SPACE-CAN

When the Winship landed on Ganymede, it was on one of those errands that are handed over to destroyer-skippers, commanding the tin-cans of the space-fleet, because nobody with silver braid wants to do them. Lieutenant Joe Peabody had been officially directed to proceed to Ganymede, land in 10° north latitude and 10° west of the zero longitude echo-beacon, and contact a Ganymedian chief called Yloop.

He was to deliver to that Ganymedian chief one swamp-car, assure him that Earth Government was very happy to give him the present he had requested, and then make what efforts seemed wise to promote cordial relations. Then he was to return to base.

It was just the sort of job that anybody with silver braid would wish off on somebody of lower rank. The Winship carried two officers, ten men, and one dog. The dog was Rickey, the official mascot of the ship and an animal of some reputation. He'd had more and taller tales told about him by the crew than less imaginative men could invent for their ship's mascots.

Such as the story that when the Winship was based on Luna, every time she came back to port there were seven girl-dogs and a Venusian vroom-cat waiting at the space-yard gate when Rickey sauntered out on his first liberty.

The Winship's armament consisted of meteor-repellers, pressure-fused signal-flares, and a pop-gun of no conceivable use out of atmosphere. In combat—if war did come with Mars—her function would be to scout ahead of the Earth battlefleet and try to get off a warning of contact before she was smashed by a guided missile. In peacetime, she ran errands not desired by anybody else and acted as one of the guinea-pigs for the technical brass.

At the moment she was still choked up inside with the three-foot lead-cadmium sheathing—put on in three-inch plates—applied to her fuel tanks when she was sent on a long and purposeless cruise to test the efficiency of pre-bombarded and therefore radioactive fuel. The fuel wasn't efficient at all. Dick Harkness, her second in command, still swore at that sheathing regularly.

He swore again as the little ship settled down through the misty Ganymedian atmosphere. The ground below, as seen through the snooperscope, was utterly featureless save for some hundreds of thousands of identical clumps of gannygrass. That was Ganymede—gannygrass and swamp.

"Remember the recruiting posters we saw, last time on Earth?" growled Dick Harkness to Joe. "'Deep Space is calling you! Ride a Comet and see the Worlds!' There oughta be a law! Look below! Who wants to see this?"

Joe Peabody watched his instruments, scratching Rickey's head absently. He'd picked out a patch of gannygrass to land on, and the snakeye corrected course if the little ship swerved by a hairsbreadth. But he watched, anyway.

"Things could be worse," he said. "They've got to recruit spacemen somehow. If glamor-posters make 'em join up, why not?"

"Glamor!" said Dick. "Look below! They ought to put a Ganymedian on the recruiting board. He'd fix those posters! 'Be a Destroyer Spaceman! Spend your time running errands! Visit Ganymede and See the Swamps! Learn to Salute!' That's the way a Ganymedian would make the posters read!"

The Winship swung ever so slightly and settled toward the chosen grass patch. Joe nodded in satisfaction. Dick Harkness grumbled again.

"Look at the doggone place! Venus is bad enough, with an aerosol for an atmosphere, and Mercury is worse! But at least the natives are human, after a fashion! Shut your eyes and listen to a Mercurian trying to bargain you out of your back teeth and you feel almost chummy. Hold your nose and watch a Venus-girl dance and you almost get sentimental! But these Ganymedians, with the way they—"

"Yeah," said Joe. He pushed the landing-cushion button. There was a tiny impact, and an infinitesimal movement in the gannygrass began directly below them. The bending spread out like a wave.

"Have to warn the crew again, Dick. Tell 'em to remember all over again that Ganymedians talk like paymasters figure. Specific. Exact. They don't understand exaggeration and they don't understand jokes. If you tell them something that isn't literally true, they think you're crazy."

"They're not human," said Dick gloomily. "They never lie and they make you mad. Huh! They send word by space-radio to a passing freighter that this chief Yloop wants a swamp-car. Then they wait for it. We'll deliver it and they'll look at it and say, 'Yes. This it.' Or else they'll say, 'This not right.' And that's all! Then they'll go off with the swamp-car."

The Winship hung low, now, barely above the thirty-foot stalks of gannygrass. A Ganymedian peered up, bracing himself against the landing-cushion field, which transferred the weight of the ship to the ground below and very neatly contracted as the little ship descended.

