But McCord’s face beamed. “Oh, I’m sure it will be all right with Cap. I’ll go and see him and be right back.”
Hydrophobia McCord waddled out again and up the companion- way. Dunc Edwards turned to me and screwed up his face in a wink. “Wait till that walking flower pot gets to the captain. He’ll get told off plenty.”
Then his face sobered and he looked worried. “But just in case—”
He went to the interphone and call the captain.
Captain Wilkins wasn’t in his quarters. In growing fear and anxiety, Edwards called all over the ship. Finally he connected with the captain in the hold and told him what McCord wanted.
“If you so much as dream of letting that combination flower pot and garbage can on wheels come into this shop, I resign!”
“McCord has already seen me and I have told him it was none of my business,” said Captain Wilkins, “but since that’s the way you feel about it I order you to allow McCord the use of any facilities he may require to produce the gadget he contemplates. Give him the run of the shop.”
Edwards' normally florid face went through shades of the spectrum like an auroral display and he hung up without another word.
He turned on me. “You heard? I should let that olfactory calamity work in here with me? I quit!”
Edwards, of course, didn’t quit. He sulked in the corridors and in the game room for half a day and finally came back, glaring as he entered the doorway and saw the mountainous back of McCord hunched over a workbench.
Nobody during the entire three months saw McCord so much as touch a drop of liquid to his lips. How he got along without it, I don’t know. He must have sneaked whiskey in minute quantities at night, but he never took enough to affect his locomotion. He slaved over his mysterious gadget in the repair shop and told no one what it was.
He had told Captain Wilkins that it was a device for insuring permanent trading possibilities with the Diomedes and Arthoids. That was enough for the captain to issue his orders to Edwards.
The last few days of the voyage McCord worked in a frenzy to finish. The day before we landed it was completed, so he said.
There was an apprehension among the crew, unspoken but definite. Without being a trader it’s hard to understand the peculiar pride the members of this queer and sometimes grotesque profession take in their work. There’s a pride in the accomplishment of meeting members of seemingly incomprehensible races and successfully putting over a barter deal.
If we failed to continue the contacts on Merans, we’d be blacklisted with every trading company in the business.
The peculiar, gadgety psychology of the Diomedes and Arthoids combined with the natural cantankerous nature of the creatures made Merans probably the most difficult trading area in existence.
No one ever has and probably never will understand what makes the little devils want to fight with every other type of life on their planet. Maybe it’s just their gadgety nature that makes them turn every device that’s traded to them into a weapon, but certainly they have a one-track idea of utility.
All we knew was that we were there to trade for Jewelworlds and it was against the law to trade weapons or interfere in local warfare.
Merans is about as desolate a world as has been encountered with life on it. Plant forms are practically nonexistent. The surface of the planet is rugged, but no mountains worthy of the name are there. There are low hills and cliffs big enough to contain caves in which the inhabitants live. And there are pools of water large enough for them to swim in, which is what they do about half the time.
The air is cold and light, but it is possible to go without spacesuits which makes trading a lot easier because all communication is by sign language. The creatures of Merans appeared to be totally voiceless and if they communicated with each other nothing was known of their methods.
Captain Wilkins set the Cassiopeia down on a barren plain between two mesas and beside a pool of water where the Diomedes were likely to be swimming.
The final jar as she settled on the stern plates was a welcome sound to us all. After three months in concentrated lilac soup we were all partially intoxicated or asphyxiated .by it.
Dunc Edwards was the first out. He leaped like a kid and beat his hands on his chest. “Air! Pure, fresh air!” he exclaimed.
It was an act for McCord’s benefit, but the latter wasn’t even looking. He left the hatch slowly with a purposeful look on his face and marched straight across the plain towards the pool. Captain Wilkins nodded with a tense, satisfied look on his face. “Better break out the pens, boys. McCord’s on his way to open negotiations.”
With full knowledge of the crucial nature of the moment, we began hauling out the cases' of writing pens to swap for Jewelworlds. The next few hours would tell us if this would be our last trip to Merans.
We had about a couple of dozen cases unloaded when Captain Wilkins pushed back his cap and shaded his eyes with his hands. “What in the name of seven constellations is that fool up to, now?”
We all looked in the direction of McCord. He was standing on the edge of the pool wigwagging frantically with his hands. It was the unique sign language he had established with the Diomedes who were frolicking in the pool.
In a moment a couple of hundred of them came tunmbling up out of the water and scrambled to the bank. They sat in orderly rows as if understanding some directions McCord was giving them.
They looked like nothing more than a flock of wet teddy bears. They had long, prehensile fingers and toes that they used to fashion the Jewelworlds—and make lethal gadgets out of eggbeaters.
Then something shocked our attention and froze us rigid where we stood.
McCord was slowly peeling off his shirt. He stood a moment in the cold and we could imagine him shivering even beneath the slabs of alcoholic fat that upholstered him.
Then he divested himself of the rest of his clothes and poised a moment on the bank. His body formed an arc and he deliberately plunged into the pool.
“McCord's taking a bath!” Somebody gasped. Maybe it was all of us. We dropped the cases of pens that were in our hands and ran for the pool until the light air made our lungs burn. But we didn’t stop.
Maybe McCord was committing suicide, was the thought that most of us had, I think. And without McCord we wouldn’t get half the Jewelworlds we expected for our cargo of pens.
The gathering of Diomedes gave us a dirty look as we came running up as if we had no right to burst in upon their god, Hydrophobia McCord, like that.
But when we topped the rise we saw what none of us expected to see. McCord was lazily floating on his back, half submerged. He spewed a column of water, whale-like, into the air and waved.
“Hi, fellows. I knew I could do it. My psychosis is all gone now, see? I can take a bath any time I want to! My hydrophobia won’t bother you no more.”
There was no trading that day or the next, because as soon as we got McCord to come out of the pool and get dressed he took one backward look and collapsed cold.
I helped catch him or, rather, to break his fall. It was like a ton of beef coming down on me and it took four of us quite a little while to carry him back to the ship and get him in his bunk.
When that was done we brought- the cases of pens back inside.
We didn’t carry a ship’s doctor because we were too small a tub for that, but I’d done a lot of first aid and was unanimously elected to take charge of the bellyaches and the drunks.
What I didn’t know about medicine would supply a dozen specialists with a lifetime of knowledge, but McCord’s condition seemed like a severe case of shock to me. After examining him, I called Captain Wilkins.