The VMR Theory (v1.1) (2 page)

“Ambitious little devils,” I said gloomily.

“They view humanity as their major stumbling block and have three competing schools of thought about us.” Crenshaw folded her hands and began acting professorial. “The peace faction espouses theory one, which is that humans are wildly variable, with geniuses to balance out the morons so that if push comes to shove in stellar-political terms, the bright humans are going to kick the living hell out of Alt Bauernhof.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” I commented.

“The militarists lean toward theory two, based on Alt Bauernhof’s unfortunate experience with career diplomats and the Contact/Survey Corps, to the effect that humans are too dumb to live, much less dominate the galaxy. As one leading scholar of the school expresses it, if you take a human out in the rain and let him look up, he’ll drown trying to talk.”

Catarina nodded. “They have the Contact boys pegged pretty well.”

“Now, as much as I would personally enjoy promoting peace through superior firepower with the Macdonalds, my orders are to try to quietly nudge them in a peaceable direction. The ones who believe in theory three hold the balance of power, and that’s where you two fit in,” Crenshaw concluded.

“What is theory three?” I asked, closing my eyes. “Theory three is that since most of the humans the Macdonalds have seen are too dumb to live, there must be a secret master race guiding humanity’s destiny. Variants on theory three include the Aryan Master Race Theory, the Inscrutable Oriental Master Race Theory, the Jewish Princess Master Race Theory, the Everyone-of-Consequence-Who-Ever-Lived-Was-Gay Master Race Theory, and—last but not least—the VMR or Vampire Master Race Theory.”

I looked at her suspiciously. “You wouldn’t have helped them come up with this Vampire Master Race Theory, would you?”

Crenshaw began examining her nails. “We may have planted a story or two to the effect that vamps run Earth.” I considered that a pretty nasty dig, considering how things run on Earth. “Swell.”

“The two of you are the only vampires that the Macdonalds have been able to identify, and your little escapade on Schuyler’s World did wonders to promote the VMR Theory, so the Macdonald leadership is
very
interested in taking a look at you.”

“Swell,” I said.

Crenshaw leaned over and pinched my cheek. “I just love it when you’re enthusiastic, MacKay. I keep wondering what Catarina sees in you.” She paused. “I’ve asked her to get her eyes checked.”

To fill an otherwise pregnant silence, I asked, “What are we actually supposed to do on Alt Bauernhot?”

“We need you to get one of our local agents out, a scientist who works on their naval armaments. Call him Dr. Blok.” Crenshaw passed across a thick packet of materials. “He’s under suspicion, and we haven’t been able to contact him.”

I glanced through the pictures in the packet. “Have you tried an ad in the personals?”

Crenshaw said pointedly, “Catarina darlin’, will you get your dopey boyfriend here flying straight? Blok is important. Everybody except the Foreign Office knows that the Macdonalds are building up their navy quicker than rabbits breed. We need the details from Blok. If the two of you can smuggle him out in that bucket of bolts you laughingly call a ship, we’ll be in a position to have the Foreign Office tell the Macdonalds to stop. Or else.” She smiled at the prospect of “or else.”

“If we fly in with the lights on our hull practically spelling out ‘Confederation Naval Intelligence,’ Blok should try to get in touch with us,” Catarina observed for my benefit.

“Ma’am, shouldn’t we have a plan or something?” I asked timidly, glancing through the packet.

“MacKay, if I actually gave you a nice, detailed plan, would you actually follow it?”

“No, but
Yd feel
better.”

Crenshaw showed me her teeth in what was intended to be a reassuring gesture. “MacKay, the minute I met you, I knew you were a natural for intelligence work.”

“Not real bright,” I admitted.

“Like I said, a natural.” She chucked me under the chin. “You know, MacKay, I made the connection between you and the VMR Theory about fourteen seconds after you volunteered your services to Navy Intelligence by threatening to bite me on the neck if I didn’t fix your ship and let Catarina ship out with you. And yes, I do hold grudges.”

I nodded and looked at Catarina, who was practicing her Mona Lisa smile. “Uh, what are the odds on the Macdonalds peaceably letting us go after we arrive?”

“The whiz kids and computers back on Earth say that there’s at least a nineteen percent chance,” Crenshaw said jovially. “Bunch of wishful thinkers, aren’t they? Concentrate on getting Blok out. Any other havoc you cause while you’re there is pure profit. Given your talent for creating mayhem, I figure you’ll convince the Macdonalds that if there is a Vampire Master Race, it’s nothing to mess with.”

