The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (83 page)

“I sank the boat. While everybody was splashing around topside, I went in with a gill mask and burner, opened the case and took off across the bay. It was easy.”

Jepson slapped his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “You sunk the boat!” He sighed. “Well, I'm gonna do you a favor. Not because I wanta, but because I hafta. I'm gonna see this
rock
finds its way back into the bay near the Rusky boat like maybe it fell overboard. And you ain't never gonna mention this thing again, right?”

“Jep,” Swimmer said, speaking with desperate urgency, “maybe I know a cutter.”

*   *   *

Jepson studied him, interested in spite of the lessons from past experiences with Swimmer. “A cutter who could handle
this
rock? A cutter who'd even try it?”

“She'll work any rock, Jep. And she won't recognize it and she won't care where it came from.”

“She?”

Swimmer wiped his forehead. He had Jepson's interest now. Maybe Jepson would come along after all.

“That's right, she,” Swimmer said. “And there isn't a cutter in this world can hold a candle to her.”

“I never heard of no dame cutter,” Jepson said. “I didn't think they had the nerves for it.”

“This is a brand new one, Jep.”

“A new cutter,” Jepson mused. “A dame. Is she a looker?”

“I doubt it, but I've never seen her.”

“You've never seen her, but you've got her?”

“I've got her.”

“Awwww,” Jepson said. He shook his head. “I find it interesting you have a new cutter on the string, but nobody can cut this rock. You seen them charts. The Ruskies don't make mistakes like that. This rock is for nobody. It can't be cut.”

“I think this cutter can do it,” Swimmer said.

The stubborn set to Swimmer's mouth whetted Jepson's interest. It was like Swimmer to be stubborn in the face of determined opposition.

“Where you got this cutter?” Jepson asked.

Swimmer wet his lips with his tongue. This was the ticklish part, Jepson's temper being what it was. “You remember my uncle Amino and his advice for you to be patient about…”

“Ahhh, hah!” Jepson barked. He pointed to the door. “Out! You hear me, creep? Out!”

“Jep, the time machine works!”

*   *   *

Silence dragged out for a dozen heartbeats while Swimmer wondered if he had timed that revelation correctly, and while Jepson reminded himself that this possibility was one of the reasons he hadn't obliterated Swimmer.

Presently, Jepson said: “It works?”

“I swear it, Jep. It works, but the controls aren't too … well, accurate. Sometimes my uncle says it balks and … it doesn't go precisely where you want.”

“But it works?” Jepson demanded.

“It brought back this cutter,” Swimmer said. “From perhaps twenty or thirty thousand years ago.”

A muscle twisted on Jepson's left cheek and his jaw line went hard. “I thought you said your cutter dame was an expert.”

Swimmer took a deep breath, wondering how he could explain paleolithic culture to a man like Jepson. The patois of the underworld didn't fit the job.

“You ain't got nothing to say?” Jepson asked.

“I'm quoting my uncle, who's a very truthful man,” Swimmer said. “According to my uncle, the people of this dame's culture made all their tools out of stone. They have what my uncle calls an
intuition
about stones and working with them. He's the one said she could cut the Mars diamond.”

Jepson frowned. “Did Uncle Professor fall off the legit? He put you up to this job?”

“Oh, no! None of my family know how I … ahh, make my living.”

Jepson groped backward with one foot, found the edge of the bed, sat down. “How much more loot does Uncle Professor need to fix his machine?”

“You have it all wrong, Jep. It isn't a matter of loot. My uncle says there are local anomalies and force-time variations and that it very likely will be impossible ever to steer the machine very close to a time mark.”

“But it works?”

“With these limitations.”

“Then why ain't I heard about it? Thing like this, seems it'd be more important than any Mars diamond. Why ain't it big news?”

“My uncle's trying to determine if his force-time variation theory is correct. Besides, he has a plan to present his stone-age woman before a scientific meeting and he's collecting supporting evidence. And he says he's having trouble teaching her how to talk. She thinks he's some kind of god.”

“I'm beginning to be very interested in what you tell me,” Jepson said. “So say some more.”

