Clifford Simak - Dusty Zebra - And Other Stories

Sheldon put on a semi-dress outfit, feeling slightly silly at dressing up for a tribe of savages, but he salved his conscience with the feeling that, after all, he was not going all the way with a full-dress uniform.

He was putting on his coat when he heard Hart come down from his quarters and turn toward his cubbyhole.

“The rest of the scouts came in,” said Hart from the door.

“Well?”

“They are all the same. Every single tribe has moved out of its old village and set up a bunch of hovels built around a higher culture god-house and a greenhouse. They’re dirty and half starving, just like this bunch out here.”

“I suspected it,” said Sheldon.

Hart squinted at him, as if he might be calculating where he best could hang one.

“It’s logical,” said Sheldon. “Certainly you see it. If one village went native for a certain reason, so would all the rest.”

“The reason, Mister Co-ordinator, is what I want to know.”

Sheldon said calmly, “I intend to discover it.”

And he thought: It was for a reason, then. If all of them went native, it was for some purpose, according to some plan! And to work out and co-ordinate such a plan among thirty-seven villages would call for smooth-working communication, far better than one would look for in a Type 10 culture.

Feet pounded on the catwalk, thundering up. Hart swung around to face the door, and Greasy, charging into it, almost collided with him.

The cook’s eyes were round with excitement and he was puffing with his run.

“They’re opening the god-house,” he gasped. “They just got the—”

“I’ll have their hides for this,” Hart bellowed. “I issued orders not to fool around with it.”

“It isn’t the men, sir,” said Greasy. “It’s the Googles. They’ve opened up their god-house.”

Hart swung around to Sheldon.

“We can’t go,” he said.

“We have to go,” Sheldon said. “They’ve invited us. At this particular moment, we can’t offend them.”

“Side-arms, then,” said Hart.

“With orders not to use them except as a last resort.”

Hart nodded. “And some men stationed up here with rifles to cover us if we have to run for it.”

“That sounds sensible,” said Sheldon.

Hart left at the double.

Greasy turned to go.

“Just a minute, Greasy. You saw the god-house standing open?”

“That I did, sir.”

“And what were you doing down there?”

“Why, sir …” From his face, Sheldon could see that Greasy was fixing up a lie.

“I’m not the skipper,” Sheldon said. “You can talk to me.”

The cook grinned. “Well, you see, it was like this. Some of them Googles were cooking up some brew and I gave them some pointers, just to help along a bit. They were doing it all wrong, sir, and it seemed a pity to have their drinking spoiled by ignorance. So …”

“So, tonight you went down to get your cut.”

“That, sir, was about the way it was.”

“I see,” said Sheldon. “Tell me, Greasy, have you been giving them some pointers on other things as well?”

“Well, I told the chief some stories.”

“Did he like them?”

“I don’t know,” said Greasy. “He didn’t laugh, but he seemed to like them all right.”

“I told him one,” said Sheldon. “He didn’t seem to get it.”

“That might be the case,” said Greasy. “If you’ll pardon me, sir, a lot of your stories are a bit too subtle.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Sheldon. “Anything else?”

“Anything—oh, I see. Well, there was one fixing up a reed to make a flute and he was doing it all wrong…”

“So you showed him how to make a better flute?”

“That I did,” said Greasy.

“I am sure,” said Sheldon, “that you feel you’ve put in some powerful licks for progress, helping along a very backward race.”

“Huh,” said Greasy.

“That’s all right,” said Sheldon. “If I were you, I’d go easy on that brew.”

“That’s all you want of me?” asked Greasy, already halfway out the door.

“That’s all I want,” said Sheldon. “Thanks, Greasy.”

A better brew, thought Sheldon. A better brew and a better flute and a string of dirty stories.

He shook his head. None of it, as yet, added up to anything.

Sheldon squatted on one side of the chief and Hart squatted on the other. Something about the chief had changed. For one thing, he was clean. He no longer scratched and he was no longer high. There was no mud between his toes. He had trimmed both his beard and hair, scraggly as they were, and had combed them out—a vast improvement over the burrs and twigs and maybe even birds’ nests once lodged in them.

But there was something more than cleanliness. Sheldon puzzled over it even as he tried to force himself to attack the dish of food that had been placed in front of him. It was a terrible-looking mess and the whiff he had of it wasn’t too encouraging, and to make matters worse, there were no forks.

Beside him, the chief slurped and gurgled, shoveling food into his mouth with a swift, two-handed technique. Listening to his slurping, Sheldon realized what else was different about him. The chief spoke better now. Just that afternoon he had talked a pidgin version of his own tongue, and now he talked with a command of the language that amounted almost to fluency!

Sheldon shot a glance around the circle of men squatted on the ground. Each Earthman was seated with a Google to each side of him, and between the slurping and the slopping, the natives made a point of talking to the Earthmen. Just like the Chamber of Commerce boys do when they have guests, thought Sheldon— doing their best to make their guest content and happy and very must at home . And that was a considerable contrast with the situation when the ship first had landed, when the natives had peeked out of doorways or had merely grunted, when they’d not actually run away.

The chief polished his bowl with circling fingers, then sucked his fingers clean with little moans of delight. Then he turned to Hart and said, “I observe that in the ship you eat off an elevated structure. I have puzzled over that.”

“A table,” mumbled Hart, having hard going with his fingers.

“I do not understand,” said the chief, and Hart went on to tell him what a table was, and its advantage over squatting on the ground.

Sheldon, seeing that everyone else was eating, although with something less than relish, dipped his fingers in the bowl. Mustn’t gag , he told himself. No matter how bad it is, I mustn’t gag.

But it was even worse than he had imagined and he did gag. But no one seemed to notice.

After what seemed interminable hours of gastronomical torture, the meal was done, and during that time Sheldon told the chief about knives and forks and spoons, about cups, about chairs, pockets in trousers and coats, clocks and watches, the theory of medicine, the basics of astronomy, and the quaint Earthian custom of hanging paintings on a wall. Hart told him about the principles of the wheel and the lever, the rotation of crops, sawmills, the postal system, bottles for the containment of liquid and the dressing of building stone.

Just encyclopedias, thought Sheldon. My God, the questions that he asks. Just encyclopedias for a squatting, slurping savage of a Type 14 culture. Although, wait a minute now—was it still 14? Might it not, within the last half day, have risen to a Type 13? Washed, combed, trimmed, with better social graces and a better language—it’s crazy, he told himself. Utterly and absolutely insane to think that such a change could take place in the span of half a day.