Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Hart took it because he didn’t know quite how far he could push the quiet man who sat behind the desk. He shifted his tactics.

  “I have a contract for the babu,” he said, “and the license for this trade route. I don’t mind telling you I’d counted on the babu. If you don’t shake loose that babu, I’ll sue…”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sheldon said.

  “They were all right five years ago,” said Hart, “the last trip we were here. A culture just can’t go to pot in that length of time.”

  “What we have here,” said Sheldon, “is something more complicated than mere going to pot. Here we have some scheme, some plan, something deliberate.

  “The Type 10 culture village stands there to the west of us, just a mile or two away, deserted, with its houses carefully locked and boarded up. Everything all tidy, as if its inhabitants had moved away for a short time and meant to come back in the not too distant future. And a mile or two outside that Type 10 village we have instead another village and a people that average Type 14.”

  “It’s crazy,” Hart declared. “How could a people lose four full culture points? And even if they did, why would they move from a Type 10 village to a collection of reed huts? Even barbarian conquerors who capture a great city squat down and camp in the palaces and temples—no more reed huts for them.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sheldon. “It’s my job to find out.”

  “And how to correct it?”

  “I don’t know that, either. It may take centuries to correct.”

  “What gets me,” said Hart, “is that god-house. And the greenhouse behind it. There’s babu growing in that greenhouse.”

  “How do you know it’s babu?” Sheldon demanded. “All you’ve ever seen of babu was the root.”

  “Years ago,” said Hart, “one of the natives took me out and showed me. I’ll never forget it. There was a patch of it that seemed to cover acres. There was a fortune there. But I couldn’t pull up a single plant. They were saving it, they said, until the root grew bigger.”

  “I’ve told the men,” said Sheldon, “to keep clear of that god-house and now, Hart, I’m telling you. And that means the greenhouse, too. If I catch anyone trying to get at babu root or anything else growing in that greenhouse, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  A short time after Hart left, the chief of the Google village climbed the stairs to call on the co-ordinator.

  He was a filthy character, generously inhabited by vermin. He didn’t know what chairs were for, and squatted on the floor. So Sheldon left his chair and squatted down to face him, but immediately shuffled back a step or two, for the chief was rather high.

  Sheldon spoke in Google lingo haltingly, for it was the first time he had used it since co-ordinator college days. There is, he supposed, not a man on the ship that could not speak it better than I, for each of the crew was on Zan before and this is my first trip.

  “The chief is welcome,” Sheldon said.

  “Favor?” asked the chief.

  “Sure, a favor,” Sheldon said.

  “Dirty stories,” said the chief. “You know some dirty stories?”

  “One or two,” said Sheldon. “But I’m afraid they’re not too good.”

  “Tell ’em,” said the chief, busily scratching himself with one hand. With the other he just as busily picked mud from between his toes.

  So Sheldon told him the one about the woman and the twelve men marooned on an asteroid.

  “Huh?” said the chief.

  So Sheldon told him another one, much simpler and more directly obscene.

  “That one all right,” said the chief, not laughing. “You know another one?”

  “That’s all I know,” said Sheldon, seeing no point in going on. “Now you tell me one,” he added, for he figured that one should do whatever possible to get along with aliens, especially when it was his job to find what made them tick.

  “I not know any,” said the chief. “Maybe someone else?”

  “Greasy Ferris,” Sheldon told him. “He’s the cook, and he’s got some that will curl your hair.”

  “So good,” said the chief, getting up to go.

  At the door he turned. “You remember another one,” he said, “you be sure to tell me.”

  Sheldon could see, without half trying, that the chief was serious about his stories.

  Sheldon went back to his desk, listening to the soft padding of the chief’s feet doing down the catwalk. The communicator chirped. It was Hart.

  “The first of the scout boats are in,” he said. “They reported on five other villages and they are just the same as this. The Googles have deserted their old villages and are living in filthy huts just a mile or two away. And every one of those reed-hut villages has a god-house and a greenhouse.”

  “Let me know as soon as the other boats come in,” said Sheldon, “although I don’t suppose we can hope for much. Their reports probably will be the same.”

  “Another thing,” said Hart. “The chief asked us to come down to the village for a pow-wow tonight. I told him that we’d come.”

  “That’s some improvement,” Sheldon said. “For the first few days they didn’t notice us. Either didn’t notice us or ran away.”

  “Any ideas yet, Mister Co-ordinator?”

  “One or two.”

  “Doing anything about them?”

  “Not yet,” said Sheldon. “We have lots of time.”

  He clicked off the squawk box and sat back. Ideas? Well, one maybe. And not a very good one.

  A purification rite? An alien equivalent of a return to nature? It didn’t click too well. For, with a Type 10 culture, the Googles never strayed far enough from nature to want to return to it.

  Take a Type 10 culture. Very simple, of course, but fairly comfortable. Not quite on the verge of the machine age, but almost—yes, just short of the machine age. A sort of golden age of barbarism. Good substantial villages with a simple commerce and sound basic economics. Peaceful dictatorship and pastoral existence. Not too many laws to stumble over. A watered-down religion without an excess of tabus. One big happy family with no sharp class distinction.

