chimpanzee cautiously.
Pan made a contemptuous motion with one hand. 'Yes, I know better. You are going to put me in a very strong cage, with a back room that can be locked by remote control. And when you want to clean the display cage in front, you are going to turn a fire hose on me so I will go in the back room. And when you want to clean the back room, I suppose there is a way of spraying a fire hose in there, too. And there will be a glass panel across the front of my cage, so I cannot take my turn and spray the customers. Bight?'
Ape said, 'Pan.'
The chimpanzee turned to him, and his expression looked like a smile. 'Yes, Ape?'
'I tole ya, when ya first come aboard the Cooke, what the chiefs' mess wants, the skipper does. I got the years in, I got the rank. Nobody's gonna treat ya like a mascot, even if that's your rank.'
'He'd be pretty goddam useful fixing the antenna in a storm,' Happy said.
Dr. Bedoian said, 'No. I — anyone your skipper consulted — would have to certify that it was not safe.'
Happy stood up, pulled his jumper down over his belly. 'What side you on, doc?'
'Pan's side. Pretty soon, if he follows the course of every male chimpanzee I ever knew, he is going to develop an intolerance for man and all his works that will make him violent.'
'He ain't a chimp,' Ape said. 'He devoluted.'
'Retrogressed,' Dr. Bedoian said. 'According to his own story. But ask him if he feels like a chimpanzee or a man?'
'The doctor's right, Ape,' Pan said, 'It wouldn't be safe.'
He shuffled across the room, blinking his eyes. But no chimpanzee has ever wept tears. He picked up the phone. 'Mr. MacMahon's room, please.'
They stared at him as he held the phone a little clumsily in his short-thumbed hand. 'This is Pan Satyrus, Mr. MacMahon. The chimpanzee. I am ready to demonstrate superluminous flight, sir. No, I am afraid I do not have the vocabulary to tell your experts; and my fingers are not adapted to holding a pencil, so I cannot draw the diagram. I shall have to demonstrate in a real live spaceship. Could we leave for Canaveral in the morning? No, not tonight. I am giving a farewell party for a few friends. You will have to call off that banquet, too.'
He hung up the phone. He shuffled across to Ape and drained the rest of the chiefs scotch highball. Then he crossed to Happy and drank the rest of the radioman's pint.
Then he went back to the phone and again asked for Mr. MacMahon. 'Send one of your boys over with a thousand dollars,' he said. He added, sharply, 'You heard me!'
Happy had pulled another pint from under his blouse. Pan took it and drank a fair half. 'Get on the horn, Happy,' he said in a fair imitation of Ape's growl. 'They got bellboys in this dump, ain't they? Tell them to send up some fifty buck pigs.'
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CANAVERAL: m. Sitio poblado de canas. Plontio de cana de azucar.
The morning was cloudless; shuffling from the plane. Pan covered his skull with his long fingers. Happy took off his white cap and gave it to him.
'Thanks,' Pan said. There was an undertone of groaning to his voice. 'Between the sun and the hangover, my head feels full of torpedo juice.'
Happy laughed, not too happily. 'Fry your brains and you might devolute some more and come out a real sailor.'
'Retrogress,' Pan said. 'No, I'm afraid that won't do it.'
Cars were waiting for them; they were driven to a long, low building near the launching pads. Mr. MacMahon hopped out of his car first and held the door for them, and they went in, Dr. Bedoian and Pan first, then Happy and Ape. The two sailors looked at General Maguire, bestarred behind his desk, and took up posts on either side of the door, at easy attention.
The general was flanked by civilians; no one Pan hadn't met before. One of the men said, 'Good morning, Aram,' to Dr. Bedoian, who said, 'Good morning, doctor,' in return.
'Nice to see you again, General,' Pan Satyrus said. 'And your good wife?'
'In Connecticut,'' General Maguire said. 'So, he's decided to come to his senses', eh, doctor?'
'You can speak directly to me,' Pan said. 'It's all right. Why, yes, General. After seeing New York and all its might and panoply, if you will pardon a rather flowery expression, I have come to a conclusion: Don't sell America short.'
'That's what I always say,' the General said.
'I thought so,' Pan said. He turned to the man on the general's right. 'If you have my old spaceship — old Nameless — set up on a pad. I think I can show you what you want to know.'
'Superluminous flight, Mem?'
'Please, Pan. Or Mr. Satyrus. Yes, superluminous flight.'
'Can't you tell me?'
Pan shook his head. He yawned alarmingly, rubbed his scalp with both hands. Then he sat down on the floor, and scratched his head with one of his hind feet.
'You're the only chimpanzee I've ever seen do that,' the senior doctor said.
'I know, sir,' Pan said. 'And I beg your pardon. I started it when I was about one and a half; the visitors to the zoo thought it was cute. It's grown to be a habit.' He yawned again, turned back to the grave man who had been questioning him. 'Bad night, last night,' he said. 'Can't we get this over with and let me get back to being a laboratory animal?'
There was a moment of silence. 'No, Pan, we can't. The other chimpanzees are all in control of all kinds of secret things. You can talk English, and I presume you can talk chimpanzee. You'd soon have more secret, dangerous knowledge than we have ever allowed one person to accumulate.'
Pan doubled his knees and swung on his knuckles. I'm to be in solitary the rest of my life?' He scratched his head and added, 'For once I'll overlook being called a person.'
'It won't happen again. No, you won't be in solitary. Give us the information we want, and we'll buy you two lovely young female chimps. Fair enough?'
Pan swung more vigorously. 'Spoken like a man, professor, if I may call you that.'
'I've been one.'
'The trouble is, I can't tell you,' Pan said. 'I'm only a simple ape, and my vocabulary wouldn't run to anything like that.'
Happy coughed. But Ape Bates had been in the Navy thirty-five years; he never varied from attention.
'And how about a diagram?' the professor asked.
Pan held up his short-thumbed hands in the piteous gesture of a street beggar in a movie about India. On the late show.
'But I could show you,' he said.
General Maguire said, 'Last time this monkey got in a spaceship, all hell broke loose. I won't finish the paper work on that for six months.'
'Yes, I know,' the professor said. 'And anyway, your ship has been completely pulled apart, Pan. Trying to find out what you did to it.'
'There was a Mark XVII ready to go when I went,' Pan said.
The room filled with silence. General Maguire, not surprisingly, broke it.
'By God, we're going to have a security check on this base that'll be a honey. Nobody leaves the post till it's done, either, and—'
Pan Satyrus swung easily to the desk, sat cross-legged on it. 'Don't blow your stack, General,' he said. 'The word gets around the laboratory zoo, you know.'
