Robert Silverberg - The Artifact Business

He packed his two artifacts up again, rose, and left. I watched him from my window as he headed across the unpaved streets to the liquor-dispensary where Kushkak was usually to be found. He entered—and a few minutes later I heard the sound of voices shouting in the night.

The news broke the next morning, and by noon the village was in a turmoil.

Kushkak, taken unawares, had exposed all. The Voltuscians—brilliant handicrafters, as everyone knew—had attempted to sell their work to the wealthy of Earth for years, but there had been no market. “Contemporary? Pah!” What the customers wanted was antiquity.

Unable to market work that was labeled as their own, the Voltuscians had obligingly shifted to the manufacture of antiquities, since their ancestors had been thoughtless enough not to leave them anything more marketable than crude clay pots. Creating a self-consistent ancient history that would appeal to the imaginations of Earthmen was difficult, but they rose to the challenge and developed one to rank with those of Egypt and Babylonia and the other fabled cultures of Earth. After that, it was a simple matter of designing and executing the artifacts.

Then they were buried in the appropriate strata. This was a difficult feat, but the Voltuscians managed it with ease, restoring the disrupted strata afterwards with the same skill for detail as they employed in creating the artifacts. The pasture thus readied, they led the herd to feast.

I looked at the scrawny Voltuscians with new respect in my eyes. Obviously they must have mastered the techniques of archaeology before inaugurating their hoax, else they would never have handled the strata relationships so well. They had carried the affair off flawlessly—until the day when one of the Earthmen had unkindly disinterred a real Voltuscian artifact.

Conditions were still chaotic when I entered the square in front of the assay office later that afternoon. Earthmen and Voltuscians milled aimlessly around, not knowing what to do next or where to go.

I picked up a rumor that Zweig was dead by his own hand, but this was promptly squelched by the appearance of the assayer in person, looking rather dreadfully upset but still living. He came to the front of the office and hung up a hastily-scrawled card. It read:

NO BUSINESS TRANSACTED TODAY

I saw Dolbak go wandering by and called to him. “I’m ready to go out,” I said innocently.

He looked at me, pity in his lidless eyes. “Sir, haven’t you heard? There will be no more trips to the Burial Grounds.”

“Oh? This thing is true, then?”

“Yes,” he said sadly. “It’s true.”

Obviously he couldn’t bear to talk further. He moved on, and I spotted Darby.

“You seem to have been right,” I told him. “The whole business has fallen apart.”

“Of course. Once they were confronted with Kushkak’s story, they saw the game was up. They’re too fundamentally honest to try to maintain the pretense in the face of our accusation.”

“It’s too bad, in a way,” I said. “Those things they turned out were lovely, you know.”

“And the Piltdown Man had an interesting jawbone, too,” Darby retorted hotly.

“Still,” I said, “it’s not as if the Voltuscians were being malicious about it. Our peculiarities of taste made it impossible for them to sell their goods honestly—so it was either do it dishonestly or starve. Weren’t we caught in something of the same trap when we agreed to join the Company?”

“You’re right there,” Darby admitted reluctantly. “But—”

“Just a second, friend,” said a deep voice from behind us. We turned to see David Sturges glaring at us bitterly.

“What do you want?” Darby asked.

“I want to know why you couldn’t keep your mouth shut,” said Sturges. “Why’d you have to ruin this nice setup for us? What difference did it make if the artifacts were the real thing or not? As long as the people on Earth were willing to lay down real cash for them, why rock the boat?”

Darby sputtered impotently at the bigger man, but said nothing.

“You’ve wrecked the whole works,” Sturges went on. “What do you figure to do for a living now? Can you afford to go to some other planet?”

“I did what was right,” Darby said.

Sturges snorted derisively and walked away. I looked at Darby. “He’s got a point, you know. We’re going to have to go to another planet now. Voltus isn’t worth a damn. You’ve succeeded in uprooting us and finishing the Voltuscian economy at the same time. Maybe you should have kept quiet.”

He looked at me stonily for a moment. “Jarrell, I think I’ve overestimated you,” he said.

A ship came for Zweig the next day, and the assay office closed down permanently. The Company wouldn’t touch Voltus again. The crew of the ship went rapidly through the Terran outpost distributing leaflets that informed us that the Company still required our services and could use us on other planets—provided we paid our own fares.

That was the catch. None of us had saved enough, out of the fees we had received from the Company, to get off Voltus. It had been the dream of all of us to see Earth someday, to explore the world from which our parent stock sprang—but it had been a fool’s dream. At Company rates, we could never save enough to leave.

1 began to see that perhaps Darby had done wrong in exposing the hoax. It certainly didn’t help us, and it was virtually the end of the world for the natives. In one swoop, a boundless source of income was cut off and their precarious economy totally wrecked. They moved silently through the quiet streets, and any day I expected to see the vultures perch on the rooftops. Honesty had been the worst policy, it seemed.

Three days after the bubble burst, a native boy brought me a note. It was from David Sturges, and it said, briefly, “There will be a meeting at my flat tonight at 1900. Sturges.”

When I arrived, I saw that the entire little colony of Company archaeologists was there—even Darby, who ordinarily would have nothing to do with Sturges.

“Good evening, Jarrell,” Sturges said politely as I entered. “I think everyone’s here now, and so we can begin.” He cleared his throat.

“Gentlemen, some of you have accused me of being unethical,” he said. “Even dishonest. You needn’t deny it. I have been unethical. However,” he said, frowning, “I find myself caught in the same disaster that has overtaken all of you, and just as unable to extricate myself. Therefore, I’d like to make a small suggestion. Accepting it will involve use of some of the—ah—moral flexibility you decry.”

“What’s on your mind, Sturges?” someone said impatiently.

“This morning,” he said, “one of the aliens came to me with an idea. It’s a good one. Briefly, he suggested that, as expert archaeologists, we teach the Voltuscians how to manufacture Terran artifacts. There’s no more market for anything from Voltus—but why not continue to take advantage of the skills of the Voltuscians as long as the market’s open for things of Earth? We could smuggle the artifacts to Earth, plant them, have them dug up again and sold there—and we’d make the entire profit, not just the miserable fee the Company allows us!”

“It’s shady, Sturges,” Darby said hoarsely. “I don’t like the idea.”

“How do you like the idea of starving?” Sturges retorted. “We’ll rot on Voltus unless we use our wits.”

I stood up. “Perhaps I can make things clearer to Dr. Darby,” I said. “George, we’re caught in a cleft stick and all we can do is try to wriggle. We can’t get off Voltus, and we can’t stay here. If we accept Sturges’ plan, we’ll build up a cash reserve in a short time. We’ll be free to move on!”