They kicked me overboard at Xanadu—me, Dan'l Fry, the best tongue in the business.
It was an old Spican freighter, one of those hitch-on deep-space jobs that look like a cluster of grapes. I had scrambled aboard at Capella II in a large hurry as there were bloodhounds who had my index, not to mention my M.O.
My mistake was trying to keep occupied. I won the schlunk strictly legit playing two-card with the nearsighted Vegan merchant. Capellans use schlunk like salt, as a seasoning. How was I to know to the Mirans it was an aphrodisiac and the merchant was a smuggler?
The real plant was the skipper, who was partner to the Vegan. He puffed out his walrus mustaches and called me names like "Sharpie!" and "Conster!" and told me that in deep space he was law, jury, judge, and executioner.
That's how it was I found myself in a delivery capsule dangling from a steel-mesh parachute and plunging through a curdling atmosphere toward the too, too solid world below. I would not have taken five to two odds for my chances when the capsule skipped over the ionosphere like a flat stone across a pond, the walls glowing through cherry red, orange, yellow, and white, the throw-away air conditioner chugging and missing and chugging again.…
But the walls did not melt, and I got off with only superficial burns. After 89 minutes the capsule landed like an old maid’s two-dollar bet, its tripod legs springing out to grip the ground, the parachute crumpling around it with a clear, ringing sound.
I punched the breakaway button, and the capsule fell apart. I stepped out on Xanadu, doing the Crusoe bit—me, Dan'l Fry, the best tongue in the business.
Xanadu, as I found out later, was that 100-1 shot in the stellar sweepstakes—a single-planet system. Its sun, a miserable little red dwarf, didn't even have a name.
That's why Xanadu was picked by a real estate firm for an exclusive suburban development during the big migration some 1,100-1,200 years ago. No traffic, no peddlers, zoned for residences only—a good place to bring up children. Xanadu was bulldozed into shape, fertilized, climatized, ecologized, planted, sold, and forgotten.
Nobody stopped by to swap stories or goods or to make a friendly book. Anything as big as a ship could not land; an interference field warned them off. And nobody was going to get dropped there blind, knowing he could not get back, unless, like me, he could not tongue his way out of it.
That is why the skipper felt so brave.
But this I did not know as I stepped out on Xanadu. I did not know, either, that Xanadu was all orchard—fruit trees and green turf. As far as I could see, though, that was it, round fruit bending down the branches. All colors: red, yellow, blue, purple, green.…
Xanadu was a two-thirds g world, not so little that a guy was afraid he'd fall off but small enough so he felt like he'd just won the Alpha Centaurish Sweepstakes. I did not feel quite lucky enough, however, to eat alien fruit.
It was then I saw the native.
It was a tall, straggly thing, naked except for a ragged loin cloth. It had a ragged gray beard on its chin, and a stick in its hand for a cane, and it was coming toward me as fast as it could move.
It was human—an old man with a bony face and ropy brown arms and legs. As he came for me he tossed aside the core of a purple fruit he'd been eating.
I was looking for a place to hide when I noticed what was bouncing on his chest from under the beard—the biggest, brightest star sapphire I ever saw.
In my pockets I had a pair of nail clippers, a collapsible comb, eight assorted coins of various realms, an unopened package of fruit-flavored vitamin drops, a disposable handkerchief, a wallet stuffed with bills and cards, a half empty pack of cigarettes, and a lighter.
A man should never get kicked overboard without a pack full of beads.
I shrugged—I would have to give up smoking soon anyhow—and gave the old boy to understand that I would trade the lighter for the pretty bauble he had dangling from his neck. I am not as good with my hands as with my tongue, but good enough. He watched me with the bright eyes of a mark.
As soon as he figured out what I wanted, he stripped off the gold chain that held the stone and put it over my head. Then he shocked me: he refused the lighter.
Easy, boy, easy, I told myself. You have either fallen into the con man's paradise or you are in danger of losing your last bet. Play it cool.
I put the lighter back in my pocket. "Thanks, sucker."
The native fell on his ancient knees and started kissing my hands. "God bless you, stranger!"
This rocked me, but I rocked right back and figured maybe I had been too quick to grab the brass ring. It is dangerous to take advantage of a mark too soon, especially when among marks and with no getaway ship. But he refused to take the geegaw back. He acted scared. I had made him rich by accepting it, he said.
Okay, okay, but watch yourself, boy, I thought, or you will find yourself shorter by a head.
He insisted on taking me to a friend of his, holding me by the arm as if I might slip the hook. As we went I picked fruit, which the old man assured me were all edible except the green which were not ripe, and ate them. The yellow ones had a tart, citrus flavor. The red ones were meaty, the blue ones were firm and mealy, like a baked potato, and the purple ones were sweet. I hadn't had such a meal since I left Earth to find my fortune among the stars.
Maybe, I thought, I had found it: a world where the temperature is warm enough to make clothes unnecessary, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner hang from trees, and where eager natives wear star sapphires around their necks.
