'Wingate!'
'That's you, Jack. Go on in, don't keep them waiting.' Wingate pushed through the doorway and found himself in a fairly crowded room. Thirty-odd men were seated around the sides of the room. Near the door a clerk sat at a desk, busy with papers. One brisk-mannered individual stood in the cleared space between the chairs near a low platform on which all the illumination of the room was concentrated. The clerk at the door looked up to say, 'Step up where they can see you.' He pointed a stylus at the platform.
Wingate moved forward and did as he was bade, blinking at the brilliant light. 'Contract number 482-23-06,' read the clerk, 'client Humphrey Wingate, six years, radio technician non-certified, pay grade six-D, contract now available for assignment.' Three weeks it had taken them to condition him, three weeks with no word from Jones. He had passed his exposure test without infection; he was about to enter the active period of his indenture. The brisk man spoke up close on the last words of the clerk:
'Now here, patrons, if you please-we have an exceptionally promising man. I hardly dare tell you the ratings he received on his intelligence, adaptability, and general information tests. In fact I won't, except to tell you that Administration has put in a protective offer of a thousand credits. But it would be a shame to use any such client for the routine work of administration when we need good men so badly to wrest wealth from the wilderness. I venture to predict that the lucky bidder who obtains the services of this client will be using him as a foreman within a month. But look him over for yourselves, talk to him, and see for yourselves.'
The clerk whispered something to the speaker. He nodded and added, 'I am required to notify you, gentlemen and patrons, that this client has given the usual legal notice of two weeks, subject of course to liens of record.' He laughed jovially, and cocked one eyebrow as if there were some huge joke behind his remarks. No one paid attention to the announcement; to a limited extent Wingate appreciated wryly the nature of the jest. He had given notice the day after he found out that Jones had been sent to South Pole Colony, and had discovered that while he was free theoretically to quit, it was freedom to starve on Venus, unless he first worked out his bounty, and his. passage both ways.
Several of the patrons gathered around the platform and looked him over, discussing him as they did so. 'Not too well muscled.' 'I'm not over-eager to bid on these smart boys; they're trouble-makers.' 'No, but a stupid client isn't worth his keep.' 'What can he do? I'm going to have a look at his record.' They drifted over to the clerk's desk and scrutinized the results of the many tests and examinations that Wingate had undergone during his period of quarantine. All but one beady-eyed individual who sidled up closer to Wingate, and, resting one foot on the platform so that he could bring his face nearer, spoke in confidential tones.
'I'm not interested in those phony puff-sheets, bub. Tell me about yourself.'
'There's not much to tell.'
'Loosen up. You'll like my place. Just like a home - I run a free crock to Venusburg for my boys. Had any experience handling niggers?'
'No.'
'Well, the natives ain't niggers anyhow, except in a manner of speaking. You look like you could boss a gang. Had any experience?'
'Not much.'
'Well ... maybe you're modest. I like a man who keeps his mouth shut. And my boys like me. I never let my pusher take kickbacks.'
'No,' put in another patron who had returned to the side of the platform, 'you save that for yourself, Rigsbee.'
'You stay out o' this, Van Huysen!'
The newcomer, a heavy-set, middle-aged man, ignored the other and addressed Wingate himself. 'You have given notice. Why?'
'The whole thing was a mistake. I was drunk.'
'Will you do honest work in the meantime?'
Wingate considered this. 'Yes,' he said finally. The heavy-set man nodded and walked heavily back to his chair, settling his broad girth with care and giving his harness a hitch.
When the others were seated the spokesman announced cheerfully, 'Now, gentlemen, if you are quite through-Let's hear an opening offer for this contract. I wish I could afford to bid him in as my assistant, by George, I do! Now ... do I hear an offer?'
'Six hundred.'
'Please, patrons! Did you not hear me mention a protection of one thousand?'
'1 don't think you mean it. He's a sleeper.'
The company agent raised his eyebrows. 'I'm sorry. I'll have to ask the client to step down from the platform.'
But before Wingate could do so another voice said, 'One thousand.'
'Now that's better!' exclaimed the agent. 'I should have known that you gentlemen wouldn't let a real opportunity escape you. But a ship can't fly on one jet. Do I hear eleven hundred? Come, patrons, you can't make your fortunes without clients. Do I hear -'
'Eleven hundred.'
