I nodded.
“Too bad you didn’t keep it under your hat, the way I have,” I said. “But it’s done now.”
I sat and thought about it. I wasn’t worried about my part in it—I had a part because everybody would know I’d trained the goonie, that Paul had got him from me. It wasn’t likely a little two-bit office manager could hurt me with the Company. They needed me too much. I could raise and train, or butcher, goonies and deliver them cheaper than they could do it themselves. As long as you don’t step on their personal egos, the big boys in business don’t mind slapping down their underlings and telling them to behave themselves, if there’s a buck to be made out of it.
Besides, I was damn good advertising, a real shill for their recruiting offices. “See?” they’d say. “Look at Jim MacPherson. Just twenty years ago he signed up with the Company to go out to the stars. Today he’s a rich man, independent, free enterprise. What he did, you can do.” Or they’d make it seem that way. And they were right. I could go on being an independent operator so long as I kept off the toes of the big boys.
But Paul was a different matter.
“Look,” I said. “You go back to Libo City and tell it around that it was just a training experiment I was trying. That it was a failure. That you exaggerated, even lied, to jolt Hest. Maybe that’ll get you out from under. Maybe we won’t hear any more about it.”
He looked at me, his face stricken. But he could still try to joke about it, after a fashion.
“You said everybody finds something inferior to himself,” he said. “I can’t think of anything lower than I am. I just can’t.”
I laughed.
“Fine,” I said with more heartiness than I really felt. “At one time or another most of us have to get clear down to rock bottom before we can begin to grow up.”
I didn’t know then that there was a depth beyond rock bottom, a hole one could get into, with no way out. But I was to learn.
I was wrong in telling Paul we wouldn’t hear anything more about it. I heard, the very next day. I was down in the south valley, taking care of the last planting in the new orchard, when I saw a caller coming down the dirt lane between the groves of pal trees. His rickshaw was being pulled by a single goonie, and even at a distance I could see the animal was abused with overwork, if not worse.
Yes, worse, because as they came nearer I could see whip welts across the pelt covering the goonie’s back and shoulders. I began a slow boil inside at the needless cruelty, needless because anybody knows the goonie will kill himself with overwork if the master simply asks for it. So my caller was one of the new Earthers, one of the petty little squirts who had to demonstrate his power over the inferior animal.
Apparently Ruth had had the same opinion for instead of treating the caller as an honored guest and sending a goonie to fetch me, as was Libo custom, she’d sent him on down to the orchard. I wondered if he had enough sense to know he’d been insulted. I hoped he did.
Even if I hadn’t been scorched to a simmering rage by the time the goonie halted at the edge of the orchard—and sank down on the ground without even unbuckling his harness— I wouldn’t have liked the caller. The important way he climbed down out of the rickshaw, the pompous stride he affected as he strode toward me, marked him as some petty Company official.
I wondered how he had managed to get past Personnel. Usually they picked the fine, upstanding, cleancut hero type—a little short on brains, maybe, but full of noble derring-do, and so anxious to be admired they never made any trouble. It must have been Personnel’s off day when this one got through—or maybe he had an uncle.
“Afternoon,” I greeted him, without friendliness, as he came up.
“I see you’re busy,” he said briskly. “I am, too. My time is valuable, so I’ll come right to the point. My name is Mr. Hest. I’m an executive. You’re MacPherson?”
“Mister MacPherson,” I answered dryly.
He ignored it.
“I hear you’ve got a goonie trained to bookkeeping. You leased it to Tyler on a thousand-dollar evaluation. An outrageous price, but I’ll buy it. I hear Tyler turned it back.”
I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes, or his loose, fat-lipped mouth. Not at all.
“The goonie is unsatisfactory,” I said. “The experiment didn’t work, and he’s not for sale.”
“You can’t kid me, MacPherson,” he said. “Tyler never made up those reports. He hasn’t the capacity. I’m an accountant. If you can train a goonie that far, I can train him on into real accounting. The Company could save millions if goonies could take the place of humans in office work.”
I knew there were guys who’d sell their own mothers into a two-bit dive if they thought it would impress the boss, but I didn’t believe this one had that motive. There was something else, something in the way his avid little eyes looked me over, the way he licked his lips, the way he came out with an explanation that a smart man would have kept to himself.
“Maybe you’re a pretty smart accountant,” I said in my best hayseed drawl, “but you don’t know anything at all about training goonies.” I gestured with my head. “How come you’re overworking your animal that way, beating him to make him run up those steep hills on those rough roads? Can’t you afford a team?”
“He’s my property,” he said.
“You’re not fit to own him,” I said, as abruptly. “I wouldn’t sell you a goonie of any kind, for any price.”
Either the man had the hide of a rhinoceros, or he was driven by a passion I couldn’t understand.
“Fifteen hundred,” he bid. “Not a penny more.”
“Not at any price. Good day, Mr. Hest.”
He looked at me sharply, as if he couldn’t believe I’d refuse such a profit, as if it were a new experience for him to find a man without a price. He started to say something, then shut his mouth with a snap. He turned abruptly and strode back to his rickshaw. Before he reached it, he was shouting angrily to his goonie to get up out of that dirt and look alive.
I took an angry step toward them and changed my mind. Whatever I did, Hest would later take it out on the goonie. He was that kind of man. I was stopped, too, by the old Liboan custom of never meddling in another man’s affairs. There weren’t any laws about handling goonies. We hadn’t needed them. Disapproval had been enough to bring tenderfeet into line, before. And I hated to see laws like that come to Libo, morals-meddling laws—because it was men like Hest who had the compulsion to get in control of making and enforcing them, who hid behind the badge so they could get their kicks without fear of reprisal.
I didn’t know what to do. I went back to planting the orchard and worked until the first sun had set and the second was close behind. Then I knocked off, sent the goonies to their pal groves, and went on up to the house.
Ruth’s first question, when I came through the kitchen door, flared my rage up again.
“Jim,” she said curiously, and a little angry, “why did you sell that clerk to a man like Hest?”
“But I didn’t,” I said.
“Here’s the thousand, cash, he left with me,” she said and pointed to the corner of the kitchen table. “He said it was the price you agreed on. He had me make out a bill of sale. I thought it peculiar because you always take care of business, but he said you wanted to go on working.”