One day Gideon, out alone, radioed to base.
“There’s something out here underneath a tree that you should take a look at,” he told Sheridan.
“Something?”
“A different kind of being. It looks intelligent.”
“A Garsonian?”
“Humanoid, all right, but it’s no Garsonian.”
“I’ll be right out,” said Sheridan. “You stay there so you can point it out to me.”
“It has probably seen me,” Gideon said, “but I did not approach it. I thought you might like first whack at it yourself.”
As Gideon had said, the creature was sitting underneath a tree. It had a glittering cloth spread out and an ornate jug set out and was taking things out of a receptacle that probably was a hamper.
It was more attractively humanoid than the Garsonians. Its features were finely chiseled and its body had a look of lithe ranginess. It was dressed in the richest fabrics and was all decked out with jewels. It had a decided social air about it.
“Hello, friend,” Sheridan said in Garsonian.
The creature seemed to understand him, but it smiled in a superior manner and seemed not to be too happy at Sheridan’s intrusion.
“Perhaps,” it finally said, “you have the time to sit down for a while.”
Which, the way that it was put, was a plain and simple invitation for Sheridan to say no, he was sorry, but he hadn’t and he must be getting on.
“Why, certainly,” said Sheridan. “Thank you very much.”
He sat down and watched the creature continue to extract things from the hamper.
“It’s slightly difficult,” the creature told him, “for us to communicate in this barbaric language. But I suppose it’s the best we can do. You do not happen to know Ballic, do you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Sheridan. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“I had thought you might. It is widely used.”
“We can get along,” said Sheridan quietly, “with the language native to this planet.”
“Oh, certainly,” agreed the creature. “I presume I’m not trespassing. If I am, of course—”
“Not at all. I’m glad to find you here.”
“I would offer you some food, but I hesitate to do so. Your metabolism undoubtedly is not the same as mine. It should pain me to poison you.”
Sheridan nodded to indicate his gratitude. The food indeed was tempting. All of it was packaged attractively and some of it looked so delectable that it set the mouth to watering.
“I often come here for …” The creature hunted for the Garsonian word and there wasn’t any.
Sheridan tried to help him out. “I think in my language I would call it picnic.”
“An eating-out-of-doors,” the stranger said. “That is the nearest I can come in the language of our hosts.”
“We have the same idea.”
The creature brightened up considerably at this evidence of mutual understanding. “I think, my friend, that we have much in common. Perhaps I could leave some of this food with you and you could analyze it. Then the next time I come, you could join me.”
Sheridan shook his head. “I doubt I’ll stay much longer.”
“Oh,” the stranger said, and he seemed pleased at it. “So you’re a transitory being, too. Wings passing in the night. One hears a rustle and then the sound is gone forever.”
“A most poetic thought,” said Sheridan, “and a most descriptive one.”
“Although,” the creature said, “I come here fairly often. I’ve grown to love this planet. It is such a fine spot for an eating-out-of-doors. So restful and simple and unhurried. It is not cluttered up with activity and the people are so genuine, albeit somewhat dirty and very, very stupid. But I find it in my heart to love them for their lack of sophistication and their closeness to the soil and the clear-eyed view of life and their uncomplicated living of that life.”
He halted his talk and cocked an eye at Sheridan.
“Don’t you find it so, my friend?”
“Yes, of course I do,” agreed Sheridan, rather hurriedly.
“There are so few places in the Galaxy,” mourned the stranger, “where one can be alone in comfort. Oh, I do not mean alone entirely, or even physically. But an aloneness in the sense that there is space to live, that one is not pushed about by boundless, blind ambitions or smothered by the impact of other personalities. There are, of course, the lonely planets which are lonely only by the virtue of their being impossible for one to exist upon. These we must rule out.”
He ate a little, daintily, and in a mincing manner. But he took a healthy snort from the ornate jug.
“This is excellent,” said the creature, holding out the jug. “Are you sure you do not want to chance it?”
“I think I’d better not.”
“I suppose it’s wise of you,” the stranger admitted. “Life is not a thing that a person parts from without due consideration.”
He had another drink, then put the jug down in his lap and sat there fondling it.
“Not that I am one,” he said, “to extoll the virtue of living above all other things. Surely there must be other facets of the universal pattern that have as much to offer …”
They spent a pleasant afternoon together.
When Sheridan went back to the flier, the creature had finished off the jug and was sprawled, happily pickled, among the litter of the picnic.
IV
Grasping at straws, Sheridan tried to fit the picnicking alien into the pattern, but there was no place where he’d fit.
Perhaps, after all, he was no more than what he seemed—a flitting dilettante with a passion for a lonely eating-out-of-doors and an addiction to the bottle.
Yet he knew the native language and he had said he came here often and that in itself was more than merely strange. With apparently the entire Galaxy in which to flit around, why should he gravitate to Garson IV, which, to the human eye, at least, was a most unprepossessing planet?