"True enough," admitted Joe, "but brass says we must cultivate cordial relations. Tip off the hands, Dick. We'll touch, now."

Gannygrass stems sprang up alongside the ship's ports as the landing-cushion field contracted and stayed pointed straight down. The descending motion ceased without a jar. The Winship rested on the yielding, matted roots which were the soil of Ganymede where it wasn't swamp. Joe flicked switches and the ship was grounded.

"We won't be here long," he observed. "They'll come for the swamp-car and they don't go in for the amenities, so we'll be off again pretty soon. You tip the hands about how to talk while I remember not to smile when I try to act pleasant. To them, a smile is an expression of rage just before it turns to murder."

He put on a light atmosphere-suit and went out the lock.

There were a good many Ganymedians on hand. From overhead, the innumerable clumps of grass had seemed without life. Gannygrass grew thirty feet high in semi-floating islands that were roughly two hundred feet across. In between the clumps was swamp. The Ganymedians lived in what amounted to burrows in their floating islands, and progressed from one grass patch to another in queer, skittering hops startlingly like the running steps of a heavy bird just about to take off upwind.

They had a civilization of sorts, but nobody could gather more than minor information about it. Questioned, they either answered exactly and literally, or else ignored the questioner. They had no manners at all by earth standards, and their morals were not matters of interest to anybody who had ever seen a Ganymedian female.

Ordinarily there would be one family group to a grass-clump, and one grass-clump to a family group. Here, though, there were very many on hand as Joe went out the lock. Their numbers increased momently. From overhead they had been nearly invisible, but they must have begun to move toward the Winship's landing-place as soon as it could be identified. Joe saw at least a dozen wearing the belts of swamp-bear claws which were signs of chiefhood.

He remembered not to smile politely.

"Yloop?" he asked.

One of the bloated figures moved. The others, as always, either stared with opaque blank eyes or paid no attention whatever to ship or skipper, even though they'd come to see it.

"Yloop, me," said the bloated figure.

"Your swamp-car," Joe told him, unsmiling, "is in the ship. We will get it out very soon. It is fueled for—" He paused, calculated, and said carefully, "—it is fueled for half a year of Ganymede."

Yloop listened. He made no reply. He offered no expression of gratitude nor committed any of the small hypocricies which make human contacts endurable. Joe found himself frowning irritably. Ganymedians got under a human's skin.

Another bloated figure stirred.

"Me Ychan," said the lipless mouth.

"I suppose," said Joe ironically, "you want a swamp-car too?"

"No," said Ychan tonelessly. By the double belt of swamp-bear claws about his middle, he was high chief. "Yloop want swamp-car. Not Ychan. Ychan want talk."

Joe's eyebrows lifted. Almost he was tempted to be sarcastic. Talk was a novelty. But—

"Talk," he said flatly.

Behind him, the lock opened again. Dick Harkness and two of the crew came out in atmosphere-suits. With them came Rickey, the ship's mascot, in the tiny, canine space-suit which was the result of infinite labor in the crew's quarters during long hours of standby duty.

"Just for the heck of it, Joe," said Dick, grinning, "the hands decided to send Rickey to see what he'll do when he sees a gannygrass stalk that he'll take for a tree. The trick is he's in his space-suit and can't sniff at it."

"Wipe off that grin!" snapped Joe. "Take the dog back! I told you no jokes!"

Dick Harkness' face went blank. "I forgot! Sorry, Joe!"

He herded the crewmen back into the lock. But they still grinned. Ychan stared at them with expressionless eyes.

"Men mad," he said. "Why?"

Joe wanted to deny it, but a smile or a grin was to Ganymedians an expression of the ultimate in fury,—and if you said something they did not believe, they thought you lunatic. A very literal-minded folk, these people of Ganymede.

"Oh—dog bad," said Joe curtly. "Kill four men. You talk."

He waited. Ychan stared as blankly as before.

"I talk," he said without expression. "You think you leave Ganymede. Martians say no. I say maybe."

Joe Peabody blinked. Then he stiffened.

"Sit," he said shortly.

A great curved plate in the ship's side opened. The crew of the Winship was opening the destroyer's store-hatch to roll out the swamp-car. Ychan squatted on the ground, where he looked like a wetly glistening anthill. Other Ganymedians moved to watch the swamp-car roll out.

