Reward for Retief (41 page)

            "What makes you think
so, Fancy-pants?" A resonant voice demanded from directly behind Magnan.
He leapt, startled, and hit the ground running, but halted after a few paces
and stood dithering.

            "It's no use, I
suppose," he declared, looking around hopefully as if for someone to
contradict him. All he saw, besides Retief and the suddenly subdued Smeer, was
a middle-aged but still burly red-head in a handsomely tailored but well-worn
yachting outfit. "Like Boss but younger and broader!" Magnan burst
out.

            "Naw," the
stranger dismissed the remark and thrust out a work-hardened hand.

            "Sol's the
handle," he said in a confident tone. "Sorry if I snuck up on you,
Mister—"

            "Magnan," the
frail diplomat blurted, grasping the proffered member. "Hi, Sol," he
added. "Actually we've met—or will meet, or—anyway Retief and I were just
going, ha, ha, so if you'll excuse us ..."

            "Going where, Mister
Mumble?" Sol challenged, not releasing his firm grip on Magnan's hand.
"Reckon you boys better stay put until I can get things straightened out
here some."

            "What things were
those, Mr. Sol?" Magnan wondered aloud.

            Sol waved a burly arm in an
all-encompassing gesture. "I reckon you noticed a few little 'nomalies',"
he suggested vaguely. His eyes strayed to Smeer, now flattened against the
major boulder as if attempting to squeeze under it. "Like that there
grateful critter," Sol amplified. "Got too big fer its britches which
it ain't even got any."

            "Have a care,
Cap," Smeer snarled. "You seem to forget the Accommodation."

            "You boys came up with
that one," he dismissed the complaint. "I never agreed to no
Accommodation. The old SAP can steamroller yer lousy SSP any day o' the week.
Now, I'm telling ya: you lay off messing around, or I'll lay the whole thing on
Herself."

            "Don't be a fool!"
Smeer cautioned sharply. "If you should disturb her meditations with such
trivia, she might well eliminate the entire nuisance from her Event Horizon.
That includes you and your ill-considered arrangements, as well as my
(innocent) self! We can work this out so that the interests of all parties are
protected. Shall we begin by restoring the present time/space/Vug locus to its
primordial pre-realization mode?"

            "Now
he's
doing
it," Magnan groaned. "Can't anyone talk sense?"

           
sense is of the essence of my utterances,
the Voice reproved.
I
call to your attention snut's third law of
motion—

           
"Not so
fast," Magnan cut him off. "The H theorem has never been rigorously
confirmed, so that leaves Snut's Law in abeyance."

           
would you have recourse to the perfect (so-called) cosmological
principle
?
the Voice taunted.

            "Hardly," Magnan
dismissed the suggestion. "Still, it
was
established by
Crmblynski's work that the cosmic background radiation emanates from a pattern
of widely distributed nodal points, one of which, of course, is located congruently
with Goldblatt's Other World, rather than from the entire Universe; and since
the Copernican Principle still holds sway ..."

           
next, you'll be invoking the cryptic concept,
the Voice predicted.

            "I would hardly dignify
such an absurdity by discussing it," Magnan announced to the Galactic
Press. ("Go ahead and quote me on that, fellows, and that's M-A-G-N-A-N,
Benjamin O.").

           
unwittingly
,
the Voice informed him,
you ally yourself with the proponents of the
sap, and the ssp as well, for that matter, whom you avow to condemn.

           
"Yivshish!"
Magnan charged. "Pure YivshishI I wash my allegorical hands of the entire
matter!"

            "Not quite yet, I
suggest, Ben," Retief contributed. "We still have some unfinished
business here." At that moment, as if on cue, the sound of a horse's
frantic hooves sounded from beyond the boulder. Magnan flattened himself
against the giant stone and eased around to catch a glimpse of the source of
the sound.

            "Heavenly days!"
he gasped, turning a stricken glance back at Retief. "It's a gang of
horrid ruffians!"

            "Staff meeting?"
Retief suggested.

            "Jape if you
must," Magnan snapped, "but these fellows appear to mean
business!"

            "What are they
doing?" Retief asked.

            "Apparently, they're
literally beating the figurative brush," Magnan supplied. "Do you
suppose they're looking for
me?
Or for us, rather, of course."

            "Why would they do
that?" Retief inquired.

            "Well, we are, after
all, interlopers on their presumed turf," Magnan pointed out.

            "Hardly," Retief
countered. "We're the guests of Chief Smeer here; right, Chief?"

            "Don't try to get
me
mixed up in
yer
private problems," the local grunted. "I
got plenty o' my own. Them Rath guys got nothing to do with
me."

           
"You're far
too modest, Captain," Retief told the surly fellow.

            " 'Captain?' "
Magnan and Smeer echoed as one. "Why, the rascal is a mere local Chief of
Constabulary," Magnan elaborated his objection.

            "Here—" Sol
blurted and fell silent.

            "—lost yer reaction
mass, Mister," Smeer was muttering.

            "Actually," Retief
told Magnan, "I suppose there's not much left of the original Goldblatt
persona after two hundred years of submergence in a paradigm incompatible with
his existence."

