I knew the reason Baxter had slipped out at night to be the first to
greet the aliens. He was determined to be useful and necessary without
fouling things up. I suppose Charlie had never felt valuable to anyone
before in his life, but at the same time it hurt him to think that he
was valuable only because he was a misfit.
He had decided to take a positive approach. If he did things right,
that would be as good proof of conditions as if he made the mistakes he
was supposed to do. But he couldn't lick that doubt of himself that had
been ground into him since birth and there he was, in trouble as always.
Now maybe Bronoski and I could get him out ourselves by a direct
approach, but Charlie would probably lose all self-confidence and sink
down into accepting himself as an Accident Prone, a purely passive
state.
We couldn't have that. We had to have Charlie acting and thinking and
therefore making mistakes whose bad examples we could profit by.
As I lay on my belly thinking, Charlie was putting up a pretty good
fight with the stringy native. He got in a few good punches, which
seemed to mystify the native, who apparently knew nothing of boxing.
Naturally Charlie then began wrestling a trained and deadly wrestler
instead of continuing to box him.
I grabbed Bronoski by his puffy ear and hissed some commands into
it. He fumbled out a book of matches and lit one for me. By the tiny
flicker of light, I began tearing apart my lighter.
* * * * *
I suppose you have played "tickling the dragon's tail" when you were a
kid. I did. I guess all kids have. You know, worrying around two lumps
of fissionable material and just keeping them from uniting and making
a critical mass that will result in an explosion or lethal radiation.
I caught my oldest boy doing it one day back on Earth and gave him a
good tanning for it. Actually I thought it showed he had a lot of grit.
Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail.
Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in
the Moran III jungle.
I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky
little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little
bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil.
I heard something that resembled a death rattle come from Charlie's
throat as the fingers of the alien closed down on it and my hand
twitched. A blooming light stabbed at my eyes and I flicked the lighter
away from me.
The explosion was a dud.
It lit up the jungle for a radius of half a mile like a giant
flashbulb, but it exploded only about ten times as loud as a pistol
shot. The mass hadn't been slapped together hard enough or held long
enough to do any real damage.
The natives weren't fools, though. They got out of there fast. I wished
I could have gone with them. There was undoubtedly an unhealthy amount
of radiation hanging around.
"Now!" I told Bronoski.
He ran into the clearing and found four bodies sprawled out: Charlie
Baxter, his two guards and the native spokesman.
Charlie and the native were both technically unconscious, but they each
had a stranglehold on each other, with Charlie getting the worst of it.
Bronoski pried the two of them apart.
While he roused Sidney and Elliot from their punch-drunk state, I
examined Charlie. He had a nasty burn on his leg and two toes were
gone. If there was an explosion anywhere around, he was bound to be in
front of it.
He was abruptly choking and blinking watery eyes.
"You did it, Charlie," I lied. "You beat him fair and square."
* * * * *
Charlie was in bed for the next few days while his grafted toes grew
on, but he didn't seem to mind.
We knew enough not to use the blood-brothers approach after fifty years
and therefore it did not take us long to find out why we shouldn't.
The Moran III culture was isolated in small colonies, but we had
forgotten that a generation of the intelligent life-forms was only
three Earth months. It seems a waste at first thought, but all things
are relative. The Crystopeds of New Lichtenstein, for instance, have a
life span of twenty thousand Terrestrial years.
With so fast a turnover in Moran III individuals, there was bound to be
a lot of variables introduced, resulting in change.
The idea that seemed to be in favor was the survival of the fittest.
Since the natives were born in litters, with single births extremely
rare, this concept was practiced from the first. Unless they were
particularly cunning, the runts of the litter did not survive the first
year and rarely more than one sibling ever saw adulthood.
Obviously, to claim to be a native's brother was to challenge him to a
test of survival.
My men learned to call themselves Last Brother in the usual bragging
preliminaries that preceded every encounter. We got pretty good results
with that approach and learned a lot about the changes in customs in
the half century. But finally one of the men--either Frank Peirmonte or
Sidney Charterson, who both claim to be the one--thought of calling the
crew a Family and right away we began hitting it off famously.
The Moranites figured we would kill each other off all except maybe
one, whom they could handle themselves. They still had folk legends
about the previous visit of Earthmen and they didn't trust us.
Charlie Baxter's original mistake had supplied us with the Rosetta
Stone we needed.
Doctor Selby told me Charlie could get up finally, so I went to his
suite and shook hands with him as he still lay in bed.
I waited for the big moment when Charlie would be on his feet again
and we could get on with the re-survey of the planet.
"Here goes," Charlie said and threw back his sheet.
He swung his legs around and tottered to his feet. He was a little
weak, but he took a few steps and seemed to make it okay.
Then the inevitable happened. He snagged the edge of one of the Persian
carpets on the bedroom floor with his big toe and started to fall.
Selby and I both dived forward to catch him, but instead of doing the
arm-waving dance for balance that we were both used to, he seemed to go
limp and he plopped on the floor like a wet fish.
Immediately he jumped to his feet, grinning. "I finally learned to go
limp when I take a fall, sir. It took a lot of practice. I imagine I'll
save some broken bones that way."
"Yes," I said uneasily. "You have been thinking about this quite a lot
while you lay there, haven't you, Baxter?"
"Yes, sir. I see I've been fighting this thing too hard. I am an
Accident Prone and I might as well accept it. Why not? I seem to always
muddle through some way, like out there in the jungle, so why should I
worry or feel _embarrassed_? _I know I can't change_ it."
