No Phule Like An Old Phule (34 page)

Whatever answer he’d been about to offer was aborted by the hotel room’s door suddenly swinging open.

“Hello, Ernie,” said the heavyset man who walked in. There were two other men behind him, who stood barring the door, which until just a moment ago had been soundly locked. While they were simply standing there, there was very little doubt what they were there for-or what they would do if either Ernie or Lola made a wrong move. The man removed his hat and turned to the window. “And Miss Lola. A pleasure to see you both here. But enough small talk—I’ve come to see what progress you’ve made on your assignment.” He paused frowning. “You have made progress, correct?”

“Well, yes, of course,” said Lola, making an effort to put on a cheerful smile. “As it happens, we were just about to lay down plans for the final phase of our operation here, and since you’re here, I’m sure your input would be…”

“DON’T GIVE ME THAT BULLSHITT!” roared Mr. V-for that was who had come to visit them, unannounced and certainly unwanted. He waited for a moment, then continued in a quieter (but no less menacing) tone, “You two have been paid good money, and as far as I can tell you haven’t done a damn thing to earn it. Now, that’s just not right, is it, boys?”

There was no response from the two men blocking the door behind him, and Mr. V turned to look, a puzzled expression on his face. It wasn’t normal for his underlings to forget their lines, especially when he’d prompted them so clearly. They were exactly where he’d stationed them, but their faces had assumed blank expressions, and even as he watched they slumped slowly to the floor. “What the hell…?” said Mr. V.

His answer came from a little man in a black jumpsuit who poked his head around the doorframe. “Mind if I come in?” he said, stepping over the two fallen thugs. Cradled in his right arm was some sort of exotic device-from the look of it, a weapon.

“Who are you?” Mr. V’s voice was harsh, but his expression looked anything but confident. His eyes stayed fixed on the weapon in the little man’s arms.

“Mostly people call me. Doc,” said the man, with a bright smile. “I’m security chief at the Fat Chance Casino. Which may give you some idea of what I’m doing here, not to mention why I just stunned your muscle boys.” He patted the weapon he was carrying. “One of the good things about working for the Legion is you get some really nice hardware.”

Mr. V and Ernie were both taken aback by this information, but Lola nodded, and said, “You’ve been keeping us under surveillance, right?”

“Well, since you won the jackpot, we have,” said Doc, with a wink. “Didn’t want one of our partners to walk around Lorelei unprotected. There are some mighty rough characters on the station, y’know.”

“Yeah, we noticed,” said Ernie. “So what happens now?”

“Well, Tullie Bascomb would like you two to come down to his office-he’s got a proposition we think will be to everyone’s advantage. As for you-” he turned to Mr. V-“there’s a squad of legionnaires out in the hallway. They’ll take you and your boys down to the spaceport and put you on the next ship out. Tell them where you’re staying and they’ll get your luggage on board. And, oh yeah-don’t plan on coming back.”

Mr. V was livid. “You won’t get away with this!” he shouted.

“Sure I will,” said Doc. Two solidly built men in black jumpsuits came through the door. Doc nodded to them, and said, “He’s all yours, men. Don’t hesitate to zap him if he gives you any trouble.”

“Right-o, Doc,” said one of the two, stepping forward to put a hand on Mr. V’s shoulder.

“Good, I knew you’d see it my way,” said Doc, as a sullen Mr. V stepped to one side and, at the casino guards’ signal, raised his hands above his head. Doc turned to Ernie and Lola. “Now, shall we go see what’s up at the casino?”

They followed him out the door, stepped over the slumbering mob heavies, and went down the stairs with him. Neither Ernie nor Lola said anything the whole way back to the Fat Chance Casino.

“Here is the hunting ground,” said Qual, softly. “It is now requisite to be very careful and quiet. The game’s afoot! And you know what that signifies!”

“Hell, no,” said L. P. Asho, testily, but Qual had crept ahead out of earshot, so he turned to Austen Tay-Shun, and muttered. “The damn critter’s been sayin‘ that all day long, like it meant somethin’. You got any idea what it means?”

“I think it’s a quote out of some Old Earth writer,” said Tay-Shun. “Prob’ly Sheik Spear-that old buzzard seems to have wrote almost everything.”

“How’s a Zenobia lizard know Sheik Spear’s stuff?”

Tay-Shun shrugged. “Maybe he just said something similar, and the translator turned it into poetry. Be quiet, now-for all I know, you’re like to scare the critters so they come chargin‘ at us, and I don’t want no part of that.”

