The Project Gutenberg eBook of Oh Mesmerist From Mimas!, by Roger Dee

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Title: Oh Mesmerist From Mimas!

Author: Roger Dee

Release Date: February 26, 2021 [eBook #64641]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OH MESMERIST FROM MIMAS! ***

Oh Mesmerist from Mimas!

By ROGER DEE

This gloriously gay smiley character; this
astounding peace-pervading creature from Saturn's
inner moon, was radiating like a space beacon
in a meteor shower when it landed on Mars ...
it was madness ... gargantuan madness.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories January 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Cargo Declarations mart at Areopolis spaceport was humming busily when I walked in. A moment later it was as quiet as a church and twice as attentive.

The sudden hush that fell wasn't out of deference to me, though I'm pretty well known through the odd corners of the Solar System, but because of the Mimasan smiley I carried in a ten-inch tungsten wire cage under my arm. Nothing this side of Saturn's inner moon can lay down the euphoric aura of peace and brotherhood that a smiley can, and this one was doing a noble job of it. He was one of the first two ever to hit Mars, young and healthy and still unmated, and he was radiating like a space beacon in a meteor shower.

"Hey, it's Blaster Bill Bailey," I heard a trader—an Earthside homo by the sound of him—say. "What's the beautiful little item you brought back this time, Bill?"

They crowded around me, Earthies and Eetees—Extraterrestrials—alike, all trying to get closer to that lovely peace-be-on-you euphoria. I looked them over carefully, counting the house and estimating their probable bids, and for the hundredth time it struck me that the place was more like a zoo than a mart for serious business.

Cargo Declarations is a regular Mecca for Eetee traders from the outlands. I saw both kinds of Martians, the cat-whiskered, man-like, yellow city dwellers and their wilder, little, brown baboon-faced cousins from the red upland deserts; pink-and-white Venusians glistening like four-foot snails under the celloplast sheaths that kept them from dehydrating in the dry Martian air; Callistans teetering like scaly green sawhorses on their four stiff-jointed legs and walking stick tails; wooly blue tree men from Titan and ponderous Europans rolling on the little three-wheeled carts they used to carry their barrel-bellied tonnage.

"It's a smiley," I told them, holding the cage up so they could admire the soulful little brute. "From Mimas, Saturn's first moon. His name is Joey and he is very much for sale."

Everybody wanted Joey, naturally. I'd have wanted him myself if I hadn't learned from the Mimasan natives, who are as rare as smileys and a damned sight less friendly, that chewing khiff roots would immunize me against his hypnotic aura. That aura makes smileys remarkable even among Eetees, so remarkable that nobody had ever brought one in before. It's their mating call, a very practical gimmick evolved to attract each other and at the same time protect themselves from native predators while they carry on their courtship. It works on anything from swamp gnats to Syrtis Major sand snakes, and it's literally irresistible.

Joey looked something like a fist-sized marmoset shaped out of pale blue smoke, his body so insubstantial that you could see the cage wires through and behind him. It was hard to put a finger on the quality unless you had learned the hard way, but there was a weird incompleteness about him that escaped definition. Smileys are paradoxical little brutes. Unmated, they're only half material because they actually aren't complete entities. But when they mate—

"Gleef?" Joey said plaintively, yearning at the assorted faces around him and loving every one of them.

That clinched it. "How much?" somebody asked, and there was a general digging for wallets and Eetee equivalents.

I had figured my price already, allowing for dealers' profits and transferral expenses. On Earth Joey would be worth at least a hundred thousand credits to psychomedic clinics treating mental disorders ranging from simple hypertension to paranoia. He should net me twenty thousand, ten of which would go to settle a grubstake lien held by Martian Bankings against the Annabelle, my little eighty-foot space tug.

The other ten would leave me knee-deep in credit notes for a two week spree that would begin at the Argonaut Club, which is as far as any chunk-hopping asteroid prospector ever plans.

"First let me point out," I said, giving Joey's aura time to soak in properly, "that Joey is the first smiley ever captured."

Which was strictly true, though I didn't see fit to mention the second one, a female named Cora which I had left hidden in an old abandoned oxygen reduction plant I knew out in Syrtis Major. I had two good reasons for that: they'd bring higher prices if sold separately, and I wasn't taking any chances on their getting together before I disposed of them. Anything could happen if they did.

"Worth a hundred thousand on Earth," I said. "How much am I bid?"

But nobody made me an offer. I might have known it. Some days you just can't turn an honest credit.

Joey's euphoric appeal should have had the traders scrambling for him, but I had underestimated his effect. They wanted him, sure, but the brotherly love he instilled in them made every buyer, Earth homo or Eetee, ashamed to jack up the price against his neighbor.

We compromised finally by listing Joey for proxy sale, and I took him out of Cargo Declarations to clear the air. He would be safe in the Annabelle's cabin because no one who got close enough to steal him would have the heart to do it, and I'd have time while the bids rolled in to sample a pitcher or two of yellow Martian skohl down at the Argonaut Club.

Joey was safe enough, but I wasn't. I hadn't walked more than forty yards from the Annabelle after putting Joey away when I bumped into Captain Giles of the spaceport police.

"Wait up," the Captain said. "I'll warn you this time before it happens, Bailey. If you start another riot at the Argonaut Club—"

Captain Giles was a rail-thin six-footer with a dour hatchet face burned to leather by Martian sun and wind, a hard-boiled but conscientious patrol officer who had missed his calling. He should have been a missionary, being as chaste as a Cosmicist monk and twice as stern.

I heard variations of his ultimatum every time I put down at Areopolis. But this time I had the answer to it.

"Will you step over to the Annabelle with me, Captain?" I asked. "I'd like your opinion on the cargo I brought in."

He went, glowering and suspicious. Sixty feet from the Annabelle we walked into Joey's euphoric aura, and his grumbling was shut off as if somebody had turned a spigot.