And another thing—how had he gotten here?
“Gideon,” asked Sheridan, “did you see, by any chance, any sort of conveyance parked nearby that our friend could have traveled in?”
Gideon shook his head. “Now that you mention it, I am sure there wasn’t. I would have noticed it.”
“Has it occurred to you, sir,” inquired Hezekiah, “that he may have mastered the ability of teleportation? It is not impossible. There was that race out on Pilico …”
“That’s right,” said Sheridan, “but the Pilicoans were good for no more than a mile or so at a time. You remember how they went popping along, like a jack rabbit making mile-long jumps, but making them so fast that you couldn’t see him jump. This gent must have covered light-years. He asked me about a language that I never heard of. Indicated that it is widely spoken in at least some parts of the Galaxy.”
“You are worrying yourself unduly, sir,” cautioned Hezekiah. “We have more important things than this galivanting alien to trouble ourselves about.”
“You’re right,” said Sheridan. “If we don’t get this cargo moving, it will be my neck.”
But he couldn’t shake entirely the memory of the afternoon.
He went back, in his mind, through the long and idle chatter and found, to his amazement, that it had been completely idle. So far as he could recall, the creature had told him nothing of itself. For three solid hours or more, it had talked almost continuously and in all that time had somehow managed to say exactly nothing.
That evening, when he brought the supper, Napoleon squatted down beside the chair, gathering his spotless apron neatly in his lap.
“We are in a bad way, aren’t we?” he asked.
“Yes, I suppose you could say we are.”
“What will we do, Steve, if we can’t move the stuff
at all—if we can’t get any podars?”
“Nappy,” said Sheridan, “I’ve been trying very hard not to think of it.”
But now that Napoleon had brought it up, he could well imagine the reaction of Central Trading if he should have to haul a billion-dollar cargo back intact. He could imagine, a bit more vividly, what might be said to him if he simply left it here and went back home without it.
No matter how he did it, he had to sell the cargo!
If he didn’t, his career was in a sling.
Although there was more, he realized, than just his career at stake. The whole human race was involved.
There was a real and pressing need for the tranquilizer made from podar tubers. A search for such a drug had started centuries before and the need of it was underlined by the fact that through all those centuries the search had never faltered. It was something that Man needed badly—that Man, in fact, had needed badly since the very moment he’d become something more than animal.
And here, on this very planet, was the answer to that terrible human need—an answer denied and blocked by the stubbornness of a shiftless, dirty, backward people.
“If we only had this planet,” he said, speaking more to himself than to Napoleon, “if we could only take it over, we could grow all the podars that we needed. We’d make it one big field and we’d grow a thousand times more podars than these natives ever grew.”
“But we can’t,” Napoleon said. “It is against the law.”
“Yes, Nappy, you are right. Very much against the law.”
For the Garsonians were intelligent—not startlingly so, but intelligent, at least, within the meaning of the law.
And you could do nothing that even hinted of force against an intelligent race. You couldn’t even buy or lease their land, for the law would rule that in buying one would be dispossessing them of the inalienable rights of all alien intelligences.
You could work with them and teach them—that was very laudable. But the Garsonians were almost unteachable. You could barter with them if you were very careful that you did not cheat them too outrageously. But the Garsonians refused to barter.
“I don’t know what we’ll do,” Sheridan told Napoleon. “How are we going to find a way?”
“I have a sort of suggestion. If we could introduce these natives to the intricacies of dice, we might finally get somewhere. We robots, as you probably know, are very good at it.”
Sheridan choked on his coffee. He slowly and with great care set the cup down.
“Ordinarily,” he told Napoleon solemnly, “I would frown upon such tactics. But with the situation as it stands, why don’t you get some of the boys together and have a try at it?”
“Glad to do it, Steve.”
“And … uh, Nappy …”
“Yes, Steve?”
“I presume you’d pick the best crap-shooters in the bunch.”
“Naturally,” said Napoleon, getting up and smoothing his apron.
Joshua and Thaddeus took their troupe to a distant village in entirely virgin territory, untouched by any of the earlier selling efforts, and put on the medicine show.
It was an unparalleled success. The natives rolled upon the ground, clutching at their bellies, helpless with laughter. They howled and gasped and wiped their streaming eyes. They pounded one another on the back in appreciation of the jokes. They’d never seen anything like it in all their lives—there had never been anything like it on all of Garson IV.
And while they were weak with merriment, while they were still well-pleased, at the exact psychological moment when all their inhibitions should be down and all stubbornness and hostility be stilled, Joshua made the sales pitch.
The laughter stopped. The merriment went away. The audience simply stood and stared.
The troupe packed up and came trailing home, deep in despondency.
Sheridan sat in his tent and faced the bleak prospect. Outside the tent, the base was still as death. There was no happy talk or singing and no passing laughter. There was no neighborly tramping back and forth.
