“Farewell,” said Coley, grinning at the Consul and starting up the ramp.
“Yunce!” the word tore itself at last from the Consul’s lips.
Coley stopped, turned around and looked a few feet down into the older man’s pleading eyes.
“What can I do for you?’ he said.
“Give me a price,” said the Consul.
“A price?” Coley, grinning, spread his hands. “A price for what?
“For not reporting this back on Sol. If you do, they’ll have to take action. They won’t have any choice. They’ll undo everything you did.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t do that,” said Coley. He grinned happily, leaned down and slapped the smaller man on the shoulder. “Cheer up,” he said. The Consul stared up at him. Slowly, the older man’s eyebrows came together in a searching frown.
“Yunce?” he said. “Who…? Just who are you anyway?”
Coley grinned and winked at him. And then he burst into a loud laugh, swing about and went trotting up the airlock ramp and into the ship, still laughing. At the airlock, he stopped, turned, and threw something white that fluttered and side-slipped through the air until it fell on the concrete pad by the Consul’s feet. The consul leaned over and picked it up.
It was a folded sheaf of paper, sealed with a melt-clip with no identifying symbol upon it. On one side it was stamped top secret.
The Consul hesitated, broke it open and looked at it. What stared back up at him was that same report he had written back to the authorities on Sol five years before, concerning the Yaran Game of Five and its possible disastrous conclusion. Clipped to it was a little hand-printed note in rather rakish block capitals.
Scratched in the lower right hand corner of the note, as if in idle afterthought, was a small A4.
\
TIGER GREEN
There is a type of sf (more often appearing in movies or TV or in stories by writers from outside the genre than in works by real sf writers) which has the highly advanced, highly ethical aliens drop in and threaten to exterminate us evil warlike humans. Such stories make me wonder who died and made those self-righteous aliens God, and why their one and only highly advanced, highly ethical solution is to exterminate intelligent species which don’t come up to their standards. My reaction is that those aliens are long overdue for a good, swift pie in the face. As you read this story, you may wonder just what this intro has to do with it. Keep reading….
I
A man with hallucinations he cannot stand, trying to strangle himself in a homemade straitjacket, is not a pretty sight. But after a while, grimly thought Jerry McWhin, the Star Scout’s navigator, the ugly and terrible seem to backfire in effect, filling you with fury instead of harrowing you further. Men in crowds and packs could be stampeded briefly, but after a while the individual among them would turn, get his back up, and slash back.
At least—the hyperstubborn individual in himself had finally so reacted.
Determinedly, with fingers that fumbled from lack of sleep, he got the strangling man—Wally Blake, an assistant ecologist—untangled and into a position where it would be difficult for him to try to choke out his own life again. Then Jerry went out of the sick-bay storeroom, leaving Wally and the other seven men out of the Star Scout’s complement of twelve who were in total restraint. He was lightheaded from exhaustion; but a berserk something in him snarled like a cornered tiger and refused to break like Wally and the others.
When all’s said and done, he thought half-crazily, there’s worse ways to come to the end of it than a last charge, win or lose, alone in the midst of all your enemies.
Going down the corridor, the sight of another figure jolted him a little back toward common sense. Ben Akham, the drive engineer, came trudging back from the air-lock corridor with a flame thrower on his back. Soot etched darkly the lines on his once-round face.
“Get the hull cleared?” asked Jerry. Ben nodded exhaustedly.
“There’s more jungle on her every morning,” he grunted. “Now those big thistles are starting to drip a corrosive liquid. The hull needs an antiacid washing. I can’t do it. I’m worn out.”
“We all are,” said Jerry. His own five-eleven frame was down to a hundred and thirty-eight pounds. There was plenty of food—it was just that the four men left on their feet had no time to prepare it; and little enough time to eat it, prepared or not.
Exploration Team Five-Twenty-Nine, thought Jerry, had finally bitten off more than it could chew, here on the second planet of Star 83476. It was nobody’s fault. It had been a gamble for Milt Johnson, the Team captain, either way—to land or not to land. He had landed; and it had turned out bad.
By such small things was the scale toward tragedy tipped. A communication problem with the natives, a native jungle evidently determined to digest the spaceship, and eight of twelve men down with something like suicidal delirium tremens—any two of these things the Team could probably have handled.
But not all three at once.
Jerry and Ben reached the entrance of the Control Room together and peered in, looking for Milt Johnson.
“Must be ootside, talking to that native again,” said Jerry.
“Ootside?—oot-side!” exploded Ben, with a sudden snapping of frayed nerves. “Can’t you say ‘out-side’?—‘out-side,’ like everybody else?”
The berserk something in Jerry lunged to be free, but he caught it and hauled it back.
“Get hold of yourself!” he snapped.
“Well… I wouldn’t mind you sounding like a blasted Scotchman all the time!” growled Ben, getting himself, nevertheless, somewhat under control. “It’s just you always do it when I don’t expect it!”
“If the Lord wanted us all to sound alike, he’d have propped up the Tower of Babel,” said Jerry wickedly. He was not particularly religious himself, but he knew Ben to be a table-thumping atheist. He had the satisfaction now of watching the other man bite his lips and control himself in his turn.
Academically, however, Jerry thought as they both headed out through the ship to find Milt, he could not really blame Ben. For Jerry, like many Scot-Canadians, appeared to speak a very middle-western American sort of English most of the time. But only as long as he avoided such vocabulary items as “house” and “out,” which popped off Jerry’s tongue as “hoose” and “oot.” However, every man aboard had his personal peculiarities. You had to get used to them. That was part of spaceship—in fact, part of human—life.
They emerged from the lock, rounded the nose of the spaceship, and found themselves in the neat little clearing on one side of the ship where the jungle paradoxically refused to grow. In this clearing stood the broad-shouldered figure of Milt Johnson, his whitish-blond hair glinting in the yellow-white sunlight.
Facing Milt was the thin, naked, and saddle-colored humanoid figure of one of the natives from the village, or whatever it was, about twenty minutes away by jungle trail. Between Milt and the native was the glittering metal console of the translator machine.
“…Let’s try it once more,” they heard Milt saying as they came up and stopped behind him.
The native gabbled agreeably.
“Yes, yes. Try it again,” translated the voice of the console.