"I don't understand this," the Captain said, giving me a saintly smile that would have sent his hard-boiled crew into a mass faint. "But it's really rather wonderful.... Let me beg you again, William, to shun that disreputable Argonaut Club. Some day—"

"I know," I finished for him. "Some day your patrolies will sweep me out of there in small, unidentifiable fragments. A dirty job."

I left him there with his bright new smile wearing strange creases in his hard hatchet face and walked down from the landing apron to the street. That was when I learned that I wasn't as safe as Joey.

The instant I set foot in the street a couple of professional uglies closed in on me, a sharp-faced Earth homo and a cat-whiskered yellow Martie in bright Terran clothing. The two of them were armed with bell-mouthed freeze guns, and they were bent on business.

I never had a chance. They ushered me into a waiting sand-car and took away the Quantrell blaster I wore buckled over my coveralls.

"We hear you got a smiley for sale, chunk-hopper," the sharp homo said while the Martie started the sand-car. "Well, we got you a buyer for it."

They didn't really need the car except for privacy. Our trip took us only half a block down the street where we stepped out at the last place I'd have expected to market a smiley—at the palatial office building of Solar Shipping, a billion-credit corporation headed by one Hume Shanig, space-line tycoon and crooked financier extraordinary.

I had heard plenty about Shanig, though I'd never done business with him. He had a finger in every financial pie on Mars from import houses to the Argonaut Club, which was directly across the street and which he owned outright. Dealing with Shanig, rumor said, was like stepping into a Venusian boghole—easier to get into than out of.

Shanig's uglies chivvied me into a reception room that was all skylights and soft rugs and shining saffa-wood furniture. A big desk stood in the center. Behind the desk sat Shanig's secretary.

It was almost worth being kidnapped to be able to stand and look at her. She was a beauty, a tall clean-lined redhead with all the curves a prodigal heredity ever promised a female of the species homo. And she had a warm red mouth and clear green eyes that matched her hair.

"Buzz the boss that we got his homo, Cheryl," the Earthie said. "And snap it up, baby. The Chief is but eager about this smiley deal."

The girl gave him a curt green glare. "Miss Trayne, to you," she snapped. But she pushed the buzzer on her desk, and a rasping voice from her audiphone said that we should come in.

I knew only one of the three men in the office beyond. He was a little blond truckler named Perry Acree who held a booking-clerk's berth at Cargo Declarations, and I didn't need to look twice at the smug complacence of his chicken-chinned face to guess who had tipped Shanig about my smiley.

The second was a fat, dignified homo with a clipped gray mustache and the deliberate look of a top-flight medic. The third was Shanig himself.

Physically, the great man had seen better days. He was small and old and wizened and bald, and the creases in his sallow face could have been carved with a kit of engraver's tools. His scrawny neck hung in slack wattles, and the hooked nose and hot black eyes of him made him look like a dissipated desert buzzard. But I wasn't tempted to sell him short for even in illness Shanig had the air about him of a baited steel trap. He was an empire builder, one of these human dynamos who pile up fortunes and then die of gastric ulcers before they can spend their loot.

"I dislike bringing you here under duress, Bailey," Shanig said. He was trying to make it smooth, but even so he barked like a Syrtis Major jackal. "Dr. Humphrey will explain my reasons for being so precipitate."

The medic harumphed reluctantly and fiddled with his mustache. Plainly he didn't like any part of it.

"Mr. Shanig," he said, "suffers from a chronic condition of extreme nervous tension, a result of the years of overstrain imposed upon him by his business enterprises. I have prescribed rest and relaxation, but at this late date Mr. Shanig is constitutionally unable to pursue that course.

"He is, in a word, incapable of relaxing; yet relax he must or collapse completely. Sedatives are unsatisfactory, impairing the mental processes. Mr. Shanig does not trust hypnotherapy.

"As a consequence we find ourselves with only one alternative—a happy chance resulting from your arrival at Areopolis with this, ah, smiley."

I got it then. At first glance it was a neat enough idea; the catch was that Shanig didn't know his smileys. He couldn't put himself under Joey's euphoric golden-rule spell and still direct a big business.

And besides that I hadn't gone through the slimy hells of those Mimasan jungles to rehabilitate a burned-out old credit-shark like Hume Shanig. Joey belonged to humanity, to the poor overwrought hypertensive homos who really needed him.

"If you want my smiley to keep this old goat from snapping his leash," I said, "the answer is no. Joey would quiet him down like a country churchyard, sure, but—"

Shanig cut me short by smacking a peremptory hand on his desk top.

"That will be all, Dr. Humphrey," he barked. "Get out."

When the medic had gone Shanig turned on me. "I have no time to waste in haggling, Bailey. How much do you ask for this creature?"

I thought it over and it still read the same.

More was at stake than the wasting of Joey's talents on a bad hat like Shanig. There was the inevitable blowup that must come later. When Shanig found out what being too long under a smiley's influence could do to a homo with his financial responsibilities, there would be the devil to pay for fair.

"I don't want trouble," I said, trying to be diplomatic. "But I can't sell Joey to you. If you'd let me explain—"

"You have a commitment against your prospect ship, I believe," Shanig cut in. "An obligation commonly referred to as a grubstake lien, is it not?"

"With Martian Bankings," I admitted. "It's a couple of weeks overdue at the moment but Martian is a friendly outfit. They'll wait for their credits until I sell the smiley."

I couldn't be sure whether Shanig laughed or barked.

"I anticipated your reluctance to sell so I purchased your lien from Martian Bankings two hours ago. I know your reputed fondness for your ship, and I understand too that a similar craft cannot be bought for twice the amount of your financial obligation."

He had me cold. It was a dirty trick of Martian's to sell me out, but I could see how it was when Shanig put the screws to them.

