Operation Stinky Read online

  "If you think that skunk…"

  The colonel raised his fist and smacked it on the desk. "Not a skunk! Something that looks like a skunk! Something that knows more about machines than you or I or any human being will ever get to know!"

  "But it hasn't got no hands. How could it do what you think?"

  He never got to answer. The door burst in and two of the saddest sacks outside the guardhouse stumbled in. They didn't bother to salute.

  "Colonel, sir," one of them said, heaving hard. "Colonel, sir, we got one. We didn't even have to catch it. We whistled at it and it followed us."

  The skunk walked in behind them, waving its tail and purring. It walked right over to me and rubbed against my legs. When I reached down and picked it up, it purred so loud I was afraid it would go ahead and explode.

  "That the one?" the colonel asked me.

  "He's the one," I said.

  The colonel grabbed the phone. "Get me Washington. General Sanders. At the Pentagon."

  He waved his hand at us. "Get out of here!"

  "But, Colonel, sir, the money…"

  "You'll get it. Now get out of here." He looked exactly like you might imagine a man might look right after he's been told he's not going to be shot at dawn.

  We turned around and got out of there.

  At the door, four of the toughest-looking hombres this side of Texas were waiting, with rifles in their hands. "Don't pay no attention to us, Mac," one of them said to me. "We're just your bodyguards."

  They were my bodyguards, all right. They went every place I went. And the skunk went with me, too. That, of course, was why they stuck around. They didn't care a rap about me. It was the skunk that was getting the bodyguarding.

  And that skunk stuck closer to me than paper to the wall. He followed at my heels and walked between my feet, but mostly he wanted me to carry him or to let him perch on my shoulder. And he purred all the blessed time. Either he figured I was the only true friend he had or he thought I was a soft touch.

  Life got a little complicated. The skunk slept with me and the four guards stayed in the room. The skunk and one of the guards went to the latrine with me while the others kept close. I had no privacy at all. I said it wasn't decent. I said it was unconstitutional. It didn't make no difference. There was nothing I could do. There were, it turned out, twelve of them guards and they worked in eight-hour shifts.

  For a couple of days, I didn't see the colonel and I thought it was funny how he couldn't rest until he'd found the skunk and then paid no attention to it.

  I did a lot of thinking about what the colonel had said about the skunk not being a skunk at all, but something that only looked like a skunk and how it might know more, some ways, than we did. And the more I lived with it, the more I began to believe that he might be right. Although it still seemed impossible that any critter without hands could know much about machinery in the first place, let alone do anything about it.

  Then I got to remembering how me and Betsy had understood each other and I carried that a little further, imagining how a man and machine might get to know one another so well, they could even talk together and how the man, even if he didn't have hands, might help the machine to improve itself.

  And while it sounds somewhat far-fetched just telling it, thinking of it in the secrecy of one's mind made it sound all right and it gave a sort of warm feeling to imagine that one could get to be downright personal friendly with machines.

  When you come to think of it, it's not so far-fetched, either.

  Perhaps, I told myself, when I had gone into the tavern and had left the skunk bedded down in Betsy, the skunk might have looked her over and felt sorry for such a heap of junk, like you or I would feel sorry for a homeless cat or an injured dog. And maybe the skunk had set out, right then and there, to fix her up as best he could, probably cannibalizing some metal here and there, from places where it would not be missed, to grow the computer and the other extra pieces on her.

  Probably he couldn't understand, for the life of him, why they'd been left off to start with. Maybe, to him, a machine was no machine at all without those pieces on it. More than likely, he thought Betsy was just a botched-up job.

  The guards began calling the skunk Stinky and that was a libel because he never stunk a bit, but was one of the best-mannered, most even-tempered animals that I have ever been acquainted with. I told them it wasn't right, but they just laughed at me, and before long the whole base knew about the name and everywhere we went they'd yell "Hi, Stinky" at us.

  He didn't seem to mind, so I began to think of him as Stinky, too.

  I got it figured out to my own satisfaction that maybe Stinky could have fixed up Betsy and even why he fixed up Betsy. But the one thing I couldn't figure out was where he'd come from to start with. I thought on it a lot and came up with no answers except some foolish ones that were too much for even me to swallow.

  I went over to see the colonel a couple of times, but the sergeants and the lieutenants threw me out before I could get to see him. So I got sore about it and decided not to go there any more until he sent for me.

  One day he did send for me, and when I got there the place was crowded with a lot of brass. The colonel was talking to an old grey-haired, eagle-beaked gent who had a fierce look about him and a rat-trap jaw and was wearing stars.

  "General," said the colonel, "may I introduce Stinky's special friend?"

  The general shook hands with me. Stinky, who was riding on my shoulder, purred at him.

  The general took a good look at Stinky.

  "Colonel," he said, "I hope to God you're right. Because if you aren't and this business ever leaks, the Air Force goose is cooked. The Army and the Navy would never let us live it down and what Congress would do to us would be a crimson shame."

  The colonel gulped a little. "Sir, I'm sure I'm right."

  "I don't know why I let myself get talked into this," the general said. "It's the most hare-brained scheme I have ever heard of."