They would watch Yloop climb into it and finger its controls and then—amazingly, the Ganymedians had a knack for the machinery their minds found logical but some literal quality kept them from making—begin its operation with practically the skill of a human who had been carefully instructed in its use.

Joe also squatted, for formal conversation. He frowned, which was courtesy here, insofar as there was any courtesy at all. It was at least a sign of attention which they recognized.

"Talk," said Joe.

The Ganymedian spoke deliberately and without emotion. Like his fellows, he was cold-blooded in all his ways. He had very few words. He used those in their baldest sense. But he knew what he wanted to say. In five minutes Joe had the complete picture. He felt a little cold chill running down his backbone.

The swamp-car came out of the ship, with its huge, inflated tires that were wheels and floats in one. There was a seat modified for non-human use. A truck body and a tiny motor which would drive the unwieldy thing at twenty miles an hour through swamp and thirty or better on solid ground.

Yloop got into it. He tried it. He drove it experimentally on the relatively hard grass-root soil, drove it into the swamp, and made a single circuit of the gannygrass clump.

Then he stopped and beckoned. His mate waddled to the edge of the island and skittered out to it over the mud. Three of the incredible Ganymedian young skittered after her. They climbed aboard. Yloop started the swamp-car again and drove away. He had asked for it. He had gotten it. He went off with it. That was that.

Then Joe stood up. "I hear," he said ungraciously. "I think. I talk later."

He turned his back on Ychan and walked into the reopened airlock. His expression was one concentrated scowl. He knew it, but he knew that to Ychan that expression meant simply tranquil and untroubled meditation. For Joe to have conveyed his actual emotions to the Ganymedian, he would have had to grin until his throat split.

He was pacing up and down the control-room of the Winship, deliberately coddling his fury to combat the cold chills that wanted to play tag up and down his spine, when Dick Harkness came in again. Rickey followed him sedately, at a sort of regulation distance.

The crew, of course, swore that Rickey knew Fleet regulations as well as an admiral, and that when he'd been caught with a lady Pomeranian visiting him on board, he'd confined himself to quarters for six weeks to the day. Now he looked warily at Joe.

"I'm sorry, Joe," said Dick Harkness contritely. "I went and warned the hands about grinning where Ganymedians could see them. But they were making bets on what Rickey'd do in a space-suit and unable to sniff, when he saw what he'd take for trees. It was too good a joke to resist. How'd you explain the grins? And shall I report our landing and delivery of the swamp-car?"

"I said," Joe told him bitterly, "that we were mad because Rickey'd killed four men. And you do not use the space-radio unless you want to commit suicide!"

Dick Harkness stared. "What—"

"Ganymedians," said Joe bitterly, "don't lie. They don't understand lying. Ychan just told me we'll be blown to bits if we use our space-phone or try to leave Ganymede."

"What's that? Who's going to try to stop us?"

"Martians," said Joe with exquisite bitterness. "Did you ever hear that there is some slight friction between the Martian government and that of Earth? Did you ever hear that if the Martians thought they had one percent edge over fifty of wiping us out and taking over the solar system they'd try it? Did you ever hear that only the technical superiority of Earth science has held off a war this far?"

Rickey moved up beside Dick and sat down. His tongue lolled out happily. The Winship's crew insisted that he'd had Venusian lockjaw once, and now always kept his mouth open to keep it from coming back.

"Sure I've heard that!" Dick Harkness said. "That's why there's so much research going on all the time—why we've still got three feet of lead plating around our tanks, too."

"The Martians," said Joe savagely, "also research. They have made a gadget. They think it might be decisive. They think it might win a war for them. But they're cagey. They want to try it out first. On us!"

Dick Harkness looked blank. "But—blast it! We can't fight back to count! We'd be a sitting duck for a battle cruiser! We'd better get in our report."

"There's a Martian scout-cruiser overhead," Joe told him. "It took off as we landed. The gadget is on the ground here somewhere, trained on us. If the scout-cruiser picks up the beginning of a space-radio message—and it's listening with all four ears—the scout flashes word down and we go pouf!"

"But that's nonsense!"

