Blessing the unknown woman, George detoured cautiously about the tabouret. The flank and back of his tunic were wet with sweat.
He found the stair, a broad low flight with a resilient surface, in the next moment. On the fifth tread a current of air brought an all too familiar odor to his nose. It was mixed with a more agreeable smell which was probably deodorant. Fortunately for George, the embassy people had underestimated the amount of deodorant needed to keep the pig inodorous.
By sniffing door after door on the second level, George located the room with the pig. It was closed with one of the usual simple-minded Martian locks, but somebody had slipped a lucidux alarm disk over it. Tampering with the lock was going to be difficult.
George put his ear to the door panel and listened. Almost immediately he caught the gurgle and slither of a moving cerberus. He jerked his head back from the panel and swallowed. There were not many things he was really afraid of, but a cerberus was certainly one of them. He would almost rather have faced a cage full of cobras. Having the flesh sucked from one’s bones by a cerberus’ corrosive membranes was such a nasty way to pass out of the viewing plate.
Luckily the window irises in the hall were open and some light was coming in. George studied the door. He couldn’t get in through the lock; how about taking off the hinges? No, the screw-heads had been soldered in. It looked as if he’d have to make an opening high up in the panel, higher than the cerberus could extrude, and figure on jumping over it. Brrrrr.
He got out the egg. It was a little longer and thinner than it had been, but it went dutifully to work on the panel when he turned its switch. In all too short a time there was a hole in the door big enough for him to get through.
George hesitated. Moist fetid air (the cerberus was a life-form from the deep Venusian swamps) was coming through the opening. Beneath the hole he could hear the humping noise the creature made as it tried to climb up for him. Then he jumped.
He landed well beyond the animal. The pig’s carrying case was sitting on a table, surrounded by charged wires. One good grab, George decided, and the pig would be his again. The trouble was that the cerberus, in its uncanny, ameboid way, moved extremely fast. Before he could make the three steps to the table and pick up the pig, it would be glued to him.
George could feel his brain whizzing like a mechanical astrogator and star positioner. The cerberus had put out a pseudopod and was now about two centimeters distant from the toe of his boot. With no waste motion at all, George pulled out the bolt anti and doughnutted it.
The result surpassed his expectations. The cerberus shot up in the air and hung there, rotating wildly, in a meter-thick, dull gray ball. Since it had nothing more substantial than air to push against, it was unable to move in any direction. The harder it tried, the more furiously it spun.
George dashed to the table and snatched up the pig. He got a shock from the wiring that almost made him drop the carrying case, but he hung on doggedly. He rushed back to the door, dodging around the still-suspended cerberus, and began struggling through the hole he had made.
He had got his torso and his right leg through when, the stasis reversing itself, the cerberus dropped to the floor with a mighty plop. George felt a cold sweat of apprehension break out on him. Almost immediately there was a stab of burning pain in the ankle of his left leg.
George held on to the door so hard he thought his fingers must be denting the panel, and kicked. He kicked for all he was worth. The sensation in his ankle, which was like that of a burn being held over a flame, was getting worse: George kicked like a maddened zebrule, his eyes bulging out and his heart knocking against his ribs.
On the fourth or fifth of his desperate lunges the cerberus came loose. It sailed across the room and landed against the far wall with a thud. And George shot out of the hole in the door like a cork out of a champagne bottle. He landed on the small dark tzintz, who had been on his way to get himself a snack out of the coolerator. And from then on things got rather mixed up.
George later had a dim recollection of banging the tzintz on the skull with the pig’s carrying case, while the pig gave a feeble oink. More vividly in his mind was the gratifying period when he held the tzintz by the ears and whanged his head repeatedly against the hard, unyielding floor. “Steal my pig, will you,” George had muttered grimly, “You little musteline! I’ll teach you to steal my pig!” Thump, thump! Thump! “Ouch!” said the tzintz. “Oink, oink,” went the pig. Thump, thump, thump!
George enjoyed this period immensely, and was sorry when it came to an end. But all things must pass. He left the semi-conscious tzintz recumbent on the floor, his head propped against the dado, and fled down the stair in three long leaps. Behind him the embassy was buzzing like an overturned skep of bees. George estimated that he had about three seconds before they started shooting at him with stun guns. He halted for a flash by the front door to depress a switch that he hoped shut the force field off. If it didn’t, he was going to die a hero’s death. Then he shot out into the night.
Blixa was waiting for him: she always seemed to be waiting for him to escape from something or other. “Get it?” she demanded excitedly.
Too winded to reply, George waved the pig at her. The long roll of a stun gun trilled wickedly past his ear. Blixa winced and then pulled him into a crouch. “This way,” she said, “hurry! And keep bent!” Doubled over, they pounded off into the darkness, headed, as far as George could judge, for the Grand Canal.
There were shouts behind them, and a salvo of stun gun shots. One of them came so close that it grazed Blixa’s shoulder and set her to rubbing it to restore the circulation. There was, however, no concerted pursuit.
“Afraid to chase us,” Blixa panted as they jogged along.
“Martian citizen— interplanetary incident. And after all, it’s our pig.
“Let’s slow down. By now we’re fairly safe—nobody after us except the police.”
George slowed obligingly. He looked at her. Blixa was panting hard, and drops of perspiration sparkled on her round sides. How different she was from Darleen! Darleen’s grooming was always so perfect he couldn’t imagine how she’d look excited and warm. It was rather becoming to Blixa, he thought.
“Did you get hurt in the embassy?” Blixa asked. “You’re walking with quite a limp.”
“It’s nothing,” George replied modestly, recalling his thoughts. “The cerberus got after my ankle a bit.”
“Oh, my!” Frowning, Blixa made him stop and roll up his trouser leg. She drew in her breath at the sight of the raw, bloody blotch the cerberus’ digestive juices had left. Deftly she plastered the wound with unguent from a tiny jar and slapped a bandijeon on it. “There,” she said, “that’ll do until a doctor can look at it. Say, do you still feel like somebody’s following us?”
George considered. They had reached the Grand Canal by now and were walking out slowly on one of its foot bridges. There was no noise anywhere except the quiet lapping of the dark, slow-flowing water. The streets were utterly empty. Marsport’s gigantic heart had almost ceased to beat. It was the quietest hour of the twenty-four, the one time when the whole city slept.
“A little,” he replied. “But I don’t see anyone. It must be nervous imagination. We’ve had a good deal tonight to put us on edge.”
“I suppose so,” Blixa answered. “Pharol, but it’s quiet!” She rested her elbows on the parapet and leaned over, looking down at the black water. “Give me the pig.”
George handed the case to her. She opened it, saw that the pig was intact, and shut the case again. Then she dropped it deliberately into the water of the canal.