Phule felt as if he’d been bouncing across the prairies of Cut ‘N’ Shoot on his robosteed for weeks without a rest. In reality, it was just a day and a half since he’d lit out in search of the Indians who had supposedly captured Beeker and Nightingale. Why the Indians would have kidnapped the butler and medic was beyond his ability to understand; but if the other locals with whom he’d had dealings were at all typical, logic didn’t have a whole lot to do with how people acted on this planet.
Fortunately, a stretch as a captain in the Space Legion, and commanding officer of Omega Company, had prepared Phule for dealing with illogic in all its glory. He chuckled as he thought of his crew of misfits and rejects, supposedly the dregs of the Legion-until he’d got hold of them and made them into a tight-knit crew that had overcome every obstacle put in their way. The Omega Mob had a distinctly unregulation way of dealing with its challenges; but the Omega way got results, and that was all that mattered to Phule. Now that he faced his own unexpected challenge, the least he could do was to overcome it in the same style and spirit as his own legionnaires.
Which he intended to do as soon as he reached the place Ol‘ Ben had told him the Indians camped this time of year. He’d have been there long since if he’d been able to take a hoverjeep-but the rulers of Cut ’N‘ Shoot were fanatics for authenticity, and nothing faster than a robosteed was permitted. He had no doubt that a few hundred credits in the right hands would have uncovered exceptions to that policy. But he’d been in too much of a hurry to catch the runaways to stop and feed the hungry bureaucratic maw- or so he’d thought. Now he was paying for his impatience with saddle sores.
All morning he’d been urging the robosteed westward through a particularly inhospitable landscape-01‘ Ben had referred to it as the “badlands,” and Phule could see why. But he had good reason to think he was nearing his destination. When he’d started out, there’d been the merest hint of a column of smoke on the horizon ahead. It had gradually grown thicker, and now the breeze carried a tantalizing aroma of mesquite-and something else. Somebody was cooking, and Phule had an idea that if he could just get his robosteed to move a little faster, he might be there in time for lunch. Whether anybody would offer him anything to eat remained to be seen, but he hadn’t gotten as far as he had by being a pessimist.
The robosteed was stoically plodding up a narrow gulch when a tall figure suddenly appeared, holding a hand up palm forward, in the universal halt sign. “You best be stopping dere, mon,” said the figure in a resonant alto voice. It was a tall woman in colorful, flowing robes, her long dark hair in a multitude of braids. She did not display any kind of weapon, but both her voice and her presence radiated authority.
“Good morning,” said Phule, pulling the robosteed to a halt and raising his own hand in a similar gesture to hers. “I’m looking for two people…”
“Maybe you find dem, if dey want you to,” said the woman, crossing her arms in front of her. “What makes you think dey be here?”
“Everyone back in town said the Indians took them…” Phule began.
“Oh, sure, mon, blame de Indian,” said the woman. “What dey know back in town, anyway? Dey think all Indians be the same.”
“Well, I’m a stranger here, myself,” said Phule. Realizing he hadn’t given his name, he added, “I’m Captain Jester, of the Space Legion.”
“Captain,” said the woman, nodding. “I am glad to know de name. People call me Rita.”
Phule nodded back. “A pleasure to meet you, Rita. So, if the folks back in town are wrong about the Indians, maybe you can set me right.” He paused, looking the woman up and down. “Uh-you
“Oh yes, West Indian,” said Rita. She pointed to the north. “You go a little bit dat-a-way, you find de East Indians. And de other way, you find de Red Indians, or de Wild Indians, de tourists like to call dem. Which kind of Indian are you wanting to find, Captain?”
“I don’t know which kind,” said Phule, now perplexed. “A fellow in town told me the people I’m lookin for were probably captured by the Indians. He didn’t tell me there were so many kinds of Indians…“
“I told you dey townspeople don’t know ‘bout Indians,” Rita scoffed. “Who dese people you trying to find? Friends of yours?”
