Reward for Retief (14 page)

            "So," the chief
came back, "it is clearly Mr. Magnan to whom I should direct my conciliatory
remarks." So saying, he gave a mighty flip of his forequarters, throwing
Henry off, just as Magnan emerged from among jumbled tables into the clear.

            "Good lord, Your
Majesty!" the Second Secretary and Consul gasped. "Did the brute ...?"

            Before Henry could frame a
disgusted reply, Smeer arrived with a
crash!
that shook the floor, and
at once threw a coil around the surprised Magnan and before the diplomat could
so much as yelp, whisked him away through the shattered window. Henry made a
fruitless lunge in the direction they had gone. "Hey!" he said
without conviction. He turned to seek out Retief and saw him, approaching from
a few feet away, Bill at his side.

            "They done got pore old
Mr. Magnan," Henry reported sadly, rubbing the elbow on which he had
landed, as if to remind everyone that he, too, had suffered at the hands of the
enemy. "Too bad. He was a nice feller, too. Used to call me 'my majesty'
and all. Too bad, but— Hey, where you going, Retief?" he broke off to call
as the latter bypassed him and continued toward the broken window. "Look
out! That dang pillar's yonder! Where he's taken Mr. Magnan."

            "Well, we can't just
let him rob us of Mr. Magnan's scintillating company, can we, Big?" Retief
said, as he climbed out through the ragged opening.

            "Don't hardly know what
that 'scent-lation' is," Henry objected. "But wait up, I guess I want
a piece o' this." He hunched his shoulders and followed through the
shard-rimmed sash, Bill close behind.

            Henry looked down and saw
spongy-looking black soil thickly grown with slender brownish reeds. He dropped
down, found the footing treacherous. Retief had started down a path overhung
with tall grasses. A few gnats hovered listlessly here, as if uncertain whom to
harrass.

            "Careful," Henry
told Bill. "Don't bog down in this here muck." The ragged path beaten
through the clustered vegetation led off in a wavering line toward the water s
edge. No locals were in sight. A battered light-alloy rowboat lay in the mud,
lapped by the oily water. Retief went to it, and from the shore caught sight of
a large, clumsy-looking galley moving briskly away, propelled by multiple oars
which moved in approximate unison.

            "How we gonna catch
'em, General?" Bill asked as he came up.

            "Got just the
thing," Henry supplied, arriving beside the two. "Right the way
round, hid out under the deck." He led the way along the barely visible
path which followed a ledge of fairly firm ground along the periphery of the
apparently derelict structure housing the club. Blinky trailed behind,
muttering audibly.

            "Don't like it, going
outside the club, 'mongst all them pillars," he told his biographers.
"No skin off
our
butts, they grab some outsider. Let it go, I
say." Henry shushed the little man.

            When they had arrived at
their destination, a cavernous, black, echoic space under the building and
behind the pilings supporting the club, Henry abruptly told Blinky to go back.
He went, protesting.

            "Ole Blink's kindy shy
o' the pillars, since he spent a week with 'em," Henry explained,
"time he went to check the weather and got hisself grabbed. Taken to some
kinda headquarters-like and he was had up before a judge with a regular little
peruke and five eyes peekin out from under it, so he says. Too bad. Useta be a
good man, old Blink: come here 'fore I did. Come on." He stepped off into
surprisingly shallow water and waded, ducking his head under the sagging
joists, to a tarp-covered dory-sized boat moored to a piling. He stripped away
the cover to reveal the sleek but work-scarred form of a regulation dispatch
boat as long ago issued to the Terran Navy for ship-to-shore personal transport
for Rear Admirals and Captains. A six-digit number was stenciled on the prow.

            "That there
trifib," Bill stated in a flat voice, "was stole from the Navy, off
the old
Imperator,
tell by the serial code on her;
Imp
was lost
on survey duty more'n a hunnert years ago. Never found a trace of her until
now." He looked Henry in the eye.

            "Where'd you get
it?" he demanded in the tone of a traffic cop almost politely requesting a
citizen's DL.

            "Right here when I
come, boy," Henry told him, and proceeded to climb aboard, then turned to
lend a hand to the Marine.

            "Oh, boy," Bill
said, almost gleefully. "Always wanted to go joy-riding in the Captain's
gig. She looks wore but ship-shape."

            "Durn right,"
Henry confirmed. "We taken good care of her. Think you can back her outa
here?"

            Retief climbed aboard as
Bill deftly maneuvered the little craft out between the pilings, its almost
silent power unit setting up an eerie, hollow echo between the riffled black
waters and the underside of the club floor, where only a few gnats darted
aimlessly.

            Retief studied the structure
close overhead. "This timber was cut with old-fashioned sonosaws," he
commented. "So it must have been built by Terries—a long time ago."

            "Club's been here a
while," Henry confirmed thoughtfully. "Some say hundreds o' years,
standard."

            Back out in the watery
sunshine, Bill looked around to orient himself, then steered alongside the
unpainted plank-sided structure, and out into open water, turning the prow
toward the fleeing boat, now a mile distant and approaching a heavily-wooded
point of land projecting into the water. Even here, he noted absently, the
gnats swarmed. He batted them away.

            "Better step on it,
before they land and skidaddle into the woods," Henry suggested; Bill
nodded and opened the throttle; the hum of the power-pack deepened, and the
prow of the boat rose as she leaped forward, a crisp bow wave curling away from
the sleek hull.

