Von Schlichten and Blount entered the bar together--the Broadway Room,
decorated in gleaming plastics and chromium in enthusiastic if
slightly inaccurate imitation of a First Century New York nightclub.
There were no native servants to spoil the illusion, such as it was:
the service was fully automatic. Going to a bartending machine, von
Schlichten dialed the cocktail they had decided upon and inserted his
key to charge the drinks to his account, filling a four-portion jug.
As they turned away, they almost collided with Hideyoshi O'Leary and
Paula Quinton. The girl wore a long-sleeved gown to conceal a bandage
on her right wrist, and her face was rather heavily powdered in spots;
otherwise she looked none the worse for recent experiences.
"Well, you seem to have gotten yourself repaired, Miss Quinton," he
greeted her. "Feel better, now?... Miss Quinton, this is
Lieutenant-Governor Blount. Eric, Miss Paula Quinton."
"Delighted, Miss Quinton," Blount said. "Carlos tells us he found you
standing over poor Mohammed Ferriera, fighting like a commando. How is
Mohammed, by the way? No danger, I hope; we all like him."
Mohammed Ferriera was still unconscious, the girl reported; he had a
minor concussion, but the medics were not greatly disturbed, and
expected him to be fully recovered in a few weeks. Von Schlichten
invited her and her escort to join him and Blount. Colonel O'Leary was
carrying a cocktail jug and a couple of glasses; finding a table out
of the worst of the noise, they all sat down together.
"I suppose you think it's a joke, our being nearly murdered by the
people we came to help," Paula began, a trifle defensively.
"Not a very funny joke," von Schlichten told her. "It's been played on
us till it's lost its humor."
"Yes, geek ingratitude's an old story to all of us," Blount agreed.
"You stay on this planet very long and you'll see what I mean."
"You call them that, too?" she asked, as though disappointed in him.
"Maybe if you stopped calling them geeks, they wouldn't resent you the
way they do. You know, that's a nasty name; in the First Century
Pre-Atomic, it designated a degraded person who performed some sort of
revolting public exhibition...."
"Biting off live chickens' heads, in a sideshow wild-man act,"
Hideyoshi O'Leary supplied. "When you get up north, watch how the
peasants kill these little things like six-legged iguanas that they
raise for food."
"That isn't the reason, though," von Schlichten said. "As we use it,
the word's pure onomatopoeia. You've learned some of the languages;
you know what they sound like. _Geek-geek-geek._"
"As far as that goes, you know what the geek name for a Terran is?"
Blount asked. "_Suddabit._"
She looked puzzled for a moment, then slipped in her enunciator. Even
in the absence of any native, she used her handkerchief to mask the
act.
"Suddabit," she said, distinctly. "Sud-da-a-bit." Taking out the
geek-speaker, she put it away. "Why, that's exactly how they'd
pronounce it!"
"And don't tell me you haven't heard it before," O'Leary said. "The
geeks were screaming it at you, over on Seventy-second Street, this
afternoon. _Znidd suddabit_; kill the Terrans. That's Rakkeed the
Prophet's whole gospel."
"So you see," Eric Blount rammed home the moral, "this is just another
case of nobody with any right to call anybody else's kettle black....
Cigarette?"
"Thank you." She leaned toward the lighter-flame O'Leary had snapped
into being. "I suspect that of being a principle you'd like me to bear
in mind at the polar mines, when I see, let's say, some laborer being
beaten by a couple of overseers with three foot lengths of
three-quarter-inch steel cable."
"Well, you could also remember that a native's skin is about half an
inch thick, and a good deal tougher than a human's," von Schlichten
told her. "And it wouldn't hurt any if you found out how these
laborers are treated at home. Mostly they're serfs hired from the big
landowners; it's a fact you can easily verify that permission to join
the labor-companies at the polar mines is regarded as a privilege,
granted as a reward or denied as a punishment. And most of the geek
landowners are bitterly critical of the way we treat our labor at the
mines; they claim we make them dissatisfied with the treatment they
get at home."
"Of course, they're always glad to have the peasants taken off their
hands during a slack agricultural season," Blount added, "and we train
workers to handle contragravity power-equipment. I won't deny that
there's a lot of unnecessary brutality on the part of the native
foremen and overseers, which we're trying, gradually, to eliminate.
You'll have to remember, though, that we're dealing with a naturally
brutal race."
"Of course, mistreatment of native labor is always blamed on other
natives, never on the gentle and kindly Terrans," she replied. "That's
been SOP on every planet our Association's had any experience with."
"Now look; you just came here from Niflheim," von Schlichten objected.
"The Company employs quite a few geeks there; how much brutality did
you run into there?"
"Well, I must admit, the Ullerans who work there are very well
treated. Except that I don't think it's right to employ any people
with silicone body-tissues where they're going to breathe
fluorine-tainted air."