'Eleven hundred from Patron Rigsbee! And a bargain it would be at that price. But I doubt if you will get it. Do I hear twelve?'
The heavy-set man flicked a thumb upward. 'Twelve hundred from Patron van Huysen. I see I've made a mistake and am wasting your time; the intervals should be not less than two hundred. Do I hear fourteen? Do I hear fourteen? Going once for twelve.. . going twi-'
'Fourteen,' Rigsbee said suddenly.
'Seventeen,' Van Huysen added at once.
'Eighteen,' snapped Rigsbee.
'Nooo,' said the agent, 'no interval of less than two, please.'
'All right, dammit, nineteen!'
'Nineteen I hear. It's a hard number to write; who'll make it twenty-one?' Van Huysen's thumb flicked again. 'Twentyone it is. It takes money to make money. What do I hear? What do I hear?' He paused. 'Going once for twenty-one going twice for twenty-one. Are you giving up so easily, Patron Rigsbee?'
'Van Huysen is a-' The rest was muttered too indistinctly to hear.
'One more chance, gentlemen. Going, going ... GONE!-He smacked his palms sharply together. '-and sold to Patron van Huysen for twenty-one hundred credits. My congratulations, sir, on a shrewd deal.'
Wingate followed his new master out the far door. They were stopped in the passageway by Rigsbee. 'All right, Van, you've had your fun. I'll cut your loses for two thousand.'
'Out of my way.'
'Don't be a fool. He's no bargain. You don't know how to sweat a man-I do.' Van Huysen ignored him, pushing on past. Wingate followed him out into warm winter drizzle to the parking lot where steel crocodiles were drawn up in parallel rows. Van Huysen paused beside a thirty-foot Remington. 'Get in.'
The long boxlike body of the crock was stowed to its load line with supplies Van Huysen had purchased at the base. Sprawled on the tarpaulin which covered the cargo were half a dozen men. One of them stirred as Wingate climbed over the side. 'Hump! Oh, Hump!'
It was Hartley. Wingate was surprised at his own surge of emotion. He gripped Hartley's hand and exchanged friendly insults. 'Chums,' said Hartley, 'meet Hump Wingate. He's a right guy. Hump, meet the gang. That's Jimmie right behind you. He rassles this velocipede.'
The man designated gave Wingate a bright nod and moved forward into the operator's seat. At a wave from Van Huysen, who had seated his bulk in the little sheltered cabin aft, he pulled back on both control levers and the crocodile crawled away, its caterpillar treads clanking and chunking through the mud.
Three of the six were old-timers, including Jimmie, the driver. They had come along to handle cargo, the ranch products which the patron had brought in to market and the supplies he had purchased to take back. Van Huysen had bought the contracts of two other clients in addition to Wingate and Satchel Hartley. Wingate recognized them as men he had known casually in the Evening Star and at the assignment and conditioning station. They looked a little woebegone, which Wingate could thoroughly understand, but the men from the ranch seemed to be enjoying themselves. They appeared to regard the opportunity to ride a load to and from town as an outing. They sprawled on the tarpaulin and passed the time gossiping and getting acquainted with the new chum
s.
But they asked no personal questions. No labor client on Venus ever asked anything about what he had been before he shipped with the company unless he first volunteered information. It 'wasn't done'.
Shortly after leaving the outskirts of Adonis the car slithered down a sloping piece of ground, teetered over a low bank, and splashed logily into water. Van Huysen threw up a window in the bulkhead which separated the cabin from the hold and shouted, 'Dumkopf! How many times do I tell you to take those launchings slowly?'
'Sorry, Boss,' Jimmie answered. 'I missed it.'
'You keep your eyes peeled, or I get me a new crocker!' He slammed the port. Jimmie glanced around and gave the other clients a sly wink. He had his hands full; the marsh they were traversing looked like solid ground, so heavily was it overgrown with rank vegetation. The crocodile now functioned as a boat, the broad flanges of the treads acting as paddle wheels. The wedge-shaped prow pushed shrubs and marsh grass aside, air struck and ground down small trees. Occasionally the lugs would bite into the mud of a shoal bottom, and, crawling over a bar, return temporarily to the status of a land vehicle. Jimmie's slender, nervous hands moved constantly over the controls, avoiding large trees and continually seeking the easiest, most nearly direct route, while he split his attention between the terrain and the craft's compass.
