"That"s what they say," he told me, "but they"re fooling away their time."
"Phil, we"ve only been here a month, and--"
"And if I hadn"t pulled a blue alert," he interrupted, "we wouldn"t even have the residentials built yet. Now they"ve got their precious privacy, and the pressure is off. They"d rather go chasing off into the woods to hunt exotic fruit and peek at the natives than get on with the project."
I hadn"t realized things were this serious. "Don"t they obey orders any more? What about your work schedules?"
"I"ve pushed them as hard as I can without forcing a test of my authority," he said. "They claim they deserve time to get adjusted and relax a little before buckling down."
"I agree with them," I said. "They"re all serious, industrious people, and this is still an adventure with them. It will wear off pretty soon, and they"ll be yearning for comforts of Earth. They"ll buckle down when the rainy season hits," I predicted.
"I wonder. Here"s one good example. Look over there. Donnegan"s food detail is just now returning with its first load. They left three hours ago." He yelled over to the foreman.
Donnegan, a large, pleasant-faced biologist sauntered over to us. Benson said, "Was the _expedition_ successful?"
Donnegan brushed off the sarcasm. "Fooling aside, it is getting to be something of an expedition to find fruit. The natives are cleaning it out near at hand."
Turning to me Benson said, "There"s another thing. The little devils have settled all around us, and everything is community property with them. Not only do they strip the fruit but they pick up anything that isn"t nailed down and wander off with it."
"That"s odd," I said. "Joe indicates that they place no value on possessions normally."
"Oh, they don"t keep things," Donnegan explained. "They pack them off, fiddle with them and then we find them strewn all over the forest.
Sometimes I"d like to wring their little necks!"
Benson looked up at him quickly. "Sounds funny coming from you, Paul.
You were one of their chief defenders at the meeting last week."
Donnegan"s face darkened. "That was last week, before I found out a few things. As a matter of fact, I think it"s time you knew about them, too." He squatted down by us and unburdened himself.
As it so often will, a barrier had erected itself between the colony members and their leader, Phillip Benson. Donnegan somewhat shamefacedly confessed what had gone on behind this curtain of silence.
It seemed that two weeks earlier Bromley, one of the chemists, had contrived some rather crude, old-fashioned, sulphur-and-phosphorus, friction matches. Trading on the native"s delight with fire, he had bribed them with matches to give him one of the tala-mangoes which he tasted, then promptly proceeded to swill until he was quite drunk.
In a generous mood he pa.s.sed out matches to other male members of the colony who, in turn, made the barter and joined the party.
"The stuff is really delicious," Donnegan admitted. "And it doesn"t even give you a hang-over."
"Go on," Benson invited coldly.
Within a few days, Donnegan related, everybody was nipping on the tala.
Bromley was turning out a steady supply of matches from his lab, and they were now the going currency for trading with the natives. In order to keep their wives quiet the men brought the super-ripe mangoes home and shared them.
The precious fruit, it developed, came from regular mango trees but reached the desired, fermented condition only at the leafy crowns of the trees where even the nimble, light-weight natives found it hazardous and difficult to reach them. Bromley said that he knew of several native casualties from fatal falls that had occurred since the traffic in tala increased.
Benson asked the question that was in my mind. "What caused you to come to me at this late date?" he demanded. "Something more serious must have happened."
"Well, I didn"t mind the tala-drinking so much--but, well, Captain Spooner and I came back to his hut one afternoon this week and found his pretty little wife with one of the natives--a male. Spooner thought it was a big joke--he was a little drunk at the time, and so was his wife.
But I don"t think it"s any joke at all."
Benson was on his feet, his face livid. "What else?"
Bromley said, "I checked around a little bit, and I found that quite a few of our people are making pets out of the natives. The little devils have got used to our scent, and they"ll do anything just to watch a match burn."
"But the quarantine?" I said.
"I guess they figure it"s safe enough. Personally, I don"t. But they feel that since you and Sue have escaped any disease there"s no reason for the non-fraternizing rule, not even in closed s.p.a.ces. Several couples I know hold parties every night in their huts after dark. They invite a couple of natives who supply the tala. They all sit around a candle. The natives sleep there."
He kicked at an empty tala skin that Joe had tossed out the door earlier. "Things are out of hand, and I"m ashamed I haven"t come to you sooner, Benson."
Phil was so outraged he couldn"t speak. I said, "Thanks, Donnegan. You did the right thing."
He left us, and while Benson was struggling to control his anger I said, "It"s a wonder they haven"t burned the place down. The forest must be damp enough to sustain fire, or they certainly would have set one."
"It might have been better," Benson said, "if they had burned the whole d.a.m.ned planet up! And you thought I was exaggerating! There you have it, a perfect set-up to make beachcombers out of the whole colony. Plenty of free food, liquor, beautiful native girls and a mild climate."
"And native boys," I added, remembering suddenly that I was harboring one of the "pets" under my own roof.
Benson clenched his fists. "From the first I knew what the answer must come to. I just didn"t have the guts to face it."
I nodded. "I suppose we"ll have to drive them off."
"Drive them off, _nothing_! They"re nomads, and they"d be back sooner or later. There will always be people in the colony willing to deal with them secretly, and the natives are clever enough to circ.u.mvent any discipline I aim against them."
"What else can you do, short of--genocide?"
"Why rule out genocide? Sam, face it! Race extermination is the only permanent and satisfactory solution."
The thought was abhorrent to me, but he argued, "If we don"t eliminate them entirely they"ll always be around to plague us. Just picture what this or any future colony would look like after a year or two of uninhibited mingling and loafing and swilling down that tala. Is that the civilization that Earth sent us out here to establish?"
In every part of the universe where living conditions have been too kind and discipline too lax, men have been known to _go native_, and suddenly I felt that Benson had been much more acute in his apprehensions than I, a graduate psychologist who was supposed to understand human nature.
Somewhat subdued I said, "How do you plan to accomplish a complete extermination? If we start hunting them down they"ll just fade into the woods. Besides, you"d have a devil of a time getting agreement among our people to take on such a messy project."
"It has to be done, that"s all. I want you to keep completely quiet about what we"ve learned until I can think about it. Bromley should have some ideas. He"s a biologist."
When Benson said, "biologist", the obvious solution popped into my head.
"If we could sterilize them--all the males, anyway--they have such a short life-span--"
"Too slow. Besides, how are you going to coax all the males to lie down and--" His eyes opened wider, "Radiation!"
"Exactly. We take them for a tour of the ship, including the X-ray booth, and pour on the power."
"Might be done at that. But it would be so slow."