Raymond Jones: Utility

The Cassiopeia had a full crew that slept aboard the night before we left for Merans. That is, it was full except for McCord, Hydrophobia McCord, and nobody was very sorry about that. Three months cooped up in the small trading ship with McCord would be plenty long. We knew. We had shipped with him before.

Rumors are absolutely false when they say that Hydrophobia McCord had never had a bath in his life. I helped give him one once on Bonsby when things got so bad that the crew ganged up and carried him outside the shed in the middle of a Bonsby winter. We had to cut through three feet of ice and it darned near killed him, but McCord got a bath. That was five years ago, of course.

Nobody I ever met could recall seeing him ever take a drink of water, but there were witnesses to that one bath. McCord was allergic to water both externally and internally.

In desperation and in the middle of a huge drunk McCord had once gone to some quack psychologist who certified for ten dollars that McCord had a psychosis which made even the near presence of water an exquisite torture to McCord’s sensitive nerves.

After his bargain-counter psychoanalysis, whenever anybody brought the subject up, McCord would get wells of tears in his big, baby-blue eyes and wail, “It’s my psychosis, fellows, I can’t help it. Don’t you see it?”

On our previous trip to Merans Captain Wilkins had said, “It isn’t the optic nerve that your psychosis bothers.”

Which about summed it up for all of us.

The Cassiopeia was a rumbling little trading ship built without much concern for the crew or any passengers which might be fool enough to want a cheap ride, but she was built like a bank vault and padded with goose down in the cargo holds for the benefit of the Jewelworlds which were the chief item of cargo from Merans to' Earth.

On the morning of this particular take-off Captain Wilkins was in the navigator’s cabin giving us the once over and sounding out the new men aboard. Most of us had shipped with him before, more times than we cared to remember—and always with Hydrophobia McCord aboard.

Captain Wilkins opened the Spaceman’s Bible that lay in front of him, a neat little pamphlet of some twenty-eight hundred pages telling what you can do and what you can’t do on which planet and why.

“Trading on Merans with the Diomedes is a ticklish proposition,” the captain said slowly and he thumbed through the Bible. “If, there’s a more ornery, cantankerous race of misbegotten protoplasm on any planet than inhabits Merans I have yet to see it.”

He continued to thumb through the volume in exasperation that was slowly turning his face red and changing its shape into a thunderous scowl.

“Who’s been—?”

I knew what was coming next. I had seen the same performance so many times before that I knew exactly how long he would thumb before he reached for his pocket- book.

He grumbled at the bottom of his throat. “Forgot. I carry this thing in my pocket so I can refer to it.” He extracted the sheet torn from the Bible.

“Section 118-B, Paragraph 32 of the Interstellar Regulations Governing the Relationship Between Sovereign Bodies of the Various Inhabited Worlds and Regulations Concerning Property Rights Thereof. ‘No trading body, corporation, company, or individual shall sell, transfer, exchange, donate or in any other manner cause to be placed in the custody or use of belligerent groups, races, individuals, or parties any weapon, tool, mechanism, or device which may be used in warfare, conflict, or belligerent action of any nature.’

'“That means that you can’t even trade a club, stick, rod, or . . . There I go! . . . you can’t trade a simple baseball bat to the Diomedes for their Jewelworlds because if you do they’ll go out and start clubbing the Arthoids.

“We tried to get the Traders’ Council to declare Merans outside the intent of this regulation but they’ve turned us down a dozen times and so I repeat for the benefit of the new members of the crew that if we swap the Diomedes anything they can use on the Arthoids we are cooked.”

I looked up quickly. He sounded more serious than before. “You mean that last—?” I started to interrupt.

Captain Wilkins glowered. “I mean that last trip when we thought we had something foolproof. We traded eggbeaters, a whole cargo- hold full of them, for Jewelworlds. We thought we could find nothing more harmless in the world than an eggbeater to use for barter. Well, as you know, the common eggbeater uses a vibratory principle, coupled with molecular air infusion. The Diomedes are little gadget lovers and they very ingeniously hooked up twenty or thirty eggbeaters in parallel and proceeded to whip the Arthoids into a froth.

“There was hell to pay when the news of it leaked out to the Council. They threatened to cancel the license of Barter, Inc. Timothy Thorgersen, president of our outfit—in case any of you are so ignorant as not to know—threatened to take the Cassiopeia crew apart molecule by molecule. He forbade us ever to trade on Merans again— and six days later he ordered us back.”

“Why the change?” asked Hap Paulson, our navigator. “I don’t get it.”

“We can thank Hydrophobia McCord—bless his smelly soul. He got the wonderful brainstorm that the one thing that the Diomedes could not turn into a weapon is the ordinary writing pen. So here we are with a hold bulging full of pens to trade to these little catastrophes of procreation.”

“Why can’t we just go now— and forget McCord?” It was Dunc Edwards, the chief engineer. He looked around hopefully and got a feeble nod from every one of the rest of the crew. Captain Wilkins merely looked at him without answer. No trading party to Merans had gone without McCord since the planet had first been discovered by him and Thorgersen eight years ago.

The captain shut the Bible and raised his arm to put the book in the wall locker. His arm halted in midair and he slowly turned around. His nose twitched. He looked suspiciously at each of the crew. But every man was looking askance at his neighbor.

Captain Wilkins saw nothing and turned again to put the book away. Then he whirled and sniffed violently.

“What in—?” he began.

I was getting it plenty strong. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, but the condensed, filtered, and distilled essence of orchids was suddenly upon the air so thickly that it swirled visibly when you turned your head.

There was the scent of roses there, too, as if a ton of them had been pulped and the juice was slowly distilling into the air. Then with an overpowering rush there seemed to be a maelstrom of odor— every flower in the botanical catalogues seemed to be there, from floating moss to snapdragons.

We were all thinking the same thing: Someone, in anticipation of McCord’s arrival, had broken a vial of dime-store perfume.

“All right, all right!” Captain Wilkins thundered. “Who brought it aboard?”

“I did. Isn’t it wonderful, fellows? My psychosis won’t bother you now.”

“McCord!”

We all whirled to face the door as Hydrophobia McCord oozed in. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he repeated. His baby-blue eyes were glowing and his nostrils oscillated appreciatively in the scented atmosphere.