“Now that is a parrot.” Alice said.
The Blabberyap grew silent, listened to her words and repeated:
“Now that is a parrot.”
Then it seemed to think a little and said in my voice:
“But why such secrecy?”
Then the Blabberyap spoke in its former master’s voice:
“…on that very same night someone tried to break into my house. And on the next night someone tried to burn me down…”
“It’s all very clear now.” I said. “We’ve been very lucky, Alice; this is a super-parrot, the parrot to end all parrots. It remembers whatever it hears, immediately and once and for all.”
At the same time the Blabberyap began to speak Russian again:
“Listen, Two, I have nothing to give you, so I want you to take my Blabberyap bird. It will remind you about our wanderings it keeps in its head everything that it hears, to the last word. And you know how to get it to repeat anything you may wish.”
The Blabberyap answered in another voice:
“Thanks, First. We’ll see…”
Then the Blabberyap’s throat gave forth a rumbling and a roaring as though off in the distance a space ship was rising toward the stars.
“Papa, you understand what it just said?” Alice asked.
“Yes. It would seem, those are the voices of the famous Captains.” I said.
We had exited one square and were trying to avoid the crowds in the section devoted to the stamp collectors with our unusual cargo. From out of the crowd ahead the familiar fat man in the black leather business suit came toward us.
“I say,” He asked. “I take it you found what you wanted?”
“Oh, yes.” I answered. “Everything went beautifully.”
“We bought a Blabberyap.” Alice spoke with pride. “And you can’t imagine all the interesting things he’s been saying.
At the same moment the Blabberyap opened his beak, straightened the crown on his head and spoke in the First Captain’s voice:
“You of all people know how much I want to get back into space again, Second. But there are barriers everywhere…”
The fat man turned toward Alice, saw the Blabberyap, and his face turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes bulged out in alarm.
“Give that to me.” The fat man said.
“Why?” I was rather surprised.
“Because you must.” The fat man reached out for the Blabberyap.
The Blabberyap managed to peck him painfully on the finger.
“Ouch!” The fat man shouted. “Damned vermin! I’ve hunted you for too long now!”
“Remove your hand.” I said.
The fat man came to his senses and obeyed.
“Sorry.” He said. “I’ve been searching for a Blabberyap bird for a long time. I came more than seventy light years to find one. You can’t refuse me! I’ll pay whatever you want.”
“But we don’t need your money.” I said. “On Earth we don’t really use it any more. We carry it along when we go into space to places where they still use it, of course….”
“But I can give you whatever you want for the bird! I can get you a whole zoo!”
“No.” I answered firmly. “As far as I understand it, Blabberyaps are almost extinct. This Blabberyap will be safe in the zoo.”
“Give me the bird, or I’ll take it.” The fat man threatened.
“Just try it.”
A pair of two Audity policemen were walking past. I turned toward then to ask for help but the fat man had vanished as though the ground had swallowed him up.
We continued our journey.
“See, Papa. There’s some sort of secret connected with the Blabberyaps.” Alice said. “Just don’t give him up to anyone.
“Don’t worry.” I calmed her down.
We were walking along an empty road. The Bazar was noise and activity on the other side of a low wall. Ahead of us we could see the city of Palaputra and its hotels. Suddenly we heard light footsteps. I turned quickly and froze from surprise.
Running up the road toward us was Doctor Verkhovtseff. His hat was pushed to one side, his suit was rumbled and he looked far thinner than when we had seen him last. He reached us.
“Professor.” He said to me, panting for breath. “You’re in great danger. You’re lucky I managed to reach you in time. What good fortune!”
“What sort of danger?” I asked.
“The danger is the Blabberyap itself. If you don’t part with it immediately, your ship is doomed. I know exactly what I am speaking…”
“Listen, Doctor Verkhovtseff.” I said angrily. “Your behavior goes well beyond strange. You behaved like some thriller novel conspirator back on the Three Captain’s World when you told us you did not know what kind of bird was carved on the monument. Then you came here and tried to destroy all the oxygen in the atmosphere, so they say, by selling white grubs. You behaved like a pig at the hotel, cooking sausages on your bed and breaking the robot attendants. And now you demand that we give you the Blabberyap bird. No, don’t interrupt me. When you’ve thought things over, come visit us in the ship and we can talk about this under calm circumstances.”