“You're not mad any more, Jep?”

“I've said unkind words. So? Maybe I'm entitled. Let us now say that interest has overcome my unhappiness. You sure your uncle didn't plan this little job?”

Swimmer shook his head. “Uncle Amino wouldn't take any part of action like this. He's cubed. No, this was mine. After our—you know—I was on the shorts. I figured to do this one for the ready and cut you in because … well I owe it to you. You'll get your bundle back with interest. And this is a job with style, Jep. The Mars diamond—impossible to cut. But we cut it.”

“And who's to believe?” Jepson said. He nodded. “You think this gal of your Uncle Professor's can do it?”

“I ran into Uncle Amino up in Long Beach. He was there buying equipment when the Russian ship made port and the Mars diamond was big news. Uncle Amino read this part about it being impossible to cut and he laughed. He said his gal could cut it into a watch fob for Premier Sherdakov if she wanted. That's the first I knew about the gal and about the machine working. He's been keeping it pretty secret, as I explained. Well … what he said, I questioned my uncle; he was serious. This stone-age gal can do it. He insists she can.”

Jepson nodded. “If he says this cutter can do it, perhaps … just perhaps, mind you, we could do business. It don't go until I see for myself, though.”

Swimmer allowed himself a deep sigh. “Well, naturally, Jep.”

Jepson pursed his lips. “I tell you a thing, Swimmer. You ain't done this entirely outa kindness for me. You heist this rock, you maybe start an international incident, but you ain't got no way to get the rock outa Mexico.”

Swimmer stared at his feet, suppressed a smile. “I guess I didn't fool you a bit, Jep. I have to get the rock up north. I have to get the cutter away from my uncle and I need a place where she can work. I need organization. You have organization.”

“Organization is expensive,” Jepson said.

Swimmer looked up. “We deal?”

“Seventy-five and twenty-five,” Jepson said.

“Ahhh, Jep! I was thinking fifty-five, forty-five.” At the look in Jepson's eyes, he said: “Sixty-forty?”

“Sharrup before I make it eighty-twenty,” Jepson said. “Just be glad you got a friend like me who'll help when you need.”

“There's a few million bucks in this thing,” Swimmer said, fighting to keep the hurt and anger from his voice. “The split's—”

“The split stands,” Jepson said. “Seventy-five and twenty-five. We don't argue. Besides, I'm nuts even to listen to you. Every time you say dough I buy trouble. This time, I better get some of my investment back. Now, you go out and tell Harpsy to slip the dolls some coin and send 'em packing. We gotta concentrate on getting this rock over the border. And
that
is gonna take some doing.”

II

The chalet nestled furtively wren-brown within the morning shadows of pines and hemlocks on a lake island. The lake itself was a sheet of silvered glass reflecting upside down images of the island and a dock on its south shore. Two airboats had been brought up under the trees and hidden beneath instiflage netting.

Seated in shadows above the dock, a man with a blast-pellet swagrifle puffed nervously on an
alerto
cigaret. Two other men, similarly armed and similarly drugged to eye-darting sensitivity, patrolled the island's opposite shore.

The sounds of an argument could be heard coming from within what had been the chalet's dining room and now was a jury-rigged workshop. It was only one of many arguments that had consumed considerable time during the past five days of harried flight northward from Mazatlan.

Swimmer, for one, was sick of the arguing, but he knew of no non-violent way to silence his uncle. Things were not going at all as he had planned. First, there had been the disconcerting discovery that a Mexican boy had identified him from mug files as the man who had walked out of the water wearing a normal business suit (permadry) and gill mask and carrying a “white rock.”

Jepson's organization had smuggled Swimmer over the border concealed in a freight load of canteloupes. One of the canteloupes had been hollowed out to hold the diamond.

Next, Swimmer's uncle—alerted by the front-page hullabaloo—had absolutely balked at cooperating in anything his wayward nephew wanted.

Jepson had lost his temper, had given terse orders to his boys and here they all were now—somewhere in Canada or northern Minnesota.

Arguing.

