First Person Peculiar (19 page)

“I’ve heard about your department and its attitude,” he said. “Just whose side are you on?”

“We’re pretty much on our own side.”

“You’re supposed to be loyal to the Republic,” Smythe said severely.

“Our job is pulling the Republic’s fat out of the fire after well-meaning assholes put a torch to it,” I replied. “You wouldn’t believe how thoroughly that erodes our respect for the Republic and its well-meaning representatives. I just wish some of you idiots would learn from your mistakes. I suppose I might as well wish for a trillion credits while I’m at it.”

“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this.”

“No, you don’t,” I agreed. “In fact, the sooner you stalk off in a petulant huff, the sooner I can analyze the situation and figure out how best to salvage it.”

He glared at me. “They say that your group comes up with unique solutions, that you’re problem-solvers of last resort.” He drew himself up to his full five and a half feet, and tried to make his voice harsh; it just sounded laughable. “They’d better be right.” He got up, frowned furiously, and minced out the door.

I resisted the urge to ask him what would happen if they were wrong.

* * *

I knew better than to try to hire an interpreter. For one thing, the only remuneration he’d accept would be cattle, and I didn’t have any. For another, the Republic had stockpiled so much hostility that I wasn’t sure I could trust his translations. So I spent a month taking sleep-intensive language disks, and when I finally landed on MacArthur 4 I was moderately fluent in the three most common languages.

There was no one waiting to greet me at the tiny spaceport that the original governor had built. As far as I could ascertain, there were no Men on the world at all. There was nothing except a few hundred million Blue Demons, separated by distance and language and custom, and united only in their distrust of the human race.

Just the kind of situation we face every day.

I left the spaceport and figured I’d follow one of the highways to whatever village it led to. I knew that it was a warm arid planet, so I’d come prepared with cotton, sweat-absorbing clothes and a broad-brimmed hat to shade my eyes. Even so, as I walked down the concrete causeway I became uncomfortably warm and began sweating pretty heavily.

When I’d gone a little over a mile, with no villages or huts or teepees in sight, I paused to wipe the sweat from my eyes and inadvertently knocked my hat off my head. As I reached down to pick it up, I could feel the heat rising from the sun-baked pavement.

I walked a little farther and saw a herd of animals grazing off in the distance. They didn’t look like the cattle that the Blue Demons used for currency, and since they were quickly aware of my presence and didn’t run off, I concluded that they’d never been hunted as meat animals—at least not this herd.

I spent most of the day walking along the highway. From time to time I had the feeling that I was being watched, but I could never spot any Blue Demons. When twilight came I pulled a meal out of my pack, sat down with my back propped up against the trunk of a smooth alien tree, and had dinner. I took a couple of adrenaline pills and another that oxygenated my blood, which would keep me going until my body had totally adjusted to the planetary conditions. I spent the next couple of hours considering the problems the Republic had created and left behind, and felt I had pretty good notion of how to solve them as the night air finally began to cool things down.

When I woke up the next morning I was surrounded by half a dozen Blue Demons. A couple had war clubs and one held a crude spear, but no one was striking any threatening postures. They were just staring at me; rather the way you stare at a snake while trying to decide whether or not he’s poisonous and whether he looks annoyed with you.

“Good morning, brothers,” I greeted them.

“You speak our language,” said the nearest, sounding mildly surprised.

“I have been banished to your world,” I replied, “so I thought I had better learn to communicate with you.”

“The Republic has banished you? What terrible crimes have you committed?”

I knew they lived in family units, so I gave them an answer that made sense to them. “I ran off with the king’s woman. And now I am here, probably forever, and I must make the best of it.” I paused and looked from one to another. “I would not presume to live in your village, among your people. But may I live just beyond it until I am better acquainted with your world, for I am sure I will have many questions to ask.”

I could see it in their faces:
The enemy of my enemy is my
friend
. They put their heads together, spoke in low whispers, and finally turned back to me. “You may come with us.”

