“How you got it figured, Steve?”
“You can never figure one beforehand,” Sheridan told him. “The boys are all set for an easy time and I hope they have it. But this is an alien planet and I never bet on aliens.”
“You look for any trouble?”
“I don’t look for anything. I just sit and wait and hope feebly for the best. Once the reports start coming in…”
“If you worry so much, why not go out yourself?”
Sheridan shook his head. “Look at it this way, Nappy. I am not a salesman and this crew is. There’d be no sense in my going out. I’m not trained for it.”
And, he thought, the fact of the matter was that he was not trained for anything. He was not a salesman and he was not a spacehand; he was not any of the things that the robots were or could be.
He was just a human, period, a necessary cog in a team of robots.
There was a law that said no robot or no group of robots could be assigned a task without human supervision, but that was not the whole of it. It was, rather, something innate in the robot makeup, not built into them, but something that was there and always might be there – the ever-present link between the robot and his human.
Sent out alone, a robot team would blunder and bog down, would in the end become unstuck entirely – would wind up worse than useless. With a human accompanying them, there was almost no end to their initiative and their capability.
It might, he thought, be their need of leadership, although in very truth the human member of the team sometimes showed little of that. It might be the necessity for some symbol of authority and yet, aside from their respect and consideration for their human, the robots actually bowed to no authority.
It was something deeper, Sheridan told himself, than mere leadership or mere authority. It was comparable to the affection and rapport which existed as an undying bond between a man and dog and yet it had no tinge of the god-worship associated with the dog.
He said to Napoleon: “How about yourself? Don’t you ever hanker to go out? If you’d just say the word, you could.”
“I like to cook,” Napoleon stated. He dug at the ground with a metal finger. “I guess, Steve, you could say I’m pretty much an old retainer.”
“A transmog would take care of that in a hurry.”
“And then who’d cook for you? You know you’re a lousy cook.”
Sheridan ate his lunch and sat in his chair, staring at the lake, waiting for the first reports on the radio.
The job at last was started. All that had gone before – the loading of the cargo, the long haul out through space, the establishing of the orbits and the unshipping of the cargo – had been no more than preliminary to this very moment.
The job was finally started, but it was far from done. There would be months of work. There would be many problems and a thousand headaches. But they’d get it done, he told himself with a sure pride. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stump this gang of his.
Late in the afternoon, Hezekiah came with the word:
“Abraham is calling, sir. It seems that there is trouble.”
Sheridan leaped to his feet and ran to the shack. He pulled up a chair and reached for the headset. “That you, Abe? How is it going, boy?”
“Badly, Steve,” said Abraham. “They aren’t interested in doing business. They want the stuff, all right. You can see the way they look at it. But they aren’t buying. You know what I think? I don’t believe they have anything to trade.”
‘That’s ridiculous, Abe! They’ve been growing podars all these years. The barns are crammed with them.”
‘Their barn is all nailed up,” said Abraham. “They have bars across the door and the windows boarded. When I tried to walk up to it, they acted sort of ugly.”
“I’ll be right out,” decided Sheridan. “I want to look this over.” He stood up and walked out of the shack. “Hezekiah, get the flier started. We’re going out and have a talk with Abe. Nappy, you mind the radio. Call me at Abe’s village if anything goes wrong.”
“I’ll stay right here beside it,” Napoleon promised him.
Hezekiah brought the flier down in the village square, landing it beside the floater, still loaded with its merchandise.
Abraham strode over to them as soon as they were down. “I’m glad you came, Steve. They want me out of here. They don’t want us around.”
Sheridan climbed from the flyer and stood stiffly in the square. There was a sense of wrongness – a wrongness with the village and the People – something wrong and different.
There were a lot of natives standing around the square, lounging in the doorways and leaning against the trees. There was a group of them before the barred door of the massive barn that stood in the center of the square, as if they might be a guard assigned to protect the barn.
“When I first came down,” said Abraham, “they crowded around the floater and stood looking at the stuff and you could see they could hardly keep their hands off it. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t talk too much, except to say that they were poor. Now all they do is just stand off and glare.”
The barn was a monumental structure when gauged against the tiny houses of the village. It stood up foursquare and solid and entirely without ornament and it was an alien thing – alien of Earth. For, Sheridan realized, it was the same kind of barn that he had seen on the backwoods farms of Earth – the great hip-roof, the huge barn door, the ramp up to the door, and even the louvered cupola that rode astride the ridge-pole.
The man and the two robots stood in a pool of hostile silence and the lounging natives kept on staring at them and there was something decidedly wrong.
Sheridan turned slowly and glanced around the square and suddenly he knew what the wrongness was.
The place was shabby; it approached the downright squalid. The houses were neglected and no longer neat and the streets were littered. And the people were a piece with all the rest of it.
“Sir,” said Hezekiah, “they are a sorry lot.”
And they were all of that.
There was something in their faces that had a look of haunting and their shoulders stooped and there was fatigue upon them.
“I can’t understand it,” said the puzzled Abraham. “The data says they were a happy-go-lucky bunch, but look at them out there. Could the data have been wrong?”
“No, Abe. It’s the people who have changed.”
For there was no chance that the data could be wrong. It had been compiled by a competent team, one of the very best, and headed by a human who had long years of experience on many alien planets. The team bad spent two years on Garson IV and had made it very much its business to know this race inside out.
Something had happened to the people. They had somehow lost their gaiety and pride. They had let the houses go uncared for. They had allowed themselves to become a race of ragamuffins.
“You guys stay here,” Sheridan said.
“You can’t do it, sir,” said Hezekiah in alarm.
“Watch yourself,” warned Abraham.
Sheridan walked toward the barn. The group before it did not stir. He stopped six feet away.
Close up, they looked more gnomelike than they had appeared in the pictures brought back by the survey team. Little wizened gnomes, they were, but not happy gnomes at all. They were seedy-looking and there was resentment in them and perhaps a dash of hatred. They had a hangdog look and there were some among them who shuffled in discomfiture.
“I see you don’t remember us,” said’ Sheridan conversationally. “We were away too long, much longer than we had thought to be.”
He was having, he feared, some trouble with the language. It was, in fact, not the easiest language in the Galaxy to handle. For a fleeting moment, he wished that there were some sort of transmog that could be slipped into the human brain. It would make moments like this so much easier.
“We remember you,” said one of them in a sullen voice.
“That’s wonderful,” said Sheridan with forced enthusiasm. “Are you speaker for this village?”
Speaker because there was no leader, no chief – no government at all beyond a loose, haphazard talking over what daily problems they had, around the local equivalent of the general store, and occasional formless town meetings to decide what to do in their rare crises, but no officials to enforce the decisions.