            The boat ahead passed the
point, then curved in sharply and disappeared behind it.

            "Wonder if the
lift-unit still works," Bill muttered to himself.

            "Better not try it,
boy," Henry cautioned from the bow. "Oh-oh," he spoke up.
"We got a stern chase on our hands, boys; there's a crick yonder; they'll
get in it and try to lose us in the shallers."

            "Look there!" Bill
exclaimed, pointing toward the nearby shore-line. A man covered with black mud
was staggering among mangrove-like roots, pausing to wave frantically.

            "It's me!"
Magnan's reedy voice came faintly across the water.

            "Better pick him up, I
reckon," Henry grunted as Bill curved in toward the shore, steering
carefully between sandbanks just below the surface. Magnan waded out, paused to
splash water over his face; his pinched features emerged starkly white against
the black mud surrounding them. Bill reached, caught him by the arm and hauled
him aboard amid the stench of sulphurous mud. Henry backed the skiff, twisting
to look back over his shoulder to steer.

            "Heavens!" Magnan
gasped. "I'm indeed glad to see you! I feared the wrenches would do me
in!" He paused to gulp air and slap ineffectually at the muck on his
once-crisp late early afternoon informal dickey-suit.

            "There are other Terran
captives, you know," he commented tonelessly. "There's a sort of
concentration camp back in the jungle. I caught a glimpse of it when I made my
break, when they beached the boat. Terrans, in rags, herded like wild animals
into that dreadful stockade, crowding around the locked gate, peering out
mournfully. We must hurry back and inform His Excellency!"

            "Maybe we ought to take
a closer look, first," Retief suggested, "so we'll know what we're
reporting."

            The boat was back in deep
water now. Henry looked inquiringly at Retief.

            "Let's go back a
hundred yards," the latter said. "Stay inshore and we'll keep a sharp
lookout. Bill, get in the prow, if you don't mind, and sing out as soon as you
see the locals."

            Bill nodded and went
forward. At once he raised a hand.

            "Hold hard,
Henry," he said. "Easy. They're on the beach; seem to be getting
ready to hike inland; unloading the boat."

            Henry halted their forward
progress. Small ripples lapped at the hull with a gently slapping sound, over
which could be heard the gabble of the pillar's wheezy voices, echoing across
the flat water.

            The Terrans arrived
unnoticed at the edge of the small stream fifty feet from where the kidnappers
had grounded their boat.

            "I had managed to free
my ankles," Magnan told Retief. "And I awaited the proper moment;
while they were engaged in pushing the boat up on the mud, I slipped over the
side and was off!"

            "Nice work, sir,"
Retief congratulated his associate. The boat from which Magnan had escaped was
a heavy, flat-bottomed affair with an untrimmed tree-trunk serving as mast and
a much-patched sail drooping, unsheeted, from the yard. The oars, apparently
chopped to shape with an axe, were heaped in a disorderly pile.

            Rounding the prow of the
beached galley, they saw a lone guard stretched out, partially coiled, in the
shade of the close-growing jungle.

            "Hadn't we, that is,
you best, er, deal with this fellow before going further?" Magnan
suggested in a gingerly way, as one Mentioning the Unmentionable, Just This
Once (1206-a).

            Retief shook his head,
"Our best bet is to go around him quietly."

            They moved up, treading
silently on the soft ground, past the prow of the galley and into the shadow of
the wattle-and-daub stockade. As they paused at the comer of the ten-foot-high
barrier, they heard a faint sound, like the hiss of escaping steam.

            "Hark!" Magnan
said softly. "Did you hear that faint sound, like the hiss of escaping
steam?"

            "It ain't no steam
that's escaping, pal," a hoarse voice whispered through a chink in the
rude wall. "It's me: Looie Segundo." The voice continued: "Youse
fellers can help. Jest get ready to decoy that dumb piker sleeping it off over
there, and I'm over the top in nothing flat."

            "Wait!" Magnan
whispered urgently. "If you arouse the sentry, we shall be caught here in
the open, exposed to his gaze."

            "It ain't his gays you
gotta worry about, chum," Segundo cautioned. "It's them fangs o' his.
Can chew a feller's leg off in two shakes of a cat's whisker—jest ast Gimpy,
here, he can tell ya. Lucky they don't like Terry meat: he spit out the leg and
let it go at that."

            "I find nothing
implicit in that datum tending to refute my thesis that caution is in
order," Magnan replied tartly.

            At that moment, the pillar
guard raised its head and opened its mouth, like a small drag-line bucket, to
expose the very appurtenances under discussion. If it noticed the intruders, it
showed no sign, but merely rearranged its sinuous body in a new configuration
indistinguishable from the original one.

            "Quick!" Looie
hissed. "Gimpy here's gonna give me a leg up—that's a little joke, see? He
only got the one leg and I said he's giving me a leg, see. The point is—"

            "Enough, Mr.
Segundo," Magnan cut in. "The jape is an ingenious one, and we fully
appreciate its subtlety. Now you'd best hurry. At any moment it's going to
occur to that alert guard that its duties do not include passive supervisions
of an escape attempt."

            "They don't care,"
Segundo replied off-handedly. "Why
should
they? It's
us
fellers
livin off the fat o' the land.