Hezekiah picked it up. “I will admit, sir, that they look fairly happy. Although, perhaps, not very smart.”
Sheridan got to his feet. “I think I’ll go out and check around and see how things are going.”
“Everything is all right, sir,” said Hezekiah. “The boys have the wreckage cleared up. I’m sorry to have to tell you, sir, that not much of the cargo could be saved.”
“From the looks of it, I’m surprised we could salvage any of it.”
“Don’t stay out too long,” Hezekiah warned him. “You’ll need a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow will be a busy day and you’ll be out at the crack of dawn.”
“I’ll be right back,” Sheridan promised and ducked out of the tent.
Batteries of camp lights had been erected and now held back the blackness of the night. The sound of hammering came from the chewed-up area where the floater had come down. There was no sign of the floater now and a gang of spacehand robots were busily going about the building of another radio shack. Another gang was erecting a pavilion tent above the conference table, where Abraham and his fellow roboticists still worked on Lemuel and Maximilian. And in front of the cook shack, Napoleon and Gideon were squatted down, busily shooting craps.
Sheridan saw that Napoleon had set up his outdoors stove again.
He walked over to them and they turned their heads and greeted him, then went back to their game.
Sheridan watched them for a while and then walked slowly on.
He shook his head in some bewilderment—a continuing bewilderment over this robotic fascination with all the games of chance. It was, he supposed, just one of the many things that a human being—any human being—would never understand.
For gambling seemed entirely pointless from a robotic point of view. They had no property, no money, no possessions. They had no need of any and they had no wish for any—and yet they gambled madly.
It might be, he told himself, no more than an aping of their fellow humans. By his very nature, a robot was barred effectively from participating in most of the human vices. But gambling was something that he could do as easily and perhaps more efficiently than any human could.
But what in the world, he wondered, did they get out of it? No gain, no profit, for there were no such things as gain or profit so far as a robot was concerned. Excitement, perhaps? An outlet for aggressiveness?
Or did they keep a phantom score within their mind—mentally chalking up their gains and loss—and did a heavy winner at a game of chance win a certain prestige that was not visible to Man, that might, in fact, be carefully hidden from a man?
A man, he thought, could never know his robots in their entirety and that might be as well—it would be an unfair act to strip the final shreds of individuality from a robot.
For if the robots owed much to Man—their conception and their manufacture and their life—by the same token Man owed as much, or even more, to robots.
Without the robots, Man could not have gone as far or fast, or as effectively, out into the Galaxy. Sheer lack of transportation for skilled manpower alone would have held his progress to a crawl.
But with the robots there was no shipping problem.
And with the transmogs there was likewise no shortage of the kind of brains and skills and techniques—as there would otherwise have been—necessary to cope with the many problems found on the far-flung planets.
He came to the edge of the camp area and stood, with the lights behind him, facing out into the dark from which came the sound of running waves and the faint moaning of the wind.
He tilted back his head and stared up at the sky and marveled once again, as he had marveled many other times on many other planets, at the sheer, devastating loneliness and alienness of unfamiliar stars.
Man pinned his orientation to such fragile things, he thought—to the way the stars were grouped, to how a flower might smell, to the color of a sunset.
But this, of course, was not entirely unfamiliar ground. Two human expeditions already had touched down.
And now the third had come, bringing with it a cargo sled piled high with merchandise.
He swung around, away from the lake, and squinted at the area just beyond the camp and there the cargo was, piled in heaps and snugged down with tough plastic covers from which the starlight glinted. It lay upon the alien soil like a herd of hump-backed monsters bedded for the night.
There was no ship built that could handle that much cargo—no ship that could carry more than a dribble of the merchandise needed for interstellar trade.
For that purpose, there was the cargo sled.
The sled, set in an orbit around the planet of its origin, was loaded by a fleet of floaters, shuttling back and forth. Loaded, the sled was manned by robots and given the start on its long journey by the expedition ship. By the dint of the engines on the sled itself and the power of the expedition ship, the speed built up and up.
There was a tricky point when one reached the speed of light, but after that it became somewhat easier—although, for interstellar travel, there was need of speed many times in excess of the speed of light.
And so the sled sped on, following close behind the expedition ship, which served as a pilot craft through that strange gray area where space and time were twisted into something other than normal space and time.
Without robots, the cargo sleds would have been impossible; no human crew could ride a cargo ship and maintain the continuous routine of inspection that was necessary.
Sheridan swung back toward the lake again and wondered if he could actually see the curling whiteness of the waves or if it were sheer imagination. The wind was moaning softly and the stranger stars were there, and out beyond the waters the natives huddled in their villages with the big red barns looming in the starlit village squares.
II
In the morning, the robots gathered around the conference table beneath the gay pavilion tent and Sheridan and Hezekiah lugged out the metal transmog boxes labeled SPECIAL—GARSON IV.
