He had nothing with which to blanket the massive retron emissions from his cargo hold. He was lost when he started, and his erratically functioning instrumentation quickly lost him much more thoroughly while he fought a losing battle to conserve fuel and keep his worn engines operating. Finally he selected the world that seemed to offer his best chance for survival and pointed his ship at it. It was in fact his last chance, because his misbehaving fuel gauge had misled him. He ran out of fuel and crashed while attempting to land.
The natives made him welcome. He became a hero by turning his las pistol on an obnoxious, leathery-skinned flying creature that dove into the sea to tear its food from the living koluf. The maf had become so numerous that the natives’ principal source of food was threatened. Obrien used up all of his magazines, shooting the creatures in flight and destroying chrysalides and young in the high, inaccessible lairs, and he rendered the maf virtually extinct.
Obrien then explored the lone continent end to end and found nothing more significant than scant deposits of coal and a few metals. Any serious prospector would have scorned them, but they sufficed to lead the natives immediately into a bronze age and give them the metal points they so desperately needed for their hunting spears. He next turned his attention to the sea and added an outrigger to the hunting boats for stability in the furious battles waged with the koluf.
He had lost interest in being rescued. He was the Langri; he had his family and his own growing village and a position of tremendous prestige. He could have been the Elder at a relatively young age, but the idea of him, an alien, ruling these people seemed repugnant to him. His refusal enhanced the natives’ respect for him. He was happy.
He also was worried. The planet had such meager natural resources that no one would be attracted to it by prospective plunder. It was so inhospitable to humans that the natives could not have survived without the koluf and the many species of gourds. There were few material things that they needed that could not be made in whole or in part from gourds, but the koluf crop barely sufficed to feed them. Fortunately for the natives, there was no galactic market for gourds. Unfortunately, the world had another potential resource that rendered it priceless.
It was a beautiful world. Its beaches were smooth and sandy, its waters warm, its climate admirable. It would make a magnificent vacation resort, a world-wide vacation resort, and those paradoxical features that made life so difficult for the natives would become assets where tourists were concerned.
Man was the alien on this world, and these natives had to be descended from a space expedition or colonization party that had gone astray hundreds of years before. Except for the koluf— after a lavish purification process—and a few roots and berries, the world’s flora and fauna were virulently poisonous to man. Fortunately, man was equally poisonous to the native animals. He could swim in the sea with perfect safety as long as he avoided drowning, for not even the most voracious monster would dare to molest him. A drop of his blood, a scrap of his flesh, meant sickness or death, and in that violent arena the first was rapidly followed by the second.
Man paid dearly for his safety, because there was so little that he could eat. The edible roots could be pounded into a barely palatable flour. A few specimens of bitter fruit and leaves were excellent for seasoning koluf meat, and there was a small, pulpy berry that was tasteless but contained juices that could be blended into an excellent fermented drink. That was all.
But if man brought his own food, avoided poisonous thorns and nettles, and guarded against those forms of the world’s distressingly potent bacteria to which man was susceptible—and a well-ordered resort would take the necessary precautions—this world would become his playground. To the people of the myriads of harsh environments whose natural resources attracted large populations—dry worlds, barren worlds, airless worlds—it would be paradise. Those who could leave their bleak atmosphere domes, or underground caverns, or sand-blown villages for a few days in this sweet-smelling, oxygen-rich atmosphere could return to their rigorous environments with renewed courage.
Luxury hotels would crowd the beaches. Lesser hotels, boardinghouses, rental cottages would press back into the hills where magnificent forests now flaunted their lavishly colored leaves. Millionaires would indulge in spirited bidding for choice stretches of beach on which to locate their mansions. The shores would be clotted with vacationers. Ships would offer relaxing sea cruises, undersea craft would introduce their passengers to the world’s fantastically rich and incredibly strange marine life, and crowded wharves would harbor fishing boats for hire—for though the sea creatures were inedible, catching such repulsive monsters would constitute rare sport. It would be a year-round business because the climate was delightful the year around: a multibillion credit business.
The natives, of course, would be crowded out. Exterminated. There were laws to protect them, and an impressive Colonial Bureau to enforce the laws, but Obrien knew only too well how such governmental bureaucracies functioned. The little freebooters such as himself, who tried to pick up a few quick credits, received stiff fines and prison terms. The big-money operators incorporated, applied for charters, and if charters weren’t available they found the required legal loophole or paid the necessary bribe. Then they went after their spoils under the protection of the laws that were supposed to protect the natives.
The tourists’ water recreations would drive the koluf to new feeding grounds, and unless the natives were able to follow it—continuously—or effect radical changes in their diet, their social structure, and their manner of living, they would starve. Obrien doubted that they could do any of those. And a century or two later, scholars, always worrying deeply about yesterday’s tragedies while blithely ignoring today’s, would bemoan the loss. “They’d achieved a splendid civilization. Some of its facets were highly original and even unique. It’s a pity, really it is. One would think there’d be a law about that kind of thing.”
The young people came from all of the villages. They swung lightly down the coast with flashing paddles and rollicking songs—ten at a time they came, handsome boys and lovely girls bronzed from their days in the sun, all of them equally experienced at the koluf hunt and the loom, for in this society either sex did the work it preferred.
Theirs was the age of carefree happiness, the age the natives called the Time of Joy, for they were granted the leisure for singing and dancing, for courtship, for—if they chose—doing nothing at all, before assuming their adult responsibilities. And though they solemnly beached their boats along the point and came into the august presence of the Langri with appropriate reverence, he knew that no talk about tomorrow’s doom would easily divert their thoughts from today’s delights.
His questions startled them. They grappled awkwardly with strange concepts. They struggled to repeat unutterable sounds. They underwent bewildering tests of strength and endurance, of memory, of comprehension. Obrien tested and rejected, and others took their places, and finally he had chosen fifty.
In the forest, remote from the attractions of sea and shore and village, Obrien had a small village constructed. He moved in with his fifty students, and he worked them from dawn until darkness and often far into the night, while other natives loyally brought food, and the villages in turn sent help to prepare it. Fornri stood by alertly to do whatever was needed, and Dalla waited patiently with a cool drink and a damp leaf for Obrien’s brow when he tired, and an entire people watched and waited. The pain in Obrien’s abdomen came and went. When he was able, he ignored it. When he could not ignore it, he dismissed his students until he felt better.