‘Ah, Miller, conscious at last! Well, your visit to us is over. There’s an auto-rocket here standing by to take you and your wife straight back to Earth.’
‘Pogsmith?’ groaned Dusty.
‘You may very well ask! The unhappy creature must have been almost crazed by boredom from its confinement. It is now hiding among the zoo buildings, having so far eluded all our efforts to recapture it. You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Your infernal curiosity is going to cost us a pretty penny, I can tell you! You’re a mischief-maker, sir, that’s what – a mischief-maker!’
‘You won’t find Pogsmith by raving at me,’ Dusty retorted irritably, brushing dust out of his clothes.
‘Can’t you see the poor man’s had enough, Director?’ Daisy asked, turning nevertheless to the poor man in question to whisper fiercely: ‘A brilliant performance you’ve made of yourself, Marmaduke. Just you wait …’
Dusty rubbed an aching jaw and followed dejectedly along a metal ramp which led to a two-man shuttle. It was a small Mercury–Earth ship that would travel auto all the way: in five minutes he could be away from the scene of his foolishness – and there would be no eavesdroppers on whatever lecture was coming.
The Director followed them to the open hatch. There he caught Dusty’s arm.
‘No ill feelings,’ he said.
Miller shook the Director’s hand and his own head dazedly and passed into the ship. With a quiet click, the door closed behind him. He staggered through the airlock and sank on to an acceleration couch.
Daisy had hardly begun to unload her vocabulary before the growl of blast take-off drowned all other sounds. They hurled upwards, and in two breath-taking minutes stars and darkness showed outside and the bright crescent of Mercury floated below.
‘Now …’ said Daisy. ‘Never in all my life – ’ She stopped, her mouth hung open, her eyes fixed glassily on a point behind Dusty’s head. He turned.
The door of a small luggage store had opened. A figure as like the Director’s as an egg is like an egg stood there glaring at them.
‘How – ’ said Dusty.
‘He’s tricked us,’ said the Director. ‘He bound and gagged me … I’ve only just struggled free … He’s – ooooh!’
He staggered back as Dusty attacked him. His foot slipped and he fell against the wall.
‘Quick, Daisy, quick!’ Dusty bellowed. ‘Help me get him in the airlock. It’s Pogsmith!’
She stood there wringing her hands helplessly. ‘How do you know this is Pogsmith?’ she asked.
‘Of course it is,’ snapped Dusty, glad to be again master of the situation. ‘Isn’t it obvious he’d try and escape like this? I’m not being fooled twice. Now lend a hand, will you?’
Still struggling and protesting, the Director was propelled into the airlock and shut in. Mopping his brow, Dusty pressed the manual switch that opened the outer door. There was a hiss of expiring air – and expiring Director.
At the Galactic Zoo the incident was soon forgotten. The Director quickly recovered his old prestige. But he was never the same man again – he had a tendency, in private, to grow red whiskers and one triumphant eye.
The four Supreme Ultralords stood apart from the crowd, waiting, speaking to nobody. Yet Mordregon, son of Great Mordregon; Arntibis Isis of Sirius III, the Proctor Superior from the Tenth Sector; Deln Phi J. Bunswacki, Ruler of the Margins; and Ped2 of the Dominion of the Sack watched, as did the countless other members of the Diet of the Ultralords of the Home Galaxy, the entrance into their council chamber of the alien, David Stevens of Earth.
Stevens hesitated on the threshold of the hall. The hesitation was part-natural, part-feigned; he had come here primed to play a part and knowing a pause for awe might be expected of him; but he had not calculated on the real awe which filled him. He had come to stand trial, for himself, for Earth, he had come prepared – as far as a man may prepare for the unpredictable. Yet, as the dolly ushered him into the hall, he knew crushingly that the task was to be more terrible than any he had visualised.
The cream of the Galaxy took in his hesitation.
He started to walk towards the dais upon which Mordregon and his colleagues waited. The effort of forcing his legs to go into action set a dew of perspiration on his forehead.
‘God help me!’ he whispered. But these were the gods of the galaxy; was there, over them, One with no material being and infinite power? Enough. Concentrate.
Squaring his shoulders, Stevens walked between the massed shapes of the rulers of the Home Galaxy. Although it had been expressly stated before he left Earth that no powers, such as telepathy, which he did not possess, would be used against him, he could feel a weight of mental power all round him. Strange faces watched him, some just remotely human, strange robes stirred as he brushed past them. The diversity! he thought. The astounding, teeming womb of the universe!
Pride suddenly gripped him. He found courage to stare back into the multitudinous eyes. They should be made to know the mettle of man. Whatever they were planning to do with him, he also had his own plans for them.
Just as it seemed only fitting to him that man should walk in this hall, it seemed no less fitting that of all the millions on Earth, he, David Stevens, should be that man. With the egotism inherent in junior races, he felt sure he could pass their trial. What if he had been awed at first? A self-confident technological civilisation, proud of its exploration projects on Mercury and Neptune, is naturally somewhat abashed by the appearance of a culture spreading luxuriously over fifty hundred thousand planets.
With a flourish, he bowed before Mordregon and the other Supreme Ultralords.
‘I offer greetings from my planet Earth of Sol,’ he said in a resonant voice.
‘You are welcome here, David Stevens of Earth,’ Mordregon replied graciously. A small object the size of a hen’s egg floated fifteen inches from his beak. All other members of the council, Stevens included, were attended by similar devices, automatic interpreters.
Mordregon was mountainous. Below his beaked head, his body bulged like an upturned grand piano. A cascade of clicking black and white ivory rectangles clothed him. Each rectangle, Stevens noted, rotated perpetually on its longitudinal axis, fanning him, ventilating him, as if he burned continually of an inexorable disease (which was in fact the case).
‘I am happy to come here in peace,’ Stevens said. ‘And shall be still happier to know why I have been brought here. My journey has been long and partially unexplained.’
At the word ‘peace’, Mordregon made a grimace like a smile, although his beak remained unsmiling.
‘Partially, perhaps; but partially is not entirely,’ Mordregon said. ‘The robot ship told you you would be collected to stand trial in the name of Earth. That seems to us quite sufficient information to work on.’
The automatic translators gave an edge of irony to the Ultralord’s voice. The tone brought faint colour to Stevens’s cheeks. He was angry, and suddenly happy to let them see he was angry.
‘Then you have never been in my position,’ he said ‘Mine was an executive post at Port Ganymede. I never had anything to do with politics. I was down at the methane reagent post when your robot ship arrived and designated me in purely arbitrary fashion. I was simply told I would be collected for trial in three months – like a convict – like a bundle of dirty laundry!’ He looked hard at them, anxious to see their first reaction to his anger, wondering whether, he had gone too far. Ordinarily, Stevens was not a man who indulged