Reward for Retief (40 page)

            "Not quite, Ben,"
Retief corrected. "In feet, it's your mind that's complicating matters at
the moment."

            "Who, me?" Magnan
wailed. "I categorically deny that! Jim," he appealed to his
colleague. "Why in the world would I—?"

            "It's quite
involuntary, of course," Retief pointed out. "And unconscious. It's
an automatic response to being suddenly immersed in the SSP."

            "What's that?"
Magnan demanded. "A supersonic some-thing-or-other? Kindly explain
yourself, Retief!"

           
the retiefbeing refers to the strong sardonic principle,
the Voice put in sharply.

            "You see," Retief
explained, "when Captain Goldblatt took the young worm under his wing, so
to speak, and by patient training, taught it to communicate, he thereby
unleashed its latent intellect, with the natural result that the Strong
Sardonic Principle came into play, evoking the curious universe into which we've
wandered, because we naively accepted its basic postulates, while our own
Universe, generated by the Strong Authropic Principle, became attenuated to the
status of an unrealized potential. We have to stop fighting the problem and
solve it instead."

            "Indeed? And just how
does one go about that, may I inquire?" Magnan yelped. "It reminds
one of the old limerick:

-

"A
Phi Beta Kappa named Carradine

Once
stepped outside of his paradigm

And
since he came back,

he
hangs round the track

and
he says, "pal, can you spare a dime?" '

-

            "Apt indeed, sir,"
Retief congratulated his immediate supervisor. "But now, let's get
busy."

            "Damn," Gaby
wailed, "I'm scared! The ground is getting all bumpy, and this here
fog—"

            "Ignore that, my
dear," Magnan counseled. "Your surroundings are purely
illusory."

            "I guess this here
gravel I got in my shoe ain't no dern loose nation!" she riposted
spiritedly. "Already got blisters, chasing around in the hot sun,
and—"

            "Of course your
blisters are real enough," Magnan conceded soothingly. "But then we
must recall that all reality is illusion."

            "I can't recall nothing
I ever heard of, and something silly as that anyways—" She broke off and
recoiled as if suddenly noticing Chief Smeer for the first time.

            "Hey!" That there's
one of them pillars!" she told her biographers. "Quick, Benny! let's
go!" She seized his arm and hauled him, protesting, into the shelter of
the boulders. "We got to
do
something!" she hissed. "Them
critters is mean as a snake!"

            "Don't be absurd,"
Magnan chided unemphatically. "Chief Smeer represents the forces of Law
and Order here on Sardon." He favored the local cop with a Congratulatory
Smile, Second Class, Inferiors, for the Encouragement of.

            "Don't go showing
me
no second class SSCIE, Terry!" Smeer rebuked him sharply. "I rate
a first-class Grimace, Ritual, Relations, for the Cementing of!"

            "Benny!" Gaby put
in. "You gonna let that there pillar smart off at you?"

            "I really must protest
your use of the pejorative epithet, Gabrielle," Magnan rebuked the
indignant girl. "As for his 'smarting off,' I'm sure Chief Smeer meant
only to suggest adherence to established protocol, in which, of course, he was
quite correct. Do excuse me, Chief: I was a bit carried away for the moment, I
fear,"

            "Talking about carried
away," Smeer riposted cheekily, "I and my boys are gonna take this
here wanted crinimal away right now, which they's a reward out on the sucker.
Stand aside, there, Ben."

            "I can hardly stand
idly by, Chief," Magnan stated firmly, "while you violate the
diplomatic immunity of a diplomatic member of the staff of the Embassy of
Terra."

            "Yer own boss throwed
the sucker to the throng," Smeer reminded him sharply, and abruptly
uncoiled. The sinuous alien used two of the arms grouped at his upper end to
rub his thorax gently. Magnan's eye was caught by the glint of polished black
metal briefly exposed below his cuff. Impulsively, he reached out quickly and
grabbed the armored wrist.

            "It's him!" he
yelped. "Retief, the Black Knight of Farbelow was really Chief Smeer here!
Somehow, he assumed the form of a high Terran official—"

            "Nope," Smeer
corrected.
"You
done that, Ben. I taken that mental image o' yours,
and used it to mould the latent energies and all."

            "He's a tricky one,
aren't you, worm?" Retief challenged.

            "Yer on a bum lay,
jailbird," Smeer retorted. "If you think
I'm
the one that's
been lousing up the paradigm. That's old Worm—"

           
enough,
the
Voice cut in sharply. Smeer fell silent in mid-expostulation.

            "Retief," Magnan
appealed.
"What
is going on here? I confess I'm quite at sea."

            "I suggest you avoid
vivid analogies for the present, sir," Retief replied, waving away the
shadowy vista of white-capped surf which for a moment had almost blocked off
the jungle view. "The space/time/Vug continuum appears to be in a highly
malleable state just now/here/vorg, because the SAP and SSP are in head-to-head
confrontation, thereby attenuating what we may as well think of as the fabric
of space/time/Vug, so the latent energies tend to assume any form offered as a
template by a strong visujalization."

