Retief and the Rascals (11 page)

            When Retief regained consciousness he found that
he was lying on a stone floor scattered with meager straw containing fleas. He
could see no light; in total darkness he paced off the dimensions of the
featureless cell. Twelve one way, nine the other, with an alcove in one corner.
It occurred to him this was the approximate size and shape of the Chancery in
the Embassy of Groac, which he had seen a few days before on a goodwill tour
arranged between Ambassadors Swinepearl and Shinth. On tiptoe, he could just
touch the ceiling—of rough planks, he concluded from the unplaned texture. He
found a stout wooden bench bolted to the wall and floor at one side of the
stuffy room. Insofar as he could determine, there was no door or window. "Still,"
he mused, "I got in here somehow."

            The floor was an unbroken slab, reasonably
clean, even. The silence was total. And while he languished here, poor Ben was
doubtless getting in deeper with every utterance.

            The ceiling seemed to be the only possibility.
Retief noticed that in the corner occupied in the Chancery by the big Fortress
£3 model safe, the ceiling sagged minutely. He went over to stand under the
heavily stressed planks. He returned to the bench, yanked it loose from its
bolts and dragged it over. He disassembled his belt-buckle by feel, working
carefully; it wouldn't do to drop anything in the pitch darkness. He freed the
tongue, a three-inch spike, from its mounting and worked it clear of the
deep-blue tump-leather. Standing on the bench, he found a joint between the
ceiling planks where the deflection was greatest. He began to gouge at it. The
wood was the tough, aromatic local iron-elm, a mutated tree of Terran origin.
It yielded reluctantly, splintering away in three-inch by half-inch chips.
After half an hour's careful work, he caught a whiff of Groaci dope-stick
through the narrow opening he had made, and a faint glimmer of light gave him
his first view of the featureless dungeon in which he was confined. He
listened, heard faint, breathy Groaci voices not far away.

            "—to express astonishment, Flinsh?" a
familiar voice was saying: it was that of Shish, the Groaci Counselor, Retief
realized. "What's that you say?" Shish went on, "Do you presume
to accuse His Excellency of connivance in violation of diplomatic immunity, and
to so far transgress the tenets of bureaucratic solidarity as actually to
countenance the employment of sacred Groacian soil for purposes of kidnapping
and illegal imprisonment? 'Unthinkable!' you say. But only today at their
farcical Awards Banquet, I was chatting with that sneaky Ben Magnan; I managed
to dissemble my distaste for his loathsome Terran body odor, and to lull the
ninny into total acceptance of my wily assurances. To distort Groac's role in
this fiasco is a trifle in the service of noble Groac; no breach of honor!
Doubtless the feckless Magnan is even now bending His Ex's auditory membranes
in the belief he's finessing him into a false position,
contraband-kickbackwise. The dupes! What a pleasure it will be, Flinsh, to
gloat, whilst wrapped in the cloak of unstained virtue even as the feckless
Terries pay the price exacted by Enlightened Galactic Opinion for the traffic
from which
we
reap the profits!"

            "I say, sir," Flinsh offered
hesitantly. "Is it entirely wise to state the case so candidly, especially
while so close to the actual environs of the Terran Mission, just beyond the
partition there?"

            "You, a mere third secretary and
vice-consul," Shish retorted contemptuously, "have the effrontery to
question the wisdom of your very own counselor?"

            "Well, sir," the impudent fellow
attempted. "I only meant—"

            "To understand very well, Flinsh,"
Shish said coldly in the Formal dialect: "To make a marginal note in your
ER to the effect that you spoke without thinking."

            "Gosh, sir," the hapless vice-consul
tried again, an example, Shish reflected, of the persistence which had been
instrumental in the boy's glacial rate of promotion.

            "After all, you're not
totally
infallible,
sir," he plunged to his doom.

            "Am I to understand, Flinsh," Shish
said in an incredulous tone, "that you take it upon yourself not only to
dispute the decision of your Big Boss, but place his very wisdom in
question?"

