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.

If we failed to continue the contacts on Merans, we’d be blacklisted with every trading company in the business.

The peculiar, gadgety psychology of the Diomedes and Arthoids combined with the natural cantankerous nature of the creatures made Merans probably the most difficult trading area in existence.

No one ever has and probably never will understand what makes the little devils want to fight with every other type of life on their planet. Maybe it’s just their gadgety nature that makes them turn every device that’s traded to them into a weapon, but certainly they have a one-track idea of utility.

All we knew was that we were there to trade for Jewelworlds and it was against the law to trade weapons or interfere in local warfare.

Merans is about as desolate a world as has been encountered with life on it. Plant forms are practically nonexistent. The surface of the planet is rugged, but no mountains worthy of the name are there. There are low hills and cliffs big enough to contain caves in which the inhabitants live. And there are pools of water large enough for them to swim in, which is what they do about half the time.

The air is cold and light, but it is possible to go without spacesuits which makes trading a lot easier because all communication is by sign language. The creatures of Merans appeared to be totally voiceless and if they communicated with each other nothing was known of their methods.

Captain Wilkins set the Cassiopeia down on a barren plain between two mesas and beside a pool of water where the Diomedes were likely to be swimming.

The final jar as she settled on the stern plates was a welcome sound to us all. After three months in concentrated lilac soup we were all partially intoxicated or asphyxiated .by it.

Dunc Edwards was the first out. He leaped like a kid and beat his hands on his chest. “Air! Pure, fresh air!” he exclaimed.

It was an act for McCord’s benefit, but the latter wasn’t even looking. He left the hatch slowly with a purposeful look on his face and marched straight across the plain towards the pool. Captain Wilkins nodded with a tense, satisfied look on his face. “Better break out the pens, boys. McCord’s on his way to open negotiations.”

With full knowledge of the crucial nature of the moment, we began hauling out the cases' of writing pens to swap for Jewelworlds. The next few hours would tell us if this would be our last trip to Merans.

We had about a couple of dozen cases unloaded when Captain Wilkins pushed back his cap and shaded his eyes with his hands. “What in the name of seven constellations is that fool up to, now?”

We all looked in the direction of McCord. He was standing on the edge of the pool wigwagging frantically with his hands. It was the unique sign language he had established with the Diomedes who were frolicking in the pool.

In a moment a couple of hundred of them came tunmbling up out of the water and scrambled to the bank. They sat in orderly rows as if understanding some directions McCord was giving them.

They looked like nothing more than a flock of wet teddy bears. They had long, prehensile fingers and toes that they used to fashion the Jewelworlds—and make lethal gadgets out of eggbeaters.

Then something shocked our attention and froze us rigid where we stood.

McCord was slowly peeling off his shirt. He stood a moment in the cold and we could imagine him shivering even beneath the slabs of alcoholic fat that upholstered him.

Then he divested himself of the rest of his clothes and poised a moment on the bank. His body formed an arc and he deliberately plunged into the pool.

“McCord's taking a bath!” Somebody gasped. Maybe it was all of us. We dropped the cases of pens that were in our hands and ran for the pool until the light air made our lungs burn. But we didn’t stop.

Maybe McCord was committing suicide, was the thought that most of us had, I think. And without McCord we wouldn’t get half the Jewelworlds we expected for our cargo of pens.

The gathering of Diomedes gave us a dirty look as we came running up as if we had no right to burst in upon their god, Hydrophobia McCord, like that.

But when we topped the rise we saw what none of us expected to see. McCord was lazily floating on his back, half submerged. He spewed a column of water, whale-like, into the air and waved.

“Hi, fellows. I knew I could do it. My psychosis is all gone now, see? I can take a bath any time I want to! My hydrophobia won’t bother you no more.”

There was no trading that day or the next, because as soon as we got McCord to come out of the pool and get dressed he took one backward look and collapsed cold.

I helped catch him or, rather, to break his fall. It was like a ton of beef coming down on me and it took four of us quite a little while to carry him back to the ship and get him in his bunk.

When that was done we brought- the cases of pens back inside.

We didn’t carry a ship’s doctor because we were too small a tub for that, but I’d done a lot of first aid and was unanimously elected to take charge of the bellyaches and the drunks.

What I didn’t know about medicine would supply a dozen specialists with a lifetime of knowledge, but McCord’s condition seemed like a severe case of shock to me. After examining him, I called Captain Wilkins.

“There’s something intensely not on the beam,” I said. “There's something inside McCord that none of us have dreamed, I think.”

“That stuff he drinks will preserve it for science until he dies, anyway,” said Captain Wilkins. “What I want to know is when can he get out and trade again?”

“You don’t get what I mean, Cap. In his head, I mean.”

