TUBEMONKEY

Echoed by the sloping, sun-drenched concrete walls, booming above the high, bony clatter of monorail cranes, shaming the entire fuming, metallic hubbub of Boat Bed 52, the sound might have been the cavernous indignation of some giant beast being dragged zoo-ward from a Bio-Institute boat. It was, however, a voice, singing:

Mountainous Rhiannon couldn't remember the last word. The clouded crystal, that was Rhiannon. He killed his buffing-ray and aimed a bellow that not only shivered the eardrums of its target but woke up Sergeant Atoms a hundred feet below, bringing him to his feet with an adoring bark.

"Hey, Stevie, what'sa last word?"

Steve Podalski swung his legs into view and slid carelessly down the dull metal roundness of tube fourteen, like a boy on a barrel. His magnetic boots thunked onto tube thirteen and took hold. He gave Rhiannon a look compounded of acid and pity. "Go to hell with your noise."

Off at the other end of Bed 52 a gong sounded its invitation to cease work and relax for a while. The twelve Navy spaceboats in 52, lined hip to hip like reclining madames on their slanting cradles, seemed suddenly to begin to shed their skins as a solid parasitica of out-ship workers melted in streams toward the upthrust frameworks of the lifts.

"I comin gout." A small cabbagelike Asteroidal came out of the smudgy darkness of the tube, a scraping-ray in each flat tentacle. "I knockin goff." Without a break in its fluid motion it climbed onto Rhiannon's arm and couched itself in the angle of his elbow.

"Yeah, me too. Coming, Stevie?"

Podalski shook his head.

He stood and watched Rhiannon and Tweety—Tieu-tuiey was its given name, but to pronounce it correctly always sounded a little gay—make their way toward the lift. He shook his head again. Once a pilot, he thought, not necessarily always a pilot. Space did rotten things to men who got careless with their radiation screens. It blotched their minds, tossed up fences around memory and intelligence.

A most brilliant crystal—that's what Rhiannon had once been.

Sixty feet away and four stories above the concrete floor of Bed 52, a man stood by the curving window of Karrin's office and watched Rhiannon descend in the lift. He was a small, padded man with the sly look of the lower Mars suburbs about him.

"Tubemonkey," he said, curling his lips over the word.

Karrin raised his sober, business-man's eyes from their inspection of the briefcase on the desk before him. "He'll do perfectly, Lin. He's just idiot enough to get us there and back and then forget all about it. He got a dose of cosmics—sometimes he can't even remember his own name."

"Yes?" Lin Janus' cold gaze followed Rhiannon as the big man went through the distant playground gate. Rhiannon was carrying Tweety on his shoulder and bouncing every other step into the air, and Tweety had wrapped indignant tentacles around his steed's head. A mud-colored puppy went scooting after them, yanked by jealousy from the quilted lay his master had prepared for him beneath Cradle Nine.

"Can he still handle a boat?"

"Not for combat." Karrin leaned far back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head with a dignity that made the awkward position seem very right. "He can still hit space, though."

Janus turned away from the window.

"You'd better make certain that he forgets," he said.

Karrin shrugged; another killing wouldn't matter much. "Why do we need a pilot in the first place?"

"You took me out last time," Janus said flatly, "and I damned near died of fright." He tapped the briefcase. "You're sure this is the right stuff? I can't tell from looking, you know—hyper-atomics are out of my line."

Karrin smiled slightly and brought his body forward in the chair. "You're getting what you're paying me for." He took his time about lighting a cigarette and then laid it on the edge of the desk as he stood up. He took a leather folder from the briefcase, opened it to reveal a dozen closely printed and diagrammed sheets.

"These," he said, "are Llarn's defenses. Take my word for it."

Unlike most wars, this one had started formally and in good military taste. From their headquarters on Llarn's moon the Rebels had made their request for political autonomy, and denial had come promptly, through Llarn's Council, from the far off Earth Federation. The Rebels had announced their intent to revolt in force and the first engagement had occurred that very day—a space battle, fought competently by both sides, and a draw. Llarn, Earth's first extra-Solar pioneer world, threw up hyper-atomic shields—Llarn's moon did likewise—and the matter rested there in a checkmate of technological perfection.

Subsequent space battles had been fought, but these mattered very little. It had boiled down to a secret service war; a deadlock to be broken by the first side skillful enough to spy out the plans of the enemy's defense set-up. Sabotage could then finish the job.