            While the occupants of the strong-room were thus
contentedly engaged in Pecking-order Ritual, Retief wedged off another wide
chunk of the tough wood. He could now see part of the room, including two pairs
of jeweled greaves above flat, bunioned feet in trump-hide sandals. The Groaci
diplomats were at the far end of the room, fully intent on their verbal
ping-pong. Retief eased his left hand through the inch-wide gap he had made,
and was able to put his fingertips on a silken throw-rug on which rested one
leg of a small end-table. He inched the silk toward him; it slid silently,
bringing the table along. Retief could see the top of a cheap Groaci copy of a
Yalcan glass pot on the table; it tottered as the table swung around minutely.

            Retief paused, watching closely, but the breathy
Groaci voices went on, poor Flinsh losing ground with each ill-advised
utterance. Shish was shifting impatiently, saying: "Yes, yes, no matter,
my boy. You're young: to learn in time." Then he turned and walked
directly toward Retief's spy-hole, Flinsh trotting at his side, the side nearer
to Retief. Timing it carefully, Retief waited until Flinsh was passing directly
by the table, then he jerked the rug. The pot rocked, leaned, and fell with a
smash!
Bits of iridescent glass scattered in every direction.

            "Fool!" Shish yelled. "Clumsy
idiot! Look where you're blundering! Do you realize that lamp was of museum
quality—a gift from the Yalcan Minister of Culture to my departed colleague
Ambassador Schluh!"

            "Gee, sir, I didn't even
touch
that
table!" Flinsh protested.

            "Stubborn!" Shish yelled, a dry
wheeze. "As we stand here actually
looking at
the shards of a
precious vase destroyed by your clumsiness, you attempt to deny the evidence
your own senses as well as mine perceive! Folly, Flinsh! No—don't aggravate the
offense—"

            "But, sir, I carefully avoided any contact
whatever with the table whereon the lamp rested!"

            "Don't imagine, Flinsh," Shish grated,
"that I fail to notice the implied rebuke in your editing my use of the
word Vase to 'lamp'! As if this petty distinction in any degree lessened the
gravity of the offense!"

            "Gee, sir," Flinsh offered. "To
hate it that the lamp, I mean vase broke and all, but
I
didn't do
it!"

            "To be quite enough, Flinsh!" his boss
declared. "Never mind! To sweep that up—no, I didn't mean that! To be
beneath your rank, after all, incompetent though you are! I go to summon a
sweeper!" Shish stamped off to his squawk-box and ordered the Groacian
Marine Guard on duty to send in the duty sweeper. All the while, Flinsh was at
his heels, whining.

            Retief watched Shish go to the big safe, which
partially blocked his view. Shish poked buttons, opened the heavy door, and rummaged,
while Flinsh hovered nervously. Shish brought out a sheaf of heavy parchment,
folded like a road map and secured by a bright red ribbon and a big gob of
sealing wax. Without hesitation, the Groaci Number Two broke away the seal and
unfolded the document.

            " 'The Ambassador of Terra presents his
compliments to the Ambassador of Groac', " he read in flawlessly accented
Terran. "... and with reference to a certain nominally contraband shipment
of office supplies—' Ha!" Shish scoffed. "Get that 'nominally'!
Weasel words, Flinsh, and I have to admit Sam is an expert with them. Still,
one mustn't be decoyed from the path of duty by such nefarious attempts at
subtlety! '—contraband merchandise'," he went on, " 'I have the honor
to request Your Excellency's assistance in exporting the aforesaid items
without troubling the Bloorian Office of Customs and Excise.' Hah! wants us to
help him smuggle flink-hides, the hypocrite! Listen to this: 'I expect you
will, in accordance with our previous mutual agreement, create a disturbance
which will distract attention from the godown in question in timely fashion, to
permit selected'—meaning 'bribed'," Shish interjected, " 'local
officials to relabel and transport the aforesaid goods to the Sealed Customs
Annex before the scheduled departure time of the Three-Planet liner
Lugubrious,
this date. Please accept, Mr. Ambassador, renewed assurances of my highest
consideration.'"

            To confess, Mr. Shish, I'm shocked!" young
Flinsh gasped.

            "To get over it, lad," the Counselor
said kindly. "To have had to discover the truth eventually: ours is a
devious calling. 'The end justifies the means,' as the revered Foreign Minister
Fishfilth said at the time of his capture. I
had
to delude poor Sammy;
it was the only way!"