“Is there anything there?”

“Plenty, I think. Just before you came in he was out of his head and he yelled Thorgersen’s name a half dozen times and then he said, ‘It’s boiling me, Thorgersen, it’s boiling me.’ After a while he started mumbling threats and then said, ‘I did it, fellows. For eight years I’ve been trying to get up courage to take a bath and I’ve done it. He can’t hurt me no more, and I’ll get my eight years back, too.”

Captain Wilkins scowled. “Sounds like he’s sore at Thorgersen. Maybe we hadn’t ought to let him out again. He might try to ruin the deal. Say . . . you don’t suppose it’s McCord that’s been back of all the trouble we’ve had here?”

I shrugged. “How could he be? He hasn’t always been the one to suggest the trade articles. He didn’t suggest the eggbeaters. And he couldn’t control the psychology of the Diomedes. Nope, I think this is, something concerning McCord alone—McCord and maybe Thorgersen.”

“Where does Thorgersen come in, I wonder?”

“They were here together the first time, remember.”

“McCord was nothing but a drunken bum long before that. He probably has carried some sort of a grudge all these years because Thorgersen made a success instead of going along with a failure like McCord. But what I want to know is where this bath business comes in. No, I don’t either. I want to know if it’s going to be safe to let him out when he comes to, and can we trust him to deal with the Diomedes and Arthoids for us?”

I shrugged again. “It’s either that or try to get as many Jewelworlds as we can by ourselves. In any event all we have to trade is the pens.”

“I guess you’re right.” Captain Wilkins turned to go. “Let me know when he comes around.”

McCord didn’t come around for two days. I thought the guy was going to die. I didn’t know enough or have the equipment—though I suppose Dunc Edwards could have rigged it up—to feed him intravenously. I was about to suggest Captain Wilkins try to raise a liner somewhere close enough to get to us a doctor when McCord finally roused.

He rose from the bunk with a glassy look in his eyes. The skin hung on him like a loosely draped rug after his two days’ fast. He got down shakily and gripped my shoulder.

“The pool, Stevens,” he said. “Help me get to it. I’ve got to take a bath again. Got to take a bath right now.”

“Easy does it, old man,” I said, trying to push him back into the bunk. It was still like trying to shove a baby elephant around.

“No. Got to take a bath, Stevens. Help me get to the pool.”

I helped him. There was nothing else I could do. Hap Paulson and a couple of machinists came along, too. All McCord had on was his shorts. He had even refused to don a shirt, and his great hulk was trembling and blue with cold. Hap was pleading with him.

“It’ll kill you, McCord. You can’t go in the water now!”

“Got to, fellows, or I may never be able to do it again. For eight years I’ve been trying to build up the courage. Now I’ve got it. Ask Doc here.” He nudged me.

“What about it?” Hap asked.

My feelings in the matter were based on no medical knowledge whatever, but I said, “I think we ought to let him go. I’ve got a hunch it’s going to do him more good than harm. If he gets pneumonia, we can lick that, but we can’t lick what’s in his head.”

Hap gave me a queer look as if he’d put me and McCord in the same classification, but he made no further protest.

When we reached the top of the rise by the pool, McCord stopped and began wagging his arms about in the air until the little furry Diomedes began tumbling over each other to get out of the water. Then McCord tossed off his shorts and gave the rest of us a shove to one side. He poised, trembling, looked into the water, and stopped—

He seemed to collapse all over like a pricked balloon. We couldn’t tell whether his body was trembling with cold or from the sudden great sobs that broke from him as he began to go back down the rise.

Hap and the machinists turned away. They couldn’t stand the sight of a man so broken by some inexplicable fear. But I touched him on the shoulder.

“Maybe if I gave you a shove—” I suggested.

He looked up at me with his tear-filled, baby-blue eyes like an ungainly St. Bernard. His head wagged slowly. “You know, don’t you, Stevens?”

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

It seemed to do something to McCord. He gathered himself into a knot and then ran back up the slope with all his might. At the top he closed his eyes and grasped his nose like a kid and leaped.

The tremendous splash covered us with icy water, but we didn’t duck. We looked to see what was going to happen to McCord.

For a moment it looked as if he were drowning, so violently did he thrash around. His face came up out of the water purplish as if he were struggling for air. Yet I knew he hadn’t been there long enough to use a half lungful.

It wasn’t lack of air. It w7as in his head.

Abruptly he stopped fighting the water. He struck out with a long, somewhat awkward stroke, but it was a stroke that had belonged to a once-experienced . swimmer. He went around the pool once, then stopped in front of us, treading water.

“It’s gone for good this time, fellows. My hydrophobia’s gone for good.”