The attendant looked at Rhiannon without enthusiasm. He gave the big man a time ticket and turned and went through an arched doorway. He had just pulled a fresh punching bag from the dwindling supply when a wham sound ran across the air of the playground outside.

Surrounded by pained chuckles, Rhiannon looked unhappily at the dangling plastic ruin and allowed himself to be shoved aside by the bitter attendant. Then, when the damage was repaired, he drew back his huge right arm again. The attendant grabbed it.

"Hold on, Rhiannon, there's a rocket game over here, fella. Come on and I'll show it to you!" He pulled the reluctant giant over to a facsimile control board set against the wall; watched for, and saw, the huge smile break out. Every day was a new life for Rhiannon, and the presence of this mock control board—installed to keep him out of trouble—came always as a wonderful surprise.

"Sit down, Rhiannon. Tubes set?"

A tense nod.

"Gravity O.K.? Green light from Central? Blast off!"

Rhiannon zoomed his boat into outer space and began to chase a comet. It got away from him. After a while he thought it would be nice if he could blast the whole Rebel navy out of the void—and they appeared, tier upon tier of them, in gleaming battle shields.

"Sergeant Atoms!" he rumbled. "Make ready to fire."

Atoms rose up on his hind legs, compelled and controlled by the strange and inexplicable telepathic aftermath of Rhiannon's misfortune. The former pilot's "cosmic braincut"—and the "braincuts" of the other few similar radiation cases—had resulted in this sour blessing: had stepped up their mental broadcasting apparatus, and left them very little to broadcast. Humans could often pick up random thoughts from these men, while animals reacted easily to their will.

Thus it was that "Sergeant" Atoms placed his paws on the dummy firing button; a temporarily selfless extension of Rhiannon's physical and psychical form.

Together, they wiped out the Rebel fleet in a matter of seconds.

Rhiannon was exploring Polaris when a hand fell lightly upon his shoulder. He whirled up and around snarling. A Rebel spy on his boat: he'd kill the son—

Karrin ducked, his face seeming to sag pallid from the front of his skull. "Whoa, now, Rhiannon, it's Karrin—it's Karrin!"

"Rebel spy!" Rhiannon had Karrin dangling off the floor at the end of his arm. He drew back his other fist—all the way to Polaris—for the blow that would end the war. Then reality registered behind those glazed, distant-seeing pupils.

"Mr. Karrin! I'm sorry sir." He set his employer's sandals back on the floor and began to shuffle uncomfortably.

Karrin looked about him, his fury artfully concealed beneath a rigid, we-must-be-patient smirk. The other workers in the ground, some of them poised in mid-step after having started to the rescue, were looking embarrassed and quickly turned to resume their games. The sounds of bowling and fencing and tennis and swimming drove away the silence, and the odd patois of multi-specied mechanics and technicians swelled up like jungle chatter.

Karrin put his hand on Rhiannon's sleeve and walked the big man into the vast quiet of Bed 52. Atoms came after them, wagging almost everything but his head which arrowed straight and true after the giant figure.

When he was paid no attention, however, he sulked over to his box and lay down and was immediately asleep. "Sergeant" Atoms would have been a poor choice to stand guard duty—he had been known to sleep the clock around, silent and unmoving. Great boats had been lifted from the cradles above him and others put into their place, and Atoms had dreamed on and on. And on.

Rhiannon started to apologize again.

"That's perfectly all right, soldier," Karrin said smoothly. "Commendable attitude!" He led the way past the cradles toward the rear of the Bed. "You want to help win the war, don't you?"

"Yes, yes," Rhiannon groaned.

Karrin beamed his approval. "Well, now, you may be able to do just that, my boy! How would you like to be—"

"I was exploring Polaris, sir." Rhiannon's tones were suddenly vacant. "The people there got three hea—" and the latter part of the word remained unspoken, forgotten.

Karrin's smile wavered. They had halted by a freight entrance opening onto the green-carpeted rear grounds. He drew the big man closer to him and snapped his words like a whip.

"Now listen, Rhiannon! How would you like to hit space again—to get your silver Sun back—to be reinstated as a commander!"

That tore through Rhiannon's fog and he reacted. He straightened his seventy nine inches into the position of attention. "I'd like nothing better, sir," he said.

Karrin made a great show of inspecting their immediate surroundings for eavesdroppers.

