But Gideon was wrong.
Back at the floater, they got in touch with base.
“I can’t understand it,” said Hezekiah, “I’ve had the same report from four other teams. I was about to call you, sir.”
“You’d better get out every floater that you can,” said Sheridan. “Check all the villages around. And keep a lookout for the people. They may be somewhere in the country. There’s a possibility they’re at a harvest festival.”
“If they’re at a festival, sir,” asked Hezekiah, “why did they take their belongings? You don’t take along your furniture when you attend a festival.”
“I know,” said Sheridan. “You put your finger on it. Get the boys out, will you?’
“There’s just the possibility,” Gideon offered, “that they are changing villages. Maybe there’s a tribal law that says they have to build a new village every so often. It might have its roots in an ancient sanitation law that the camp must be moved at stated intervals.”
“It could be that,” Sheridan said wearily. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Abraham thumbed a fist toward the barn.
Sheridan hesitated, then threw caution to the winds.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Gideon stalked up the ramp and reached the door. He put out a hand and grasped one of the planks nailed across the door. He wrenched and there was an anguished shriek of tortured nails ripping from the wood and the board came free. Another plank came off and then another one and Gideon put his shoulder to the door and half of it swung open.
Inside, in the dimness of the barn, was the dull, massive shine of metal—a vast machine sitting on the driveway floor.
Sheridan stiffened with a cold, hollow sense of terror.
It was wrong, he thought. There could be no machine.
The Garsonians had no business having a machine. Their culture was entirely non-mechanical. The best they had achieved so far had been the hoe and wheel, and even yet they had not been able to put the hoe and wheel together to make themselves a plow.
They had had no machine when the second expedition left some fifteen years ago, and in those fifteen years they could not have spanned the gap. In those fifteen years, from all surface indications, they had not advanced an inch.
And yet the machine stood in the driveway of the barn.
It was a fair-sized cylinder, set on end and with a door in one side of it. The upper end of it terminated in a dome-shaped cap. Except for the door, it resembled very much a huge and snub-nosed bullet.
Interference, thought Sheridan. There had been someone here between the time the second expedition left and the third one had arrived.
“Gideon,” he said.
“What is it, Steve?”
“Go back to base and bring the transmog chest. Tell Hezekiah to get my tent and all the other stuff over here as soon as he is able. Call some of the boys off reconnaissance. We have work to do.”
There had been someone here, he thought—and most certainly there had. A very urbane creature who sat beneath a tree beside a spread-out picnic cloth, swigging at his jug and talking for three solid hours without saying anything at all!
V
The messenger from Central Trading brought his small ship down to one side of the village square, not far from where Sheridan’s tent was pitched. He slid back the visi-dome and climbed out of his seat.
He stood for a moment, shining in the sun, during which be straightened his SPECIAL COURIER badge, which had become askew upon his metal chest. Then he walked deliberately toward the barn, heading for Sheridan, who sat upon the ramp.
“You are Sheridan?” he asked.
Sheridan nodded, looking him over. He was a splendid thing.
“I had trouble finding you. Your base seems to be deserted.”
“We ran into some difficulty,” Sheridan said quietly.
“Not too serious, I trust. I see your cargo is untouched.”
“Let me put it this way—we haven’t been bored.”
“I see,” the robot said, disappointed that an explanation was not immediately forthcoming. “My name is Tobias and I have a message for you.”
“I’m listening.”
Sometimes, Sheridan told himself, these headquarters robots needed taking down a peg or two.
“It is a verbal message. I can assure you that I am thoroughly briefed. I can answer any questions you may wish to ask.”
“Please,” said Sheridan. “The message first.”
“Central Trading wishes to inform you that they have been offered the drug calenthropodensia in virtually unlimited supply by a firm which describes itself as Galactic Enterprises. We would like to know if you can shed any light upon the matter.”
“Galactic Enterprises,” said Sheridan. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Neither has Central Trading. I don’t mind telling you that we’re considerably upset.”
“I should imagine you would be.”
Tobias squared his shoulders. “I have been instructed to point out to you that you were sent to Garson IV to obtain a cargo of podars, from which this drug is made, and that the assignment, in view of the preliminary work already done upon the planet, should not have been so difficult that—”
“Now, now,” cautioned Sheridan. “Let us keep our shirts on. If it will quiet your conscience any, you may consider for the record that I have accepted the bawling out you’re supposed to give me.”
“But you—”
“I assume,” said Sheridan, “that Galactic Enterprises is quoting a good stiff price on this drug of theirs.”
“It’s highway robbery. What Central Trading has sent me to find out—”
“Is whether I am going to bring in a cargo of podars. At the moment, I can’t tell you.”
“But I must take back my report!”
“Not right now, you aren’t. I won’t be able to make a report to you for several days at least. You’ll have to wait.”
“But my instructions are—”
“Suit yourself,” Sheridan said sharply. “Wait for it or go back without it. I don’t give a damn which you do.”
