“I’ll make a deal,” said Doyle.
All five of them asked, DEAL?
“I’ll tell you where he is; you do something for me. You let me up into that orchard for an hour tonight, then let me out again. Without letting Metcalfe know.”
They huddled, conferring, their blackboard fronts a-squiggle with the queer, confusing symbols Doyle had seen on the rolla’s chest back in Metcalfe’s garden.
Then they turned to face him again, the five of them lined up, shoulder to shoulder:
WE CANNOT DO THAT
WE MADE AN AGREEMENT
AND WE GAVE OUR WORD
WE GROW THE MONEY
METCALFE DISTRIBUTES
IT
“I wouldn’t distribute it,” said Doyle. “I promise that I wouldn’t. I’d keep it for myself.”
NO SOAP, spelled out rolla No. 1.
“This agreement that you have with Metcalfe. How come you made it?”
GRATITUDE, said No. 2.
“Don’t mind my snickering, but gratitude for Metcalfe …”
HE FOUND US
AND HE RESCUED
AND PROTECTED US
AND WE ASKED HIM
WHAT CAN WE DO?
“And he said, grow me some money.”
HE SAY THE PLANET
NEEDED MONEY
HE SAY MONEY
MAKE HAPPY ALL
POOR HEELS LIKE YOU
“The hell you say,” said Doyle, aghast.
WE GROW IT
HE DISTRIBUTE IT
BETWEEN US WE
MAKE ALL THE
PLANET HAPPY
“Just a bunch of missionaries!”
WE DO NOT
READ YOU, CHUM
“Missionaries. People who do good.”
WE DO GOOD
ON MANY PLANETS
WHY NOT DO
GOOD HERE?
“But money?”
THAT WHAT METCALFE
SAY.
HE SAY PLANET HAS
PLENTY OF ALL ELSE
BUT IS SHORT ON MONEY.
“What about the other two rollas that are missing?”
THEY DISAGREE
THEY LEAVE
WE WORRY
MUCH ABOUT
THEM.
“You disagreed on growing money? They thought, maybe, you should grow something else?”
WE DISAGREE
ON METCALFE.
TWO SAY HE TRICK US.
REST OF US
SAY HE VERY
NOBLE HUMAN
What a bunch of creeps, thought Doyle.
Very noble human!
WE TALK
ENOUGH
NOW WE
SAY
GOODBYE.
They turned around, almost as if someone had shouted orders at them, and went stumping up the slope, back toward the orchard.
“Hey!” yelled Doyle, leaping to his feet.
Behind him was a rustle and he whirled around.
The nettles that had been laid to either side to make the path were rising, wiping out the path!
“Hey!” yelled Doyle again, but the rollas paid no attention to him. They went on stumping up the slope.
Doyle stood in his little trampled area, wedged against the fence, and all around him were the nettles—upright and strong and bright in the afternoon. They stretched in a solid mass at least a hundred feet back from the fence and they were shoulder high.
A man could manage to get through them. They could be kicked aside and trampled down, but some of them would be bound to peg a man and by the time one got out of there he’d have plenty welts.
And did he, at the moment, really want to get out of there?
He was, he told himself, no worse off than he had been before.
Better off, perhaps, for he was through the nettles. Better off, that is, if those stinking little rollas didn’t run and tattle on him.
There was no sense, he decided, in going through the nettles now. If he did, in just a couple of hours or so he’d have to wade back through them once again to reach the fence.
He couldn’t climb the fence until it was getting dark and he had no place else to go.
He took a good look at the fence and it would be a tough one to get over. It was a good eight feet of woven wire and atop that were three strands of barbed wire, attached to an arm-like bracket that extended outward beyond the woven fence.
Just beyond the fence stood an ancient oak tree and if he had had a rope he could make a lariat—but he had no rope, and if he wanted to get over the fence, he would somehow have to climb it.
He hunkered tight against the ground and felt downright miserable. His body was corrugated with mosquito lumps and the nettle welts on his hand had turned into blisters and he’d had a bit more sun than he was accustomed to. And now the upper molar on the left side of his jaw was developing a sort of galloping ache. All he needed.
He sneezed and it hurt his head to sneeze and the aching tooth gave a bounding leap.
Maybe, he figured, it was the pollen from those lousy nettles.
Never saw no nettles like them before, he told himself, eying them warily.
More than likely the rollas had a hand in growing them. The rollas were good with plants. They had developed the money trees and if they could develop money trees there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do with plants. He remembered how the nettles had fallen over to the left and right to make a path for him. It had been the rolla, he was sure, who had made them do that, for there hadn’t been enough wind to do it and even if there had been a wind, there wasn’t any wind that blew two ways at once.
There was nothing like the rollas in the world. And that might be exactly it. They’d said something about doing good on other worlds. But no matter what they’d done on other worlds, they’d sure been suckered here.
Do-gooders, he thought. Missionaries, maybe, from some other world, from some place out in space—a roving band of beings devoted to a cause. And trapped into a ridiculous situation on a planet that might have little, if anything, in common with any other world they’d ever seen.
Did they even, he wondered, understand what money was? Just what kind of story had Metcalfe palmed off on them?
They had arrived and Metcalfe, of all persons, had stumbled onto them and taken them in tow. Metcalfe, not so much a man as an organization that from long experience would know exactly how to exploit a situation such as the rollas offered. One man alone could not have handled it, could not have done all that needed to be done to set up the rollas for the kill. And only in an organization such as Metcalfe headed, long schooled in the essentials of self preservation, could there have been any hope of maintaining the essential secrecy.
The rollas had been duped—completely, absolutely fooled—and yet they were no fools. They had learned the language, not the spoken language only, but both the spoken and the written, and that spelled sharp intelligence. Perhaps more intelligence than was first apparent, for they did not make use of sound in their normal talk among themselves. But they had adapted readily, it seemed, to sound communication.
The sun long since had disappeared behind the nettles and now was just above the tree line of the bluffs. Dusk would be coming soon and then, Doyle told himself, he could get busy.
He debated once again which course he should take. By now the rollas might have told Metcalfe he was at the fence and Metcalfe might be waiting for him, although Metcalfe, if he knew, more than likely would not just wait, but would be coming out to get him. And as for the raid upon the orchard—he’d had trouble enough with just one rolla when he tried to rob a tree. He didn’t like to think what five might do to him.
Behind him the nettles began to rustle and he leaped to his feet. Maybe, he thought wildly, they were opening up the path again. Maybe the path was opened automatically, at regularly scheduled hours. Maybe the nettles were like four o’clocks or morning glories—maybe they were engineered by the rollas to open and to close the path so many times a day.