When I saw Captain Wilkins next morning he was in a blue fury. I heard him raging up and down the bridge and before I even came in I could hear McCord’s name mentioned vigorously several times.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

The captain stopped long enough to eye me up and down as if I were an imbecile. “Wrong!”

Then his eyes settled on me steadily and a beatific expression came over him. “Stevens—it seems to me that McCord has taken a strange liking to you. He told me last night that you were the only one around here that understood him. Maybe you can talk to him and straighten him out.”

The captain’s voice was sugary and I knew it meant I’d better get some results or it would be my neck in the stocks next.

“What’s he done?” I asked.

“It’s what he’s going to do. He insists on taking this cargo of pens that I’ve lugged across seventy light-years of space and trading them to the Arthoids for their inferior grade of Jewelworlds that give enough distortion to make a man think he’s drunk every time he looks into one.”

‘‘Why not the Diomedes first?”

“That's what you’re going to find out.”

McCord was in the bathtub when I went in. He had taken six baths during the night and had had three more before breakfast.

“What’s the dope on our new trading angle?" I asked.

He dunked completely under the water and bubbled up again like a kid. “Just a new wrinkle. Going to make the Diomedes jealous and give us a better deal. I found out they could produce twice as many Jewelworlds as they do if they weren’t so darn lazy.”

It sounded a bit fishy. I didn’t think the Diomedes had any capacity for an emotion like jealousy.

"You don't mean to trade all our pens with the Arthoids, do you?”

“No, just eight or ten cases of them ought to be enough.”

“But that won't leave enough to make a decent trade with the Diomedes !”

“Sure it will. You’ll see.”

“I don’t know whether I will or not. Captain Wilkins is about ready to go out and try to make a deal himself.”

That got McCord. He went pale all over. He stood up and began to dry himself. He was shaking again though the room was warm.

“He can’t do that! Stevens, you’ve got to help me. Say you'll do it.”

“Do what? I’d like to know what the score is.”

“It’s awfully important to me,” pleaded McCord, “and it’s nothing that will hurt the traders, but we’ve got to work with the Arthoids first. Maybe five cases of pens will be enough to make the Diomedes jealous. Persuade the captain for me, will you ?’

I had that hunch again that something tremendous—for McCord— was going on inside his skull. But I was a little dubious about his inexplicable desire to trade with the Arthoids first. That jealousy angle was phony as a glass eye.

“I’ll do it,” I said for no reason that I could fathom. It was a hunch and I prayed it wouldn’t be a bad one.

I went back to the captain and explained the jealousy angle.

He looked at me out of one eye. “You don’t believe that gag, do you?”

“Why not?” I said innocently. “Figure it out for yourself. These little gadget maniacs are craftsmen. When they see we're trading with their rivals first, they’ll know something’s wrong with the deal they’ve been giving us. Always we go to the Arthoids second and fill up with the second-rate stuff after we’ve got all the first grade we can get. We know about how much we can expect from the Diomedes so we reverse the procedure and get a better deal next time we come around.”

“You’re either a blockhead or a liar,” said Captain Wilkins. “But if he only wants to trade five cases of pens to the Arthoids we’ll humor him. I'm going to see Thorgersen about this when we get back, though.”

So we traded with the Arthoids first. McCord led the trading procession next day and five of us followed his regal obesity across the plain, past the pool where the Diomedes stopped to stare at us as if they coudn’t believe their eyes. They knew what was going on, but McCord didn’t give them a second glance.

We paraded on over to the mesa on the opposite side of the valley, where the Arthoids were poking around in their caves. Their powerful, roselike odor filled the air. The five of us stopped while McCord went ahead to palaver with his arm waving. None of us knew where he had picked it up. He wouldn’t teach it to anyone else and any other traders had to get along as best they could, which wasn’t very good. I once tried waving my hands around in front of a Diomede for a couple of hours and the only response I got was his turning over and going to sleep.

But it seemed as if McCord was having instant and overwhelming success. The Arthoids came tumbling out of their caves, apparently flattered by our coming to them first. Each one was juggling an armful of their second-rate Jewelworlds.

We watched McCord pick up one and look at it. He set it down and haggled some more. Finally, he called us over and we began dealing out the pens in exchange for the Jewelworlds.

I got that queer feeling in the pit of my stomach again about those pens as I saw the way the little creatures grabbed them so excitedly, made sure they could operate them and then dashed up to their holes in the cliffs again. There was something distinctly not right, but it was only a hunch again and I decided to stay shut up.

It took us quite a number of trips to bring back all the Jewelworlds we got for five cases of pens. The Arthoids refused to help. They said the Diomedes still had one bank of eggbeaters with a little power left and were waiting to catch some Arthoids at close range.

By the time the deal was over and we had trundled the loot back to the ship the day was pretty well gone. The days are several hours shorter than on Earth, anyway. We decided to wait until tomorrow before approaching the Diomedes.

