The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sentimentalists, by Murray Leinster
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Title: The Sentimentalists
Author: Murray Leinster
Release Date: February 1, 2016 [EBook #51102]
Language: English
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The Sentimentalists
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrated by HUNTER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction April 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
You do not always have to go looking for
a guardian angel. He may be looking for
you--but perhaps for somebody else's benefit!
Rhadampsicus and Nodalictha were on their honeymoon, and consequently
they were sentimental. To be sure, it would not have been easy for
humans to imagine sentiment as existing between them. Humans would
hardly associate tenderness with glances cast from sets of sixteen
eyes mounted on jointed eye stalks, nor link langorous thrills with
a coy mingling of positronic repulsion blasts--even when the emission
of positron blasts from beneath one's mantle was one's normal personal
mode of locomotion. And when two creatures like Rhadampsicus and
Nodalictha stood on what might be roughly described as their heads and
twined their eye stalks together, so that they gazed fondly at each
other with all sixteen eyes at once, humans would not have thought of
it as the equivalent of a loving kiss. Humans would have screamed and
run--if they were not paralyzed by the mere sight of such individuals.
Nevertheless, they were a very happy pair and they were very
sentimental, and it was probably a good thing, considered from all
angles. They were still newlyweds on their wedding tour--they had been
married only seventy-five years before--when they passed by the sun
that humans call Cetis Gamma.
Rhadampsicus noted its peculiarity. He was anxious, of course, for
their honeymoon to be memorable in every possible way. So he pointed it
out to Nodalictha and explained what was shortly to be expected. She
listened with a bride's rapt admiration of her new husband's wisdom.
Perceiving his scientific interest, she suggested shyly that they stop
and watch.
* * * * *
Rhadampsicus scanned the area. There were planets--inner ones, and
then a group of gas giants, and then a very cosy series of three outer
planets with surface temperatures ranging from three to seven degrees
Kelvin.
They changed course and landed on the ninth planet out, where the
landscape was delightful. Rhadampsicus unlimbered his traveling kit and
prepared a bower. Nitrogen snow rose and swirled and consolidated as
he deftly shifted force-pencils. When the tumult subsided, there was a
snug if primitive cottage for the two of them to dwell in while they
waited for Cetis Gamma to accomplish its purpose.
Nodalictha cried out softly when she entered the bower. She was
fascinated by its completeness. There was even running liquid hydrogen
from a little rill nearby. And over the doorway, as an artistic and
appropriate touch, Rhadampsicus had put his own and Nodalictha's
initials, pricked out in amber chlorine crystals and intertwined within
the symbol which to them meant a heart. Nodalictha embraced him fondly
for his thoughtfulness. Of course, no human would have recognized it as
an embrace, but that did not matter.
Happily, then, they settled down to observe the phenomenon that Cetis
Gamma would presently display. They scanned the gas giant planets
together, and then the inner ones.
On the second planet out from the sun, they perceived small biped
animals busily engaged in works of primitive civilization. Nodalictha
was charmed. She asked eager questions, and Rhadampsicus searched
his memory and told her that the creatures were not well known, but
had been observed before. Limited in every way by their physical
constitution, they had actually achieved a form of space travel by
means of crude vehicles. He believed, he said, that the name they
called themselves was "men."
* * * * *
The sun rose slowly in the east, and Lon Simpson swore patiently as
he tried for the eighteenth time to get the generator back again in a
fashion to make it work. His tractor waited in the nearby field. The
fields waited. Over in Cetopolis, the scales and storesheds waited,
and somewhere there was doubtless a cargo ship waiting for a spacegram
to summon it to Cetis Gamma Two for a load of _thanar_ leaves. And of
course people everywhere waited for _thanar_ leaves.
A milligram a day kept old age away--which was not an advertising
slogan but sound, practical geriatric science. But _thanar_ leaves
would only grow on Cetis Gamma Two, and the law said that all habitable
planets had to be open for colonization and land could not be withheld
from market.
There was too much population back on Earth, anyhow. Therefore the
Cetis Gamma Trading Company couldn't make a planetwide plantation and
keep _thanar_ as a monopoly, but could only run its own plantation for
research and instruction purposes for new colonists. Colonists had to
be admitted to the planet, and they had to be sold land. But there are
ways of getting around every law.
Lon Simpson swore. The Diesel of his tractor ran a generator. The
generator ran the motors in the tractor's catawheels. But this was
the sixth time in a month that the generator had broken down, and
generators do not break down.
Lon put it together for the eighteenth time this breakdown, and it
still wouldn't work. There was nothing detectably wrong with it, but he
couldn't make it work.
Seething, he walked back to his neat, prefabricated house. He picked up
the beamphone. Even Cathy's voice at the exchange in Cetopolis could
not soothe him, he was so furious.
"Cathy, give me Carson--and don't listen!" he said tensely.
He heard clickings on the two-way beam.
"My generator's gone," he said sourly when Carson answered. "I've
repaired it twice this week. It looks like it was built to stop
working! What is this all about, anyhow?"
The representative of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company sounded bored.
"You want a new generator sent out?" he asked without interest. "Your
crop credit's still all right--if the fields are in good shape."
"I want machinery that works!" Lon Simpson snapped. "I want machinery
that doesn't have to be bought four times over a growing season! And I
want it at a decent price!"
"Look, those generators come out from Earth. There's freight on them.
There's freight on everything that comes out from Earth. You people
come to a developed planet, you buy your land, your machinery, your
house, and you get instruction in agriculture. Do you want the company
to tuck you in bed at night besides? Do you want a new generator or
not?"
"How much?" demanded Lon. When Carson told him, he hit the ceiling.
"It's robbery! What'll I have left for my crop if I buy that?"
* * * * *
Carson's voice was still bored. "If you buy it and your crop's up to
standard, you'll owe the crop plus three hundred credits. But we'll
stake you to next growing season."
"And if I don't?" demanded Lon. "Suppose I don't give you all my work
for nothing and wind up in debt?"
"By contract," Carson told him, "we've got the right to finish
cultivating your crop and charge you for the work because we've
advanced you credit on it. Then we attach your land and house for the
balance due. And you get no more credit at the Company stores. And
passage off this planet has to be paid for in cash." He yawned. "Don't
answer now," he said without interest. "Call me back after you calm
down. You'd only have to apologize."
Lon Simpson heard the click as he began to describe, heatedly, what
was in his mind. He said it anyhow. Then Cathy's voice came from the
exchange. She sounded shocked but sympathetic.
"Lon! Please!"
He swallowed a particularly inventive description of the manners,
morals and ancestry of all the directors and employees of the Cetis
Gamma Trading Company. Then he said, still fuming, "I told you not to
listen!"
His wrongs overcame him again. "It's robbery! It's peonage! They've got
every credit I had! They've got three-quarters of the value of my crop
charged up for replacements of the lousy machinery they sold me--and
now I'll end the growing season in debt! How am I going to ask you to
marry me?"
"Not over a beamphone, I hope," said Cathy.
He was abruptly sunk in gloom.
"That was a slip," he admitted. "I was going to wait until I got paid
for my crop. It looked good. Now--"
"Wait a minute, Lon," Cathy said. There was silence. She gave somebody
else a connection.
The phone-beams from the colony farms all went to Cetopolis and
Cathy was one of the two operators there. If or when the colony got
prosperous enough, there would be a regular intercommunication system.
So it was said. Meanwhile, Lon had a suspicion that there might be
another reason for the antiquated central station.
Cathy said brightly, "Yes, Lon?"
"I'll come in to town tonight," he said darkly. "Date?"
"Y-yes," stammered Cathy. "Oh, yes!"
He hung up and went back out to the field and the tractor. He began to
think sourly of a large number of things all at once. There was a law
to encourage people to leave Earth for colonies on suitable planets.
There was even governmental help for people who didn't have funds
of their own. But if a man wanted to make something of himself, he
preferred to use his own money and pick his own planet and choose his
own way of life.
Lon Simpson had bought four hectares of land on Cetis Gamma Two. He'd
paid his passage out. He'd given five hundred credits a month for an
instruction course on the Company's plantation, during which time he'd
labored faithfully to grow, harvest, and cure _thanar_ leaves for the
Company's profit. Then he'd bought farm machinery from the Company--and
a house--and very painstakingly had set out to be a colonist on his own.
* * * * *
Just about that time, Cathy had arrived on a Company ship and taken up
her duties as beamphone operator at Cetopolis. It was a new colony,
with not more than five thousand humans on the whole planet, all of
them concentrated near the one small town with its plank sidewalks and
prefabricated buildings. Lon Simpson met Cathy, and his labors on his
_thanar_ farm acquired new energy and purpose.
But he was up against a shrewd organization. His inordinately expensive
farm machinery broke down. He repaired it. After a time it could not
be repaired any longer and he had to buy more. Before the _thanar_
plants were half grown, he owed more than half his prospective crop for
machinery replacements.
Now he could see the method perfectly. The Company imported all
machinery. It made that machinery in its own factories, machinery
that was designed to break down. So this year--even if nothing else
happened--Lon would wind up owing more for machinery replacements than
the crop would bring.
It was not likely that nothing else would happen. Next season he
would start off in debt, instead of all clear, and if the same thing
happened he would owe all his crop and be six thousand credits behind.
By harvest after next, his farm and house could be foreclosed for debt
and he could either try to work for other colonists--who were in the
process of going through the same wringer themselves--or hire out as a
farmhand on the Company's plantation. He would never be able to save
space-fare away from the planet. He would be very much worse off than
the assisted emigrants to other planets, who had not invested all they
owned in land and machinery and agricultural instructions.
And there was Cathy. She owed for her passage. It would be years before
she could pay that back, if ever. She couldn't live in the farmhand
barracks. They might as well give up thinking about each other.
