“Hamilton!” squeaked Meek.
“Sure,” said Gus. “Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation moss you ever clapped your eyes on.”
“Then you’re the gentleman who has bugs,” said Meek.
“Now, look here,” warned Gus, “you watch what you say or I’ll hang one on you.”
“He means your rock bugs,” Moe explained, hastily.
“Oh, them,” said Gus.
“Yes,” said Meek, “I’m interested in them. I’d like to see them.”
“See them,” said Gus. “Mister, you can have them if you want them. Drove me out of house and home, they did. They’re dippy over metal. Any kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They’ll tromp you to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.”
Meek looked crestfallen.
“Can’t get near them, then,” he said.
“Sure you can,” said Gus. “Why not?”
“Well, a spacesuit’s metal and…”
“Got that all fixed up,” said Gus. “You come back with me and I’ll let you have a pair of stilts.”
“Stilts?”
“Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don’t know what wood is. Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you want to, long as you’re walking on the stilts.”
Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.
III
THE BUGS had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places preparatory to the start of another game.
For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus Hamilton’s moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game.
Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of stone that jutted from the surface.
Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was ample proof of that.
Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.
None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished. Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been reached, some point won, some advantage gained.
But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.
The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in. The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of a moon smashed up by Saturn’s pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.
Saturn itself, for that matter. A planet that kept Man at bay with deadly radiations. But radiations that, while they kept Man at a distance, at the same time served Man. For here, on the Inner Ring, where they had become so diluted that ordinary space armor filtered them out, they made possible the medical magic of the famous radiation moss.
One of the few forms of plant life found in the cold of space, the moss was nurtured by those mysterious radiations. Planted elsewhere, on kindlier worlds, it wilted and refused to grow. The radiations had been analyzed, Meek knew, and reproduced under laboratory conditions, but there still was something missing, some vital, elusive factor that could not be analyzed. Under the artificial radiation, the moss still wilted and died.
And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because it would grow nowhere else but here on th Inner Ring, men squatted on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the mockery of space before them.
Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.
THE BUGS had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously, watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.
Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly popping in and out of holes.
If there were opposing sides… and if it were a game, there’d have to be… they didn’t seem to alternate the moves. Although, Meek admitted, certain rules and conditions which he had failed to note or recognize, might determine the number and order of moves allowed each side.
Suddenly there was confusion on the board. For a moment a half-dozen of the bugs raced madly about, as if seeking the proper hole to occupy. Then, as suddenly, all movement had ceased. And in another moment, they were on the move again, orderly again, but retracing their movements, going back several plays beyond the point of confusion.
Just as one would do when one made a mistake working a mathematical problem… going back to the point of error and going on again from there.
“Well, I’ll be…” Mr. Meek said.
Meek stiffened and the stylus floated out of his hand, settled softly on the rock below.
A mathematical problem!
His breath gurgled in his throat.
He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had thrown him off.
Games! Those bugs weren’t playing any game. They were solving mathematical equations!
Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space.
The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed.
He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged. He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.
On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.
Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand before him. It was covered with the bugs.
Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of Hamilton’s shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.
Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.
“Gus will give me hell for this,” he told himself.
GUS shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic scurrying within it.
“By rights,” he declared, judiciously, “I should take this over and dump it in Bud’s ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector.”
“But you got the injector back,” Meek pointed out.
“Oh, sure, I got it back,” admitted Gus. “But it wasn’t orthodox, it wasn’t. Just getting your property back ain’t getting even. I never did have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector.”