  He had another squint at Stinky. "He looks like a common skunk to me," the general said.

  The colonel introduced me to a bunch of other colonels and a batch of majors, but he didn't bother with the captains if there were any there and I shook hands with them and Stinky purred at them and everything was cozy.

  One of the colonels picked up Stinky, but he kicked up quite a fuss trying to get back to me.

  [missing text] just had to sit in a certain place to earn it, why, it was all right.

  Stinky didn't pay any attention to any of the stuff. He settled down in my lap and went to sleep, or at least he seemed to go to sleep. He took it easy, for a fact. Once in a while, he opened an eye or twitched an ear, but that was all he did.

  I hadn't thought much about it at first, but after I'd sat there for an hour or so, I began to get an idea of why they wanted me and Stinky in the plane. They figured, I told myself, that if they put Stinky in the ship, he might feel sorry for it, too, and do the same kind of job on it as he had done on Betsy. But if that was what they thought, they sure were getting fooled, for Stinky didn't do a thing except curl up and go to sleep.

  We sat there for several hours and finally they told us that we could get out.

  And that is how Operation Stinky got off to a start. That is what they called all that foolishness. It does beat hell, the kind of names the Air Force can think up.

  It went on like that for several days. Me and Stinky would go out in the morning and sit in a plane for several hours, then take a break for noon, then go back for a few hours more.

  Stinky didn't seem to mind. He'd just as soon be there as anywhere. All he'd do would be curl up in my lap and in five minutes he'd be dozing.

  As the days went on, the general and the colonel and all the technicians who cluttered up the hangar got more and more excited. They didn't say a word, but you could see they were aching to bust out, only they held it back. And I couldn't understand that, for as far as I could see, there was nothing whats
oever happening.

  Apparently their work didn't end when Stinky and I left.

  Evening after evening, lights burned in the hangar and a gang was working there and they had guards around three deep.

  One day they pulled out the jet we had been sitting in and hauled in another and we sat in that and it was just the same as it had been before. Nothing really happened. And yet the air inside that hangar was so filled with tension and excitement, you could fairly light a fire with it.

  It sure beat me what was going on.

  Gradually the same sort of tension spread throughout the entire base and there were some funny goings-on. You never saw an outfit that was faster on its toes. A construction gang moved in and started to put up buildings and as soon as one of them was completed, machinery was installed. More and more people kept arriving until the base began to look like an anthill with a hotfoot.

  On one of the walks I took, with the guards trailing along beside me, I found out something else that made my eyes bug.

  They were installing a twelve-foot woven fence, topped with barbed wire, all around the area.

  And inside the fence, there were so many guards, they almost walked on one another.

  I was a little scared when I got back from the walk, because from what I saw, this thing I'd been pitchforked into was bigger and more important than I had ever dreamed. Up until then, I'd figured it was just a matter of the colonel having his neck stuck out so far he could never pull it back. All along, I had been feeling sorry for him because that general looked like the kind of gent who would stand for just so much tomfoolery before he lowered the boom.

  It was about this time that they began to dig a big pit out in the centre of one of the runways. I went over one day to watch it and it didn't make no sense at all. Here they had a nice, smooth runway they'd spent a lot of money to construct and now they were digging it up to make what looked like a swimming pool. I asked around about it, but the people that I talked to either didn't know or they weren't talking.

  Me and Stinky kept on sitting in the planes. We were on our sixth one now. And there wasn't any change. I sat, bored stiff, while Stinky took it easy.

  One evening the colonel sent a sergeant over to say he'd like to see me.

  I went in and sat down and put Stinky on the desk. He lay down on top of it and looked from one to the other of us.

  "Asa," said the colonel, "I think we got it made."

  "You mean you been getting stuff?"

  "We've got enough we actually understand to give us unquestioned air superiority. We're a good ten years, if not a hundred, depending on how much we can use, ahead of the rest of them. They'll never catch us now."

  "But all Stinky did was sleep!"

  "All he did," the colonel said, "was to redesign each ship. In some instances, there were principles involved that don't make a bit of sense, but I'll bet they will later. And in other cases, what he did was so simple and so basic that we're wondering why we never thought of it ourselves."

  "Colonel, what is Stinky?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "You got an idea, though."

  "Sure, an idea. But that's all it is. It embarrasses me even to think of it."

  "I don't embarrass easy."

  "Okay, then—Stinky is like nothing on Earth. My guess is that he's from some other solar system. I think he crossed space to us. How or why, I have no notion. His ship might have been wrecked and he got into a lifeboat and made it here." "But if there was a lifeboat…"

  "We've combed every foot of ground for miles around."

  "And no lifeboat?"

  "No lifeboat," said the colonel.

  Getting that idea down took a little doing, but I did it. Then I got to wondering about something else.

  "Colonel," I said, "you claim Stinky fixed up the ships, made them even better. Now how could he have done that with no hands and just sleeping and never touching a thing?"

  "You tell me," said the colonel. "I've heard a bunch of guesses. The only one that makes any kind of sense—and cockeyed sense at that—is telekinesis."