"You are in no position to bargain with me, you simple fool," Shanig said, looking more than ever like a dissipated buzzard. "I shall make you one offer before claiming forfeit—the cancellation of your debt plus five thousand credits in cash."

He shouldn't have baited me with the Annabelle. I love that rusty old tub the way some homos love their women. And after being sandbagged with Shanig's kind of persuasion I began to figure that selling Joey to him was as neat a revenge as I could ask. He deserved it—plus.

"All right," I said. "You've bought a smiley."

Shanig thumbed his buzzer and the redhead came in from the reception office with a legal-looking paper in her hand. She went straight to Shanig's desk, walking in a way to make any homo's pulse beat out of step, but when she passed Perry Acree the two of them exchanged a swift, secret look of complete understanding that actually made me flinch.

Sometimes I think I'll never understand women. Here was this gorgeous wench, five-feet-ten and built like a hermit's dream, and what did she pick? An egregious little idiot who—

"Sign here," Shanig grunted. He fitted the paper onto a desk pad and whipped it toward me along with a stylus.

It was a simple enough contract release giving me full title to the Annabelle plus five thousand credits in exchange for uncontested ownership to one male Mimasan smiley answering to the name of Joey.

Something about the pad-and-stylus routine rang a warning bell at the back of my mind but I was too mad to listen. I wrote "William X. Bailey" in the proper blank and the deed was done.

When Perry Acree and Shanig's hired homo signed as witnesses all of us stood up but Shanig.

"That's all," Shanig snapped, pushing a check for five thousand credits at me. "Get out!"

I took the check and went out, so mad I could feel my ears crisping. Entering the reception room again, it didn't soothe my mangled ego any to get a disdainful once-over from the redhead.

"I'm taking a weekend off with this little item to see the sights," I said, snapping the check. "Like to come along for the ride? There's a little pleasure colony up on Phobos that's out of this universe, where anything goes."

"Not with you, you swamp-stained wolf," she snapped. When I waited, grinning, she bit her lip and her eyes shot green sparks. "Beat it or I'll buzz for Perry."

II

I didn't mind the brush-off but the idea of her calling for Perry Acree to toss me out fanned my slow burn to a blaze.

"That seed-sized cipher?" I scoffed. "Why, for two centi-credits I'd—"

Shanig's door opened and Perry came out. He added up the score in a blink and jumped to the conclusion that I was waiting to settle with him.

"Now look, Bill," he began. "I couldn't help it if—"

"That secret agent stunt of yours just cost me five thousand credits, Acree," I said, cutting him short. "I think you're going to be as sorry as Shanig before this is over."

He lost the little color he had. "I don't want trouble with you, Mr. Bailey! Cheryl, will you—"

The girl pushed her buzzer. Her eyes dodged mine, and I could read her mind like the back of a credit-note. She was making allowances for Perry but it hurt to call for help.

Shanig's office door opened again and his two uglies came out. Both of them had freeze guns and the yellow Martie wore my Quantrell blaster tucked into his belt, but it was plain that they didn't expect to need them.

"Hey, take it easy!" Perry wailed, not wanting any part of this. "That's Blaster Bill Bailey you jerks are—"

They closed in, disregarding him, and I cracked their heads together hard enough to make their knees bend like rubber. Then I took back my Quantrell and left them holding each other up like a pair of skohl addicts.

"You can phonovise me at the Argonaut Club if you change your mind about that weekend on Phobos," I told the redhead. "But don't wait too long or this will have gone the way of all credits."

I tucked the check away and went out with Perry Acree trailing apologetically at my heels. Shanig had sent him to bring back the smiley it seemed, so I let him tag along. He left the Annabelle with Joey under his arm and that mesmerized Sunday-services look on his face, and I strolled down to Martian Bankings with my check.

It wasn't really a surprise to find that Shanig had stopped payment on it. What did give me the devil of a turn, though, was realizing that he must have double-dealt me about the Annabelle, too. If he wouldn't honor a five-thousand-credit contract he'd certainly balk at giving up a twenty-thousand-credit ship.

I broke all sprint records back to the spaceyards and slammed the Annabelle's port practically in the faces of Captain Giles and a squad of patrolies who had been sent by Shanig to secure his latest acquisition.

Giles and his crew were yelling blue murder when I cut in the Annabelle's jets. A moment later they were racing like mad to beat the apron-flash of the blastoff.

It was all my own fault, I told myself. I should have suspected that desk-pad-and-stylus snare of Shanig's—he had slipped a telewriter plate under my contract release, and when I signed it I signed another paper, by remote control, in another office. A paper that surrendered my smiley and also my equity in the Annabelle.

All I had now was a worthless check and a ship spaced in defiance of legal foreclosure. I'd be lucky, I figured, if I didn't owe Shanig a few thousand credits into the bargain.

I didn't hit for open space, knowing that Captain Giles would have a radar spotting-net out for me. Instead I swung the Annabelle eastward and whizzed over Syrtis Major toward the abandoned oxygen-reduction plant where I had hidden Cora, my other smiley. I needed a hideout while I figured out a campaign to clear myself, and there was a flimsy old warehouse at the oxy-plant that would screen the Annabelle nicely.

I scouted the desert carefully before drifting in for landing, and saw nothing but a great desolate ocean of gritty red sand. Back in the days when Earth was just beginning to cool off that desert might have been a landscape of sorts, but aeons of oxidation had changed all that. It was nothing now but a waste of powdered iron rust, sifted fine by a million winds and patterned by the feet of jackals.

The old reduction plant huddled in a wide, shallow depression made in years past by the scooping and hauling of sand to the converters. It reminded me of the ghost towns I had read of as a kid, before telemovies and stereo-spools replaced the old historical novels carried over from the twentieth century. It was never haunted by Indians and buffalo, but it had seen its share of jackals and sand snakes, and the wild, little, brown baboon-faced Marties of the deserts had smashed all its windows when the Earthies moved on.

