Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

“It is not necessary to express copious thank-yous,” she said benevolently. “You know next commission meeting? You don’t go there by yourself. You wait. At proper time I come by your dwelling, pick you up, take you to meeting so you can expiate offense given to new noisy Kalkaboo High Champion. Have no further fears, Large Male Giyt. It is all to be okay.”

When he got home Rina was just taking her leave of Lupe and the children. She hurried to join him, putting up her face to be kissed. “So did Mrs. Brownbenttalon like the fries?”

“Oh, sure,” Giyt said absently, sniffing. “She said to thank you very much. What’s that smell?”

“We’ve been wondering about that. Lupe said she thought maybe some Delts had been around, but it doesn’t smell Delt to me. Anyway, would you like a cup of coffee?”

She started the coffeemaker, but left to take a message on her screen. She was gone long enough for the coffee to be ready, and Giyt was just pouring out two cups when she came back, broadly grinning. “Guess what, hon? I heard from my sister again. They loved the clock, Shammy! They say all the neighbors are green with envy because—Shammy? Is something the matter?”

He hadn’t been able to keep from changing expression. “Nothing,” he said. “I just remembered . . . No, nothing.”

“You sure? Well, anyway,” she said doubtfully, but picking up speed, “they’re really impressed by what I told them about life here on Tupelo. Salen says she’d cut out of Des Moines and emigrate in a hot minute, it sounds so good, but her husband’s a real stick-in-the-mud—”

By then Giyt had his expression under control. He nodded and smiled while he considered the sudden enlightenment that had just come to him.

Rina’s call to her sister! That had to be how Hagbarth had tracked her record down. Once somebody who was looking for dirt on the Giyts knew that the sister existed it wouldn’t take a major expert to find out everything there was to find out about Rina.

When Rina set down her coffee cup and excused herself for a moment Giyt pondered the consequences. That answered a question for him, but like many answers, it was of no practical help. There was nothing for him to do about it, least of all reproach Rina for giving Hagbarth’s gang the chance to dig up old dirt. The damage was done.

“Hon?” Rina said, frowning as she came back. “I’m afraid the toilet won’t flush. What do you suppose is wrong?”

Giyt was no plumber, but it didn’t take long to find out the answer. When inspection of the bathroom showed nothing obvious, he looked out at the back of the house.

There was an excavation that hadn’t been there before, and a rank smell of sewage. While they were out of the house somebody had dug up their drains. And it seemed that Hagbarth’s harassment was not going to stop with gossip.

Giyt didn’t want to talk to Hoak Hagbarth. Given a choice, he would have cut the man out of his life entirely, but the mess in his backyard left him little choice. Something had to be done.

When he tried to call Hagbarth about getting it fixed, the man didn’t answer his personal communicator; when he called the Hagbarth house, only Olse Hagbarth was there. “You say they dug up your backyard? Really? Well, I did hear something or other about a complaint of stopped-up drains a while back, but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention.”

When Giyt asked who had made the complaint she only shrugged. “I guess you’d have to ask Hoak about that. Well, no, he isn’t here right now. He’s in a major meeting—you know, getting ready for the six-planet congress—and I can’t interrupt him. Anyway, the sewers are Slug business, you know. Why don’t you file a requisition? Although they’re so backed up with the congress coming heaven knows when they’d be able to get around to it.”

She was right about that. The Slugs were so busy getting ready for their VIPs to visit that there wasn’t a single Slug in the waterworks office. In fact, there was only one person there, and that person—oh, when your luck was bad, it was bad all the way—was a female Kalkaboo.

When she saw Giyt coming, she raced him to the door, but he got inside the office before she could lock him out. Sulkily she retired to her desk.

At first Giyt thought she wasn’t going to talk to him at all, but evidently her sense of duty overcame her revulsion. “Have no authority accept requisition,” she told the air, unwilling to look Giyt in the face. “Slugs all in Slugtown, performing extremely great group sing for safety of soon-arriving leaders. Go away.”

“But it’s an emergency,” Giyt protested.

“Yes, of course emergency, what difference? This work you are complaining not done by Slugs anyway. No work order in file. No progress report. So not Slug, so Slugs probably not going fix anyway. You don’t like? You ask head Slug about same at commission meeting of joint governance, see how much good that do you. Go away.”

The visit to the waterworks office wasn’t quite a total loss. At least he had found out that the ruin in his backyard wasn’t part of some official maintenance program. Which left only one possibility: it was more of Hoak Hagbarth’s teaching Giyt a lesson.

The ameliorating fact was that the lack of waste-water disposal wasn’t a desperate emergency. The de Mirs had offered them the use of their own facilities at any hour of the day or night. Then when Giyt got back from the waterworks office, he inexpertly managed to hook up a hose drain to the kitchen sink. It took an hour of swearing and getting wet, but when he was finished, Rina could at least cook, the waste spilling out onto what passed for their lawn.

None of that helped to alleviate the smell from the backyard.

Smoldering, Giyt snapped on the human-language broadcast to take his mind off Hagbarth’s malice. What was on was a delayed broadcast of an Earthly hockey game. He watched it unseeingly until Rina called to him. “Hon? You haven’t forgotten you’ve got a commission meeting coming up?”

He had. What’s more, he had also completely forgotten about Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s promise to mend matters with the Kalkaboos.

Mrs. Brownbenttalon hadn’t, though. By the time Giyt got more or less cleaned up from his exploits with the kitchen drain, there the Centaurian was, leaning out of a cart before his door and calling to him. “What you do,” she instructed as soon as he was inside, “is totally prepared by me. You perform return bout with new High Champion, okay? Nothing serious, you understand. No maiming. But element of paramount importance you must remember is you positively must not this time win.” She bobbed her long nose at him for emphasis. “No more discuss this, please. What is terrible smell?”

And when Giyt told her about his troubles with the Slug repair crews she sighed. “Slugs,” she said mournfully. “Who can do anything with Slugs? Perhaps you do like Kalkaboo lady say and ask head Slug at commission meeting, maybe he in good mood. Usually not. Now we have conversation of trivial matters so you compose yourself. You like this fine weather we having now, temporarily?”