The clusters of buildings had looked close. It took fully an hour
before the settlers reached them. By that time, they were hot and
thirsty and dispirited. As they went up the village street, the guides
pointed out the numbered houses, and the settlers assigned to them
left the column and carried their luggage inside. Most of them were
inside only a few minutes before they came to the doorways to stare
unhappily at each other. They had found that the houses, made of wood
and plaster, each consisted of three boxy rooms containing a few sticks
of crudely made furniture. Nothing was painted. There was no glass in
the windows. The beds consisted of four posts with mattresses of woven
vines.
"What did you expect--innersprings?" Harvey said. "Remember--Colonel
Baker never said you'd get innersprings on this planet. The man never
told you a lie."
The toilets were tiny out-houses, a hundred yards away in the field.
"Oh, dear," Ruth said.
"Well, you can't expect the man to transport sewer pipe to Paradise,"
Harvey said grimly.
He stood in the doorway and waited until the guides had deposited the
last of the settlers and were started on their return trip. Harvey
called to them as they came by. They glanced at him blankly, said
something to each other, and kept on walking. Harvey leaped to the
street, raced after them, grabbed them by the shoulders and spun them
both around. "When I talk to somebody, I expect an answer," he said
savagely.
The two guides looked at him with worn, emotionless eyes. They stood
there, shoulders drooping slightly in a weirdly identical posture.
"What's this all about?" Harvey said, subduing his voice with
difficulty. He waited. Nothing came out of them. "Do you work for
Baker? Don't you have farms like the rest of us?"
The stocky one's mouth twisted slightly. Then he spoke. "We have
farms," he said in a low, sullen voice. "We are also guides. We
couldn't work our farms all the way. We had to do extra work to meet
our payments."
Harvey stared at them. "Payments for what? Didn't you pay for the farms
before you came here?"
"Payments for the oxygen," said the stocky man.
"What do you mean?"
A weak, sardonic smile edged across their faces. "They weren't told,"
the tall man said.
Harvey boiled over. He grabbed one man by the throat. "Told what,
goddamn you? Talk!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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