Not many reduction plants were needed on Mars any more. The first homos to come had to wear atmosphere masks—a first-water paradox, because the rusty red deserts were full of good oxygen locked up in simple ferrous oxide form—but they soon changed that. When enough of them had come they set up atom-powered reduction plants by the hundreds, breaking the red sand back to its primal elements of iron and oxygen.

They used the iron in their first cities and they let the oxygen go free. Before the Big Jump there used to be arguments, I've heard, to the effect that Earthies could never live permanently on Mars because the air was too thin and oxygen-poor. But unlocking oxygen from the sand solved half the problem, and the other half never existed.

In the .38 gravity of Mars, any physical action requires only a fraction more than one-third as much effort as it would require on Earth. And only one-third as much oxygen is needed to sustain that effort.

So a hundred years after Earthmen abandoned the Syrtis Major plant, I had a perfect place to lick my wounds in privacy. I berthed the Annabelle in the old warehouse, opened her up from bow to stern to let out the stink of stale tobacco smoke and machine oil, and brought my second smiley out of the dusty records vault where I had hidden her.

Cora was as affectionate as Joey and twice as eager. She made an earnest effort to hypnotize me with that euphoric mating call of hers, but when the khiff root kept me immune she settled down to staring wistfully across the desert toward Areopolis where Joey radiated back at her.

I broke out the emergency rations I lived on while prospecting the asteroids or moon-hopping, and sat down to think. I had to clear myself with Captain Giles or I'd never see Areopolis or the Argonaut Club again. I had to break Shanig's claim against the Annabelle or I'd be an asteroid prospector without a ship. In other words, a bum.

And besides that I'd have to settle with Shanig for the slimy trick he had pulled on me or I'd be laughed out of the System. For some reason, considering that angle reminded me again of the unlikely old romances I'd read of the days when people rode horses and steam engines and chivvied buffalo around with red-hot stamping irons. They prospected for the rare earths—gold was a precious metal then, I think—and they had to keep their reputations as he-men intact or go down before the pellet guns of their fellow homos.

It seemed to me that things hadn't changed so much, after all. I had some small reputation of my own in the outlands, and if I let a wizened little credit-shark like Shanig beat me I was done for.

So I sat in front of the rickety old warehouse and munched my E-rations and thought about those things until finally, being the honest type, I had to admit that none of them mattered half as much as getting back to Areopolis and making another pitch at a streamlined redhead with scornful green eyes. There was still an outside chance that Cheryl Trayne might have phonovised me at the Argonaut Bar about that weekend on Phobos, and....

I was daydreaming about that when the shutter-speed sunset of Mars flicked away the day and left me sitting in darkness with the Syrtis Major wind sharp and cold on my face and the wild howling of desert jackals in my ears.

III

For three interminable days I sat around the old oxy-plant, eating and sleeping and thinking, and the monotony of it got deadlier and deadlier. I couldn't even switch on my communications equipment for the news since Captain Giles and his lads might be making spot patrols, and the localized radiation of my receiving unit would be enough to pinpoint me.

I had a fair idea of what went on with Shanig, though. No homo can operate after his fashion without making enemies, and the bigger his business the more powerful his enemies. Vigilance becomes the price of existence, financially speaking, and it was on that point that I figured Shanig had over-reached himself.

All that was pure guesswork, of course, until the afternoon of the third day. Then I had unexpected confirmation of it, brought by the last person on Mars I dreamed of seeing.

I was in the Annabelle's cabin with Cora when the helicar settled in front of my makeshift hangar. I came out on the double with my Quantrell ready, and saw Cheryl Trayne standing in the warehouse entrance. The sun, hanging low on the desert's rim, outlined her tantalizingly against a blaze of light and made her hair a shimmering halo of burnished copper.

It was so wonderful to see her, but at the same time I was a little disappointed. It had been a pleasant possibility that she might change her mind about that Phobos trip, but to have her track me down like this.

"How did you find me?" I demanded. "And who's with you?"

She gave me a child's trusting smile, a reversal of her old haughty brush-off that gave me the devil of a jolt until I remembered Cora in the Annabelle's cabin. Cheryl was as deep under Cora's spell now as she must have been under Joey's before—

"Never mind that," I said. "How did you get away from Shanig's smiley? Is Shanig out of his trance, too?"

She looked puzzled, as if she were trying to remember something tremendously important.

"I came alone," she said. "I traced you through Joey, after Mr. Shanig sent Perry away with him. I remembered then how Joey always faced toward the east when he was quiet. He used to crouch for hours in his cage when no one was near him and stare in this direction. After he was gone it came to me that he sensed another smiley somewhere was calling to it. And if there was another smiley on Mars...."

"Then I had brought it and I'd be with it," I finished for her. "Neat enough. I only hope no one else thought of it."

She gave me that trusting smile again, and my conscience dealt me a sharp nudge. I went over and gave her a khiff root.

"Chew it," I said. "Never mind the taste. It'll make you as good as new."

She took it obediently, and a couple of minutes later something like horror chased the contentment out of her face. She stared at me, her green eyes turning angry.

"You must have enjoyed seeing me like that," she said acidly. "It never occurred to me that I'd fall under the other smiley's influence if I found you or I'd never have—"

"You'd never have dared come at all," I said. "You'd have been afraid I'd bring up that Phobos jaunt again, and you couldn't have said no with Cora around."

She bit her lip in the way she had, and I could see her admitting reluctantly that she might just possibly have misjudged me.

"All right, you found me," I said. "Now give. What happened? How did Shanig get rid of Joey and why did you hunt me down if you're still nursing a phobia against Phobos?"

