The Sentimentalists

by Murray Leinster

  * * * * *

  But Lon couldn't talk to her. He panted at her, and hung up. It isessential to a young man in love that he shine, somehow, in the eyesof the girl he cares for. Lon was not shining. He was appearing as theGalaxy's prize sap. He'd invested a sizable fortune in his farm. He wasa good farmer--hard-working and skilled. In the matter of repairinggenerators, he'd proved to be a genius. But he was at the mercy ofthe Cetis Gamma Company's representative. He was already in debt. Ifhe wanted to go on eating, he'd go deeper. If he were careful andindustrious and thrifty, the Trading Company would take his crop andfarm in six more months and then give him a job at day-labor wages.

  He went grimly to the kitchen of his home. He looked at the trivialamount of food remaining. He was hungry. He could eat it all right now.

  If he did--

  Then, staring at the food in the kitchen locker, he blinked. An ideahad occurred to him. He was blankly astonished at it. He went over andover it in his mind. His expression became dubiously skeptical, andthen skeptically amazed. But his eyes remained intent as he thought.

  Presently, looking very skeptical indeed, he went out of the houseand unwound more copper wire from the remnant of the disassembledgenerator. He came back to the kitchen. He took an emptied tin canand cut it in a distinctly peculiar manner. The cuts he made wereasymmetrical. When he had finished, he looked at it doubtfully.

  A long time later he had made a new gadget. It consisted of two opencoils, one quite large and one quite small. Their resemblance to eachother was plain, but they did not at all resemble any other coils thathad been made for any other purpose whatsoever. If they looked likeanything, it was the ”mobiles” that some sculptors once insisted wereart.

  Lon stared at his work with an air of helplessness. Then he went outagain. He returned with the forked stick that had proved to be agenerator. He connected the wires from that improbable contrivance tothe coils of the new and still more unlikely device. The eccentricallycut tin can was in the middle, between them.

  There was a humming sound. Lon went out a third time and came back witha mass of shrubbery. He packed it in the large coil.

  He muttered to himself, ”I'm out of my head! I'm crazy!”

  But then he went to the kitchen locker. He put a small packet of frozengreen peas in the tin can between the two coils.

  The humming sound increased. After a moment there was another parcelof green peas--not frozen--in the small coil.

  Lon took it out. The device hummed more loudly again. Immediately therewas another parcel of green peas in the small coil. He took them out.

  When he had six parcels of green peas instead of one, the mass offoliage in the large coil collapsed abruptly. Lon disconnected thewires and removed the debris. The native foliage looked shrunken,somehow, dried-out. Lon tossed it through the window.

  * * * * *

  He put a parcel of unfrozen green peas on to cook and sat down and heldhis head in his hands. He knew what had happened. He knew how.

  The local flora on Cetis Gamma Two naturally contained the samechemical elements as the green peas imported from Earth. Those elementswere combined in chemical compounds similar, if not identical to, thoseof the Earth vegetation. The new gadget simply converted the compoundsin the large coil to match those in the sample--in the tin can--andassembled them in the small coil according to the physical structure ofthe sample. In this case, as green peas.

  The device would take any approximate compound from the large coil andreassemble it--suitably modified as per sample--in the small coil.It would work not only for green peas, but for roots, barks, herbs,berries, blossoms and flowers.

  It would even work for _thanar_ leaves.

  When that last fact occurred to him, Lon Simpson went quietly loony,trying to figure out how he had come to think of such a thing. He wasdefinitely crocked, because he picked up the beamphone and told Cathyall about it. And he was not loony because he told Cathy, but becausehe forgot his earlier suspicions of why there was a central stationfor beamphones in Cetopolis, instead of a modern direct-communicationsystem.

  In fact, he forgot the system in operation on Cetis Gamma Two--theCompany's system. It had been designed to put colonists through thewringer and deposit them at its own farm to be day-laborers foreverwith due regard to human law. But it was a very efficient system.

  It took care of strokes of genius, too.

  That night, Carson, listening boredly to the record of all theconversations over the beamphone during the day, heard what Lon hadtold Cathy. He didn't believe it, of course.

  But he made a memo to look into it.

  Rhadampsicus stretched himself. Out on the ninth planet, the weatherwas slightly warmer--almost six degrees Kelvin, two hundred andsixty-odd degrees centigrade below zero--and he was inclined to belazy. But he was very handsome, in Nodalictha's eyes. He was seventyor more feet from his foremost eye stalk to the tip of his leastcrimson appendage, and he fluoresced beautifully in the starlight. Hewas a very gallant young bridegroom.