* * * * *
I was beginning to do some worrying of my own. Things weren't working
out the way they should. We were supposed to see that Prones kept
developing a certain amount of doomed self-confidence, but they
couldn't be allowed to believe they were infallible Prones. A Prone's
value lies in his active and constructive effort to do the right thing.
If he merely accepts being a Prone, his accidents gain us nothing. We
can't profit from mistakes that come about from resignation or laughing
off blunders or, as in this case, conviction that he never got himself
into anything he couldn't get himself out of.
"Doctor Selby, would you excuse us?" I asked.
The medic left with a bow and a surly expression. I turned to Baxter,
rather wishing Selby could have stayed. It was a labor dispute and I
was used to having a mediator present at bargaining sessions at my
glassworks. But this was a military, not a civilian, spaceship.
"I have some facts of life to give you, Baxter," I told him. "It
is your duty to _actively_ fulfill your position. You have to make
decisions and plan courses of action. Do you figure on just walking
around in that jungle until a tree falls on you?"
He sat down on the edge of the bed and examined the pattern in the
carpet. "Not exactly, sir. But I get tired of people waiting for me to
make a fool out of myself. I have a natural talent for--for _Creative
Negativism_. That's it. And I should be able to exercise my talent with
_dignity_."
"If you don't actively fulfill the obligations of a Prone, you aren't
allowed the luxuries and privileges that go with the position. Do you
think you would like to be without your armed guards to protect you
every moment?"
"I can take care of myself, sir!"
I paused and came up with my best argument. "How would you like to
live like an ordinary spaceman, without rare steaks and clean sheets?
Because if you're not our Accident Prone, you're just another crew
member, you know."
That one hurt him, but I saw I had put it to him as a challenge and
he must have had some guilt feelings about accepting all that luxury
for being nothing more than he was. "I could fulfill the duties of an
ordinary spaceman, sir."
I snorted. "It takes skill and training, Baxter. Your papers entitle
you to one position and one only anywhere--Accident Prone of a
spaceship complement. If you refuse to do your duties in that post, you
can only become a ward of the Galaxy."
His jaw line firmed. He had gone through a lot to keep from taking such
abject charity. "Isn't there," he asked in a milder tone, "_any_ other
position I could serve in on this ship, sir?"
I studied his face a moment. "We had to blast off without an Assistant
Pile Driver, j.g. It keeps getting harder and harder to recruit an APD,
j.g. I suppose it's those reports about the eventual fatalities due to
radiation leak back there where they are stationed."
Baxter looked back at me steadily. "There are a lot of rumors about the
high mortality rate among Accident Prones in space, too."
* * * * *
He was right. We had started the rumors. We wanted the Prones alert,
active and scheming to stay alive. More beneficial accidents that way.
Actually, most Prones died of old age in space, which is more than
could be said of them on Earth, where they didn't have the kind of
protection the Service gives them.
"Look here, Baxter, do you like your quarters on this ship?" I demanded.
"You mean this master bedroom, the private heated swimming pool, the
tennis court, bowling alley and all? Yes, sir, I like it."
"The Assistant Pile Driver has a cot near the fuel tanks."
He gazed off over my left shoulder. "I had a bed behind the furnace
back on Earth before the building I was working in burned down."
"You wouldn't like this one any better than the one before."
"But there I would have some chance of _advancement_. I don't want to
be stuck in the rank of Accident Prone for life."
I stared at him in frank amazement. "Baxter, the only rank getting
higher pay or more privileges than Prone is Grand Admiral of the
Services, a position it would take you at least fifty years to reach if
you had the luck and brains to make it, which you haven't."
"I had something more modest in mind, sir. Like being a captain."
He surely must have known how I lived in comparison to him, so I didn't
bother to remind him. I said, "Have you ever seen a case of radiation
poisoning?"
Baxter's jaw thrust forward. "It must be pretty bad--but it isn't as
violent as being eaten by floating fungi or being swallowed in an
earthquake on some airless satellite."
"No," I agreed, "it is much slower than any of those. It is unfortunate
that we don't carry the necessary supplies to take care of Pile
Drivers. Most of our medical supplies are in the Accident Prone First
Aid Kit, for the exclusive use of the Prone. Have you ever taken a good
look at that?"
Baxter shivered. "Yes, I've seen it. Several drums of blood, Type AB,
my type. A half-dozen fresh-frozen assorted arms and legs, several rows
of eyes, a hundred square feet of graftable skin, and a well-stocked
tank of inner organs and a double-doored bank of nerve lengths.
Impressive."
I smiled. "Sort of gives you a feeling of confidence and security,
doesn't it? It would be unfortunate for anyone who had a great many
accidents to be denied the supplies in that Kit, I should think. Of
course, it is available only to those filling the position of Accident
Prone and doing the work faithfully and according to orders."
"Yes, sir," Charlie mumbled.
"Selby is your personal physician, you realize," I drove on. "He takes
care of the rest of us only if he has time left over from you. Why,
when I was having my two weeks in the summer as an Ensign, I had to
lie for half an hour with a crushed foot while the doctor sprayed our
Prone's throat to guard against infection. Let me tell you, I was in
quite a bit of pain."
Charlie's pale eyes narrowed as if he had just made a sudden discovery,
perhaps about the relationship between us. "You don't make as much
money as I do, do you, sir? You don't have a valet? And your bed folds
into the bulkhead?"