He got up from the ramp and walked into the barn.
The robots, he saw, had finally pried or otherwise dislodged the cap from the big machine and had it on the side on the driveway floor, tilted to reveal the innards of it.
“Steve,” said Abraham bitterly, “take a look at it.”
Sheridan took a look. The inside of the cap was a mass of fused metal.
“There were some working parts in there,” said Gideon, “but they have been destroyed.”
Sheridan scratched his head. “Deliberately? A self-destruction relay?”
Abraham nodded. “They apparently were all finished with it. If we hadn’t been here, I suppose they would have carted this machine and the rest of them back home, wherever that may be. But they couldn’t take a chance of one of them falling in our hands. So they pressed the button or whatever they had to do and the entire works went pouf.”
“But there are other machines. Apparently one in every barn.”
“Probably just the same as this,” said Lemuel, rising from his knees beside the cap.
“What’s your guess?” asked Sheridan.
“A matter transference machine, a teleporter, whatever you want to call it,” Abraham told him. “Not deduced, of course, from anything in the machine itself, but from the circumstances. Look at this barn. There’s not a podar in it. Those podars went somewhere. This picnicking friend of yours—”
“They call themselves,” said Sheridan, “Galactic Enterprises. A messenger just arrived. He says they offered Central Trading a deal on the podar drug.”
“And now Central Trading,” Abraham supplied, “enormously embarrassed and financially outraged, will pin t
he blame on us because we’ve delivered not a podar.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Sheridan. “It all depends upon whether or not we can locate these native friends of ours.”
“I would think that most unlikely,” Gideon said. “Our reconnaissance showed all the villages empty throughout the entire planet. Do you suppose they might have left in these machines? If they’d transport podars, they’d probably transport people.”
“Perhaps,” said Lemuel, making a feeble joke, “everything that begins with the letter p.”
“What are the chances of finding how they work?” asked Sheridan. “This is something that Central could make a lot of use of.”
Abraham shook his head. “I can’t tell you, Steve. Out of all these machines on the planet, which amounts to one in every barn, there is a certain mathematical chance that we might find one that was not destroyed.”
“But even if we did,” said Gideon, “there is an excellent chance that it would immediately destroy itself if we tried to tamper with it.”
“And if we don’t find one that is not destroyed?”
“There is a chance,” Lemuel admitted. “All of them would not destroy themselves to the same degree, of course. Nor would the pattern of destruction always be the same. From, say, a thousand of them, you might be able to work out a good idea of what kind of machinery there was in the cone.”
“And say we could find out what kind of machinery was there?”
“That’s a hard one to answer, Steve,” Abraham said. “Even if we had one complete and functioning, I honestly don’t know if we could ferret out the principle to the point where we could duplicate it. You must remember that at no time has the human race come even close to something of this nature.”
It made a withering sort of sense to Sheridan. Seeing a totally unfamiliar device work, even having it blueprinted in exact detail, would convey nothing whatever if the theoretical basis was missing. It was, completely, and there was a great deal less available here than a blueprint or even working model.
“They used those machines to transport the podars,” he said, “and possibly to transport the people. And if that is true, it must be the people went voluntarily—we’d have known if there was force involved. Abe, can you tell me: Why would the people go?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Abraham. “All I have now is a physicist transmog. Give me one on sociology and I’ll wrestle with the problem.”
There was a shout outside the barn and they whirled toward the door. Ebenezer was coming up the ramp and in his arms he carried a tiny, dangling form.
“It’s one of them,” gasped Gideon. “It’s a native, sure enough!”
Ebenezer knelt and placed the little native tenderly on the floor. “I found him in the field. He was lying in a ditch. I’m afraid he’s done for.”
Sheridan stepped forward and bent above the native. It was an old man—any one of the thousands of old men he’d seen in the villages. The same leathery old face with the wind and weather wrinkles in it, the same shaggy brows shielding deep-sunk eyes, the same scraggly crop of whiskers, the same sense of forgotten shiftlessness and driven stubbornness.
“Left behind,” said Ebenezer. “Left behind when all the others went. He must have fallen sick out in the field …”
“Get my canteen,” Sheridan said. “It’s hanging by the door.”
The oldster opened his eyes and glanced around the circle of faces that stared down at him. He rubbed a hand across his face, leaving streaks of dirt.
“I fell,” he mumbled. “I remember falling. I fell into a ditch.”
“Here’s the water, Steve,” said Abraham.
Sheridan took it, lifted the old man and held him half upright against his chest. He tilted the canteen to the native’s lips. The oldster drank unneatly, gulping at the water. Some of it spilled, splashing down his whiskers to drip onto his belly.
Sheridan took the canteen away.
“Thank you,” the native said and, Sheridan reflected, that was the first civil word to come their way from any of the natives.
The native rubbed his face again with a dirty claw. “The people all are gone?”
