“I can speak for them,” the native said somewhat evasively. He shuffled slowly forward. “There were others like you who came many years ago.”
“You were friends to them.”
‘We are friends to all.”
“But special friends to them. To them you made the promise that you would keep the podars.”
“Too long to keep the podars. The podars rot away.”
“You had the barn to store them in.”
“One podar rots. Soon there are two podars rotten. And then a hundred podars rotten. The barn is no good to keep them. No place is any good to keep them.”
“But we – those others showed you what to do. You go through the podars and throw away the rotten ones. That way you keep the other podars good.”
The native shrugged.. “Too hard to do. Takes too long.”
“But not all the podars rotted. Surely you have some left.”
The creature spread his hands. “We have bad seasons, friend. Too little rain, too much. It never comes out right. Our crop is always bad.”
“But we have brought things to trade you for the podars. Many things you need. We had great trouble bringing them. We came from far away. It took us long to come.”
“Too bad,” the native said. “No podars. As you can see, we are very poor.”
“But where have all the podars gone?”
“We,” the man said stubbornly, “don’t grow podars any more. We changed the podars into another crop. Too much bad luck with podars.”
“But those plants out in the fields?”
“We do not call them podars.”
“It doesn’t matter what you call them. Are they podars or are they not?”
“We do not grow the podars.” Sheridan turned on his heel and walked back to the robots. “No soap,” he said. “Something’s happened here. They gave me a poor-mouth story and finally, as a clincher, said they don’t grow podars any more.”
“But there are fields of podars,” declared Abraham. “If the data’s right, they’ve actually increased their acreage. I checked as I was coming in. They’re growing more right now than they ever grew before.”
“I know,” said Sheridan. “It makes no sense at all. Hezekiah, maybe you should give base a call and find what’s going on.”
“One thing,” Abraham pointed out. “What about this trade agreement that we have with them? Has it any force?”
Sheridan shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe we can wave it in their faces, just to see what happens. It might serve as a sort of psychological wedge a little later on, once we get them softened up a bit.”
“If we get them softened up.”
“This is our first day and this is only one village.”
“You don’t think we could use the agreement as a club?”
“Look, Abe, I’m not a lawyer, and we don’t have a lawyer transmog along with us for a damned good reason – there isn’t any legal setup whatever on this planet. But let’s say we could haul them into a galactic court. Who signed for the planet? Some natives we picked as its representatives, not the natives themselves; their signing couldn’t bind anything or anybody. The whole business of drawing up a contract was nothing but an impressive ceremony without any legal basis – it was just meant to awe the natives into doing business with us.”
“But the second expedition must have figured it would work.”
“Well, sure. The Garsonians have a considerable sense of morality – individually and as families. Can we make that sense of morality extend to bigger groups? That’s our problem.”
“That means we have to figure out an angle,” said Abraham. “At least for this one village.”
“If it’s just this village,” declared Sheridan, “we can let them sit and wait. We can get along without it.”
But it wasn’t just one village. It was all the rest of them, as well.
Hezekiah brought the news.
“Napoleon says everyone is having trouble,” he announced. “No one sold a thing. From what he said, it’s just like this all over.”
“We better call in all the boys,” said Sheridan. “This is a situation that needs some talking over. We’ll have to plan a course of action. We can’t go flying off at a dozen different angles.”
“And we’d better pull up a hill of podars,” Abraham suggested, “and see if they are podars or something else.”
III
Sheridan inserted a chemist transmog into Ebenezer’s brain case and Ebenezer ran off an analysis.
He reported to the sales conference seated around the table.
“There’s just one difference,” he said, “The podars that I analyzed ran a higher percentage of calenthropodensia – that’s the drug used as a tranquilizer – than the podars that were brought in by the first and second expeditions. The factor is roughly ten per cent, although that might vary from one field to another, depending upon weather and soil conditions – I would suspect especially soil conditions.”
“Then they lied,” said Abraham, “when they said they weren’t growing podars.”
“By their own standards,” observed Silas, “they might not have lied to us. You can’t always spell out alien ethics – satisfactorily, that is – from the purely human viewpoint. Ebenezer says that the composition of the tuber has changed to some extent. Perhaps due to better cultivation, perhaps to better seed or to an abundance of rainfall or a heavier concentration of the protozoan in the soil – or maybe because of something the natives did deliberately to make it shift…”
“Si,” said Gideon, “I don’t see what you are getting at.”
“Simply this. If they knew of the shift or change, it might have given them an excuse to change the podar name. Or their language or their rules of grammar might have demanded that they change it. Or they may have applied some verbal mumbo-jumbo so they would have an out. And it might even have been a matter of superstition. The native told Steve at the village that they’d had bad luck with podars. So perhaps they operated under the premise that if they changed the name, they likewise changed the luck.”
“And this is ethical?”
“To them, it might be. You fellows have been around enough to know that the rest of the Galaxy seldom operates on what we view as logic or ethics.”
“But I don’t see,” said Gideon, “why they’d want to change the name unless it was for the specific purpose of not trading with us – so they could tell us they weren’t growing podars.”
“I think that is exactly why they changed the name,” Maximilian said. “It’s all a piece with those nailed-up barns. They knew we had arrived. They could hardly have escaped knowing. We had clouds of floaters going up and down and they must have seen them.”
“Back at that village,” said Sheridan, “I had the distinct impression that they had some reluctance telling us they weren’t growing podars. They had left it to the last, as if it were a final clincher they’d hoped they wouldn’t have to use, a desperate, last-ditch argument when all the other excuses failed to do the trick and -”
“They’re just trying to jack up the price,” Lemuel interrupted in a flat tone.
Maximilian shook his head. “I don’t think so. There was no price set to start with. How can you jack it up when you don’t know what it is?’
“Whether there was a price or not,” said Lemuel testily, “they still could create a situation where they could hold us up.”
“There is another factor that might be to our advantage,” Maximilian said. “If they changed the name so they’d have an excuse not to trade with us, that argues that the whole village feels a moral obligation and has to justify its refusal.”
“You mean by that,” said Sheridan, “that we can reason with them. Well, perhaps we can. I think at least we’ll try.”
“There’s too much wrong,” Douglas put in. “Too many things have changed. The new name for the podars and the nailed-up barns and the shabbiness of the villages and the people. The whole planet’s gone to pot. It seems to me our job – the first job we do – is to find what happened here. Once we find that out, maybe we’d have a chance of selling.”
“I’d like to see the inside of those barns,” said Joshua.
“What have they got in there? Do you think there’s any chance we might somehow get a look?”
“Nothing short of force,” Abraham told him. “I have a hunch that while we’re around, they’ll guard them night and day.”
“Force is out,” said Sheridan. “All of you know what would happen to us if we used force short of self-defense against an alien people. The entire team would have its license taken away. You guys would spend the rest of your lives scrubbing out headquarters.”
“Maybe we could just sneak around. Do some slick detective work.”