“You see any critters?” whispered Euston 0’Better.

“Damn if I can see anything like a dino…”

“In this light, I’m damned if I can see my hand in front of my face,” said Asho. “There could be all sorts of critters out there and we’d never…”

“SHHH!” said Qual, and the three hunters jumped. The Zenobian guide had crept back practically on top of them, so quietly that none of them had noticed. “If humans aren’t being very careful and quiet, all is for nought. I am guiding like a good native, but humans must do their part. Follow!” And before any of them could ask a question, Qual turned and vanished into the semidarkness again.

The hunters, chastened, moved in the general direction he’d gone, hoping the trail wasn’t too difficult to follow. Some of the places he’d led them through today had been almost too much for the humans, with thick briarlike tangles of underbrush, small biting flying creatures that seemed to have an appetite for human flesh even though they hadn’t evolved to eat it, and another small creature whose nest they seemed to have threatened, and which noisily kept trying to repel them until they were far out of its territory. It had been quite a challenge for the three humans to keep up with Qual.

“I don’t know how the hell we’re supposed to find the damned dinos if we can’t see ‘em,” Asho muttered again. “Why, they might be sneakin’ right up on us…”

“Come on, you know somethin‘ that big would make a lot of noise,” whispered O’Better.

“Hey, some of the most dangerous Old Earth dinos were little fellers, not much bigger than you or me,” said Asho. “Take that lizard boy Qual, for example. If he was huntin‘ for us, you think you’d hear him? He could take a big bite out of your butt before you knew he was in the same county…”

“He could take a bigger one out o‘ yours,” said Tay Shun. “Now, why don’t y’all do like he says and hush up. At least then, if some dangerous kind of critter tries to sneak up on us, at least we’ll have some chance to hear it.”

“SHHH!” said Qual, who’d sneaked up on them unnoticed again. When the hunters were done jumping, the Zenobian said, “Game is very close. We wanting to surprise it. Follow me, and be very, very quiet.”

Dutifully, the hunters fell into single file behind Qual and crept forward through the tall alien vegetation.

Now Qual carried a dim handlight of some sort-more for the hunters’ convenience than for his own, it seemed. The little Zenobian’s vision was evidently as good in the starlit night of his home world as theirs was in full daylight. Perhaps the sunglasses he habitually wore in bright sunlight were another consequence of his night-adapted vision.

The party came into a moderately large clearing, perhaps twenty meters across. The sandy soil was soft and loosely packed here. “Look!” said Qual, shining his light on a depression in the ground. It was an enormous footprint.

“Ghu almighty, what kind of critter made that?” said Asho. “It must be enormous…”

“That is game we hunt,” said Qual. “The mark is fresh, so we are very up close to it. It went that away.”

He pointed to the left.

“How did somethin‘ that big walk past us and we didn’t even hear it?” said Tay-Shun, falling in behind Qual, who had wordlessly begun to stalk in the direction the footprints pointed-they could now see that there were more of them.

“Here’s another footprint,” O’Better whispered, turning back over his shoulder. He pointed down. “This mother’s big-you boys got your guns ready?”

“Sure do,” said L. P. Asho, brandishing the Legion surplus weapon he’d gotten from Chocolate Harry’s arsenal. “Who gets first shot?”

“I dunno-I reckon we all oughta be ready, in case it charges. When we see it, we better spread out so’s we all have a clear shot in case it charges or somethin‘. If we get time to think about it, we can decide who’s got the hammer then.”

“Good plan,” whispered 0’Better. “Can anybody see anything? It’s darker than the inside of a horse…”

“SHHHH!” said Qual, turning around. “I sense the game just ahead,” he whispered. “It is in a small clearing. I will turn out the light, and we will all step forward utterly quietly, or it may respond unpredictably. Everyone is to expand sideways, so we are having direct view before I turn on light.”

The hunters stepped forward into the clearing, suddenly aware despite the darkness of some huge living creature there in front of them. Asho held his stun ray at the ready, and to either side he could hear his friends moving into place. “Now!” whispered Qual, and turned his light on to a brighter beam.

Asho stared upward, where the beast ought to be, startled at the sudden brightness in the clearing.

Where was it? Had it heard them and escaped already?

“What the hell…” said O’Better, expressing the puzzlement all of them felt. They swung their heads in all directions, looking for the huge creature that must be directly in front of them. “Where’s the critter?”