“Thank you,” I said, getting to my feet and grabbing my backpack.

They headed off across the uneven grasslands, paralleling the road, and I fell into step beside them.

“Excuse me, my brethren,” I said innocently, “but why don’t we walk on the highway? After all, it is level, and has no obstructions.”

“Men made it, Men can use it,” said one of the Blue Demons contemptuously.

“So you will use nothing Men have given you?”

“Nothing.”

“I
knew
they were wrong,” I said.

The Blue Demons all stopped and stared at me. “Wrong about what?” demanded the leader.

“About why you refuse to use the highways,” I replied. “I knew you must have a reason, and that you weren’t cowards.”

“They call us cowards?”

I shrugged. “They say you are afraid to walk on the roads, but I was sure they must be wrong.”

“They put the roads here to cripple and kill us!” said the leader.

“Watch,” said another. He spat onto the sun-baked highway. Within a minute his saliva began bubbling and quickly evaporated. “Would
you
walk on that?”

“I walked on it all the way from the spaceport,” I said.

“And it didn’t burn your feet?”

“My feet never touched it.”

“I had hoped you might be different,” he said wearily. “I was mistaken. All Men are liars.”

“Wait!” I said, trying to look surprised. I pointed to my shoes. “You think
these
are my feet?”

“Of course.”

I took off a shoe and held it up. “They are artifacts created to
protect
my feet. We call them shoes.”

Each Blue Demon in turn examined the shoe with various amazed mutterings.

“They protect my feet from heat, from cold, from rain, from snow, even from thorns and stones that I step on,” I explained.

The leader stood next to me and looked down at both our feet. “They would not protect me,” he said.

“That is because your feet are shaped differently,” I answered. “But if you made a shoe that fit around your foot, it would afford you the same protection my shoes afford me.”

He studied the shoe again, his fingers probing every inch of it.

“What is it made of?”

Reprocessed petroleum products, but you don’t need to know
that yet.
“Cured animal skins,” I said.

“We do not kill our cattle,” he said, using his unpronounceable word for
cattle
. “Would you bind your feet with Man’s paper money, or affix his coins to the bottoms of your toes?”

I pointed to a distant herd of grazing herbivores. “Do you use
them
for currency?”

“No.”

“Then your problem is solved.”

“I only wanted to know how
you
managed to walk on the roads,” he said. “We have no desire to walk on Man’s highways.”

“You’re right, of course,” I said. “They’re Men’s highways. Why should you care that they think you’re a race of ignorant cowards?”

“Why indeed?” he agreed with just a hint of hesitation in his voice.

We walked another mile across the uneven vegetation, and then another Blue Demon fell into step beside me.

“What else do they say about us?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Nothing?”

“They feel a race that is too cowardly to walk on the roads and too ignorant to protect their feet isn’t worth talking about,” I said. “That’s why they’ve decided to deposit their lawbreakers on your planet. They don’t think it’s good for anything else.”

“I will wait by the spaceport and kill them!” bellowed the largest of the Blue Demons.

“Well, yes, you could do that,” I admitted. “But that would just convince them that you are ignorant killers rather than ignorant pastoralists.”

Cowardly
hadn’t worked that well, but
ignorant
was doing its job. I clammed up, and we walked all the way to the village in silence.

They were pretty decent folk. They let me sleep in an empty teepee that night, and the next day about a dozen of them of both sexes showed up and helped me build a hut. It only took about two hours, and then they left me alone while I explored the village and surrounding area.

Three days later the leader showed up in the ugliest, smelliest, most ill-fitting pair of moccasins anyone ever saw.

“It doesn’t work,” he complained. “They keep falling apart, and stones and thorns pierce through them, and the odor attracts unwelcome flesh-eaters.” He stared at me reproachfully. “I should have known better than to listen to a Man.”