"Nobody ought to be employed on that planet!" Hideyoshi O'Leary
declared. "I did a two-year hitch there, when I was first commissioned
in the Company service."
"I put in two years there, too," Blount supported him. "And I might
add that that's a year longer than any Ulleran native is ever allowed
to spend on Niflheim. You know what the setup is, there, don't you?
The Terran Federation Space Navy discovered and explored both Uller
and Niflheim, which made both planets public domain. The Company was
originally formed to exploit Uller alone, but the Federation insisted
that both planets would have to be franchised to the same company.
They wanted Niflheim exploited, mainly because of the uranium-deposits
there. As it turned out, the Company's making as much money out of
Niflheim as we are out of Uller."
"What you miss is this," von Schlichten pointed out. "On Niflheim,
there are about a thousand Terrans, and not more than five hundred
geeks, all employed on construction-work and in the mines, on the
planet itself, working directly under Terran supervision. We use them
because they have four hands, and in the power-driven contragravity
armor that's necessary there, they can manipulate more controls and do
more things at once than we can. Here on Uller, at the polar mines,
there are about ten thousand geeks working under five hundred Terrans,
and most of the latter are engineers or technicians who don't do
supervisory work. So we have to use native foremen, and they're guilty
of what mistreatment the workers suffer."
"And remember, too," O'Leary added, "work at the polar mines can only
go on for about two months out of the year--mid-September to
mid-November at the Arctic, and mid-March to mid-May at the Antarctic.
Naturally, things have to be done in a hurry and under pressure."
"Well, why do you work mines at the poles? Aren't there mineral
deposits in places where you can work all year 'round?"
"Not as rich, or as accessible," Blount said. "You know what the
seasons are like, at the poles of this planet. The temperature will
range from about two-fifty Fahrenheit in mid-summer to a hundred and
fifty below in winter. There's the most intense sort of thermal
erosion you can imagine--the ice-cap melts in the spring to a sea,
which boils away completely by the middle of the summer. There will be
violent circular storms of hot wind, blowing away the light sand and
dust and leaving the heavier particles of metallic ores and metals
behind. Then, when the winds fall, we move in for a couple of months.
It isn't really mining, or even quarrying; we just scoop up ore from
the surface, load it onto ore-boats, and fly it down to Skilk and
Krink and Grank, where it's smelted through the winter. The natives
run the smelters; use the heat to thaw frozen food for themselves and
their livestock while they're melting the ore. In the north,
metallurgy and food-preparation have always been combined that way."
"Yes, if you think the natives who work at the mines feel themselves
ill-treated, you might propose closing them down entirely and see what
the native reaction would be," von Schlichten told her. "Independently
hired free workers can make themselves rich, by native standards, in a
couple of seasons; many of the serfs pick up enough money from us in
incentive-pay to buy their freedom after one season."
"Well, if the Company's doing so much good on this planet, how is it
that this native, Rakkeed, the one you call the Mad Prophet, is able
to find such a following?" Paula demanded. "There must be something
wrong somewhere."
"That's a fair question," Blount replied, inverting a cocktail jug
over his glass to extract the last few drops. "When we came to Uller,
we found a culture roughly like that of Europe during the Seventh
Century Pre-Atomic, or, more closely, like that of Japan before the
beginning of the First Century P. A. We initiated a technological and
economic revolution here, and such revolutions have their casualties,
too. A number of classes and groups got squeezed pretty badly, like
the horse-breeders and harness-manufacturers on Terra by the invention
of the automobile, or the coal and hydroelectric interests when direct
conversion of nuclear energy to electric current was developed, or
the railroads and steamship lines at the time of the discovery of the
contragravity-field. Naturally, there's a lot of ill-feeling on the
part of merchants and artisans who weren't able or willing to adapt
themselves to changing conditions; they're all backing Rakkeed and
yelling '_Znidd suddabit!_' now. You know, it's a shame that geek
messiah isn't a smart crook, instead of an honest fanatic; he could
take in the equivalent of a couple of million sols a year off the
North Uller merchants and the Equatorial Zone shipowners. But it is a
fact, which not even Rakkeed can successfully deny, that we've raised
the general living standard of this planet by about two hundred
percent."
"Rakkeed is a Zirk," von Schlichten said. "They're the nomads who hire
out to the northern merchants as caravan-drivers, and also prey, or
used to prey, on the caravans as brigands. Since our air-freighters
got into operation, neither caravan-driving nor caravan-raiding has
been a paying business, and our air-patrols have made caravan-raiding
suicidal as well. So the Zirks don't like us. The only thing they know
or are willing to learn is handling these six-legged riding-and
pack-animals we call hipposaurs. We employ a few of them as cavalry,
and a few more of them work as the local equivalent of _gauchos_, and
the rest just sit around and listen to Rakkeed's sermons."
