“Whether there was a price or not,” said Lemuel testily, “they still could create a situation where they could hold us up.”
“There is another factor that might be to our advantage,” Maximilian said. “If they changed the name so they’d have an excuse not to trade with us, that argues that the whole village feels a moral obligation and has to justify its refusal.”
“You mean by that,” said Sheridan, “that we can reason with them. Well, perhaps we can. I think at least we’ll try.”
“There’s too much wrong,” Douglas put in. “Too many things have changed. The new name for the podars and the nailed-up barns and the shabbiness of the villages and the people. The whole planet’s gone to pot. It seems to me our job—the first job we do—is to find what happened here. Once we find that out, maybe we’d have a chance of selling.”
“I’d like to see the inside of those barns,” said Joshua. “What have they got in there? Do you think there’s any chance we might somehow get a look?”
“Nothing short of force,” Abraham told him. “I have a hunch that while we’re around, they’ll guard them night and day.”
“Force is out,” said Sheridan. “All of you know what would happen to us if we used force short of self-defense against an alien people. The entire team would have its license taken away. You guys would spend the rest of your lives scrubbing out headquarters.”
“Maybe we could just sneak around. Do some slick detective work.”
“That’s an idea, Josh,” Sheridan said. “Hezekiah, do you know if we have some detective transmogs?”
“Not that I know of, sir. I have never heard of any team using them.”
“Just as well,” Abraham observed. “We’d have a hard time disguising ourselves.”
“If we had a volunteer,” Lemuel said with some enthusiasm, “we could redesign him …”
“It would seem to me,” said Silas, “that what we have to do is figure out all the different approaches that are possible. Then we can try each approach on a separate village till we latch onto one that works.”
“Which presupposes,” Maximilian pointed out, “that each village will react the same.”
Silas said: “I would assume they would. After all, the culture is the same and their communications must be primitive. No village would know what was happening in another village until some little time had passed, which makes each village a perfectly isolated guinea pig for our little tests.”
“Si, I think you’re right,” said Sheridan. “Somehow or other we have to find a way to break their sales resistance. I don’t care what kind of prices we have to pay for the podars at the moment. I’d be willing to let them skin us alive to start with. Once we have them buying, we can squeeze down the price and come out even in the end. After all, the main thing is to get that cargo sled of ours loaded down with all the podars it can carry.”
“All right,” said Abraham. “Let’s get to work.”
They got to work. They spent the whole day at it. They mapped out the various sales approaches. They picked the villages where each one would be tried. Sheridan divided the robots into teams and assigned a team to each project. They worked out every detail. They left not a thing to chance.
Sheridan sat down to his supper table with the feeling that they had it made—if one of the approaches didn’t work, another surely would. The trouble was that, as he saw it, they had done no planning. They had been so sure that this was an easy one that they had plunged ahead into straight selling without any thought upon the matter.
In the morning, the robots went out, full of confidence.
Abraham’s crew had been assigned to a house-to-house campaign and they worked hard and conscientiously. They didn’t miss a single house in the entire village. At every house, the answer had been no. Sometimes it was a firm but simple no; sometimes it was a door slammed in the face; at other times, it was a plea of poverty.
One thing was plain: Individual Garsonians could be cracked no more readily than Garsonians en masse.
Gideon and his crew tried the sample racket—handing out gift samples door to door with the understanding they would be back again to display their wares. The Garsonian householders weren’t having any. They refused to take the samples.
Lemuel headed up the lottery project. A lottery, its proponents argued, appealed to basic greed. And this lottery had been rigged to carry maximum appeal. The price was as low as it could be set—one podar for a ticket. The list of prizes offered was just this side of fabulous. But the Garsonians, as it appeared, were not a greedy people. Not a ticket was sold.
And the funny thing about it—the unreasonable, maddening, impossible thing about it—was that the Garsonians seemed tempted.
“You could see them fighting it,” Abraham reported at the conference that night. “You could see they wanted something we had for sale, but they’d steel themselves against it and they never weakened.”
“We may have them on the very edge,” said Lemuel. “Maybe just a little push is all it will take. Do you suppose we could start a whispering campaign? Maybe we could get it rumored that some other villages are buying right and left. That should weaken the resistance.”
But Ebenezer was doubtful. “We have to dig down to causes. We have to find out what is behind this buyers’ strike. It may be a very simple thing, if we only knew …”
Ebenezer took out a team to a distant village. They hauled along with them a pre-fabricated supermarket, which they set up in the village square. They racked their wares attractively. They loaded the place with glamor and excitement. They installed loud-speakers all over town to bellow out their bargains.
Abraham and Gideon headed up two talking-billboard crews. They ranged far and wide, setting up their billboards splashed with attractive color, and installing propaganda tapes.
Sheridan had transmogged Oliver and Silas into semantics experts and they had engineered the tapes—a careful, skillful job. They did not bear down too blatantly on the commercial angle, although it certainly was there. The tapes were cuddly in spots and candid in others. At all times, they rang with deep sincerity. They sang the praises of the Garsonians for the decent, upstanding folks they were; they preached pithy homilies on honesty and fairness and the keeping of contracts; they presented the visitors as a sort of cross between public benefactors and addle-pated nitwits who could easily be outsmarted.
The tapes ran day and night. They pelted the defenseless Garsonians with a smooth, sleek advertising—and the effects should have been devastating, since the Garsonians were entirely unfamiliar with any kind of advertising.
Lemuel stayed behind at base and tramped up and down the beach, with his hands clenched behind his back, thinking furiously. At times he stopped his pacing long enough to scribble frantic notes, jotting down ideas.
Lemuel was trying to arrive at some adaptation of an old sales gag that he felt sure would work if he could only get it figured out—the ancient I-am-working-my-way-through-college wheeze.
Joshua and Thaddeus came to Sheridan for a pair of playwright transmogs. Sheridan said they had none, but Hezekiah, forever optimistic, ferreted into the bottom of the transmog chest. He came up with one transmog labeled auctioneer and another public speaker. They were the closest he could find.
Disgusted, the two rejected them and retired into seclusion, working desperately and as best they could on a medicine show routine.
For example, how did one write jokes for an alien people? What would they regard as funny? The off-color joke—oh, very fine, except that one would have to know in some detail the sexual life of the people it was aimed at. The mother-in-law joke—once again one would have to know; there were a lot of places where mothers-in-law were held in high regard, and other places where it was bad taste to even mention them. The dialect routine, of course, was strictly out, as it well deserved to be. Also, so far as the Garsonians were concerned, was the business slicker joke. The Garsonians were no commercial people; such a joke would sail clear above their heads.