He said: "This is a very important, a top secret mission. We—the Council—believe that you are the only man who can fly it. We selected you from among thousands, Rhiannon!"

Rhiannon stood ever more stiffly, his face incandescent.

"Yes sir. I didn't know you were a Council Member, sir."

"Very few people do," Karrin replied dryly. "Now, soldier, a special boat is being tuned up at my private field. Do you know where that is?"

"Outside in back, sir. I've worked on your boats."

Karrin nodded. "Then go there immediately and wait. Talk to no one. I have to confer with President Naro before—"

"President Naro, sir!"

Karrin saluted theatrically and Rhiannon responded with eyes afire. The big man executed a neat about-face and marched one two through the door. And looking after the broad back, Karrin speculated where to place the death shot when the time came.

The nebula hung to starboard, seeming almost at arm's length from the ports; a silver pinwheel; a thirty thousand light year toy. Rhiannon jockeyed the boat closer and closer to the Rebel craft, his big hands skipping over the board with consummate, unthinking skill. He shot out the hand-line and it snaked to the airlock of the other boat.

Janus, holding the briefcase flat against his belly, stepped into the lower portion of the single spacesuit and ducked under and up into the top portion that hung from its rack. The muffled clicks as he turned the sealing handles were the only sound in the cabin. Then his voice came metallic from the speaker. "We'll contact you, Karrin, if we need you again—although I think this trip should be the last one." He inflated the suit and stamped several times, testing the suit's perfection by the ringing in his ears.

Karrin's reply was purposefully vague, with an eye to Rhiannon. "There should be use for the Security Chief of Federation Spacelines even after the war is over, Janus. A—ah—'Rebel' underground will likely start up—and as you've already seen, a man with a briefcase will hardly doubt the purity of my kitchens or suspect one of my cabin-boys of unwanted partisanship. I have some very cooperative men working for me."

Putting a boot on the hatch-ladder, Janus showed a sardonic grin through his faceplate. "Every man's purse is a traitor—"

Karrin sliced off the words with a quick gesture and shot a look at Rhiannon. The tubemonkey was staring through the front port at the stars, his face a caricature of bliss.

Janus shrugged, saying: "I thought you said he was nicht—" and swung himself clumsily up the ladder. "Besides," he added, "weren't you going to convince him of the necessity for silence?" He disappeared into the airlock. There was an airy phoot sound as he let himself into the void.

Karrin walked over to the front port and watched for Janus to become visible on the near length of the line. Watched, too, Rhiannon's reflection in the glass. The big man was gaping at the nebula and twitching the thick muscles of his neck in ecstasy. Karrin felt an urge to snicker.

"Good to get back, eh?" he asked.

Rhiannon pointed. "There's your friend, sir."

Janus was bobbing, hand over hand, toward the unmarked Rebel boat. His faceplate gleamed once as it caught the fire of the nebula.

Then, before Karrin's paling face, the silver cigar that was the other boat suddenly threw off into space a thin leafing of curved misshapen plates. It grew whiskers that were ray-guns and the Nova sign of the Patrol blinked into being on its nose. The transformation took just three seconds, and on the tick of the fourth there was a honk from Karrin's telaudio to announce that the revealed law-boat desired contact.

Hissing between his clamped teeth Karrin leaned over Rhiannon's wide shoulder and speared a finger at the control board. The Patrolmen had made the mistake of judging his boat at its space-yacht face value, but it was far more than that.

The "yacht's" concealed atomicannons blasted the other craft into radioactive dust. The frantically gesticulating figure of Janus was swallowed by the glare, and when space darkened again there was only the fused cable end, chewed off short near Karrin's porthole.

"Ge-ez!" cried Rhiannon. "Why'd you do that?"

"Why'd you do that?" cried Rhiannon.

"Didn't you see?" Karrin snapped. "It was a Rebel boat! Janus must have been a spy!"

"But there was a Patrol Nova on—"

"Rhiannon—you've done a magnificent job!" Karrin clapped a hand on the giant's arm and tightened it emotionally. He slipped the safety on his pocketed atom pistol with the other hand. "That wasn't a Nova—that was the Rebel Tetra!"

Rhiannon looked up at him, his forehead plowed over with thought; then gradually a wide grin spread his lips. "We done it, didn't we?"

"We sure did."