  When he saw Nodalictha looking at him admiringly, he said with hiscustomary tenderness:

  ”It was fatiguing to make him go through it, darling, but since youwished it, it is done. He now has food to share with the female.”

  ”And you're handsome, too, Rhadampsicus!” Nodalictha said irrelevantly.

  She felt as brides sometimes do on their honeymoons. She was quitesure that she had not only the bravest and handsomest of husbands, butthe most thoughtful and considerate.

  Presently, with their eye stalks intertwined, he asked softly:

  ”Are you weary of this place, darling? I would like to watch the restof this rather rare phenomenon, but if you're not interested, we can goon. And truly I won't mind.”

  ”Of course we'll stay!” protested Nodalictha. ”I want to do anythingyou want to. I'm perfectly happy just being with you.”

  And, unquestionably, she was.

  * * * * *

  Carson, though bored, was a bit upset by the recorded conversation he'dlistened to. Lon Simpson had been almost incoherent, but he obviouslymeant Cathy to take him seriously. And there were some things to backit up.

  He'd reported his generator hopelessly useless--and hadn't bought a newone. He'd reported all his food spoiled--and hadn't bought more. Carsonthought it over carefully. The crop inspection helicopter reportedSimpson's fields in much better shape than average, so his tractor wasobviously working.

  Carson asked casual, deadpan questions of other colonists who cameinto the Company store. Most of them were harried, sullen and bitter.They were unanimously aware of the wringer they were being putthrough. They knew what the Company was doing to them and they hatedCarson because he represented it. But they did answer Carson's casualquestions about Lon Simpson.

  Yes, he'd tried to borrow food from them. No, they couldn't lend it tohim. Yes, he was still eating. In fact he was offering to swap food.He was short on fruit and long on frozen green peas. Then he was longon fruit and frozen green peas and short on frozen sweet corn andstrawberries. No, he didn't want to trade on a big scale. One packageof frozen strawberries was all he wanted. He gave six packages offrozen peas for it. He gave six packages of frozen strawberries for onepackage of frozen sweet corn. He'd swapped a dozen parcels of sweetcorn for one of fillet of flounder, two dozen fillet of flounder forcigarettes, and fifty cartons of cigarettes for a frozen roast of beef.

  It didn't make sense unless the conversation on the beamphone wasright. If what Lon had told Cathy was true, he'd have his frozenfood locker filled up again by now. He had some sort of device whichconverted the indigestible local flora and fauna into digestibleEarth products. To suspect such a thing was preposterous, but Carsonsuspected everyone and everything.

  As representative of the Company, Carson naturally did its dirty work.New colonists bought farms from the central office on Earth and happilytook ship to Cetis Gamma Two. Then Carson put them through theirinstruction course, outfitted t
hem to try farming on their own, andsaw to it that they went bankrupt and either starved or took jobs asfarmhands for the Company, at wages assuring that they could never takeship away again.

  It was a nasty job and Carson did it very well, because he loved it.

  While he still debated Lon's insane boasts to Cathy over the beamphonesystem, he prepared to take over the farm of another colonist. Thatman had been deeper in debt than Lon, and he'd been less skilledat repairs, so it was time to gather him in. Carson called him toCetopolis to tell him that the Company regretfully could not extendfurther credit, would have to take back his farm, house, and remainingfood stores, and finish the cultivation of his _thanar_ leaf crop torepay itself for the trouble.

  The colonist, however, said briefly: ”Go to hell.”

  * * * * *

  He started to leave Carson's air-cooled office. Carson said mildly:

  ”You're broke. You'll want a job when you haven't got a farm. You can'tafford to tell me to go to hell.”

  ”You can't take my farm unless my fields are neglected,” the colonistsaid comfortably. ”They aren't. And my _thanar_ leaf crop is going tobe a bumper one. I'll pay off all I owe--and we colonists are planningto start a trading company of our own, to bring in good machinery anddeal fairly.”

  Carson smiled coldly.

  ”You forget something,” he said. ”As representative of the TradingCompany, I can call on you to pay up all your debts at once, if I havereason to think you intend to try to evade payment. I do think so. Icall on you for immediate payment in full. Pay up, please!”

  This was an especially neat paragraph in the fine print of thecolonists' contract with the Company. Any time a colonist got obstinatehe could be required to pay all he owed, on the dot. And if he hadenough to pay, he wouldn't owe. So the Trading Company could ruinanybody.

  But this colonist merely grinned.

