Reward for Retief (31 page)

            oh,
dear,
Junior's
voice, sounding nervous, lamented.
really
did hope there wouldn't be need for violence. poor boony: I wonder if ...

           
The man lying
across the table flopped an arm as if groping for support, then sat up. He
shook his head like a dog drying itself after a swim, then slid down off the
table to his feet, one hand pressed to his chest. The other men recoiled,
looking horrified.

            "I never figgered old
Sol would do it," the risen man stated, still fingering his wound. "I
thought we was pals, him and me. We been together a long time. Great guy, old
Sol, in spite of what he done." Boony took a step toward the door, but
halted at the same moment that Junior's voice cut sharply across Retief s
awareness:

           
nobody but nobody comes in here, understand? that means you, boony,
and moxie and al, too. manny, you go get retief: he's the one with the
shoulders across the room there. its old worm's fault, calling me junior! the
upstart! got me mad ...

           
Manny pushed his
way through the crowd, which had stood silent and unmoving since the first stir
by the Private door. Retief waited for him calmly.

            "Geeze, Mr.
Retief." Manny offered as he came up hesitantly. "Guess Boss wants to
see you. You going to come nice, or have I gotta blow the whistle?"

            "Whistles are bad for
my nerves, Manny," Retief told him affably. "Let's go."

            The other henchmen of the
mysterious Boss waited silently as Manny came up, elbowed his way through them,
and halted by the door. His hand went out and hesitated, not touching the knob.

            Retief went past him and
flung the door open. At the other side of the spacious room, a plump, nearly
bald man sat behind a chromalloy desk clearly salvaged from a ship of the line.
He grunted and waved Manny back, picked up a fat cigar from an ashtray chipped
from a five-pound carbon crystal, drew on it thoughtfully while examining
Retief from head to toe.

           
you don't look like a muscler-in,
Junior's voice rapped out
shockingly loud.

            "Don't kid me,
Captain," Retief dismissed the remark. "You know exactly who I am and
why I'm here, and the sooner we get on with it the better."

            "You like my
layout?" the Boss inquired in a mellow voice quite at variance with his
rough-and-tough appearance.

            "I thought it was
Manny's
idea of Heaven," Retief replied.

            The Boss nodded.
"Right, Mister; old Manny was responsible for the basic layout, but I
added the refinements." He pressed a hidden button and with a soft
humming, a fully equipped den-style bar deployed from the adjacent wall,
complete with ice-bucket, booze and water dispensers and bowls of tasty snacks.
"Have a drink, Retief," the Boss urged. "Lay off the rye, that's
Manny's; it ain't up to my standard. The gin is tops. And how come you called
me 'Captain' when you come in?"

           
" 'Captain
Goldblatt' would have been more precise," Retief said, and took the chair
which had rolled into position before the desk. "Quite an enterprise
you've undertaken here," Retief went on. "And it almost worked."

            "Whattaya mean,
'almost'?" the Boss demanded, a worried look abruptly on his fleshy
features. "My name's 'O'Reilly'," he added. "Big Red O'Reilly,
six-oh, two-twenny stripped, and still plenty tough."

            "Shanghaing a few Terry
spacers was all right," Retief told him. "Nobody much noticed that
for a while. But when you started meddling with the Terran Embassy you went a
little too far."

            "What, that bunch of
stuffed shirts?" the Boss jeered. "I got them dopes where I want 'em:
right here." He opened and closed his right hand. "Take that phoney
Sid Overbore: thinks he's little Jesus, or maybe little Moses I should say. All
I hadda do was take him on a little mindtrip, and he caved in like a hull full
of shipworms!"

            "Naughty," Retief
reproved. "Do you have a blackboard?"

            "Why—" Boss
started, then pressed another button. At once a panel slid back to reveal a
dull green chalkboard.

            "Now," Retief
directed, "you're going to write T will not play with the head of the
Counselor of Embassy of Terra,' fifty times."

            "I dunno know how you
spell that 'Counselor'," Boss objected, "and there ain't room to do
fifty. Maybe twenty-five." He rose and picked up the chalk and started in
briskly. After he had managed to spell 'Counselor' three different ways, Retief
called him off. "Start telling me things, Captain," he ordered the
shaky Boss.

            "How do you plan to
make me?" the Boss demanded truculently. "This is
my
turf,
Mister! I been here a while, and I don't need any gang of bureaucrats coming
along, telling me what to do! What's your beef, anyway? You've had it pretty
nice, mostly, I'd say."

           
"just do as you're told
," Retief cut off the
objection, miming the Voice.

            Boss looked shaken; he
stepped back, keeping his eyes on Retief. "All right," he almost
yelled. "I see I made a few miscalculations; just take it easy and we can
work something out!"

           
"all you need to work out
," Retief contradicted,
"is where to start. i'd suggest the
beginning."

           
"Like I
said," Boss temporized, "that's been a while. I dunno how long; I
don't keep in touch with Outside. But I guess a few years. Started losing my
hair, till I put an end to all that."

           
"you're making me impatient, junior
," Retief told
the shaken man.

           
sure, but this hit me pretty sudden,
the familiar silent
Voice objected. I
got to have time to
adjust to altered circumstances. whadd aya mean, 'junior'? i'm still number
one. gimme a break!

