!” he added, as a cord tied around his ankle tightened and drew him backward up the shaft.
His distant cries grew fainter. He announced in a fading voice that he had a bottle of 2, 4, 5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid in his pocket and that broken glass was a safety hazard. So saying he departed into inaudibility. Since Ao had not really noticed that he was present she remained unaffected.
“Ah, well,” Macduff philosophized as he flew down a corridor slightly ahead of the Atmospheric Inspector’s hurtling toe-cap, “Justice is blind. This is my thanks for working overtime-at least three minutes overtime. But now I am off duty and free to set my plans in motion.”
Five minutes later, having eluded the Inspector and smoothed his ruffled plumage somewhat, he made his way briskly toward the lounge.
“There’s one point in my favor,” he reflected. “Ess Pu apparently doesn’t know Ao is aboard. The last time he chased me he was still speaking bitterly of my part in forcing him to leave her on Aldebaran Tau. Unhappily that’s practically the only point in my favor. I must now mingle with the passengers in the grand lounge, while remaining undetected by Ess Pu, Captain Ramsay or any ship’s officer. I wish I were a Cerean. Ah, well.”
As Macduff cautiously made his way toward the lounge his memory dwelt all too vividly on his recent progress from riches to rags. His meteoric descent from job to worse job had been little short of phenomenal.
“Would you set a cinematome to digging ditches?” he had inquired. “Would you weigh elephants on a torquemeter?”
He was told to stop gabbling and pick up that shovel. Instantly he began to work out the most efficient application of the law of leverages. There was some delay while he extended his decimals to include the influencing factor of low-threshold radioactivity upon the alpha waves of the brain.
“The inhabitants of Ceres were long supposed to be invisible. Lately ft has been discovered that Ceres has no inhabitants.
“Otherwise, anything can happen,” he explained, demonstrating. There was a crash.
Macduff was then, by request, taken off the Hot Gang and put to work elsewhere. But, as he took pains to point out, his frame of reference did not include special skills in the block-processing of garbage for fuel, oiling of the symbiotic hemostatic adjustment mechanisms provided for the comfort of the passengers or testing refractive indices of liquid-coated bimetallic thermostats. He proved this empirically.
So he was-by request-removed to Hydroponics, where the incident of the radioactive carbon tracer occurred. He said it wasn’t the carbon, it was the gammexene, and besides it wasn’t really the gammexene so much as his inadvertent neglect to supplement the insecticide with meso-inositol.
But when thirty square feet of rhubarb plants began breathing out carbon monoxide as a result of sudden heredity changes brought on by the ganimexene Macduff was promptly sent down to the kitchens, where he introduced a growth hormone into the soup, with nearly catastrophic results.
At present he was an unvalued member of the staff of Atmospheric Controls, where he did the jobs nobody else wanted to do.
More and more he had become conscious of the odor of sphyghi pervading the ship. Nothing could disguise its distinctive fragrance, which seeped by osmosis through membranes, trickled along the surface of molecular films and very likely rode piggyback on careening quanta. As Macduff made his stealthy way toward the lounge he realized that the word sphyghi was on every tongue, just as he had anticipated.
He paused warily on the threshold of the lounge, which ran like a belt (or cravat) around the entire ship, so that in two directions the floor seemed to slope steeply, until you tried to walk up it. Then it felt like a squirrel cage, which compensated automatically to your own speed.
Here was luxury. Macduff’s sybaritic soul yearned toward the tempting buffets of smorginbord, ti-pali and Gustators. Like a palace of ice an ornate perambulating bar swung slowly past on its monorail track. An orchestra was playing Starlit Days and Sunny Nights, an eminently suitable choice for a ship in space, and sphyghi fragrance sent its luxurious breath from wall to wall.
Macduff stood with unobtrusive dignity near the door for some minutes, regarding the crowd. He was waiting for the appearance of Captam Ramsay. Presently a buzz of interested comment began to arise and a throng of passengers converged down the salon’s slopes. The Captain had arrived. Macduff melted into the crowd and vanished with the suddenness of a Boojum.
Ramsay stood at the bottom of a concave sectioned amphitheater, looking up at his audience with an unaccustomed smile on his seamed face. There was no trace of Macduff, though a repressed mutter of sotto voce comment came occasionally from behind a broad-beamed member of the Plutonian lepidoptera.
Captain Ramsay spoke.
“As ye probably ken,” he said, “we are here to arrange aboot the ship’s pool. Some of ye may not have travelled in space before, so the acting firrst mate wull explain how this is done. Mister French, please.”
Mr. French, a serious young man, took the stage. He cleared his throat, hesitated and looked around as a brief burst of applause came from behind the Plutonian lepidoptera.
“Thank you,” he said. “Eh-many of you may be familiar with the old-time ship’s pool, in which passengers guessed the time of arrival in port. in space, of course, compensatory feedback devices, effectors and subtractors control our ship so exactly that we know the S utter will arrive in Xeria at exactly the posted time, which is—”