Read Ebook: One touch of Terra by Bok Hannes

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Ebook has 159 lines and 8613 words, and 4 pages

"Trixie!" Horseface bawled, "what do you think you're doing?"

She scowled more fiercely than ever. "You!" she thundered, pointing a muscular arm for emphasis. "You're a fine one, asking me that! I'm clearing out of here, that's what. I'm sick and tired of all you useless loafers preying on my good nature! Ain't it so, Goreck?"

The Martian nodded, grinning.

"For years and years," Trixie cried on, "you've been bleeding me dry! Trixie will you do this for me? Trixie will you do that? And I been doing it 'cause I felt sorry for you hopeless free-loaders, like as if maybe you was my own Mike. But now I'm through with you--and why? 'Cause you never treated me like no lady, that's why! You don't deserve a woman's kindness, Goreck says, and he's right!"

The uproar was dying down, no doubt keeping the miners' spirits company.

"Maybe I ain't no raving beauty," Trixie continued, "but that don't mean I ain't no lady, see?" In her next remark she used questionable words of interstellar origin--it is doubtful if they could have been said to have enriched any language. "Why, you frownzley glorfels, you even swear in front of me! So I'm clearing out. I've more than paid my debt to Mike, Lord rest him."

As the groans began, she gestured airily. "Put the flowers in the rocket, lads!"

"But Trixie!" Horseface called, pushing a step ahead. The Martian's gun dug a trifle deeper into his side.

"Eassy doess it," the Martian admonished in his whistling accent.

Horseface cried, "We're your own people, Trixie! You can't ditch us for Martians!"

"My people are the people treating me with respect!" she retorted, and Horseface's long visage fell several inches longer.

Goreck's Martians slid the dandelion-container into the rocket's baggage compartment and stood back, forming a lane down which Goreck assisted Trixie with exaggerated politeness. Surely she should have seen that his smirk was purely one of triumph!

But she didn't. She swung along on her wooden leg, thrilled to the core, beaming coyly at Goreck and actually blushing. He handed her into the rocket, let her arrange herself comfortably, then went to the other side of the flyer and swung aboard.

He slammed the door shut and reached for the controls. He treated the assemblage to one last sneer so poisonous that even a coral snake would have flinched from it. Trixie leaned across him to thumb her nose--after all, Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt had been dead for a century.

The Martian with his gun in Horseface's midriff stepped back and away. Horseface would have rushed after him, but Mouse Digby caught him from behind.

"Hold it, Horseface!" And more softly, "We been up to something--"

Goreck pulled the rocket's power-lever with a grand flourish. Nothing happened. He smiled sweetly at Trixie, shrugged and dragged on the lever again. Nothing happened. On the third try he nearly wrenched the stick from its socket. From one of the rocket's jets, as though torn from its very heart, came two feeble sparks and a mournful burp.

"We busted their feed-line!" Digby chuckled.

Goreck, having gone thus far, was not minded to stop now. He sprang from the rocket, called something in Martian to his men, and several of them raced away. The miners cheered perhaps a shade precipitately and bore down on the rest. The gun-toting Martians filled the air with frantic warning blasts and were swept down before they could turn their weapons to more practical use. The miners reeled around the rocket, swaying it as they clubbed the Martians with their own guns.

Goreck backed them away with well-laced blasts near their toes--what was known as "the quick hotfoot" since it turned the ground molten. He maneuvered himself with his back to his ship, his men breaking free and joining him.

Trixie clambered out seething with wrath. "You brakking chadouzes!" she howled, brandishing a brawny fist. The men subsided sheepishly silent. She was accustomed to having her way, and they were accustomed to letting her have it. It had proved the best policy in the long run.

"Look at you, brawling and trying to keep me from having the one thing I want more than anything else--being treated lady-like! You think I got any sympathy for you when you act like this? You can't keep me here no longer, and you might as well realize it--and leave me go!"

They muttered angrily, but there was nothing to do except surrender. Horseface didn't bother to sheathe his gun--he threw it down in the dust. Mouse Digby, who'd been so elated over the stalling of the rocket, turned away and burst into tears.

The men were driven farther back as Trixie's supply-jeep snorted up to the rocket, driven by those Martians to whom Goreck earlier had shouted. They leaped down and assisted their fellow in transferring the dandelions from the rocket to the jeep.

"Dissable my sship, will you?" Goreck asked, grinning foxily. "Well, as we Martians say, there are plenty of ways to cook a gnorph!"

He snapped his fingers to one of his big-eared breed. "Phorey, you drive the jeep over to Ssaturday." Trixie started toward the jeep and he halted her--very courteously, of course. "No, my dear lady, we will let the jeep go firsst. Then we can be certain that nobody followss after it to rob you of your lovely flowerss. We will leave later."