            "But I thought you and that wretched Terry
were bosom buddies!" Flinsh wailed. "All the times he's saved your
mummified blurb-jowl by honestly lying on your behalf! Actually, I'd conceived
a sort of secret admiration for Ambassador Swinepearl, Terry though he is. I'm
devastated!" Poor young Flinsh flicked a drop of lachrymal exudant from
his middle eye-stalk. Shish patted his carapace comfortingly. "I know, my
boy; I, too was shocked in the beginning. On my very first tour, in the Goober
Cluster, I had the unhappy duty to 'accidentally' lose a certain document which
would have suggested less than total lack of culpability on the part of my
revered Chief of Mission in regard to the premature release of certain Terran
detainees being held on behalf of Incompetent Fumbler Swive, a poor fool who
had been so naive as to trust us. He paid for his folly when his Mission was
incontinently ejected from the Western Arm, where he had secured a toehold
unknown to the CDT. A band of bucolic dacoits set upon him in his very chancery
and evicted him into the low street. For a while, I felt shamed, but in the
end, well, we shall yet see who prevails in Tip Space!"

            "Sure, sir," Flinsh replied brokenly,
"but this isn't just playing His Terran Ex for a fool, it's condemning all
those cute little flinks to extermination! I can't bear it! Something must be
done!"

            "Something to keep my name out of it, you
mean," Shish supplied. "Good thinking, lad. Suppose you just take
this potentially compromising document, which I signed tongue-in-cheek and with
both outer pairs of oculars crossed, solely to give poor Sam a sense of
security. He feared that if the trade agreement became generally known, GFU
shipments would cease at once, endangering the success of his Mission, as well
as casting himself into disrepute. Poor Sammy. He was only an amateur
scoundrel; no chance against the real thing in the person of myself!"

            "Right, sir," Flinsh gobbled, taking
the incriminating Agreement form. "I think I'm beginning to get the hang
of it!" he exclaimed as he eyed the heavy parchment which Shish had given
him. "Guess I'll burn it, eh, Chief?"

            "By no means, Flinsh," Shish
countered. "It constitutes hard evidence of my unexampled virtuosity! I
shall yet find a use for it, with a few discreet modifications made by an
expert in amending such evidence."

            "Gosh, sir, I wasn't thinking, I
guess," Flinsh confessed. "Hide it?" he offered.

            "Precisely," Shish confirmed.
"There—behind that crack in the paneling. Shoddy construction, but it has
its uses."

            Flinsh went to the designated gap in the
imitation berpwood partition, swung open the secret door and thrust the
document inside. It landed with a heavy
thump!
beside Retief. He tucked
it away.

        "Hark! I heard a
heavy
thump!"
Flinsh exclaimed.

            "Nonsense, lad," Shish soothed.
"There's nothing below but the refuse pits. They'd make more of a
splash!"

           
"Sure, I guess so, sir," Flinsh
retreated. "But if anybody finds that, it would—"

            "Forget it!" Shish ordered. "Do
you suggest that your very own supervisor would be so careless as—" He
broke off at a distinct
creak!
from the floor underfoot.
"Here!" he hissed. "What's—?"

            "Just this old floor creaking, sir,"
Flinsh supplied. "You know how careless these local contractors are."

            "But this building is the former Grand
Imperial Doghouse," Shish protested, "once Headquarters of the Local
Order of the Schnauzer! It was built fifty years before the first visit of
Ambassador-at-Large Thush! So ..."

            As the two Groaci bureaucrats wrangled, Retief
studied the deflected planks under the weighty safe, and noticed newly-exposed
fibers of the tough iron-elm, weakened by his gouging, where a new longitudinal
split had opened spontaneously. Working silently, he widened the aperture
further, while the two Groaci diplomats nattered on above, unnoticing. When the
crack was a quarter of an inch wide, Retief carefully tore a narrow strip of
parchment from the Memorandum, folded it lengthwise for stiffening and, when
the Groaci were at the far end of the room, poked the strip through the opening
and gave it a tap which propelled it through, and a few inches away. He waited.
After a full minute, Flinsh exclaimed: "Sir! You must have dropped—I mean,
clearly
somebody
dropped a scrap of paper, and—" He came up to the
safe. Retief noticed the slight further deflection of the floor under the
junior officer's added weight.