And here, on this very planet, was the answer to that terrible human need – an answer denied and blocked by the stubbornness of a shiftless, dirty, backward people.
“If we only had this planet,” he said, speaking more to himself than to Napoleon, “if we could only take it over, we could grow all the podars that we needed. We’d make it one big field and we’d grow a thousand times more podars than these natives ever grew.”
“But we can’t,” Napoleon said. “It is against the law.”
“Yes, Nappy, you are right. Very much against the law.” For the Garsonians were intelligent – not startlingly so, but intelligent, at least, within the meaning of the law.
And you could do nothing that even hinted of force against an intelligent race. You couldn’t even buy or lease their land, for the law would rule that in buying one would be dispossessing them of the inalienable rights of all alien intelligences.
You could work with them and teach them – that was very laudable. But the Garsonians were almost unteachable. You could barter with them if you were very careful that you did not cheat them too outrageously. But the Garsonians refused to barter.
“I don’t know what we’ll do,” Sheridan told Napoleon. “How are we going to find a way?”
“I have a sort of suggestion. If we could introduce these natives to the intricacies of dice, we might finally get somewhere. We robots, as you probably know, are very good at it.”
Sheridan choked on his coffee. He slowly and with great care set the cup down.
“Ordinarily,” he told Napoleon solemnly, “I would frown upon such tactics. But with the situation as it stands, why don’t you get some of the boys together and have a try at it?”
“Glad to do it, Steve.”
“And… uh, Nappy…”
“Yes, Steve?”
“I presume you’d pick the best crap-shooters in the bunch.”
“Naturally,” said Napoleon, getting up and smoothing his apron.
Joshua and Thaddeus took their troupe to a distant village in entirely virgin territory, untouched by any of the earlier selling efforts, and put on the medicine show.
It was an unparalleled success. The natives rolled upon the ground, clutching at their bellies, helpless with laughter. They howled and gasped and wiped their streaming eyes. They pounded one another on the back in appreciation of the jokes. They’d never seen anything like it in all their lives – there had never been anything like it on all of Garson IV. And while they were weak with merriment, while they were still well-pleased, at the exact psychological moment when all their inhibitions should be down and all stubbornness and hostility be stilled, Joshua made the sales pitch.
The laughter stopped. The merriment went away. The audience simply stood and stared.
The troupe packed up and came trailing home, deep in despondency.
Sheridan sat in his tent and faced the bleak prospect. Outside the tent, the base was still as death. There was no happy talk or singing and no passing laughter. There was no neighborly tramping back and forth.
“Six weeks,” Sheridan said bitterly to Hezekiah. “Six weeks and not a sale. We’ve done everything we can and we’ve not come even close.”
He clenched his fist and hit the desk. “If we could only find what the trouble is! They want our merchandise and still they refuse to buy. What is the holdup, Hezekiah? Can you think of anything?”
Hezekiah shook his head. “Nothing, sir. I’m stumped. We all are.”
“They’ll crucify me back at Central,” Sheridan declared. “They’ll nail me up and keep me as a horrible example for the next ten thousand years. There’ve been failures before, but none like this.”
“I hesitate to say this, sir,” said Hezekiah, “but we could take it on the lam. Maybe that’s the answer. The boys would go along. Theoretically they’re loyal to Central, but deep down at the bottom of it, it’s you they’re really loyal to. We could load up the cargo and that would give us capital and we’d have a good head start…”
“No,” Sheridan said firmly. “We’ll try a little longer and we may solve the situation. If not, I face the music.”
He scraped his hand across his jaw.
“Maybe,” he said, “Nappy and his crap-shooters can turn the trick for us. It’s fantastic, sure, but stranger things have happened.”
Napoleon and his pals came back, sheepish and depressed. “They beat the pants off us,” the cook told Sheridan in awe. “Those boys are really naturals. But when we tried to pay our bets, they wouldn’t take our stuff!”
“We have to try to arrange a powwow,” said Sheridan, “and talk it out with them, although I hold little hope for it. Do you think, Napoleon, if we came clean and told them what a spot we’re in, it would make a difference?’
“No, I don’t,” Napoleon said.
“If they only had a government,” observed Ebenezer, who had been a member of Napoleon’s gambling team, “we might get somewhere with a powwow. Then you could talk with someone who represented the entire population. But this way you’ll have to talk with each village separately and that will take forever.”
“We can’t help it, Eb,” said Sheridan. “It’s all we have left.”
But before any powwow could be arranged, the podar harvest started. The natives toiled like beavers in the fields, digging up the tubers, stacking them to dry, packing them in carts and hauling them to the barns by sheer manpower, for the Garsonians had no draft animals.
They dug them up and hauled them to the barns, the very barns where they’d sworn that they had no podars.
But that was not to wonder at when one stopped to think of it, for the natives had also sworn that they grew no podars.
They did not open the big barn doors, as one would have normally expected them to do. They simply opened a tiny, man-size door set into a bigger door and took the podars in that way. And when any of the Earth party hove in sight, they quickly stationed a heavy guard around the entire square.
“We’d better let them be,” Abraham advised Sheridan. “If we try to push them, we may have trouble in our lap.”
So the robots pulled back to the base and waited for the harvest to end. Finally it was finished and Sheridan counseled lying low for a few days more to give the Garsonians a chance to settle back to their normal routine.
Then they went out again and this time Sheridan rode along, on one of the floaters with Abraham and Gideon.
The first village they came to lay quiet and lazy in the sun. There was not a creature stirring.
Abraham brought the floater down into the square and the three stepped off.
The square was empty and the place was silent – a deep and deathly silence.
Sheridan felt the skin crawling up his back, for there was a stealthy, unnatural menace in the noiseless emptiness.
“They may be laying for us,” suggested Gideon. “I don’t think so,” said Abraham. “Basically they are peaceful.”
They moved cautiously across the square and walked slowly down a street that opened from the square.
And still there was no living thing in sight. And stranger still – the doors of some of the houses stood open to the weather and the windows seemed to watch them out of blind eyes, with the colorful crude curtains gone.
“Perhaps,” Gideon suggested, “they may have gone away to some harvest festival or something of that nature.”
“They wouldn’t leave their doors wide open, even for a day,” declared Abraham. “I’ve lived with them for weeks and I’ve studied them. I know what they would do. They’d have closed the doors very carefully and tried them to be sure that they were closed.”
“But maybe the wind…?’
“Not a chance,” insisted Abraham. “One door, possibly. But I see four of them from here.”
“Someone has to take a look,” said Sheridan. “It might as well be me.”
He turned in at a gate where one of the doors stood open and went slowly up the path. He halted at the threshold and peered in. The room beyond was empty. He stepped into the house and went from room to room and all the rooms were empty – not simply of the natives, but of everything. There was no furniture and the utensils and the tools were gone from hooks and racks. There was no scrap of clothing. There was nothing left behind. The house was dead and bare and empty, a shabby and abandoned thing discarded by its people.
He felt a sense of guilt creep into his soul. What if we drove them off? What if we hounded them until they’d rather flee than face us?
But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There must be some other reason for this incredibly complete mass exodus.