It was a system. Beautifully legal, absolutely airtight. Not a thing
wrong with it. The Company had a monopoly on _thanar_, despite the law.
It had all the cultivated land on Cetis Gamma Two under its control,
and its labor problem was solved. Its laborers first paid something
like sixteen thousand credits a head for the privilege of trying to
farm independently for a year or two, and then became farmhands for
the Company at a bare subsistence wage.
Lon Simpson was in the grip of that system. He had taken the generator
apart and put it back together eighteen times. There was nothing
visibly wrong with it. It had been designed to break down with nothing
visibly wrong with it. If he couldn't repair it, though, he was out
fifteen hundred credits, his investment was wiped out, and all his
hopes were gone.
He took the generator apart for the nineteenth time. He wondered grimly
how the Company's designers made generators so cleverly that they would
stop working so that even the trouble with them couldn't be figured
out. It was a very ingenious system.
* * * * *
Out on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus explained the situation to his
bride as they waited for the interesting astronomical phenomenon.
They were quite cosy, waiting. Their bower was simple, of course.
Frozen nitrogen walls, and windows of the faint bluish tint of oxygen
ice. Rhadampsicus had grown some cyanogen flower-crystals to make the
place look homelike, and there was now a lovely reflection-pool in
which liquid hydrogen reflected the stars. Cetis Gamma, the local
sun, seemed hardly more than a very bright and very near star--it was
four light-hours away--and it glimmered over the landscape and made
everything quite charming.
Nodalictha, naturally, would not enter the minds of the male bipeds
on the inner planet. Modesty forbade such a thing--as, of course, the
conscientiousness of a brand-new husband limited Rhadampsicus to the
thoughts of the males among the bipeds. But Nodalictha was distressed
when Rhadampsicus told her of what was occurring among the bipeds. He
guided her thoughts to Cathy, in the beamphone exchange at Cetopolis.
"But it is terrible!" said Nodalictha in distress when she had absorbed
Cathy's maiden meditations. She did not actually speak in words and
soundwaves. There is no air worth mentioning at seven degrees Kelvin.
It's all frozen. A little helium hangs around, perhaps. Nothing else.
The word for communication is not exactly the word for speech, but it
will do. Nodalictha said, "They love each other! In a cute way, they
are like--like we were, Rhadampsicus!"
Rhadampsicus played a positron-beam on her in feigned indignation.
If that beam had hit a human, the human would have curled up in a
scorched, smoking heap. But Nodalictha bridled.
"Rhadampsicus!" she protested fondly. "Stop tickling me! But can't you
do something for them? They are so cute!"
And Rhadampsicus gallantly sent his thoughts back to the second planet,
where a biped grimly labored over a primitive device.
* * * * *
Lon Simpson, staring at the disassembled generator, suddenly blinked.
The grimness went out of his expression. He stared. An idea had
occurred to him. He went over it in his mind. He blew out his breath in
a long whistle. Then, very painstakingly, he did four or five things
that completely ruined the generator for the extremely modest trade-in
allowance he could have gotten for it at the Company store.
He worked absorbedly for perhaps twenty minutes, his eyes intent. At
the end of that time he had threads of unwound secondary wire stretched
back and forth across a forked stick of _dhil_ weed, and two small
pieces of sheet iron twisted together in an extremely improbable
manner. He connected the ends of the secondary wire to contacts in his
tractor. He climbed into the tractor seat. He threw over the drive
control.
The tractor lurched into motion. The Diesel wasn't running. But the
tractor rolled comfortably as Lon drove it, the individual motors in
the separate catawheels drawing power from a mere maze of wires across
a forked stick--plus two pieces of sheet iron. There was plenty of
power.
Lon drove the tractor the rest of the morning and all afternoon with a
very peculiar expression on his face. He understood what he had done.
Now that he had done it, it seemed the most obvious of expedients. He
felt inclined to be incredulous that nobody had ever happened to think
of this particular device before. But they very plainly hadn't. It
was a source of all the electric power anybody could possibly want.
The voltage would depend on the number of turns of copper wire around
a suitably forked stick. The amperage would be whatever that voltage
could put through whatever was hooked to it.
He no longer needed a new generator for his tractor. He had one.
He didn't even need a Diesel.
With adequate power--he'd been having to nurse the Diesel along,
too, lately--Lon Simpson ran his tractor late into the twilight. He
cultivated all the ground that urgently needed cultivation, and at
least one field he hadn't hoped to get to before next week. But his
expression was amazed. It is a very peculiar sensation to discover
that one is a genius.
* * * * *
That night, in Cetopolis, he told Cathy all about it. It was a very
warm night--an unusually warm night. They walked along the plank
sidewalks of the little frontier town--as a new colony, Cetis Gamma Two
was a frontier--and Lon talked extravagantly.
He had meant to explain painfully to Cathy that there was no use in
their being romantic about each other. He'd expected to have to tell
her bitterly that he was doomed to spend the rest of his life adding
to the profits of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company, with all the laws
of the human race holding him in peonage. He'd thought of some very
elegant descriptions of the sort of people who'd worked out the system
in force on Cetis Gamma Two.
But he didn't. As they strolled under the shiver trees that lined the
small town's highways, and smelled the _chanel_ bushes beyond the
town's limits, and listened to the thin violinlike strains of what
should have been night birds--they weren't; the singers were furry
instead of feathered, and they slept in burrows during the day--as they
walked with linked fingers in the warm and starlit night, Lon told
Cathy about his invention.
He explained in detail just why wires wound in just that fashion, and
combined with bits of sheet iron twisted in just those shapes, would
produce power for free and forever. He explained how it had to be so.
He marveled that nobody had ever thought of it before. He explained it
so that Cathy could almost understand it.
"It's wonderful!" she said wistfully. "They'll run spaceships on your
invention, won't they, Lon? And cities? And everything! I guess you'll
be very rich for inventing it!"
He stopped short and stared at her. He hadn't thought that far ahead.
Then he said blankly:
"But I'll have to get back to Earth to patent it! And I haven't got the
money to pay one fare, let alone two!"
"Two?" asked Cathy hopefully. "Why two?"
"You're going to marry me, aren't you?" he demanded. "I sort of hope
that was all settled."
Cathy stamped her foot.
"Hadn't you heard," she asked indignantly, "that such things aren't
taken for granted? Especially when two people are walking in the
starlight and are supposed to be thrilled? It isn't settled--not until
after you've kissed me, anyhow!"
He remedied his error.
* * * * *
Out on the ninth planet, very far away, Nodalictha blushed slightly.
As a bride, she was in that deliciously embarrassing state of
becoming accustomed to discussions which would previously have been
unconventional.
"They are so quaint!" Then she hesitated and said awkwardly, "The idea
of putting their--their lips together as a sign of affection--"
Rhadampsicus was amused, as a bridegroom may be by the delightful
innocences of a new wife. He evinced his amusement in a manner no human
being could conceivably have recognized as the tender laugh it was.
"Little goose!" he said fondly. Of course, instead of a fowl, he
thought of a creature that had thirty-four legs and scales instead of
feathers and was otherwise thoroughly ungooselike. "Little goose, they
do that because they can't do this!"
And he twined his eye stalks sentimentally about hers.
* * * * *
Days passed on Cetis Gamma Two. Lon Simpson cultivated his _thanar_
fields. But he began to worry. His new power source was more than a
repair for a broken-down tractor. It was valuable. It was riches! He
had in it one of those basic, overwhelmingly important discoveries by
which human beings have climbed up from the status of intelligent
Earthbound creatures to galactic colonists--And a lot of good it had
done them!
It was a basic principle for power supply that would relieve mankind
permanently of the burden of fuels. The number of planets available
for colonization would be multiplied. The cost of every object made by
human beings would be reduced by the previous cost of power. The price
of haulage from one planet to another would be reduced to a fraction.
Every member of the human race would become richer as a result of
the gadget now attached to Lon Simpson's tractor. He was entitled to
royalties on the wealth he was to distribute. But....
He was a _thanar_ farmer on Cetis Gamma Two. His crop was mortgaged. He
could not possibly hope to raise enough money to get back to Earth to
arrange for the marketing of his invention. Especially, he could not
conceivably raise money enough to take Cathy with him. He had riches,
but they weren't available. And something else might happen to ruin him
at any time.
Something else did. The freezer element of his deep-freeze locker broke
down. He didn't notice it. He had a small kitchen locker in which food
for week-to-week use was stored. He didn't know anything about the
deep-freeze unit that held a whole growing season's supply of food.
The food in it--all imported from Earth and very expensive--thawed,
fermented, spoiled, developed evil smelling gases, and waited for an
appropriate moment to reveal itself as a catastrophe.
There were other things to worry about at the time. A glacier up at
Cetis Gamma Two's polar region began to retreat, instead of growing
as was normal for the season. There was a remarkable solar prominence
of three days' duration swinging around the equator of the local sun.
There was a meeting of directors of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company,
at which one of the directors pointed out that the normal curve of
increase for profits was beginning to flatten out, and something had
to be done to improve the financial position of the company. Ugly
sun-spots appeared on the northern hemisphere of Cetis Gamma. If there
had been any astronomers on the job, there would have been as much
excitement as a four alarm fire. But there were no astronomers.
The greatest agitation on the second planet of Cetis Gamma Two was felt
by Lon Simpson. Cathy had made friends with a married woman colonist
who would chaperon her on a visit to Lon's farm, and was coming out
to visit and see the place that was to be the scene of the ineffable,
unparalleled happiness she and Lon would know after they were married.
She came, she saw, she was captivated. Lon blissfully opened the door
of the house she was to share. He had spent the better part of two days
cleaning up so it would be fit for her to look at. Cathy entered. There
was a dull, booming noise, a hissing, and a bubbling, and then a rank
stench swept through the house and strangled them.
