“That’s an idea, Josh,” Sheridan said. “Hezekiah, do you know if we have some detective transmogs?”
“Not that I know of, sir. I have never heard of any team using them.”
“Just as well,” Abraham observed. “We’d have a hard time disguising ourselves.”
“If we had a volunteer,” Lemuel said with some enthusiasm, “we could redesign him…”
“It would seem to me,” said Silas, “that what we have to do is figure out all the different approaches that are possible. Then we can try each approach on a separate village till we latch onto one that works.”
“Which presupposes,” Maximilian pointed out, “that each village will react the same.”
Silas said: “I would assume they would. After all, the culture is the same and their communications must be primitive. No village would know what was happening in another village until some little time had passed, which makes each village a perfectly isolated guinea pig for our little tests.”
“Si, I think you’re right,” said Sheridan. “Somehow or other we have to find a way to break their sales resistance. I don’t care what kind of prices we have to pay for the podars at the moment. I’d be willing to let them skin us alive to start with. Once we have them buying, we can squeeze down the price and come out even in the end. After all, the main thing is to get that cargo sled of ours loaded down with all the podars it can carry.”
“All right,” said Abraham. “Let’s get to work.”
They got to work. They spent the whole day at it. They mapped out the various sales approaches. They picked the villages where each one would be tried. Sheridan divided the robots into teams and assigned a team to each project. They worked out every detail. They left not a thing to chance.
Sheridan sat down to his supper table with the feeling that they had it made – if one of the approaches didn’t work, another surely would. The trouble was that, as he saw it, they had done no planning. They had been so sure that this was an easy one that they had plunged ahead into straight selling without any thought upon the matter.
In the morning, the robots went out, full of confidence.
Abraham’s crew had been assigned to a house-to-house campaign and they worked hard and conscientiously. They didn’t miss a single house in the entire village. At every house, the answer had been no. Sometimes it was a firm but simple no; sometimes it was a door slammed in the face; at other times, it was a plea of poverty.
One thing was plain: Individual Garsonians could be cracked no more readily than Garsonians en masse.
Gideon and his crew tried the sample racket – handing out gift samples door to door with the understanding they would be back again to display their wares. The Garsonian householders weren’t having any. They refused to take the samples.
Lemuel headed up the lottery project. A lottery, its proponents argued, appealed to basic greed. And this lottery had been rigged to carry maximum appeal. The price was as low as it could be set – one podar for a ticket. The list of prizes offered was just this side of fabulous. But the Garsonians, as it appeared, were not a greedy people. Not a ticket was sold.
And the funny thing about it – the unreasonable, maddening, impossible thing about it – was that the Garsonians seemed tempted.
“You could see them fighting it,” Abraham reported at the conference that night. “You could see they wanted something we had for sale, but they’d steel themselves against it and they never weakened.”
“We may have them on the very edge,” said Lemuel. “Maybe just a little push is all it will take. Do you suppose we could start a whispering campaign? Maybe we could get it rumored that some other villages are buying right and left. That should weaken the resistance.”
But Ebenezer was doubtful. “We have to dig down to causes. We have to find out what is behind this buyers’ strike. It may be a very simple thing, if we only knew…”
Ebenezer took out a team to a distant village. They hauled along with them a pre-fabricaled supermarket, which they set up in the village square. They racked their wares attractively. They loaded the place with glamor and excitement. They installed loud-speakers all over town to bellow out then bargains.
Abraham and Gideon headed up two talking-billboard crews. They ranged far and wide, setting up their billboards splashed with attractive color, and installing propaganda tapes.
Sheridan had transmogged Oliver and Silas into semantics experts and they had engineered the tapes – a careful, skillful job. They did not bear down too blatantly on the commercial angle, although it certainly was there. The tapes were cuddly in spots and candid in others. At all times, they rang with deep sincerity. They sang the praises of the Garsonians for the decent, upstanding folks they were; they preached pithy homilies on honesty and fairness and the keeping of contracts; they presented the visitors as a sort of cross between public benefactors and addle-pated nitwits who could easily be outsmarted;
The tapes ran day and night. They pelted the defenseless Garsonians with a smooth, sleek advertising – and the effects should have been devastating, since the Garsonians were entirely unfamiliar with any kind of advertising.
Lemuel stayed behind at base and tramped up and down the beach, with his hands clenched behind his back, thinking furiously. At times he stopped his pacing long enough to scribble frantic notes, jotting down ideas.
Lemuel was trying to arrive at some adaptation of an old sales gag that he felt sure would work if he could only get it figured out – the ancient I-am-working-my-way-through-college wheeze.
Joshua and Thaddeus came to Sheridan for a pair of playwright transmogs. Sheridan said they had none, but Hezekiah, forever optimistic, ferreted into the bottom of the transmog chest. He came up with one transmog labeled auctioneer and another public speaker. They were the closest he could find.
Disgusted, the two rejected them and retired into seclusion, working desperately and as best they could on a medicine show routine.
For example, how did one write jokes for an alien people? What would they regard as funny? The off-color joke – oh, very fine, except that one would have to know in some detail the sexual life of the people it was aimed at. The mother-in-law joke – once again one would have to know; there were a lot of places where mothers-in-law were held in high regard, and other places where it was bad taste to even mention them. The dialect routine, of course, was strictly out, as it well deserved to be. Also, so far as the Garsonians were concerned, was the business slicker joke. The Garsonians were no commercial people; such a joke would sail clear above their heads.
But Joshua and Thaddeus, for all of that, were relatively undaunted. They requisitioned the files of data from Sheridan and spent hours poring over them, analyzing the various aspects of Garsonian life that might be safely written into their material. They made piles of notes. They drafted intricate charts showing relationships of Garsonian words and the maze of native social life. They wrote and rewrote and revised and polished. Eventually, they hammered out their script.
“There’s nothing like a show,” Joshua told Sheridan with conviction, “to loosen up a people. You get them feeling good and they lose their inhibitions. Besides, you have made them become somewhat indebted to you. You have entertained them and naturally they must feel the need to reciprocate.”
“I hope it works” said Sheridan, somewhat doubtful and discouraged.
For nothing else was working.
In the distant village, the Garsonians had unbent sufficiently to visit the supermarket – to visit, not to buy. It almost seemed as if to them the market was some great museum or showplace. They would file down the aisles and goggle at the merchandise and at times reach out and touch it, but they didn’t buy. They were, in fact, insulted if one suggested perhaps they’d like to buy.
In the other villages, the billboards had at first attracted wide attention. Crowds had gathered around them and had listened by the hour. But the novelty had worn off by now and they paid the tapes very little attention. And they still continued to ignore the robots. Even more pointedly, they ignored or rebuffed all attempts to sell.
It was disheartening.
Lemuel gave up his pacing and threw away his notes. He admitted he was licked. There was no way, on Garson IV, to adapt the idea of the college salesman.
Baldwin headed up a team that tried to get the whisper campaign started. The natives flatly disbelieved that any other village would go out and buy.
There remained the medicine show and Joshua and Thaddeus had a troupe rehearsing. The project was somewhat hampered by the fact that even Hezekiah could not dig up any actor transmogs, but, even so, they were doing well.