The Only Neat Thing to Do

heads. And they have…' Here the voice stammers, as if finding it hard to speak. 'They have like two, uh, private parts. Two sets, I mean. Some of them. And their faces' — the voice runs on, relieved—'their faces are fierce. Some teeth! When they came and looked in first, we were pretty nervous. And big eyes, sort of like mixed-up people and animals. Cats. But they acted friendly, they gave back the signals, so we came out. That was when they grabbed us and pushed their heads onto ours. Then they let go, and acted like something was wrong. I heard one say 'Ponz,' and like 'Lashley' or 'Leslie.' '

'Leslie was with Ponz, I told you,' says the second.

'Yeah. So then they grabbed us again, and held on, and that was when they gave the treatment. I think something went into me, I can still hear like a voice. Ko says, him, too. …Oh, and there were young ones and some others running around on an island; they said they're not like them until they get the treatment. 'Drons,' they called the young ones. And afterward they're 'Ee-ah-drons.' The ones we talked to. It's sort of confusing. Like the Ee-ah are people, too. But you don't see them.' His voice — it must be Boney — runs down. 'Is that all?' Coati hears him ask aside.

'Yeah, I guess so,' the other voice — Ko — replies. 'We better get started, we got one more stop …and I don't feel so good anymore. I wish we was home.'

'Me, too. Funny, we felt so great. Well, DRS 914 B-K signing off… I guess this is the longest record we ever sent, huh? Oh, we have some corrections to send. Stand by.'

After a long drone of coordinate corrections, the record ends.

Coati sits pensive, trying to sort out the account. It's clear that a new race has been contacted, and they seem friendly. Yet something about it affects her negatively— she has no desire to rush off and meet the big white six-legs and be given the 'smart treatment.' Boney and Ko were supposed to be a little — innocent. Maybe they were fooled in some way, taken advantage of? But she can't think why, or what. It's beyond her….

The other thing that's clear is that this should go to Base, fastest. Wasn't there a ship going to follow Boney and Ko's route? That would take them to the cat planet, which is at — she consults her wrist — thirty-twenty north, et cetera. Oh, dear, must she go back? Turn back, abort her trip to deliver this? Why had she been so smart, pulling in other people's business?

But wait. If it's urgent, she could speed it by calling base and reading the message, thus bypassing the last leg. Then surely they wouldn't crack her for interfering! Maybe she's still in commo range.

She powers up the transponder and starts calling FedBase 900. Finally a voice responds, barely discernible through the noise. She fiddles with the suppressors and gets it a bit clearer.

'FedBase 900, this is CC-One at AL. Beacon One. Do you read me? I have intercepted a message pipe from Supply Ship DRS 914 B-K, the missing ship, Boney and Ko.' She repeats. 'Do you read that?'

'Affirmative, CC-One. Message from ship 914 B-K intercepted. What is the message?'

'It's too long to read. But listen — important. They are on their way to a planet at — wait a minim—'' She rolls the record back and gets the coordinates. 'And before that they stayed at that planet thirty-twenty north — you have the specs. There are people there! It's a First Contact, I think. But listen, they say something's funny. I don't think you should go there until you get the whole message. I'm sending it right on.'

'CC-One, I lost part of that. Is planet at 'thirty-twenty north a First Contact?'

Garble is breaking up Commo's voice. Coati shouts as clearly as she can, 'Yes! Affirmative! But don't, repeat, do — not — go — there — until you get B-K's original message. I — will — send — pipe — at once. Did you get that?'

'Repeating… Do not proceed to planet thirty-twenty north, forty-two-twenty-eight west until B-K message received. Pipe coming soonest. Green, CC-One?'

'Go. If I can't make the pipe work, I'll bring it. CC-One signing off.' She finishes in a swirl of loud static, and turns her attention to getting the pipe back on its way.