* * * * *
The boom, of course, was the bursting open of the deep-freeze locker
from the pressure of accumulated gases within it. The smell was that
of the deep-freeze contents, ten days thawed out without Lon knowing
it. There are very few smells much worse than frozen fish gone very,
very bad in a hot climate. If there are worse smells, they come from
once-frozen eggs bursting from their shells when pressure outside
them is relieved. In this case, trimmings were added by fermenting
strawberries, moldy meat and badly decayed vegetables, all triumphantly
making themselves known at the same instant.
Cathy gasped and choked. Lon got her out of doors, gasping himself. It
was not difficult to deduce what had happened.
He opened the house windows from the outside, so the smell could go
away. But he knew despair.
"I--can't show you the house, Cathy," he said numbly. "My locker went
bad and all the food followed suit."
"Lon!" wailed Cathy. "It's terrible! How will you eat?"
Lon began to realize that the matter was more serious than the loss
of an opportunity for a sentimental inspection of the house. He had
dreamed splendidly, of late. He didn't quite know how he was going
to manage it, but since his tractor was working magnificently he had
come to picture himself and Cathy in the rôle of successful colonists,
zestfully growing _thanar_ leaves for the increasing multitudes of
people who needed a milligram a day.
He'd reverted to the pictured dreams in the Cetis Gamma Trading
Company's advertisements. He'd daydreamed of himself and Cathy as
growing with the colony, thriving as it throve, and ultimately becoming
moderately rich--in children and grandchildren, anyhow--with life
stretching out before them in a sort of rosy glow. He'd negligently
assumed that somehow they would also be rich from the royalties on his
invention. But now he came down to reality.
His house was uninhabitable for the time being. He could continue
to cultivate his fields, but he wouldn't be able to eat. The local
plant-life was not suitable for human digestion. He had to live on food
imported from Earth. Now he had to buy a new stock from the Company,
and it would bankrupt him.
With an invention worth more--probably--than the Cetis Gamma Company
itself, if he could realize on it, he still was broke. His crop was
mortgaged. If Carson learned about his substitute for a generator, the
Company would immediately clamp down to get it away from him.
He took Cathy back to Cetopolis. He feverishly appealed to other
colonists. He couldn't tell them about his generator substitute. If
they knew about it, in time Carson would know. If they used it, Carson
would eventually get hold of a specimen, to send back to Earth for
pirating by the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. All Lon could do was try
desperately to arrange to borrow food to live on until his crop came
in, though even then he wouldn't be in any admirable situation.
He couldn't borrow food in quantity. Other colonists had troubles,
too. They'd give him a meal, yes, but they couldn't refill his freezer
without emptying their own. Which would compel them to buy more. Which
would be charged against their crops. Which would simply hasten the day
when they would become day-laborers on the Company's _thanar_ farm.
Lon had about two days' food in the kitchen locker. He determined to
stretch it to four. Then he'd have to buy more. With each meal, then,
his hopes of freedom and prosperity--and Cathy--grew less.
Of course, he could starve....
* * * * *
Rhadampsicus was enormously and pleasantly interested in what went on
in Cetis Gamma's photosphere. From the ninth planet, he scanned the
prominences with enthusiasm, making notes. Nodalictha tried to take
a proper wifely interest in her husband's hobby, but she could not
keep it up indefinitely. She busied herself with her housekeeping.
She fashioned a carpet of tufted methane fibres and put up curtains
at the windows. She enlarged the garden Rhadampsicus had made, adding
borders of crystallized ammonia and a sort of walkway with a hedge
of monoclinic sulphur which glittered beautifully in the starlight.
She knew that this was only a temporary dwelling, but she wanted
Rhadampsicus to realize that she could make any place a comfortable
home.
He remained absorbed in the phenomena of the local sun. One great
prominence, after five days of spectacular existence, divided into two
which naturally moved apart and stationed themselves at opposite sides
of the sun's equator. They continued to rotate with the sun itself,
giving very much the effect of an incipient pinwheel. Two other minor
prominences came into being midway between them. Rhadampsicus watched
in fascination.
Nodalictha came and reposed beside him on a gentle slope of volcanic
slag. She waited for him to notice her. She would not let herself be
sensitive about his interest in his hobby, of course, but she could not
really find it absorbing for herself. A trifle wistfully, she sent her
thoughts to the female biped on the second planet.
After a while she said in distress, "Rhadampsicus! Oh, they are so
unhappy!"
Rhadampsicus gallantly turned his attention from the happenings on the
sun.
"What's that, darling?"
"Look!" said Nodalictha plaintively. "They are so much in love,
Rhadampsicus! And they can't marry because he hasn't anything edible to
share with her!"
Rhadampsicus scanned. He was an ardent and sentimental husband. If his
new little wife was distressed about anything at all, Rhadampsicus was
splendidly ready to do something about it.
* * * * *
Lon Simpson looked at his kitchen locker. The big deep-freezer was
repaired now. Once a season, a truck came out from Cetopolis and filled
it. The food was costly. A season's supply was kept in deep-freeze.
Once in one or two weeks, one refilled the kitchen locker. It was best
to leave the deep-freeze locker closed as much as possible. But now the
big deep-freeze was empty. He'd cleaned out the ghastly mess in it, and
he had it running again, but he had nothing to put in it. To have it
refilled would put him hopelessly at the Company's mercy, but there was
nothing else to do.
Bitterly, he called the Trading Company office, and Carson answered.
"This is Simpson," Lon told him. "How much--"
"The price for a generator," said Carson, bored, "is the same as
before. Do you want it sent out?"
"No! My food locker broke down. My food store spoiled. I need more."
"I'll figure it," replied Carson over the beamphone. He didn't seem
interested. After a moment, he said indifferently, "Fifteen hundred
credits for standard rations to crop time. Then you'll need more."
"It's robbery!" raged Lon. "I can't expect more than four thousand
credits for my crop! You've got three thousand charged against me now!"
Carson yawned. "True. A new generator, fifteen hundred; new food
supplies fifteen hundred. If your crop turns out all right, you'll
start the new season with two thousand credits charged up as a loan
against your land."
Lon Simpson strangled on his fury. "You'll take all my leaves and I'll
still owe you! Then credit for seed and food and--If I need to buy more
machinery, you'll own my farm _and_ crop next crop time! Even if my
crop is good! Your damned Company will own my farm!"
"That's your lookout," Carson said without emotion. "Being a _thanar_
farmer was your idea, not mine. Shall I send out the food?"
Lon Simpson bellowed into the beamphone. He heard clicking, then
Cathy's voice. It was at once reproachful and sympathetic.
"Lon! Please!"
* * * * *
But Lon couldn't talk to her. He panted at her, and hung up. It is
essential to a young man in love that he shine, somehow, in the eyes
of the girl he cares for. Lon was not shining. He was appearing as the
Galaxy's prize sap. He'd invested a sizable fortune in his farm. He was
a good farmer--hard-working and skilled. In the matter of repairing
generators, he'd proved to be a genius. But he was at the mercy of
the Cetis Gamma Company's representative. He was already in debt. If
he wanted to go on eating, he'd go deeper. If he were careful and
industrious and thrifty, the Trading Company would take his crop and
farm in six more months and then give him a job at day-labor wages.
He went grimly to the kitchen of his home. He looked at the trivial
amount of food remaining. He was hungry. He could eat it all right now.
If he did--
Then, staring at the food in the kitchen locker, he blinked. An idea
had occurred to him. He was blankly astonished at it. He went over and
over it in his mind. His expression became dubiously skeptical, and
then skeptically amazed. But his eyes remained intent as he thought.
Presently, looking very skeptical indeed, he went out of the house
and unwound more copper wire from the remnant of the disassembled
generator. He came back to the kitchen. He took an emptied tin can
and cut it in a distinctly peculiar manner. The cuts he made were
asymmetrical. When he had finished, he looked at it doubtfully.
A long time later he had made a new gadget. It consisted of two open
coils, one quite large and one quite small. Their resemblance to each
other was plain, but they did not at all resemble any other coils that
had been made for any other purpose whatsoever. If they looked like
anything, it was the "mobiles" that some sculptors once insisted were
art.
Lon stared at his work with an air of helplessness. Then he went out
again. He returned with the forked stick that had proved to be a
generator. He connected the wires from that improbable contrivance to
the coils of the new and still more unlikely device. The eccentrically
cut tin can was in the middle, between them.
There was a humming sound. Lon went out a third time and came back with
a mass of shrubbery. He packed it in the large coil.
He muttered to himself, "I'm out of my head! I'm crazy!"
But then he went to the kitchen locker. He put a small packet of frozen
green peas in the tin can between the two coils.
The humming sound increased. After a moment there was another parcel
of green peas--not frozen--in the small coil.
Lon took it out. The device hummed more loudly again. Immediately there
was another parcel of green peas in the small coil. He took them out.
When he had six parcels of green peas instead of one, the mass of
foliage in the large coil collapsed abruptly. Lon disconnected the
wires and removed the debris. The native foliage looked shrunken,
somehow, dried-out. Lon tossed it through the window.
* * * * *
He put a parcel of unfrozen green peas on to cook and sat down and held
his head in his hands. He knew what had happened. He knew how.
The local flora on Cetis Gamma Two naturally contained the same
chemical elements as the green peas imported from Earth. Those elements
were combined in chemical compounds similar, if not identical to, those
of the Earth vegetation. The new gadget simply converted the compounds
in the large coil to match those in the sample--in the tin can--and
assembled them in the small coil according to the physical structure of
the sample. In this case, as green peas.
The device would take any approximate compound from the large coil and
reassemble it--suitably modified as per sample--in the small coil.
