“What we have here,” said Sheldon, “is something more complicated than mere going to pot. Here we have some scheme, some plan, something deliberate.
“The Type 10 culture village stands there to the west of us, just a mile or two away, deserted, with its houses carefully locked and boarded up. Everything all tidy, as if its inhabitants had moved away for a short time and meant to come back in the not too distant future. And a mile or two outside that Type 10 village we have instead another village and a people that average Type 14.”
“It’s crazy,” Hart declared. “How could a people lose four full culture points? And even if they did, why would they move from a Type 10 village to a collection of reed huts? Even barbarian conquerors who capture a great city squat down and camp in the palaces and temples—no more reed huts for them.”
“I don’t know,” said Sheldon. “It’s my job to find out.”
“And how to correct it?”
“I don’t know that, either. It may take centuries to correct.”
“What gets me,” said Hart, “is that god-house. And the greenhouse behind it. There’s babu growing in that greenhouse.”
“How do you know it’s babu?” Sheldon demanded. “All you’ve ever seen of babu was the root.”
“Years ago,” said Hart, “one of the natives took me out and showed me. I’ll never forget it. There was a patch of it that seemed to cover acres. There was a fortune there. But I couldn’t pull up a single plant. They were saving it, they said, until the root grew bigger.”
“I’ve told the men,” said Sheldon, “to keep clear of that god-house and now, Hart, I’m telling you. And that means the greenhouse, too. If I catch anyone trying to get at babu root or anything else growing in that greenhouse, there’ll be hell to pay.”
A short time after Hart left, the chief of the Google village climbed the stairs to call on the co-ordinator.
He was a filthy character, generously inhabited by vermin. He didn’t know what chairs were for, and squatted on the floor. So Sheldon left his chair and squatted down to face him, but immediately shuffled back a step or two, for the chief was rather high.
Sheldon spoke in Google lingo haltingly, for it was the first time he had used it since co-ordinator college days. There is, he supposed, not a man on the ship that could not speak it better than I, for each of the crew was on Zan before and this is my first trip.
“The chief is welcome,” Sheldon said.
“Favor?” asked the chief.
“Sure, a favor,” Sheldon said.
“Dirty stories,” said the chief. “You know some dirty stories?”
“One or two,” said Sheldon. “But I’m afraid they’re not too good.”
“Tell ’em,” said the chief, busily scratching himself with one hand. With the other he just as busily picked mud from between his toes.
So Sheldon told him the one about the woman and the twelve men marooned on an asteroid.
“Huh?” said the chief.
So Sheldon told him another one, much simpler and more directly obscene.
“That one all right,” said the chief, not laughing. “You know another one?”
“That’s all I know,” said Sheldon, seeing no point in going on. “Now you tell me one,” he added, for he figured that one should do whatever possible to get along with aliens, especially when it was his job to find what made them tick.
“I not know any,” said the chief. “Maybe someone else?”
“Greasy Ferris,” Sheldon told him. “He’s the cook, and he’s got some that will curl your hair.”
“So good,” said the chief, getting up to go.
At the door he turned. “You remember another one,” he said, “you be sure to tell me.”
Sheldon could see, without half trying, that the chief was serious about his stories.
Sheldon went back to his desk, listening to the soft padding of the chief’s feet doing down the catwalk. The communicator chirped. It was Hart.
“The first of the scout boats are in,” he said. “They reported on five other villages and they are just the same as this. The Googles have deserted their old villages and are living in filthy huts just a mile or two away. And every one of those reed-hut villages has a god-house and a greenhouse.”
“Let me know as soon as the other boats come in,” said Sheldon, “although I don’t suppose we can hope for much. Their reports probably will be the same.”
“Another thing,” said Hart. “The chief asked us to come down to the village for a pow-wow tonight. I told him that we’d come.”
“That’s some improvement,” Sheldon said. “For the first few days they didn’t notice us. Either didn’t notice us or ran away.”
“Any ideas yet, Mister Co-ordinator?”
“One or two.”
“Doing anything about them?”
“Not yet,” said Sheldon. “We have lots of time.”
He clicked off the squawk box and sat back. Ideas? Well, one maybe. And not a very good one.
A purification rite? An alien equivalent of a return to nature? It didn’t click too well. For, with a Type 10 culture, the Googles never strayed far enough from nature to want to return to it.
Take a Type 10 culture. Very simple, of course, but fairly comfortable. Not quite on the verge of the machine age, but almost—yes, just short of the machine age. A sort of golden age of barbarism. Good substantial villages with a simple commerce and sound basic economics. Peaceful dictatorship and pastoral existence. Not too many laws to stumble over. A watered-down religion without an excess of tabus. One big happy family with no sharp class distinction.
And they had deserted that idyllic life.
Crazy? Of course it was crazy.
As it stands now the Googles seem barely to get along. Their vocabulary is limited; why, I speak the language even better than the chief, Sheldon told himself.
Their livelihood was barely above the survival level. They hunted and fished, picked some fruit and dug some roots, and went a little hungry—and all the time the garden patches outside the deserted villages lay fallow, waiting for the plow and hoe, waiting for the seed, but with evidence of having been worked only a year or so before. And in those patches undoubtedly they had grown the babu plants as well as vegetables. But the Googles now apparently knew nothing of plow or hoe or seed. Their huts were ill-made and dirty. There was family life, but on a moral level that almost turned one’s stomach. Their weapons were of stone and they had no agricultural implements.
Retrogression? No, not just simple retrogression. For even in the retrogression, there was paradox.
In the center of the Type 14 village to which the Googles had retreated stood the god-house, and back of the god-house stood the greenhouse with babu growing in it. The greenhouse was built of glass and nowhere else in the Type 14 village was there any sign of glass. No Type 14 alien could have built that greenhouse, nor the god-house, either. No mere hut, that god-house, but a building made of quarried stone and squared timbers, with its door locked tight by some ingenious means that no one yet had figured out. Although, to tell the truth, no one had spent much time on it. On an alien planet, visitors don’t monkey with a god-house.
“I swear,” said Sheldon, talking aloud to himself, “that the god-house was never built by that gang out there. It was built, if I don’t miss my guess, before the retrogression. And the greenhouse, too.”