Two women came from the back. They staggered under the weight of heavy suitcases. They were drab worn-looking females with tight thin-lipped mouths, narrow eyes, long gray tubular dresses of a style utterly outmoded.
The auctioneer laughed in an embarrassed way. “It will take a long time to count all this.”
Morgan stood up. “Count it when you have time. There are twenty-five hundred mil-pesos there. Count it and send me my change.” He walked out.
Timothy caught the man in the main lobby. The man would have continued on if Timothy hadn’t planted himself squarely in front of him. Morgan had a heavy animal smell about him. His small eyes were red-rimmed.
“Well?” he said.
“You bought Banaldar!”
“I seem to remember doing something of the sort, young fellow.”
“This is serious to me. I—”
“Serious to you? Twenty-one hundred mil-pesos isn’t a joke, my young friend.”
“For five years I’ve been working and planning to buy Banaldar.”
“So?”
“You can’t take it this way. Look, give me some time. I’ll see that you make a profit. Let me have some time and I’ll buy it from you. I promise.”
Morgan sucked at his teeth. He laughed. “No. We want it. It is a good place for the Free Lives. We go there now. We live there from now on. Not for five thousand mil-pesos can you have it. You know our group. We do not buy or sell for profit.”
“You’re some sort of a sect, aren’t you?”
“Sect? No. We are men and women. We live the way men and women were meant to live.”
He pushed by Timothy and walked toward the door, the two women followed him meekly. “What are you going to do on Banaldar?” Timothy asked hopelessly.
Morgan turned. “Do? We live naked and eat berries and hunt with stones and clubs. What do you think men are meant to do? Live like this?” He included in an expressive gesture all of the glitter and bustle of the capital. “No. We live in caves and we fill our bellies and breed our children and sleep well at night. Good day to you. I have a lot to do. We all leave soon, seven hundred of us.”
When the auction was over Timothy sought out the representative of Transgalactic Development. The man said, “That was quite a surprise, wasn’t it? I mean that bunch of crazy-heads buying themselves a planet. They’ve been chased out of the most respectable areas. Nudity and inability to accept moral codes have made them undesirable.”
“How did they get that much money?”
The auctioneer shrugged. “I understand they’ve taken wealthy widows into the tribe with the understanding that they sign everything over to the Leader. There have been law suits but the Free Lives seem to be able to afford pretty good legal talent.”
“I want to ask about something,” Timothy said. “I’ve gone over the laws pretty carefully. If, for any reason, at the end of three years, the purchased planet has not been developed in any way and is not populated the sale can revert to the second highest bidder. Is that right?”
“Yes,” the man said dubiously. “But only if the second bid money is left on deposit with Transgalactic as a guarantee of good faith. And I frankly don’t see much point in such a move. Those Free Lives aren’t going to vacate in a hurry. We have a lot of attractive planets in various stages of preparation for sale. Wouldn’t it be better...”
Timothy Trench wrapped his big hand in the front of the auctioneer’s jacket and shook him gently. “I want Banaldar,” he said.
The man, who had started to be friendly, pushed Timothy’s hand away coldly. “Suit yourself. The auction seems overcrowded with crazy people today. Come with me and we’ll prepare the papers.”
The two thousand, infected by Timothy’s dream, had impatiently awaited word of the purchase. Many of them had burned bridges behind them. Their immediate disappointment at losing out on the legendary Banaldar was submerged in a mighty and towering anger when they found that Timothy, in a moment of amazingly poor judgment, had put the fund out of their reach for a three-year period.
They cursed themselves for fools, cursed Timothy for a charlatan. Eyes which had looked to the stars turned regretfully back to Earth and to the construction of bridges to replace the burned ones.
Timothy, after getting word to all his followers, haunted the Free Lives. He could not believe that they would actually embark for Banaldar. But at last, one cool morning, he stood on Take-off Mesa in the state of Hidalgo and watched the unwashed sleazy women, the whining brawling children, the heavy-bodied men, all carrying bundles of personal effects, file aboard the chartered converted freighter. Leader Morgan stood off to one side and watched them file aboard, scratching himself ruminatively.
Then there was the ballooning antigrav lift, the straightening by means of the gyroscopes. At the warning gun Timothy, the only spectator, turned away as did the port crews. The flash lit the countryside like a vast photobulb. When he looked again the freighter was gone. Timothy took the shuttle back to Mexico City and got thoroughly and completely drunk on a combination of mescal and pulque.
Two weeks later he awoke in a rancid hotel room in Rio, broke, dirty and with a bad case of the shakes. He presented himself at the nearest Reclaim Office, signed the agreement and was forthwith cleaned, fed and given employment. He worked mechanically and well and did not permit himself to think. To think meant Banaldar and thoughts of Banaldar hurt. It wasn’t good to think of his virgin world infested with the Free Lives.
He could picture them, hunkered around their fires in the evening, strong teeth ripping meat from small animal bones, chanting gutturally for their crude dances — a scene from the dawn of man — whereas Timothy had planned that Banaldar would be the high noon of mankind. To think of Banaldar given over to brute orgy was like thinking of a lovely mistress assaulted in the dark alleys of an evil city.
And so Timothy Trench avoided thought as much as possible.
At the end of a full year he found that he had saved a respectable sum, two cien-pesos. For a time the money meant nothing to him. He was too far sunk in gloom. And then he began to wonder how Banaldar looked at the end of a year. It was, he guessed, a form of masochism.
He wondered and slowly wonder turned to determination. Maybe Leader Morgan didn’t like Banaldar any more. Maybe he could be talked into leaving or selling. Determination strengthened into an iron resolve. Timothy began to haunt the spaceports, to read the classified advertising.
And at last he found the two-man launch he wanted. It was six years old but the hull was sound. It had logged only thirty-one months and the agency man said that it had belonged to an elderly couple who always brought it in like a feather.
Finally the agency man said, “Okay, okay. So we take a loss on it. I’ll let you have it for two and a half cien-pesos. Nobody ever made a better buy. You’ll never regret it, fella.”
Within two weeks, Timothy had got his license renewal, his space permit and his astrogation pattern. He took off for Banaldar.
As the launch bucked and shuddered and trembled its way out of hyper-flight, Timothy gagged and retched and shook his head until his vision cleared. It took a half hour to pick up his points of manual reference and plot his position. And then, with deep excitement in him, he saw the pin-head of light slowly growing larger, centered on the cross-hairs of the landing screen.
Within two hours continental land masses appeared, cloud formations like tiny white scatter rugs against them. He set the launch in orbit, braking it into concentric circles, watching the skin gauges as he hit the atmosphere. At ten thousand feet he nullified his own gravity to the equivalent of a five pound mass, peeled back the direct vision port and cruised slowly across the smiling sunlit face of the planet.