'Yeah, I guess so,' Wingate answered, and threw the weapon as far as he could out into the marshy waste. Several of the amphibians streaked after it and dived. 'I guess you can let him up now.'
The Pusher said nothing to them as he brushed himself off, but he turned to the Crocker who had remained quietly in his saddle at the controls the whole time. 'Why the hell didn't you help me?'
'I supposed you could take care of yourself, Boss,' Jimmie answered noncommittally.
Wingate and Hartley finished that 'work period as helpers to labor clients already stationed. The Pusher had completely ignored them except for curt orders necessary to station them. But while they were washing up for supper back at the compound they received word to report to the Big House.
When they were ushered into the Patron's office they found the Pusher already there with his employer and wearing a self-satisfied smirk while Van Huysen's expression was black indeed.
'What's this I hear about you two?' he burst out. 'Refusing work. Jumping my foreman. By Joe, I show you a thing or two!'
'Just a moment, Patron van Huysen,' began Wingate quietly, suddenly at home in the atmosphere of a trial court, 'no one refused duty. Hartley simply protested doing dangerous work without reasonable safeguards. As for the fracas, your foreman attacked us; we acted simply in self-defense, and desisted as soon as we had disarmed him.'
The Pusher leaned over Van Huysen and whispered in his ear. The Patron looked more angry than before. 'You did this with natives watching. Natives! You know colonial law? I could send you to the mines for this.'
'No,' Wingate denied, 'your foreman did it in the presence of natives. Our role was passive and defensive throughout -'
'You call jumping my foreman peaceful? Now you listen to me-Your job here is to work. My foreman's job is to tell you where and how to work. He's not such a dummy as to lose me my investment in a man. He judges what work is dangerous, not you.' The Pusher whispered again to his chief. Van Huysen shook his head. The other persisted, but the Patron cut him off with a gesture, and turned back to the two labor clients.
'See here-I give every dog one bite, but not two. For you, no supper tonight and no rhira. Tomorrow we see how you behave.'
'But Patron van Huys -'
'That's all. Get to your quarters.'
At lights out Wingate found, on crawling into his bunk, that someone had hidden therein a food bar. He munched it gratefully in the dark and wondered who his friend could be. The food stayed the complaints of his stomach but was not sufficient, in the absence of rhira, to permit him to go to sleep. He lay there, staring into the oppressive blackness of the bunkroom and listening to the assorted irritating noises that men can make while sleeping, and considered his position. It had been bad enough but barely tolerable before; now, he was logically certain, it would be as near hell as a vindictive overseer could make it. He was prepared to believe, from what he had seen and the tales he had heard, that it would be very near indeed!
He had been nursing his troubles for perhaps an hour when he felt a hand touch his side. 'Hump! Hump!' came a whisper, 'come outside. Something's up.' It was Jimmie.
He felt his way cautiously through the stacks of bunks and slipped out the door after Jimmie. Satchel was already outside and with him a fourth figure.
It was Annek van Huysen. He wondered how she had been able to get into the locked compound. Her eyes were puffy, as if she had been crying.
Jimmie started to speak at once, in cautious, low tones. 'The kid tells us that I am scheduled to haul you two lugs back into Adonis tomorrow.'
'What for?'
'She doesn't know. But she's afraid it's to sell you South. That doesn't seem likely. The Old Man has never sold anyone South-but then nobody ever jumped his pusher before. I don't know.'
They wasted some minutes in fruitless discussion, then, after a bemused silence, Wingate asked Jimmie, 'Do you know where they keep the keys to the crock?'
'No. Why do y-'
'I could get them for you,' offered Annek eagerly.
'You can't drive a crock.'
'I've watched you for some weeks.'
'Well, suppose you can,' Jimmie continued to protest, 'suppose you run for it in the crock. You'd be lost in ten miles. If you weren't caught, you'd starve.'
Wingate shrugged. 'I'm not going to be sold South.'
'Nor am I,' Hartley added.
'Wait a minute.'
'Well, I don't see any bet-'
'Wait a minute,' Jimmie reiterated snappishly. 'Can't you see I'm trying to think'?'
The other three kept silent for several long moments. At last Jimmie said, 'Okay. Kid, you'd better run along and let us talk. The less you know about this the better for you.' Annek looked hurt, but complied docilely to the extent of withdrawing out of earshot. The three men conferred for some minutes. At last Wingate motioned for her to rejoin them.
'That's all, Annek,' he told her. 'Thanks a lot for everything you've done. We've figured a way out.' He stopped, and then said awkwardly, 'Well, good night.'
She looked up at him.
Wingate wondered what to do or say next. Finally he led her around the corner of the barracks and bade her good night again. He returned very quickly, looking shame-faced. They re-entered the barracks.
Patron van Huysen also was having trouble getting to sleep. He hated having to discipline his people. By damn, why couldn't they all be good boys and leave him in peace? Not but what there was precious little peace for a rancher these days. It cost more to make a crop than the crop fetched in Adonis-at least it did after the interest was paid.
He had turned his attention to his accounts after dinner that night to try to get the unpleasantness out of his mind, but he found it hard to concentrate on his figures. That man Wingate, now ... he had bought him as much to keep him away from that slave driver Rigsbee as to get another hand. He had too much money invested in hands as it was in spite of his foreman always complaining about being short of labor. He would either have to sell some, or ask the bank to refinance the mortgage again.
Hands weren't worth their keep any more. You didn't get the kind of men on Venus that used to come when he was a boy. He bent over his books again. If the market went up even a little, the bank should be willing to discount his paper for a little more than last season. Maybe that would do it.
He had been interrupted by a visit from his daughter. Annek he was always glad to see, but this time what she had to say, what she finally blurted out. had only served to make him angry. She, preoccupied with her own thoughts, could not know that she hurt her father's heart, with a pain that was actually physical.
But that had settled the matter insofar as Wingate was concerned. He would get rid of the trouble-maker. Van Huysen ordered his daughter to bed with a roughness he had never before used on her.
Of course it was all his own fault, he told himself after he had gone to bed. A ranch on Venus was no place to raise a motherless girl. His Annekchen was almost a woman grown now; how was she to find a husband here in these outlands? What would she do if he should die? She did not know it, but there would be nothing left, nothing, not even a ticket to Terra. No, she would not become a labor client's vrouw; no, not while there was a breath left in his old tired body.
Well, Wingate would have to go, and the one they called Satchel, too. But he would not sell them South. No, he had never done that to one of his people. He thought with distaste of the great, factory like plantations a few hundred miles further from the pole, where the temperature was always twenty to thirty degrees higher than it was in his marshes and mortality among labor clients was a standard item in cost accounting. No, he would take them in and trade them at the assignment station; what happened to them at auction there would be none of his business. But he would not sell them directly South.