“Six weeks,” Sheridan said bitterly to Hezekiah. “Six weeks and not a sale. We’ve done everything we can and we’ve not come even close.”
He clenched his fist and hit the desk. “If we could only find what the trouble is! They want our merchandise and still they refuse to buy. What is the holdup, Hezekiah? Can you think of anything?”
Hezekiah shook his head. “Nothing, sir. I’m stumped. We all are.”
“They’ll crucify me back at Central,” Sheridan declared. “They’ll nail me up and keep me as a horrible example for the next ten thousand years. There’ve been failures before, but none like this.”
“I hesitate to say this, sir,” said Hezekiah, “but we could take it on the lam. Maybe that’s the answer. The boys would go along. Theoretically they’re loyal to Central, but deep down at the bottom of it, it’s you they’re really loyal to. We could load up the cargo and that would give us capital and we’d have a good head start …”
“No,” Sheridan said firmly. “We’ll try a little longer and we may solve the situation. If not, I face the music.”
He scraped his hand across his jaw.
“Maybe,” he said, “Nappy and his crap-shooters can turn the trick for us. It’s fantastic, sure, but stranger things have happened.”
Napoleon and his pals came back, sheepish and depressed.
“They beat the pants off us,” the cook told Sheridan in awe. “Those boys are really naturals. But when we tried to pay our bets, they wouldn’t take our stuff!”
“We have to try to arrange a powwow,” said Sheridan, “and talk it out with them, although I hold little hope for it. Do you think, Napoleon, if we came clean and told them what a spot we’re in, it would make a difference?”
“No, I don’t,” Napoleon said.
“If they only had a government,” observed Ebenezer, who had been a member of Napoleon’s gambling team, “we might get somewhere with a powwow. Then you could talk with someone who represented the entire population. But this way you’ll have to talk with each village separately and that will take forever.”
“We can’t help it, Eb,” said Sheridan. “It’s all we have left.”
But before any powwow could be arranged, the podar harvest started. The natives toiled like beavers in the fields, digging up the tubers, stacking them to dry, packing them in carts and hauling them to the barns by sheer manpower, for the Garsonians had no draft animals.
They dug them up and hauled them to the barns, the very barns where they’d sworn that they had no podars.
But that was not to wonder at when one stopped to think of it, for the natives had also sworn that they grew no podars.
They did not open the big barn doors, as one would have normally expected them to do. They simply opened a tiny, man-size door set into the bigger door and took the podars in that way. And when any of the Earth party hove in sight, they quickly stationed a heavy guard around the entire square.
“We’d better let them be,” Abraham advised Sheridan. “If we try to push them, we may have trouble in our lap.”
So the robots pulled back to the base and waited for the harvest to end. Finally it was finished and Sheridan counseled lying low for a few days more to give the Garsonians a chance to settle back to their normal routine.
Then they went out again and this time Sheridan rode along, on one of the floaters with Abraham and Gideon.
The first village they came to lay quiet and lazy in the sun. There was not a creature stirring.
Abraham brought the floater down into the square and the three stepped off.
The square was empty and the place was silent—a deep and deathly silence.
Sheridan felt the skin crawling up his back, for there was a stealthy, unnatural menace in the noiseless emptiness.
r /> “They may be laying for us,” suggested Gideon.
“I don’t think so,” said Abraham. “Basically they are peaceful.”
They moved cautiously across the square and walked slowly down a street that opened from the square.
And still there was no living thing in sight.
And stranger still—the doors of some of the houses stood open to the weather and the windows seemed to watch them out of blind eyes, with the colorful crude curtains gone.
“Perhaps,” Gideon suggested, “they may have gone away to some harvest festival or something of that nature.”
“They wouldn’t leave their doors wide open, even for a day,” declared Abraham. “I’ve lived with them for weeks and I’ve studied them. I know what they would do. They’d have closed the doors very carefully and tried them to be sure that they were closed.”
“But maybe the wind …”
“Not a chance,” insisted Abraham. “One door, possibly. But I see four of them from here.”
“Someone has to take a look,” said Sheridan. “It might as well be me.”
He turned in at a gate where one of the doors stood open and went slowly up the path. He halted at the threshold and peered in. The room beyond was empty. He stepped into the house and went from room to room and all the rooms were empty—not simply of the natives, but of everything. There was no furniture and the utensils and the tools were gone from hooks and racks. There was no scrap of clothing. There was nothing left behind. The house was dead and bare and empty, a shabby and abandoned thing discarded by its people.
He felt a sense of guilt creep into his soul. What if we drove them off? What if we hounded them until they’d rather flee than face us?
But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There must be some other reason for this incredibly complete mass exodus.
He went back down the walk. Abraham and Gideon went into other houses. All of them were empty.
“It may be this village only,” suggested Gideon. “The rest may be quite normal.”