From that moment our relations improved immensely. Joe enlisted the help
of various females to keep him supplied with skins of tala, and with the
satiation of his craving he took a completely new interest in life.
* * * * *
We spent hours every day working out our language difficulties. He
learned so rapidly that I abandoned learning his language in favor of
teaching him ours. Even such abstract concepts as time and space proved
no obstacles. He grasped the purpose of my wristwatch after a single
day's demonstration of its relationship to the passage of Sirius across
the sky.
Using a pencil I had managed to convey our symbols for large numbers.
Joe could count up to any number now, and he seemed actually to
understand the open-end nature of our system of enumeration.
It made possible a mutual agreement on such matters as the number of
"days" in a year, which he was mildly interested to learn numbered 440
on his planet. Then a startling piece of information came from him when
I asked how long his people lived.
"Two years. Maybe three," he replied. Because of the shorter days, a
Sirian year about equalled an Earth year, and I found it difficult to
believe that these wonderful little animals lived only two or three
years. He persisted until I believed him.
He was strangely vague when I tried to determine the common manner of
death. Indeed, personal death was a concept either so hazy or
distasteful to him that he refused to dwell on it. The most he would
convey was that there were always new faces in the tribe, and the old
faces rarely remained more than three years. At this time, he described
himself as being more than a year old.
This was only one of several startling items that were revealed in our
conversations. The golden people matured in three months to fully grown
adults. A female could bear several babies a year and usually did. Yet
Joe insisted that his tribe was the only clan on the face of the planet,
so far as he knew, and that it numbered fewer than a thousand
individuals.
There was no such thing as monogamy or even polygamy. True, at night
when the air was cooler, they paired off, male and female, and each male
chose from among several favorites. But there was no formal nor
permanent mating arrangement.
Benson, who had set up a sheltered desk outside Joe's window in order to
listen in with an anthropologist's avid interest, posed the question
which grew into quite a mystery. Under such fruitful conditions and
ideal environment, why hadn't Joe's people overrun the planet? Even with
the brief life-span, each female should produce many babies.
Joe had no answer. The problem didn't interest him, and he refused to
ponder it. He'd squat in the corner jealously guarding his limp-skinned
mango, nipping at it occasionally when our questions failed to make
sense.
We were all, incidentally, quite curious to taste Joe's tala juice, but
it was his sole property. His lady-friends would hand it to no one but
him, and he guarded it selfishly. Bailey and Sorenson had enlisted the
help of our two organic chemists to examine the moist residue of the
empty skins, but with their limited lab facilities all they could do was
make guesses that the coveted juice was the product of fermentation or
enzymic action with which we were unfamiliar.
As a psychologist I knew that Joe responded to the tala similarly to the
way a human dipsomaniac does to alcohol. When he was well-supplied he
was cheerful and happy. When he ran out, he became taciturn and
irritable. His frequent resort to the liquor, when we tried to force him
to answer troublesome questions, confirmed my suspicion that there were
certain matters his brilliant mind simply refused to embrace, and the
simplest way to avoid worrying about them was to take another drink of
tala.
Benson and I discussed this one afternoon while Joe was taking a nap. We
sat in the shade of my hut spooning the lush pulp of a mango into our
mouths. He said, "Everything points to a race of super-intelligence held
down by sheer degeneracy."
"You mean the tala-drinking?" I asked.
He nodded. "For one thing. Our work parties report that they never stop
drinking the stuff. The older ones get quite plastered. I've seen it
myself. Disgusting. And they have no common sense of, of--well, I
shouldn't say decency, because obviously morality as we know it just
doesn't exist. But thank heavens they don't care for the scent of
humans."
I said, "Don't depend on that too much. I asked Joe about it, and he
said that we don't necessarily smell bad to them. It's just so alien to
any scent they've known that they tend to shy off. Joe is quite used to
it now. He lets Sue rub his back and his head. She's made quite a pet of
him."
Benson didn't like this news at all. He pondered thoughtfully for a
moment. "That means that they'll all gradually get used to being around
us. I don't like it, Phil. They're just human enough to have a bad
influence on the colony. They're dissolute and entirely without
ambition. In fact they seem to have damned little race survival instinct
at all."
I had pondered this many times, but it hadn't struck me as especially
dangerous to the colony. Benson went on, "We have a glorious planet
here, rich in minerals and other natural resources. By comparison, Earth
is so worn-out and depleted and over-crowded that the contrast is almost
too great."
