The Third Murray Leinster Page 7

  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 no
thing 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.…