It would work not only for green peas, but for roots, barks, herbs,
berries, blossoms and flowers.
It would even work for _thanar_ leaves.
When that last fact occurred to him, Lon Simpson went quietly loony,
trying to figure out how he had come to think of such a thing. He was
definitely crocked, because he picked up the beamphone and told Cathy
all about it. And he was not loony because he told Cathy, but because
he forgot his earlier suspicions of why there was a central station
for beamphones in Cetopolis, instead of a modern direct-communication
system.
In fact, he forgot the system in operation on Cetis Gamma Two--the
Company's system. It had been designed to put colonists through the
wringer and deposit them at its own farm to be day-laborers forever
with due regard to human law. But it was a very efficient system.
It took care of strokes of genius, too.
That night, Carson, listening boredly to the record of all the
conversations over the beamphone during the day, heard what Lon had
told Cathy. He didn't believe it, of course.
But he made a memo to look into it.
Rhadampsicus stretched himself. Out on the ninth planet, the weather
was slightly warmer--almost six degrees Kelvin, two hundred and
sixty-odd degrees centigrade below zero--and he was inclined to be
lazy. But he was very handsome, in Nodalictha's eyes. He was seventy
or more feet from his foremost eye stalk to the tip of his least
crimson appendage, and he fluoresced beautifully in the starlight. He
was a very gallant young bridegroom.
When he saw Nodalictha looking at him admiringly, he said with his
customary tenderness:
"It was fatiguing to make him go through it, darling, but since you
wished it, it is done. He now has food to share with the female."
"And you're handsome, too, Rhadampsicus!" Nodalictha said irrelevantly.
She felt as brides sometimes do on their honeymoons. She was quite
sure that she had not only the bravest and handsomest of husbands, but
the most thoughtful and considerate.
Presently, with their eye stalks intertwined, he asked softly:
"Are you weary of this place, darling? I would like to watch the rest
of this rather rare phenomenon, but if you're not interested, we can go
on. And truly I won't mind."
"Of course we'll stay!" protested Nodalictha. "I want to do anything
you want to. I'm perfectly happy just being with you."
And, unquestionably, she was.
* * * * *
Carson, though bored, was a bit upset by the recorded conversation he'd
listened to. Lon Simpson had been almost incoherent, but he obviously
meant Cathy to take him seriously. And there were some things to back
it up.
He'd reported his generator hopelessly useless--and hadn't bought a new
one. He'd reported all his food spoiled--and hadn't bought more. Carson
thought it over carefully. The crop inspection helicopter reported
Simpson's fields in much better shape than average, so his tractor was
obviously working.
Carson asked casual, deadpan questions of other colonists who came
into the Company store. Most of them were harried, sullen and bitter.
They were unanimously aware of the wringer they were being put
through. They knew what the Company was doing to them and they hated
Carson because he represented it. But they did answer Carson's casual
questions about Lon Simpson.
Yes, he'd tried to borrow food from them. No, they couldn't lend it to
him. Yes, he was still eating. In fact he was offering to swap food.
He was short on fruit and long on frozen green peas. Then he was long
on fruit and frozen green peas and short on frozen sweet corn and
strawberries. No, he didn't want to trade on a big scale. One package
of frozen strawberries was all he wanted. He gave six packages of
frozen peas for it. He gave six packages of frozen strawberries for one
package of frozen sweet corn. He'd swapped a dozen parcels of sweet
corn for one of fillet of flounder, two dozen fillet of flounder for
cigarettes, and fifty cartons of cigarettes for a frozen roast of beef.
It didn't make sense unless the conversation on the beamphone was
right. If what Lon had told Cathy was true, he'd have his frozen
food locker filled up again by now. He had some sort of device which
converted the indigestible local flora and fauna into digestible
Earth products. To suspect such a thing was preposterous, but Carson
suspected everyone and everything.
As representative of the Company, Carson naturally did its dirty work.
New colonists bought farms from the central office on Earth and happily
took ship to Cetis Gamma Two. Then Carson put them through their
instruction course, outfitted them to try farming on their own, and
saw to it that they went bankrupt and either starved or took jobs as
farmhands for the Company, at wages assuring that they could never take
ship away again.
It was a nasty job and Carson did it very well, because he loved it.
While he still debated Lon's insane boasts to Cathy over the beamphone
system, he prepared to take over the farm of another colonist. That
man had been deeper in debt than Lon, and he'd been less skilled
at repairs, so it was time to gather him in. Carson called him to
Cetopolis to tell him that the Company regretfully could not extend
further credit, would have to take back his farm, house, and remaining
food stores, and finish the cultivation of his _thanar_ leaf crop to
repay itself for the trouble.
The colonist, however, said briefly: "Go to hell."
* * * * *
He started to leave Carson's air-cooled office. Carson said mildly:
"You're broke. You'll want a job when you haven't got a farm. You can't
afford to tell me to go to hell."
"You can't take my farm unless my fields are neglected," the colonist
said comfortably. "They aren't. And my _thanar_ leaf crop is going to
be a bumper one. I'll pay off all I owe--and we colonists are planning
to start a trading company of our own, to bring in good machinery and
deal fairly."
Carson smiled coldly.
"You forget something," he said. "As representative of the Trading
Company, I can call on you to pay up all your debts at once, if I have
reason to think you intend to try to evade payment. I do think so. I
call on you for immediate payment in full. Pay up, please!"
This was an especially neat paragraph in the fine print of the
colonists' contract with the Company. Any time a colonist got obstinate
he could be required to pay all he owed, on the dot. And if he had
enough to pay, he wouldn't owe. So the Trading Company could ruin
anybody.
But this colonist merely grinned.
"By law," he observed, "you have to accept _thanar_ leaves as legal
tender, at five credits a kilo. Send out a truck for your payment. I've
got six tons in my barn, all ready to turn in."
He made a most indecorous gesture and walked out. A moment later, he
put his head back in.
"I forgot," he commented politely. "You said I couldn't afford to
tell you to go to hell. With six tons of _thanar_ leaves on hand, I'm
telling you to--"
He added several other things, compared to which telling Carson to go
to hell was the height of courtesy. He went away.
Carson went a little pale. It occurred to him that this colonist was a
close neighbor of Lon Simpson. Maybe Lon had gotten tired of converting
_dhil_ weed and shiver leaves into green peas and asparagus, and had
gotten to work turning out _thanar_.
* * * * *
Carson went to Lon's farm. It was a very bad road, and any four-wheeled
vehicle would have shaken itself to pieces on the way. The gyrocar
merely jolted Carson severely. The jolting kept him from noticing how
hot the weather was. It was really extraordinarily hot, and Carson
suffered more because he spent most of his time in an air-conditioned
office. But for the same reason he did not suspect anything abnormal.
When he reached Lon's farm, he noticed that the _thanar_ leaves were
growing admirably. For a moment, sweating as he was, he was reminded
of tobacco plants growing on Maryland hillsides. The heat and the
bluish-green color of the plants seemed very familiar. But then a
cateagle ran hastily up a tree, out on a branch, and launched its
crimson furry self into midair. That broke the spell of supposedly
familiar things.
Carson turned his gyrocar in at Lon Simpson's house. There were half
a dozen other colonists around. Two of them drove up with farm trucks
loaded with mixed foliage. They had pulled up, cut off and dragged down
just about anything that grew, and loaded their truck with it. Two
other colonists were loading another cart with _thanar_ leaves, neatly
bundled and ready for the warehouse.
They regarded Carson with pleased eyes. Carson spoke severely to Cathy.
"What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on duty at the
beamphone exchange! You can be discharged--"
Lon Simpson said negligently, "I'm paying her passage. By law, anybody
can pay the passage of any woman if she intends to marry him, and then
her contract with the company is ended. They had rules like that in
ancient days--only they used to pay in tobacco instead of _thanar_
leaves."
Carson gulped. "But how will you pay her fare?" He asked sternly.
"You're in debt to the Company yourself."
Lon Simpson jerked his thumb toward his barn. Carson turned and looked.
It was a nice-looking barn. The aluminum siding set it off against a
backing of shiver trees, _dhil_ and giant _sketit_ growth. Carson's
eyes bugged out. Lon's barn was packed so tightly with _thanar_ leaves
that they bulged out the doors.
"I need to turn some of that stuff in, anyhow," said Lon pleasantly.
"I haven't got storage space for it. By law you have to buy it at five
credits a kilo. I wish you'd send out and get some. I'd like to build
up some credit. Think I'll take a trip back to Earth."
At this moment, there was a very peculiar wave of heat. It was not
violent, but the temperature went up about four degrees--suddenly, as
if somebody had turned on a room heater.
But still nobody looked up at the sun.
* * * * *
Rattled, Carson demanded furiously if Lon had converted other local
foliage into _thanar_ leaves, as he'd made his green peas and the
other stuff he'd told Cathy about on the beamphone. Lon tensed, and
observed to the other colonists that evidently all beamphones played
into recorders. The atmosphere became unfriendly. Carson got more
rattled still. He began to wave his arms and sputter.
Lon Simpson treated him gently. He took him into the house to watch the
converter at work. One of the colonists kept its large coil suitably
stuffed with assorted foliage. There was a "hand" of cured, early--best
quality--_thanar_ leaves in an erratically cut tin can. Duplicates of
that hand of best quality _thanar_ were appearing in the small coil as
fast as they were removed, and fresh foliage was being heaped into the
large coil.
"We expect," said Lon happily, "to have a bumper crop of the best grade
of _thanar_ this year. It looks like every colonist on the planet will
be able to pay off his debt to the Company and have credit left over.
We'll be sending a committee back to Earth to collect our credits there
and organize an independent cooperative trading company that will bring
out decent machinery and be a competitive buying agency for _thanar_.
