Standing under this window, Alvah called, “Hello in there!”
The muffled voices died away for a moment, then buzzed as busily as ever.
“Come on out―I want to talk to you!”
Same result.
“You don’t have to be afraid! I come in peace!”
The voices died away again, and Alvah thought he saw a dim face momentarily through the pane. A single voice rose on an interrogative note.
“Peace!” Alvah shouted.
The window slid abruptly back into the wall and, as Alvah gaped upward, a deluge of slops descended on him, followed by a gale of coarse laughter.
Alvah’s immediate reaction, after the first dazed and gasping instant, was a hot-water-and-soap tropism, carrying with it an ardent desire to get out of his drenched clothes and throw them away. His second, as imperious as the first, had the pure flame of artistic inspiration―he wanted to see how many esthetically satisfying small pieces one explosive charge would make out of that excrescence-shaped building.
Under no conditions, said the handbook he had been required to memorize, will you commit any act which might be interpreted by the Muckfeet as aggressive, nor will you make use of your weapons at any time, unless such use becomes necessary for the preservation of your own life.
Alvah wavered, grew chilly and retired. Restored in body, but shaken in spirit, he headed south.
Then there had been his encounter with the old man and the animal. Somewhere in the triangle of land between the Mississippi and the Big Black, at a point which was not on his itinerary at all, but had the overwhelming attraction of being more than a thousand air-miles from New York, he had set the floater down near another sprawling settlement.
AS usual, all signs of activity in and around the village promptly disappeared. With newly acquired caution, Alvah sat tight. Normal human curiosity, he reasoned, would drive the Muckfeet to him sooner or later ―and even if that failed, there was his nuisance value. How long could you ignore a strange object, a few hundred yards from your home, that was shouting, waving flags, flashing colored lights and sending up puffs of pink-and-green smoke?
Nothing happened for a little over an hour. Then, half dozing in his control chair, Alvah saw two figures coming toward him across the field.
Alvah’s ego, which had been taking a beating all day, began to expand. He stepped out onto the platform and waited.
The two figures kept coming, taking their time. The tall one was a skinny loose-jointed oldster with a conical hat on the back of his head. The little one ambling along in front of him was some sort of four-footed animal.
In effect, an audience of one―at any rate, it was Alvah’s best showing so far. He mentally rehearsed his opening lines. There was no point, he thought, in bothering with the magic tricks or the comic monologue. He might as well go straight into the sales talk.
The odd pair was now much closer, and Gustad recognized the animal half of it. It was a socalled watchdog, one of the incredibly destructive beasts the Muckfeet trained to do their fighting for them. It had a slender, supple body, a long feline tail and a head that looked something like a terrier’s and something like a housecat’s. However, it was not half as large or as frightening in appearance as the pictures Alvah had seen. It must, he decided, be a pup.
TWO yards from the platform, the oldster came to a halt. The watchdog sat down beside him, tongue lolling wetly. Alvah turned off the loudspeakers and the color displays.
“Friend,” he began, “I’m here to show you things that will astound you, marvels that you wouldn’t believe unless you saw them with your own―”
“You a Yazoo?”
Thrown off stride, Alvah gaped. “What was that, friend?”
“Ah said―you a Yazoo?”
“No,” said Alvah, feeling reasonably positive.
“Any kin to a Yazoo?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Git,” said the old man.
Unlikely as it seemed, a Yazoo was apparently a good thing to be. “Wait a second, said Alvah. Did you say Yazoo? I didn’t understand you there at first. Am I a Yazoo! Why, man, my whole family on both sides has been―” what was the plural of Yazoo?
“Ah’ll” count to two, said the old man. “One.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Alvah, feeling his ears getting hot. The watchdog, he noticed, had hoisted its rump a fraction of an inch and was staring at him in a marked manner. He flexed his right forearm slightly and felt the reassuring pressure of the pistol in its pop-out holster. “What makes you Muckfeet think you can―”
“Two,” said the oldster, and the watchdog was a spreadeagled blur in midair, seven feet straight up from the ground.
Instinct took over. Instinct had nothing to do with pistols or holsters, or with the probable size of a full-grown Muckfoot watchdog. It launched Alvah’s body into a backward standing broad jump through the open floater door, and followed that with an economical underhand punch at the control button inside.
The door slammed shut. It then bulged visibly inward and rang like a gong. Sprawled on the floor, Gustad stared at it incredulously. There were further sounds―a thunderous growling and a series of hackle-raising skrieks, as of hard metal being gouged by something even harder. The whole floater shook.
Alvah made the control chair in one leap, slammed on the power switch and yanked at the steering bar.. At an altitude of about a hundred feet, he saw the dark shape of the watchdog leap clear and fall, twisting.
A few seconds later, he put the bar into neutral and looked down. Man and watchdog were moving slowly back across the field toward the settlement. As far as Alvah could tell, the beast was not even limping.
ALVAH’s orders were reasonably elastic, but he had already stretched them badly in covering the southward leg of his route in one day. Still, there seemed to be nothing else to do. Either there was an area somewhere on the circuit where he could get the Muckfeet to listen to him, or there wasn’t. If there was, it would make more sense to hop around until he found it, and then work outward to its limits, than to blunder straight along, collecting bruises and insults.
And if there wasn’t―and this did not bear thinking about―then the whole trip was a bust.
Alvah switched on his communicator and tapped out the coded clicks that meant, “Proceeding on schedule”―which was a lie―“no results yet”―which was true. Then he headed north.
Nightfall overtook him as he was crossing the Ozark Plateau. He set the floater’s controls to hover at a thousand feet, went to bed and slept badly until just before dawn. With a cup of kaffin in his hand, he watched this phenomenon in surprised disapprovaclass="underline" The scattered lights winking out below, the first colorless hint of radiance, which illuminated nothing, but simply made the Universe seem more senselessly vast and formless than before; finally, after an interminable progression of insignificant changes, the rinds of orange and scarlet, and the dim Sun bulging up at the rim of the turning Earth.
It was lousy theater.
How, Alvah asked himself, could any human being keep himself from dying of sheer irrelevance and boredom against a background like that? He was aware that billions had done so, but his general impression of history was that people who didn’t have a city always got busy improving themselves until they could build one or take one away from somebody else. All but the Muckfeet …
Once their interest has been engaged, said the handbook at one point, you will lay principal stress upon the competitive advantages of each product. It will be your aim to create a situation in which ownership of one or more of our products will be not only an economic advantage, but a mark of social distinction. In this way, communities which have accepted the innovations will, in order to preserve and extend the recognition of their own status, be forced to convert members of neighboring communities.