The jeep chugged away. Trixie was very red-faced and unable to look at her erst-while Finchburg admirers. Perhaps, Horseface hoped, she was relenting. But if she were, Goreck knew how to prevent it.

"Ssuch clods, to sstare sso at a lady!" he purred, and Trixie glared relentlessly at the men who had adored her so long--and apparently, so vainly.

Since Goreck's rocket was damaged beyond immediate repair, he rode off with Trixie on the town borer, a community-owned tractor equipped with a giant blaster and used in boring mine-tunnels. It was not intended for general travel and rumbled away very slowly, kicking up a great deal of dust. The other Martians had come on gwips, which they now mounted, then made off in a hurry.

"You'll get your borer back when I get my rocket back!" Goreck called from the wake of dust.

The Finchburgers stayed as they were, every spine an S of dejection.

"With Trixie gone," Candy Derain mourned, "there ain't no use our staying here. We'll all starve!"

Baldy Dunn said, "Maybe we was bad-mannered accepting things off of her, but I always meant to pay her back as soon as I found me some psithium. If I'd of thought--"

Horseface said, "Of course Goreck is just giving Trixie the runaround. All he's really after is her dandelions, 'cause he knows what they mean to us. He'll keep 'em till we go to his diggings to work for him, that's what! He'll charge us real money every time we want to touch 'em--and where are we going to get money? It's like he's holding 'em for ransom!"

He set his jaw. "Well, we ain't going to let him get away with it! When Trixie finds out what a nopper he is, she'll be sorry, sure--but she won't never come back here on account of she's too proud! She'll just stay in Saturday being Goreck's slave, her poor heart meanwhiles busting--and I ain't going to let her!"

He started briskly for the stable, the others hesitantly trailing along. "I'm getting on Elmer and going after her. Dandelions be desubricated, I'm going to save Trixie in spite of herself!"

But it seemed that everybody was having that identical idea at once. Not all of them owned gwips, so the party of rescuers set off on a peculiar assortment of vehicles--Candy on his vacuum-cup bicycle meant for scaling precipices, Baldy Dunn and several others on pick-wielding ore-cars, some on the psithium-detectors, and Digby on the mowing-machine which cut and baled grasses for the feeding of the gwips. About a third of the expedition had to go afoot.

In no time at all, Horseface and the other gwip-riders had far outstripped the clumsy machines and the pedestrians. As Elmer soared toward Saturday in forty-foot bounds, Horseface called to the rider abreast of him:

"Wasn't that Martian driving Trixe's jeep Phorey Yakkermunn? Yeah? Kind of thought so! Remembered him from way back when the rush was on," he mumbled to himself. "Seemed a little crazy even then, and guess he had to be, to go and turn against us what used to be his buddies. Elmer, for the love of Pete, space your jumps--you're beating the breath out of me!"

He came to a fork in the road and turned left, following the borer's tracks. Then he halted, letting the other gwips overtake him. They had started after Trixie too late. A swathe of sip-flowers had moved in across the road.

"Might as well try to swim through space to Terra!" Horseface lamented. "Blast them zips!"

But it wouldn't have done him much good if he had blasted them.

The zips were pretty things, something like Terrestrial tiger-lilies--brilliant orange cups on tall green stems. They grew very thickly and had been named because of their incredibly swift life-cycle. In five seconds they would zip up from the ground as sprouts, attain full green growth, blossom, produce seed, fall withering and scatter the seed which in another five seconds would do the same thing over again.

Nobody possibly could wedge through their rank masses. If anyone tried, and were somehow to reach their midst, he would find himself being tossed up and down at five-second intervals as though being hazed on a blanket.

The zips traveled whichever way the wind carried their seeds--which happened right now to be away from Saturday. If the salt plains and chains of vertical peaks had not checked them, they might have choked the whole of Venus centuries ago.

Horseface blinked at them, dismayed. The other men also blinked, since the continual change from bare earth to green stems to orange blooms and back to bare earth again took place in five snaps of the fingers, like the winking of an illuminated sign.

Elmer helpfully tried to eat them, but they vanished in decay even as his beak closed over them. And they stretched for miles and miles.

"Awrk!" He spat them out and shrugged discouragedly, almost hurling Horseface off the saddle.

"Guess we got to detour," Horseface sighed. They skirted the encroaching zips and ran smack into a sheerly perpendicular cliff. While they were wondering what to do next, Candy purred up on his vacuum-cup bicycle.

"At least I can ride up and over," he said, switching gear. He shot up the cliff and out of sight, the suction-cups popping like a string of fire-crackers.

"You fool, come back here!" Horseface bawled, but Candy was out of earshot by then. "He's forgot there's nothing but rock-spires for miles and miles on the other side. He'll ride up and down for hours and get no farther forward than a hundred yards!"

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