“Well, listen a little more and I’ll tell you what you did wrong,” I said. I spent the rest of the day showing him how to cure a hide, how to make a sturdy thread from the creature’s gut, and how to reinforce the soles so that nothing could puncture them.

It took him another three weeks (and another two dozen dead herbivores, each killed for about two percent of its hide) to make a mildly workable pair of moccasins, but he finally did it, then walked up and down the highway that ran beside the village with his contempt for the Republic written all over his face.

Within another month every member of the village could fashion a crude pair of shoes, and suddenly they had something to trade neighboring villages besides cattle.

Of course, no village wanted to deplete its stock of four-legged currency to buy shoes, so each village studied the items and began making their own. The “enlightened” villages realized they’d better make more shoes in a hurry, before the more distant villages learned to make their own, and I taught them how to use the wind to power some crude machines that could turn out shoes a little faster than before.

Once they understood the principle of mass production, they found more efficient means of powering their machines, and began specializing in the various aspects of shoe-making: this group designed the ever-more-sophisticated footwear, that group hunted the herbivores, this group tanned the hides, that group worked the machines, this group became the merchants that sold them to distant villages.

I was an honored consultant, but I kept pointing out that this was
their
industry; the products were theirs to do with as they pleased, and I was happy to simply serve as an occasional advisor.

I’d been told that they weren’t creative, and despite their reaction to the hut tax, that description was true—which made my job a lot easier. It never occurred to any of them to start using their skills to make leather clothing, or better coverings for their teepees, or anything else except more shoes. And then came the day I’d been waiting for, the day when they realized that every Blue Demon household had more shoes than the members could possibly wear in half a dozen lifetimes.

What were they to do with all these extra shoes, they wondered?

“That’s easy,” I told them when they sought me out. “You will trade them”—I was careful not to use the word
sell
—“to other worlds. After all, almost every race needs shoes.”

“But their feet will not be the same as ours.”

“Men live on thousands of planets,” I said. “They will be your best trading partners. You can make molds from my feet, and the feet of the men and women who pilot the ships that land here. Later you can send some of your artisans abroad in the galaxy to meet more races, make more molds, and arrange more trades.”

“But they have no cattle,” protested the Blue Demons. “What will they trade for the shoes?”

“That presents a problem,” I agreed, “but it’s far from insurmountable. You will have to trade the shoes for currency, and then trade the currency to other worlds for things that you want.”

“What kind of things?” they asked suspiciously.

“If you keep making shoes at this rate, you will kill the last of your herbivores in another year’s time,” I said. “So I suggest that you trade the currency for more hides and artificial materials, and with the shoes you will then be able to make, you will trade them for still more currency and then trade the currency for better machines to make still more and better shoes.”

And before you know it, you’ll be “trading” cash for
medicines and clothing, for vehicles to run on your unused roads,
and for a million other things.

“We will have to think about it,” they told me.

“You had better think quickly,” I warned them, “before you run out of animals.”

“This is a serious decision,” they said. “Money has no value. It cannot reproduce, or give sustenance. It is just pieces of paper and chips of metal. If Men want to introduce money into our daily lives, then it must be a bad thing.”

“You’re looking at it all wrong,” I said. “Of course money has no value … but if the races you’re trading with are too ignorant”—that word again—“to realize that, why not take advantage of it? Consider the alternative: what would you rather trade for things that you want—cattle or worthless paper?”

It was a persuasive argument, and they may have been uneducated but they weren’t stupid. Within a month they were exporting shoes to Deluros VIII, Spica II, the Roosevelt system, and a dozen other worlds. In six months’ time they had tripled the number of factories on the planet, and had traded some of their worthless paper to a team of cold fusion experts who showed them how to power those factories.

In less than two years hotels for businessmen had sprung up around the no-longer-tiny spaceport, and visitors were greeted by a banner proclaiming that they had just landed on Beta Prognani II—Cobbler to the Galaxy.