  ”By law,” he observed, ”you have to accept _thanar_ leaves as legaltender, at five credits a kilo. Send out a truck for your payment. I'vegot six tons in my barn, all ready to turn in.”

  He made a most indecorous gesture and walked out. A moment later, heput his head back in.

  ”I forgot,” he commented politely. ”You said I couldn't afford totell you to go to hell. With six tons of _thanar_ leaves on hand, I'mtelling you to--”

  He added several other things, compared to which telling Carson to goto hell was the height of courtesy. He went away.

  Carson went a little pale. It occurred to him that this colonist was aclose neighbor of Lon Simpson. Maybe Lon had gotten tired of converting_dhil_ weed and shiver leaves into green peas and asparagus, and hadgotten to work turning out _thanar_.

  * * * * *

  Carson went to Lon's farm. It was a very bad road, and any four-wheeledvehicle would have shaken itself to pieces on the way. The gyrocarmerely jolted Carson severely. The jolting kept him from noticing howhot the weather was. It was really extraordinarily hot, and Carsonsuffered more because he spent most of his time in an air-conditionedoffice. But for the same reason he did not suspect anything abnormal.

  When he reached Lon's farm, he noticed that the _thanar_ leaves weregrowing admirably. For a moment, sweating as he was, he was remindedof tobacco plants growing on Maryland hillsides. The heat and thebluish-green color of the plants seemed very familiar. But then acateagle ran hastily up a tree, out on a branch, and launched itscrimson furry self into midair. That broke the spell of supposedlyfamiliar things.

  Carson turned his gyrocar in at Lon Simpson's house. There were halfa dozen other colonists around. Two of them drove up with farm trucksloaded with mixed foliage. They had pulled up, cut off and dragged downjust about anything that grew, and loaded their truck with it. Twoother colonists were loading another cart with _thanar_ leaves, neatlybundled and ready for the warehouse.

  They regarded Carson with pleased eyes. Carson spoke severely to Cathy.

  ”What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on duty at thebeamphone exchange! You can be discharged--”

  Lon Simpson said negligently, ”I'm paying her passage. By law, anybodycan pay the passage of any woman if she intends to marry him, and thenher contract with the company is ended. They had rules like that inancient days--only they used to pay in tobacco instead of _thanar_leaves.”

  Carson gulped. ”But how will you pay her fare?” He asked sternly.”You're in debt to the Company yourself.”

  Lon Simpson jerked his thumb toward his barn. Carson turned and looked.It was a nice-looking barn. The aluminum siding set it off against abacking of shiver trees, _dhil_ and giant _sketit_ growth. Carson'seyes bugged out. Lon's barn was packed so tightly with _thanar_ leavesthat they bulged out the doors.

  ”I need to turn some of that stuff in, anyhow,” said Lon pleasantly.”I haven't got storage space for it. By law you have to buy it at fivecredits a kilo. I wish you'd send out and get some. I'd like to buildup some credit. Think I'll take a trip back to Earth.”

  At this moment, there was a very peculiar wave of heat. It was notviolent, but the temperature went up about four degrees--suddenly, asif somebody had turned on a room heater.

  But still nobody looked up at the sun.

  * * * * *

  Rattled, Carson demanded furiously if Lon had converted other localfoliage into _thanar_ leaves, as he'd made his green peas and theother stuff he'd told Cathy about on the beamphone. Lon tensed, andobserved to the other colonists that evidently all beamphones playedinto recorders. The atmosphere became unfriendly. Carson got morerattled still. He began to wave his arms and sputter.

  Lon Simpson treated him gently. He took him into the house to watch theconverter at work. One of the colonists kept its large coil suitablystuffed with assorted foliage. There was a ”hand” of cured, early--bestquality--_thanar_ leaves in an erratically cut tin can. Duplicates ofthat hand of best quality _thanar_ were appearing in the small coil asfast as they were removed, and fresh foliage was being heaped into thelarge coil.

  ”We expect,” said Lon happily, ”to have a bumper crop of the best gradeof _thanar_ this year. It looks like every colonist on the planet willbe able to pay off his debt to the Company and have credit left over.We'll be sending a committee back to Earth to collect our credits thereand organize an independent cooperative trading company that will bringout decent machinery and be a competitive buying agency for _thanar_.I'm sure the Company will be glad to see us all so prosperous.”

