XI

 

 

There was nothing much on Vashti except the mining settlement, a city of oblong apartment blocks faced with the dusty reddish color of the iron-rich rocks so common in the equatorial zone and so pregnant with metal that the saving in refinement time more than outweighed the expense of shipping bulk cargoes off a planetary surface. The native vegetation had been cleared off about eighteen thousand square miles of rolling land—some of it was poisonous to human beings—and over the area it had occupied the mining machinery and the processing equipment had spread like another kind of plant, like vigorous weeds driving out competitors. As well as iron there was rutile; there were brine-beds left from a vanished sea which were an economic source of magnesium; there was some tungsten, a lot of antimony, there was gallium in such quantity that the eventual plans included factories for semiconductors and solid-state circuitry on the spot.

But that was about it, and Ogric sometimes had the feeling that the bleakness of the environment had left its stamp on Snutch, the general manager of the entire mining complex.

He was a much bigger man than Ogric, but he had the same kind of explosive manner, suggestive in his case of overcompensation for some real or imagined inferiority. He was a superb organizer, that was known; he could hold every last detail of the program for his mines in his head, and under his management production had expanded eight-fold in six years. But Ogric found him the kind of person about whom it was reassuring to tell oneself, “Well, you don’t have to like him.”

He came out to the ship directly after it landed, to take formal charge of his new employees, and sat in the captain’s office sending snapping glances all around him.

Hoping to get his business over quickly, Ogric went straight to the point.

“Eight hundred for you this trip,” he said. “Usual contracts—five-year, wide range of work listed, twenty thousand cash payment at end of term, and home world repatriation if required or another thousand in lieu.”

“Gutter-sweepings,” Snutch grunted. “I checked up on the place where you were getting ’em from. Have any trouble on the way?”

Ogric frowned. He’d hoped Snutch might forget to ask—but still, there it was. He bent sideways in his chair so that his voice would be caught by the hear-this microphone and called for the doctor who had attended Kazan. While waiting for him to arrive, he ran over the bald facts of the affair.

Snutch stared at him. When he had heard the story to its end, he threw up his hands.

“Not just gutter-sweepings!” he said. “But lunatics! How do I account to the government for production lost when they start worshiping the big excavators, or refuse to work a night shift because of the ghosts?”

“It’s not like that at all,” Ogric said stiffly. “After the first day or so we had no trouble. The only two you’ll have to watch out for are this man Hego, who’s as strong as they come and passed very high on the manual skills tests—he’ll probably make an excavator driver—but who’s not very bright, and Kazan himself. Ah, doctor; come in. We were just talking about the Kazan problem.”

The doctor nodded to Snutch and took a chair. He laid a file of documents on his knees. He said, “It seems to be working itself out satisfactorily. You know I gave him a course of treatment for this hysterical state he was in?”

Ogric nodded. Snutch looked coldly attentive.

“I have the results of another set of tests I gave him afterwards,” the doctor said. He took a sheet of paper from his file and handed it to Ogric. “Just glance down that. And note the times marked against the individual results.”

Ogric obeyed, frowning. After reading the page carefully twice he passed it to Snutch and stared at the doctor.

“What have you got there?” he said. “A freak of nature?”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” the doctor said with a smile. “I’d dearly like to take him home with us and run a full-scale investigation of him. His genetic make-up ought to be something out of the galaxy.”

Snutch snapped one finger against the paper he was holding, making a noise like a rubber band breaking. He said, “These results must be faked.”

“I promise you they aren’t,” the doctor said. “I gave him the tests personally. You can check up for yourself, if you like. When we lifted, he couldn’t read—except very haltingly, and about three or four words at a time. Names of streets and stores—that was his limit. And he couldn’t sign his name. About halfway through the trip I advised him to learn. He got himself some lessons from a girl who’d taken an interest in him. She reads slowly, with a lot of subvocalization, but fairly well. He took two days to memorize the letters and a basic syllabary by the shape-technique. I checked him out of curiosity just before we broached atmosphere. Know what his reading speed is?”

