Robert Silverberg: Company Store

Colonist Roy Wingert gripped his blaster with shaky hands. He took dead aim at the slimy wormlike creatures wriggling behind his newly deposited pile of crates.

They told me this planet was uninhabited, he thought. Hah!

He yanked back the firing stud. A spurt of violet light leaped out.

His nostrils caught the smell of roasting alien flesh. Shuddering, Wingert turned away from the mess before him, in time to see four more of the wormlike beings writhing toward him from the rear.

He ashed those. Two more dangled invitingly from a thick-boled tree at his left.

Getting into the spirit of the thing now, Wingert turned the beam on them, too. The clearing was beginning to look like the vestibule of an abattoir. Sweat ran down Wingert’s face. His stomach was starting to get queasy, and his skin was cold at the prospect of spending his three year tour on Quellac doing nothing but fighting off these overgrown night crawlers.

Two more of them were wriggling out of a decaying log near his feet. They were nearly six feet long, with saw-edged teeth glistening in Quellac’s bright sunlight. Nothing very dangerous, Wingert thought grimly. Ho! He recharged the blaster and roasted the two newcomers.

Loud noises back of him persuaded him to turn. Something very much like a large gray toad, seven or eight feet high and mostly mouth, was hopping toward him through the forest. It was about thirty yards away now. It looked very hungry.

Squaring his shoulders, Wingert prepared to defend himself against this new assault. But just as he started to depress the firing stud a motion to his far right registered in the corner of his eye. Another of the things—approaching rapidly from the opposite direction.

“Pardon me, sir,” a sharp crackling voice said suddenly. “You seem to be in serious straits. May I offer you the use of this Duarm Pocket Force-Field Generator in this emergency? The cost is only ‑”

Wingert gasped. “Damn the cost! Turn the thing on! Those toads are only twenty feet away!”

“Of course, sir.”

Wingert heard a click, and abruptly a shimmering blue bubble of force sprang up around them. The two onrushing pseudotoads cracked soundly into it and were thrown back.

Wingert staggered over to one of the packing cases and sat down limply. He was soaked with sweat from head to foot.

“Thanks,” he said. “You saved my life. But who the hell are you, and where’d you come from?”

“Permit me to introduce myself. I am XL-ad41, a new-model Vending and Distributing Robot manufactured on Densobol II. I arrived here not long ago, and, perceiving your plight—”

Wingert saw now that the creature was indeed a robot, roughly humanoid except for a heavy pair of locomotory treads. “Hold on! Let’s go back to the beginning.” The toad things were eyeing him hungrily from outside the force-field. “You say you’re a new-model what?”

“Vending and Distributing Robot. It is my function to diffuse through the civilized galaxy the goods and supplies manufactured by my creators, Associated Artisans of Densobol II.” The robot’s rubberized lips split in an oily smile. “I am, you might say, a mechanized Traveling Salesman. Are you from Terra, perhaps?”

“Yes, but—”

“I thought as much. By comparing your physical appearance with the phenotype data in my memory banks I reached the conclusion that you were of Terra origin. The confirmation you have just given is most gratifying.”

“Glad to hear it. Densobol II is in the Magellanic Cluster, isn’t it? Lesser or Greater Cloud?”

“Lesser. One matter puzzles me, though. In view of your Terran origin, it seems odd that you didn’t respond when I mentioned that I am a traveling salesman.”

Wingert frowned. “How was I supposed to respond? Clap my hands and wriggle my ears?”

“You were supposed to show humor response. According to my files on Terra, mention of traveling salesmen customarily strikes upon a common well of folklore implanted in the subconscious, thereby inducing a conscious humor reaction.”

“Sorry,” Wingert apologized. “I’m afraid I never was too interested in Earth. That’s why I signed on with Planetary Colonization.”

“Ah, yes. I had just concluded that your failure to show response to standard folklore indicated some fundamental dislocation of your position relative to your cultural Gestalt. Again, confirmation is gratifying. As an experimental model, I’m subject to careful monitoring by my makers. I’m anxious to demonstrate my capability as a salesman.”

Wingert had almost completely recovered from his earlier exertions. He eyed the two toad beings uneasily and said, “That force-field generator—that’s one of the things you sell?”

“The Duarm Generator is one of our finest products. It’s strictly one-way, you know. They can’t get in, but you can still fire at them.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me that long ago?” Wingert drew his blaster and disposed of the toad creatures with two well-placed shots.

“That’s that,” he said. “I guess I sit inside this force-field and wait for the next ones, now.”

“Oh, they won’t be along for a while,” the robot said lightly. “The creatures that attacked you are native to the next continent. They’re not found here at all.”

“Then how’d they get here?”

“I brought them,” the robot said sunnily. “I collected the most hostile creatures I could find on this world, and left them in your vicinity in order to demonstrate the necessity for the Duarm Force Field Generator ‑”

“You brought them?” Wingert rose and advanced on the robot menacingly. “Deliberately, as a sales stunt? They could have killed and eaten me!”

“On the contrary. I was controlling the situation, as you saw. When matters became serious I intervened.”

“Get out of here!” Wingert raged. “Go on, you crazy robot! I have to set up my bubble. Go!”

“But you owe me—”

“We’ll settle up later. Get going, fast!”

The robot got. Wingert watched it scuttle off into the underbrush.

He tried to control his rage. Angry as he was, he felt a certain amusement at the robot’s crude sales tactics. It was clever, in a coarse way, to assemble a collection of menacing aliens and arrive at the last minute to supply the force-field. But when you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!

He glanced speculatively at the forest, hoping the robot had told the truth. He didn’t care to spend his entire tour on Quellac fighting off dangerous beasts.

The generator was still operating; Wingert studied it and found a cam that widened the field. He expanded it to a thirty-yard radius and left it that way. The clearing was littered with alien corpses.

Wingert shuddered.

Well, now that amusement was over, it was time to get down to business. He had been on Quellac just an hour, and had spent most of that time fighting for his life.

The Colonists’ Manual said, “The first step for a newly arrived colonist is to install his Matter-Transmitter.” Wingert closed the book and peered at the scattered pile of crates that were his possessions until he spied the large yellow box labeled Matter-Transmitter, Handle With Care .

From the box marked Tools he took a crowbar and delicately pried a couple of planks out of the packing crate. A silvery metallic object was visible within. Wingert hoped the Matter-Transmitter was in working order; it was his most important possession, his sole link to far-off Terra.

The Manual said, “All necessities of life will be sent via matter-transmitter without cost.” Wingert smiled. Necessities of life? He could have magneboots, cigars, senso, tapes, low-power, short-range matter-transmitters, dream pellets, bottled Martinis and nuclear fizzes, simply by requisitioning them. All the comforts of home. They had told him working for Planetary Colonization was rugged, but it was hardly that. Not with the Matter-Transmitter to take the sting out of pioneering.