[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction November 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The man worth while couldn't be allowed
to smile ... if he ever laughed at himself,
the entire ship and crew were as good as dead!
If there is anything I am afraid of, and there probably is, it is
having a rookie Accident Prone, half-starved from the unemployment
lines, aboard my spaceship. They are always so anxious to please. They
remember what it is like to live in a rathole behind an apartment
house furnace eating day-old bread and wilted vegetables, which doesn't
compare favorably to the Admiralty-style staterooms and steak and
caviar they draw down in the Exploration Service.
You may wonder why anybody should make things so pleasant for a grownup
who can't walk a city block without tripping over his own feet and who
has a very low life expectancy on Earth due to the automobiles they are
constantly stepping in front of and the live wires they are fond of
picking up so the street won't be littered.
The Admiralty, however, is a very thorough group of men. Before they
open a planet to colonization or even fraternization, they insist on
knowing just what they are up against.
Accident Prones can find out what is wrong with a planet as easily
as falling off a log, which they will if there is one lonely tree on
the whole world. A single pit of quicksand on a veritable Eden of a
planet and a Prone will be knee-deep in it within an hour of blastdown.
If an alien race will smile patronizingly on your heroic attempts at
genocide, but be offended into a murderous religious frenzy if you blow
your nose, you can take the long end of the odds that the Prone will
almost immediately catch a cold.
All of this is properly recorded for the next expedition in the
Admiralty files, and if it's any consolation, high officials and screen
stars often visit you in the hospital.
* * * * *
Charlie Baxter was like all of the other Prones, only worse. Moran III
was sort of an unofficial test for him and he wanted to make good. We
had blasted down in the black of night and were waiting for daylight to
begin our re-survey of the planet. It was Charlie's first assignment,
so we had an easy one--just seeing if anything new had developed in the
last fifty years.
Baxter's guard was doubled as soon as we set down, of course, and
that made him fidgety. He had heard all the stories about how high
the casualty rate was with Prones aboard spaceships and now he was
beginning to get nervous.
Actually Charlie was safer in space than he would be back on Earth
with all those cars and people. We could have told him how the Service
practically never lost a Prone--they were too valuable and rare to
lose--but we did not want him to stop worrying. The precautions we
took to safeguard him, the armed men who went with him everywhere, the
Accident Prone First Aid Kit with spare parts for him, blood, eyes,
bone, nerves, arms, legs, and so forth, only emphasized to him the
danger, not the rigidly secured safety.
We like it that way.
No one knows what causes an accident prone. The big insurance
companies on Earth discovered them when they found out in the last part
of the nineteenth century that ninety per cent of the accidents were
happening to a few per cent of the people. They soon found out that
these people were not malingering or trying to defraud anybody; they
simply had accidents.
I suppose everything from psychology to extra-sensory perception has
been used to explain or explain away prones. I have my own ideas. I
think an accident prone is simply a super-genius with a super-doubt of
himself.
I believe accident prones have a better system of calculation than a
cybernetic machine. They can take _everything_ into consideration--the
humidity, their blood sugar, the expression on the other guy's
face--and somewhere in the corners and attic of their brain they
_infallibly_ make the _right_ choice in any given situation. Then,
because they are incapable of trusting themselves, they do exactly the
opposite.
I felt a little sorry for Charlie Baxter, but I was Captain of the
_Hilliard_ and my job was to keep him worried and trying. The worst
thing that can happen is for a Prone to give up and let himself sink
into the fate of being a Prone. He will wear the rut right down into a
tomb.
Accident Prones have to stay worried and thinking, trying to break
out of the jinx that traps them. Usually they come to discover this
themselves, but by then, if they are real professionals with a career
in the Service, they have framed the right attitude and they keep it.
* * * * *
Baxter was a novice and very much of an amateur at the game. He didn't
like the scoring system, but he was attached to the equipment and
didn't want to lose it.
His clumsiness back on Earth had cost him every decent job he ever had.
He had come all the way down the line until he was rated eligible only
for the position of Prone aboard a spaceship. He had been poor--hungry,
cold, wet, poor--and now he had luxury of a kind almost no one had in
our era. He was drunk with it, passionately in love with it. It would
cease to be quite so important after a few years of regular food, clean
clothes and a solid roof to keep out the rain. But right now I knew he
would come precariously close to killing to keep it. Or to being killed.