All I need, I thought, is a beautiful native girl to pick the fruit for me.
It was sunset when we reached the palace—that's what I called it since it was bigger than the Playdium on Aldebaran II. To the natives it was a modest bungalow. The sun was warm and red and friendly on the horizon, like a wheel with every number a winner. The sky was streaked with red and gold and purple.
The palace, like a mound of glistening soap bubbles, picked up all the colors in its curved walls, scattered them and brought them back together again in new combinations.
It was prettier than the first gleam of avarice in the eyes of a mark when he thinks he has found the way to beat the game.
The old man opened a door in one of the bubble walls. We went in. There were thick rugs on the floor, colored fountains spouting out of carved marble, statues, paintings, display cases of jewels, and walls that were pastel reflections of those outside.
It was like that Moslem pleasure satellite near Regulus IV, only no houris.
I had to swallow hard. It was like somebody read my mind and granted my every wish.
And the man who came into the room, dressed in sparkling robes, was the genie.
Maybe he was. He had a hard, hungry look to him when he saw the sapphire hanging from my neck.
It turns out the middle-aged joker is the old boy's son-in-law. I was touted to him as a great benefactor, a true saint. And then the old boy did a fadeaway through the door.
As soon as his father-in-law was gone, Quent gave me the pitch: "Dan'l, I want you to see my modest bungalow. There is not much worth anything, but if you like something let me know."
I could see that he had me pegged for a mark, but what was his game I could not understand. In every room there was at least one thing that made me suck in my breath. Quent gave it to me. "It is yours," he would say and press the buttons on a little box he had in his robes.
This made me nervous, being still not sure what was going on and whether there might not be some joker in the deck pop up to whack off my head or throw me in the pokey, but he explained it was merely inventory.
The only part of the house we did not inspect was his wife's apartment. This Quent said we could not enter. Okay.
At dinner—the same fruit I had eaten outside only piled in silver dishes—I met his daughter Kit. It was like seeing a horse in the paddock—the clean lines, the fine head, the eyes of a winner—and knowing you've got to put the roll on her nose, win or lose.
It was like that with her, too.
I told Quent I was sorry his wife was sick. This was the wrong thing to say, as he got very white and said his wife was not sick. She was still of childbearing age and had to stay in her apartment when there were visitors. Okay.
Without appearing too stupid, I picked up what I could in the next few weeks. Palaces, with a family to each, were scattered about every hundred square miles over the planet. There were a handful of wanderers like the old man. They had no homes. They roamed through the orchards of the world eating fruit and sacking out under the trees. They were treated like the head of a syndicate, with great respect.
Every day Quent dusted his treasures. I'd have thought nothing could have pried them loose from him, but it was pitiful to see how he jumped at the chance to give them to me. After a while I owned as much as Quent did. I started feeling sorry for him, which is a bad habit a man can fall into with a mark when he is not on the stick, and I stopped admiring things. Maybe part of it was the hurt look in Kit's eyes when Quent forced into my hands some new trinket.
You'd have thought young bucks would have been clustered around Kit like high rollers around the only game in town, but I had her to myself. I asked her one day how come Xanadu wasn't jumping with people: the climate was mild, the food was easy, and the girls were beautiful.
Her wide, dark eyes grew darker. "Marriage is a big step. There are many sacrifices. Two people must be very much in love; those are hard to find."
I said softly, "Not so hard."
She looked at me sadly. "You're so poor."
"Give me a chance," I said. "I'll make good."
Her eyes half-filled with tears. "Perhaps you will." She wound her arms around my neck. "Oh, I don't care. I love you so very much."
Just then Quent came in and it was too late to copper the bet. I guess maybe I didn't want to.
The wedding was simple enough. Quent put Kit's hand in mine and said we were married. "Treat her kindly," he said to me. "Remember that she who brings misfortune also may be your deliverance from it. As my wedding gift"—he hesitated and then rushed on—"I give you this house and everything within it."
Kit protested, but I told her that Quent knew what he was doing. When, at last, I turned to kiss the bride, her face was salty with tears. "Dan'l," she whispered, "I'm so sorry." Who can figure a dame?
Quent and his wife and two smaller kids moved out that day to a ten-room house a few miles away.
A con man's heaven? A con man's hell. In a world of marks, I was the biggest mark of all.
The honeymoon lasted three months. There was Kit, who loved me as much as I loved her, and there was the palace. I thought I would never get tired of owning these things, of knowing they were mine. We wandered through the palace, Kit and I, dusting and admiring. Then, slowly, we stopped going so often, and I took to sitting by myself, thinking about nothing, like one of the blasted statues.
I couldn't peg what was wrong with me. All I knew was something had gone sour.
Kit and I had our first fight the day her father came to see us. Kit said she was going to her apartment, the one that had been her mother's. I couldn't figure it. "I'm pregnant," she said. "Well?" I said.
Suddenly she was screaming like a sorehead loser, "If you haven't got a decent respect for your own welfare, you might at least try not to ruin the lives of your children." She ran from the room, crying. A woman.