“All gone,” said Sheridan.
“Too late,” the old man said. “I would have made it if I hadn’t fallen down. Perhaps they hunted for me …” His voice trailed off into nothingness.
“If you don’t mind, sir,” suggested Hezekiah, “I’ll get a medic transmog.”
“Perhaps you should,” said Sheridan. “Although I doubt it’ll do much good. He should have died days ago out there in the field.”
“Steve,” said Gideon, speaking softly, “a human doctor isn’t too much use treating alien people. In time, if we had the time, we could find out about this fellow—something about his body chemistry and his metabolism. Then we could doctor him.”
“That’s right, Steve,” Abraham said.
Sheridan shrugged. “All right then, Hezekiah. Forget about the transmog.”
He laid the old man back on the floor again and got up off his knees.
He sat on his heels and rocked slowly back and forth.
“Perhaps,” he said to the native, “you’ll answer one question. Where did all your people go?”
“In there,” the native said, raising a feeble arm to point at the machine. “In there, and then they went away just as the harvest we gathered did.”
Sheridan stayed squatting on the floor beside the stricken native.
Reuben brought in an armload of grass and wadded it beneath the native’s head as a sort of pillow.
So the Garsonians had really gone away, Sheridan told himself, had up and left the planet. Had left it, using the machines that had been used to make delivery of the podars. And if Galactic Enterprises had machines like that, then they (whoever, wherever they might be) had a tremendous edge on Central Trading. For Central Trading’s lumbering cargo sleds, snaking their laborious way across the light-years, could offer only feeble competition to machines like those.
He had thought, be remembered, the first day they had landed, that a little competition was exactly what Central Trading needed. And here was that competition—a competition that had not a hint of ethics. A competition that sneaked in behind Central Trading’s back and grabbed the market that Central Trading needed—the market that Central could have cinched if it had not fooled around, if it had not been so sly and cynical about adapting the podar crop to Earth.
Just where and how, he wondered, had Galactic Enterprises found out about the podars and the importance of the drug? Under what circumstances had they learned the exact time limit during which they could operate in the podar market without Central interference? And had they, perhaps, been slightly optimistic in regard to that time limit and gotten caught in a situation where they had been forced to destroy all those beautiful machines?
Sheridan chuckled quietly to himself. That destruction must have hurt them!
It wasn’t hard, however, to imagine a hundred or a thousand ways in which they might have learned about the podar situation, for they were a charming people and really quite disarming. He would not be surprised if some of them might be operating secretly inside of Central Trading.
The native stirred. He reached out a skinny hand and tugged at the sleeve of Sheridan’s jacket.
“Yes, what is it, friend?”
“You will stay with me?” the native begged. “These others here, they are not the same as you and I.”
“I will stay with you,” Sheridan promised.
“I think we’d better go,” said Gideon. “Maybe we disturb him.”
The robots walked quietly from the barn and left the two alone.
Reaching out, Sheridan put a hand on the native’s brow. The flesh was clammy cold.
“Old friend,” he said, “I think perhaps you owe me something.?
??
The old man shook his head, rolling it slowly back and forth upon the pillow. And the fierce light of stubbornness and a certain slyness came into his eyes.
“We don’t owe you,” he said. “We owed the other ones.”
And that, of course, hadn’t been what Sheridan had meant.
But there they lay—the words that told the story, the solution to the puzzle that was Garson IV.
“That was why you wouldn’t trade with us,” said Sheridan, talking to himself rather than to the old native on the floor. “You were so deep in debt to these other people that you needed all the podars to pay off what you owed them?”
And that must have been the way it was. Now that he thought back on it, that supplied the one logical explanation for everything that happened. The reaction of the natives, the almost desperate sales resistance was exactly the kind of thing one would expect from people in debt up to their ears.
That was the reason, too, the houses bad been so neglected and the clothes had been in rags. It accounted for the change from the happy-go-lucky shiftlessness to the beaten and defeated and driven attitude. So pushed, so hounded, so fearful that they could not meet the payments on the debt that they strained their every resource, drove themselves to ever harder work, squeezing from the soil every podar they could grow.
“That was it?” he demanded sharply. “That was the way it was?”
The native nodded with reluctance.
“They came along and offered such a bargain that you could not turn it down. For the machines, perhaps? For the machines to send you to other places?”
The native shook his head. “No, not the machines. We put the podars in the machines and the podars went away. That was how we paid.”
“You were paying all these years?”
“That is right,” the native said. Then he added, with a flash of pride: “But now we’re all paid up.”
“That is fine,” said Sheridan. “It is good for a man to pay his debts.”
“They took three years off the payments,” said the native eagerly. “Was that not good of them?”
“I’m sure it was,” said Sheridan, with some bitterness.
He squatted patiently on the floor, listening to the faint whisper of a wind blowing in the loft and the rasping breath of the dying native.