places for the moment, 980713896. Do you want it with the decimal places too?'
A mentally muttered morbid curse was his only answer, and Chuck smiled warmly as his two friends came forward to beat him on the back and welcome him back to sanity.
'I was going to ask you what we were doing here. The last I remember is some torture or other and things getting dim; then, bango, I'm in this valley and somebody asked me that question, and by reflex of course, I put the old brain box to work and dug up the answer. I was startled so it was a good thing it was a simple question.'
'That's about enough of the old self-laudatory praise,' the voice spoke coldly in their minds. Not only in their minds, but they realized suddenly that they were hearing it with their ears. They looked up at the ledge whence the voice had spoken and recoiled together. For there was Baksheesh.
He was an ancient, gnarled, scratched and generally beat-up native of the planet Haggis, that was obvious. But he was old. Generations of spiders had built webs between his claws until he was almost wrapped in a cocoon. Yet for all his age, the light of a great intelligence burned in his crystalline eyes. Nor was that all. His color. . . .
'White. I know what you are thinking,' the thought crackled down at them. 'Hideous white like the vile Hagg- Loos, not beautiful and black like the Hagg-Inder. Well, I have news for you. I AM a Hagg-Loos. Ha! You might very well cringe back at that news. But I am above petty politics now. Once I was as human as any other, and as mad as any, but the fortunes of war brought me here, and I crawled into that cave and came to rest over a powerful radioactive source. My madness was cured, and my intelligence soared as I was made immortal by most standards. Including my own, I must add. But to remain immortal I must toast over the radioactives. If I leave the cave, I die, so now I must return. You know my secret, but you will not betray me, for my wisdom is of the ages. I have come before you to tell you one thing that you must never forget.' It rattled its antenna wildly, and the last thought blasted like a hurricane through their minds.
'BEWARE THE KRAKAR!'
They staggered under the mental blast, and when they looked up, the pallid creature had gone, and they were alone among the bones and chitin of the dead.
16
ENIGMA IN SPACE
'Krakar . . . Krakar . . . now where did I hear that before?'
Lord Prrsi muttered to himself, trying to place the transient memory that rattled around inside the chitin of his head. This was at the meeting of the top executives of the Galaxy Rangers, and they were having this first historical meeting in the first-class lounge of the Pleasantville Eagle. Sally, who had been made president of the Ladies' Auxiliary and given a gold brooch with a miniature star on it, was serving drinks while the Rangers discussed the fateful final words spoken by Baksheesh. Sally passed around cigars, and most of the Earthmen lit up, though Jerry was enjoying a joint, and the aliens present either ate theirs or threw them under the chairs when no one was looking.
'I have it!' Lord Prrsi shouted and snapped his claws in excitement, cutting a solid steel lounge chair in half without noticing it. 'Somewhere in the transcript from one of the Hagg-Loos prisoners we took when we raided their secret laboratory. Just hold on, chaps, I'll send a mental command to the computer to dig it out and beam it back to me. Won't take long.'
John rapped for attention with his whiskey glass, then held it up to Sally for a refill.
'While we're waiting for that thought to come through, let's hear that security report that old squid-head SlugTogath put together on the Lortonoi. You have the floor, Sluggy.'
The Garnishee prime minister rose and coughed with two or three of his mouths, then picked up the report with the tentacles on his head and held it before a couple of his close-reading eyes. He coughed again and began.
'This is an amalgamation of all information that could be obtained about our traditional and mentally repulsive enemy, the brain-sucking Lortonoi. Evidence was taken from every race that has fought the Lortonoi, and more evidence tortured out of those who have fought cheek by jowl with these disgusting creatures. The first fact we have uncovered is that no one, not even their allies, has ever seen a Lortonoi. They arrive in their own spaceship and hardly ever leave it, since all instructions and commands are given by mental telepathy. On certain occasions, as in the secret laboratory of the Hagg-Loos, they have made an appearance, but since they arrived in a great armored tank and never left it, this isn't much help either.'
'So you've told us what we don't know,' John said.
'What do we know?'
'I'm just getting to that part. We know that they have fantastic mental powers which they use only for evil. They appear at many places through the galaxy and aid any race they can either mentally control or which is nasty enough to go along with them. In their travels they seem to have picked up a knowledge of all the weapons and science that are around, so that any race they aid immediately goes to war with any other race nearby. Very nasty. Their goal seems to be complete control of the galaxy for their own evil ends.'
'And ours is to crush them for free enterprise, a rigid class system and all the other forms of democracy we love,' John shouted, and all present cheered. 'Now what about it, Lord Prrsi, you old red-hot scorpion, any word yet from your molasses-clogged computer? Seems pretty slow.'
'Really quite fast, Number One. The answer came back within three nanoseconds, but I didn't want to interrupt the pep talk. It seems that while we were questioning one of the technicians, he shouted something like 'The Krakar will get you, ha-ha' before he lapsed into acoma.'
'Coma?'
'Understandable. Our questioning can be rather severe at times, but after all, they are only Hagg-Loos, and working class at that.'
'Can you get any more out of him?' Jerry asked.
'Maybe even a spot of torture if you have to.'
'My dear boy! What on Haggis do you think our normal questioning is? Short of stripping off his chitin and boiling him like a lobster, there is little else we can do. He is still recovering from the last round of questioning, and I sincerely doubt that more of the same will reveal any more than this. Very strong-willed, these blighters, and insane to boot.'
'Why don't you try curing his madness?' Sally asked, refilling the glasses, but they went on talking, ignoring her completely. Jerry was holding forth in great detail on Earthly torture methods to see if the Hagg-Inder had missed any when she raised the glass martini jug and dropped it onto his head. Well, this caught their attention a bit, and while she had it, she repeated her question.
'Why don't you try curing the prisoner's insanity and perhaps he will cooperate voluntarily?'
'Bourgeois sentimentality!' Lord Prrsi snorted.
'Did you have to do that?' Jerry said aggrievedly, picking a pickled onion out of his ear.
'I think you might have an idea there, Sally.' John rapped again for order. 'What about it, Prrsi you old sting- tail monster? Why don't you have your shrinks try to cure this guy, put a metal box around his brain so he doesn't have a relapse, read to him from the Bible, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. . . .'
'Fill his head with that subversive rot!'
'Sure, you can always kill him afterward so the word doesn't spread, but it might work.'
'I say, it might indeed. I'll issue an order by thought mail . . . there, it's gone. Work will begin at once.'
'All right, then to new business,' John said. 'Work on our secret Ranger base on Planet X, tenth planet of this sun Sirius, has been completed and we can move our volunteers there so the Hagg-Inder can turn off their air conditioning.'
'Well, thank Great Cacodyl!' Lord Prrsi breathed. 'I swear I am turning blue-black from the cold and feel galloping pneumonia coming on. Anything below the boiling point of water gives me a positive chill on my liver.'
'Save the medical chitchat for later,' John said. 'Let's get on with this so we can get down to some heavy drinking, and listen, Jerry, that is the third joint in a quarter hour, and your eyes are getting glassy. Can you kindly