I'm sure the Company will be glad to see us all so prosperous."
It was stifling hot by now, but nobody noticed. The colonists were
much too interested in seeing Carson go visibly to pieces before them.
He was one of those people who seem to have been developed by an
all-wise Providence expressly to be underlings for certain types of
large corporations. Their single purpose in life is to impress their
superiors in the corporation that hires them. But now Carson saw his
usefulness ended. Through his failure, in some fashion, the Company's
monopoly on _thanar_ leaves and its beautiful system of recruiting
labor were ruined. He would be discharged and probably blacklisted.
If he had looked up toward the western sky, squinted a little, and
gazed directly at the local sun, he would have seen that his private
troubles were of no importance at all. But he didn't. He went
staggering to his gyrocar and headed back for Cetopolis.
It was a tiny town, with plank streets, a beamphone exchange, and its
warehouses over by the spaceport. It was merely a crude and rather ugly
little settlement on a newly colonized planet. But it had been the
center of an admirable system by which the Cetis Gamma Trading Company
got magnificently rich and dispensed _thanar_ leaf (a milligram a day
kept old age away) throughout all humanity at the very top price the
traffic would bear. And the system was shaky now and Carson would be
blamed for it.
Behind him, the colonists rejoiced as hugely as Carson suffered. But
none of them got the proper perspective, because none of them looked at
the sun.
About four o'clock in the afternoon, it got suddenly hotter again,
as abruptly as before. It stayed hotter. Something made Cathy look
up. There was a thin cloud overhead, just the right thickness to act
something like a piece of smoked glass. She could look directly at the
sun through it, examine the disk with her naked eye.
But it wasn't a disk any longer. Cetis Gamma was a bulging, irregularly
shaped thing twice its normal size. As she looked, it grew larger still.
* * * * *
Out on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus was absorbed in his contemplation
of Cetis Gamma. With nothing to interfere with his scanning, he could
follow the developments perfectly. There had been first one gigantic
prominence, then two, which separated to opposite sides of its equator.
Then two other prominences began to grow between them.
For two full days, the new prominences grew, and then split, so that
the sun came to have the appearance of a ball of fire surrounded by a
ring of blue-white incandescence.
Then came instability. Flame geysers spouting hundreds of thousands
of miles into emptiness ceased to keep their formation. They turned
north and south from the equatorial line. The outline of the sun became
irregular. It ceased to be round in profile, and even the appearance
of a ring around it vanished. It looked--though this would never have
occurred to Rhadampsicus--very much like a fiercely glowing gigantic
potato. Its evolution of heat went up incredibly. It much more than
doubled its rate of radiation.
Rhadampsicus watched each detail of the flare-up with fascinated
attention. Nodalictha dutifully watched with him. But she could not
maintain her interest in so purely scientific a phenomenon.
When a thin streamer of pure blue-white jetted upward from the sun's
pole, attaining a speed of six hundred and ninety-two miles per second,
Rhadampsicus turned to her with enthusiasm.
"Exactly in the pattern of a flare-up according to Dhokis' theory!" he
exclaimed. "I have always thought he was more nearly right than the
modernists. Radiation pressure can build up in a closed system such
as the interior of a sun. It can equal the gravitational constant. And
obviously it would break loose at the pole."
Then he saw that Nodalictha's manner was one of distress. He was
instantly concerned.
"What's the matter, darling?" he asked anxiously. "I didn't mean to
neglect you, my precious one!"
Nodalictha did something that would have scared a human being out of a
year's growth, but was actually the equivalent of an unhappy, stifled
sob.
"I am a beast!" said Rhadampsicus penitently. "I've kept you here, in
boredom, while I enjoyed myself watching this sun do tricks. I'm truly
sorry, Nodalictha. We will go on at once. I shouldn't have asked you
to--"
But Nodalictha said unhappily, "It isn't you, Rhadampsicus. It's me!
While you've been watching the star, I've amused myself watching those
quaint little creatures on the second planet. I've thought of them
as--well, as pets. I've grown fond of them. It was absurd of me--"
"Oh, but it is wonderful of you," said Rhadampsicus tenderly. "I love
you all the more for it, my darling. But why are you unhappy about
them? I made sure they had food and energy."
"They're going to be burned up!" wailed Nodalictha, "and they're so
cute!"
Rhadampsicus blinked his eyes--all sixteen of them. Then he said
self-accusingly, "My dear, I should have thought of that. Of course
this is only a flare-up, darling...." Then he made an impatient
gesture. "I see! You would rather think of them as happy, in their
little way, than as burned to tiny crisps."
He considered, scanning the second planet with the normal anxiety of a
bridegroom to do anything that would remove a cloud from his bride's
lovely sixteen eyes.
* * * * *
Night fell on Cetopolis, and with it came some slight alleviation of
the dreadfulness that had begun that afternoon. The air was furnacelike
in heat and dryness. There was the smell of smoke everywhere. The stars
were faint and red and ominous, seen through the smoke that overlay
everything. So far, to be sure, breathing was possible. It was even
possible to be comfortable in an air-conditioned room. But this was
only the beginning.
Lon and Cathy sat together on the porch of his house, after sundown.
The other colonists had gone away to their own homes. When the crack
of doom has visibly begun, men do queer things. In Cetopolis some
undoubtedly got drunk, or tried to. But there were farmers who would
spend this last night looking at their drooping crops, trying to
persuade themselves that if Cetis Gamma only went back to normal before
sunrise, the crops might yet be saved. But none of them expected it.
Off to the south there was an angry reddish glare in the sky. That was
vegetation on the desert there, burning. It grew thick as jungle in the
rainy season, and dried out to pure dessication in dry weather. It had
caught fire of itself from the sun's glare in late afternoon. Great
clouds of acrid smoke rose from it to the stars.
Beyond the horizon to the west there was destruction.
Lon and Cathy sat close together. She hadn't even asked to be taken
back to Cetopolis, as convention would have required. The sun
was growing hotter still while it sank below the horizon. It was
expanding in fits and starts as new writhing spouts of stuff from its
interior burst the bonds of gravity. Blazing magma flung upward in an
unthinkable eruption. The sun had been three times normal size when it
set.
Lon was no astronomer, but plainly the end of life on the inner planets
of Cetis Gamma was at hand.
Cetis Gamma might, he considered, be in the process of becoming a
nova. Certainly beyond the horizon there was even more terrible heat
than had struck the human colony before sundown. Even if the sun
did not explode, even if it was only as fiercely blazing as at its
setting, they would die within hours after sunrise. If it increased in
brightness, by daybreak its first rays would be death itself. When dawn
came, the very first direct beams would set the shiver trees alight on
the hilltops, and as it rose the fires would go down into the valleys.
This house would smoke and writhe and melt; the air would become flame,
and the planet's surface would glow red-hot as it turned into the
sunshine.
* * * * *
"It's going to be--all right, Lon," Cathy said unconvincedly. "It's
just something happening that'll be over in a little while. But--in
case it isn't--we might as well be together. Don't you think so?"
Lon put his arm comfortingly around her. He felt a very strong impulse
to lie. He could pretend to vast wisdom and tell her the sun's behavior
was this or that, and never lasted more than a few hours, but she'd
know he lied. They could spend their last hours trying to deceive each
other out of pure affection. But they'd know it was deceit.
"D-don't you think so?" insisted Cathy faintly.
He said gently, "No, Cathy, and neither do you. This is the finish. It
would've been a lot nicer to go on living, the two of us. We'd have had
long, long years to be together. We'd have had kids, and they'd have
grown up, and we'd have had--a lot of things. But now I'm afraid we
won't."
He tried to smile at her, but it hurt. He thought passionately that
he would gladly submit himself to be burned in the slowest and most
excruciating manner if only she could be saved from it. But he couldn't
do anything.
Cathy gulped. "I-I'm afraid so, too, Lon," she said in a small voice.
"But it's nice we met each other, anyhow. Now we know we love each
other. I don't like the idea of dying, but I'm glad we knew we loved
each other before it happened."
Lon's hands clenched fiercely. Then the rage went away. He said almost
humorously, "Carson--he's back in Cetopolis. I wonder how he feels. He
has no better chance than anybody else. Maybe he's sent off spacegrams,
but no ship could possibly get here in time."
Cathy shivered a little. "Let's not think about him. Just about us. We
haven't much time."
And just then, very strangely, an idea came to Lon Simpson. He tensed.
After a moment, he said in a very queer voice, "This isn't a nova. It's
a flare-up. The sun isn't exploding. It's just too hot, too big for the
temperature inside it, and it's a closed system. So radiation pressure
has been building up. Now it's got to be released. So it will spout
geysers of its own substance. They'll go out over hundreds of thousands
of miles. But in a couple of weeks it will be back--nearly--to normal."
He suddenly knew that. He knew why it was so. He could have explained
it completely and precisely. But he didn't know how he knew. The items
that added together were themselves so self evident that he didn't even
wonder how he knew them. They _had_ to be so!
* * * * *
Cathy said muffledly, her face against his shoulder, "But we won't be
alive in a couple of weeks, Lon. We can't live long past daybreak."
He did not answer. There were more ideas coming into his mind. He
didn't know where they came from. But again they were such self
evident, unquestionable facts that he did not wonder about them. He
simply paid tense, desperately concentrated attention as they formed
themselves.
"We--may live," he said shakily. "There's an ionosphere up at the
top of the atmosphere here, just like there is on Earth. It's made
by the sunlight ionizing the thin air. The--stronger sunlight will
multiply the ionization. There'll be an--actually conducting layer of
air.... Yes.... The air will become a conductor, up there." He wet his
lips. "If I make a--gadget to--short-circuit that conducting layer to
the ground here.... When radiation photons penetrate a transparent
conductor--but there aren't any transparent conductors--the photons
will--follow the three-finger rule....
