sighed.
“Listen, it’s a long story. I’ve got a buggy over here to take you into town. They’re puttin’ you up at a hotel so you can look the place over. I’ll tell you on the way in.”
“The heck with that,” Dahlinger said indignantly, “we want to see the man.”
“You’re not goin’ to see the man, sonny,” Horton said patiently, “You are, as a matter of fact, the last people on the planet the man wants to see right now.”
Dahlinger started to say something but Travis shut him up. He told Trippe to stay with the ship and took Dahlinger with him. At the end of the field was a carriage straight out of Seventeenth Century England. And the things that drew it—if you closed your eyes—looked reasonably similar to horses. The three men climbed aboard. There was no driver. Horton explained that the ‘horses’ would head straight for the hotel.
“Well all right,” Travis said, “what’s the story?”
“Don’t turn those baby browns on me,” Horton said gloomily, “I would have warned you if I could, but you know the law says we can’t show favoritism . . . .”
Travis decided the best thing to do was wait with as much patience as possible. After a while Horton had apologized thoroughly and completely, although what had happened was certainly not his fault, and finally got on with the tale.
“Now this here planet,” he said cautiously, “is whacky in a lot of ways. First off they call it Mert. Mert. Fine name for a planet. Just plain Mert. And they live in houses strictly from Dickens, all carriages, no sewers, narrow streets, stuff like that. With technology roughly equivalent to seventeenth century. But now—see there, see that building over there?”
Travis followed his pointing finger through the trees. A large white building of blinding marble was coming slowly into view. Travis’ eyes widened.
“You see? Just like the blinkin’ Parthenon, or Acropolis, whichever it is. All columns and frescoes. In the middle of a town looks just like London. Makes no sense, but there it is. And that’s not all. Their government is Grecian too, complete with Senate and Citizens. No slaves though. Well not exactly. You couldn’t call them slaves. Or could you? Heck of a question, that—” He paused to brood. Travis nudged him.
“Yes. Well, all that is minor, next to the big thing. This is one of two major countries on the planet. There’s a few hill tribes but these make up about 90 percent of the population, so you have to deal with these. They never go to war, well maybe once in a while, but not very often. So no trouble there. The big trouble is one you’d never guess, not in a million years.”
He stared at Travis unhappily.
“The whole planet’s run on astrology.”
He waited for a reaction. Travis said nothing.
“It ain’t funny,” Horton said. “When I say run on astrology I mean really run. Wait’ll you hear.”
“I’m not laughing,” Travis said. “But is that all? In this business you learn to respect the native customs, so if all we have to do—”
“I ain’t finished yet,” Horton said ominously, “you don’t get the point. Everything these people do is based on astrology. And that means business too, lad, business too. Every event that happens on this cockeyed world, from a picnic to a wedding to a company merger or a war, it’s all based on astrology. They have it down so exact they even tell you when to sneeze. You ought to see the daily paper. Half of it’s solid astrological guidance. All the Senators not only have astrologers, they are astrologers. And get this: every man and woman and child alive on this planet was catalogued the day he was born. His horoscope was drawn up by the public astrologer—a highly honored office—and his future laid out according to what the horoscope said. If his horoscope indicates a man of stature and responsibility, he becomes, by God, a man of stature and responsibility. You have to see it to believe it. Kids with good horoscopes are sent to the best schools, people fight to give them jobs. Well, take the courts, for example. When they’re trying a case, do they talk about evidence? They do not. They call in a legal astrologer—there’s all kinds of branches in the profession—and this joker all by himself determines the guilt or innocence of the accused. By checking the aspects. Take a wedding. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Does boy go see girl? No. He heads straight for an astrologer. The girl’s horoscope is on file in the local city hall, just like everybody else. The astrologer compares the charts and determines whether the marriage will be a good one. He is, naturally, a marital astrologer. He gives the word. If he says no they don’t marry.
“I could go on for hours. But you really have to see it. Take the case of people who want to have children. They want them born, naturally, at the time of the best possible aspects, so they consult an astrologer and he gives them a list of the best times for a baby to be conceived. These times are not always convenient, sometimes it’s 4:18 in the morning and sometimes it’s 2:03 Monday afternoon. Yet this is a legitimate excuse for getting out of work. A man goes in, tells his boss it’s breeding time, and off he goes without a penny docked. Build a better race, they say. Of course the gestation period is variable, and they never do hit it right on the nose, and also there are still the natural accidents, so quite a few are born with terrible horoscopes—”
“Holy smoke!” Travis muttered. The possibilities of it blossomed in his mind. He began to understand what was coming.
“Now you begin to see?” Horton went on gloomily. “Look what an Earthman represents to these people. We are the unknown, the completely capital U Unknown. Everybody else is a certain definite quantity, his horoscope is on file and every man on Mert has access to all his potentialities, be they good, bad or indifferent. But not us. They don’t know when we were born, or where, and even if they did it it wouldn’t do them any good, because they haven’t got any system covering Mars and Jupiter, the planets at home. Everybody else is catalogued, but not us.”
“And just because they believe so thoroughly in their own astrology they’ve gotten used to the idea that a man is what his horoscope says he is.”
“But us? What are we? They haven’t the vaguest idea, and it scares hell out of them. The only thing they can do is check with one of the branches, what they call Horary Astrology, and make a horoscope of the day we landed. Even if that tells them nothing about us in particular at least it tells them, or so they believe, all about our mission to Mert. Because the moment our ship touched the ground was the birth date of our business here.”
He paused and regarded Travis with woeful sympathy.
“With us, luckily, it was all right. The Mapping Command just happened to hit here on a good day. But you? Trav, old buddy, for once you came just too damn fast—”
“Oh my God,” Travis breathed. “We landed on a bad day.”
“Bad?” Horton sighed. “Man, it’s terrible.”
*
“You see,” Horton said as they drove into the town, “not a soul on the streets. This is not only a bad day, this is one for the books. To-morrow, you see, there is an eclipse. And to these people there is nothing more frightening than an eclipse. During the entire week preceding one they won’t do a darn thing. No business, no weddings, no anything. The height of it will be reached about tomorrow noon. Their moon—which is a tiny little thing not much bigger than our first space station—is called Felda. It is very important in their astrology. And