But before she takes the cassette out of the voder, she rechecks the designation of the planet B-K are headed for. Eighteen-ten north. Twenty-eight-thirty west. RD Thirty. That's closer than the First Contact planet; that's right, they said they'd stop there on their way home. She copies the first coordinates off on her workpad, and replaces them on her wrist with the new ones. If she wants to help look for Boney and Ko, she could go straight there — but of course she hasn't really made up her mind. As she rolls back her sleeve, she notices that her arm still feels odd, but she can't see any trace of a cold-burn. She rubs the arm a couple of times, and it goes away.

'Getting goosey from excitement,' she mutters. She has a childish habit of talking aloud to herself when she's alone. She figures it's because she was alone so much as a child, happily playing with her space toys and holos.

Putting the message pipe back on course proves to be absurdly simple. She blows it clean of the yellow powdery stuff, reinserts the cassette, and ejects it beside the viewports. Fascinated, she watches the little ship spin slowly, orienting to its homing frequency broadcast from Base 900. Then, as if satisfied, it begins to glide away, faster and faster. Sure enough, as well as she can judge, it's headed down the last leg from Beacon One to FedBase. Neat! She's never heard of pipes before; there must be all kinds of marvelous frontier gadgets that'll be new to her.

She has a guilty twinge as she sees it go. Isn't it her duty to go nearer back to Base and read the whole thing? Could the men be in some kind of trouble where every minim counts? But they sounded green, only maybe a little tired. And she understands it's their routine to send a pipe after every stop. If some of those corrections are important, she could never read them straight; her voice would give out. Better they have Boney's own report.

She turns back to figuring out her course, and finds she was fibbing: she has indeed made up her mind. She'll just go to the planet B-K were headed for and see if she can find them there. Maybe they got too sick to move on, maybe they found another alien race they got involved with. Maybe their ship's in trouble. …Any number of reasons they could be late, and she might be helpful. And now she knows enough about the pipes to know that they can't be sent from a planet's surface. Only from above atmosphere. So if Boney and Ko can't lift, they can't message for help — by pipe, at least.

She's half-talking this line of reasoning out to herself as she works on the holocharts. Defining and marking in a brand-new course for the computer is far more work than she'd realized; the school problems she had done must have been chosen for easy natural corridors. 'Oh, gods …I've got to erase again; there's an asteroid path there. Help! I'll never get off this beacon at this rate — explorers must have spent half their time mapping!'

As she mutters, she becomes aware of something like an odd little echo in the ship. She looks around; the cabin is tightly packed with shiny cases of supplies. 'Got my acoustics all buggered up,' she mutters. That must be it. But there seems to be a peculiar delay; for example, she hears the word 'Help!' so tiny-clear that she actually spends a few minim searching the nearby racks. Could a talking animal pet or something have got in at Far Base? Oh, the poor creature. Unless she can somehow get it in cold-sleep, it'll die.

But nothing more happens, and she decides it's just the new acoustical reflections. And at last she achieves a good, safe three-leg course to that system at eighteen-ten north. She's pretty sure an expert could pick out a shorter, elegant, two-leg line, but she doesn't want to risk being waked up by some unforeseen obstacle. So she picks routes lined by well-corrected red dwarfs and other barely visible sky features. These charts are living history, she thinks. Not like the anonymous holos back home, where everything is checked a hundred times a year, and they give you only tripstrips. In these charts she can read the actual hands of the old explorers. The man Ponz, for instance — he must have spent a lot of time working around the route to the yellow suns, before he landed on thirty-twenty and crashed and died. …But she's dawdling now.

She stacks the marked cassettes in order in her computer take-up, and clicks the first one in. To the unknown, at last!

She readies her cold-sleep chest and hops in. As she relaxes, she notices she still has a strange sensation of being accompanied by something or someone. 'Maybe because I'm sort of one of the company of space now,' she tells herself romantically, and visualizes a future chart with a small 'CC' correction. Hah! She laughs aloud, drowsily, in the darkness, feeling great. An almost physical rosy glow envelops her as she sinks to dreamless stasis.

She can take off thus unconscious amid pathless space with no real fear of getting lost and being unable to return, because of a marvelously simple little gadget carried by all jumpships — a time-lapse recorder in the vessel's tail, which clicks on unceasingly, recording the star scene behind. It's accelerated by motion in the field,