"Shanig's underofficials at Solar Shipping rescued him," she said. "They couldn't reach him at first because everyone they sent fell under the smiley's influence. But they had to do something. Shanig was like an irresponsible child, giving away company holdings as well as his own. They were so frantic that—"

"I tried to warn him," I pointed out. "He turned cherub the instant Perry arrived with Joey, didn't he? Word of it got around in nothing flat and his competitors, his enemies, starting phonovising him right and left. They must have stood in line at the telewrite stations to take his holdings and Solar's. A couple of days of that must have practically ruined him and Solar Shipping as well. How did they snap him out of it?"

"They phonovised him to step out on his window balcony. When he came out to the rail they knocked him off with a freeze gun and caught him with a net in the street below. He almost went mad when he realized what he had done."

I grinned for two reasons. I had been right and Shanig had lost his shirt. It served him right.

"So Shanig is starting from scratch again. What line is he taking?"

For the first time she looked scared.

"A line you didn't anticipate. Solar's stockholders have ordered him to recover what he gave away, and he's taking no chances on losing what personal holdings he has left. He tried to eliminate Perry and me the minute he snapped back to normal, and he'll have you erased as soon as you're taken."

I stared at her. "That's going pretty far, even for Shanig. Why should he beam us out?"

She gave me an exasperated look. "Because he's afraid you might force Perry and me to swear that he tricked you on your contract release. It didn't matter before when he was powerful enough to smother the charge, but he's been so hard hit that he can't risk a reversal of that contract now. Don't you see? If you brought suit for reparations and won it would ruin him. The only way Shanig can make himself safe is to eliminate you as claimant or to get rid of Perry and me as witnesses."

It was a deadly sort of logic. I had expected Shanig to yell foul but I hadn't looked for a planet-wide homo hunt with myself as the quarry.

"It's up to us, then," I said. "We'll have to settle Shanig first or he'll get us as sure as sin."

She didn't look so frightened now as embarrassed.

"That's why I came to you. We can keep out of Shanig's way, perhaps, but poor Perry is trapped. Someone will have to get him out of that horrible place before Shanig reaches him."

I gaped a little over that one. "What horrible place? Where is Perry?"

"At the Argonaut Club," she said. "As soon as Shanig was himself again he photovised Perry and ordered him to take the smiley there, partly to get Joey away and partly to cut down breakage expense at the Argonaut. Perry's been there all day, associating with Eetee outlanders and drinking skohl like any common spacehand. He'll drink himself to death before Shanig finds a way to get to him, if we don't hurry."

I laughed until my face hurt. I couldn't help it. The idea of Perry Acree drinking himself blind in the Argonaut's rowdy company was too much. Thinking about the prayer-meeting hush that Joey must be laying over the toughest shot-slot in the System made it all the funnier until the real reason for Cheryl's hunting me down percolated through my skull and sobered me up.

Her motive was enlightening, but not flattering.

"So that's why you risked your luscious hide to find me," I said. "To talk me into dragging that idiot dwarf out of the Argonaut. Am I right?"

She looked hopping mad and pleading at the same time, which is quite a trick even for a redhead.

"You can do it if anyone can. I checked on your background this morning, and it seems that—well, that you may not be the windbag I thought you after all. One asteroid prospector told me that you—"

"Never believe a chunk-hopper," I told her. "They lie for fun or on principle, depending on the circumstances. But I'm not interested in Perry Acree. If he hadn't tipped Shanig to my smiley none of this would have happened. The Annabelle would be clear of debt and I'd be in the Argonaut instead of Perry. Why should I risk my neck for that simpering sycophant?"

She had trouble telling me why. Having to ask my help burned her plenty, and its being Perry's fault made it worse. She turned pink and talked in circles, not meeting my eye, and when I finally guessed how she had meant to persuade me you could have clubbed me down with a sand thistle.

"You really are sold on that puling parasite," I said. "Look, are you sure he's worth a weekend on Phobos?"

"Beast!" she cried, and slapped my face.

"Good enough," I said when my ears stopped ringing. "Faint heart never haggled with fair hell-cat. Let's go rescue your skohl-swilling light of love."

I moved Cora's little tungsten cage into the helicar and Cheryl took us up. We didn't have to wait for darkness. The split-second Martian twilight took care of that in the wink of an eye.

The two-hour flight was almost pleasant. The stars over our speeding helicar glittered down like far, frosty eyes and the gritty red ocean of desert under us lost its harshness and took on a magic pattern of soft, shifting shadows. Phobos paced us across the black night sky like a swift silver morning-star, and the little gray jackals crept out of their dens and howled at her with all the pent-up loneliness of a million, million years.

Cheryl shivered at their keening, and the thought that she could be as skittish as other women gave me a little jolt of surprise.

"Mournful little beggars, aren't they?" I said. "I wonder what they'd think of Earth, with its big yellow moon all night in the sky?"

Cheryl didn't answer, but it seemed to me that she thawed out a little. It was almost cozy in the helicar after that until the dusty neon haze of Areopolis ballooned up out of the desert.

IV

We came in low to avoid any radar net the port patrol might have up, and entered the sleeping city above the shadowy warrens of the native district.

"You'll have to be careful," Cheryl warned. "And quick. Shanig's men will be watching the Argonaut, and the police won't have forgotten you so soon."

"I'll be careful," I said, knowing better than she the sort of odds Shanig would favor. "The next question is where do I find you after I drag that case of arrested development out of there?"

She gave me an address. "I took a room there as soon as I realized that Shanig was after me. I doubt that he's been able to trace me so soon."

We dipped into an apartment house section and Cheryl set the helicar down in a night-quiet street. "Apartment Six-A," she said. And then, unexpectedly: "Take care of yourself, Bill, please. Don't do anything rash!"

I patted her shoulder reassuringly. "You may have to rescue me before the night is over," I told her. "Stand by your phonovision and be ready to bring Cora in a hurry if I call you. I can't risk taking her into the Argonaut because of Joey, but I may need her if I run afoul of Shanig. Got it?"