I asked Catarina, “You have any idea how we’re going to get out of this alive?”

“Just remember, shorty,” Crenshaw cautioned, “you’re doing this for truth, for justice, for peace and eternal fellowship in the galaxy, and I forget how the rest of it goes.”

“Why do I feel like this is PBS pledge week?” I thought for a minute. “What can I tell my crew?”

“Nothing. They’re not cleared for it.”

“That settles it.” I decided to see what would happen if I tried to avoid getting killed for a change. “Catarina and I may have volunteered to go off on suicide missions, but I can’t drag my crew into this blind. Count me out.”

“Ken—” Catarina said.

I didn’t wait for her to finish. I’ve learned to move quickly when the situation demands it, and I headed for the door before Crenshaw could twist my arm, either figuratively or literally. As I emerged into the saloon, the bartender caught me by the elbow. “Senhor, I am so very sorry. We have not a single bottle of mineral water in the house with a cap on. Have a beer instead.” He grimaced as if the words were being pulled out of him with tongs. “On the house.”

“Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but I’m in a hurry and-—”

His eyes narrowed. “You refuse my kind offer. You disdain my kind offer.” He raised his voice. “You perhaps don’t like our beer, senhor?” Several persons in the vicinity began eyeing me.

“Well, it’s not that I don’t like beer—”

“Then you will drink!” He raised his fist. “To Brasilia Nuevo!”

The crowd repeated it. Like a lot of colonial worlds, Brasilia Nuevo would be severely underpopulated if they made potential immigrants pass intelligence tests. It’s also one of those places where Diogenes would have been well-advised to ditch his lamp and walk around with a floodlight chained to his wrist. Smiling cordially, I drank.

Discovering I was allergic to something or other in the beer, I promptly threw up. I gather it would have been safer to spit on the local flag.

Next to Detroit, Newark, and Washington, D.C., Brasilia Nuevo is the most heavily armed society in the galaxy, and people here have the habit of firing guns in the air to celebrate special occasions like birthdays, funerals, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Fortunately, the police arrived within four or five minutes to form a human wall and escort me off into protective custody.

Unfortunately, my stock plummeted when they found Catarina’s spray paint in my pocket. Rio’s hoosegow proved to be less than desirable; having been in several jails since becoming acquainted with Catarina, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. The local vermin weren’t nearly as cute as the rats you find most places, and the little red eyes glaring out at me made me feel unwelcome. Catarina appeared about an hour later.

“Is this one of those good news, bad news sorts of things?” I asked.

She nodded.

“What’s it going to cost to get me out of here?”

“That’s the bad news, I’m afraid. One of the people you threw up on was an alderman. Also, the locals have a well-developed and possibly well-deserved inferiority complex. The local beer is about the only thing they have to be proud of, so it assumes religious significance in the local culture.”

She paused to allow me to digest this. Colonial planets tend to be provincial. On many of them, drinking beer is the most popular form of recreational activity. On some of them, it’s the only form of activity.

“After the police took you away, the crowd in the bar formed themselves up into a lynch mob.” She shrugged. “I bought a few rounds, so it’s likely to be three or four days before they navigate from there to here, but I don’t think the municipal government is going to let me bail you out.”

“Hmmm,” I said.

She looked around my cell. “The place could use some wallpaper. Lots of company?”

“The constabulary mentioned that they like to nibble on your toes if you fall asleep, but otherwise they’re fairly harmless.” I asked hesitantly, “What was the good news?”

“Lydia and I followed you out, and after she finished chortling, I talked her out of court-martialing you. She offered her good offices in getting you sprung, although she recalled both of us to active duty and made me promise to keelhaul you if you act up again. She says we can tell our crew everything except Dr. Blok. Would you consider reconsidering?”

“I assume you’ve already briefed and polled our shipmates. How many of them voted to come along?”

“All of them, although Wyma Jean’s cat deserted.”

I exploded. “They all want to come? For heaven’s sake, what a bunch of idiots! Of course, they’d have to be to work for us.”

“True. Most spacers don’t like to work for people with communicable diseases, like difficulty with cash flow. Anyway, we’ve already received an offer through the Macdonald consulate, and Bunkie jacked them up to twice standard rates in real money, half in advance. We can sign the contract and start loading whenever you want.”

“Okay. When can I get out of here?”