  It was stifling hot by now, but nobody noticed. The colonists weremuch too interested in seeing Carson go visibly to pieces before them.He was one of those people who seem to have been developed by anall-wise Providence expressly to be underlings for certain types oflarge corporations. Their single purpose in life is to impress theirsuperiors in the corporation that hires them. But now Carson saw hisusefulness ended. Through his failure, in some fashion, the Company'smonopoly on _thanar_ leaves and its beautiful system of recruitinglabor were ruined. He would be discharged and probably blacklisted.

  If he had looked up toward the western sky, squinted a little, andgazed directly at the local sun, he would have seen that his privatetroubles were of no importance at all. But he didn't. He wentstaggering to his gyrocar and headed back for Cetopolis.

  It was a tiny town, with plank streets, a beamphone exchange, and itswarehouses over by the spaceport. It was merely a crude and rather uglylittle settlement on a newly colonized planet. But it had been thecenter of an admirable system by which the Cetis Gamma Trading Companygot magnificently rich and dispensed _thanar_ leaf (a milligram a daykept old age away) throughout all humanity at the very top price thetraffic would bear. And the system was shaky now and Carson would beblamed for it.

  Behind him, the colonists rejoiced as hugely as Carson suffered. Butnone of them got the proper perspective, because none of them looked atthe sun.

  About four o'clock in the afternoon, it got suddenly hotter again,as abruptly as before. It stayed hotter. Something made Cathy
lookup. There was a thin cloud overhead, just the right thickness to actsomething like a piece of smoked glass. She could look directly at thesun through it, examine the disk with her naked eye.

  But it wasn't a disk any longer. Cetis Gamma was a bulging, irregularlyshaped thing twice its normal size. As she looked, it grew larger still.

  * * * * *

  Out on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus was absorbed in his contemplationof Cetis Gamma. With nothing to interfere with his scanning, he couldfollow the developments perfectly. There had been first one giganticprominence, then two, which separated to opposite sides of its equator.Then two other prominences began to grow between them.

  For two full days, the new prominences grew, and then split, so thatthe sun came to have the appearance of a ball of fire surrounded by aring of blue-white incandescence.

  Then came instability. Flame geysers spouting hundreds of thousandsof miles into emptiness ceased to keep their formation. They turnednorth and south from the equatorial line. The outline of the sun becameirregular. It ceased to be round in profile, and even the appearanceof a ring around it vanished. It looked--though this would never haveoccurred to Rhadampsicus--very much like a fiercely glowing giganticpotato. Its evolution of heat went up incredibly. It much more thandoubled its rate of radiation.

  Rhadampsicus watched each detail of the flare-up with fascinatedattention. Nodalictha dutifully watched with him. But she could notmaintain her interest in so purely scientific a phenomenon.

  When a thin streamer of pure blue-white jetted upward from the sun'spole, attaining a speed of six hundred and ninety-two miles per second,Rhadampsicus turned to her with enthusiasm.

  ”Exactly in the pattern of a flare-up according to Dhokis' theory!” heexclaimed. ”I have always thought he was more nearly right than themodernists. Radiation pressure can build up in a closed system suchas the interior of a sun. It can equal the gravitational constant. Andobviously it would break loose at the pole.”

  Then he saw that Nodalictha's manner was one of distress. He wasinstantly concerned.

  ”What's the matter, darling?” he asked anxiously. ”I didn't mean toneglect you, my precious one!”

  Nodalictha did something that would have scared a human being out of ayear's growth, but was actually the equivalent of an unhappy, stifledsob.

  ”I am a beast!” said Rhadampsicus penitently. ”I've kept you here, inboredom, while I enjoyed myself watching this sun do tricks. I'm trulysorry, Nodalictha. We will go on at once. I shouldn't have asked youto--”

  But Nodalictha said unhappily, ”It isn't you, Rhadampsicus. It's me!While you've been watching the star, I've amused myself watching thosequaint little creatures on the second planet. I've thought of themas--well, as pets. I've grown fond of them. It was absurd of me--”

  ”Oh, but it is wonderful of you,” said Rhadampsicus tenderly. ”I loveyou all the more for it, my darling. But why are you unhappy aboutthem? I made sure they had food and energy.”

  ”They're going to be burned up!” wailed Nodalictha, ”and they're socute!”

  Rhadampsicus blinked his eyes--all sixteen of them. Then he saidself-accusingly, ”My dear, I should have thought of that. Of coursethis is only a flare-up, darling....” Then he made an impatientgesture. ”I see! You would rather think of them as happy, in theirlittle way, than as burned to tiny crisps.”

  He considered, scanning the second planet with the normal anxiety of abridegroom to do anything that would remove a cloud from his bride'slovely sixteen eyes.