She nodded and gave me her phonovision code. I got out of there and headed down the street while she took the helicar up to her apartment house roof landing.

It wasn't far. Fifteen minutes of fast walking through the back streets brought me up a dark alley to the Argonaut's side entrance. The service door was locked, of course, and as a consequence none of Shanig's uglies were guarding it.

I kicked it in and went through a dusty corridor into the smoky, skohl-pungent bar-room.

The instant I was inside I knew that Cheryl had been right. Joey was there, and he was radiating for all he was worth. There was the spellbound crowd for proof of that.

The Argonaut Club was known the breadth of the System as the toughest dive that ever sold a drunken rockethand a pitcher of drugged skohl. I wound up there every time I touched Mars, and I knew the dump down to the latest ray-burn on its dingy plastoid walls. You hit some pretty rowdy shot-slots in the other spaceports, but the Argonaut topped them all. The Argonaut was rough.

Ordinarily. Tonight it looked like a missionary's picnic.

At the bar, Earthies sporting two-week passage beards and Quantrell blasters bucked over grimy rocketroom coveralls, rubbed elbows with cat-whiskered yellow city Martians and their vicious little baboon-faced cousins from the deserts. Woolly blue tree men from Titan drank with squishy Venusians and tentacled Ionians. I saw a couple of Callistans in a corner, braced saw-horse-fashion on their jointless legs and sticklike tails, grinning happily while they fraternized with a pair of ponderous Europans. The Europans, coy as two honeymooning hippos under Joey's spell, blubbered amiably back and rolled in small polite circles on their little three-wheeled carts.

Even the bouncer was happy.

This last was an Earthie, a big, battered homo named Husky Harrigan who tipped the scales at two-fifty Earthweight and looked like a tuskless Mercurian sandhog, bristles and all. I had run into difficulties with him before. He had the disposition of a thwarted ape, wore brass knuckles the way other men wore finger rings, and was the prime reason for the Argonaut's tough reputation.

But tonight Harrigan was as gentle as a dove, circulating through the crowd and shaking hands with anything that had a hand to shake.

I spotted Perry Acree at once. He was sitting at a table with two Earthies and a spiny pink Ganymedan, drinking skohl straight from the pitcher and staring soulfully at nothing in particular. I made a bee-line for his table but brought up short when I heard Husky Harrigan roaring my name.

Force of habit made me set myself for trouble, but under Joey's spell, Harrigan was everybody's friend, even mine. He put out a hairy paw and grinned like a crocodile, whinnying with joy and showing a set of second-rate bridgework where somebody had kicked out a handful of teeth.

"Hey, kids, it's Blaster Bill Bailey!" he bellowed. "C'mon and have fun, Willie. First drink on the house!"

I nearly clipped him for that "Willie" crack before I thought. Not that I had scruples about clouting an oaf like Harrigan when he was in no position to strike back. I just couldn't afford the delay. Captain Giles' patrolies might be along any minute. And there was always Shanig.

So I pushed past Harrigan and yanked Perry to his feet.

"Cheryl's waiting for you, Stupid," I said. "Snap to it, before I write you off and keep the date myself."

He grinned vacuously and came along like a lamb.

The two patrolies looked in through the swinging doors up front when Perry and I were halfway to the service corridor. Their sunburned faces lighted up when they saw me, and they shoved the doors wider to command the room with their bell-mouthed freeze guns. Behind them on the street stood their tandem air-scooter, lights on and motor purring.

"You're under arrest, Bailey," one of them called. He was a corporal, and it was written all over him that he saw a sergeant's rating coming for this night's work. "Come out of that!"

I got a firmer grip on Perry's collar.

"Come and get me," I called back, knowing what would happen if they did.

They came in on the double with their freeze guns ready—and halted, looking sheepish, when the smiley's aura got to them.

"Aw, forget it," the corporal said. "You're a good guy, Bailey. Go ahead. Go anywhere you like."

"Sure," the other seconded. "Take our air-scooter if you want. Need any extra credits where you're going?"

I headed for the service with Perry again but we had waited too long. One of Shanig's uglies was standing in the doorway with a foolish grin on his face, and I knew there would be others waiting in the alley outside. And those others wouldn't be under Joey's influence.

So I cut for the front entrance instead, dragging Perry like a bag of old laundry. The patrolies' air-scooter stood purring at the curb. I draped Perry across it and jumped for the operator's seat, expecting to be beamed down any second. I'd have made it, too, but for Perry.

Perry had taken on a monumental load of skohl during the day, and the instant he was out of Joey's influence the inflated little ego of him demanded to be heard. He scrambled off the air-scooter, swelled out his size thirty-two chest and launched into an old rocketroom ballad—a smutty saga listing the personal iniquities of the Captain Crow who led the first Mars flight just before the turn of the century.

In nineteen hundred and ninety-two

A homo from Milwaukee

Warmed up his jets and—

I quieted him with a rabbit punch and tossed him back on the air-scooter, but the damage was done. I hit the control seat again just as Shanig's crew swarmed out of the alley and surrounded us.

The air-scooter took off like a rocket when I gave it the gun, plowing straight through them. I hung on somehow, but Perry wasn't so lucky. He bounced once and pitched off, square into the enemy's hands.

When I looked back at the first street intersection they had scooped him up and were headed toward Solar Shipping in a hurry. The sight reassured me a little. They hadn't blasted Perry on the spot, which meant that they would probably hold him as hostage until they got Cheryl as well. One witness at large was as dangerous to Shanig as two, and the chances were he wouldn't risk beaming out one unless he could be sure of both.

I took the only course left, doubling the air-scooter back and skimming toward Shanig's offices.