“Whatever it is, he was faking before,” Snutch snapped.

“It’s eleven hundred and sixty a minute,” the doctor said imperturbably. “I’ve been reading since I was five years old, and my speed has never topped nine hundred. And his retention is nearly eidetic. I’d dearly like to buy him out of his contract, I must say, and see where he’s going to go from here.”

Snutch’s eyes narrowed barely perceptibly. He said, with an effort to hide his reluctance, “Well, I guess I’ll have to take your word. According to what you’re telling me, he’s a magnitude one genius, is that right?”

“And going up,” the doctor said, nodding.

“Well, we can do with some intelligence around here,” Snutch said after a pause. He got to his feet. “I’ll go and take my first look at what you’ve lumbered me with.”

When he had gone, Ogric exchanged a wry glance with the doctor. He said, “You didn’t fake those results, I suppose?”

“For the love of life, no!” The doctor stared at him. “Why do you think for a moment that I did?”

“Because I never saw anything like them before,” Ogric growled. He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Let me see them again.” He reached for the sheet of paper.

“And you’re not likely to again,” the doctor said with unusual solemnity. “If he hadn’t spent his life in the slums of Berak, if he’d had a proper education, that boy would be famous by now. I didn’t mention it to Snutch, because I felt he might think I was overdoing it, but at the same time as I ran the reading test I gave him the literacy section of the intelligence tests, which I couldn’t do previously, of course.”

“And?” Ogric said, as though not eager for the answer.

“How do you measure the man who goes through the highest grade of test you have in four minutes under the theoretical limit?” said the doctor. On the last phrase his voice shook.

There was a pause. “Vocabulary?” Ogric said in a tone to suggest clutching at straws.

“I think he was getting at the words he didn’t know by sheer logic—deducing the sense from the context or from resemblance to other words. When he came aboard I’d say his vocabulary was what you might expect—six to seven thousand. It’s well over twenty now and probably rising continually.” He hesitated. “You know something, Captain?” he said at last.

Ogric cocked an eyebrow.

“Next time we pass Vashti—maybe not until the time when we pick up the repatriates five years from now, but probably a lot sooner—I think you’re going to find Kazan either running this place instead of Snutch, or dead.”

“If you mean what I think you mean,” Ogric began. The doctor cut the sentence short.

“Then you’d better not take me seriously,” he said.

 

When he lined up to come aboard, nothing had suited Kazan’s mood better than the mechanical business of processing the applicants. Now, during the disembarkation, he chafed and fretted. They were being handled by roomgroups; consequently he and Clary moved up the line together.

“This is stupidly inefficient,” he muttered to her when they had been out of the ship for twenty minutes. “What would it have cost them to signal ahead full details of everyone aboard? If they’d done it yesterday, people could have been ready now to split us up, jobs allotted.” His voice trailed away as he frowned at the officious supervisors attending to the third or fourth group of workers. Trucks stood waiting on the edge of the landing-ground; there were ore tubs in the background, ugly squat ships whose only permanent feature was a drive-unit, the rest of the hull being manufactured crudely on the spot out of Vashti metal and broken up on arrival.

In five more minutes, under Clary’s gaze—which when it was turned on him was becoming by marked degrees more adoring and worshipful every time—he had worked out in his mind a foolproof system for getting any number of new workers off a ship and into their jobs within fifteen minutes of landing. Since the idea had no practical application at the moment, he was about to dismiss it as a mere mental exercise.

Then he checked himself, There was something new about it for him. And yet something familiar. He sought about in his memory as an animal might snuff for the source of a tantalizing odor, and was startled to realize what he was reminded of: the early part of the day when he rescued Prince Luth, the time he had spent giving instructions as to how to dispose the forces available. At the time he hadn’t given it a second thought—it was not so far removed from planning a gang raid on a store, which was part of his life in the Dyasthala.

Now it felt different. It had a different texture. Call it the idea of organizing people. Or events. Systematization. It would probably be easier with machines than people, naturally.

It was something he could do that he hadn’t known about. That was the crucial point.

