"Nay, lad, tha'll no get me to coom."
"But, that is to say, but!" squeaked Captain Radhakrishnan. He jumped up and down, windmilling his arms. The last dayglow flashed off his monocle; it fell from his eye and he popped it back and cried: "Well, but haven't you any courage? All we need to do, don't y' know, is destroy their geegee and they'll jolly well have to go home. I mean to say, we can do it ten minutes, once we've overcome whatever guards they have posted."
"Posted wi' machine guns," said the farmer.
"Aye," nodded his mate. "An' brass knuckles, Ah'll be bound."
"But where's your patriotism?" shouted Captain Radha-krishnan. "Imitate the action of the tiger! Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage, and all diat sort of thing."
At this point Herr Syrup joined them. "You ban crazy?" he demanded.
"Ah." Captain Radhakrishnan turned to him and beamed. "The very man. Come, let's leave these bally caitiffs and proceed."
"But!" wailed Herr Syrup.
His assistant, Mr. Shubbish, nudged him with a tentacle and leered: "I fixed up a Molotov cocktail, chief. Don't worry. We got it made."
There was something in the air, a smell which—Herr Syrup's bulbous nose drank deep. Yes. Irish whisky. The crew must have spent a convivial afternoon with the spaceport sentries. So diat explained why they were so eager!
"Miss Croft is right," he muttered, "About whisky, anyhow. It calcifies the liver."
He pushed his bicycle along the road, beside Radhakrishnan's babbling commando, and tried to think of somediing which would turn them back. Eloquence was never his strong point. Could he borrow some telling phrase from the great poets of the past, to recall them to reason? But all diat rose into his churning brain was the Deadi Song of Ragnar Lodhbrok, which consists of phrases like "Where the swords were whining while they sundered helmets"—and did not seem to fit his present needs.
Vaguely dirough dusk and a grove of trees, he saw the terraforming plant. And then the air whirred and a small flyer slipped above him. It hung for an instant, then pounced low and fired a machine-gun burst. The racket was unholily loud, and the tracer stream burned like meteorites.
"Oh, my goodness!" exclaimed Captain Radhakrishnan.
"Wait there!" bawled an amplified voice. "Wait there an" we'll see what tricks ye're up to, ye Sassenach omadhauns!"
"Eek," said Mr. Shubbish.
Herr Syrup ascertained that no one had been hit. As the flyer landed and disgorged more large Celts than he had thought even a spaceship could hold, he switched off his bicycle lamp and wheeled softly back out of the suddenly quiet and huddled rebel band. Crouched beneath a hedgerow, he heard a lusty bellow:
"An' what wad ye be a-doin' here, where 'tis forbidden to venture by order of the General?" "We were just out for a walk," said Captain Radhakrishnan, much subdued.
"Sure, sure. With weapons to catch the fresh air, no doubt."
Herr Syrup stole from the shadows and began to pedal back the way he came. Words drifted after him. "We'll jist see what himself has to say about this donnybrookin', me lads. Throw down your gear!
'Bout face! March!"
Herr Syrup pedaled a little faster. He would do no one any good languishing in the Grendel calaboose and living off mulligan stew.
Not, he thought gloomily, that he was accomplishing much so far.
The asteroid night deepened around him. In this shallow atmosphere the stars burned with wintry brilliance. Jupiter was not many millions of kilometers away, so whitely bright that Grendel's trees cast shadows; you could see the Galilean satellites with the naked eye. A quick green moon strode up over the topplingly close horizon and swung toward Aries -one of the other Anglian asteroids—spinning with
its cluster mates around a common center of gravity, along a common resultant orbit. Probably New Winchester itself, maddeningly near. When you looked carefully at the sky, you could identify other little worlds among the constellations. The Erse Republic was still too remote to see without a telescope, but it was steadily sweeping closer; conjunction, two months hence, would bring it within a million kilometers of Anglia.
Herr Syrup, who was a bit of a bookworm, wondered in a wry way what Clausewitz or Halford Mackinder would think of modern astropolitics. Solemn covenants were all very well for countries which stayed put; but if you made a treaty with someone who would be on the other side of the sun next year, you must allow for the fact. There were alliances contingent on the phase of a moon and customs unions which existed only on alternate Augusts and—
And none of this was solving a problem which, if unsolved, risked a small but vicious interplanetary war and would most certainly put the Mercury Girl and the Alt Heideblerg Rathskeller out of business.
When he re-entered the spaceport, Herr Syrup met a blaze of lights and a bustle of men. Trucks rumbled back and forth, loaded with castings and fittings, sacks of cement and gangs of laborers. The Erse were working around the clock to make Grendel mobile. He dismounted and walked past a sentry, who gave him a suspicious glare, to the berth ladder, and so up to the air lock. He whistled a little tune as he climbed, trying to assure himself that no one could prove he had not merely been out on a spin for his health.
The ship was depressingly large and empty. His footsteps clanged so loud that he jumped, which only made matters worse, and peered nervously into shadowed corners. There was no good reason to stay aboard, he thought; an inn would be more cheerful and he could doubtless get off-season rates; but no, he had been a spaceman too long, one did not leave a ship completely unwatched. He contented himself with appropriating a case of Nashornbrau from the cargo—since the consignee had, after all, refused acceptance—and carried it back to his personal cubbyhole off the engine room.
Claus the crow blinked wicked black eyes at him from the bunk. "Goddag," he said.
"Goddag," said Herr Syrup, startled. To be courteously greeted by Claus was so rare that it was downright ominous.
"Fanden hade dig!" yelled the bird. "Chameau! Go stuff yourself, you scut! Vaya al Diablo!"
"Ah," said Herr Syrup, relieved. "Dat's more like it."
He sat down on the bunk and pried the cap off a bottle and tilted it to his mouth. Claus hopped down and poked a beak in his coat pocket, looking for pretzels. Herr Syrup stroked the crow in an absent-minded way.
He wondered if Claus really was a mutant. Quite possibly. All ships carried a pet or two, cat or parrot or lizard or uglopender, to deal with insects and other small vermin, to test dubious air, and to keep the men company. Claus was the fourth of his spacefaring line; there had been radiation, both cosmic and atomic, in his ancestral history. To be sure, Earthside crows had always had a certain ability to talk, but Claus' vocabulary was fantastic and he was constantly adding to it. Also, could chance account for the selectivity which made most of his phrases pure billingsgate?
Well—there was a more urgent question. How to get a message to New Winchester? The Girl's radio was carefully gutted. How about making a substitute on the sly, out of spare parts? No, O'Toole was not that kind of a dolt, he would have confiscated the spare parts as well, including even the radar.
But let's see. New Winchester was only some thousands of kilometers off. A spark-gap oscillator, powered by the ship's plant, could send an S.O.S. that far, even allowing for the inverse-square enfeeblement of an unbeamed broadcast. It would not be too hard to construct such an oscillator out of ordinary electrical stuff lying around the engine room. But it would take a while. Would O'Toole let Knud