long time later he had made a new gadget. It consisted of two open coils, one quite large and one quite small. Their resemblance to each other was plain, but they did not at all resemble any other coils that had been made for any other purpose whatsoever. If they looked like anything, it was the “mobiles” that some sculptors once insisted were art.
Lon stared at his work with an air of helplessness. Then he went out again. He returned with the forked stick that had proved to be a generator. He connected the wires from that improbable contrivance to the coils of the new and still more unlikely device. The eccentrically cut tin can was in the middle, between them.
There was a humming sound. Lon went out a third time and came back with a mass of shrubbery. He packed it in the large coil.
He muttered to himself, “I’m out of my head! I’m crazy!”
But then he went to the kitchen locker. He put a small packet of frozen green peas in the tin can between the two coils.
The humming sound increased. After a moment there was another parcel of green peas—not frozen—in the small coil.
Lon took it out. The device hummed more loudly again. Immediately there was another parcel of green peas in the small coil. He took them out.
When he had six parcels of green peas instead of one, the mass of foliage in the large coil collapsed abruptly. Lon disconnected the wires and removed the debris. The native foliage looked shrunken, somehow, dried-out. Lon tossed it through the window.
He put a parcel of unfrozen green peas on to cook and sat down and held his head in his hands. He knew what had happened. He knew how.
The local flora on Cetis Gamma Two naturally contained the same chemical elements as the green peas imported from Earth. Those elements were combined in chemical compounds similar, if not identical to, those of the Earth vegetation. The new gadget simply converted the compounds in the large coil to match those in the sample—in the tin can—and assembled them in the small coil according to the physical structure of the sample. In this case, as green peas.
The device would take any approximate compound from the large coil and reassemble it—suitably modified as per sample—in the small coil. It would work not only for green peas, but for roots, barks, herbs, berries, blossoms and flowers.
It would even work for thanar leaves.
When that last fact occurred to him, Lon Simpson went quietly loony, trying to figure out how he had come to think of such a thing. He was definitely crocked, because he picked up the beamphone and told Cathy all about it. And he was not loony because he told Cathy, but because he forgot his earlier suspicions of why there was a central station for beamphones in Cetopolis, instead of a modern direct-communication system.
In fact, he forgot the system in operation on Cetis Gamma Two—the Company’s system. It had been designed to put colonists through the wringer and deposit them at its own farm to be day-laborers forever with due regard to human law. But it was a very efficient system.
It took care of strokes of genius, too.
That night, Carson, listening boredly to the record of all the conversations over the beamphone during the day, heard what Lon had told Cathy. He didn’t believe it, of course.
But he made a memo to look into it.
Rhadampsicus stretched himself. Out on the ninth planet, the weather was slightly warmer—almost six degrees Kelvin, two hundred and sixty-odd degrees centigrade below zero—and he was inclined to be lazy. But he was very handsome, in Nodalictha’s eyes. He was seventy or more feet from his foremost eye stalk to the tip of his least crimson appendage, and he fluoresced beautifully in the starlight. He was a very gallant young bridegroom.
When he saw Nodalictha looking at him admiringly, he said with his customary tenderness:
“It was fatiguing to make him go through it, darling, but since you wished it, it is done. He now has food to share with the female.”
“And you’re handsome, too, Rhadampsicus!” Nodalictha said irrelevantly.
She felt as brides sometimes do on their honeymoons. She was quite sure that she had not only the bravest and handsomest of husbands, but the most thoughtful and considerate.
Presently, with their eye stalks intertwined, he asked softly:
“Are you weary of this place, darling? I would like to watch the rest of this rather rare phenomenon, but if you’re not interested, we can go on. And truly I won’t mind.”
“Of course we’ll stay!” protested Nodalictha. “I want to do anything you want to. I’m perfectly happy just being with you.”
And, unquestionably, she was.
Carson, though bored, was a bit upset by the recorded conversation he’d listened to. Lon Simpson had been almost incoherent, but he obviously meant Cathy to take him seriously. And there were some things to back it up.
He’d reported his generator hopelessly useless—and hadn’t bought a new one. He’d reported all his food spoiled—and hadn’t bought more. Carson thought it over carefully. The crop inspection helicopter reported Simpson’s fields in much better shape than average, so his tractor was obviously working.
Carson asked casual, deadpan questions of other colonists who came into the Company store. Most of them were harried, sullen and bitter. They were unanimously aware of the wringer they were being put through. They knew what the Company was doing to them and they hated Carson because he represented it. But they did answer Carson’s casual questions about Lon Simpson.
Yes, he’d tried to borrow food from them. No, they couldn’t lend it to him. Yes, he was still eating. In fact he was offering to swap food. He was short on fruit and long on frozen green peas. Then he was long on fruit and frozen green peas and short on frozen sweet corn and strawberries. No, he didn’t want to trade on a big scale. One package of frozen strawberries was all he wanted. He gave six packages of frozen peas for it. He gave six packages of frozen strawberries for one package of frozen sweet corn. He’d swapped a dozen parcels of sweet corn for one of fillet of flounder, two dozen fillet of flounder for cigarettes, and fifty cartons of cigarettes for a frozen roast of beef.
It didn’t make sense unless the conversation on the beamphone was right. If what Lon had told Cathy was true, he’d have his frozen food locker filled up again by now. He had some sort of device which converted the indigestible local flora and fauna into digestible Earth products. To suspect such a thing was preposterous, but Carson suspected everyone and everything.
As representative of the Company, Carson naturally did its dirty work. New colonists bought farms from the central office on Earth and happily took ship to Cetis Gamma Two. Then Carson put them through their instruction course, outfitted them to try farming on their own, and saw to it that they went bankrupt and either starved or took jobs as farmhands for the Company, at wages assuring that they could never take ship away again.
It was a nasty job and Carson did it very well, because he loved it.
While he still debated Lon’s insane boasts to Cathy over the beamphone system, he prepared to take over the farm of another colonist. That man had been deeper in debt than Lon, and he’d been less skilled at repairs, so it was time to gather him in. Carson called him to Cetopolis to tell him that the Company regretfully could not extend further