            "I see, sort of,"
Magnan replied vaguely. "And in that case, let's just visualize ourselves
safely back where we belong!" He closed his eyes as if in concentration.

            "Hey! Don't go—"
Smeer started, but subsided when Retief thrust him aside. "I suggest you
proceed carefully, sir," he told Magnan. "Let's give the matter some
thought at this point, rather than acting impulsively."

            "Just think ..."
Magnan mused aloud. "If only we hadn't been in such a hurry to get to
Staff Meeting on time, we'd never have become embroiled in this madness. So
it's all the fault of Ambassador Shortfall, really, for being such a
martinet!"

            "If that thought
soothes you, Ben," Retief said, "I'm sure it's all right to go ahead
and have it."

            "Darn right!"
Magnan confirmed. "And things were going so well: after my stunning
coup
in making contact with TERRI in the person of Big, my career was assured! I
was dreaming of promotion: just savor the sound of it: 'Career Ambassador
Benjamin O. Magnan'. Sensuous, eh?"

            "Virtually
pornographic, sir," Retief confirmed.

            " 'Of all sad words of
tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'it might have been'," Magnan quoted
gloomily.

            "Hey, that ain't the
way it goes!" Smeer corrected at once. "I seen it in a Terry tape
once: The saddest words on sea or shore are 'once it was and is no more.'
Whatever that means."

            "That's a corruption of
the original." Magnan dismissed the idea.

            "Oh, yeah?" Smeer
retorted. "Well, I guess the SSP is as valid as the SAP on any day!"

            "That is a question for
the philosophers," Magnan adjudicated. "Or possibly the Cosmologists.
In fact," he went on, "if I ever everge from this contretemps, I have
decided, on the basis of the SAP, to do so with a large fortune, in gold. Oddly
perhaps, gemstones don't move me, but the solid bulk of gold coin—that's fat
city. This is no mere greedy impulse, you understand, Retief; I shall employ an
adequate portion of my wealth to endow a Chair of Experimental Cosomology at
Omaha State, my old alma mater.

            "You might
object," he mused aloud, "that no such discipline as Experimental
Cosmology exists—but it
should,
if every Tom, Dick and Meyer is going to
go around begetting his own Universe. No wonder there's no harmony in human affairs.
The thing must be reduced to a strict scientific basis!"

            "How do you figger to
haul all this jack out of here?" Smeer inquired sardonically. "Kinda
heavy to back-pack."

            "So long as I am
evoking the mineral from primordial energies," Magnan replied loftily,
"I may as well evoke it neady stacked in the vaults at the Cora Exchange
County Bank, over on Choctaw."

            "Good idea,"
Retief approved.

            "Still," Magnan
rambled on, "all this is still highly theoretical: the Philosophical
Discourse Dogma of course assumes the existence of other powerful intellects,
equally capable with Man of evoking realities. But nobody expected them to be
like
this!"

           
you consider such intellects to be hypothetical?
the
Voice thundered, having regained its former volume and timbre,
surely you do not attempt to deny the
copernican principle, of which the principle of mediocrity is but a special
case.

           
"Well, not
exactly," Magnan temporized, "but after all, it's fer simpler to
suppose that I'm merely hallucinating. That's Occam's Razor, you know: the
simplest thesis is the best one."

           
sirwilliamfoccam knew nothing of collapsin schrodinger functions,
the Voice reminded him curtly.

            "That's not the
point," Magnan whined.

           
what, then,
IS
the
point?
the relentless
Voice demanded.

            "Well," Magnan
started gamely, "the point is, Retief and I were dispatched on a perfectly
routine errand, and were set upon by a mob led by Chief Smudge, and took refuge
in an unlikely establishment known as the Cloud Cuckoo Club, where Will Shakespeare
was a regular; then a mob of local dacoits burst in, and I was raped away to a
jungle fastness."

           
what IS
a
'jungle fastness
?
the Voice wanted to know.

            "Well, it's just what
the term suggests," Magnan explained. "A thieves' den in the jungle.
Or anyway, that's what it looks like. They were about to clap me into a
concentration camp when my colleague Mr. Retief chanced along, and things grew
rapidly worse!"

           
you consider that an explanation
?
the Voice boomed
silently.

            "How can I explain when
I don't understand myself?" Magnan demanded, not illogically.

           
one should never undertake to explain that of which one has no
comprehension
,
the Voice chided sternly,
pray allow me to enlighten you ...

           
"Can
you?" Magnan yelped.
"Will
you? Please do! I fear I'll lose my
sanity soon—"

            "Easy, Ben,"
Retief counseled. "I think we've stumbled into a node here, a point where
the two paradigms overlap, like two overlapping circles, only in four or five
dimensions. All we have to do is get outside of it, and the SAP will be in
charge again. Meanwhile, what we think of as reality is malleable, and we're
forming it with our minds. Captain Goldblatt was the first human here, so he
impressed a basic pattern on the whole scene: we've only been modifying the
details."

            Magnan groaned. "The
captain must have been a strange character," he commented.