Karrin's face was flattened at the cheeks. How the Patrol had known of this meeting he would never know, short of torturing each of his "cooperative men." Janus was gone. The briefcase was gone. The real Rebel boat was probably bright drifting dust somewhere between here and Llarn's moon. Karrin shivered.

Would the Patrol have his office covered? Had they known whom they were trapping? Or had the tip-off not mentioned names?

"One way to find out."

Rhiannon looked up vaguely. "What, sir?"

"Get us back to Llarn, Rhiannon. I've got to report this to the President."

The swirling salt of the nebula moved out of the port and vanished as the big man tailed the boat around and side-stepped it into hyper-space. Karrin stood with wet hands clasped at his back. My papers. My money. I'll get them and make a run for Rebel H.Q. Surely the tip had not implicated him or he would never have gotten off Llarn in the first place. The Patrol would have seen to that: they knew that so many things could go wrong out in space.

Such as, he thought with grim satisfaction, what had gone wrong.

The Government Spaceport was emptied and darkened by the evening. Steve Podalski and his brethren had gone to their homes, Tweety had gone sailing up into the stratosphere to sleep, and the only living creature was Sergeant Atoms who lay twitching his paws in a dream-chase.

From the floor of Bed 52 Rhiannon watched Karrin labor up the motionless 'scalator, saw the lights flicker on, saw his employer move about shoving things into a carrycase.

Rhiannon's affliction may be said to have been "stroboscopic" in character. That is, his brain functioned with an irregular alternation of clarity and fuddle. At this moment the lights were on in that great skull and his brain cells were skittering about, playing with a Thought.

It had been a Patrol boat. He had seen the Nova. It had been a Patrol boat. He'd seen that Nova.

He shifted uneasily in his wrappings of tubemonkey suit and reflections. He looked up again at Karrin's office. The man had moved back from the window; only his head was visible, seeming to roll like Tweety back and forth on the broad sill as he crossed from safe to desk, desk to safe. That distant face was sculptured in pure anxiety. Karrin was obviously, was definitely, not reporting to President Naro. He wasn't doing anything of the kind.

Rhiannon put these observations one under the other, added them, and got the right answer. He'd been taken. Just as his fellow workers could play incredible jokes on him—when Stevie wasn't around—and have them pan out because of his braincut, so had Spy Karrin pulled a whopper.

Having worked this out, the busy cells slowed down, the lights began to dim behind the giant's dulling eyes. He stood there in the darkness, having one grim determination, and not knowing quite why he had it.

Karrin came out of his office and grunted down the 'scalator, unused to the knee action of climbing and descending. His shadowy figure came across the floor, gradually giving its details. His face was red, his eyes were feathered with red; he hugged the carrycase like a mourning Apache mother.

"Ready?" he asked.

Rhiannon blocked the door; his voice came puzzledly: "I ain't going."

The carrycase thudded to the floor; it didn't bounce, but if it had, the appearance of Karrin's atom pistol would have shaded the second thud. Rhiannon planted his legs like standards.

"I ain't going to fly you anyplace," he said, "an' I ain't gonna let you go either. I—don't know why—I—can't—won't—"

At that moment a door rolled open at the far end of 52, and the tall, wary shapes of Patrolmen blinked through the rectangle of light into the dark pool of the Bed. They made directly for the still lighted office.

Silently, silently! Karrin had to reach to do it. He reached high, standing on tiptoe, and brought the butt of his gun down on Rhiannon's head. The giant made a sound like a baffled ape and took a forward step. His outflinging leg struck the floor without sensation and buckled. The gun went up and came down twice again.

Rhiannon felt a cloth-ripping pain in his head. Static crackled and slammed into his brain. It swelled louder and more penetrating; then muffled down to lengthening drumrolls.

The nebula beckoned him from his straight path back to Polaris. He circled it carefully, although there wasn't any sign of danger. It wasn't a very interesting nebula. He wheeled Karrin's boat once again toward Polaris and his three-headed friends. Sergeant Atoms sat alertly at his side.

Then suddenly, terrifying, the boat pulled away from under their feet and left them cold and lonely in airlessness. The sweet stars began to blink out in clusters; the celestial static dimmed down into the silence of infinite sleep.

From somewhere in this dying universe came a cold and wet nose. It sniffed anxiously at his face and red-matted hair.

A whine. Another louder whine; and a scratch of claws on concrete.

Rhiannon opened his eyes.