“You will come to regret it.” Verkhovtseff said, and reached into his jacket pocket.
The Empathicator turned red from terror. The Sewing Spider started to wave the unfinished scarf in Verkhovtseff’s direction.
“Be careful, papa! He has a gun!” Alice shouted.
“Poloskov.” I spoke into the transmitter that was placed on my chest. “Take down our coordinates. We’re in danger. Emergency!”
On hearing my words Verkhovtseff froze, thinking what to do next. To our good fortune a large crowd of collectors leading an enormous green elephant came onto the road; Verkhovtseff jumped over a fence and vanished.
“Oh, I really like all this!” Alice said. “We’re having a real adventure.”
“Frankly, I don’t like adventures like this at all. We’re here to collect animals for the Zoo, not fight battles with Doctor Verkhovtseff.”
Three minutes later the Pegasus’s landing boat hung over our heads; it was Poloskov on a rescue mission. The boat slowly flew over us all the way back to the ship, which we arrived at without further incident.
Chapter Eleven
On Course For the Medusa System
As soon as we had settled the animals in their cages and fed them I went up to the bridge and sent a message to the research base on Arcturus Minor. It read:
“Please determine location of Doctor Verkhovtseff. Have reason to believe he is not what he appears to be.”
That evening the answer arrived from Arcturus Minor:
“Doctor Verkhovtseff not on Three Captains’ World. No other information currently available.”
“We’d already found out by ourselves he wasn’t on the Three Captains’ World on our own,” Poloskov said when he read the message. “He’s here.”
We had constructed a large cage for the Blabberyap bird and hung it in the crew’s lounge. The Blabberyap spent the whole day muttering in unknown languages and never came close to uttering anything by one of the Captains, but Poloskov believed Alice and me anyway and said:
“I think this is the very same Blabberyap which belonged to the First Captain and which he gave to the Second when they split up.”
“Could it be that Verkhovtseff was chasing after all the Blabberyaps because he wanted to get his hands specially on this one?” Alice asked.
“But what did he want this Blabberyap bird for?” I asked.
“What else! We know the Second Captain vanished without a trace; no one knows where he is. We know that he had the Blabberyap bird…”
“Of course!” The engineer Zeleny cut in. “That’s it. Our kid’s right on target. There’s no Captain, but the Blabberyap bird is here, and that means the Blabberyap knows where the Captain is. And Verkhovtseff wants to find that out himself.”
“But why make such a mystery of it?” I asked him. “We’d be willing to help him, with pleasure.”
The sound of knocking interrupted us. Someone had come a-visiting.
I went down to the airlock and opened it. The fat man in the black leather suit was standing on the gangway.
“I beg your pardon for this intrusion,” he oozed. “I would like to make amends for my behavior in the market place. I was so desperate to obtain a living Blabberyap bird that I fear I could not contain myself.”
“Quite all right,” I answered. “We weren’t offended. But there is no way we could possibly part with the Blabberyap bird.”
“Oh no, I wouldn’t want you to part with it,” the fat man said cheerfully. “But I simply must do something to better the terrible impression I must have made. Please, you cannot refuse to do me the honor of accepting this as a parting gift.”
He held out a very rare animal indeed, a diamond backed turtle from Menata. The turtle’s shell was composed of real diamonds and flashed so brightly it hurt your eyes to look at it.
“Please, accept it,” the Fat Man said. “I still do have three.”
Naturally I was less than eager to take a gift from such a strange individual one really has to show some caution but there wasn’t a single diamond-backed turtle in any of Earth’s zoos! We had been searching for one for five years, and now we had found someone who just gave us one!
“Please do not refuse,” the Fat Man said. “Fare thee well. Perhaps we will meet again. Bear in mind, I am known on a hundred planets. My name is Veselchak U.”
And he stamped his feet on the steps, went down the gangway and jumped up on the moving walkway that led in the direction of Palaputra.
It had already grown dark; both suns had set almost simultaneously, although from different spots on the horizon, and two sunsets fell over the space port, one prettier than the other, and I found myself thinking how pointless it was to think the worst of people. That fat man, for example, was a true amateur biologist, yet he had not hesitated to give us this rare animal as a gift.
So I returned to the crew’s lounge in a very fine mood and showed my friends the gift. The turtle moved from one of my hands to the other, and everyone admired the superb play of light on the diamonds that composed the shell.