When Quent arrived, I asked for the pitch. For once he gave it to me straight, looking ashamed. Kit didn't want anybody but me to know the birthday of her baby. Otherwise every year everybody would have an excuse to give it presents.
"That's bad?" I said.
He nodded. "I knew you did not understand. I took advantage of your ignorance." He massaged his hands together. "Will you ever forgive me? Here on Xanadu to have nothing is to have everything; to have everything is to have nothing."
"Speak plainer."
"What sane man would want possessions? Do they make you wiser or happier or more free? No. They chain your mind and your emotions to things. You are their slave, for you must care for them. They give you nothing; they steal your life away, second by second."
He got a look on his face like reverence and went on. "My father-in-law is free. When I married his daughter he gave me everything but that star sapphire. He wanders where he pleases, does what he wants to do. He has no cares, no responsibilities. He can tend to the important things of life. He is rich. You and I are poor."
The message began to reach me. The real estate gamesters had done their job too well. They had made life too easy: food was as handy as the nearest tree; rags and roofs were like a fifth leg—they slow down the race. And they had made Xanadu too exclusive: what's the advantage of having the scratch if it can't talk and there's nobody itching to get it?
It had happened—slowly, maybe: everybody had got sane, a terrible condition for a society. But not completely.
How come, I said, he didn't just walk out and live? He acted like he was a priest and I had knocked religion. After his lid settled back, he explained that this was what he called a "residual characteristic" of their society, a carryover from the old days. They couldn't shake the habit of looking after the good things, like dusting the stuff. He ran his hand along the base of a statue.
I got the drift. It was like other people who wore clothes whether they needed them or not or people who dug up gold and then buried it in another hole so that the paper money they printed would be worth more than the paper it was printed on. There was no logic to it, just emotion.
Quent was looking at his fingers like he had just picked up a pair of loaded dice. There was dust on his fingers.
He screamed at me for a while about decency. Then he was gone and I didn't notice that either. I had it pegged now, what was wrong. A con man needs a mark like a cop needs a crook. But what I wanted these marks to do, they wanted to do but worse. If there was something I wanted I had only to ask.
I was the mark.
It built up inside me, hard and bitter and violent. Kit tried to talk to me, but I snapped at her. Finally I picked up a chair and swung it at a painting on the wall. The chair broke but the painting wasn't scratched. That was it. I raged through the place knocking over the furniture and finally succeeded in tipping over a grotesque welded thing of scrap metal.
That's when the committee came in: Quent, his father-in-law, and a stranger, another wanderer. They had a look on their faces like I had been needling horses.
I panted at them: "The stuff won't break!"
Quent said sourly, "Our ancestors built well. You see, father—it is worse than I feared."
It was then the old man turned on me. He'd handicapped me as a slow starter since I didn't know the track, but I'd had my chance, and now I would have to carry extra weight. I had broken the rules, and I would have to be punished.
That opened my eyes. "How?" I said. What could they do? What they could do was to load onto me some more property. A man had died without kids; his place had been a public liability ever since. Now I owned it. Okay.
I could have told them to take their property and what they could do with it, but that wasn't my M.O. Something like that destroys confidence, which is the basis of society.
It was a skin game I had stepped into, and I was the one getting skinned. I had landed here as rich as the richest man on Xanadu, and the old buzzard had come running up to nail me before I got wise.
Right off I felt better. I hired me a man to look after my other property—he showed up every week to hand me his wages—and Kit and I made the palace shine. I had been hard to live with, but that all changed. I hummed, I sang, I hugged Kit, big as she was getting.
I was fixed, but I was not going to wait for our kids to pull me out. I had promised Kit I would make good. Okay.
A few days later I gave Quent's door a quick rat-tat. Fast and sure I gave him the pitch. "Daddy-o, I want you to know you did not get a patsy for a son-in-law. I am going to make us both rich.
"You see this list? It's your ticket to fortune. I bought it this morning for one sapphire. One small star sapphire I let a guy give me, and you can have it for the same amount.
"As you can see, there are six names on this list. You go to the man whose name is at the top and accept a gift from him—that is two sapphires. You scratch out his name and put your name at the bottom. Then you make six copies which you sell to your friends. Okay? Already you have made a clear profit of four sapphires. You can't lose."
Then I gave him the hook. "Here is the clincher. As soon as your name reaches the top of the list, five thousand eight hundred and thirty-two men will come to you for a gift."
"Five thousand eight hun—!" Quent began, swallowing hard.
I dropped the list and a sapphire into his hand. "Be sure not to break the chain. It means a lifetime of poverty and bad luck."
I walked away whistling. I was right the first time: Xanadu was a con man's paradise.
If this didn't work, there was always something else. In a few days I would run a raffle. Then there was bingo, punchboards, slot machines, roulette, and the old galloping dominoes. There was a whole catalogue of confidence games nobody on Xanadu had even heard of.
I would be rid of my property in no time.
Once I got the pitch what chance did they have against me, Dan'l Fry, the best tongue in the business?