Only one of the dining room's occupants had failed to participate in the arguments. She answered to the name of Ob (although her own people had called her Kiunlan, which translated as Graceful Shape).

*   *   *

Kiunlan-Ob stood five feet one inch tall. Professor Amino Rumel's lab scales had placed her weight at one hundred twenty-seven pounds nine ounces. Her blue-black hair had been drawn back and tied with a red ribbon. She had a low forehead and large, wide-set blue-gray eyes. Her nose was flat and with large nostrils. Both chin and mouth were broad, the lips thick. Fifteen welted red scars down the left side of her face told the initiated that she had seen fifteen summers and had not yet littered. A simple brown pullover dress belted at the waist covered her heavy-legged body, but failed to conceal the fact that she had four breasts.

This feature had first attracted Swimmer's fascinated attention. He had then noted her hands. These bore thick horn callouses over palms and fingers and along the inner edges of the fingers—even occasionally on the backs of the fingers, especially around the nails.

Ob stood now beside a bench that had replaced the chalet dining room's table. One of her hands rested on the back of a high stool drawn up to the bench. The Mars diamond lay on a cushioned square of black velvet atop the bench. The stone's milky surface reflected a faint yellow from the spotlight hanging close to it on a gooseneck.

As the argument progressed, Ob's attention shifted fearfully from speaker to speaker. First, there were many angry noises from Gruaack, the super devil-god who was called Proff Ess Orr. Then came equally loud and angry noises from the big stout devil-god called Jepp, the one whose eyes blazed with the threat of unknown terrors and who obviously was superior over all the others in this place.

Sometimes there were softer sounds from the smaller creature who had accompanied the devil-god Jepp. The status of this creature was not at all clear. He appeared to Ob to be vaguely human. The face was not at all unpleasant. And he seemed to share some of Ob's fears. She thought perhaps the other creature was a human snared like herself by these terrible beings.

“Yes, she's a genius at shaping stones!” Uncle Professor blared. “Yes! Yes! But she's still a primitive creature whose understanding of what we want is definitely limited.”

He paced back and forth in front of Ob and the bench, a bald, skinny little man trembling with indignation.

Thieves, assassins, kidnappers,
he thought.
How could Conrad have become associated with such a crew? Coming on him in his lab that way, crating his equipment without a by-your-leave and spiriting him off to this remote place.

“You through yakking?” Jepson asked.

“No, I am not,” Uncle Professor said. He pointed to the diamond on the bench. “That … that is no ordinary diamond. That is the Mars diamond. Turning such a priceless stone over to…”

“Sharrup!” Jepson said.

Creeps with their stupid arguments,
he thought.

*   *   *

Uncle Professor glanced at his nephew. There'd been some bad moments during the past few days of their furtive journey. Again, the Professor wondered about nephew Conrad. Could the boy have been deceived by Jepson? The man was a criminal and that obviously was where all his money came from—all the money provided to develop the time machine. Was it possible this Jepson had dragged poor Conrad into this nefarious scheme through some terrible threat?

In a quiet voice, Jepson said: “Did you or didn't you tell your nephew the Swimmer here that your gal could cut this Mars rock?”

“Yes, I said that; I said she could cut any stone, but…”

“So awright. I want she should cut.”

“Will you please try to understand?” the Professor pleaded. “Ob undoubtedly can
cut
your stone. But any idea of facets and deriving the maximum brilliance from a given gem—this probably is outside her understanding. She's accustomed to
functional
artifacts, to simpler purposes in her…”

“Simple, Schmimple!” Jepson snarled. “You're stalling. What's it, huh? D'you lie about this dame? Alla stories I ever see 'bout creeps like her, the guys did the stone cutting and the dames sat around caves hiding from tigers they got teeth six feet long.”

“We're going to have to revise our previous hypotheses about stone-age divisions of labor,” the Professor said. “As nearly as I can make out from Ob, women made the tools and weapons while the men did the hunting. Their society was matriarchal with certain women functioning somewhat like priestesses. Cave Mothers, I believe it would translate.”