“There is a chance,” Lemuel admitted. “All of them would not destroy themselves to the same degree, of course. Nor would the pattern of destruction always be the same. From say, a thousand of them, you might be able to work out a good idea of what kind of machinery there was in the cone.”
“And say we could find out what kind of machinery was there?’
“That’s a hard one to answer, Steve,” Abraham said. “Even if we had one complete and functioning, I honestly don’t know if we could ferret out the principle to the point where we could duplicate it. You must remember that at no time has the human race come even close to something of this nature.”
It made a withering sort of sense to Sheridan. Seeing a totally unfamiliar device work, even having it blueprinted in exact detail, would convey nothing whatever if the theoretical basis was missing. It was, completely, and there was a great deal less available here than a blueprint or even working model.
“They used those machines to transport the podars,” he said, “and possibly to transport the people. And if that is true, it must be the people went voluntarily – we’d have known if there was force involved. Abe, can you tell me: Why would-the people go?” “I wouldn’t know,” said Abraham. “All I have now is a physicist transmog. Give me one on sociology and I’ll wrestle with the problem.”
There was a shout outside the barn and they whirled toward the door. Ebenezer was coming up the ramp and in his arms he carried a tiny, dangling form.
“It’s one of them,” gasped Gideon. “It’s a native, sure enough!”
Ebenezer knelt and placed the little native tenderly on the floor. “I found him in the field. He was lying in a ditch. I’m afraid he’s done for.”
Sheridan stepped forward and bent above the native. It was an old man – any one of the thousands of old men he’d seen in the villages. The same leathery old face with the wind and weather wrinkles in it, the same shaggy brows shielding deep-sunk eyes, the same scraggly crop of whiskers, the same sense of forgotten shiftlessness and driven stubbornness.
“Left behind,” said Ebenezer. “Left behind when all the others went. He must have fallen sick out in the field…”
“Get my canteen,” Sheridan said. “It’s hanging by the door.”
The oldster opened his eyes and glanced around the circle of faces that stared down at him. He rubbed a hand across his face, leaving streaks of dirt.
“I fell,” he mumbled. “I remember falling. I fell into a ditch.”
“Here’s the water, Steve,” said Abraham.
Sheridan took it, lifted the old man and held him half upright against his chest. He tilted the canteen to the native’s lips. The oldster drank unneatly, gulping at the water.
Some of it spilled, splashing down his whiskers to drip onto his belly.
Sheridan took the canteen away.
“Thank you,” the native said and, Sheridan reflected, that was the first civil word to come their way from any of the natives.
The native rubbed his face again with a dirty claw. “The people all are gone?”
“All gone,” said Sheridan.
“Too late,” the old man said. “I would have made it if I hadn’t fallen down. Perhaps they hunted for me…” His voice trailed off into nothingness.
“If you don’t mind, sir,” suggested Hezekiah, “I’ll get a medic transmog.”
“Perhaps you should,” said Sheridan. “Although I doubt it’ll do much good. He should have died days ago out there in the field.”
“Steve,” said Gideon, speaking softly, “a human doctor isn’t too much use treating alien people. In time, if we had the time, we could find out about this fellow – something about his body chemistry and his metabolism. Then we could doctor him.”
“That’s right, Steve,” Abraham said.
Sheridan shrugged. “All right then, Hezekiah. Forget about the transmog.”
He laid the old man back on the floor again and got up off his knees. He sat on his heels and rocked slowly back and forth.
“Perhaps,” he said to the native, “you’ll answer one question. Where did all your people go?”
“In there,” the native said, raising a feeble arm to point at the machine. “In there, and then they went away just as the harvest we gathered did.”
Sheridan stayed squatting on the floor beside the stricken native.
Reuben brought in an armload of grass and wadded it beneath the native’s head as a sort of pillow.
So the Garsonians had really gone away, Sheridan told himself, had up and left the planet. Had left it, using the machines that had been used to make delivery of the podars. And if Galactic Enterprises had machines like that, then they (whoever, wherever they might be) had a tremendous edge on Central Trading. For Central Trading’s lumbering cargo sleds, snaking their laborious way across the light-years, could offer only feeble competition to machines like those.
He had thought, be remembered, the first day they had landed, that a little competition was exactly what Central Trading needed. And here was that competition – a competition that had not a hint of ethics. A competition that sneaked in behind Central Trading’s back and grabbed the market that Central Trading needed – the market that Central could have cinched if it had not fooled around, if it had not been so sly and cynical about adapting the podar crop to Earth. Just where and how, he wondered, had Galactic Enterprises found out about the podars and the importance of the drug? Under what circumstances had they learned the exact time limit during which they could operate in the podar market without Central interference? And had they, perhaps, been slightly optimistic in regard to that time limit and gotten caught in a situation where they had been forced to destroy all those beautiful machines?
Sheridan chuckled quietly to himself. That destruction must have hurt them!
It wasn’t hard, however, to imagine a hundred or a thousand ways in which they might have learned about the podar situation, for they were a charming people and really quite disarming. He would not be surprised if some of them might be operating secretly inside of Central Trading.
The native stirred. He reached out a skinny hand and tugged at the sleeve of Sheridan’s jacket.
“Yes, what is it, friend?”
“You will stay with me?” the native begged. “These others here, they are not the same as you and…”
“I will stay with you,” Sheridan promised.
“I think we’d better go,” said Gideon. “Maybe we disturb him.”
The robots walked quietly from the barn and left the two alone.
Reaching out, Sheridan put a hand on the native’s brow. The flesh was clammy cold.
“Old friend,” he said, “I think perhaps you owe me something.”
The old man shook his head, rolling it slowly back and forth upon the pillow. And the fierce light of stubbornness and a certain slyness came into his eyes.
“We don’t owe you,” he said. “We owed the other ones.”
And that, of course, hadn’t been what Sheridan had meant.
But there they lay – the words that told the story, the solution to the puzzle that was Garson IV.
“That was why you wouldn’t trade with us,” said Sheridan, talking to himself rather than to the old native on the floor.
“You were so deep in debt to these other people that you needed all the podars to pay off what you owed them?”
And that must have been the way it was. Now that he thought back on it, that supplied the one logical explanation for everything that happened. The reaction of the natives, the almost desperate sales resistance was exactly the kind of thing one would expect from people in debt up to their ears.
That was the reason, too, the houses bad been so neglected and the clothes had been in rags. It accounted for the change from the happy-go-lucky shiftlessness to the beaten and defeated and driven attitude. So pushed, so hounded, so fearful that they could not meet the payments on the debt that they strained their every resource, drove themselves to ever harder work, squeezing from the soil every podar they could grow.
“That was it?” he demanded sharply. “That was the way it was?”
The native nodded with reluctance.
“They came along and offered such a bargain that you could not turn it down. For the machines, perhaps? For the machines to send you to other places?”
The native shook his head. “No, not the machines. We put the podars in the machines and the podars went away. That was how we paid.”
“You were paying all these years?”
“That is right,” the native said. Then he added, with a flash of pride: “But now we’re all paid up.”
“That is fine,” said Sheridan. “It is good for a man to pay his debts.”
“They took three years off the payments,” said the native eagerly. ‘Was that not good of them?”