“Well, I’ll imagine a few ways that the little buggers could have done it, and I’ll test it somehow. I’ll ask them how they did it. If the tittering little obscenities have any intelligence at all, I’ll find a way to ask them.”
The “tittering little obscenities,” the Thieving Bears, were not much like bears. They were more like large flying squirrels, and they did glide on the winds, apparently for sport. They were more like pack rats (the Neotoma cinerea of Earth) both in appearance and in their thieving ways, but larger. It was old John Chancel who had named the species “Ursus furtificus, the Thieving Bears.” Oh, the explorers had their introduction to the thieving of the little animals within five minutes of planet-landing. The creatures came into the ship itself and got into places that should have been impossible to them. They stole Selma’s candy and Dixie’s snuff. They stole (by drinking it on the spot) George Mahoon’s “He-Man Scent—Cinnamon,” thirteen bottles of it, but they did not drink any of the other scents. They went wild over mustard, emptying whole containers of it and then wheezing in delicious agony from the effect. Elton Fad tried to drive them away with heavy sticks. They fastened onto the sticks while he swung them and ate them right up to his hands. They were funny, but they could become infuriating. They stole six of Dixie Late-Lark’s French horror story novels.
That wouldn’t be fatal to her. She had lots of them.
“They’re going to sample them,” Dixie said. (She herself looked a little bit like one of those Thieving Bears.) “They’ll be the test. If they do read them and appreciate them, it’ll prove that they’re intelligent creatures and have better reading tastes than my crewmates. That will be a start in analyzing them, something to put into the electronic notebooks.”
Could the Thieving Bears talk? That was not determined for sure within the first ten or even twenty minutes.
“Say ‘Good morning,’ fuzzy head,” Selma rattled at one of the creatures.
“Say good morning, fuzzy head,” it bear-barked back at her. Well, it had the right number of syllables, and the right rhythm and stress. And the bear-barks did resemble Selma’s rattling words. And whenever the bears answered one of the persons, it answered in that person’s own timbre. The bears began to imitate the people quickly, and there was never any doubt as to which person was being imitated.
The tittering that went with the imitations, though! Ooooh, that could become tiresome after a little while. “Tittering little obscenities,” yes.
Could the Thieving Bears read? ’Twould be known in a bit, maybe. The bears had gotten into those big lockers that were full of comic books and had stolen big bunches of them. These comic books from the Trader Planets were now collector’s items on Old Earth, and they generated quite a profit. The wonderful things should be collector’s items everywhere.
Some of the big Thieving Bears were “reading” those comic books to some of the little Thieving Bears, reading them in the Thieving Bears’ own barking talk. And some of the little bears would bark their excitement and incredulity at parts of the narration and would come and look at the pictures and the worded balloons themselves. And then there would be that damned tittering!
It was clear that the big bears believed that they were reading, and that the little bears believed they were understanding. But the wording in the comic book balloons was in the Gno-Pidgin dialect of the Trader Planets, and people from the Traders had never been to Thieving Bear Planet. It was almost too much to believe that “Sangster’s Syndrome Intuitive Translation” was being practiced by animals below the level of conceptual thinking. Then some of the little bears were clearly acting out episodes from the comic books (very subtle episodes, according to Benedict Crix-Crannon, who had total knowledge of the content of all the comic books from the lockers). Well, there was no easy explanation for that.
The explorers treated themselves to a bonus meal within an hour of their arrival, after things were pretty well settled down. On a new world, they did this only when they had complete confidence that everything was under control. It was a traditional Earth-hearty meal, though it was from a packet of such bonus meals that had been packaged on Trader Planet Number Four. There were ten-centimeter-thick Cape buffalo steaks, mountains of Midland mushrooms, Camiroi currants and Astrobe apples, Elton eels, Wrack World rye bread, “Galaxy” brand goat butter, Rain Mountain coffee, Rumboat cordials, and Ganymede cigars (“They have an aroma that outlasts the Everlasting Hills,” a testimonial said of those perfectos).
“Logs of earlier explorers say that there is no real enjoyment in eating on Thieving Bear Planet because of the harassment of the bears,” Benny Crix-Crannon gloated. “Well, I’m enjoying this meal (another bumper of Rumboat cordial, Luke, please), and I’d like to see anybody take that enjoyment away from me.” And yet the enjoyment and savor of that grand meal began to disappear almost at that moment. How? Oh, it was just that all the items of their enjoyment were being mysteriously stolen away from them.
“All the rest of Dixie’s snuff has been stolen by the bears now,” Gladys said. “That’s too bad. She loves it so much. If all her idiosyncrasies are stolen away, it’s as if she is stolen away too.”
“And another thirty or so of Dixie’s French horror story novels have been stolen by the bears,” Elton Fad grumbled. “She’s bound to be frustrated by that. We should insist on fair play from the bears.”
“Her gold snuffboxes have been stolen, too,” Selma Last-Rose lamented. “How mean of the bears! The snuffboxes were valuable, even for the gold.”
“And her hookah pipe is gone,” Luke Fronsa complained. “What will the bears steal next?”
“I don’t know,” George Mahoon wondered, “but Dixie Late-Lark has herself been stolen now, or at least she’s gone. She could not have gone out unrecorded, for the ship is on full security. And yet the ship itself registers that she is no longer on board. She was sitting between you and Selma, was she not, Gladys?”
“She was, yes, just a moment ago, on the chair between the two of us. But there isn’t any chair between us now, and there couldn’t have been; there isn’t any room for one. She must have been sitting on something else. Oh, that damned tittering! I wonder how they stole her and what they did with her.”
“Be rational, Gladys,” Luke said. “There’s no way the little bears could have stolen Dixie Late-Lark.”
“Then where did she go? And how?”
“I don’t know,” Mahoon admitted, “and I don’t believe that any of us know. All at once, it doesn’t seem very important. Ah, I’m queasy. Yes, and I’m hungry. After a perfect bonus meal, I shouldn’t be either. Fortunately, I had plugged myself into the ship’s monitor, because of early reports of anomalies on Thieving Bear Planet, reports of the well-feeling and the wits of the explorers being stolen away. All right, monitor, what has gone wrong with me?”
The ship’s monitor spilled it all out. It was in coded chatter. “But we all understand the coded chatter just like our mother’s milk,” as Dixie had once said. All of them were completely tuned to the code of their own ship. And each of them put it into words automatically.