"What are you driving at?" I demanded.
"Just this. From the first the biggest problem here has been to prod
everyone to work. We have a civilization to build here, and that means
clearing more land, breaking the soil, mining, construction,
manufacturing."
"Look," I said somewhat impatiently, "you don't expect 80 people to
accomplish all this in four years, surely?"
"I expect progress," he said firmly. "Do you realize that when we
finished the last of the forty houses that virtually ended the building
program? Work on the two warehouses, the water system, sewage disposal
plant and the commissary we planned is almost at a standstill."
"The people want time to finish up their homes and make them
comfortable," I objected.
"That's what they say," he told me, "but they're fooling away their
time."
"Phil, we've only been here a month, and--"
"And if I hadn't pulled a blue alert," he interrupted, "we wouldn't even
have the residentials built yet. Now they've got their precious privacy,
and the pressure is off. They'd rather go chasing off into the woods to
hunt exotic fruit and peek at the natives than get on with the project."
I hadn't realized things were this serious. "Don't they obey orders any
more? What about your work schedules?"
"I've pushed them as hard as I can without forcing a test of my
authority," he said. "They claim they deserve time to get adjusted and
relax a little before buckling down."
"I agree with them," I said. "They're all serious, industrious people,
and this is still an adventure with them. It will wear off pretty soon,
and they'll be yearning for comforts of Earth. They'll buckle down when
the rainy season hits," I predicted.
"I wonder. Here's one good example. Look over there. Donnegan's food
detail is just now returning with its first load. They left three hours
ago." He yelled over to the foreman.
Donnegan, a large, pleasant-faced biologist sauntered over to us. Benson
said, "Was the _expedition_ successful?"
Donnegan brushed off the sarcasm. "Fooling aside, it is getting to be
something of an expedition to find fruit. The natives are cleaning it
out near at hand."
Turning to me Benson said, "There's another thing. The little devils
have settled all around us, and everything is community property with
them. Not only do they strip the fruit but they pick up anything that
isn't nailed down and wander off with it."
"That's odd," I said. "Joe indicates that they place no value on
possessions normally."
"Oh, they don't keep things," Donnegan explained. "They pack them off,
fiddle with them and then we find them strewn all over the forest.
Sometimes I'd like to wring their little necks!"
Benson looked up at him quickly. "Sounds funny coming from you, Paul.
You were one of their chief defenders at the meeting last week."
Donnegan's face darkened. "That was last week, before I found out a few
things. As a matter of fact, I think it's time you knew about them,
too." He squatted down by us and unburdened himself.
* * * * *
As it so often will, a barrier had erected itself between the colony
members and their leader, Phillip Benson. Donnegan somewhat shamefacedly
confessed what had gone on behind this curtain of silence.
It seemed that two weeks earlier Bromley, one of the chemists, had
contrived some rather crude, old-fashioned, sulphur-and-phosphorus,
friction matches. Trading on the native's delight with fire, he had
bribed them with matches to give him one of the tala-mangoes which he
tasted, then promptly proceeded to swill until he was quite drunk.
In a generous mood he passed out matches to other male members of the
colony who, in turn, made the barter and joined the party.
"The stuff is really delicious," Donnegan admitted. "And it doesn't even
give you a hang-over."
"Go on," Benson invited coldly.
Within a few days, Donnegan related, everybody was nipping on the tala.
Bromley was turning out a steady supply of matches from his lab, and
they were now the going currency for trading with the natives. In order
to keep their wives quiet the men brought the super-ripe mangoes home
and shared them.
The precious fruit, it developed, came from regular mango trees but
reached the desired, fermented condition only at the leafy crowns of the
trees where even the nimble, light-weight natives found it hazardous and
difficult to reach them. Bromley said that he knew of several native
casualties from fatal falls that had occurred since the traffic in tala
increased.
Benson asked the question that was in my mind. "What caused you to come
to me at this late date?" he demanded. "Something more serious must have
happened."
"Well, I didn't mind the tala-drinking so much--but, well, Captain
Spooner and I came back to his hut one afternoon this week and found his
pretty little wife with one of the natives--a male. Spooner thought it
was a big joke--he was a little drunk at the time, and so was his wife.
But I don't think it's any joke at all."