I wouldn't. I didn't. I said, "It would be a lot more thoughtful if he planted the damn things himself. What's with this guy, anyway? Is he always like that?"
It was pretty much a rhetorical question, but Bertie chose to answer it. He took a moment to think first. Then he said delicately, "Wan has done quite a few—ah—impulsive things, now and then. Some of them caused some trouble. Police trouble, even."
"You mean he's a criminal?"
"Oh, well," Bertie said dismissively, "never with any kind of real jail time. There wouldn't be, would there? With the kind of lawyers his kind of money can buy?" Then he changed the subject. "One thing I should tell you about. Those berry bushes are supposed to need quite a lot of water, so make sure you plant them near the runoff from the drinking fountains, all right? And, listen, see if you can keep the giraffes from eating the seedlings before they grow out."
"How are we supposed to do that?" I asked, but Bertie had already cut the connection. Naturally. He's a boss. You know the story about the second lieutenant and the sergeant and the flagpole? There's this eight-meter flagpole and the lieutenant only has six meters of rope. Big problem. How does the lieutenant get the flagpole up?
Simple. The lieutenant says, "Sergeant, put that flagpole up," and goes off to have a beer at the officers' club.
As far as Bertie is concerned, I'm his sergeant. I don't have to be, though. Bertie keeps asking me to conic in and take a job as a sector chief at the Nairobi office. There'd be more money, too, but then I'd have to live-in the big city. Besides, that would mean I wouldn't be in direct contact with the Old Ones anymore.
Everything considered, you might think that wouldn't sound so bad, but—oh, hell, I admit it—I knew I'd miss every smelly, dumb-ass one of them. They weren't very bright and they weren't very clean, and most of the time, although I liked them, I wasn't a bit sure that they liked me back. But they needed me.
By the time Wan had been with us for three days, we had got kind of used to having him around. We didn't actually see a lot of him. Most of the daylight time he was off in his hover with a couple of the Old Ones for company, feeding them ice-cream pops and lemonade out of his freezer—things that really weren't good for them but, I had to admit, wouldn't do them much harm once or twice in a lifetime. When it got dark he was always back in the housing compound, but he didn't mingle with us rangers even then. He stayed in his vehicle, watching soaps and cartoons again with a couple of Old Ones for company. He slept in it, too.
When I finally asked Wan just how long he intended to be with us, he just gave me that grin again and said, "Can't say, Gracie. I'm having fun."
"Don't call me Gracie," I said. But he had already turned his back on me to collect another handful of Old Ones for a joyride.
Having fun seemed to be what Wan's life was all about. He'd already been all over the galaxy before he came back to see us, flying around in his own private ship. (Did you get that? His own private ship!) He could afford it. Those royalties on the Heechee stuff that came out of the Food Factory made him, he told us, the eighth richest person in the galaxy, and what Wan could afford was pretty nearly anything he could think up. He made sure he let us all know it, too, which didn't endear him to most of the staff, especially Carlo. "He gets on my nerves with his goddamn bragging all the time," Carlo complained to me. "Can't I run the son of a bitch off?"
"As long as he doesn't make trouble," I said, "no. How are you coming with the planting?"
Actually that was going pretty well. All the guys had to do was scoop out a little hole in the ground, a couple of meters away from a fountain, and set one of the pressed-earth pots in it. That was the whole drill. Since there were a couple of patrols going out all over the reservation every day anyway, checking for signs of elephant incursions or unauthorized human trespassers, it only took them a couple of extra minutes at each stop.
Then, without warning, Wan left us.
I thought I heard the sound of his hover's fans, just as I was going to sleep. I considered getting up to see what was going on, but—damn it!— the pillow seemed more interesting than Wan just then and I rolled over and forgot it.
Or almost forgot it. I guess it was my subconscious, smarter than the rest of me, that made my sleep uneasy. And about the fourth or fifth time I half woke, I heard the voices of Old Ones softly, worriedly, murmuring at each other just outside my window.
That woke me all the way up. Old Ones don't like the dark, never having had any back home. I pulled on a pair of shorts and stumbled outside. Spot was sitting there on her haunches, along with Brute and Blackeye, all three of them turning to stare at me. "What's the matter?" I demanded.
She was munching on a chunk of CHON-food. "Grathe," she said politely, acknowledging my existence. "He. Gone." She made sweeping-away gestures with her hands to make sure I understood her.
"Well, hell," I said. "Gone where?"
She made the same gesture again. "Away."
"Yes, I know away," I snarled. "Did he say when he was coming back?"
She swallowed and spat out of a piece of wrapper. "No back," she said.
I guess I was still pretty sleepy, because I didn't take it in right away. "What do you mean, 'no back?'"
"Gone," she told me placidly. "Also Beautiful. Pony. Gadget. They too."
IV
I woke Shelly and Carlo and sent them up in the ultralight to check out the whole reservation, but I didn't wait for their report. I was calling headquarters even before they were airborne. Bertie wasn't in his office, of course—it was the middle of the night, and the headquarters people kept city hours—but I got him out of bed at home. He didn't sound like he believed me. "Why the hell would anyone kidnap a couple of Old Ones?" he wanted to know.
"Ask the bastard yourself," I snarled at him. "Only find him first. That's three of the Old Ones that he's kidnapped—Beauty and her two-year-old, Gadget. And Pony. Pony is the kid's father, probably."
He made a sound of irritation. "All right. First thing, I'll need descriptions no, sorry," he said, catching himself; how would you describe three Old Ones? And why would you need to? "Forget that part. I'll take it from here. I guarantee he won't get off the planet. I'll have cops at the Loop in ten minutes, and a general alarm everywhere. I'll—"
But I cut him off there. "No, Bertie. Not so much you will. More like we will. I'll meet you at the Loop and, I don't care how rich the son of a bitch is, when we catch him I'm going to punch him out. And then he's going to see what the inside of a jail looks like."
But that wasn't the way the hand played out.
I took our two-man hover, which is almost as fast as the ultra-light. The way I was goosing it along, maybe a little faster. By the time I got within sight of the Lofstrom Loop, with Nairobi's glowing bubble a few kilometers to the north, I was already aware of police planes crisscrossing across the sky—once or twice dropping down to get a good look at me before they were satisfied and zoomed away.
At night the Loop is picked out with lights, so that it looks like a kind of roller-coaster ride, kilometers long. I could hear the whine of its rotating magnetic cables long before I got to the terminal. There weren't many pods either coming or going—maybe because it was nighttime in this part of the world—so, I figured, there wouldn't be so many passengers that Wan and his captives might not be noticed. (As though anybody wouldn't notice three Old Ones.)
Actually at that time of night there were hardly any passengers waiting around in the terminal. Bertie was there already, with half a dozen Nairobi city cops, but they didn't have much to do. Neither did I, except to fret and swear to myself for letting him get away.