“So where do we go from here?” Poloskov asked after dinner.
“For the Sklisses.” Alice said. “On the planet Sheshineru.”
“Why not?” I agreed. “We were planning to go there anyway.”
It was at that moment that the Blabberyap bird, which hitherto had been sitting peacefully in its cage and looking down on us drinking tea, began to speak again.
“You’re planning to leave,” he asked in the First Captain’s voice.
“Yes, I’m flying to meet him,” the Blabberyap bird answered himself in the Second Captain’s voice.
“All right then. Second, if there’s trouble, don’t hesitate to call on me.’
“If I can.”
“Take the Blabberyap bird. You can tell him everything. I know how to get him to repeat it. Give the bird all the details.”
“Until we meet again, then.”
“Until we meet again.”
The Blabberyap bird grew silent.
“Well, you heard it, Poloskov?” Alice asked.
“Of course I heard it; don’t shout,” Poloskov answered and started to think.
The Blabberyap bird nodded its golden crown, as though considering whether it should continue or not. Abruptly it spoke very slowly in the Second Captain’s voice:
“Set course for the Medusa system.”
We waited in the expectation that the bird might speak again, but the Blabberyap bird closed its eyes and tucked its head beneath its wing.
“So, the Second Captain got into trouble and sent the Blabberyap bird for help,” Alice said. “Now how can we get it to tell us more?”
“Hold on,” I spoke up. “Just what is it you’ve decided? Remember, the Blabberyap bird did not fly to Venus where the First Captain is working, but returned to its home planet. That means that no one sent it anywhere. The Second Captain might have just died, and the bird went home.”
“It really could have been anything,” Poloskov said, and got up from behind the table.
He left the crew’s lounge and returned in five minutes, carrying with him the Galactic Map. He placed it on the table, pushing aside some tea cups, and pressed the control. The holographic image sprang into existence above the table. He pointed to the edge of the map.
“Here.” he said, “this is the Medusa system. Completely unexplored. The star has planets. I propose we fly there. If the Captain is alive, we may be able to help him. If he has died, at the very least we will find out what happened! And where.”
“But he could very well have perished in space.” I objected.
“And just what could have happened to the great Captain in space?”
“His ship could have exploded, for example.”
“And would not the Blabberyap bird have exploded with it?”
“Well, anything at all could have happened!”
I fell silent. In the final analysis, the expedition had its own questions, and it was totally unknown if the planets of the Medusa system had any sort of life forms at all. The flight to the star and our return would take up most of the time allotted to the expedition. And we really did not know anything other than what we had heard the bird say. What if the Captain had spent some time there, and then gone off to another part of the Galaxy and perished there? I mentioned this to my colleagues, but the longer I spoke the less convinced I was of the rightness of my arguments, and the more I knew that I had failed to convince either Poloskov or Alice. “Fine,” I said finally. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Just let’s make a stop at Sheshineru first. We really have to find out what a Skliss is.”
“Agreed.” Poloskov moved his finger through the map. “This is our route, then; along the way we should be able to stop on various planets and search for rare animals for the Zoo.”
“And now it’s time to sleep.” I said. “We’ll depart tomorrow morning. Are all the animals fed and watered?”
“A-Okay Boss Expedition Leader Sir,” Alice, who was responsible for the feeding of the animals, answered.
“And where is the diamond-backed turtle?” I asked.”
“It was here just a moment ago.” Poloskov said. “Where is it now?”
We wasted an entire hour crawling all over the ship and only found the diamond-backed turtle with the aid of the Empathicator, who had hunted it down right in the air lock.
“It’s obvious it wants to run away.” Zeleny said. “Just like I warned. We’ll have to keep a constant eye on this turtle.”
The Empathicator became a bright yellow.
I dug out the table listing the Empathicator’s colors and feelings they indicated which the two-headed snake gave me, and said:
“A yellow color indicates distrust.”
“Don’t believe the turtle?” Zeleny asked the Empathicator. “Neither do I.”
The Empathicator became so yellow it outshone even the light of the lamp.
“Oh well,” I said then. “I’ll confine him in his cage.”
The Empathicator remained just as yellow, but black bands ran up and down its spine. The table advised us that black bands on a yellow background indicated disagreement.
“Oh, all right.” I said. “If you distrust it that much we’ll lock it in the safe for the night.”
When I spoke the Empathicator turned a delighted dark green.