Utility Read online

  Utility

  Raymond F. Jones

  Utility

  by David Anderson

  They were queer little brutes, distinguished by an uncanny ability to turn anything—even egg beaters and fountain pens!—into deadly weapons. And Space Law forbade traders to sell deadly weapons or their parts—!

  The Cassiopeia had a full crew that slept aboard the night before we left for Merans. That is, it was full except for McCord, Hydrophobia McCord, and nobody was very sorry about that. Three months cooped up in the small trading ship with McCord would be plenty long. We knew. We had shipped with him before.

  Rumors are absolutely false when they say that Hydrophobia McCord had never had a bath in his life. I helped give him one once on Bonsby when things got so bad that the crew ganged up and carried him outside the shed in the middle of a Bonsby winter. We had to cut through three feet of ice and it darned near killed him, but McCord got a bath. That was five years ago, of course.

  Nobody I ever met could recall seeing him ever take a drink of water, but there were witnesses to that one bath. McCord was allergic to water both externally and internally.

  In desperation and in the middle of a huge drunk McCord had once gone to some quack psychologist who certified for ten dollars that McCord had a psychosis which made even the near presence of water an exquisite torture to McCord’s sensitive nerves.

  After his bargain-counter psychoanalysis, whenever anybody brought the subject up, McCord would get wells of tears in his big, baby-blue eyes and wail, “It’s my psychosis, fellows, I can’t help it. Don’t you see it?”

  On our previous trip to Merans Captain Wilkins had said, “It isn’t the optic nerve that your psychosis bothers.”

  Which about summed it up for all of us.

  The Cassiopeia was a rumbling little trading ship built without much concern for the crew or any passengers which might be fool enough to want a cheap ride, but she was built like a bank vault and padded with goose down in the cargo holds for the benefit of the Jewelworlds which were the chief item of cargo from Merans to' Earth.

  On the morning of this particular take-off Captain Wilkins was in the navigator’s cabin giving us the once over and sounding out the new men aboard. Most of us had shipped with him before, more times than we cared to remember—and always with Hydrophobia McCord aboard.

  Captain Wilkins opened the Spaceman’s Bible that lay in front of him, a neat little pamphlet of some twenty-eight hundred pages telling what you can do and what you can’t do on which planet and why.

  “Trading on Merans with the Diomedes is a ticklish proposition,” the captain said slowly and he thumbed through the Bible. “If, there’s a more ornery, cantankerous race of misbegotten protoplasm on any planet than inhabits Merans I have yet to see it.”

  He continued to thumb through the volume in exasperation that was slowly turning his face red and changing its shape into a thunderous scowl.

  “Who’s been—?”

  I knew what was coming next. I had seen the same performance so many times before that I knew exactly how long he would thumb before he reached for his pocket- book.

  He grumbled at the bottom of his throat. “Forgot. I carry this thing in my pocket so I can refer to it.” He extracted the sheet torn from the Bible.

  “Section 118-B, Paragraph 32 of the Interstellar Regulations Governing the Relationship Between Sovereign Bodies of the Various Inhabited Worlds and Regulations Concerning Property Rights Thereof. ‘No trading body, corporation, company, or individual shall sell, transfer, exchange, donate or in any other manner cause to be placed in the custody or use of belligerent groups, races, individuals, or parties any weapon, tool, mechanism, or device which may be used in warfare, conflict, or belligerent action of any nature.’

  '“That means that you can’t even trade a club, stick, rod, or . . . There I go! . . . you can’t trade a simple baseball bat to the Diomedes for their Jewelworlds because if you do they’ll go out and start clubbing the Arthoids.

  “We tried to get the Traders’ Council to declare Merans outside the intent of this regulation but they’ve turned us down a dozen times and so I repeat for the benefit of the new members of the crew that if we swap the Diomedes anything they can use on the Arthoids we are cooked.”

