Philip Dick - The Science Fiction Anthology

Lon Simpson was in the grip of that system. He had taken the generator apart and put it back together eighteen times. There was nothing visibly wrong with it. It had been designed to break down with nothing visibly wrong with it. If he couldn’t repair it, though, he was out fifteen hundred credits, his investment was wiped out, and all his hopes were gone.

He took the generator apart for the nineteenth time. He wondered grimly how the Company’s designers made generators so cleverly that they would stop working so that even the trouble with them couldn’t be figured out. It was a very ingenious system.

Out on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus explained the situation to his bride as they waited for the interesting astronomical phenomenon. They were quite cosy, waiting. Their bower was simple, of course. Frozen nitrogen walls, and windows of the faint bluish tint of oxygen ice. Rhadampsicus had grown some cyanogen flower-crystals to make the place look homelike, and there was now a lovely reflection-pool in which liquid hydrogen reflected the stars. Cetis Gamma, the local sun, seemed hardly more than a very bright and very near star—it was four light-hours away—and it glimmered over the landscape and made everything quite charming.

Nodalictha, naturally, would not enter the minds of the male bipeds on the inner planet. Modesty forbade such a thing—as, of course, the conscientiousness of a brand-new husband limited Rhadampsicus to the thoughts of the males among the bipeds. But Nodalictha was distressed when Rhadampsicus told her of what was occurring among the bipeds. He guided her thoughts to Cathy, in the beamphone exchange at Cetopolis.

“But it is terrible!” said Nodalictha in distress when she had absorbed Cathy’s maiden meditations. She did not actually speak in words and soundwaves. There is no air worth mentioning at seven degrees Kelvin. It’s all frozen. A little helium hangs around, perhaps. Nothing else. The word for communication is not exactly the word for speech, but it will do. Nodalictha said, “They love each other! In a cute way, they are like—like we were, Rhadampsicus!”

Rhadampsicus played a positron-beam on her in feigned indignation. If that beam had hit a human, the human would have curled up in a scorched, smoking heap. But Nodalictha bridled.

“Rhadampsicus!” she protested fondly. “Stop tickling me! But can’t you do something for them? They are so cute!”

And Rhadampsicus gallantly sent his thoughts back to the second planet, where a biped grimly labored over a primitive device.

Lon Simpson, staring at the disassembled generator, suddenly blinked. The grimness went out of his expression. He stared. An idea had occurred to him. He went over it in his mind. He blew out his breath in a long whistle. Then, very painstakingly, he did four or five things that completely ruined the generator for the extremely modest trade-in allowance he could have gotten for it at the Company store.

He worked absorbedly for perhaps twenty minutes, his eyes intent. At the end of that time he had threads of unwound secondary wire stretched back and forth across a forked stick of dhil weed, and two small pieces of sheet iron twisted together in an extremely improbable manner. He connected the ends of the secondary wire to contacts in his tractor. He climbed into the tractor seat. He threw over the drive control.

The tractor lurched into motion. The Diesel wasn’t running. But the tractor rolled comfortably as Lon drove it, the individual motors in the separate catawheels drawing power from a mere maze of wires across a forked stick—plus two pieces of sheet iron. There was plenty of power.

Lon drove the tractor the rest of the morning and all afternoon with a very peculiar expression on his face. He understood what he had done. Now that he had done it, it seemed the most obvious of expedients. He felt inclined to be incredulous that nobody had ever happened to think of this particular device before. But they very plainly hadn’t. It was a source of all the electric power anybody could possibly want. The voltage would depend on the number of turns of copper wire around a suitably forked stick. The amperage would be whatever that voltage could put through whatever was hooked to it.

He no longer needed a new generator for his tractor. He had one.

He didn’t even need a Diesel.

With adequate power—he’d been having to nurse the Diesel along, too, lately—Lon Simpson ran his tractor late into the twilight. He cultivated all the ground that urgently needed cultivation, and at least one field he hadn’t hoped to get to before next week. But his expression was amazed. It is a very peculiar sensation to discover that one is a genius.

That night, in Cetopolis, he told Cathy all about it. It was a very warm night—an unusually warm night. They walked along the plank sidewalks of the little frontier town—as a new colony, Cetis Gamma Two was a frontier—and Lon talked extravagantly.

He had meant to explain painfully to Cathy that there was no use in their being romantic about each other. He’d expected to have to tell her bitterly that he was doomed to spend the rest of his life adding to the profits of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company, with all the laws of the human race holding him in peonage. He’d thought of some very elegant descriptions of the sort of people who’d worked out the system in force on Cetis Gamma Two.

But he didn’t. As they strolled under the shiver trees that lined the small town’s highways, and smelled the chanel bushes beyond the town’s limits, and listened to the thin violinlike strains of what should have been night birds—they weren’t; the singers were furry instead of feathered, and they slept in burrows during the day—as they walked with linked fingers in the warm and starlit night, Lon told Cathy about his invention.

He explained in detail just why wires wound in just that fashion, and combined with bits of sheet iron twisted in just those shapes, would produce power for free and forever. He explained how it had to be so. He marveled that nobody had ever thought of it before. He explained it so that Cathy could almost understand it.

“It’s wonderful!” she said wistfully. “They’ll run spaceships on your invention, won’t they, Lon? And cities? And everything! I guess you’ll be very rich for inventing it!”

He stopped short and stared at her. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. Then he said blankly:

“But I’ll have to get back to Earth to patent it! And I haven’t got the money to pay one fare, let alone two!”

“Two?” asked Cathy hopefully. “Why two?”

“You’re going to marry me, aren’t you?” he demanded. “I sort of hope that was all settled.”

Cathy stamped her foot.

“Hadn’t you heard,” she asked indignantly, “that such things aren’t taken for granted? Especially when two people are walking in the starlight and are supposed to be thrilled? It isn’t settled—not until after you’ve kissed me, anyhow!”

He remedied his error.

Out on the ninth planet, very far away, Nodalictha blushed slightly. As a bride, she was in that deliciously embarrassing state of becoming accustomed to discussions which would previously have been unconventional.

“They are so quaint!” Then she hesitated and said awkwardly, “The idea of putting their—their lips together as a sign of affection—”

Rhadampsicus was amused, as a bridegroom may be by the delightful innocences of a new wife. He evinced his amusement in a manner no human being could conceivably have recognized as the tender laugh it was.

“Little goose!” he said fondly. Of course, instead of a fowl, he thought of a creature that had thirty-four legs and scales instead of feathers and was otherwise thoroughly ungooselike. “Little goose, they do that because they can’t do this!”