“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 the 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.
He went back down the walk. Abraham and Gideon went into other houses. All of them were empty.
“It may be this village only,” suggested Gideon. “The rest may be quite normal.”
But Gideon was wrong.
Back at the floater, they got in touch with base.
“I can’t understand it,” said Hezekiah, “I’ve had the same report from four other teams. I was about to call you, sir.”
“You’d better get out every floater that you can,” said Sheridan. “Check all the villages around. And keep a lookout for the people. They may be somewhere in the country. There’s a possibility they’re at a harvest festival.”
“If they’re at a festival, sir,” asked Hezekiah, “why did they take their belongings? You don’t take along your furniture when you attend a festival.”
“I know,” said Sheridan. “You put your finger on it. Get the boys out, will you?’
“There’s just the possibility,” Gideon offered, “that they are changing villages. Maybe there’s a tribal law that says they have to build a new village every so often. It might have its roots in an ancient sanitation law that the camp must be moved at stated intervals.”
“It could be that,” Sheridan said wearily. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Abraham thumbed a fist toward the barn.
Sheridan hesitated, then threw caution to the winds.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Gideon stalked up the ramp and reached the door. He put out a hand and grasped one of the planks nailed across the door. He wrenched and there was an anguished shriek of tortured nails ripping from the wood and the board came free. Another plank came off and then another one and Gideon put his shoulder to the door and half of it swung open.
Inside, in the dimness of the barn, was the dull, massive shine of metal—a vast machine sitting on the driveway floor.
Sheridan stiffened with a cold, hollow sense of terror.
It was wrong, he thought. There could be no machine.
The Garsonians had no business having a machine. Their culture was entirely non-mechanical. The best they had achieved so far had been the hoe and wheel, and even yet they had not been able to put the hoe and wheel together to make themselves a plow.
They had had no machine when the second expedition left some fifteen years ago, and in those fifteen years they could not have spanned the gap. In those fifteen years, from all surface indications, they had not advanced an inch.
And yet the machine stood in the driveway of the barn.
It was a fair-sized cylinder, set on end and with a door in one side of it. The upper end of it terminated in a dome-shaped cap. Except for the door, it resembled very much a huge and snub-nosed bullet.