"They'll move at right angles to their former course--"
He swallowed. Then he got up very quietly. He put her aside. He went
to his tool shed. He climbed to the roof of the barn now filled with
_thanar_ leaves. He swung his axe.
The barn was roofed with aluminum over malleable plastic. The useful
property of malleable plastic is that it does not yield to steady
pressure, but does yield to shock. It will stay in shape indefinitely
under a load, but one can tap it easily into any form one desires.
Lon swung his axe, head down. Presently he asked Cathy to climb up a
ladder and hold a lantern for him. He didn't need light for the rough
work--the burning desert vegetation gave enough for that. But when one
wants to make a parabolic reflector by tapping with an axe, one needs
light for the finer part of the job.
* * * * *
In Cetopolis, Carson agitatedly put his records on tape and sent it all
off by spacegram. He'd previously reported on Lon Simpson, but now he
knew that he was going to die. And he followed his instinct to transmit
all his quite useless records, in order that his superiors might
realize he had been an admirable employee. It did not occur to him that
his superiors might be trying frantically to break his sending beam to
demand that he find out how Lon Simpson made his power gadget and how
he converted vegetation, before it was too late. They didn't succeed in
breaking his beam, because Carson kept it busy.
He was true to type.
Elsewhere, other men were true to type, too. The human population of
Cetis Gamma Two was very small. There were less than five thousand
people on the planet--all within a hundred miles of Cetopolis, and all
now on the night side. The rest of the planet's land masses scorched
and shriveled and burst into flame where the sun struck them. The few
small oceans heated and their surfaces even boiled. But nobody saw it.
The local fauna and flora died over the space of continents.
But in the human settlement area, people acted according to
their individual natures. Some few ran amok and tried to destroy
everything--including themselves--before the blazing sun could return
to do it. More sat in stunned silence, waiting for doom. A few dug
desperately, trying to excavate caves or pits in which they or their
wives or children could be safe....
But Lon pounded at his barn roof. He made a roughly parabolic mirror
some three yards across. He stripped off aluminum siding and made a
connection with the ground. He poured water around that connection. He
built a crude multiply twisted device of copper wire and put it in the
focus of the parabolic mirror.
He looked up at the sky. The stars seemed dimmer. He took the copper
thing away, and they brightened a little. He carefully adjusted it
until the stars were at their dimmest.
He descended to the ground again. He felt an odd incredulity about what
he'd done. He didn't doubt that it would work. He was simply unable to
understand how he'd thought of it.
* * * * *
"There, darling! Your pets are quite safe!" Rhadampsicus said pleasedly.
Nodalictha scanned the second planet. It was apparently coated with a
metallic covering. But it was not quite like metal. It was misty, like
an unsubstantial barrier to light--and to Nodalictha's penetrating
thoughts.
"I had your male pet," Rhadampsicus explained tenderly, "set up a power
beam link to the ionosphere. With several times the usual degree of
ionization--because of the flaring sun--the grounded ionosphere became
a _Rhinthak_ screen about the planet. The more active the sun, the
more dense the screen. They'll have light to see by when their side of
the planet is toward the sun, but no harmful radiation can get down to
them. And the screen will fade away as the sun goes back to its normal
state."
Nodalictha rejoiced. Then she was a little distressed.
"But now I can't watch them!" she pouted. Rhadampsicus watched her
gravely. She said ruefully, "I see, Rhadampsicus. You've spoiled me!
But if I can't watch them for the time being, I won't have anything to
occupy me. Darling Rhadampsicus, you must talk to me sometimes!"
He talked to her absorbedly. He seemed to think, however, that
discussion of the local solar phenomena was conversation. With
feminine guile, she pretended to be satisfied, but presently she went
back to her housekeeping. She began to dream of their life when they
had returned home, and of the residence they would inhabit there.
Presently she was planning the parties she would give as a young
matron, with canapés of krypton snow and zenon ice, with sprinklings of
lovely red nickel bromide crystals for a garnish--
* * * * *
The sun rose again, and they lived. It was as if the sky were covered
with a thick cloud bank which absorbed the monstrous radiation of a sun
now four times its previous diameter and madly changing shape like a
monstrous ameba of flame.
In time the sun set. It rose again. It set. And Cetis Gamma Two
remained a living planet instead of being a scorched cinder.
When four days had gone by and nobody died, the colonists decided that
they might actually keep on living. They had at first no especially
logical foundation for their belief.
But Cathy boasted. And she boasted in Cetopolis. Since they were going
to keep on living, the conventions required that she return to the
planet's one human settlement and her duties as a beamphone operator.
It wasn't proper for her to stay unchaperoned so long as she and Lon
weren't married yet.
She had no difficulty with Carson. He didn't refer to her desertion.
Carson had his own troubles. Now that he had decided that he would
live, his problems multiplied. The colonists' barns were filled to
capacity with _thanar_ leaves which would pay off their debts to the
Company. He began to worry about that.
Lost without the constant directives from the Company, he had his
technicians step up the power in the settlement transmitter. He
knew that the screen Lon had put up would stop ordinary spacegram
transmission. Even with a tight beam, he could broadcast and receive
only at night, when the screen was thinnest. Even so, he had to search
out holes in the screen.
The system didn't work perfectly--it wasn't two-way at all, until the
Company stepped up the power in its own transmitter--but spacegrams
started to get through again.
Carson smiled in relief. He began to regain some of his old arrogantly
bored manner. Now that the Company's guiding hand was once more with
him, nothing seemed as bad as it had been. He was able to report that
something had happened to save the colony from extinction, and that
Lon Simpson had probably done it.
In return, he got a spacegram demanding full particulars, and precise
information on the devices he had reported Lon Simpson to have made.
Humbly, Carson obeyed his corporation.
* * * * *
He pumped Cathy--which was not difficult, because she was bursting with
pride in Lon. She confirmed, in detail, the rumor that Lon was somehow
responsible for the protective screen that was keeping everybody alive.
Carson sent the information by spacegram. He was informed that a
special Company ship was heading for Cetis Gamma Two at full speed.
Carson would take orders from its skipper when it arrived. Meanwhile,
he would buy _thanar_ leaf if absolutely necessary, but stall as long
as possible. The legal staff of the Trading Company was working on
the problem of adapting the system to get the new surplus supplies of
_thanar_ without letting anybody get anything in particular for it. He
would keep secret the coming of the special ship, which was actually
the space yacht of a member of the Board of Directors. And he would
display great friendliness toward Lon Simpson.
The last was the difficult part, because Lon Simpson was becoming
difficult. With the sun writhing as if in agony overhead--seen dimly
through a permanent blessed mistiness--and changing shape from hour
to hour, Lon Simpson had discovered something new to get mad about.
Lon had felt definitely on top of the world. He had solved the problem
of clearing his debts and getting credit sufficient for two passages
back to Earth, with money there to take care of getting rich on his
inventions. There was no reason to delay marriage. He wanted to get
married. And through a deplorable oversight, there had been no method
devised by which a legal marriage ceremony could be performed on Cetis
Gamma Two.
It was one of those accidental omissions which would presently be
rectified. But the legal minds who'd set up the system for the planet
had been thinking of money, not marriages. They hadn't envisioned
connubial bliss as a service the Company should provide. And Lon was
raising cain. His barn was literally bursting with _thanar_ leaves,
and he was filling up his attic, extra bedroom, living quarters and
kitchen with more. He was rich. He wanted to get married. And it wasn't
possible.
Lon was in a position to raise much more cain than ordinary. He'd made
an amicable bargain with his fellow colonists. They brought truckloads
of miscellaneous foliage to be put into his vegetation converter, and
he converted it all into _thanar_ leaves. The product was split two
ways. Everybody was happy--except Carson--Because every colonist had
already acquired enough _thanar_ leaf to pay himself out of debt, and
was working on extra capital.
If this kept up, the galactic market would be broken.
Carson had nightmares about that.
* * * * *
So the sun went through convulsions in emptiness, and nobody on its
second planet paid any attention at all. After about a week, it
occasionally subsided. When that happened, the ionization of the
planet's upper atmosphere lessened, the radiation screen grew thinner,
and a larger proportion of light reached the surface. When the sun
flared higher, the shield automatically grew thicker. An astronomical
phenomenon which should have destroyed all life on the inner planets
came to be taken for granted.
But events on the second planet were not without consequences
elsewhere. The Board of Directors of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company
simultaneously jittered and beamed with anticipation. If Lon could
convert one form of vegetable product into another, then the Company's
monopoly of _thanar_ would vanish as soon as he got loose with his
device. On the other hand, if the Company could get that device for its
very own....
_Thanar_ had a practically unlimited market. Every year a new age
group of the population needed a milligram a day to keep old age away.
But besides that, there was Martian _zuss_ fiber, which couldn't be
marketed because there wasn't enough of it, but would easily fetch a
thousand credits a kilo if Lon's gadget could produce it from samples.
There was that Arcturian _sicces_ dust--the pollen of an inordinately
rare plant on Arcturus Four--which could be sold at more than its
weight in diamonds, for perfume. And--
The directors of the Company shivered over what might happen; and
gloated over what could. So they kept their fingers crossed while the
space yacht of one of their number sped toward Cetis Gamma Two, manned
by very trustworthy men who would carry out their instructions with
care and vigor and no nonsense about it.
Lon Simpson worked with his neighbors, converting all sorts of
vegetable debris--the fact that some of it was scorched did not
seem to matter--into _thanar_ leaf which was sound legal tender on
that particular planet. From time to time he went to Cetopolis. He
talked sentimentally and yearningly to Cathy. And then he went to
Carson's office and raised the very devil because there was as yet no
arrangement by which he and Cathy could enter into the state of holy
matrimony.