            "I'm losing you again,
Jim," Magnan complained. "As I understand it, Captain Goldblatt made
planetfall on this unexplored world, inhabited by the caterpillar-like people
we know as the Sardons: in his extremity, marooned here, and wounded after an
uncontrolled landing, he was helped by a local animal of which he made a pet.
The creature, and indeed all its kind, were at the threshold of a mentational
breakthrough into higher-order intellectual levels; under the captain's
tutelage, his pet achieved that breakthrough and his latent intellect was
manifested; accordingly, it altered space/time/Vug, it, or should I say
he-or-she evoked a Universe, as required by the SAP. Previously, other highly
intelligent races had not evoked observable universes, because it is
characteristic of the peculiarly human way of thinking so to organize the
exocosm, and of course that first Sardonic genius, whom I suppose we may as
well call the Great Worm, having had his intellect shaped by a Terran, acquired
that same capacity, and its evocation was accordingly compatible with the
Captain's. Do you agree?"

            Retief nodded and Magnan
went on: "Then, it appears, a second Terran vessel, wandering far from the
space-lanes, arrived here, and abruptly Worm was presented with several dozen
new paradigms which, originating virtually in superimposition with its own, and
the compatible one of the captain, tended to overwhelm its own halcyon
conceptualization. It of course resorted to appeal to the captain to join it in
rejecting the intrusions. He agreed ..." Magnan's voice trailed off.
'That's about as far as I've puzzled it out," he admitted. "And none
of it actually helps us to deal with the situation. Where are we now,
actually,
Jim?" Magnan whimpered. "And why is this place so unlike the
city, and that idyllic park we found inside the fence, as well?"

            "Because we
blundered," Retief told him. "We somehow penetrated the paradigmatic
surface-tension and got out of one paradigm, but not into the adjacent one, but
only into the zone where they partially merge. At least that's my
analysis." He turned to Smeer. "What do you say, Captain?"

            "Look here," Sol
began, but the police chief spoke louder:

            "Why," Smeer
demanded coldly, "do you persist in addressing me in that manner? You may
call me 'Chief'."

            "The fact, as I analyze
it," Retief said, "is that as the Goldblatt paradigm began to
conflict at various points with his erstwhile pet's world-view, under pressure
of the new arrivals, the locals—you, chief, in your new, over-educated state,
began to feel resentful of your formerly well-beloved mentor, and undertook to
oppose his paradigm. This led, after some time, to a direct ego-to-ego
confrontation. The pressure thus generated on the Cosmic All by two powerful
entities of
almost
identical character, led to a merging of paradigms, a
hitherto totally non-existant situation, since no two Terrans of equal potency
had ever so opposed each other, and all previous alien Strong Principles were
too mismatched to the SAP to mesh in that fashion. In the process, the
Goldblatt persona was submerged in that of Worm, though not completely; he was,
and is, still able to follow exocosmic affairs through the Worm mind, and to
express himself as the false Junior. He also selected a prime specimen from the
local population to act as his vehicle; he controls Smeer here, and sees
through his eyes. So to some extent, the Chief here can be thought of as
representing Captain Goldblatt himself."

            "B-but—" Magnan
objected. Sol, meanwhile, had moved a few feet and stood with his back to the
others.

            "There's something in
what you say," Smeer conceded glumly. "But I insist the presence of
this pesky Terran inside my cranial cartilage doesn't make me
him\"

           
"Ignore
us," Retief suggested. "Just relax your alertness, and let the
Goldblatt aspect of your compound mind come to the fore."

            "That's it,"
Smeer's vocal organs gasped. "With that damn pillar asleep, now maybe we
can get someplace. Sure, I'm Sol Goldblatt; got into some strange places in my
time, but this one beats 'em all. I been listening: you're dead right about
that pillar coming along to help me out there at the beginning, when I was
alone and lost and starving. Took me right along to as nice a tavern as ever had
a roaring fireplace and fresh bagels and lox, and plenty o' rare steaks and
cold draft. Good stuff, too. Reminded me a lot of the home-brew lager an old
uncle of mine used to lay down every year. Then the sumbuck—the worm, not Unc
Izzy—started trying to change things: kept stocking the reefer with some kinda
lightning-bugs, and putting hoob-juice in the kegs—stuff like that. At first I
didn't know what was going wrong, but after a while I figgered it out: he was
trying to make the Club over to suit him. So I called him on it, and he tried
to pull a fast one on me—locked me up in the ladies' room—no ladies here then,
so it was OK—but I outfoxed him and tricked him into Bottomless Cave, but I
blundered: I let him sweet-talk me into the cave to see it, and he faked up a
replica of my old neighborhood, and I went for it, went charging into my old
house like a kid, expecting to see my Ma and all—got confused, lost my head—and
he
had
me. Sorry about old Smeer here giving you a hard time, but I
couldn't help it. I was still in the Cave, o' course, and he and the army of
pillars he'd conned into being his slaves bustled me through a tunnel and into
the Park— said it was twice five miles o' farmland; had a wall around. Left me
in the woods, crippled, as if my mind was wrapped up in cobwebs. I try to break
out, but it's too tough. I'm locked in some kinda room, maybe underground; no
windows. After a while, I noticed you fellers' mind-fields and started trying
to contact you on the same level of abstraction as I had to talk to Worm on,
and it worked, after a while. It was Retief here had a strong enough persona to
punch through old Wiggly's shielding. Then, as you know, Herself butted in and
started to mess things up. I couldn't get through until just now, when Wiggly
konked out all of a sudden and now I ..." Smeer's body went limp and his
voice ceased.