One in 300 (21 page)

 

 

I wondered what Ritchie could possibly want with Morgan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

 

 

Occasionally as the weeks passed I remembered Ritchie's words and wondered
if there was anyone among the fugitives from Earth who was just waiting for
a chance to step in and take over Winant. It was possible. It made too much
sense.

 

 

The big, clumsy, badly constituted council was all that was needed while
everyone was still working fourteen hours a day. Keep people busy enough
and they don't need a government. They don't need much law either.

 

 

Eventually, however, the situation would change. And what was being done
to prepare for the time when we were no longer concerned merely with
staying alive?

 

 

Nothing.

 

 

Nothing, at any rate, officially. Ritchie, of course, would be preparing.
I didn't know anything of what his schemes would be, but I knew there
would be schemes, all with the same object -- the greatest possible power,
success, comfort, safety, and freedom for Alec Ritchie.

 

 

And if there was one Alec Ritchie, there must be more. Possibly Ritchie
himself would be a complete failure, his schemes collapsing about him
in ruin. But some other smart Alec, some bigger and shrewder Ritchie,
might even now be planning a future the council didn't dream of, yet a
future that could swallow ours. Ritchie had put it plainly and neatly,
and possibly even truly. I'd seen something of the sort happen on Earth,
often.

 

 

The slow, patient, stupid peasant spends forty years saving enough to
keep him in comfort for the rest of his life. And the smart, smooth,
practiced con man spends forty minutes taking it away from him.

 

 

The small child slowly gathers a fine collection of shells. The bigger
child acquires the whole collection by the simple method of taking it
from him.

 

 

It's not as easy to take over a community like Winant as it is to take
shells from a small child. Of course not. But does the peasant expect
to lose his money? Does the child expect to lose his shells? No, and
we were putting ourselves in line by not expecting anyone to become a
dictator in Winant.

 

 

At that point I usually laughed at myself and thought of some more pleasant
aspect of the future, like whether we were going to have a son or a daughter,
and what we were going to call him or her.

 

 

 

 

There was no money in the settlement, and a lot of people, myself included,
thought we could get on very nicely without it. When the so-called labor
units came in, however, we lieutenants had to take notice of them. There
were different kinds of labor units at first. The root idea behind them
all was that people who wanted something made promises of one kind or
another, the prospective seller insisted on having them in writing,
and the buyer drew up a contract and signed it.

 

 

And before we knew it we had money again.

 

 

The principal thing that could replace money, of course, was service.
People would promise, in return for something, that when they were able
they would do some job or other. Sometimes the promise was to replace the
article at some future date with another of slightly better quality. These
promises were written down and became, inevitably, negotiable.

 

 

When we realized we had to do something about this innovation we were already
too late to catch the first profiteers of the new settlement. Some cunning
characters had been quick to realize the possibility of gain in this system.
With their uncanny instinct for profit they had sold all they had to sell,
plus a lot that they didn't, exchanged the tokens they gained for others,
gave out promises of their own, shuffled their gains about with the
magical sleight of hand of the brilliant businessman, sold them to
the right people at the right moment, bought back their own promises,
and generally kept things on the move, with each move meaning a little
more in their own pockets. It was they who flooded the market with bad
currency -- promises that could never be fulfilled, made by people who
would promise anything -- while the real, hard cash, the tokens of the
people who kept their word, was in their pockets.

 

 

We saw we couldn't stop this practice, we could only check it, standardize
and administer it. We'd have liked to cancel all previous transactions,
but we couldn't.

 

 

Lieutenants became bankers along with all the other things they had to do.
Came the one-labor unit, representing certain stated service, the
five-labor unit and the ten. We forbade anything above the ten, at
first. Labor unit became labit, then laby. We had abandoned dollars,
francs, pounds, marks, pesos, lire, rupees, kronen, rubles, and acquired,
to replace them all, the laby. Every laby had to represent a genuine
promise of service, and was countersigned by a lieutenant. It wasn't
long before we were using watermarked paper, and money was back.

 

 

Close on the heels of this came another new factor connected with it.

 

 

Morgan didn't appear to work one day on the building we were erecting,
but someone, a Czechoslovakian who spoke very little English, came in his
place. On investigating I found he'd been paid to do Morgan's job. He was
satisfied; he was a tough, honest fellow who could do two men's work.
One man's work he had to do for nothing, but he could get money for the
extra work he did. He must somehow have arranged his freedom from his
own party, by doing three days' work in two, perhaps.

 

 

I couldn't do a thing. I didn't know where Morgan got the money --
he wasn't the kind of smart businessman who could take advantage of any
opportunity to line his pockets -- but I could guess. Alec Ritchie, I
was certain, was the kind of smart businessman who could take advantage
of any opportunity to line his pockets, and had.

 

 

That day was notable for more than the reintroduction of paid service.

 

 

Group 94 was being transferred to the excavations, now well advanced,
and three of us went on ahead to see what we were going to have to do,
while the rest, minus Morgan and plus his hired hand, carried on at the
old job under Sammy. The three who went were Leslie, Betty, and I.

 

 

Betty seemed unnaturally gay. She wasn't a talker as a rule, but on
this occasion she talked so much that Leslie and I could hardly get a
word in. I caught Leslie's inquiring glance once or twice, and wondered
whether to ask Betty bluntly what the matter was. It would be something
to do with Morgan, of course.

 

 

However, Leslie suddenly asked, when Betty stopped talking for a moment:
"Are you feeling all right, Betty?"

 

 

Leslie must have seen things I missed. I hadn't noticed anything physically
wrong with Betty. But I knew Leslie was on the right track when Betty said
swiftly:

 

 

"No, it's just the air pressure. I'm all right."