  I looked up quickly. He sounded more serious than before. “You mean that last—?” I started to interrupt.

  Captain Wilkins glowered. “I mean that last trip when we thought we had something foolproof. We traded eggbeaters, a whole cargo- hold full of them, for Jewelworlds. We thought we could find nothing more harmless in the world than an eggbeater to use for barter. Well, as you know, the common eggbeater uses a vibratory principle, coupled with molecular air infusion. The Diomedes are little gadget lovers and they very ingeniously hooked up twenty or thirty eggbeaters in parallel and proceeded to whip the Arthoids into a froth.

  “There was hell to pay when the news of it leaked out to the Council. They threatened to cancel the license of Barter, Inc. Timothy Thorgersen, president of our outfit—in case any of you are so ignorant as not to know—threatened to take the Cassiopeia crew apart molecule by molecule. He forbade us ever to trade on Merans again— and six days later he ordered us back.”

  “Why the change?” asked Hap Paulson, our navigator. “I don’t get it.”

  “We can thank Hydrophobia McCord—bless his smelly soul. He got the wonderful brainstorm that the one thing that the Diomedes could not turn into a weapon is the ordinary writing pen. So here we are with a hold bulging full of pens to trade to these little catastrophes of procreation.”

  “Why can’t we just go now— and forget McCord?” It was Dunc Edwards, the chief engineer. He looked around hopefully and got a feeble nod from every one of the rest of the crew. Captain Wilkins merely looked at him without answer. No trading party to Merans had gone without McCord since the planet had first been discovered by him and Thorgersen eight years ago.

  The captain shut the Bible and raised his arm to put the book in the wall locker. His arm halted in midair and he slowly turned around. His nose twitched. He looked suspiciously at each of the crew. But every man was looking askance at his neighbor.

  Captain Wilkins saw nothing and turned again to put the book away. Then he whirled and sniffed violently.

  “What in—?” he began.

  I was getting it plenty strong. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, but the condensed, filtered, and distilled essence of orchids was suddenly upon the air so thickly that it swirled visibly when you turned your head.

  There was the scent of roses there, too, as if a ton of them had been pulped and the juice was slowly distilling into the air. Then with an overpowering rush there seemed to be a maelstrom of odor— every flower in the botanical catalogues seemed to be there, from floating moss to snapdragons.

  We were all thinking the same thing: Someone, in anticipation of McCord’s arrival, had broken a vial of dime-store perfume.

  “All right, all right!” Captain Wilkins thundered. “Who brought it aboard?”

  “I did. Isn’t it wonderful, fellows? My psychosis won’t bother you now.”

  “McCord!”

  We all whirled to face the door as Hydrophobia McCord oozed in. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he repeated. His baby-blue eyes were glowing and his nostrils oscillated appreciatively in the scented atmosphere.

  “No!” roared Captain Wilkins. “In the name of all that’s smelly what did you spill on you?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said McCord innocently. “It’s one of these newfangled midget ologenerators. See?” He held up a tiny instrument with a dial face and a couple of switches on it.

  “It’s small enough to go in your pocket and you can adjust to any strength or any scent you like. I�
�ve got it on full on all of them now. Thought you’d like it better that way. But I can give you anything you want. There’s lilacs for example.”

  Instantly, the overpowering scent of all the flowers in the books disappeared and was replaced by the gentle, springy scent of lilacs. Even Captain Wilkins was mollified. To tell the truth, it wasn’t half bad compared to what we had expected with McCord’s appearance.

  “Leave it there,” Captain Wilkins grumbled. “And turn it down. Keep it just high enough to—” He jerked his head meaningly.

  McCord wasn’t a bad sort if you could endure the sight of his great, bulbous form occupying the full width of a catwalk as he ambled along as if in a heavy sea like some great ship designed by a drunken naval architect. And if you didn’t mind his psychosis—

  A special cargo of ninety proof was aboard for McCord’s own use. He swore to all creation that his psychosis wouldn’t permit him to partake of any other liquid. But nobody cared particularly about that. It meant McCord would be in his bunk during most of the voyage, completely at the mercy of his psychosis.