  I sat there and admired that word. "What's it mean, Colonel?" I wanted to use it on the boys at the tavern, if I ever got back there, and I wanted to get it right.

  "Moving things by the power of thought," he said.

  "But there wasn't nothing moved," I objected. "All the improvements in Betsy and the planes came from right inside them, not stuff moved in."

  "That could be done by telekinesis, too."

  I shook my head, thoughtful-like. "Ain't the way I see it."

  "Go ahead," he sighed. "Let's hear your theory. No reason you should be an exception."

  "I think Stinky's got a kind of mental green thumb for machines," I said. "Like some people got green thumbs for plants, only he's got…"

  The colonel took a long, hard frown at me. Then he nodded very slowly. "I see what you mean. Those new parts weren't moved in or around. They were grown."

  "Something like that. Maybe he can make a machine come kind of alive and improve itself, grow parts that'll make it a better and happier and more efficient machine."

  "Sounds silly when you say it," the colonel said, "but it makes a lot more sense than any of the other ideas. Man's been working with machines—real machines, that is—only a century or two. Make that ten thousand or a million years and it might not seem so silly."

  We sat in silence while the twilight crept into the room and I think the both of us must have been thinking the same thing.

  Thinking of the black night that lay out beyond Earth and of how Stinky must have crossed it. And wondering, too, about what kind of world he came from and why he might have left it and what happened to him out in the long dark that forced him to look for asylum on Earth.

  Thinking, too, I guess, about the ironic circumstance that had cast him on a planet where his nearest counterpart was a little animal that no one cared to have much to do with.

  "What I can't understand," the colonel said, "is why he does it. Why does he do it for us?"

  "He doesn't do it for us," I answered. "He does it for the planes. He feels sorry for them."

  The door burst open and the general came tramping in. He was triumphant. Dusk had crept into the room and I don't think he saw me.

  "We got an okay!" he gloated. "The ship will be in tomorrow. The Pentagon agrees!"

  "General," said the colonel, "we're pushing this too hard. It's time for us to begin to lay some sort of grounds for basic understanding. We've grabbed what we can grab the quickest. We've exploited this little cuss right up to the hilt. We have a lot of data…"

  "Not all we need!" the general bellowed. "What we have been doing has been just sort of practice. We have no data on the A-ship. That is where we need it."

  "What we need as well is an understanding of this creature. An understanding of how he does it. If we could talk to him…"

  "Talk!" the general shouted.

  "Yes, talk!" the colonel shouted back. "He keeps purring all the time. That may be his means of communication. The men who found him simply whistled and he came. That was communication. If we had a little patience…"

  "We have no time for patience, Colonel."

  "General, we can't simply wring him dry. He's done a lot for us. Let's give the little guy a break. He's the one who has had the patience—waiting for us to communicate with him, hoping that someday we'll recognize him for what he is!"

  They were yelling at one another and the colonel must have forgotten I was there. It was embarrassing. I held out my arms to Stinky and he jumped into them. I tiptoed across the room and went out as quietly as I could.

  That night, I lay in bed with Stinky curled up on the covers at my feet. The four guards sat in the room, quiet as watchful mice.

  I thought about what the colonel had said to the general and my heart went out to Stinky. I thought how awful it would be if a man suddenly was dumped into a world of skunks who didn't care a rap about him except that he could di
g the deepest and slickest burrows that skunks had ever seen and that he could dig them quick. And there were so many burrows to be dug that not one of the skunks would take the time to understand this man, to try to talk with him or to help him out.

  I lay there feeling sorry and wishing there was something I could do. Then Stinky came walking up the covers and crawled in under them with me and I put out my hand and held him tight against me while he purred softly at me. And that is how we went to sleep.

  The next afternoon, the A-ship arrived. The last of three that had been built, it was still experimental. It was a monster and we stood far back behind a line of guards and watched it come mushing down, settling base-first into the water-filled rocket pit they'd dug out on the runway. Finally it was down and it stood there, a bleak, squat thing that somehow touched one with awe just to look at it.

  The crew came down the ladder and the launch went out to get them. They were a bunch of cocky youngsters and you could sense the pride in them.

  Next morning, we went out to the ship. I rode in the launch with the general and the colonel, and while the boat bobbed against the ladder, they had another difference of opinion.

  "I still think it's too risky, General," said the colonel. "It's all right to fool around with jets, but an atomic ship is a different matter. If Stinky goes fooling with that pile…"

  The general said, tight-lipped: "We have to take the chance."

  The colonel shrugged and went up the ladder. The general motioned to me and I went up with Stinky perched on my shoulder. The general followed.

  Whereas Stinky and I before this had been in a ship alone, this time a picked crew of technicians came aboard as well.

  There was plenty of room and it was the only way they could study what Stinky might be doing. And I imagined that, with an A-ship, they'd want to keep close check.

  I sat down in the pilot's chair and Stinky settled himself in my lap. The colonel stayed with us for a while, but after a time he left and we were alone.

  I was nervous. What the colonel had said made good sense to me. But the day wore on and nothing happened and I began to feel that perhaps the colonel had been wrong.