"Did you ever hear of catalysis?" asked Joe ironically. "Did you ever hear of ultra-violet radiation acting as a catalyst to turn carbon dioxide into sugar? Chlorophyl has to be present, but so has ultra-violet. The Martians have found a wave-form or frequency that acts like ultra-violet on drive-fuel. It synthesizes drive-fuel into energy. If they turn it on us, our fuel will blow."

"Either the Martians would use it and brush off their hands, or they'd never let us know."

"There's a Ganymedian at the trigger of the gadget. There's a Ganymedian listening to the space-radio. A Ganymedian has to give the fire-at-will signal, and a Ganymedian has to pull the trigger. But when that happens, we fly apart into little pieces. Ganymedians don't lie."

Dick Harkness sat down on the settee at the back of the control-room. He didn't look scared. He looked incredulous.

"But—why? They haven't any grudge against us! They've nothing to gain."

"They're cold-blooded fish," Joe said furiously, "and they can be on the winning side! The Martians offer them incredible bribes! Don't you see? It's like that Spanish civil war the history books tell of, when the Germans tested out their weapons by helping one side in the civil war, without risking having another first-class nation fight back!

"The Martian government won't risk a war it isn't sure it will win. But it sees a chance to make sure! If the Ganymedians will keep their mouths shut, the Martians can make a base here. With this new gadget they can snipe our ships, one by one. If anything goes wrong, the Martian government will say it was a little group of earth-haters and they're so sorry! But if everything goes right, they'll have half our fleet before we know what's what!"

Dick Harkness' mouth opened and shut.

"If we don't get back," raged Joe, "Headquarters will query by space-radio. The Ganymedians will simply not answer. They do that sort of thing. Headquarters will send a ship here. It will disappear too, when its fuel blows. They'll send another and another. When they start sending squadrons, either the whole Martian Navy—armed with these gadgets—will jump them, or there'll be a sneak attack on all our bases, all our fuel-dumps will go—and what good's a fleet without fuel reserves and bases?"

"Then why warn us?" demanded Dick Harkness.

"The Ganymedians! Don't you see that either? The Martians can't do a thing without their help. They've got to keep their mouths shut! And they've said they will keep their mouths shut if the Martians will prove they're going to win! So the Martians are going to prove it—on us!"

Dick Harkness, his features slack and bewildered, shook his head.

"But—"

"The Ganymedians are cold-blooded. They won't risk anything. They say that something might go wrong. A ship might get away and warn our fleet. But if the Martians can win even after we know what they've got, why, then they'll play. So they've told us what the Martians have got. They won't let us use space-radio, or they let go.

"But if we prove we can lick the Martians after we've been warned, they'll consider we'll win, and they'll play with us. But if the Martians blow us up—" Then he added, gritting his teeth, "They're still around because they can jam our space-radio. If we try to send a report, or try to lift, they'll duck and use the Martian gadget. They're playing it safe all around!"

Dick Harkness looked dazed. "But—but—" Then he shook his head as if to clear it. "Logical people, aren't they? No manners, no morals, no weak spots at all. Not even pets! It sounds crazy, but they've never been tricky."

Rickey pricked up his ears. That sounded like his name. Joe paced up and down.

"They're too darned literal to be tricky!"

Rickey was sure he heard his name. He stood up, his tail wagging. He pawed at Joe's foot. Joe stopped short. He stared down at the ship's mascot, then spoke feverishly.

"But they won't expect us to be tricky either! Look, Dick! They saw you grinning at Rickey and I told 'em he'd killed four men. With no sense of humor they aren't capable of understanding. They simply can't conceive of anything but coldbloodedness. They haven't any weaknesses, and that's one terrible weakness! Now listen!"

It was very, very simple. Less than an hour after Ychan told him of his situation, Joe Peabody went out of the airlock again onto the yielding, intermatted roots which were the solid ground of Ganymede. Inside the ship, Dick Harkness painstakingly finished the fitting of a pressure-fuse into a small smoke-bomb made in the shape of a padlock. And that was all.

Joe scowled, outside the airlock, which to the Ganymedians meant tranquil and untroubled meditation. A Ganymedian looked at him blankly.

"Tell Ychan I talk," said Joe curtly.

He squatted down. Only minutes later Ychan waddled up and plumped down in a heap that looked like a glistening anthill. Joe spoke without preliminaries.