  In two respects, this voyage was like no other that we’d made with Captain Wilkins. For the first time we had an atmosphere of lilacs instead of decayed cabbage, and we knew it would be our last trip after the fabulous Jewelworlds of the Diomedes and the Arthoids unless McCord’s hunch was right and the cargo of pens would prove to be a harmless medium of exchange with the creatures.

  The inhabitants of Merans all seem to belong to the same genus but there are a dozen different species. Only the two, the Diomedes and the Arthoids, produce the famous Jewelworlds. The products of the Diomedes are far superior to the others which produce considerable distortion.

  Barter, Inc., had made a fortune out of the Jewelworlds by holding them up to robbery prices. It’s true the things are rare enough and most people have never even seen one. They are simply crystal-clear spheres anywhere from a half inch to eight inches in diameter. They have a property which causes them to respond to the minute waves of the human brain and will recreate a picture of any imagined scene in the mind of a person gazing into the sphere.

  A couple of thousand treatises have been written on the Jewelworlds, but none has yet been able to figure out how they work. It has been called everything from self-hypnosis to a complicated mechanical and electrical receiver and projector for mental radiations. No one knows for sure.

  The creatures of Merans make them partly out of raw materials found on the planet and, like oysters making pearls, they use secretions of their own bodies in fashioning the spheres. Unlike oysters and pearls, the Jewelworlds are made entirely outside the bodies of the creatures. They fashion them with their own furry paws.

  The reason Hydrophobia McCord is so invaluable to any trading party is that he was the first human being to make contact with the Diomedes and Arthoids. Though the two species are mortal enemies, they both act as if McCord is their god.

  The creatures are gadget maniacs. It’s queer, but they do not have an intricate mechanical culture of their own. All they make are the Jewelworlds. But in the presence of any gadget from Earth or elsewhere they act completely off their bases.

  In the matter of utility, they have one-track minds. No matter what the gadget, they try to make a weapon out of it. It seems as if that’s the only use they can conceive for anything mechanical. They tear into the most complicated televisor and put it back together again so that it will practically lay eggs—or spray a death ray. Gadgets are like drink to them.

  McCord may be partly responsible for this. He and Timothy Thorgersen were the first ones to land on Merans and McCord discovered the two species making Jewelworlds. He finagled one out of them in exchange for a pocket visor. They practically worshiped him for what they seemed to think was an exchange that was robbery —of McCord.

  I suppose you could build up quite a thesis on human nature that the two men, McCord and Thorgersen, were on Merans simultaneously and had exactly the same opportunity to exploit the planet. One of them snowballed that beginning into the greatest trading company operating out of the Solar System. The other one remained a drunken bum.

  Even during the following years when McCord gave up his erratic and ill-managed attempts to do his own trading around the systems and became merely a cheaply paid negotiator for Barter, Inc., and other companies, he never seemed to realize his real worth in dealing with the creatures of Merans. Or rather, he seemed afraid they would decide to get along without him and he wouldn’t get a chance to go back to Merans.

  No one knew quite what attitude to take towards McCord. It was usually a combination of disgust and pity, with disgust the larger portion.

  The Cassiopeia, suffused with the fumes of lilac blossoms, rose into the skies for its three months’ journey which might well be the last trip to Merans if we slipped and pulled a boner like we did on the eggbeater trade.

  Hydrophobia McCord seemed optimistic, however, that the pens would prove to be the solution to all the trading troubles on Merans. I wasn’t so sure. There was nothing ' complicated about the pens. They were the ordinary type of supersonic points designed to produce a permanent record on Permosize paper, but I felt kind of leery of turning over to the Diomedes even such a simple gadget as the tiny supersonic generator contained in the barrels of the pens.

  But there was no use worrying. We were on our way.