He was ready to work.
I knocked politely on his hatch and straightened my tunic. I have
always admired the men who can look starched in a uniform. Mine always
seemed to wrinkle as soon as I put them around my raw-boned frame.
Sometimes it is hard for me to keep a military appearance or manner. I
got my commission during the Crisis ten years back, because of my work
in the reserve unit that I created out of my employees in the glass
works (glassware blown to order for laboratories).
Someone said something through the door and I went inside.
Bronoski looked at me over the top of his picture tape from where he
lay on the sofa. No one else was in the compartment.
"Where is Baxter?" I asked the hulking guard. My eyes were on the sofa.
My own bed pulled out of the wall and was considerably inferior to
this, much less Baxter's bed in the next cabin. But then I am only a
captain.
Bronoski swung his feet off the couch and stood more or less in what I
might have taken for attention if I hadn't known him better. "Sidney
and Elliot escorted him down to the men's room, Captain Jackson."
"You mean," I said very quietly, "that he isn't in his own bath?"
"No sir," Bronoski said wearily. "He told us it was out of order."
I stifled the gurgle of rage that came into my throat and motioned
Bronoski to follow me. The engines on the _Hilliard_ were more likely
to be out of order than the plumbing in the Accident Prone's suite. No
effort was spared to insure comfort for the key man in the whole crew.
One glance inside the compartment at the end of the corridor satisfied
me. There wasn't a thing wrong with the plumbing, so Baxter must have
had something in mind.
On a hunch of my own, I checked the supply lockers next to the airlock
while Bronoski fired questions at my back. Three translator collars
were missing. Baxter had left the spaceship and gone off into an alien
night.
Elliot and Sidney, the guards, were absolutely prohibited from
interfering in any way with a Prone's decisions. They merely had to
follow him and give their lives to save his, if necessary.
I grabbed up a translator collar and tossed one to Bronoski. Then, just
as we were getting into the airlock, I remembered something and ran
back to the bridge.
The thick brown envelope I had left on my desk was gone. I had shown
it to Baxter and informed him that he should study it when he felt so
inclined. He had seemed bored with the idea then, but he had come back
for the report before leaving the ship. The envelope contained the
exploration survey on Moran III made some fifty years before.
I unlocked a desk drawer with my thumb print and drew out a duplicate
of the report. I didn't have too much confidence in it and I hoped
Charlie Baxter had less. Lots of things can change on a planet in fifty
years, including its inhabitants.
* * * * *
Bronoski picked up Baxter's tracks and those of the two guards, Elliot
and Sidney, with ultra-violet light. They were cold splotches of green
fire against the rotting black peat of the jungle path. The whole dark,
tangled mess smelled of sour mash, an intoxicating bourbon-type aroma.
I jogged along following the big man more by instinct than anything
else, ruining my eyes in an effort to refresh my memory as to the
contents of the survey report in the cheery little glow from my
cigarette lighter.
The lighter was beginning to feel hot to my fingers and I started to
worry about radiation leak, although they are supposed to be guaranteed
perfectly shielded. I read that before the last exploration party had
left, they had made the Moranite natives blood brothers. Then Bronoski
knocked me down.
Actually he put his hands in the small of my back and shoved politely
but firmly. Just the same, I went face down into the moist dirt fast
enough.
I raised my head cautiously to see if Bronoski would shove it back
down. He didn't.
I could see through the stringy, alcoholic grass fairly well and there
were Baxter, Elliot and Sidney in the middle of a curious mob of aliens.
Charlie Baxter had got pretty thin on his starvation diet back on
Earth. He had grown a slight pot belly on the good food he drew down as
Prone, but he was a fairly nice-looking young fellow. He looked even
better in the pale moonlight, mixed amber and chartreuse from the twin
satellites, and in contrast to the rest of the group.
Elliot Charterson and Sidney Von Elderman were more or less type-cast
as brawny, brainless bodyguards. Their friends described them as
muscle-bound apes, but other people sometimes got insulting.
The natives were less formidable. They made the slight lump of fat
Charlie had at his waist look positively indecent.
The natives were _skinny_. How skinny? Well, the only curves they had
in their bodies were their bulging eyeballs. But just because they were
thin didn't mean they were pushovers. Whips and garrotes aren't fat and
these looked just as dangerous.