  And they had deserted that idyllic life.

  Crazy? Of course it was crazy.

  As it stands now the Googles seem barely to get along. Their vocabulary is limited; why, I speak the language even better than the chief, Sheldon told himself.

  Their livelihood was barely above the survival level. They hunted and fished, picked some fruit and dug some roots, and went a little hungry—and all the time the garden patches outside the deserted villages lay fallow, waiting for the plow and hoe, waiting for the seed, but with evidence of having been worked only a year or so before. And in those patches undoubtedly they had grown the babu plants as well as vegetables. But the Googles now apparently knew nothing of plow or hoe or seed. Their huts were ill-made and dirty. There was family life, but on a moral level that almost turned one’s stomach. Their weapons were of stone and they had no agricultural implements.

  Retrogression? No, not just simple retrogression. For even in the retrogression, there was paradox.

  In the center of the Type 14 village to which the Googles had retreated stood the god-house, and back of the god-house stood the greenhouse with babu growing in it. The greenhouse was built of glass and nowhere else in the Type 14 village was there any sign of glass. No Type 14 alien could have built that greenhouse, nor the god-house, either. No mere hut, that god-house, but a building made of quarried stone and squared timbers, with its door locked tight by some ingenious means that no one yet had figured out. Although, to tell the truth, no one had spent much time on it. On an alien planet, visitors don’t monkey with a god-house.

  “I swear,” said Sheldon, talking aloud to himself, “that the god-house was never built by that gang out there. It was built, if I d
on’t miss my guess, before the retrogression. And the greenhouse, too.”

  On Earth when we go away for a vacation and have potted flowers or plants that we wish to keep alive, we take them to a neighbor or a friend to care for them, or make arrangements for someone to come in and water them.

  And when we go on vacation from a Type 10 culture back to Type 14, and we have some babu plants that are valuable seed stock, what do we do with them? We can’t take them to a neighbor, for our neighbor, too, is going on vacation. So we do the best we can. We build a greenhouse and rig it up with a lot of automatic gadgets that will take care of the plants until we come back to care for them ourselves.

  And that meant, that almost proved, that the retrogression was no accident.

  The crew slicked themselves up for the pow-wow, putting on clean clothes, taking baths and shaving. Greasy hauled out his squeeze box and tried a tune or two by way of warming up. A gang of would-be singers in the engine room practiced slow harmony, filling the ship with their caterwauling. Master Hart caught one of the tube-men with a bottle that had been smuggled aboard. He broke the man’s jaw with one well-directed lick, a display of enthusiastic discipline which Sheldon told Hart was just a bit extreme.

  Sheldon put on a semi-dress outfit, feeling slightly silly at dressing up for a tribe of savages, but he salved his conscience with the feeling that, after all, he was not going all the way with a full-dress uniform.

  He was putting on his coat when he heard Hart come down from his quarters and turn toward his cubbyhole.

  “The rest of the scouts came in,” said Hart from the door.

  “Well?”

  “They are all the same. Every single tribe has moved out of its old village and set up a bunch of hovels built around a higher culture god-house and a greenhouse. They’re dirty and half starving, just like this bunch out here.”

  “I suspected it,” said Sheldon.

  Hart squinted at him, as if he might be calculating where he best could hang one.

  “It’s logical,” said Sheldon. “Certainly you see it. If one village went native for a certain reason, so would all the rest.”

  “The reason, Mister Co-ordinator, is what I want to know.”

  Sheldon said calmly, “I intend to discover it.”

  And he thought: It was for a reason, then. If all of them went native, it was for some purpose, according to some plan! And to work out and co-ordinate such a plan among thirty-seven villages would call for smooth-working communication, far better than one would look for in a Type 10 culture.

  Feet pounded on the catwalk, thundering up. Hart swung around to face the door, and Greasy, charging into it, almost collided with him.

  The cook’s eyes were round with excitement and he was puffing with his run.

  “They’re opening the god-house,” he gasped. “They just got the—”

  “I’ll have their hides for this,” Hart bellowed. “I issued orders not to fool around with it.”

  “It isn’t the men, sir,” said Greasy. “It’s the Googles. They’ve opened up their god-house.”

  Hart swung around to Sheldon.

  “We can’t go,” he said.

  “We have to go,” Sheldon said. “They’ve invited us. At this particular moment, we can’t offend them.”

  “Side-arms, then,” said Hart.

  “With orders not to use them except as a last resort.”

  Hart nodded. “And some men stationed up here with rifles to cover us if we have to run for it.”

  “That sounds sensible,” said Sheldon.

  Hart left at the double.

  Greasy turned to go.

  “Just a minute, Greasy. You saw the god-house standing open?”

  “That I did, sir.”

  “And what were you doing down there?”

  “Why, sir …” From his face, Sheldon could see that Greasy was fixing up a lie.

  “I’m not the skipper,” Sheldon said. “You can talk to me.”

  The cook grinned. “Well, you see, it was like this. Some of them Googles were cooking up some brew and I gave them some pointers, just to help along a bit. They were doing it all wrong, sir, and it seemed a pity to have their drinking spoiled by ignorance. So …”

  “So, tonight you went down to get your cut.”

