O'Dea and Hawthorne watched their repaired vessel roll out of the
Centaur repair shop. The smashed plates had been neatly straightened;
the vessel gleamed from nose to tail.
An enthusiastic Centaur foreman accompanied the ship.
"Oh my intimate friends!" he sprayed in Hawthorne's face. "I too
_parlez-vous_ the English! For men I have the great love! It will give
me tremendous enjoyment to help to populate this planet with human
beings!"
"You go to Hell," Hawthorne growled. He shivered in Avignon's thin
atmosphere and pulled the rough blanket Morguma had supplied tighter
around him. He and O'Dea looked like a pair of Indian chiefs.
"Undertake to observe," said the foreman. "Seizure beams!"
He shouted something in his own language to his workers inside the
ship. The pale green beams lanced out. The foreman's fangs protruded
several inches.
"And the interior is so dainty!" the creature warbled. "Chenille
curtains over the ports! Pastel wallflower paper! Furnishings of a
luxuriance that would be of pleasure even to the dictator himself!"
Hawthorne spat disgustedly. "Pastel wallpaper! Chenille curtains! Who
ever heard of curtains in a space ship, much less chenille!"
His homely face twisted in pain. "Chenille!" he groaned again.
"You have no soul," grinned O'Dea. "As long as these baboons are
willing to supply us with the finer things of life, you might at least
appreciate it."
"You know what I think of you," growled Hawthorne. "Chenille
curtains--ugh!"
He spat disgustedly.
Morguma appeared and waved them to the open lock. He preceded them,
and when they had mounted to the lock, he shoved them back gently with
his huge paws until they faced a barrage of Centaur camera fiends. The
three of them, Morguma in the middle with a giant smirking grin, stood
framed in the lock while shutters clicked.
"I wish you wouldn't breathe in my face," O'Dea said. "You smell like
something that forgot to die off in the Mesozoic era."
Morguma giggled. "All Centauri loves you! Your beautiful faces will be
in all our newspapers now!"
They went into the control room. Hawthorne stared unbelievingly
at the transformation. Flowers were spread profusely. Embroidered
antimacassars graced the dainty chairs. And the curtains over the ports
were indeed of chenille. The pilot groaned dismally.
But O'Dea's eyes lighted when he saw the huge portrait over the control
board.
"Mercedes!" he shouted.
"Oh how happy I am to see you pleased!" exclaimed Morguma. "We found
this divine female human being's picture and enlarged it as you see.
She is an entrancing thing!"
"You talk the truth," O'Dea agreed. "But that won't change the fact
that I don't like you. What happens now?"
Morguma looked mildly apologetic. "Now we must perform labor! The great
task for which this ship has been fitted!"
The Centaur seated himself at the rear of the control room, produced an
instrument that looked like a whip. It looked like a whip because it
was one. He flicked it experimentally.
"Oh how devastated I would be," he told them, "if I should be forced
to use this! You will take off and fly to our asteroid belt, following
the intelligent directions I shall give you. We will find a substantial
piece of some agreeable material and bring it back to Avignon."
The two men looked at each other and then at the whip. The alien
snapped it lightly a few times as if nervous. They turned to the
control board.
* * * * *
A few hours later they were in Alpha Centauri's asteroid belt, dodging
debris. For a while they were nervous. It was here, in this field of
small flying particles that was worse even than their Solar System's,
that a baseball-sized rock had eluded their detectors and knifed
through their vessel, passing through all three fuel chambers in its
line of flight and taking a long stream of rocket fuel for its wake.
But the Centaurs evidently had perfected asteroid navigation; and
when they saw several pieces of matter that were about to strike them
deflected, they stopped worrying.
O'Dea manned a board lined with instruments the Centaurs had installed.
They were simple to operate. He merely moved a telescope lens until a
piece of cosmic scrap was in the cross hair, then he read a dial. The
telescope was synchronized with a Centaur version of a spectroscope,
and its reading was given in figures on the dial.
He felt the Centaur looking over his shoulder, checking up on him,
so he had to do his work properly. Not that it made much difference.
Whether he and Hawthorne played the game was of little importance as
far as the Centaur's plans went, except that the creatures liked the
symbolism created by having two humans work on the project.