Because of the utterly literal minds of Ganymedians, and their scorn for indirection of any sort, it was necessary to phrase things especially for their comprehension. Scowling, Joe talked in the monotonous tone and idiom used for the strictly business-like conversation of Ychan's kind.

Earthmen, said Joe, were prepared against the Martian weapon. He had passed his time inside the ship simply in setting up detectors for the detonation-beam in case the Martians were fools enough to try it. If they did, with Ganymedian assistance, Joe and the Winship would prove to them how completely foolish it was. If the Martians were fools enough to make war on Earth, they would be wiped out. And their friends. And their friends!

Joe paused to let that sink in. Ychan had listened without emotion. Now he said tonelessly.

"How?"

Joe said shortly that if the Martians tried to destroy the Winship that he, Ychan, would have personal experience of the method. But he would explain. The Earthmen had a weapon the Martians knew nothing about. It destroyed all living things. It killed them by turning them to vapor. Turned upon a space-ship, the Earth-weapon turned its crew to smoke and vapor, and left the space-ship unharmed. Turned upon a planet, the Earth-weapon would make all its vegetation explode, and all its people, and even the fish in its swamps.

Ychan listened. "How?" he asked stolidly.

Joe answered scornfully that he would demonstrate it—so that the Ganymedians would not make fools of themselves and be wiped out. But he would have to take precautions to avoid undue destruction. If he pointed the weapon at the horizon, all living things to the horizon would flash into clouds of vapor.

If he pointed it down to the ground, not only all life immediately below it would burst into steam, but life on the other side of Ganymede would cease to exist over a large area. The Earth-ray would penetrate a planet and destroy life on both sides simultaneously.

Ychan listened with no trace of emotional reaction.

"You show," he insisted.

Joe scowled more deeply still and observed that for his forbearance in not destroying all life for, say, a hundred miles all around him, there would be a price. A small price. But when he had proved the Earth-weapon he would make a demand.

"What?" asked Ychan flatly.

Joe said negligently that he would ask for the useless Martian gadget. Earthmen, he said untruthfully, had earlier models and had been amused by it. But just in case there had been improvements, he would trade a local demonstration instead of a general one for the device. Just the device. He did not care about the Martians.

Then he waited, scowling as deeply as possible to show complete indifference. Ychan made his decision.

"Yes," he said.

It was a bargain and a treaty, because Ganymedians did not lie. They used words as mathematicians use figures. For results.

"All right," said Joe shortly, over his shoulder. "Get going. And you can grin."

The outside microphone picked up his voice. The airlock opened. It was full of the lead-cadmium plates that had been put around the fuel-tanks when radioactive fuel had been tried on an experimental cruise. There was barely room for the two crew-members, in atmosphere-suits, who began to unload it.

"We make shield," said Joe curtly. "Stop weapon here."

The men began to lay the slightly curved leaden plates to cover a fairly large space. Ychan waddled over and felt one. It was solid metal, three inches thick and two feet by four feet in size.

The men laid a floor twenty feet square. They laid a second layer. Then they began to build a platform in the center, seemingly solid, of plates stacked up for thickness.

They made a platform eight by twelve feet and six feet high, using antigrav handlers to lift the unwieldy pieces of metal. The airlock was filled again with the stuff for them to use. They used all that had been in the ship.

Ganymedians arrived by scores and hundreds. They watched with expressionless eyes until they understood what the men were doing. Then they lost interest. But they came back to attentiveness when the airlock opened a third time and two grinning men came out with atmosphere-suits on themselves, but a tiny canine space-suit on Rickey. The dog's suit was of hand-formed glassite and he was plainly visible inside it.

The grinning of the men, to the Ganymedians, meant rage at the murder point. And Rickey was hopelessly uncomfortable in his space-suit. He loathed it. He looked imploringly up at the men and licked out his tongue, and grinned sheepishly, dog-fashion—which meant rage on his part too, to Ychan and his fellows. Rickey's space-suit had been made with infinite care, but he did not like it.

"This," said Joe, scowling, "is dog. Dog is bad. Killed four men. He dies."

The humorless, factual men of the small planet could not possibly imagine anyone having a pet animal. And they saw no reason to doubt the deadliness of a small animal. Their own swamp-bears were even smaller than Rickey, but they were deadly.

