Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

“Lot of funny animals, but none of them were very dangerous. No reptilian life; all of it mammalian, but a funny kind of mammalian if you know what I mean.”

Blake said, “I don’t want to know what you mean. Get to the natives and the earrings.”

I said, “But of course with animals like that, you never know whether they’re dangerous until you’ve been around them for a while. You can’t judge by size or looks. Like if you’d never seen a snake, you’d never guess that a little coral snake was dangerous, would you? And a Martian zeezee looks for all the world like an overgrown guinea pig. But without a gun—or with one, for that matter—I’d rather face a grizzly bear or a—”

“The earrings,” said Blake. “You were talking about earrings.”

I said, “Oh, yes; earrings. Well, the natives wore them—for now, I’ll put it that way, to make it easier to tell. One earring apiece, even though they had two ears. Gave them a sort of lopsided look, because they were pretty fair-sized earrings—like hoops of plain gold, two or three inches in diameter.”

“Anyway, the tribe we landed near wore them that way. We could see the village—a very primitive sort of place made of mud huts—from where we landed. We had a council of war and decided that three of us would stay in the ship and the other three go to the village. Lecky, the biologist, and Art Willis and I with guns. We didn’t know what we might run into, see? And Lecky was chosen because he was pretty much of a linguist. He had a flair for languages and could talk them almost as soon as he heard them.”

“They’d heard us land and a bunch of them—about forty, I guess—met us halfway between the ship and the village. And they were friendly. Funny people. Quiet and dignified and acting not at all like you’d expect savages to act toward people landing out of the sky. You know how most primitives react—either they practically worship you or else they try to kill you.”

“We went to the village with them—and there were about forty more of them there; they’d split forces just as we did, for the reception committee. Another sign of intelligence. They recognized Lecky as leader, and started jabbering to him in a lingo that sounded more like a pig grunting than a man talking. And pretty soon Lecky was making an experimental grunt or two in return.”

“Everything seemed on the up and up, and no danger. And they weren’t paying much attention to Art and me, so we decided to wander off for a stroll around the village to see what the country was like and whether there were any dangerous beasties or what-not. We didn’t see any animals, but we did see another native. He acted different from the others—very different. He threw a spear at us and then ran. And it was Art who noticed that this native didn’t wear an earring.”

“And then breathing began to get a bit hard for us—we’d been away from the ship over an hour—so we went back to the village to collect Lecky and take him to the ship. He was getting along so well that he hated to leave, but he was starting to pant, too, so we talked him into it. He was wearing one of the earrings, and said they’d given it to him as a present, and he’d made them a return present of a pocket slide-rule he happened to have with him.”

“‘Why a slide-rule?’ I asked him. ‘Those things cost money and we’ve got plenty of junk that would make them happier.’”

“‘That’s what you think,’ he said. ‘They figured out how to multiply and divide with it almost as soon as I showed it to them. I showed them how to extract square roots, and I was starting on cube roots when you fellows came back.’”

“I whistled and took a close look to see if maybe he was kidding me. He didn’t seem to be. But I noticed that he was walking strangely and—well, acting just a bit strangely, somehow, although I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I decided finally that he was just a bit over-excited. This was Lecky’s first trip off Earth, so that was natural enough.”

“Inside the ship, as soon as Lecky got his breath back—the last hundred yards pretty well winded us—he started in to tell Haynes and Hilda Race about the Ganymedeans. Most of it was too technical for me, but I got that they had some strange contradictions in them. As far as their way of life was concerned, they were more primitive than Australian bushmen. But they had brains and a philosophy and a knowledge of mathematics and pure science. They’d told him some things about atomic structure that excited hell out of him. He was in a dither to get back to Earth where he could get at equipment to check some of those things.”

“And he said the earring was a sign of membership in the tribe—they’d acknowledged him as a friend and compatriot and what-not by giving it to him.”

Blake asked, “Was it gold?”

“I’m coming to that,” I told him. I was feeling cramped from sitting so long in one position on the bunk, and I stood up and stretched.

There isn’t much room to stretch in an asteroid tug and my hand hit against the pistol resting in the clips on the wall. I said, “What’s the pistol for, Blake?”

He shrugged. “Rules. Has to be one hand weapon on every space-craft. Heaven knows why, on an asteroid ship. Unless the council thinks some day an asteroid may get mad at us when we tow it out of orbit so it cracks up another. Say, did I ever tell you about the time we had a little twenty-ton rock in tow and—”

“Shut up, Blake,” Charlie said. “He’s just getting to those damn earrings.”

“Yeah, the earrings,” I said. I took the pistol down from the wall and looked at it. It was an old-fashioned metal project weapon, twenty-shot, circa 2000. It was loaded and usable, but dirty. It hurts me to see a dirty gun.

I went on talking, but I sat back down on the bunk, took an old handkerchief out of my duffle-box and started to clean and polish the hand-gun while I talked.

I said, “He wouldn’t let us take the earring off. Acted just a little funny about it when Haynes wanted to analyze the metal. Told Haynes he could get one of his own if he wanted to mess with it. And then he went back to rhapsodizing over the superior knowledge the Ganymedeans had shown.”

“Next day all of them wanted to go to the village, but we’d made the rule that not more than three of the six of us would be outside the ship at once, and they’d have to take turns. Since Lecky could talk their grunt-lingo, he and Hilda went first, and Art went along to guard them. Looked safe enough to work that proportion now—two scientists to one guard. Outside of that one native that had thrown a spear at Art and me, there hadn’t been a sign of danger. And he’d looked like a half-wit and missed us by twenty feet anyway. We hadn’t even bothered to shoot at him.”

“They were back, panting for breath, in less than two hours. Hilda Race’s eyes were shining and she was wearing one of the rings in her left ear. She looked as proud as though it was a royal crown making her queen of Mars or something. She gushed about it, as soon as she got her wind back and stopped panting.”

“I went on the next trip, with Lecky and Haynes.”

“Haynes was kind of grumpy, for some reason, and said they weren’t going to put one of those rings in his ear, even if he did want one for analysis. They could just hand it to him, or else.”

“Again nobody paid much attention to me after we got there, and I wandered around the village. I was on the outskirts of it when I heard a yell—and I ran back to the center of town but fast, because it sounded like Haynes.”

“There was a crowd around a spot in the middle of—well, call it the compound. Took me a minute to wedge my way through, scattering natives to all sides as I went. And when I got to the middle of things, Haynes was just getting up, and there was a big stain of red on the front of his white linen coat.”