Presently the conversation lagged and one of the ranch hands started to sing. He had a passable tenor voice and was soon joined by others. Wingate found himself singing the choruses as fast as he learned them. They sang Pay Book and Since the Pusher Met My Cousin and a mournful thing called They Found Him in the Bush. But this was followed by a light number, The Night the Rain Stopped, which seemed to have an endless string of verses recounting various unlikely happenings which occurred on that occasion. ('The Squeezer bought a round-a-drinks -')
Jimmie drew applause and enthusiastic support in the choruses with a ditty entitled That Redheaded Venusburg Gal, but Wingate considered it inexcusably vulgar. He did not have time to dwell on the matter; it was followed by a song which drove it out of his mind.
The tenor started it, slowly and softly. The others sang the refrains while he rested-all but Wingate; he was silent and thoughtful throughout. In the triplet of the second verse the tenor dropped out and the others sang in his place.
'Oh, you stamp your paper and you sign your name, ('Come away! Come away!)
'They pay your bounty and you drown your shame.
('Rue the day! Rue the day!)
'They land you down at Ellis Isle and put you in a pen;
'There you see what happens to the Six-Year men-'They haven't paid their bounty and they sign 'em up again!
('Here to stay! Here to stay!)
'But me I'll save my bounty and a ticket on the ship, ('So you say! So you say!)
'And then you'll see me leavin' on the very next trip. ('Come the day! Come the day!)
'Oh, we've heard that kinda story just a thousand times and one.
'Now we wouldn't say you're lyin' but we'd like to see it done.
'We'll see you next at Venusburg apayin' for your fun! And you'll never meet your bounty on this hitch!
('Come away!')
It left Wingate with a feeling of depression not entirely accounted for by the tepid drizzle, the unappetizing landscape, nor by the blanket of pale mist which is the invariable Venerian substitute for the open sky. He withdrew to one corner of the hold and kept to himself, until, much later, Jimmie shouted, 'Lights ahead!'
Wingate leaned out and peered eagerly towards his new home.
Four weeks and no word from Sam Houston Jones. Venus had turned once on its axis, the fortnight long Venerian 'winter' had given way to an equally short 'summer'-indistinguishable from 'winter' except that the rain was a trifle heavier and a little hotter-and now it was 'winter' again. Van Huysen's ranch, being near the pole, was, like most of the tenable area of Venus, never in darkness. The miles-thick, ever present layer of clouds tempered the light of the low-hanging sun during the long day, and, equally, held the heat and diffused the light from a sun just below the horizon to produce a continuing twilight during the two-week periods which were officially 'night', or 'winter'.
Four weeks and no word. Four weeks and no sun, no moon, no stars, no dawn. No clean crisp breath of morning air, no life-quickening beat of noonday sun, no welcome evening shadows, nothing, nothing at all to distinguish one sultry, sticky hour from the next but the treadmill routine of sleep and work and food and sleep again-nothing but the gathering ache in his heart for the cool blue skies of Terra.
He had acceded to the invariable custom that new men should provide a celebration for the other clients and had signed the Squeezer's chits to obtain happywater-rhira-for the purpose-to discover, when first he signed the pay book, that his gesture of fellowship had cost him another four months of delay before he could legally quit his 'job'. Thereupon he had resolved never again to sign a chit, had foresworn the prospect of brief holidays at Venusburg, had promised himself to save every possible credit against his bounty and transportation liens.
Whereupon he discovered that the mild alcoholoid drink was neither a vice nor a luxury, but a necessity, as necessary to human life on Venus as the ultraviolet factor present in all colonial illuminating systems. it produces, not drunkenness, but lightness of heart, freedom from worry, and without it he could not get to sleep. Three nights of self-recrimination and fretting, three days of fatigue-drugged uselessness under the unfriendly eye of the Pusher, and he had signed for his bottle with the rest, even though dully aware that the price of the bottle had washed out more than half of the day's microscopic progress toward freedom.
