“And big. Not small.”
“Big it is, Mr. Horgan,” I said. I rolled up Jack Denny’s sketches into a thick wad and threw them at him in the door, but not before he had closed it behind him.
Garigolli to Home Base
Listen Chief,
I appreciate your trying to work out a solution for us, but you’re not doing as well as we’re doing, even. Not that that’s much.
We tried again to meet that constant aura of medium-of-exchange need for the Host, but he destroyed the whole lash-up again. Maybe we’re misunderstanding him?
Artifacts are out. He’s too big to see anything we make. Energy sources don’t look promising. Oh, sure, we could elaborate lesser breeds that would selectively concentrate, for instance, plutonium or one of the uraniums. I don’t think this particular Host would know the difference unless the scale was very large, and then, blooie, critical mass.
Meanwhile morale is becoming troublesome. We’re holding together, but I wouldn’t describe the condition as good, Vellitot has been wooing Dinnoliss in spite of the secondary directives against breeding while on exploration missions. I’ve cautioned them both, but they don’t seem to stop. The funny thing is they’re both in the male phase.
Garigolli
Between Jack Denny and myself we got about half of the month’s Plastics Briefs before quitting time. Maybe they weren’t big, but they were real windblown. All factors considered, I don’t think it is very much to my discredit that two hours later I was moodily drinking my seventh beer in a dark place near the railroad station.
The bartender respected my mood, the TV was off, the juke box had nothing but blues on it and there was only one fly in my lugubrious ointment, a little man who kept trying to be friendly.
From time to time I gave him a scowl I had copied from Mr. Horgan. Then he would edge down the bar for a few minutes before edging back. Eventually he got up courage enough to talk, and I got too gloomy to crush him with my mighty thews, corded like the jungle-vines that looped from the towering nganga-palms.
He was some kind of hotelkeeper, it appeared. “My young friend, you may think you have problems, but there’s no business like my business. Mortgage, insurance, state supervision, building and grounds maintenance, kitchen personnel and purchasing, linen, uniforms, the station wagon and the driver, carpet repairs -oh, God, carpet repairs! No matter how many ash trays you put around, you know what they do? They steal the ashtrays. Then they stamp out cigarettes on the carpets.” He began to weep.
I told the bartender to give him another. How could I lose? If he passed out I’d be rid of him. If he recovered I would have his undying, doglike affection for several minutes, and what kind of shape was I in to sneer at that?
Besides, I had worked out some pretty interesting figures. “Did you know,” I told him, “that if you spend $1.46 a day on cigarettes, you can save $14,752.03 by giving up smoking for 10,104 and a quarter days?”
He wasn’t listening, but he wasn’t weeping any more either. He was just looking lovingly at his vodka libre, or whatever it was. I tried a different tack. “When you see discarded plastic bottles bobbing in the surf,” I asked, “does it make you feel like part of something grand and timeless that will go on forever?”
He glanced at me with distaste, then went back to adoring his drink. “Or do you like buzzards better than babies?” I asked.
“They’re all babies,” he said. “Nasty, smelly, upchucking babies.”
“Who are?” I asked, having lost the thread. He shook his head mysteriously, patted his drink and tossed it down.
“Root of most evil,” he said, swallowing. Then, affectionately, “Don’t know where I’d be with it, don’t know where I’d be without it.”
He appeared to be talking about booze. “On your way home, without it?” I suggested.
He said obscurely, “Digging ditches, without it.” Then he giggled. “Greatest business in the world! But oh! the worries! The competition! And when you come down to it it’s all just aversion, right?”
“I can see you have a great aversion to liquor,” I said politely.
“No, stupid! The guests.”
Stiffly I signaled for Number Eight, but the bartender misunderstood and brought another for my friend, too. I said, “You have an aversion to the guests?”
He took firm hold on the bar and attempted to look squarely into my eyes, but wound up with his left eye four inches in front of my left eye and both our right eyes staring at respective ears. “The guests must be made to feel an aversion to alcohol,” he said. “Secret of the whole thing. Works. Sometimes. But oh! it costs.”
Like the striking fangs of Nag, the cobra, faster than the eye can follow, my trained reflexes swept the beer up to my lips. I drank furiously, scowling at him. “You mean to say you ran a drunk farm?” I shouted.
He was shocked. “My boy! No need to be vulgar. An ‘institute,’ eh? Let’s leave the aversion to the drunks.”
“I have to tell you, sir,” I declared, “that I have a personal reason for despising all proprietors of such institutions!”
He began to weep again. “You, too! Oh, the general scorn.”
“In my case, there is nothing general-“
“-the hatred! The unthinking contempt. And for what?”
I snarled. “For your blood-sucking ways.”
“Blood, old boy?” he said, surprised. “No, nothing like that. We don’t use blood. We use gold, yes, but the gold cure’s old hat. Need new gimmick. Can’t use silver, too cheap. Really doesn’t matter what you say you use. All aversion-drying them out, keeping them comfy and aversion. But no blood.”
He wiggled his fingers for Number Nine. Moodily I drank, glaring at him over my glass.
“In the wrong end of it, I sometimes think,” he went on meditatively, staring with suspicious envy at the bartender. “He doesn’t have to worry. Pour it out, pick up the money. No concern about expensive rooms standing idle, staff loafing around picking their noses, overhead going on, going on-you wouldn’t believe how it goes on, whether the guests are there to pay for it or not-“
“Hah,” I muttered.
“You’ve simply no idea what I go through,” he sobbed. “And then they won’t pay. No, really. Fellow beat me out of $14,752.03 just lately. I’m taking it out of the co-signer’s hide, of course, but after you pay the collection agency, what’s the profit?”
I choked on the beer, but he was too deep in sorrow to notice.
Strangling, I gasped, “Did you say fourteen thousand-?”
He nodded. “Seven hundred and fifty-two dollars, yes. And three cents. Astonishes you, doesn’t it, the deadbeats in this world?”
I couldn’t speak.
“You wouldn’t think it,” he mourned. “All those salaries. All those rooms. The hydrotherapy tubs. The water bill.”
I shook my head.
“Probably you think my life’s a bowl of roses, hey?”
I managed to pry my larynx open enough to wheeze, “Up to this minute, yes, I did. You’ve opened my eyes.”
“Drink to that,” he said promptly. “Hey, barman!”
But before the bartender got there with Number Ten the little man hiccoughed and slid melting to the floor, like a glacier calving into icebergs.
The bartender peered over at him. “Every damn night,” he grumbled. “And who’s going to get him home this tune?”
My mind working as fast “as Ngo, the dancing spider, spinning her web, I succeeded in saying, “Me. Glad to oblige. Never fear.”
Garigolli to Home Base
Chief,
All right, I admit we haven’t been exactly 144 p.g. on this project, but there’s no reason for you to get loose. Reciting the penalties for violating the Triple Directive is uncalled-for.