            "the
same kind of break you gave mr. magnan?"
Retief demanded.

           
hey, ben's ok. just got him locked in a holding cell, is all: to keep
him outa my hair. boy, was he full of plans! I trieda tell him but he wouldn't
listen! anyway, I was just going to let him out!

           
"Pass that
for now," Retief said aloud. "I'll see about the formal charges
later. Just get him in here, clean, well-fed, healthy, and right now."

           
as I said, that was precisely my intention,
Came the silent
reply,
cant blame me.- he could have
spoiled everything.

           
Boss went to an
inconspicuous door marked Supplies and opened it. In the semi-darkness, Retief
saw Magnan, standing on an upended shoe-rack, his head and shoulders out of
sight as he struggled to climb higher through an open hinged panel in the
ceiling of the cramped space.

            "Retief!" Magnan's
muffled voice cried into the space above. "Only a little more! I can see
light! Just catch my hand and give me a little boost!"

            "Relax, sir,"
Retief said behind him; Magnan started, lost his footing and fell to the floor
with complicated
thumpling.
He struggled to his feet at once, peering
out into what must have seemed to him the brilliant glow of the well-lit
office.

            "Don't come up
behind
me like that!" he wailed. "I was almost through, now I've got to
start it all again!"

            "Never mind, Mr.
Magnan," Retief soothed. He gave his distraught senior a hand out. Magnan
saw Boss and shied.

            "Retief!" he
yelped. "Look out! Behind you!"

            "That's the fellow they
call Boss," Retief replied unperturbed. "Actually he's Line Captain
Sol Z. Goldblatt, presumed lost in space but actually quite well, as you see.

            "B-but that was over a
century ago!" Magnan objected, sidling so as to keep Retief between
himself and the object of his glassy stare. "Anyway, there's a monster
loose with green and yellow scales, and the
biggest
fangs I ever saw!
Look out! It's about to leap at you! I barely escaped into the closet, before ...!"
He leapt for the door to the storeroom, but Retief intercepted him.

            "Be calm, Ben," he
advised the struggling First Secretary: then, to Boss, again miming the Big
Voice:

           
"stop fooling, junior!"

           
"Help, Big
Voice!" Magnan screeched. "Make it go away!"

            Retief restrained the
panicky senior diplomat and turned to Boss. "No more tricks,
Captain," he instructed the stocky man, who nodded eagerly.

            "I don't get it,"
Boss complained. "I got the feeling there for a minute that
you
were
Worm. But that can't be, because I happen to know you Embassy Johnnies only
been here on Zanny a week, and old Worm has been here longer'n me! So how about
it, feller? What goes on?"

            "You were just telling
me, remember," Retief countered. "Go back to where you were losing
your hair."

            "Oh; well, after I got
things kind of shaped up here— cleaned out Boony's alley and all; I figured,
why shave? So I done away with my whiskers, and itching—never did like to itch
much—and fat, too." He patted his firm belly. "I got like padding,
but I ain't fat."

            "Good thinking,"
Retief congratulated him. "But maybe you'd better go a little farther
back."

            "Uh, to Before—I see
what you mean," Boss acceeded readily. "Well, I was conning my
command—old Tiglath-Pileser III, in to a cold turkey approach on this here
uncharted planet—which I registered her with GPS, called her Goldblatt's Other
World, seeing's I already registered the first Goldblatt's—but in the log I
named her Zanny-du, after a book or something I heard about— that was after I
survived the clobber-in—I can't call it a landing—and found the
ice-caves." Boss paused to catch his breath.

            "Damn Worm was
responsible," he said in a less enthusiastic tone "—contacted me a
Luna out, made me see a Class One installation where there was nothing but
jungle and gnats; even gave me bogus contact numbers from Approach Control.
Some wise guy, that Worm. Well, it took me a couple days in the automed to get
it together, and another couple to cut my way outa Command Deck—I'll tell
youse, them bulkheads was folded up like a deck chair—anyways, I looked around,
and found out I'd discovered me a .999 Terry world. Not a bad place at all,
except fer them damn gnats. Ain't as bad lately. I was kind of lonely, at first.
My crew got clear in the lifeboats and took me a year to find most of the boys.
A few are still MIA. So, I found this nice little joint with a neon sign and
all and I went in, and—"

            "One moment,"
Magnan interrupted curdy. "You mean to tell us that, while wandering
through an uninhabited jungle on an unknown world far off the spaceways, you
came upon a commercial establishment, there among the hang-a-man trees?"

            "Sure," Boss
confirmed promptly. "I guess I seen what I seen."

            Magnan turned to Retief.
"Are we to listen solemnly to this ruffian's outrageous lies?"

            "Remember the Cloud
Cuckoo Club," Retief cautioned his colleague. "And Nudine, and the
rather good service back in the ice-cave. We've seen stranger things than a
neon sign."

            "To be sure," Magnan
conceded distastefully. "And in any case what's this nonsense about
Captain Goldblatt? It's well-known the captain died heroically over a century
ago, as I said. What I want to know is what's he done with Gaby?"