There were walls and the concrete floor and the hovering, shadowed cradles. There was the crouching figure of Karrin, seen from below and distorted, framed briefly in the door. There was a mud-colored shadow that sniffed and whined and gave its tail little hesitant twitches.

Then Rhiannon's eyes blinded and closed; he found himself back in that fearful, dimming universe. The distant sparking of the space-boat's jets—a few stars to shape the emptiness.

Rhiannon's last desperate, melting thought was: Atoms!—Atoms—we gotta catch up to that boat!—come on—we—gotta get back in that—boat—

The scratching claws went away. The last star was lost and the velvet blackness, without entity, was complete.

Karrin faded as quietly as a cat out the door and hurried into his boat, darted forward to the control-cabin and slammed down a lever. With a rumble the ground-ramp folded in and the hatch sealed itself shut. He leaned against a port and shielded his eyes from the interior glare.

The noise had attracted the Patrolmen. They boiled through the far door and came streaking across the field, their guns spitting tight green flame.

Karrin thumbed his nose at them and laughed. A moment later the boat was clawing its way toward Llarn's stratosphere.

He set the spectro for the tiny moon and turned away to relax on the bunk. His "yacht" embodied principles developed by his own technicians—armament and locomotive potentials unknown to the Patrol—and he knew that he was safe from them. He regretted, however, that the hyper-space drive was useless for such short distances, for with it he might have reached his destination in less than a second. But with it also, at such a range, came the danger of overshooting, nailing himself and the boat a mile into the ground, and so he used the regular blasts and was thankful for his advanced shields. The Patrol might spot him, tail him—but that was all.

Smiling, he stretched out on the bunk, reached for a book, and settled himself for the twenty hour trip.

Beneath the bunk, curled in the warm darkness, Sergeant Atoms had settled himself for the trip long ago, for his master's dying thought-command had been an urgent and overpowering one, and this space-boat had been pictured and pointed out as clearly from its fellows as had been the "firing button" among the myriad devices on the dummy control board. An obedient but sleepy Atoms had entered the boat almost at Karrin's heels; unheard and unseen in the confusion of rumbling hatches and charging Patrolmen; very eager to get back to his interrupted dream-chase. With all his famous quiet and quiescence—he slept.

After a while Karrin yawned. The cabin seemed stuffy. He looked up from his book and his eyes happened to fall on the oxygen gauge. He felt a momentary chill. As there had been no time to recharge, it was very fortunate that there had been no need: Rhiannon wasn't coming along.

"Almost empty," he breathed. "I'll barely make it." He put the book aside, turned over, and went to sleep.

Hours later, when the oxy-alarm clanged empty, he roused, sweat-soaked and gasping, to the realization that Rhiannon, in a manner of speaking, had come along after all....

Lt. Dhene of the Rebels glanced out his office window, eyes resting puzzledly on the space-boat that sat silently where it had been brought down by the landing field's tractor-beams. He frowned, then continued writing his report:

"What would seem to have happened is this: Karrin, with a depleted store of oxygen and unaware of the animal's presence, undertook to flee here to escape the Patrol (see Rep. 151 and recordings of Patrol broadcasts M16, 17, N2), and in midpassage discovered the dog which must have somehow contrived to remain out of sight until that time. By then it was too late, for the tanks were empty and the oxygen in the body of the boat was not sufficient to last the trip. He could not turn back, and that he knew we would not risk sending a boat to pick him up is evinced by the fact that he did not call upon us to do so.

"I believe it likely that Karrin debated killing the dog as well as himself, but decided vengefully that the animal—indirectly the cause of his destruction—should suffer the agony of asphyxiation. Therefore he shot only himself (see enclosed microshots, showing interior of boat with corpse exactly as found after boat, due to erratic behavior, was beamed onto field as safety measure). The dog, however—"

Lieutenant Dhene looked up and grinned at the stern-wagging Atoms, working noisily over a garn steak beside the desk.

"—the dog, being very small and somewhat addicted to inactivity, survived the trip and led us a merry chase before his final capture. I request that we be allowed to adopt him as a mascot—"

Dhene chewed at his pencil, then laid it on the desk and clapped his hands.

"Here, boy," he growled, "you've given me a crazy kind of report to write up. Come here and give us a hand!—come on, speak! What's the story?"

Sergeant Atoms eyed him for a moment, growled softly, and returned to the steak.