Raymond Jones: Utility

“No!” roared Captain Wilkins. “In the name of all that’s smelly what did you spill on you?”

“Oh, nothing,” said McCord innocently. “It’s one of these newfangled midget ologenerators. See?” He held up a tiny instrument with a dial face and a couple of switches on it.

“It’s small enough to go in your pocket and you can adjust to any strength or any scent you like. I’ve got it on full on all of them now. Thought you’d like it better that way. But I can give you anything you want. There’s lilacs for example.”

Instantly, the overpowering scent of all the flowers in the books disappeared and was replaced by the gentle, springy scent of lilacs. Even Captain Wilkins was mollified. To tell the truth, it wasn’t half bad compared to what we had expected with McCord’s appearance.

“Leave it there,” Captain Wilkins grumbled. “And turn it down. Keep it just high enough to—” He jerked his head meaningly.

McCord wasn’t a bad sort if you could endure the sight of his great, bulbous form occupying the full width of a catwalk as he ambled along as if in a heavy sea like some great ship designed by a drunken naval architect. And if you didn’t mind his psychosis—

A special cargo of ninety proof was aboard for McCord’s own use. He swore to all creation that his psychosis wouldn’t permit him to partake of any other liquid. But nobody cared particularly about that. It meant McCord would be in his bunk during most of the voyage, completely at the mercy of his psychosis.

In two respects, this voyage was like no other that we’d made with Captain Wilkins. For the first time we had an atmosphere of lilacs instead of decayed cabbage, and we knew it would be our last trip after the fabulous Jewelworlds of the Diomedes and the Arthoids unless McCord’s hunch was right and the cargo of pens would prove to be a harmless medium of exchange with the creatures.

The inhabitants of Merans all seem to belong to the same genus but there are a dozen different species. Only the two, the Diomedes and the Arthoids, produce the famous Jewelworlds. The products of the Diomedes are far superior to the others which produce considerable distortion.

Barter, Inc., had made a fortune out of the Jewelworlds by holding them up to robbery prices. It’s true the things are rare enough and most people have never even seen one. They are simply crystal-clear spheres anywhere from a half inch to eight inches in diameter. They have a property which causes them to respond to the minute waves of the human brain and will recreate a picture of any imagined scene in the mind of a person gazing into the sphere.

A couple of thousand treatises have been written on the Jewelworlds, but none has yet been able to figure out how they work. It has been called everything from self-hypnosis to a complicated mechanical and electrical receiver and projector for mental radiations. No one knows for sure.

The creatures of Merans make them partly out of raw materials found on the planet and, like oysters making pearls, they use secretions of their own bodies in fashioning the spheres. Unlike oysters and pearls, the Jewelworlds are made entirely outside the bodies of the creatures. They fashion them with their own furry paws.

The reason Hydrophobia McCord is so invaluable to any trading party is that he was the first human being to make contact with the Diomedes and Arthoids. Though the two species are mortal enemies, they both act as if McCord is their god.

The creatures are gadget maniacs. It’s queer, but they do not have an intricate mechanical culture of their own. All they make are the Jewelworlds. But in the presence of any gadget from Earth or elsewhere they act completely off their bases.

In the matter of utility, they have one-track minds. No matter what the gadget, they try to make a weapon out of it. It seems as if that’s the only use they can conceive for anything mechanical. They tear into the most complicated televisor and put it back together again so that it will practically lay eggs—or spray a death ray. Gadgets are like drink to them.

McCord may be partly responsible for this. He and Timothy Thorgersen were the first ones to land on Merans and McCord discovered the two species making Jewelworlds. He finagled one out of them in exchange for a pocket visor. They practically worshiped him for what they seemed to think was an exchange that was robbery —of McCord.

I suppose you could build up quite a thesis on human nature that the two men, McCord and Thorgersen, were on Merans simultaneously and had exactly the same opportunity to exploit the planet. One of them snowballed that beginning into the greatest trading company operating out of the Solar System. The other one remained a drunken bum.

Even during the following years when McCord gave up his erratic and ill-managed attempts to do his own trading around the systems and became merely a cheaply paid negotiator for Barter, Inc., and other companies, he never seemed to realize his real worth in dealing with the creatures of Merans. Or rather, he seemed afraid they would decide to get along without him and he wouldn’t get a chance to go back to Merans.

No one knew quite what attitude to take towards McCord. It was usually a combination of disgust and pity, with disgust the larger portion.

The Cassiopeia , suffused with the fumes of lilac blossoms, rose into the skies for its three months’ journey which might well be the last trip to Merans if we slipped and pulled a boner like we did on the eggbeater trade.

Hydrophobia McCord seemed optimistic, however, that the pens would prove to be the solution to all the trading troubles on Merans. I wasn’t so sure. There was nothing ' complicated about the pens. They were the ordinary type of supersonic points designed to produce a permanent record on Permosize paper, but I felt kind of leery of turning over to the Diomedes even such a simple gadget as the tiny supersonic generator contained in the barrels of the pens.

But there was no use worrying. We were on our way.

McCord himself seemed bent on making it a memorable journey. Instead of retiring to his cabin with a case of the ninety proof, he seemed to refrain entirely from liquid nourishment and wandered about the ship in jovial temperament.

You could detect him coming two levels away by the increase in lilac scent pervading the air.

The second day out, Dunc Edwards down in his chief engineer’s repair shop detected the now familiar, almost overpowering scent. He looked up from his bench where he was examining a burned-out meter as McCord waddled in.

“Hello, chief,” McCord said with a friendly grin. “Mind if I come in?”

Dunc Edwards’ response was a low growl in the lower regions of his throat. But McCord was used to such response and acted as if he’d been welcomed like a long-lost uncle with a fortune to share.

His bulk sidled up to the chief.

Edwards stood it as long as he could. “Will you please turn that thing down a little? What are you trying to do? Anaesthetize me?”

“Sure, sorry.”

I happened to be over in the corner of the shop doing a grease monkey’s job on a converter chamber that had blown out just after take-off. None of us had been able to figure out what caused it to blow and Dunc Edwards was in a boiling stew over it.

He finally turned to McCord in suppressed rage and said in tempered tones, “Will you kindly state your business as quickly as possible, Mr. McCord, and then scram?”