“I guess you could call them that,” said Phule. “I’m looking for two people, a man and woman traveling together…”
Rita cut him off with a laugh. “You know how many tourists fit dat picture? Almost everybody who come here, dey come in couples. You may be de only single man I see dis year, and you say you not a tourist. So how I know dem if I see dem?”
“Hmmm…” said Phule, trying to think of a way to distinguish Beeker and Nightingale from other tourist couples. “An older man with a younger woman,” he said. “She’s maybe thirty, tall and dark-skinned like you. He’s shorter and about forty-five-I think. I don’t know how they’re dressed-the last time I saw them, she was wearing the same kind of uniform I am, and he was in a dark suit. But I doubt they’re wearing that on their vacation…”
Rita nodded. “Captain, come wit‘ me.” She turned and began to walk back up the trail Phule had been following.
“Wait-where are you taking me?” he said, putting his robosteed into forward mode again.
“We goin‘ to see de Mon,” said Rita, and Phule had nothing to do but to follow her.
Chocolate Harry looked out over the large plot he’d just marked off to the south of Zenobia Base. It was about the most worthless piece of land in the vicinity; good for a practice bombing range, if Omega Company had included any bomber pilots it wanted to turn loose on some simulated targets. Or maybe the plot would’ve been good enough to con some gullible investor into a land deal, although Harry was fairly sure that no investor who actually laid eyes on the place was likely to buy it. After all, even the Zenobians had no particular use for it-at least, not until they’d ended up leasing it to the Legion as part of the Zenobian Base.
Now he’d been ordered to turn it into a golf course. Lieutenant Armstrong had drawn up a set of plans for three golf holes-all they’d have the time to build before General Blitzkrieg arrived on base. It was going to be Harry’s job to take that worthless patch of ground and make Armstrong’s plan a reality.
Things had come along reasonably well, he had to admit. He’d already turned loose a couple of squads with flamethrowers to get rid of the worst of the gnarly Zeno-bian desert vegetation. Heavy earthmovers would follow, doing what they could to turn the brutal ravine-crossed terrain into something a sane sophont might want to take an occasional recreational stroll over.“ With any luck, the brush fires and rumbling machines would have driven off at least the larger local predators by the time he sent the squads back out for pick-and-shovel work.
But to judge by the reports coming back from the construction gangs, it wasn’t the large predators that were going to be a problem. The whole area was apparently the prime breeding grounds for some kind of Zenobian critter-Flight Leftenant Qual had identified them as “florbigs,” and dismissed them as harmless. Harmless they may have been, and there were even a few of the legionnaires who thought they were “sorta cute,” as Brick put it. They also had an unfortunate habit of darting out of the underbrush to steal any small object left unattended for more than a moment. This included hand tools, the workers’ lunch, and the occasional article of apparel. And they were fast-most of the time, the workers never got a glimpse of them until they were scurrying away with somebody’s sandwich. Harry’s first instinct was to send out another flamethrower squad to get rid of the vermin, once and for all.
But Harry made the mistake of asking Lieutenant Rembrandt’s permission, which was when he learned of a provision in the treaty that Captain Jester had signed with the Zenobians-a clause inserted on the insistence of the Extraterrestrial Protection Agency, forbidding the Legion to harass any local creature, no matter what the natives thought of the matter. And despite his attempts to prove the contrary, toasting the critters with flamethrowers was definitely a form of harassment. This left Harry with two choices: hire a squad of Zenobians to get rid of the florbigs or put up with them. After a discreet inquiry as to the going rate for local exterminators, he reluctantly chose the latter option.
Then there was some kind of gravitational anomaly in the middle of the tract. Nothing big and dangerous, like a stray white hole, but definitely something that didn’t match the gravitational profile of the rest of the plot of land. Harry’d sent a crew out to locate it, but the best they could do was report that it was something like a hundred yards underground, more trouble than it was worth to try to dig up. Besides, its profile on the surface was almost small enough to ignore entirely-an area about twenty feet across that, gravitationally, acted as if it were a sharp pinnacle instead of a flat surface. That would’ve been almost no problem at all-if it hadn’t been smack in the