“Now I think,” said Sheridan, “that we can get down to business, if you gentlemen will pay attention to me.” He opened one of the transmog boxes. “In here, we have some transmogs tailor-made for the job that we’re to do. Because we had prior knowledge of this planet, it was possible to fabricate this special set. So on this job we won’t start from scratch, as we are often forced to do …”
“Cut out the speeches, Steve,” yelled Reuben, “and let’s get started with this business.”
“Let him talk,” said Abraham. “He certainly has the right to, just like any one of us.”
“Thank you, Abe,” Sheridan said.
“Go ahead,” said Gideon. “Rube’s just discharging excess voltage.”
“These transmogs are basically sales transmogs, of course. They will provide you with the personality and all the techniques of a salesman. But, in addition to that, they contain as well all the data pertaining to the situation here and the language of the natives, plus a mass of planetary facts.”
He unlocked another of the boxes and flipped back the lid.
“Shall we get on with it?” he asked.
“Let’s get going,” demanded Reuben. “I’m tired of this spacehand transmog.”
Sheridan made the rounds, with Hezekiah carrying the boxes for him.
Back at his starting point, he shoved aside the boxes, filled now with spacehand and other assorted transmogs. He faced the crew of salesmen.
“How do they feel?” he asked.
“They feel okay,” said Lemuel. “You know, Steve, I never realized until now how dumb a spacehand is.”
“Pay no attention to him,” Abraham said, disgusted. “He always makes that crack.”
Maximilian said soberly: “It shouldn’t be too bad. These people have been acclimated to the idea of doing business with us. There should b
e no initial sales resistance. In fact, they may be anxious to start trading.”
“Another thing,” Douglas pointed out. “We have the kind of merchandise they’ve evinced interest in. We won’t have to waste our time in extensive surveys to find out what they want.”
“The market pattern seems to be a simple one,” said Abraham judiciously. “There should be no complications. The principal thing, it would appear, is the setting of a proper rate of exchange—how many podars they must expect to pay for a shovel or a hoe or other items that we have.”
“That will have to come,” said Sheridan, “by a process of trial and error.”
“We’ll have to bargain hard,” Lemuel said, “in order to establish a fictitious retail price, then let them have it wholesale. There are many times when that works effectively.”
Abraham rose from his chair. “Let’s get on with it. I suppose, Steve, that you will stay in camp.”
Sheridan nodded. “I’ll stay by the radio. I’ll expect reports as soon as you can send them.”
The robots got on with it. They scrubbed and polished one another until they fairly glittered. They brought out fancy dress hardware and secured it to themselves with magnetic clamps. There were colorful sashes and glistening rows of medals and large chunks of jewelry not entirely in the best of taste, but designed to impress the natives.
They got out their floaters and loaded up with samples from the cargo dump. Sheridan spread out a map and assigned each one a village. They checked their radios. They made sure they had their order boards.
By noon, they all were off.
Sheridan went back to the tent and sat down in his camp chair. He stared down the shelving beach to the lake, sparkling in the light of the noon-high sun.
Napoleon brought his lunch and hunkered down to talk, gathering his white cook’s apron carefully in his lap so it would not touch the ground. He pushed his tall white cap to a rakish angle.
“How you got it figured, Steve?”
“You can never figure one beforehand,” Sheridan told him. “The boys are all set for an easy time and I hope they have it. But this is an alien planet and I never bet on aliens.”
“You look for any trouble?”
“I don’t look for anything. I just sit and wait and hope feebly for the best. Once the reports start coming in …”
“If you worry so much, why not go out yourself?”
Sheridan shook his head. “Look at it this way, Nappy. I am not a salesman and this crew is. There’d be no sense in my going out. I’m not trained for it.”
And, he thought, the fact of the matter was that he was not trained for anything. He was not a salesman and he was not a spacehand; he was not any of the things that the robots were or could be.
He was just a human, period, a necessary cog in a team of robots.
There was a law that said no robot or no group of robots could be assigned a task without human supervision, but that was not the whole of it. It was, rather, something innate in the robot makeup, not built into them, but something that was there and always might be there—the ever-present link between the robot and his human.
Sent out alone, a robot team would blunder and bog down, would in the end become unstuck entirely—would wind up worse than useless. With a human accompanying them, there was almost no end to their initiative and their capability.
It might, he thought, be their need of leadership, although in very truth the human member of the team sometimes showed little of that. It might be the necessity for some symbol of authority and yet, aside from their respect and consideration for their human, the robots actually bowed to no authority.
It was something deeper, Sheridan told himself, than mere leadership or mere authority. It was comparable to the affection and rapport which existed as an undying bond between a man and dog and yet it had no tinge of the god-worship associated with the dog.
He said to Napoleon: “How about yourself? Don’t you ever hanker to go out? If you’d just say the word, you could.”