* * * * *
Rhadampsicus looked over his notes and was very well pleased. He
explained to Nodalictha that from now on the return of Cetis Gamma to
its normal condition would be a cut-and-dried affair. He would like to
stay and watch it, but the important phenomena were all over now. He
said solicitously that if she wanted to go on, completing their nuptial
journey.... She might be anxious to see her family and friends.... She
might be lonely....
Nodalictha smiled at him. The process would have been horrifying to a
human who watched, but Rhadampsicus smiled back.
"Lonely?" asked Nodalictha coyly. "With you, Rhadampsicus?"
He impulsively twined his eye stalks about hers. A little later he was
saying tenderly, "Then I'll just finish my observations, darling, and
we'll go on--since you don't mind waiting."
"I'd like to see my pets again," said Nodalictha, nestling comfortably
against him.
Together, they scanned the second planet, but their thoughts could
not penetrate its _Rhinthak_ screen. They saw the space yacht flash
up to it. Rhadampsicus inspected the minds of the bipeds inside it.
Nodalictha, of course, modestly refrained from entering the minds of
male creatures other than her husband.
"Peculiar," commented Rhadampsicus. "Very peculiar. If I were a
sociologist, I might find it less baffling. But they must have a very
queer sort of social system. They actually intend to harm your pets,
Nodalictha, because the male now knows how to supply them all with food
and energy! Isn't that strange? I wish the _Rhinthak_ screen did not
block off scanning.... But it will fade, presently."
"You will keep the others from harming my pets," said Nodalictha
confidently. "Do you know, darling, I think I must be quite the
luckiest person in the Galaxy, to be married to you."
* * * * *
The space yacht landed at the field outside Cetopolis. Inhabitants
of the tiny town flocked to the field to see new faces. They were
disappointed. One man came out and the airlock closed. No visitors.
The skipper went into Carson's office. He closed the door firmly
behind him. He had very beady eyes and a very hard-boiled expression.
He looked at Carson with open contempt, and Carson felt that it was
because Carson did the Company's dirty work with figures and due
regard for law and order, instead of frankly and violently and without
shilly-shallying.
"This Lon Simpson's got those gadgets, eh?" asked the skipper.
"Why--yes," said Carson unhappily. "He's very popular at the moment. He
made something on his barn roof that kept the sun from burning us all
to death, you know--that still keeps us from burning to death, for that
matter."
"So if we take it away or smash it," observed the skipper, "we don't
have to worry about anybody saying nasty things about us afterward.
Yeah?"
Carson swallowed.
"Everybody'd die if you smashed the gadget," he admitted, "but all the
_thanar_ plants in existence would be burned up, too. There'd be no
more _thanar_. The Company wouldn't like that."
The skipper waved his hand. "How do I get this Simpson on my ship? Take
a bunch of my men and go grab him?"
"Wh-what are you going to do with him?"
"Don't you worry," said the skipper comfortingly. "We know how to
handle it. He knows how to make some things the bosses want to know how
to make. Once I get him on the ship, he'll tell. We got ways. Do I take
some men and grab him, or will you get him on board peaceable?"
"There--ah--" Carson licked his lips. "He wants to get married. There's
no provision in the legal code for it, as yet. It was overlooked. But I
can tell him that as a ship captain, you--"
The skipper nodded matter of factly.
"Right. You get him and the girl on board. And I've got some orders for
you. Gather up plenty of _thanar_ seed. Get some starting trays with
young plants in them. I'll come back in a couple of days and take you
and them on board. The stuff this guy has got is too good, understand?"
"N-no. I'm afraid I don't."
* * * * *
"I get this guy to tell us how to make his gadgets," the skipper
explained contemptuously. "We make sure he tells us right. To be extra
sure, we leave the gadgets he's got made and working back here, where
he can't get to 'em and spoil 'em. But when we know all he knows--and
what he only guesses, too, and my tame scientists have made the same
kinda gadgets, an' they work--why, we come back and pick you up, and
the _thanar_ seed and the young growing plants. Then we get the gadgets
this guy made here, and we head back for Earth."
"But if you take the gadget that keeps us all from being burned up--"
Carson said agitatedly, "if you do, everybody here--"
"Won't that be too bad!" the skipper said ironically. "But you won't be
here. You'll be on the yacht. Don't worry. Now go fix it for the girl
and him to walk into our parlor."
Carson's hand shook as he reached for the beamphone. His voice was not
quite normal as he explained to Cathy in the exchange that the skipper
of the space yacht had the legal power to perform marriage ceremonies
in space. And Carson, as a gesture of friendship to one of the most
prominent colonists, had asked if the captain would oblige Cathy and
Lon. The captain had agreed. If they made haste, he would take them out
in space and marry them.
The skipper of the space yacht regarded him with undisguised scorn when
he hung up the phone and mopped his face.
"Pretty girl, eh?" he asked contemptuously, "and you didn't have the
nerve to grab her for yourself?" He did not wait for an answer. "I'll
look her over. You get your stuff ready for when I come back in a
couple of days."
"But--when you release them," Carson said shakily, "They'll report--"
The skipper looked at Carson without any expression at all. Then he
went out.
Carson felt sick. But he was a very loyal employee of the Cetis Gamma
Trading Company. From the windows of his air-conditioned office, he
watched Lon Simpson greet Cathy on his arrival in Cetopolis. He saw
Cathy put a sprig of _chanel_ blossoms on the lapel of her very best
suit, in lieu of a bridal bouquet. And he watched them go with shining
faces toward the airport. He didn't try to stop them.
Later he heard the space yacht take off.
* * * * *
Nodalictha prepared to share the thoughts and the happiness of the
female biped whose emotions were familiar, since Nodalictha was so
recently a bride herself. Rhadampsicus was making notes, but he
gallantly ceased when Nodalictha called to him. They sat, then, before
their crude but comfortable bower on the ninth planet, all set to share
the quaint rejoicing of the creatures of which Nodalictha had grown
fond.
Nodalictha penetrated the thoughts of the female, in pleased
anticipation. Rhadampsicus scanned the mind of the male, and his
expression changed. He shifted his thought to another and another of
the bipeds in the ship's company. He spoke with some distaste.
"The ones you consider your pets, Nodalictha, are amiable enough. But
the others--" He frowned. "Really, darling, if you went into their
minds, you'd be most displeased. They are quite repulsive. Let's forget
about them and start for home. If you really care for pets, we've much
more suitable creatures there."
Nodalictha pouted.
"Rhadampsicus, let's just watch their marriage ceremony. It is so
cute to think of little creatures like that loving each other--and
marrying--"
Rhadampsicus withdrew his thought from the space yacht and looked
about the charming rural retreat he and Nodalictha had occupied.
Its nitrogen-snow walls glittered in the starlight. The garden of
cyanogen flowers and the border of ammonia crystals and the walkway
of monoclinic sulphur, and the reflection pool of liquid hydrogen
he'd installed in an odd half hour. These were simple, but they were
delightful. The crudity of the space yacht with its metal walls so
curiously covered over with a coating of lead oxide in hardened oil,
and the vegetable gum flooring.... Rhadampsicus did not like the
surroundings men made for themselves in space.
"Very well, darling," he said resignedly. "We will watch, and then
we'll take off for home. I'm anxious to see what the modernists have
to say when I show them my notes on this flare-up.--And of course," he
added with grave humor, "you want to show your family that I haven't
ill-treated you."
He was the barest trace impatient, but Nodalictha's thoughts were with
the female biped in the spaceship. Her expression was distressed.
"Rhadampsicus!" she said angrily. "The other bipeds are being unkind to
my pets! Do something! I don't like them!"
* * * * *
A sailor in a soiled uniform led them into the space yacht's saloon.
The airlock clanked shut, and the yacht soared for the skies. The
sailor vanished. Nobody else came near. Then Lon stiffened. He got the
flavor of his surroundings. He had Cathy with him. On her account, his
flesh crawled suddenly.
This was a space yacht, but of a very special kind. It was a pleasure
ship. The decorations were subtly disgusting. There were pictures on
the walls, and at first glance they were pretty enough, but on second
glance they were disquieting, and when carefully examined they were
elaborately and allusively monstrous. This was the yacht of someone
denying that anything could be more desirable than pleasure--and who
took his pleasure in a most unattractive fashion.
Lon grasped this much, and it occurred to him that the crew of such a
yacht would be chosen for its willingness to coöperate in its owner's
enterprises. And Lon went somewhat pale, for Cathy was with him.
The ship went up and up, with the dark shutters over the ports showing
that it was in sunshine fierce enough to be dangerous on unshielded
flesh. Presently there was the feel of maneuvering. After a time the
shutters flipped open and stars were visible.
Lon went quickly to a port and looked out. The great black mass of the
night side of Cetis Gamma Two filled half the firmament. It blotted
out the sun. The space yacht might be two or three thousand miles up
and in the planet's umbra--its shadow--which was not necessary for a
space wedding, or for anything involving a reasonably brief stay in the
excessive heat Cetis Gamma gave off.
There were clankings. A door opened. The skipper came in and Cathy
smiled at him because she didn't realize Lon's fierce apprehension.
Four other men followed, all in soiled and untidy space yacht uniforms,
then two other men in more ordinary clothing. Their expressions were
distinctly uneasy.
The four sailors walked matter of factly over to Lon and grabbed at
him. They should have taken him completely by surprise, but he had been
warned just enough to explode into battle. It was a very pretty fight,
for a time. Lon kept three of them busy. One snarled with a wrenched
wrist, another spat blood and teeth and a third had a closed eye before
the fourth swung a chair. Then Lon hit something with his head. It was
the deck, but he didn't know it.