V

The way the situation added up reminded me of the old historical thrillers I'd read as a kid, most of them written in the days when our rough-and-ready ancestors bought contraband skohl from underground talk-gentlies and rival groups of uglies hijinked each other with torpedoes. It was something like a present-day telemovie gripper in a sense, only there wasn't any Colonel Super in this plot to lend me a hand.

Not that I wasted time looking for help. I wasn't used to it.

Outside the Solar Shipping building I lifted the air-scooter and swooped up to the balcony outside Shanig's office windows. There wasn't time to set it down. I needed every second to get inside before Shanig could give the alarm.

I jumped, and the air-scooter went on without me into the night. It wouldn't have worked on Earth, but under Mars' .38 gravity an athletic homo has all the breaks. I landed just inside the guard-rail and dived through the balcony windows with a great crashing of glass before Shanig could clap a hand to the buzzer on his desk.

"Don't touch it," I said, and turned my Quantrell on him.

"You!" Shanig barked. His face went sallower than ever, but his hot black eyes didn't waver. "What do you want here?"

Down the corridor rose a sudden babel of voices—Shanig's crew returning with their prize.

"They got Acree," I said, heading for the phonovision unit beside Shanig's desk. "But if you make a sound before they get here you won't be able to use him. Clear?"

The screen lit up when I touched the switch. I punched the code Cheryl had given me, and drew the first deep breath I'd had for an hour when she looked out at me.

"Bring Cora over to Shanig's office on the double," I said. "I'm going to need her but quick!"

I cut her off without waiting for an answer and punched another number. Captain Giles stared out at me this time, his weathered hatched face clownish with astonishment.

"Get a crew of patrolies up to Shanig's offices," I said. "And make it fast or there's going to be more excitement here than you can write off your records in a month."

For the first time Shanig looked worried. He saw no threat in Cheryl's coming, not knowing about my second smiley. But if Captain Giles should arrive before Perry could be moved—

The crew of uglies outside crossed me up by buzzing Shanig's audiphone. "We got the little homo, Chief. Shall we bring him in?"

Shanig, knowing that I couldn't afford to beam him at this stage of the game, tipped them before I could stop him. "Take him away. Bailey's here!"

I jumped for the door, hoping to grab Perry before they got him away. I was too late. They were already out of the reception office. All I saw of Perry Acree was his heels.

That left us at stalemate. Shanig couldn't get away, and I couldn't leave him unguarded to go after Perry. I was racking my brain for the next move when it was taken out of my hands.

The phonovision screen beside Shanig's desk lighted up and one of his uglies looked out. "We got him where he won't be found, Chief. What next?"

And I let Shanig beat me to the jump again. "The girl is coming here. Intercept her!"

I made sure it wouldn't happen again by raying the phonovision unit to a heap of smoking junk. Reflected heat from the flash curled Shanig's eyebrows, but he didn't flinch.

"That finishes you, Bailey," he said. "My men have Acree safe. They'll have the girl the instant she appears. Under the circumstances it should be quite entertaining to watch you prove your position to the police."

He had me cold. Shanig could afford to wait but I couldn't.

It turned out that Shanig's handymen didn't share his confidence in the police. I heard them getting set in the reception-room corridor to block any dash I might make. When I sneaked a look through the balcony windows I caught a glimpse of another group working like beavers in the building across the alley. They were setting up a tripod affair which I recognized at a glance as a sleep-bomb catapult.

They had it charged to fire when Captain Giles and his patrolies arrived. A babble of confusion rose in the corridor again, and the Captain's harsh bellow silenced it like a hand across the mouth. A moment later he called through the doorway: "Stand fast, Bailey. We're coming in, and God help you if you give us trouble!"

I stood fast, giving up any hope of Cheryl's showing up in time. Having Cora along should make it easy enough for her to get into the building, but even Cora couldn't help if Captain Giles had already dragged me away.

Giles came around Shanig's desk toward me, his hatchet face thunderous. "I've warned you often enough, Bailey. This time you've gone too far."

Shanig treated himself to one of his sandpaper chuckles. "He'll probably give you some wild story designed to clear himself, Captain. Don't believe a word of it. I trusted him, and you can see what it led to!"

The Captain was taking my Quantrell blaster when my reprieve came. One of Shanig's uglies burst into the office with disaster written all over him.

"Chief, the girl's coming up in the lift with another smiley! The whole lower floor is hypnotized. She'd have got me too if the lift hadn't carried me out of reach!"

I'll give Shanig credit for this—he thought fast. He added up the score in a flash and lunged across the desk, yelling for his startled uglies to follow up. If Cheryl got to us with the smiley the jig was up, and he knew it.

He ripped the Quantrell blaster out of Captain Giles' hand and turned it on us. He meant to wipe out the lot and clear himself by laying the carnage to a battle between me and the patrol.

It was close, but not close enough.

A sudden serenity wiped the tension off his face like chalk marks off a blackboard. Captain Giles and his patrolies slacked off with him, caught in the same euphoric spell.

They stood smiling and docile while Cheryl Trayne strode in with Cora's little tungsten cage under her arm. If she had looked good to me before, right then she looked like a red-haired angel.

"Good girl," I said, and took over from there.

Shanig confessed on the spot to the slimy deal he had pulled over me, and signed a statement to that effect. He got on the reception-room phonovision and ordered his crew in the adjoining building to drop everything and return Perry Acree at once. He destroyed the bogus contract and took back the elastic check he had given me, and he enjoyed doing it. Cora, sensing Joey so close in the Argonaut Bar across the street, was working her mating call overtime.

"It was really inconsiderate of you to swindle our young friend William," the Captain said to Shanig. "Of course you won't object to serving a light sentence—say five years—to make amends?"

"Certainly not," Shanig said brightly, beaming back at him. "My only regret is that I must be separated from this adorable creature. I love smileys."

