Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

There were a dozen or more persons milling around outside the door of the Hexagon, humans and eeties mixed. Giyt eyed them warily, but there did not seem to be any Kalkaboos among them. As Giyt entered, one of the men caught his arm. “Where the hell are we supposed to sit, Giyt?” he demanded.

Actually it was a fair question. Inside the building Delt and human crews were ripping out most of the seats usually supplied for the audience. New and obviously a good deal more comfortable chair equivalents were stacked along the wall, ready to be installed for the comfort of the delegations. Giyt gave the man a helpless shrug and entered cautiously.

All the other members were already in their places, even the Kalkaboo High Champion, who did not even look at Giyt. Mrs. Brownbenttalon piped to the room in general, “Sorrow for lateness. I and Earth human had business of nonpublic nature. Please begin.”

And the Principal Slug, acting as chair for the day, slapped the desktop with one extruded member for order, commanded the work crews to stop their noisy activities, and began the meeting.

It was not a peaceful one. It seemed that every member of the commission had a complaint to make or a demand to register. The Principal Slug was first, usurping the privilege of the chair to point out that there were not enough damp-conditioned carts available in working order for the use of their delegation from the Slug home planet. Then the Petty-Primes’ Responsible One protested that the traffic involved in preparing for the meeting was so heavy that their small carts were at risk of being run over in the streets, and then the Delts weighed in by announcing that the other members of the commission were taking up time on frivolous matters when they should have ratified the seat assignments on the suborbital polar rocket and, really, they should move along so the work crews could finish preparing the hall for the six-planet meeting. Even Mrs. Brownbenttalon indignantly proclaimed that all that work should have been completed long ago, because more staff members for the six-planet meeting would be arriving very soon, and the accommodations for the Centaurians were not ready.

It did not take Giyt long to figure out what was motivating them all. The audience was much larger than usual, uncomfortably perched on whatever surfaces were left for them. Most of them were eeties—Giyt even saw the female Kalkaboo from the waterworks office—and among them were a number he had never seen before.

Those newcomers, he realized, had to be advance staff members for the delegations from the home planets. What the mayors were doing was showing off for the high brass. Only the new Kalkaboo High Champion was silent. He did not speak, did not look at Giyt, hardly moved at all except for the flapping of his huge ears. The only time he paid any attention at all was when Giyt found an opening to bring up his own business with the Principal Slug. Then the Kalkaboo conspicuously turned his back, while the Slug in the chair slobbered reprovingly, “These smelly drains leak purely unofficial personal matter, Mayor Giyt. Not to come before this body never. No other proper business? Good. Meeting I now adjourn.”

Well, Giyt thought, he hadn’t really expected any more. Meanwhile, what about this other matter? He started over to ask Mrs. Brownbenttalon what had gone wrong with her arrangements with the Kalkaboos.

That was when he found out that nothing had gone wrong at all.

He had incautiously turned his back on the High Champion. Before Giyt knew what was happening, the Kalkaboo leaped off his platform and bore him to the ground. “Die in wretched agony, vicious murdering person!” he shrieked, pounding Giyt’s head against the floor. But not really very hard, and not for more than a moment. Then the Kalkaboo rose and said politely, “Thank you. Vengeance is now complete. Expect you recover from this beating soon.”

When vengeance was complete, it seemed, it was complete, and it produced some unexpected dividends. The High Champion of the Kalkaboos did not become friendly, exactly—friendliness did not seem to be among the behaviors in the Kalkaboo repertory—but he did something better than that. He beckoned to the female Kalkaboo from the Slug office and whispered into her great ear. She in turn spoke to the Principal Slug, who listened for a moment, then called to Giyt. “Am informed repair requisition of you on file, so work will be done. Is quite irregular. Slugs, however, always cooperate reliably, this our nature.”

And then the next morning, as he was breakfasting with Rina at daybreak, they heard the pop of an explosion outside their own door. When they peered out they found it was pouring, but they caught a glimpse of a Kalkaboo running away in the rain. “I guess they didn’t trust you to set off your own firecracker, Shammy,” Rina said. “Anyway, it’s all straightened out now, right?”

“Looks that way,” he said, and returned to his pancakes, more cheerful than he had been in days. At least the problems with the extraterrestrials on Tupelo seemed to be healing themselves.

The humans, however, were a different matter. The stresses there were not healing themselves. They were getting worse.

The more Evesham Giyt thought about it, ;the more he was convinced that this world would be a better place if Hoak Hagbarth weren’t in it, either back on Earth or, preferably, dead.

That was a conclusion that startled him. Giyt had never before in his life wished for any other person’s death. It wasn’t that he planned to do anything about it. He had no intention of getting into a shoot-out with Hagbarth, even if either of them had had weapons to shoot each other out with. But to punch the man stupid, yes, that was a tempting possibility. Bash him bloody and then kick his ugly face in—yes, definitely that scenario had real attractions for Giyt . . . Or would have had, if Rina hadn’t begged him to let the matter pass; “All he did was tell the truth, Shammy,” she said, dry-eyed and somber. “The whole thing is my fault.”

“ Nothing about this is your fault!”

She gave him the pursed-lips look that meant, You’re entirely wrong and I’m certainly right, but I don’t choose to debate it any further. All she said was, “Please, Shammy. I’m asking you to let it go. For me.”