* * * * *
When he came to, he was hobbled. He was not bound so he couldn't move,
but his hands were handcuffed together, with six inches of chain
between for play. His ankles were similarly restricted. He could
move, but he could not fight. Blood was trickling down his temple and
somebody was holding his head up.
The skipper said impatiently, "All right, stand back."
Lon's head was released. The skipper jerked a thumb. Men went out.
Lon looked about desperately for Cathy. She was there--dead white and
terrified, but apparently unharmed. She stared at Lon in wordless
pleading.
"You're a suspicious guy, aren't you?" asked the skipper sardonically.
"Somebody lays a finger on you and you start fighting. But you've got
the idea. I'll say it plain so we can get moving. You're Lon Simpson.
Carson, down on the planet, reported some nice news about you. You made
a gadget that converts any sort of leaf to _thanar_. Maybe it turns
stuff to other stuff, too." He paused. "We want to know how to make
gadgets like that. You're gonna draw plans an' explain the theory. I
got guys here to listen. We're gonna make one, from your plans an'
explanations, an' it'd better work. See?"
"Carson sent for you to do this," Lon Simpson said thickly.
"He did. The Company wants it. They'll use it to make _zuss_ fiber and
sicces dust, and stuff like that. Maybe dream dust, too, an' so on. The
point is you're gonna tell us how to make those gadgets. How about it?"
Lon licked his lips. He said slowly, "I think there's more. Go on."
"You made another gadget," said the skipper, with relish, "that turns
out power without fuel. The Company wants that, too. Spacelines will
pay for it. Cities will pay for it. It ought to be a pretty nice thing.
You're gonna make plans and explanations of how that works and we're
gonna make sure they're right. That clear?"
"Will you let us go when I've told you?" Lon asked bitterly.
"Not without one more gadget," the skipper added amiably. "You made
something that put a screen around the planet yonder, so it didn't
get burned up. It'd oughta be useful. The company'll put one around
Mercury. Convenient for minin' operations. One around that planet
that's too close to Sirius. Oh, there's plenty of places that'll be
useful. So you'll get set to draw up the plans for that, too--_and_
explanations of how it works. Then we'll talk about lettin' you go."
* * * * *
Lon knew that he wouldn't be let go in any case. Not after he'd told
them what was wanted. Not by men who'd work on a pleasure craft like
this. Not with Cathy a prisoner with him. But he might as well get all
the cards down.
"And if I won't tell you what you want to know?" he asked.
The skipper shrugged his shoulders. "You were knocked out a while," he
said without heat. "While we were waitin' for you to come to, we told
her--" he jerked his thumb at Cathy--"what would happen to her if you
weren't obligin'. We told her plenty. She knows we mean it. We won't
hurt you until we've finished with her. So you'd better get set to
talk. I'll let her see if she can persuade you peaceable. I'll give her
ten minutes."
He went out. The door clicked shut behind him and Lon knew that this
was the finish. He looked at Cathy's dazed, horror-filled eyes. He knew
this wasn't a bluff. He was up against the same system that had brought
colonists to Cetis Gamma Two. The brains that had planned that system
had planned this. They'd gotten completely qualified men to do their
dirty work in both cases.
"Lon, darling! Please kill me!" Cathy said in a hoarse whisper.
He looked at her in astonishment.
"Please kill me!" repeated Cathy desperately. "They--they can't ever
dare let us go, Lon, after what they've told me! They've got to kill us
both. But--Lon, darling--please kill me first...."
An idea came into Lon's mind. He surveyed it worriedly. He knew that he
would have to tell what he knew and then he would be killed. The Cetis
Gamma Trading Company wanted his inventions, and it would need him dead
after it had them.
The idea was hopeless, but he had to try it. They knew he'd made
gadgets which did remarkable things. If he made something now and
persuaded them that it was a weapon....
His flesh crawled with horror. Not for himself, but for Cathy. He
fumbled in his pockets. A pocket knife. A key chain. String. His
face was completely gray. He ripped an upholstered seat. There were
coiled springs under the foamite. He pulled away a piece of decorative
molding. He knew it wouldn't work, but there wasn't anything else
to do. His hands moved awkwardly, with the handcuffs limiting their
movements.
Time passed. He had something finished. It was a bit of wood with a
coil spring from the chair, with his key chain wrapped around it and
his pocket knife set in it so that the blade would seem to make a
contact. But it would achieve nothing whatever.
Cathy stared at him. Her eyes were desperate, but she believed. She'd
seen three equally improbable devices perform wonders. While Lon made
something that looked like the nightmare of an ultimatist sculptor, she
watched in terrified hope.
* * * * *
He had it in his hand when the door opened again and the skipper came
back into the saloon. He said prosaically, "Shall I call in the
scientist guys to listen, or the persuader guys to work on her?"
"Neither. I've made another gadget," Lon said from a dry throat. "It
will kill you. It'll kill everybody on the ship--from here. You're
going to put us back down on the planet below."
The skipper did not look at the gadget, but at Lon's face. Then he
called. The four men of the crew and the two uneasy scientists came in.
"We got to persuade," the skipper said sardonically. "He just told me
he's made a new gadget that'll kill us all."
He moved unhurriedly toward Lon. Lon knew that his bluff was no good.
If the thing had actually been a weapon, he'd have been confident and
assured. He didn't feel that way, but he raised the thing menacingly as
the skipper approached.
The skipper took it away, laughing.
"We'll tie him in a chair an' get to work on her. When he's ready
to talk, we'll stop." He looked at the object in his hands. It was
ridiculous to look at. It was as absurd as the device that extracted
power from matter stresses, and the machine that converted one kind
of vegetation into another, and the apparatus--partly barn roof--that
had short-circuited the ionosphere of Cetis Gamma Two to the planet's
solid surface. It looked very foolish indeed.
The skipper was amused.
"Look out, you fellas," he said humorously. "It's gonna kill you!"
He crooked his finger and the knifeblade made a contact. He swept it
in mock menace about the saloon. The four crew-members and the two
scientists went stiff. He gaped at them, then turned the device to
stare at it incredulously. He came within its range.
He stiffened. Off-balance, he fell on the device, breaking its gimcrack
fastenings and the contact which transmitted nothing that Lon Simpson
could imagine coming out of it. The others fell, one by one, with
peculiarly solid impacts.
Their flesh was incredibly hard. It was as solid, in fact, as so much
mahogany.
* * * * *
Nodalictha said warmly, "You're a darling, Rhadampsicus! It was
outrageous of those nasty creatures to intend to harm my pets! I'm glad
you attended to them!"
"And I'm glad you're pleased, my dear," Rhadampsicus said pleasantly.
"Now shall we set out for home?"
Nodalictha looked about the cosy landscape of the ninth planet of
Cetis Gamma. There were jagged peaks of frozen air, and mountain ranges
of water, solidified ten thousand aeons ago. There were frost-trees
of nitrogen, the elaborate crystal formations of argon, and here a
wide sweep of oxygen crystal sward, with tiny peeping wild crystals of
deep-blue cyanogen seeming to grow more thickly by the brook of liquid
hydrogen. And there was their bower; primitive, but the scene of a true
honeymoon idyll.
"I almost hate to go home, Rhadampsicus," Nodalictha said. "We've been
so happy here. Will you remember it for always?"
"Naturally," said Rhadampsicus. "I'm glad you've been happy."
Nodalictha snuggled up to him and twined eye stalks with him.
"Darling," she said softly, "you've been wonderful, and I've been
spoiled, and you've let me be. But I'm going to be a very dutiful wife
from now on, Rhadampsicus. Only it has been fun, having you be so nice
to me!"
"It's been fun for me, too," replied Rhadampsicus gallantly.
Nodalictha took a last glance around, and each of her sixteen eyes
glowed sentimentally. Then she scanned the far-distant spaceship in the
shadow of the second planet from the now subsiding sun.
"My pets," she said tenderly. "But--Rhadampsicus, what are they doing?"
"They've discovered that the crew of their vehicle--they call it a
space yacht--aren't dead, that they're only in suspended animation. And
they've decided in some uneasiness that they'd better take them back to
Earth to be revived."
"How nice! I knew they were sweet little creatures!"
Rhadampsicus hesitated a moment.
"From the male's mind I gather something else. Since the crew of this
space yacht was incapacitated, and they were--ah--not employed on
it, he and your female will bring it safely to port, and, I gather
that they have a claim to great reward. Ah--it is something they
call 'salvage.' He plans to use it to secure other rewards he calls
'patents' and they expect to live happily ever after."
"And," cried Nodalictha gleefully, "from the female's mind I know that
she is very proud of him, because she doesn't know that you designed
all the instruments he made, darling. She's speaking to him now,
telling him she loves him very dearly."
Then Nodalictha blushed a little, because in a faraway space yacht
Cathy had kissed Lon Simpson. The process seemed highly indecorous to
Nodalictha, so recently a bride.
"Yes," said Rhadampsicus, drily. "He is returning the compliment. It is
quaint to think of such small creatures--Ha! Nodalictha, you should be
pleased again. He is telling her that they will be married when they
reach Earth, and that she shall have a white dress and a veil and a
train. But I am afraid we cannot follow to witness the ceremony."
Their tentacles linked and their positron blasts mingling, the two of
them soared up from the surface of the ninth planet of Cetis Gamma.
They swept away, headed for their home at the extreme outer tip of the
most far-flung arm of the spiral outposts of the Galaxy.
"But still," said Nodalictha, as they swept through emptiness at a
speed unimaginable to humans, "they're wonderfully cute."
"Yes, darling," Rhadampsicus agreed, unwilling to start an argument so
soon after the wedding. "But not as cute as you."
* * * * *
On the space yacht, Lon Simpson tried to use his genius to invent a way
to get his handcuffs and leg-irons off. He failed completely.
Cathy had to get the keys out of the skipper's pocket and unlock them
for him.
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