The Best of Sci-Fi-5

“So then what happened?” I’d lost my grin suddenly.

“It all happened in front of his office staff. He’s got a lot of those suck-ups that enjoy his humor when he tongue-skins us stupid bastards from out in the field. Their ears were all flapping. They heard the works. I went on about my business around town, and it wasn’t more than an hour before I knew I was an untouchable. The word had spread. It grew with the telling. Maybe an outsider wouldn’t get the full force of it, but here in Libo, well, you know what it would mean to tell a man he could be replaced by a goonie.”

“I know,” I said around the stem of my pipe, while I watched his face. Something had grabbed my tailbone and was twisting it with that tingling feeling we get in the face of danger. I wondered if Paul even yet, had fully realized what he’d done.

“Hell! All right, Jim, goddamn it!” he exploded. “Suppose a goonie could do their work better? That’s not going to throw them out of a job. There’s plenty of work, plenty of planets besides this one—even if the Company heard about it and put in goonies at the desks.”

“It’s not just that,” I said slowly. “No matter how low down a man is, he’s got to have something he thinks is still lower before he can be happy. The more inferior he is, the more he needs it. Take it away from him and you’ve started something.”

“I guess,” Paul agreed, but I could see he had his reserve of doubt. Well, he was young, and he’d been fed that scout-master line about how noble mankind is. He’d learn.

“Anyhow,” he said. “Friend of mine, better friend than most, I’ve found out, tipped me off. Said I’d better get rid of that goonie clerk, and quick, if I knew which side was up. I’m still a Company man, Jim. I’m like the rest of these poor bastards out here, still indentured for my space fare, and wouldn’t know how to keep alive if the Company kicked me out and left me stranded. That’s what could happen. Those guys can cut my feet out from under me every step I take. You know it. What can I do but knuckle under? So—I brought the goonie back.”

I nodded.

“Too bad you didn’t keep it under your hat, the way I have,” I said. “But it’s done now.”

I sat and thought about it. I wasn’t worried about my part in it—I had a part because everybody would know I’d trained the goonie, that Paul had got him from me. It wasn’t likely a little two-bit office manager could hurt me with the Company. They needed me too much. I could raise and train, or butcher, goonies and deliver them cheaper than they could do it themselves. As long as you don’t step on their personal egos, the big boys in business don’t mind slapping down their underlings and telling them to behave themselves, if there’s a buck to be made out of it.

Besides, I was damn good advertising, a real shill for their recruiting offices. “See?” they’d say. “Look at Jim MacPherson. Just twenty years ago he signed up with the Company to go out to the stars. Today he’s a rich man, independent, free enterprise. What he did, you can do.” Or they’d make it seem that way. And they were right. I could go on being an independent operator so long as I kept off the toes of the big boys.

But Paul was a different matter.

“Look,” I said. “You go back to Libo City and tell it around that it was just a training experiment I was trying. That it was a failure. That you exaggerated, even lied, to jolt Hest. Maybe that’ll get you out from under. Maybe we won’t hear any more about it.”

He looked at me, his face stricken. But he could still try to joke about it, after a fashion.

“You said everybody finds something inferior to himself,” he said. “I can’t think of anything lower than I am. I just can’t.”

I laughed.

“Fine,” I said with more heartiness than I really felt. “At one time or another most of us have to get clear down to rock bottom before we can begin to grow up.”

I didn’t know then that there was a depth beyond rock bottom, a hole one could get into, with no way out. But I was to learn.

I was wrong in telling Paul we wouldn’t hear anything more about it. I heard, the very next day. I was down in the south valley, taking care of the last planting in the new orchard, when I saw a caller coming down the dirt lane between the groves of pal trees. His rickshaw was being pulled by a single goonie, and even at a distance I could see the animal was abused with overwork, if not worse.

Yes, worse, because as they came nearer I could see whip welts across the pelt covering the goonie’s back and shoulders. I began a slow boil inside at the needless cruelty, needless because anybody knows the goonie will kill himself with overwork if the master simply asks for it. So my caller was one of the new Earthers, one of the petty little squirts who had to demonstrate his power over the inferior animal.

Apparently Ruth had had the same opinion for instead of treating the caller as an honored guest and sending a goonie to fetch me, as was Libo custom, she’d sent him on down to the orchard. I wondered if he had enough sense to know he’d been insulted. I hoped he did.

Even if I hadn’t been scorched to a simmering rage by the time the goonie halted at the edge of the orchard—and sank down on the ground without even unbuckling his harness— I wouldn’t have liked the caller. The important way he climbed down out of the rickshaw, the pompous stride he affected as he strode toward me, marked him as some petty Company official.

I wondered how he had managed to get past Personnel. Usually they picked the fine, upstanding, cleancut hero type—a little short on brains, maybe, but full of noble derring-do, and so anxious to be admired they never made any trouble. It must have been Personnel’s off day when this one got through—or maybe he had an uncle.

“Afternoon,” I greeted him, without friendliness, as he came up.

“I see you’re busy,” he said briskly. “I am, too. My time is valuable, so I’ll come right to the point. My name is Mr. Hest. I’m an executive. You’re MacPherson?”

“Mister MacPherson,” I answered dryly.

He ignored it.

“I hear you’ve got a goonie trained to bookkeeping. You leased it to Tyler on a thousand-dollar evaluation. An outrageous price, but I’ll buy it. I hear Tyler turned it back.”

I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes, or his loose, fat-lipped mouth. Not at all.

“The goonie is unsatisfactory,” I said. “The experiment didn’t work, and he’s not for sale.”

“You can’t kid me, MacPherson,” he said. “Tyler never made up those reports. He hasn’t the capacity. I’m an accountant. If you can train a goonie that far, I can train him on into real accounting. The Company could save millions if goonies could take the place of humans in office work.”

I knew there were guys who’d sell their own mothers into a two-bit dive if they thought it would impress the boss, but I didn’t believe this one had that motive. There was something else, something in the way his avid little eyes looked me over, the way he licked his lips, the way he came out with an explanation that a smart man would have kept to himself.

“Maybe you’re a pretty smart accountant,” I said in my best hayseed drawl, “but you don’t know anything at all about training goonies.” I gestured with my head. “How come you’re overworking your animal that way, beating him to make him run up those steep hills on those rough roads? Can’t you afford a team?”

“He’s my property,” he said.

“You’re not fit to own him,” I said, as abruptly. “I wouldn’t sell you a goonie of any kind, for any price.”

Either the man had the hide of a rhinoceros, or he was driven by a passion I couldn’t understand.