“Down there!” said Qual, pointing. Sure enough, there on the floor of the clearing, directly in front of them, sat the creature they had been trailing. It was a stubby creature, more or less the size of a lounge chair. At first glance it looked like nothing so much as the enormous paw of some huge beast of prey, cut off just above the ankle. At the top, a pair of bulbous eyes on thin stalks swung toward the sudden light, staring at the hunters for just a moment. Then, before any of them could react, the huge appendage flexed its toes and bounded out of the clearing, too swiftly for any of them to get a shot off.

“What the hell?” said Asho, making up in vehemence what he lacked in originality. “I never seen anything like that before. What was that thing?”

Qual turned to them, and said, grinning toothily, “Didn’t I tell you? It is just as I said: The game’s a foot!”

“Look here, Qual, this won’t do at all,” said Euston O’Better. “We’d be pure and simple laughin‘ stocks if we showed up back home with that kind of thing as a trophy.” The hunters had returned to the camp, and the three of them were sitting with the Zenobian around a small camp stove, warming up coffee for the humans.

Qual grinned, showing his intimidating array of daggerlike teeth. “You did not explain this to me,” he said. “What kind of game is it you search, then, if the snool is not it?”

“Hell, dinos!” said L. P. Asho. “The big mothers—you know, like tranasaurs or brontosaurs. You got ‘em here, don’t you?”

“Big mothers?” Qual looked puzzled. “My own mother is rather large, perhaps twenty centimeters taller than the average female, and proportionately weighty. But I do not think she would like being hunted…”

“L. P’s just usin‘ a figure of speech, is all,” said O’Better, hastily. “He don’t really want to shoot nobody’s mother, do you now, L. P.?”

“Well, I gotta think about that, Euston,” said Asho, rubbing his chin. “Eddy Joe Hollub’s mom was always real mean to me back when I was a kid…”

“Har, har!” said O’Better. “L. P.‘s full of jokes, ain’t he? But seriously, Qual, a big hairy jumpin’ foot’s pretty unusual, but I don’t think it’s quite the kind of thing you can be proud of havin‘ shot, y’know? It don’t make a very smart trophy.”

“I think not,” said Qual. “The snool is a very stupid animal. It rarely knows whether it is coming or going…”

Austen, Tay-Shun cut him off. “Nab, we don’t want the animal to be smart-we want it to look impressive as a mounted trophy. You know, big and fierce, like that.” Qual’s eyes opened wider. “Big and fierce? Aha, why did you not say so? I can find you many such beasts.”

“All right,” said Asho, setting his coffee cup loudly down on a flat stone. “Now we’re cookin‘ with raw antimatter. What kind of critters are we talkin’ about, and how soon can we get a shot at ‘em?”

“Oh, these are very large beasts,” said Qual, his eyes rolling as if to suggest their magnitude. “They are bad tempered and always hungry. I do not know whether a wise sophont would go looking for them on purpose. The best way to deal with them is to be somewhere else.”

“Whoo-ee, that sure sounds nasty,” said Asho. “Do they have big teeth, or claws, or somethin‘ else like that?”

“Teeth, and claws, and horns, and a sharp, sharp barb on the tippy-tip of the tail,” said Qual, putting his hands over his eyes. “I think you are very smart humans. Listen to me, you go hunt for these animals, maybe they get the smart idea to come hunting for humans instead. And if that happens, the beasts having all the fun.”

“Whoo-ee,” said O’Better. “I reckon we oughta stop and think about that one, boys.”

“I knew you would be smart humans,” said Qual. “Now, I can find you nice safe things to hunt, like gryff…”

“Damnit, we don’t want safe!” bellowed Asho. “What are you boys, men or miffles? We come here for just two things, to get us some samples of Phule-Proof’s new models and to hunt some big ol‘ critters.”

“Shh!” said O’Better. “The boy here might tell somebody!”

“”Shee-it, Euston, the boy ain’t gonna tell nobody,“ said Asho. ”He don’t know anybody at Phule-Proof to go yappin‘ to. But he sure does sound like he can take us to some serious big game-I mean, fierce-lookin’ critters with teeth and claws. I don’t want to come home with nothin‘, but I don’t want the folks back on Tejas to think I shot some poor old woman’s milk cow, neither.“

Qual seemed to slump, and he said in a voice that, even through the translator, sounded subdued. “If you are so anxious to seek danger, then I will take you. But do not tell me I did not give you all fair warnings.”