Nor had he been assigned to radio operation. Van Huysen had an operator. Wingate, although listed on the books as standby operator, went to the swamps with the rest. He discovered on rereading his contract a clause which permitted his patron to do this, and he admitted with half his mind-the detached judicial and legalistic half-that the clause was reasonable and proper, not inequitable.
He went to the swamps. He learned to wheedle and bully the little, mild amphibian people into harvesting the bulbous underwater growth of Hyacinthus veneris johnsoni-Venus swamproot-and to bribe the co-operation of their matriarchs with promises of bonuses in the form of 'thigarek', a term which meant not only cigarette, but tobacco in any form, the staple medium in trade when dealing with the natives.
He took his turn in the chopping sheds and learned, clumsily and slowly, to cut and strip the spongy outer husk from the pea-sized kernel which alone had commercial value and which must be removed intact, without scratch or bruise. The juice from the pods made his hands raw and the odor made him cough and stung his eyes, but he enjoyed it more than the work in the marshes, for it threw him into the company of the female labor clients. Women were quicker at the work than men and their smaller fingers more dextrous in removing the valuable, easily damaged capsule. Men were used for such work only when accumulated crops required extra help.
He learned his new trade from a motherly old person whom the other women addressed as Hazel. She talked as she worked, her gnarled old hands moving steadily and without apparent direction or skill. He could close his eyes and imagine that he was back on Earth and a boy again, hanging around his grandmother's kitchen while she shelled peas and rambled on. 'Don't you fret yourself, boy,' Hazel told him. 'Do your work and shame the devil. There's a great day coming.'
'What kind of great day, Hazel?'
'The day when the Angels of the Lord will rise up and smite the powers of evil. The day when the Prince of Darkness will be cast down into the pit and the Prophet shall reign over the children of Heaven. So don't you worry; it doesn't matter whether you are here or back home when the great day comes; the only thing that matters is your state of grace.'
'Are you sure we will live long enough to see the day?'
She glanced around, then leaned over confidentially. 'The day is almost upon us. Even now the Prophet moves up and down
the land gathering his forces. Out of the clean farm country of the Mississippi Valley there comes the Man, known in this world'-she lowered her voice still more-'as Nehemiah Scudder!'
Wingate hoped that his start of surprise and amusement did not show externally. He recalled the name. It was that of a pipsqueak, backwoods evangelist, an unimportant nuisance back on Earth, but the butt of an occasional guying news story, but a man of no possible consequence.
The chopping shed Pusher moved up to their bench. 'Keep your eyes on your work, you! You're way behind now.' Wingate hastened to comply, but Hazel came to his aid.
'You leave him be, Joe Tompson. It takes time to learn chopping.'
'Okay, Mom,' answered the Pusher with a grin, 'but keep him pluggin'. See?'
'I will. You worry about the rest of the shed. This bench'll have its quota.' Wingate had been docked two days running for spoilage. Hazel was lending him poundage now and the Pusher knew it, but everybody liked her, even pushers, who are reputed to like no one, not even themselves.
Wingate stood just outside the gate of the bachelors' compound. There was yet fifteen minutes before lock-up roll call; he had walked out in a subconscious attempt to rid himself of the pervading feeling of claustrophobia which he had had throughout his stay. The attempt was futile; there was no 'outdoorness' about the outdoors on Venus, the bush crowded the clearing in on itself, the leaden misty sky pressed down on his head, and the steamy heat sat on his bare chest. Still, it was better than the bunkroom in spite of the dehydrators.
He had not yet obtained his evening ration of rhira and felt, consequently, nervous and despondent, yet residual self-respect caused him to cherish a few minutes clear thinking before he gave in to cheerful soporific. It's getting me, he thought, in a few more months I'll be taking every chance to get to Venusburg, or worse yet, signing a chit for married quarters and condemning myself and my kids to a life-sentence. When he first arrived the women clients, with their uniformly dull minds and usually commonplace faces, had seemed entirely unattractive. Now, he realized with dismay, he was no longer so fussy. Why, he was even beginning to lisp, as the other clients did, in unconscious imitation of the amphibians.
Logic of Empire Page 3