“I like to cook,” Napoleon stated. He dug at the ground with a metal finger. “I guess, Steve, you could say I’m pretty much an old retainer.”
“A transmog would take care of that in a hurry.”
“And then who’d cook for you? You know you’re a lousy cook.”
Sheridan ate his lunch and sat in his chair, staring at the lake, waiting for the first reports on the radio.
The job at last was started. All that had gone before—the loading of the cargo, the long haul out through space, the establishing of the orbits and the unshipping of the cargo—had been no more than preliminary to this very moment.
The job was finally started, but it was far from done. There would be months of work. There would be many problems and a thousand headaches. But they’d get it done, he told himself with a sure pride. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stump this gang of his.
Late in the afternoon, Hezekiah came with the word: “Abraham is calling, sir. It seems that there is trouble.”
Sheridan leaped to his feet and ran to the shack. He pulled up a chair and reached for the headset. “That you, Abe? How is it going, boy?”
“Badly, Steve,” said Abraham. “They aren’t interested in doing business. They want the stuff, all right. You can see the way they look at it. But they aren’t buying. You know what I think? I don’t believe they have anything to trade.”
“That’s ridiculous, Abe! They’ve been growing podars all these years. The barns are crammed with them.”
“Their barn is all nailed up,” said Abraham. “They have bars across the doors and the windows boarded. When I tried to walk up to it, they acted sort of ugly.”
“I’ll be right out,” decided Sheridan. “I want to look this over.” He stood up and walked out of the shack. “Hezekiah, get the flier started. We’re going out and have a talk with Abe. Nappy, you mind the radio. Call me at Abe’s village if anything goes wrong.”
“I’ll stay right here beside it,” Napoleon promised him.
Hezekiah brought the flier down in the village square, landing it beside the floater, still loaded with its merchandise.
Abraham strode over to them as soon as they were down. “I’m glad you came, Steve. They want me out of here. They don’t want us around.”
Sheridan climbed from the flier and stood stiffly in the square. There was a sense of wrongness—a wrongness with the village and the people—something wrong and different.
There were a lot of natives standing around the square, lounging in the doorways and leaning against the trees. There was a group of them before the barred door of the massive barn that stood in the center of the square, as if they might be a guard assigned to protect the barn.
“When I first came down,” said Abraham, “they crowded around the floater and stood looking at the stuff and you could see they could hardly keep their hands off it. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t talk too much, except to say that they were poor. Now all they do is just stand off and glare.”
The barn was a monumental structure when gauged against the tiny houses of the village. It stood up foursquare and solid and entirely without ornament and it was an alien thing—alien of Earth. For, Sheridan realized, it was the same kind of barn that he had seen on the backwoods farms of Earth—the great hip-roof, the huge barn door, the ramp up to the door, and even the louvered cupola that rode astride the ridge-pole.
The man and the two robots stood in a pool of hostile silence and the lounging natives kept on staring at them and there was something decidedly wrong.
Sheridan turned slowly and glanced around the square and suddenly he knew what the wrongness was.
The place was shabby; it approached the downright squalid. The houses were neglected and no longer neat and the streets were littered. And the people were a piece with all the rest of it.
“Sir,” said Hezekiah, “they are a sorry lot.”
And they were all of that.
There was something in their faces that had a look of haunting and their shoulders stooped and there was fatigue upon them.
“I can’t understand it,” said the puzzled Abraham. “The data says they were a happy-go-lucky bunch, but look at them out there. Could the data have been wrong?”
“No, Abe. It’s the people who have changed.”
For there was no chance that the data could be wrong. It had been compiled by a competent team, one of the very best, and headed by a human who had long years of experience on many alien planets. The team had spent two years on Garson IV and had made it very much its business to know this race inside out.
Something had happened to the people. They had somehow lost their gaiety and pride. They had let the houses go uncared for. They had allowed themselves to become a race of ragamuffins.
“You guys stay here,” Sheridan said.
“You can’t do it, sir,” said Hezekiah in alarm.
“Watch yourself,” warned Abraham.
Sheridan walked toward the barn. The group before it did not stir. He stopped six feet away.
Close up, they looked more gnomelike than they had appeared in the pictures brought back by the survey team. Little wizened gnomes, they were, but not happy gnomes at all. They were seedy-looking and there was resentment in them and perhaps a dash of hatred. They had a hangdog look and there were some among them who shuffled in discomfiture.
“I see you don’t remember us,” said Sheridan conversationally. “We were away too long, much longer than we had thought to be.”
He was having, he feared, some trouble with the language. It was, in fact, not the easiest language in the Galaxy to handle. For a fleeting moment, he wished that there were some sort of transmog that could be slipped into the human brain. It would make moments like this so much easier.
“We remember you,” said one of them in a sullen voice.
“That’s wonderful,” said Sheridan with forced enthusiasm. “Are you speaker for this village?”
I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories Page 3