Both jugs were empty. Colonel O'Leary, as befitted his junior rank,
picked them up; after a good-natured wrangle with von Schlichten,
Blount handed the colonel his credit-key.
"The merchants in the north don't like us; beside spoiling the
caravan-trade, we're spoiling their local business, because the
land-owning barons, who used to deal with them, are now dealing
directly with us. At Skilk, King Firkked's afraid his feudal nobility
is going to try to force a Runnymede on him, so he's been currying
favor with the urban merchants; that makes him as pro-Rakkeed and as
anti-Terran as they are. At Krink, King Jonkvank has the support of
his barons, but he's afraid of his urban bourgeoisie, and we pay him a
handsome subsidy, so he's pro-Terran and anti-Rakkeed. At Skilk,
Rakkeed comes and goes openly; at Krink he has a price on his head."
"Jonkvank is not one of the assets we boast about too loudly,"
Hideyoshi O'Leary said, pausing on his way from the table. "He's as
bloody-minded an old murderer as you'd care not to meet in a dark
alley anywhere."
"We can turn our backs on him and not expect a knife between our
shoulders, anyhow," von Schlichten said. "And we can believe, oh, up
to eighty percent of what he tells us, and that's sixty percent better
than any of the other native princes, except King Kankad, of course.
The Kragans are the only real friends we have on this planet." He
thought for a moment. "Miss Quinton, are you doing sociographic
research-work here, in addition to your Ex-Rights work?" he asked.
"Well, let me advise you to pay some attention to the Kragans. You'll
only find them treated at any length at all in that compendium of
misinformation, Willard Stanley-Browne's _Short Sociographic History
of Beta Hydrae II_, and ninety percent of what Stanley-Browne says
about them is completely erroneous."
"Oh, but they're just a parasite-race on the Terrans," Dr. Paula
Quinton objected. "You find races like that all through the explored
galaxy--pathetic cultural mongrels."
Both men laughed heartily. Colonel O'Leary, returning with the jugs,
wanted to know what he'd missed. Blount told him.
"Ha! She's been reading that thing of Stanley-Browne's," he said.
"What's the matter with Stanley-Browne?" Paula demanded.
"Stanley-Browne is one author you can depend on," O'Leary assured her.
"If you read it in Stanley-Browne, it's wrong. You know, I don't think
she's run into many Kragans. We ought to take her over and introduce
her to King Kankad."
Von Schlichten allowed himself to be smitten by an idea. "By Allah, so
we had!" he exclaimed. "Look, you're going to Skilk, in the next week,
aren't you? Well, do you think you could get all your end-jobs cleared
up here and be ready to leave by 0800 Tuesday? That's four days from
today."
"I'm sure I could. Why?"
"Well, I'm going to Skilk, myself, with the armed troopship
_Aldebaran_. We're stopping at King Kankad's Town to pick up a
battalion of Kragan Rifles for duty at the polar mines, where you're
going. Suppose we leave here in my command-car, go to Kankad's Town,
and wait there till the _Aldebaran_ gets in. That would give us about
two to three hours. If you think the Kragans are 'pathetic cultural
mongrels,' what you'll see there will open your eyes. And I might add
that the nearest Stanley-Browne ever came to seeing Kankad's Town was
from the air, once, at a distance of four miles."
"Well, they live entirely by serving as mercenary soldiers for the
Uller Company, don't they?"
"More or less. You see, when we came to Uller, they were barbarian
brigands; had a string of forts along caravan-roads and at fords and
mountain-passes, and levied tolls. They raided into Konkrook and
Keegark territory, too. Well, we had to break that up. We fought a
little war with them, beat them rather badly in a couple of
skirmishes, and then made a deal with them. That was before my time,
when old Jerry Kirke was Governor-General. He negotiated a treaty with
their King, bought their rievers'-forts outright, and paid them a
subsidy to compensate for loss of tolls and raid-spoil, and agreed to
employ the whole tribe as soldiers. We've taught them a lot--you'll
see how much when you visit their town--but they aren't cultural
mongrels. You'll like them."
"Well, general, I'll take you up," she said. "But I warn you; if this
is some scheme to indoctrinate me with the Uller Company's side of the
case and blind me to unjust exploitation of the natives here, I don't
propagandize very easily."
"Fair enough, as long as you don't let fear of being propagandized
blind you to the good we're doing here, or impair your ability to
observe and draw accurate conclusions. Just stay scientific about it
and I'll be satisfied. Now, let's take time out for lubrication," he
said, filling her glass and passing the jug.
Two hours and five cocktails later, they were still at the table, and
they had taught Paula Quinton some twenty verses of _The Heathen
Geeks, They Wear No Breeks_, including the four printable ones.