  “That, sir, was about the way it was.”

  “I see,” said Sheldon. “Tell me, Greasy, have you been giving them some pointers on other things as well?”

  “Well, I told the chief some stories.”

  “Did he like them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Greasy. “He didn’t laugh, but he seemed to like them all right.”

  “I told him one,” said Sheldon. “He didn’t seem to get it.”

  “That might be the case,” said Greasy. “If you’ll pardon me, sir, a lot of your stories are a bit too subtle.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Sheldon. “Anything else?”

  “Anything—oh, I see. Well, there was one fixing up a reed to make a flute and he was doing it all wrong…”

  “So you showed him how to make a better flute?”

  “That I did,” said Greasy.

  “I am sure,” said Sheldon, “that you feel you’ve put in some powerful licks for progress, helping along a very backward race.”

  “Huh,” said Greasy.

  “That’s all right,” said Sheldon. “If I were you, I’d go easy on that brew.”

  “That’s all you want of me?” asked Greasy, already halfway out the door.

  “That’s all I want,” said Sheldon. “Thanks, Greasy.”

  A better brew, thought Sheldon. A better brew and a better flute and a string of dirty stories.

  He shook his head. None of it, as yet, added up to anything.

  Sheldon squatted on one side of the chief and Hart squatted on the other. Something about the chief had changed. For one thing, he was clean. He no longer scratched and he was no longer high. There was no mud between his toes. He had trimmed both his beard and hair, scraggly as they were, and had combed them out—a vast improvement over the burrs and twigs and maybe even birds’ nests once lodged in them.

  But there was something more than cleanliness. Sheldon puzzled over it even as he tried to force himself to attack the dish of food that had been placed in front of him. It was a terrible-looking mess and the whiff he had of it wasn’t too encouraging, and to make matters worse, there were no forks.

  Beside him, the chief slurped and gurgled, shoveling food into his mouth with a swift, two-handed technique. Listening to his slurping, Sheldon realized what else was different about him. The chief spoke better now. Just that afternoon he had talked a pidgin version of his own tongue, and now he talked with a command of the language that amounted almost to fluency!

  Sheldon shot a glance around the circle of men squatted on the ground. Each Earthman was seated with a Google to each side of him, and between the slurping and the slopping, the natives made a point of talking to the Earthmen. Just like the Chamber of Commerce boys do when they have guests, thought Sheldon—doing their best to make their guest content and happy and very must at home. And that was a considerable contrast with the situation when the ship first had landed, when the natives had peeked out of doorways or had merely grunted, when they’d not actually run away.

  The chief polished his bowl with circling fingers, then sucked his fingers clean with little moans of delight. Then he turned to Hart and said, “I observe that in the ship you eat off an elevated structure. I have puzzled over that.”

  “A table,” mumbled Hart, having hard going with his fingers.

  “I do not understand,” said the chief, and Hart went on to tell him what a table was, and its advantage over squatting on the ground.

  Sheldon, seeing that everyone else was eating, although with
something less than relish, dipped his fingers in the bowl. Mustn’t gag, he told himself. No matter how bad it is, I mustn’t gag.

  But it was even worse than he had imagined and he did gag. But no one seemed to notice.

  After what seemed interminable hours of gastronomical torture, the meal was done, and during that time Sheldon told the chief about knives and forks and spoons, about cups, about chairs, pockets in trousers and coats, clocks and watches, the theory of medicine, the basics of astronomy, and the quaint Earthian custom of hanging paintings on a wall. Hart told him about the principles of the wheel and the lever, the rotation of crops, sawmills, the postal system, bottles for the containment of liquid and the dressing of building stone.

  Just encyclopedias, thought Sheldon. My God, the questions that he asks. Just encyclopedias for a squatting, slurping savage of a Type 14 culture. Although, wait a minute now—was it still 14? Might it not, within the last half day, have risen to a Type 13? Washed, combed, trimmed, with better social graces and a better language—it’s crazy, he told himself. Utterly and absolutely insane to think that such a change could take place in the span of half a day.

  From where he sat he could look across the circle directly at the god-house with its open door. And staring at the black maw of the doorway, in which there was no hint of life or light, he wondered what was there and what might come out of it—or go into it. For he was certain that within the doorway lay the key to the enigma of the Googles and their retrogression, since it seemed that the god-house itself must have been erected in preparation for the retrogression. No Type 14 culture, he decided, could have erected it.

  After the meal was over, the chief rose and made a short speech, telling them that he was glad the visitors could eat with the tribe that night, and that now they would have some entertainment. Then Hart stood up and made a speech, saying they were glad to be on Zan and that his men had come prepared to offer a small matter of entertainment in return, if the chief would care to see it. The chief said he and his people would. Then he clapped his hands as a signal and about a dozen Google girls came out and marched around in the center of the circle, going through a ritual figure, weaving and dancing without benefit of music. Sheldon saw that the Googles watched intently, but none of it made much sense to him, well-grounded as he was on alien ritual habits.