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.
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.
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.”