 

 

Human beings always have to have a handy excuse for everything, and on
Mars the reduced air pressure was blamed for a lot of things it didn't
do. Mars really had a very thick envelope of air, much thicker than
anyone had thought before the first ship reached Mars. The only thing
Mars couldn't do in this respect was make the air weigh so much. Mars
had a surprisingly high air pressure, but it was well short of what we
were used to.

 

 

Knowing this, people used it as an excuse for being tired, or stiff, or
having a headache, or not wanting to work, or whatever it was they wanted
an excuse for. But in actual fact it had scarcely any perceptible effect
on us at all, beyond reducing the boiling point of water so that what
we called hot water ceased to exist except in a laboratory. Or rather,
it had the same effect on all of us. We adapted to it, as we adapted to
the reduced gravity. We couldn't help it.

 

 

So when Betty made the new but already old excuse I knew she was hiding
something.

 

 

"You don't feel sick, do you?" I asked.

 

 

"No, it's nothing. Forget it."

 

 

Obviously it made her feel worse when we talked about it. I noticed now
that she was a little unsteady on her feet. Since she wanted to talk about
something else, anything else, we let her do it.

 

 

About two minutes later she reeled in a sudden gust of wind. I caught
her, quite gently, and steadied her. But at my touch she stiffened and
collapsed in a faint.

 

 

"Leslie," I said, "have a look at her. She fainted when I put my arm
around her."

 

 

I paced about as Leslie bent over the girl. I was hoping fervently that
this was nothing over which I would have to take action. I was quite sure
that what I'd told Sammy about Morgan was right. The only hope for Morgan
was that bit by bit he could be made to realize clearly and plainly
what he was doing and see just how that conduct fitted, or didn't fit,
in the fabric of the fight for existence of a tiny remnant of all the
peoples of Earth.

 

 

I heard Leslie catch her breath sharply and knew that ignoring this
wasn't going to be possible.

 

 

"I think you'd better have a look at her, Bill," said Leslie. There was
fury in her voice which I had never heard before.

 

 

There was no sign of Betty's pregnancy yet. Her belly was thin and flat,
and it was one big angry bruise. There was hardly a square inch of clear,
undamaged skin below the waist. It was no surprise at all that Betty had
fainted at a touch. How she could have come by those injuries I found
it difficult to guess. I didn't think merely pounding her with a fist
could have done that.

 

 

Leslie was too angry to speak. I wasn't angry, after one wild surge of rage,
just tired, disappointed, and sorry. The man who could do that could do
anything. He could easily have killed Betty; the fact that she was able
to walk about and pretend nothing had happened to her wasn't his fault.

 

 

"Now I'll have to beat him," I said wearily, "and if we don't watch them
day and night he'll take it out of Betty. Until finally he kills her.
Then we can shoot or hang Morgan, and the air around here will be
a little cleaner."

 

 

"He's not going to kill Betty!" exclaimed Leslie fiercely.

 

 

"I don't see how we can stop him," I said. "She won't leave him, even now.
We can't execute him, or put him in prison, or extradite him. All we can do
is wait till he kills someone, and then by ordinary, common-sense law
we can execute him to stop him from killing anyone else."

 

 

I went on in weary bitterness: "God, to think I did this. I could have
done better by picking the first lounger I saw in the street -- "

 

 

Betty stirred and opened her eyes. She looked up at us, searched our faces,
and then suddenly felt the breeze on her skin. With a convulsive movement
she sat up, wincing, and grabbed at her suit.

 

 

"Let me do it," said Leslie. She eased the garment carefully over the
bruised flesh.

 

 

"I fell," said Betty quickly. "It was during the gale yesterday -- "

 

 

"Hell, you're not going to cover up for Morgan now, are you?" I demanded.

 

 

"It wasn't Morgan. It was -- "

 

 

"How did he do it?" I asked.

 

 

She capitulated. She burst into tears, crying as I had never seen
a woman cry before. She didn't weep with passion, but with grief and
misery and hopelessness.

 

 

Through her tears, in choked phrases, she told us what had happened.

 

 

Morgan had taken her far out in the desert the night before, just after
sunset. He had told her she mustn't have her baby. If she did, he would
kill it. She had been crying, begging, screaming, but he slapped her face
until she was quiet. He asked her if she knew how to arrange a miscarriage.
She didn't. It hadn't occurred to her that any woman had ever tried to
arrange a miscarriage. Even slapping her face couldn't stop her crying
and pleading again.

 

 

He threw her down and started hitting her with a round stone, sitting on
her chest to hold her down. Betty didn't know how long that went on. She
thought she had been unconscious for a while, but when she revived he
was still beating her with the stone. Finally he said, "That ought to
do it," threw the stone away, and let her get up, when she could.

 

 

"But
why
, Betty?" said Leslie wonderingly. "Did he say why?"

 

 

Through a fresh flood of tears Betty said: "He said he's going to have
Aileen Ritchie. He said he didn't want me and a kid I could say was his
always hanging around his neck. Now I'll lose my baby and -- "

 

 

"You won't," I said. "Not if you keep away from Morgan in future and
don't give him another chance."

 

 

The tears stopped abruptly. "I won't lose my baby?" Betty asked
incredulously.

 

 

"I don't think so. Morgan doesn't know a thing about it, which is just
as well. Keep clear of him and you'll have your baby all right."

 

 

"But I can't keep clear of him! I love him."

 

 

I knew that. I'd thought about it already. I sighed. "Make sure he never
has a chance to do anything like that again, then."

 

 

Betty looked almost happy. "Then we can forget all about it?" she asked
hopefully.