Despite the failure of everything they had tried, the robots kept going out to the villages, kept plugging away, kept on trying to sell, hoping that one day they would get a clue, a hint, an indication that might help them break the shell of reserve and obstinacy set up by the natives;
One day Gideon, out alone, radioed to base.
“There’s something out here underneath a tree that you should take a look at,” he told Sheridan.
“Something?”
“A different kind of being. It looks intelligent.”
“A Garsonian?”
“Humanoid, all right, but it’s no Garsonian.”
“I’ll be right out,” said Sheridan. “You stay there so you can point it out to me.”
“It has probably seen me,” Gideon said, “but I did not approach it. I thought you might like first whack at it yourself.”
As Gideon had said, the creature was sitting underneath a tree. It had a glittering cloth spread out and an ornate jug set out and was taking things out of a receptacle that probably was a hamper.
It was more attractively humanoid than the Garsonians. Its features were finely chiseled and its body had a look of lithe ranginess, it was dressed in the richest fabrics and was all decked out with jewels. It had a decided social air about it.
“Hello, friend,” Sheridan said in Garsonian.
The creature seemed to understand him, but it smiled in a superior manner and seemed not to be too happy at Sheridan’s intrusion.
“Perhaps,” it finally said, “you have the time to sit down for a while.”
Which, the way that it was put, was a plain and simple invitation for Sheridan to say no, he was sorry, but he hadn’t and be must be getting on.
“Why, certainly,” said Sheridan. “Thank you very much.” He sat down and watched the creature continue to extract things from the hamper.
“It’s slightly difficult,” the creature told him, “for us to communicate in this barbaric language. But I suppose it’s the best we can do. You do not happen to know Ballic, do you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Sheridan. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“I had thought you might. It is widely used.”
“We can get along,” said Sheridan quietly, “with the language native to this planet.”
“Oh, certainly,” agreed the creature. “I presume I’m not trespassing. If I am, of course -”
“Not at all. I’m glad to find you here.”
“I would offer you some food, but I hesitate to do so. Your metabolism undoubtedly is not the same as mine. It should pain me to poison you.”
Sheridan nodded to indicate his gratitude. The food indeed was tempting. All of it was packaged attractively and some of it looked so delectable that it set the mouth to watering.
“I often come here for…” The creature hunted for the Garsonian word and there wasn’t any.
Sheridan tried to help him out. “I think in my language I would call it picnic.”
“An eating-out-of-doors,” the stranger said. “That is the nearest I can come in the language of our host.”
“We have the same idea.”
The creature brightened up considerably at this evidence of mutual understanding. “I think, my friend, that we have much in common. Perhaps I could leave some of this food with you and you could analyze it. Then the next time I come, you could join me.”
Sheridan shook his head. “I doubt I’ll stay much longer.”
“Oh,” the stranger said, and he seemed pleased at it. “So you’re a transitory being, too. Wings passing in the night. One hears a rustle and then the sound is gone forever.”
“A most poetic thought,” said Sheridan, “and a most descriptive one.”
“Although,” the creature said, “I come here fairly often. I’ve grown to love this planet. It is such a fine spot for an eating-out-of-doors. So restful and simple and unhurried. It is not cluttered up with activity and the people are so genuine, albeit somewhat dirty and very, very stupid. But I find it in my heart to love them for their lack of sophistication and their closeness to the soil and the clear-eyed view of life and their uncomplicated living of that life.”
He halted his talk and cocked an eye at Sheridan.
“Don’t you find it so, my friend?”
“Yes, of course I do,” agreed Sheridan, rather hurriedly.
“There are so few places in the Galaxy,” mourned the stranger, “where one can be alone in comfort. Oh, I do not mean alone entirely, or even physically. But an aloneness in the sense that there is space to live, that one is not pushed about by boundless, blind ambitions or smothered by the impact of other personalities. There are, of course, the lonely planets which are lonely only by the virtue of their being impossible for one to exist upon. These we must rule out.”
He ate a little, daintily, and in a mincing manner. But he took a healthy snort from the ornate jug.
“This is excellent,” said the creature, holding out the jug. “Are sure you do not want to chance it?”
“I think I’d better not.”
“I suppose it’s wise of you,” the stranger admitted. “Life is not a thing that a person parts from without due consideration.”
He had another drink, then put the jug down in his lap and sat there fondling it.
“Not that I am one,” he said, “to extoll the virtue of living above all other things. Surely there must be other facets of the universal pattern that have as much to offer.”
They spent a pleasant afternoon together.
When Sheridan went back to the flier, the creature had finished off the jug and was sprawled, happily pickled, among the litter of the picnic.
IV
Grasping at straws, Sheridan tried to fit the picnicking alien into the pattern, but there was no place where he’d fit.
Perhaps, after all, he was no more than what he seemed – a flitting dilettante with a passion for a lonely eating-out-of-doors and an addiction to the bottle.
Yet he knew the native language and he had said he came here often and that in itself was more than merely strange. With apparently the entire Galaxy in which to flit around, why should he gravitate to Garson IV, which, to the human eye, at least, was a most unprepossessing planet?
And another thing – how had he gotten here?
“Gideon,” asked Sheridan, “did you see, by any chance, any sort of conveyance parked nearby that our friend could have traveled in?”
Gideon shook his head. “Now that you mention it, I am sure there wasn’t. I would have noticed it.”
“Has it occurred to you, sir,” inquired Hezekiah, “that he may have mastered the ability of teleportation? It is not impossible. There was that race out on Pilico..
“That’s right,” said Sheridan, “but the Pilicoans were good for no more than a mile or so at a time. You remember how they went popping along, like a jack rabbit making mile-long jumps, but making them so fast that you couldn’t see him jump. This gent must have covered light-years. He asked me about a language that I never heard of. Indicated that it is widely spoken in at least some parts of the Galaxy.”
“You are worrying yourself unduly, sir,” cautioned Hezekiah. “We have more important things than this galivanting alien to trouble ourselves about.”
“You’re right,” said Sheridan. “If we don’t get this cargo moving, it will be my neck.”
But he couldn’t shake entirely the memory of the afternoon. He went back, in his mind, through the long and idle chatter and found, to his amazement, that it had been completely idle. So far as he could recall, the creature had told him nothing of itself. For three solid hours or more, it had talked almost continuously and in all that time had somehow managed to say exactly nothing.
That evening, when he brought the supper, Napoleon squatted down beside the chair, gathering his spotless apron neatly in his lap.
“We are in a bad way, aren’t we?” he asked.
“Yes, I suppose you could say we are.”
“What will we do, Steve, if we can’t move the stuff at all – if we can’t get any podars?”
“Nappy,” said Sheridan, “I’ve been trying very hard not to think of it.”
But now that Napoleon had brought it up, he could well imagine the reaction of Central Trading if he should have to haul a billion-dollar cargo back intact. He could imagine, a bit more vividly, what might be said to him if he simply left it here and went back home without it.
No matter how he did it, he had to sell the cargo!
If he didn’t, his career was in a sling.
Although there was more, he realized, than just his career at stake. The whole human race was involved.
There was a real and pressing need for the tranquilizer made from podar tubers. A search for such a drug had started centuries before and the need of it was underlined by the fact that through all those centuries the search had never faltered. It was something that Man needed badly – that Man, in fact, had needed badly since the very moment he’d become something more than animal.