The Sentimentalists by Murray Leinster (the false prince txt) 📖

He took Cathy back to Cetopolis. He feverishly appealed to other colonists. He couldn't tell them about his generator substitute. If they knew about it, in time Carson would know. If they used it, Carson would eventually get hold of a specimen, to send back to Earth for pirating by the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. All Lon could do was try desperately to arrange to borrow food to live on until his crop came in, though even then he wouldn't be in any admirable situation.

He couldn't borrow food in quantity. Other colonists had troubles, too. They'd give him a meal, yes, but they couldn't refill his freezer without emptying their own. Which would compel them to buy more. Which would be charged against their crops. Which would simply hasten the day when they would become day-laborers on the Company's thanar farm.

Lon had about two days' food in the kitchen locker. He determined to stretch it to four. Then he'd have to buy more. With each meal, then, his hopes of freedom and prosperity—and Cathy—grew less.

Of course, he could starve....

Rhadampsicus was enormously and pleasantly interested in what went on in Cetis Gamma's photosphere. From the ninth planet, he scanned the prominences with enthusiasm, making notes. Nodalictha tried to take a proper wifely interest in her husband's hobby, but she could not keep it up indefinitely. She busied herself with her housekeeping. She fashioned a carpet of tufted methane fibres and put up curtains at the windows. She enlarged the garden Rhadampsicus had made, adding borders of crystallized ammonia and a sort of walkway with a hedge of monoclinic sulphur which glittered beautifully in the starlight. She knew that this was only a temporary dwelling, but she wanted Rhadampsicus to realize that she could make any place a comfortable home.

He remained absorbed in the phenomena of the local sun. One great prominence, after five days of spectacular existence, divided into two which naturally moved apart and stationed themselves at opposite sides of the sun's equator. They continued to rotate with the sun itself, giving very much the effect of an incipient pinwheel. Two other minor prominences came into being midway between them. Rhadampsicus watched in fascination.

Nodalictha came and reposed beside him on a gentle slope of volcanic slag. She waited for him to notice her. She would not let herself be sensitive about his interest in his hobby, of course, but she could not really find it absorbing for herself. A trifle wistfully, she sent her thoughts to the female biped on the second planet.

After a while she said in distress, "Rhadampsicus! Oh, they are so unhappy!"

Rhadampsicus gallantly turned his attention from the happenings on the sun.

"What's that, darling?"

"Look!" said Nodalictha plaintively. "They are so much in love, Rhadampsicus! And they can't marry because he hasn't anything edible to share with her!"

Rhadampsicus scanned. He was an ardent and sentimental husband. If his new little wife was distressed about anything at all, Rhadampsicus was splendidly ready to do something about it.

Lon Simpson looked at his kitchen locker. The big deep-freezer was repaired now. Once a season, a truck came out from Cetopolis and filled it. The food was costly. A season's supply was kept in deep-freeze. Once in one or two weeks, one refilled the kitchen locker. It was best to leave the deep-freeze locker closed as much as possible. But now the big deep-freeze was empty. He'd cleaned out the ghastly mess in it, and he had it running again, but he had nothing to put in it. To have it refilled would put him hopelessly at the Company's mercy, but there was nothing else to do.

Bitterly, he called the Trading Company office, and Carson answered.

"This is Simpson," Lon told him. "How much—"

"The price for a generator," said Carson, bored, "is the same as before. Do you want it sent out?"

"No! My food locker broke down. My food store spoiled. I need more."

"I'll figure it," replied Carson over the beamphone. He didn't seem interested. After a moment, he said indifferently, "Fifteen hundred credits for standard rations to crop time. Then you'll need more."

"It's robbery!" raged Lon. "I can't expect more than four thousand credits for my crop! You've got three thousand charged against me now!"

Carson yawned. "True. A new generator, fifteen hundred; new food supplies fifteen hundred. If your crop turns out all right, you'll start the new season with two thousand credits charged up as a loan against your land."

Lon Simpson strangled on his fury. "You'll take all my leaves and I'll still owe you! Then credit for seed and food and—If I need to buy more machinery, you'll own my farm and crop next crop time! Even if my crop is good! Your damned Company will own my farm!"

"That's your lookout," Carson said without emotion. "Being a thanar farmer was your idea, not mine. Shall I send out the food?"

Lon Simpson bellowed into the beamphone. He heard clicking, then Cathy's voice. It was at once reproachful and sympathetic.

"Lon! Please!"

But Lon couldn't talk to her. He panted at her, and hung up. It is essential to a young man in love that he shine, somehow, in the eyes of the girl he cares for. Lon was not shining. He was appearing as the Galaxy's prize sap. He'd invested a sizable fortune in his farm. He was a good farmer—hard-working and skilled. In the matter of repairing generators, he'd proved to be a genius. But he was at the mercy of the Cetis Gamma Company's representative. He was already in debt. If he wanted to go on eating, he'd go deeper. If he were careful and industrious and thrifty, the Trading Company would take his crop and farm in six more months and then give him a job at day-labor wages.

He went grimly to the kitchen of his home. He looked at the trivial amount of food remaining. He was hungry. He could eat it all right now.

If he did—

Then, staring at the food in the kitchen locker, he blinked. An idea had occurred to him. He was blankly astonished at it. He went over and over it in his mind. His expression became dubiously skeptical, and then skeptically amazed. But his eyes remained intent as he thought.

Presently, looking very skeptical indeed, he went out of the house and unwound more copper wire from the remnant of the disassembled generator. He came back to the kitchen. He took an emptied tin can and cut it in a distinctly peculiar manner. The cuts he made were asymmetrical. When he had finished, he looked at it doubtfully.

A 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