Andre Norton - The Science Fiction anthology

A milligram a day kept old age away—which was not an advertising slogan but sound, practical geriatric science. But thanar leaves would only grow on Cetis Gamma Two, and the law said that all habitable planets had to be open for colonization and land could not be withheld from market.

There was too much population back on Earth, anyhow. Therefore the Cetis Gamma Trading Company couldn’t make a planetwide plantation and keep thanar as a monopoly, but could only run its own plantation for research and instruction purposes for new colonists. Colonists had to be admitted to the planet, and they had to be sold land. But there are ways of getting around every law.

Lon Simpson swore. The Diesel of his tractor ran a generator. The generator ran the motors in the tractor’s catawheels. But this was the sixth time in a month that the generator had broken down, and generators do not break down.

Lon put it together for the eighteenth time this breakdown, and it still wouldn’t work. There was nothing detectably wrong with it, but he couldn’t make it work.

Seething, he walked back to his neat, prefabricated house. He picked up the beamphone. Even Cathy’s voice at the exchange in Cetopolis could not soothe him, he was so furious.

“Cathy, give me Carson—and don’t listen!” he said tensely.

He heard clickings on the two-way beam.

“My generator’s gone,” he said sourly when Carson answered. “I’ve repaired it twice this week. It looks like it was built to stop working! What is this all about, anyhow?”

The representative of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company sounded bored.

“You want a new generator sent out?” he asked without interest. “Your crop credit’s still all right—if the fields are in good shape.”

“I want machinery that works!” Lon Simpson snapped. “I want machinery that doesn’t have to be bought four times over a growing season! And I want it at a decent price!”

“Look, those generators come out from Earth. There’s freight on them. There’s freight on everything that comes out from Earth. You people come to a developed planet, you buy your land, your machinery, your house, and you get instruction in agriculture. Do you want the company to tuck you in bed at night besides? Do you want a new generator or not?”

“How much?” demanded Lon. When Carson told him, he hit the ceiling. “It’s robbery! What’ll I have left for my crop if I buy that?”

Carson’s voice was still bored. “If you buy it and your crop’s up to standard, you’ll owe the crop plus three hundred credits. But we’ll stake you to next growing season.”

“And if I don’t?” demanded Lon. “Suppose I don’t give you all my work for nothing and wind up in debt?”

“By contract,” Carson told him, “we’ve got the right to finish cultivating your crop and charge you for the work because we’ve advanced you credit on it. Then we attach your land and house for the balance due. And you get no more credit at the Company stores. And passage off this planet has to be paid for in cash.” He yawned. “Don’t answer now,” he said without interest. “Call me back after you calm down. You’d only have to apologize.”

Lon Simpson heard the click as he began to describe, heatedly, what was in his mind. He said it anyhow. Then Cathy’s voice came from the exchange. She sounded shocked but sympathetic.

“Lon! Please!”

He swallowed a particularly inventive description of the manners, morals and ancestry of all the directors and employees of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. Then he said, still fuming, “I told you not to listen!”

His wrongs overcame him again. “It’s robbery! It’s peonage! They’ve got every credit I had! They’ve got three-quarters of the value of my crop charged up for replacements of the lousy machinery they sold me—and now I’ll end the growing season in debt! How am I going to ask you to marry me?”

“Not over a beamphone, I hope,” said Cathy.

He was abruptly sunk in gloom.

“That was a slip,” he admitted. “I was going to wait until I got paid for my crop. It looked good. Now—”

“Wait a minute, Lon,” Cathy said. There was silence. She gave somebody else a connection.

The phone-beams from the colony farms all went to Cetopolis and Cathy was one of the two operators there. If or when the colony got prosperous enough, there would be a regular intercommunication system. So it was said. Meanwhile, Lon had a suspicion that there might be another reason for the antiquated central station.

Cathy said brightly, “Yes, Lon?”

“I’ll come in to town tonight,” he said darkly. “Date?”

“Y-yes,” stammered Cathy. “Oh, yes!”

He hung up and went back out to the field and the tractor. He began to think sourly of a large number of things all at once. There was a law to encourage people to leave Earth for colonies on suitable planets. There was even governmental help for people who didn’t have funds of their own. But if a man wanted to make something of himself, he preferred to use his own money and pick his own planet and choose his own way of life.

Lon Simpson had bought four hectares of land on Cetis Gamma Two. He’d paid his passage out. He’d given five hundred credits a month for an instruction course on the Company’s plantation, during which time he’d labored faithfully to grow, harvest, and cure thanar leaves for the Company’s profit. Then he’d bought farm machinery from the Company—and a house—and very painstakingly had set out to be a colonist on his own.

Just about that time, Cathy had arrived on a Company ship and taken up her duties as beamphone operator at Cetopolis. It was a new colony, with not more than five thousand humans on the whole planet, all of them concentrated near the one small town with its plank sidewalks and prefabricated buildings. Lon Simpson met Cathy, and his labors on his thanar farm acquired new energy and purpose.

But he was up against a shrewd organization. His inordinately expensive farm machinery broke down. He repaired it. After a time it could not be repaired any longer and he had to buy more. Before the thanar plants were half grown, he owed more than half his prospective crop for machinery replacements.

Now he could see the method perfectly. The Company imported all machinery. It made that machinery in its own factories, machinery that was designed to break down. So this year—even if nothing else happened—Lon would wind up owing more for machinery replacements than the crop would bring.

It was not likely that nothing else would happen. Next season he would start off in debt, instead of all clear, and if the same thing happened he would owe all his crop and be six thousand credits behind. By harvest after next, his farm and house could be foreclosed for debt and he could either try to work for other colonists—who were in the process of going through the same wringer themselves—or hire out as a farmhand on the Company’s plantation. He would never be able to save space-fare away from the planet. He would be very much worse off than the assisted emigrants to other planets, who had not invested all they owned in land and machinery and agricultural instructions.

And there was Cathy. She owed for her passage. It would be years before she could pay that back, if ever. She couldn’t live in the farmhand barracks. They might as well give up thinking about each other.

It was a system. Beautifully legal, absolutely airtight. Not a thing wrong with it. The Company had a monopoly on thanar , despite the law. It had all the cultivated land on Cetis Gamma Two under its control, and its labor problem was solved. Its laborers first paid something like sixteen thousand credits a head for the privilege of trying to farm independently for a year or two, and then became farmhands for the Company at a bare subsistence wage.