  McCord himself seemed bent on making it a memorable journey. Instead of retiring to his cabin with a case of the ninety proof, he seemed to refrain entirely from liquid nourishment and wandered about the ship in jovial temperament.

  You could detect him coming two levels away by the increase in lilac scent pervading the air.

  The second day out, Dunc Edwards down in his chief engineer’s repair shop detected the now familiar, almost overpowering scent. He looked up from his bench where he was examining a burned-out meter as McCord waddled in.

  “Hello, chief,” McCord said with a friendly grin. “Mind if I come in?”

  Dunc Edwards’ response was a low growl in the lower regions of his throat. But McCord was used to such response and acted as if he’d been welcomed like a long-lost uncle with a fortune to share.

  His bulk sidled up to the chief.

  Edwards stood it as long as he could. “Will you please turn that thing down a little? What are you trying to do? Anaesthetize me?”

  “Sure, sorry.”

  I happened to be over in the corner of the shop doing a grease monkey’s job on a converter chamber that had blown out just after take-off. None of us had been able to figure out what caused it to blow and Dunc Edwards was in a boiling stew over it.

  He finally turned to McCord in suppressed rage and said in tempered tones, “Will you kindly state your business as quickly as possible, Mr. McCord, and then scram?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure—” McCord seemed dismayed by Edwards’ abrupt manner. “I just wanted to ask you a little favor. I would like to use a bench and some of the tools in the shop during the trip. There’s a little gadget I want to work on.”

  “All during the trip?”

  “Most of the trip.”

  “Right here in this room?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “I'm sorry, McCord, but I am charged with maintaining the mechanical operation of this ship and this repair shop is private domain into which no other members of the crew are allowed except by special permission of Captain Wilkins.” Edwards’ voice was so formal and level with fury that it hurt.

  But McCord’s face beamed. “Oh, I’m sure it will be all right with Cap. I’ll go and see him and be right back.”

  Hydrophobia McCord waddled out again and up the companion- way. Dunc Edwards turned to me and screwed up his face in a wink. “Wait till that walking flower pot gets to the captain. He’ll get told off plenty.”

  Then his face sobered and he looked worried. “But just in case—”

  He went to the interphone and call the captain.

  Captain Wilkins wasn’
t in his quarters. In growing fear and anxiety, Edwards called all over the ship. Finally he connected with the captain in the hold and told him what McCord wanted.

  “If you so much as dream of letting that combination flower pot and garbage can on wheels come into this shop, I resign!”

  “McCord has already seen me and I have told him it was none of my business,” said Captain Wilkins, “but since that’s the way you feel about it I order you to allow McCord the use of any facilities he may require to produce the gadget he contemplates. Give him the run of the shop.”

  Edwards' normally florid face went through shades of the spectrum like an auroral display and he hung up without another word.

  He turned on me. “You heard? I should let that olfactory calamity work in here with me? I quit!”

  Edwards, of course, didn’t quit. He sulked in the corridors and in the game room for half a day and finally came back, glaring as he entered the doorway and saw the mountainous back of McCord hunched over a workbench.

  Nobody during the entire three months saw McCord so much as touch a drop of liquid to his lips. How he got along without it, I don’t know. He must have sneaked whiskey in minute quantities at night, but he never took enough to affect his locomotion. He slaved over his mysterious gadget in the repair shop and told no one what it was.

  He had told Captain Wilkins that it was a device for insuring permanent trading possibilities with the Diomedes and Arthoids. That was enough for the captain to issue his orders to Edwards.

  The last few days of the voyage McCord worked in a frenzy to finish. The day before we landed it was completed, so he said.

  There was an apprehension among the crew, unspoken but definite. Without being a trader it’s hard to understand the peculiar pride the members of this queer and sometimes grotesque profession take in their work. There’s a pride in the accomplishment of meeting members of seemingly incomprehensible races and successfully putting over a barter deal.