"Morguma," he said. "Those spaceships on Avignon can't all be engaged
in this work. There are types there that can be of no use."
"Oh you are so intelligent to reason that!" Morguma marveled. "This
pretty planet of Avignon is the reservation we have set aside for all
space work. All of our ships are built there and all are based there!"
O'Dea tracked down a likely looking asteroid.
"How come?" he asked.
"We Centaurs are a delicate sensitive people! We love the beautiful
things of life, and dislike such noisy greasy articles as space ships.
So a few years ago it was decided to remove all the dirty factories
from our home planets. Now the only craft that disturb the peace of our
people on the main planets of Centauri are the rockets that transport
materials and workers to and from Avignon!"
"There's something wrong there." O'Dea centered his instrument on the
asteroid. "_You_ seem to be happy enough. And the other workers on
Avignon--they didn't seem to be disgusted by the dirt and noise."
"Oh, I am ecstatic!" Morguma raved. "It is my aptitude! Rocket fuel is
my life blood! There are those among us who have a love for this noisy
distasteful life of space!"
"Sounds logical," O'Dea murmured. "Some humans enjoy doing the dirty
work that nauseates the average person ... unpleasant, but necessary.
As for that remark about rocket fuel's being your life blood, Morguma,
I happen to know it's true!"
He chuckled at the look of discomfiture that spread over Morguma's
features. The _quintol_ that was a part of rocket fuel was the
equivalent of alcohol to the metabolism of the Centaurs. Several times
he had seen Morguma take a quick pull from a small bottle he kept in
his leathery garment--the Centaur version of a hip flask.
Morguma changed the subject as O'Dea's throaty chuckle continued. He
pointed to the grayish speck in the telescope.
"Oh a remarkable find! A lump of solid carbon dioxide, and of such a
size! Oh how fortunate we are to have such fortunate fortune!"
Their vessel closed in on the chunk of almost pure carbon dioxide,
a piece larger than the ship. Under the Centaur's directions, O'Dea
fed out the seizure beams. He watched the rough mass become gradually
rigid, fixed in space relative to them.
That seizure beam would interest Earth's scientists. But Earth was
trillions of miles away.
Morguma clapped his paws together in foolish delight. "Oh how goody! We
must hasten back to Avignon! On the way, we will analyze this precious
find!"
* * * * *
As they blasted back toward Centauri's sixth planet, O'Dea learned
from Morguma how the analysis was made by instrument. The figures they
reported would be turned into a central office, along with the results
of other ships engaged in the same task. In that way, the Centaurs
checked the composition of the atmosphere they were creating for the
planet, knew what elements were most necessary at any given moment.
They swooped low over the planet, on the side opposite the space base.
Other Centaurs were bringing laden ships down, loosing their cargoes
like sticks of bombs. A great plateau was speckled with white, and
below, the ocean bed was filling with water.
Hawthorne joined the procession of Centaur ships. When they neared the
surface, he barked at O'Dea to loosen their load. The seizure beams
disappeared and the icy chunk splashed over several acres of ground.
"A successful mission!" Morguma giggled. "Now we return to our lovely
base to rest!"
O'Dea and Hawthorne glowered.
The next day was similar to the first, and the one after it, and all
the rest until they had turned in a dozen days of work as slaves in the
asteroid belt. O'Dea became proficient in operating his instruments;
and Hawthorne brushed up on precision bombing until he could have
planted his loads on a dime, if anybody had provided the dime.
They found out that the Centaurs didn't believe in resting on the
Sabbath. Working hours were roughly from sunup to sundown--about an
eight hour stretch, since Avignon's day was shorter than Earth's.
At dawn, a skipping troop of young Centaurs invaded their chambers.
The students were learning English, diplomatic French, South Martian
Portuguese, and a score of other languages of which Hawthorne and O'Dea
knew nothing.
Then Morguma came and led them to a huge boiler factory that was fitted
as a dining room, where they toyed with Centaur food and ate vita-horm
capsules salvaged from their ship.
After that, it was out to the asteroid belt for another load of frozen
atmosphere.
"Oh, Hell," said O'Dea. They were going back to their quarters after
another day's work. "If it wasn't for that picture of Mercedes, I'd
throw in my buttons. I'm dying to see a human being again!"