Whenever I see aliens who are so humanoid, I remember all that Sunday
supplement stuff about the Galaxy being colonized sometime by one
humanlike race and the Ten Lost Tribes and so forth.
They didn't give me much time to think about it just then. The natives
looked unhappy--belligerently unhappy.
I began to shake and at the same time to assure myself that I didn't
have anything to worry about, that the precious Accident Prone would
come out of it alive. After all, Elliot and Sidney were there to
protect him. They had machine guns, flame-throwers, atomic grenades,
and some really potent weapons. They could handle the situation. I
didn't have a thing to worry about.
So why couldn't I stop shaking?
Maybe it was the way the natives were slowly but deliberately forming a
circle about Charlie and his bodyguards.
* * * * *
The clothing of the Moranites hadn't changed much, I noticed. That was
understandable. They had a non-mechanical civilization with scattered
colonies that it would take a terrestrial season to tour by animal cart.
An isolated culture like that couldn't change many of its customs.
Then Charlie shouldn't have any trouble if he stuck to the findings on
behavior in the report. Naturally, that meant by now he had discovered
the fatal error.
The three men were just standing still, waiting for the aliens to make
the first move. The natives looked just as worried as Charlie and his
guards, but then that might have been their natural expression.
I jumped a little when the natives all began to talk at once. The
mixture of sound was fed to me through my translator collar while the
cybernetic unit back on board the spaceship tried decoding the words.
It was too much of an overload and, infuriatingly, the sound was cut
out altogether. I started to rip my collar off when the natives stopped
screeching and a spokesman stepped forward.
The native slumped a little more than the others, as if he were more
relaxed, and his eyes didn't goggle so much. He said, "We do not
understand," and the translation came through fine.
Baxter swallowed and started forward to meet the alien halfway. His
boot slipped on the wet scrub grass and I saw him do the desperate
little dance to regain his balance that I had seen him make so many
times; he could never stay on his feet.
Before he could perform his usual pratfall, Sidney and Elliot were
at his sides, supporting him by his thin biceps. He glared at them
and shrugged them off, informing them wordlessly that he would have
regained his balance if they had given him half a chance.
"We do not understand," the native repeated. "Do you hold us in so much
contempt as to claim _all_ of us as your brothers?"
"All beings are brothers," Charlie said. "We were made blood brothers
by your people and my people several hundred of your years ago."
Charlie's words were being translated into the native language, of
course, but Bronoski's collars and mine switched them back into
Terrestrial. I've read stories where explorers wearing translators
couldn't understand each other, but that isn't the way it works. If you
listen closely, you make out the words in your own language underneath,
and if you pay very close attention, you can find minor semantic
differences in the original words and the echo translated back from a
native language.
I was trying to catch both versions from Charlie. I knew he was making
a mistake and later I wanted to be sure I knew just what it was.
Frankly, I would have used the blood-brother gambit myself. I had also
read about it in the survey report, as I made a point of telling you.
This just proves that Accident Prones haven't secured the franchise on
mistakes. The difference is that I would have gone about it a lot more
cautiously.
"Enough of this," the native said sharply. "Do you claim to be _my_
brother?"
"Sure," Charlie said.
Dispassionately but automatically, the alien launched himself at the
Prone's throat.
* * * * *
Charterson and Von Elderman instantly went into action. Elliot
Charterson jumped to Charlie's assistance while Sidney Von Elderman
swung around to protect Charlie from the rest of the crowd.
But the defense didn't work.
The other aliens didn't try to get to Baxter, but when they saw Elliot
start to interfere with the two writhing opponents, they clawed him
down into the grass. Sidney had been set to defend the Prone, not his
fellow guard. They might have been all right if he had pulled a few
off Elliot and let him get to work, except his training told him that
the life of a guard did not matter a twit, but that a Prone must be
defended. He started toward Charlie Baxter and was immediately pulled
down by a spare dozen of the mob.
It all meant one thing to me. The reaction of the crowd had been
spontaneous, not planned. That meant that the struggle between Charlie
and the spokesman was a high order of single combat with which it was
unholy, indecent and dastardly to interfere.
I could fairly hear Bronoski's steel muscles preparing for battle as
he saw his two mammoth pals go down under the press of numbers. A
bristle-covered bullet of skull rose out of the grass beside me and it
was my turn to grind his face in the muck.