The bloated figures regarded Rickey as he was dragged to the elaborately constructed platform of lead-cadmium plates. It was lucky that they had heard only one imaginative tale about him. If anybody had told them about the time when he allegedly barked in space-code to warn the skipper when sneak-thieves from another ship were stealing beer from the Winship—!

The two members of the crew took Rickey—their mascot—to the center of the leaden platform. They fastened him there while he squirmed and tried to lick their hands through his glassite helmet. They padlocked him in place. But the chain which held him was rather queer.

"Ship go up," said Joe briefly. "Use weapon. Then come back for Martian thing. Or—"

He permitted himself a faint flicker of a smile. Then he turned to Dick Harkness.

"Take her up to a thousand feet and let 'er go," he commanded. "Be sure to hit it squarely. A miss would be bad! I wait here."

For him to stay on the ground was wisdom, but he felt horribly lonely as his little ship lifted and left him behind. If he stayed on the ground, the Ganymedians would stay and witness the demonstration of the Earth-weapon. If he didn't stay, they might slip away—and miss what they ought to see.

It was very simple and very effective. The Winship rose to a thousand feet or more and hovered over the cadmium-lead platform. Suddenly there was a faint, bluish glow beneath it. Instantly there was a billowing, expanding cloud of smoke where Rickey had been.

It cleared. Rickey was gone. Even his chain had vanished. He was living matter, in a space-suit. The Earth-weapon had been trained upon him, after an elaborate shield had been made to keep it from destroying all life in a huge area on the far side of the planet.

Rickey, the mascot, had certainly exploded.

He had, unquestionably, exploded. Joe saw it. He grinned. And Ychan turned those milky-gray opaque eyes of his on Joe, and saw the expression which to him meant the ultimate of satisfied rage as regarded the animal which had killed four men. A ripple went over Ychan's glistening hide.

"Earthmen," said Ychan with finality, "would win war. You wait. We bring Martian thing."

When the Winship took off from Ganymede, the lead-cadmium plates were stored again. Joe would have abandoned them for speed, but there was a reason for retrieving them. Speed was called for, because he had a Martian gadget on board—made with that finicky, uselessly detailed artistry of all Martian objects—and it was desirable to get it to base, fast, for examination so counter-measures could be worked out.

But there was a reason for retrieving the lead, too. After all, it would not have been wise to abandon it and let the Ganymedians take the platform apart. If they found that in its building a neat cavity had been left in its center—that it had been covered by a slab doctored to remain in place even under Rickey's weight, but to tilt decidedly when a meteor-repeller beam came on it—!

They might not work it out, but they might. The meteor-repeller beam, of course, had set off the pressure-fuse which made so impressive a mass of smoke, hiding Rickey completely as he slid squirming into the crypt in the platform when the beam came on.

It hadn't been difficult to smuggle Rickey back on board, though. The Ganymedians drifted away. Joe suspected that they intended to go over and watch whatever happened to the Martians with the fuel-exploding device.

They would probably fight, and the Ganymedians would probably be very firm, because they would not want the Earth-weapon used against them.

Dick Harkness came into the control-room, Rickey frisking about his feet.

"Cussed dog!" said Dick fondly, looking down at him. "He hates that space-suit of his, though it protected him perfectly when that smoke bomb went off."

"Mmmm," said Joe.

"Do you think that Martian scout-ship will try for us?" asked Dick hopefully.

"No chance," said Joe. "They want to get back with news of our new weapon. Martian technical brass will go crazy trying to figure it out."

"Huh!" said Dick gloomily. "Nothing ever happens on a space-can! Headquarters will hush-hush the story, too. What a life! And those recruiting posters say 'Deep Space is Calling! Ride a Comet and See the Worlds!' It's a lie! There ought to be a law!"

Rickey sat down, his tongue lolling out. He looked alertly up at Dick.

"Say!" said Dick. "The hands have got their story worked out. They're going to swear that Rickey subdued Ganymede and stopped an alliance with Mars. The high spot in the story is where Rickey saw a tree and in his space-suit he couldn't sniff at it, and he got so mad that steam came out of his ears and the Ganymedians thought he was a dog-god and bowed down to him instead of helping the Martians!"

The Winship drove on through space on the way back to base.