He went over to the desk where Cheryl had left Cora's cage and fondled the little brute through the wires. He played the very devil in doing it, too. Somehow or other the cage door had worked loose during the time it had been banged about, and Shanig's fumbling hands slid it open.

Cora was out of the cage and through the broken balcony windows in a smoky bluish flash, whizzing like a bullet toward the Argonaut Club and Joey.

VI

Everybody snapped back to normal with a roar. There was a frantic rush of Shanig's uglies trying to escape and of Giles' patrolies collaring them again. I took no chances with Shanig. I turned my Quantrell on him and held him fast.

Hell broke loose in the Argonaut then. Even before the confusion quieted in Shanig's office we could hear the din that went up across the street.

From our balcony windows we had a grandstand view of the Argonaut's more timid patrons exploding out of the place and tearing down the street, wobbling and lurching each in his own outlandish fashion from the assortment of Eetee drinks they had taken aboard under Joey's spell. The rougher souls left inside had begun a battle royal that raised a bedlam wilder than a robot rooting section at a rocket-games stadium.

"What is it!" Captain Giles yelled, goggling at a barrel-bellied Europan who shot out of the Argonaut with a pack of little baboon-faced Marties harrying its speeding cart from the rear. "What have you done now?"

"Shanig has just ruined a forty-thousand-credit investment for me," I told him, "by letting my pair of smileys get together. That peace-be-on-you feeling they've been broadcasting is a thing of the past. They feel just the opposite now, and so will anyone who goes near them."

I had to explain it twice before they got it.

Mimasan smileys, as I've said before, are weird little brutes. Unmated, their euphoric mating calls attract them to each other and at the same time protects them from native predators. The catch is that when they mate they coalesce, each complementing the insubstantiality of the other to become a single material entity.

And then, of course, there's no further need of their wistful, coaxing aura.

After that they hate everybody, being newlyweds and not wanting to be disturbed, so of course they radiate an exactly opposite aura that guarantees them the privacy their joint little heart craves. Nothing can come near enough to interrupt them without becoming so rabidly angry that it has to rush off somewhere else looking for something to fight. But you see how it goes.

"And from the row going on in the Argonaut," I finished, "I'd say that Joey and Cora are definitely on their honeymoon."

"You mean they'll be like that always?" Cheryl asked, wide-eyed. "That no one can go near them without flying into a rage?"

"Not always," I said glumly. "Just for five years. After that they divide by fission into a dozen or so baby smileys, and after that the rat-race starts over again. The progeny will be worth plenty, but who's going to stand guard over that amalgamated little demon while it broadcasts hate and damnation in every direction? I won't, and there's not a homo in the System that would take the job for love or—"

The answer hit me like a thumb in the eye, bang in the middle of a sentence.

"Captain Giles," I said. "I've a suggestion that...."

The Captain got it on first bounce. For the first time in history he laughed without benefit of smiley.

It worked out neatly enough, at that. An Areopolitan court decreed that Shanig, being bound by the requirements of Martian law to expiate his crimes with as little expense to the polity as possible, should spend the five years of his sentence guarding Joey-Cora in a force-wall detention area to be set up in Syrtis Major. By the time his term ended my combination smiley would have fissioned, Shanig would have paid his debt to society and my investment would have paid dividends.

It could have been worse. For the time being I was out some forty thousand credits, but I managed to salvage enough for a moderate celebration by contracting with the government to furnish khiff roots from Mimas to keep Shanig from going berserk under Joey-Cora's influence.

The arrangement wasn't too hard on Shanig, even. The worst of it would be the isolation—that, and the packs of Syrtis Major jackals that would crowd around the force-wall at night and howl for his blood.

"Good enough," I told Cheryl after the trial. "That leaves just one small detail to be arranged. I'll have to wangle another loan from Martian Bankings."

She raised a slim brow. "Loan? For a grubstake?"

"For our weekend on Phobos," I said. "Remember?"

She laughed. "There's another little detail you overlooked, William. My ring size is five and one-half."

"Ring?" I said. "Oh, a ring.... Would you rather have a Tellurian diamond, an A-belt fire-opal, or—"

"Nothing expensive," she cut me off. "Something simpler would be more appropriate, I think. Under the circumstances, I'd suggest a plain gold band."

I gaped at her like a swamp-guppy until it seeped through my skull that she was in dead earnest.

"Wait up," I said. "What about Perry Acree?"

She snapped her fingers. "That for Perry. I thought I wanted the little creep until you brought him back, but after that I couldn't bear the sight of him."

"You mean," I said, grasping at any straw, "that you really want to be—"

"Married," she said definitely. "First and firmly, or no Phobos trips!"

"It wouldn't last," I argued. "Being an A-belt prospector's wife is no snap, Cheryl. I'd be out in the Annabelle for weeks on end, slamming around in God knows what kind of dangers. And one of these days I wouldn't come back at all and you'd be a widow."

"You wouldn't be slamming around," she corrected me softly. "We would, Willie dear. I'd be with you every minute."

That did it. It was "Willie dear" already, and she'd be with me every minute. Even in port....

"I'll have to give this some serious thought," I said. "Look, you wouldn't want us to plunge into a deal that wouldn't work out, would you?"

"Of course not," she said with a demure certainty that made my blood curdle. "But this will work, Willie darling. I'll see to that."

I got out of there and went down to Martian Bankings in the devil of a hurry. They were apologetic over selling my grubstake lien, and were glad to advance me a few thousand credits against Joey-Cora's expectations.

For once I passed the Argonaut Club without even looking back. A homo with a skinful of skohl is short on resistance, and resistance just then was what I needed most.

When I reached the blastoff aprons, the Annabelle's rusty old hulk was the sweetest sight I ever saw. I pointed her lovely, meteor-dented nose at the sky and blasted off, and the howling of her jets was like a lullaby in my ears. The starry backdrop of space ahead was like a cosmos-sized painting of all Creation, a master canvas done.

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