“I don’t blame you,” Davison said. “Men aren’t supposed to do things the way those guys do.”
“Nossir,” the Mayor said. “But we fix ’em when they do. There was a fellow down from Lanargon Seven last year, took a job here as a beekeeper. Nice boy—young, with a good head on his shoulders. Saw a lot of my daughter. We all liked him. We never suspected he was a wronger.”
“Witch, eh?”
“Sure was,” Domarke said. “Swarm of his bees got loose and broke up. They come after him, and started stinging away. Next thing we know, he’s looking at them kinda funny and fire starts shootin’ from his fingertips.” Domarke shook his head retrospectively. “Burned all those bees to tatters. He didn’t even try to stop us when we strung him up.”
“Strung him up? How come you didn’t burn him?” Davison asked, morbidly curious.
Domarke shrugged. “Wasn’t any point to it. Those guys in league with fire, you don’t get anywhere trying to burn ’em. We hang them on the spot.”
One of Kechnie’s boys, probably, Davison thought. A pyrotic sent out here to learn how to control his power. He didn’t learn fast enough.
He chewed at his lower lip for a second and said, “Guess it’s about time I got to my point. Who can I see about getting a room in this town?”
They found him a room with a family named Rinehart, on a small farm about ten minutes’ walk from the heart of the village. They had posted a sign advertising for a hired hand.
He moved in that afternoon, unpacked his meager belongings, and hung up his jacket in the tiny closet they provided. Then he went downstairs to meet his hosts.
It was a family of five. Rinehart was a balding man of fifty-five or so, dark skinned from long hours of toil in the blazing sun, heavy-jowled and jovial. His wife—Ma—was a formidable woman in an amazingly archaic-looking apron. Her voice was a mellow masculine boom, and she radiated an atmosphere of simple, traditional folksiness. It was, thought Davison, a frame of mind long since extinct on so sophisticated a planet as Earth.
They had three children—Janey, a long-legged, full-bodied girl of eighteen or so; Bo, a sullen-faced, muscular seventeen-year-old; and Buster, a chubby eleven-year-old. It seemed to be a happy familial setup, thought Davison.
He left his room—painstakingly opening and closing the door by hand—and ambled down the stairs. He slipped on the fourth from the bottom, started to slide, and teeked against the landing to hold himself upright. He caught his balance, straightened up, and then, as he realized what he had done, he paused and felt cold droplets of sweat starting out on his forehead.
No one had seen. No one this time.
But how many more slips would there be?
He let the shock filter out of his nervous system, waited a moment while the blood returned to his cheeks, and then finished descending the stairs and entered the living-room. The Rineharts were already gathered.
“Evening, Ry!” Rinehart said pleasantly.
“Evening, sir,” Davison said. He smiled at the rest of them, and took a seat.
“All unpacked?” Ma Rinehart asked. “You like your room?”
“It’s fine, Mrs. Rinehart.”
“Ma, if you don’t mind.”
“All right—Ma. I like the room just fine. I’m going to be very happy here.”
“Sure you are,” Rinehart said. “Maybe it’s not as fancy a place as some, but you’ll like it here. We’re good people on this world—sound, sane, feet-on-the-ground people. I can’t think of any planet I’d rather live on.”
“At the moment, neither can I,” Davison lied. “After Dariak III, anything would be an improvement.”
“It’s a damned rainy world there,” Rinehart muttered. “You’ll get some good sun on your face here. Two weeks out in my fields and you’ll lose that fishbelly paleness of yours, Ry.”
Janey appeared in the doorway and glanced indolently at Davison. “Supper’s on,” she said.
Rinehart scooped himself out of his big chair and they followed him to the kitchen, ranging themselves around the table. “That seat down there’s yours,” Rinehart said.
Davison sat down. Rinehart, at the head of the table, uttered a brief but devout blessing, finishing up with a word of prayer for the new hired hand who had come among them. Then Janey appeared from the back with a tray of steaming soup.
“Hot stuff,” she said, and Bo and Buster moved apart to let her serve it. She brought the tray down—and then it happened. Davison saw it starting, and bit his lip in anguish.
One of the scalding bowls of soup began to slide off the end of the tray. He watched, almost in slow motion, as it curled over the lip of the tray, dipped, and poured its steaming contents on his bare right arm.
Tears of pain came to his eyes—and he didn’t know which hurt more, the pain of the soup on his arm or the real shock he had received when he had forced himself to keep from teeking the falling soup halfway across the room.
He bit hard into his lip, and sat there, shivering from the mental effort the restraint had cost him.
Janey put down the tray and fussed embarrassedly over him. “Gee, Ry, I didn’t mean that! Gosh, did I bum you?”
“I’ll live,” he said. “Don’t trouble yourself about it.”
He mopped the soup away from his corner of the table, feeling the pain slowly subside.
Kechnie, Kechnie, you didn’t send me on any picnic!
Rinehart gave him a job, working in the fields.
The staple crop of Mondarran IV was something called Long Beans, a leguminous vegetable that everyone ate in great quantities, pounded down into wheat, and used for a dozen other purposes. It was a tough, almost indestructible plant that yielded three crops a year in the constant warmth of Mondarran IV.
Rinehart had a small farm, ten acres or so, spreading out over a rolling hill that overlooked a muddy swimming-hole. It was almost time for the year’s second crop, and that meant a laborious process of stripping the stalks of the twisted pods that contained beans.
There were, of course, machines that whisked down the rows of plants, ripping loose the pods and depositing them in a hopper in which the beans were extracted, the pods baled, and the leaves stripped away, all in a moment. Davison had seen them in operation on Earth one summer, when he’d paid a visit to the farmlands of middlewestem America.
They had such machines on Mondarran IV, too. Lord Gabrielson had one—he was the wealthy landowner who farmed a thousand acres on the other side of the river. Lord Darnley, back the other way, had one too. But Dirk Rinehart and the other small farmers stripped their pods by hand, without complaining.
“You bend down like this and rip,” Rinehart said, demonstrating for Davison. “Then you swivel around and drop the pod in the basket behind you.”
“Doesn’t look like fun,” Davison said.
“It isn’t.” Rinehart straightened up and extended a thick, powerful, corded forearm. “This is what happens to you after a while. But hard work’s its own reward, son. Don’t ever forget it.”
Davison grinned. “Don’t worry about me, sir. I’m here to work.”
“I wasn’t accusing you, boy. Come on—take a furrow through with me, just to get the feel of it.” Rinehart strapped the harness around Davison’s shoulders, then donned his own, and together they started through the field. Overhead, the sun was high. It always seems to be noon on this planet, Davison thought, as he began to sweat.
Purple-winged flies buzzed noisily around the thick stalks of the bean-plants. Dragging the basket behind him, Davison advanced through the field, struggling to keep up with Rinehart. The older man was already ten feet ahead of him in the next furrow, ducking, bobbing, yanking, and depositing the pod in the basket, all in a smooth series of motions.