Catarina pulled a chocolate bar out of her purse and handed it to me through the bars. “You’ll be out in no time.”

Observing the guards nudging each other, I was not unduly surprised to find a hacksaw blade stuffed inside the wrapper.

We caught a shuttle, thoughtfully laid on by Lydia, up to Rio’s little space platform, where my purser, Bunkie Bunker, and my supercargo, Harry Halsey, were scurrying trying to load the stuff the Macdonalds wanted shipped and locate things that might pay for us to carry on our own account.

Bunkie is a diminutive ex-yeoman we stole from the navy who will undoubtedly end up as CEO of a very large company if she ever gets serious about a career and quits hanging around Catarina and me. Harry, who could pass as the “after” photo in a steroid commercial, is also ex-navy, but the navy asked him to leave. He usually tells people that a supercargo is a kind of space cadet, and they believe him. He sold his bar on Schuyler’s World to give me some much needed working capital, and on Schuyler’s World, where bouncing drunks is considered an art form, I’ve been told by people interested in that sort of thing that he practically invented the cross-body headlock toss, which makes him very good at helping Bunkie negotiate contracts on planets like Brasilia Nuevo.

After signing where Bunkie told me to sign, I went back to check on the cargo the Macdonalds had waiting. Finding that they hadn’t committed any overt violations of Confederation law, we took on seventy pallets and about a hundred tons of industrial solvent through the four-centimeter tubing that extends from Brasilia Nuevo’s space platform to a ground station just outside Rio. Because it’s bad luck to have industrial solvent sloshing around trying to dissolve the hull, we did so carefully, and I hoped that Rio’s station master would remember to clean out the hose before somebody tried shipping flour.

This accomplished, I went back to see how Catarina was making out back in Stores. “How are we doing?”

“We’re stocked up and almost ready to roll.” She smiled impishly. “I bought some fresh fish for dinner tonight.”

I stopped to peer into a little tank where Mr. Fish and several family members were lethargically swimming around. “How do you plan on fixing it?” I asked, tumbling into her trap.

“You like tempura. How about some battered cod?”

“Sure,” I said thoughtlessly.

“Okay.” She pulled out a fish and tossed him into my arms. “Smack him around.” It took several seconds to register, after which the fish and I both started gasping for oxygen.,

“I know I shouldn’t bait you, but think of it as my squid pro quo for getting you out of jail,” she explained.

“I’m eel-equipped to handle this sort of thing,” I countered, hoping that somebody would suspend her poetic license.

“Reel-ly, Ken. You’re floundering.”

Minnie, one of our two Rodent watch-standers, appeared, sparing me further piscatorial torment. Minnie is an attractive young member of her species, which means she looks something like an upright schnauzer. “Friend Ken, sir, the manifest checks, payment cleared, and Rosalee says we’re ready to rock and roll.”

Generally speaking, IPlixxi* are friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful, thrifty, less than completely truthful, and thoroughly irreverent. They resemble furry bowling pins, and they shed, which is hell on drains aboard ship. The ones who deal with humans adopt human names. Our friend, Bucky Beaver, the current Poobah occupying !Plixxi*’s Semi-Sacred Cushion, named himself after the principal character in a popular set of children’s stories, while our two, who were selected from among his nieces and nephews and stand about twentieth in the line of succession, picked “Minnie” and “Mickey.” While no one is quite sure what the IPlixxi* did for amusement before they encountered mankind, I for one would be very interested in finding out.

“Uh, thanks, Minnie. Ask the port master if we can shove off in half an hour.”

“Sure thing.”

As she waddled off, I complained to Catarina, “What happened to a brisk salute and ‘Aye-aye, captain, we’re ready to lift ship’?”

Catarina wiggled her nose. “I think it stopped about the time they took ‘Tere Simms: Queen of the Space-ways’ off the air.” The fish was adjusting to the situation better than I was, so she popped him back in the tank and we went forward.

I sent off a quick message to Catarina’s friend, Father Yakub, on Schuyler’s World. If anyone has a private pipeline to the Big Guy in the Sky, it’s Father Yakub, who runs a surprisingly successful mission to Schuyler’s World’s numerous feebleminded. Father Yakub has done some heavy-duty praying on our behalf in the past, and I figured a little more might not hurt. Then I joined my other three watch-standers, Rosalee Dykstra, Clyde Witherspoon, and Wyma Jean Spooner, on the bridge.