It gave him food for thought right up till the moment when the group to which he and Clary belonged was called down to the line of trucks, almost half of which had now filled up and moved off. There were men and women with lists here, most of them wearing drab, serviceable uniforms of a reddish-brown which matched the general tone of the landscape, noting and ticking off the individual workers and sending them to various trucks, presumably to different areas of the settlement near their allotted jobs.

As the first names were being called and checked, Clary suddenly squeezed his hand. She said, “What are we going to do if they split us up?”

“Argue,” Kazan said shortly. His eyes were on the one man in the cluster of supervisors who was not dressed in the red-brown uniform, but in a black temperature suit. He was big, and carried himself well, but showed a definite nervousness in his expression and his restless hands.

“Clary, no other name, female,” the bored voice of the checkman said. “Truck six, administrative and supervisory. Kazan, no other name, male, illiterate—”

“Literate,” growled the big man in black. He looked Kazan up and down. “So you’re the phenomenon!” he went on. “They tell me, that is.”

Clary hesitated. For a moment the checkman was distracted by the big man’s words and did not hurry her along. He said, “Uh—Manager Snutch!”

“What are we going to do with you?” the big man contined, ignoring the interruption. “From all acounts, you’re too good for any jobs we have here. That right?”

As though the man’s thoughts had been laid bare for him by some psychic scalpel, Kazan found he could see why Snutch was so heavily sarcastic, and why he was afraid. He had no wish to touch a raw spot in him. The checkman had called him manager, and he was clearly in authority, but it was plain that his personality was as sensitive as a broody bird’s breast.

He said, “I’ll do what I’m set to do, Manager.”

Snutch seemed to turn the reply over as though looking for a cause of offence in it. Failing, he grunted something which sounded like, “I hope so!” He made to turn away.

“Manager Snutch!” the checkman said again. “He’s down as illiterate—allotted to repair and maintenance training, truck twenty. Did you say that was wrong?”

There was a mutter of dismay from Clary. She moved back to Kazan’s side and took his hand again. Snutch watched the movement, scowling, and then studied her from head to foot.

He said, “Where’s the woman down for?”

The checkman told him.

“I see,” Snutch said heavily. “I see.” And was going to turn away again, but paused.

“He’s down for repair and maintenance,” he said. “He goes to repair and maintenance, and we sort him out later if we have to.”

Clary’s fingers pressed Kazan’s sharply. He cleared his throat. “Uh—Manager! I can read now, you know. I—”

“You just said you’d do what you were set to do,” Snutch broke in. “Get to it.”

“This isn’t a jail, you know,” one of the supervisors added reassuringly. “Okay, move it along there! Move it along!”

“Right!” Snutch said. “But it isn’t paradise either, and it isn’t a vacation resort. It’s a place for getting things done. Move it along. You heard the order!”

Huddled together against the lonely strangeness of this wide-open world and its arching roof of sky, the other workers waiting to be allotted to their jobs listened and grew restive.

“We want to be together,” Clary said obstinately. The supervisor who had spoken before, sighed and exchanged a glance with the checkman.

“Look!” he said. “This is what there is on Vashti—what you can see and damned little else!” He waved at the landscape around them. “Tomorrow you file an application with the accommodation bureau and we’ll fix you up, right? Now you move and stop being in other people’s way.”

Kazan hesitated. He too shared Clary’s automatic, Dyasthala-bred distrust of people in authority. But he could sense that this was a different kind of authority from that which he had known before. He said, “Go on, Clary. We’d better do as they say.”

Snutch took a huge stride forward and confronted Kazan less than an arm’s length distant. He said, “Better do as we say? Better than what? Now you get this through your head at once! You do what you’re told or you break your contract and you go back in the gutter you came from, understood?”

Kazan gave him a level stare and said nothing. After a moment in which Snutch’s face grew redder and redder a jolting fist came up and took him under the jaw. He reeled back, recovered his balance, and still said nothing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the checkman had caught Clary’s arm to prevent her from going for Snutch.

He shrugged, rubbed his chin, and walked towards the truck.