McCord took some more baths. Nobody else could get in the tub because he was always there. I began to think he’d grow gills.

And the way he drank water—

I saw him drink three quarts in a row at least twice in that one day, and he had several pints in between as a sort of chaser. Once, somebody offered him a glass of beer and I thought he was going to lay the man out.

Along about suppertime, which was after dark, the commotion started.

It started as if the Cassiopeia were suddenly being pounded with a hail of shrapnel and a sort of unearthly squealing and yelling filled the air.

We raced to the ports and looked out after turning on the outside lights. There must have been about four or five thousand Diomedes out there throwing stones at the ship and making those little squealing noises.

“McCord!” Captain  Wilkins thundered. “See what’s wrong out there!”

McCord obediently got out of the bathtub and hastily donned a robe. He went out through the hatch and raised his arms above his head. The clamor stopped instantly but the little Diomedes crouched and cowered as if in intense pain. There was a lot of arm waving then between McCord and the furry creatures, then McCord slowly came up the companionway.

“Well—?” Captain Wilkins looked as if he were ready to throw McCord bodily down the stairs again.

“I guess we muffed it, captain. The Arthoids seem to be getting even for that eggbeater deal.”

Captain Wilkins went white under his space tan. So did every other member of the crew present.

“You mean they’ve made a weapon out of those pens?”

McCord nodded.

I looked at him suspiciously. The whole business smelled as high as McCord used to, but there was nothing I could put a finger on. Who could have suspected that the Arthoids could do anything with a harmless object like a pen?

Nobody but me, and it was only a hunch.

“What have they done?” Captain Wilkins asked.

“It seems that the Diomedes have a system of communication that we have never suspected. They are like bats. They generate supersonic waves, and by means of very delicate organs they can detect those waves. The Arthoids knew that and that’s why they were so glad to have the supersonic pens. They’ve hooked them all in phase and turned them on full power. They are slowly torturing the Diomedes to death through their sensitive hearing organs. They’ll all be dead by morning unless we help them.”

Captain Wilkins let out a groan that was echoed by all the rest of us. We visioned our trading careers blighted for the rest of our lives. The Council wouldn’t allow any company to hire us after this boner.

“There’s something else, too,” said McCord.

“You couldn’t possibly make it worse,” said Captain Wilkins.

“I’m afraid so. I learned something else. The Jewelworlds have a property we didn’t know anything about. Ordinarily, the Diomedes live several hundreds of our years, but when one of them dies all the Jewelworlds it has made cease functioning no matter where they are. That means that all the Jewelworlds we have ever brought back will be practically worthless.”

Captain Wilkins was too stupefied by this news to groan any more. He merely sat down and buried his face in his hands.

Dunc Edwards looked out the port towards the far stars. “We could head out away from the Solar System as far as our fuel would take us,” he suggested.

Captain Wilkins glared at him, but he was deadly serious.

And then McCord spoke again. “I have a suggestion.”

Captain Wilkins’ glare turned on him was permission to speak.

“The only solution is for us to exterminate the Arthoids,” said McCord.

“How would you do that, even if it weren’t stupid to even think of such a thing ?”

“I have a method,” said McCord quietly.

Every eye turned upon him. A cold wave swept over us and we all seemed to get the same idea at the same time. That gadget McCord had been working on during the trip —his insistence on trading with the Arthoids first.

“Why, you—” I spluttered.

“You planned this!” Captain Wilkins thundered.

“Captain!” McCord’s voice was full of hurt and he averted his eyes.

I don’t quite know yet what saved McCord from being slaughtered right there in the ship in the next fifteen minutes. Captain Wilkins swore, the men of the crew tried to grab McCord but he beat them off with a heavy metal chair and when our rage had exhausted us, he said quietly, "I suggest you call Timothy Thorgersen and get permission to exterminate the Arthoids. It can be done in such a way that it will appear that the Diomedes have done it without any help from us.”

All this time the clamor outside had been going on again. The Diomedes peppered the ship with rocks and kept up their high-pitched squealing that we didn’t even know they could make before, pleading for our help.

“It’s the only way,” said McCord.

Slowly, Captain Wilkins turned around to the communication panel and put in a call for Timothy Thorgersen. Every man in the room knew that it was the end of his trading career and there was murder in their eyes as they glowered at McCord.

It took a while to get Thorgersen on the beam. He was out partying somewhere as usual and his face was flushed and angry as he came in view. “What is the meaning of this interruption, captain ?” he snapped.

Briefly, Captain Wilkins explained the situation and the solution as given by McCord.

On the color screen we could see the blood rush to Thorgersen’s head and the little veins in his forehead swelled and pulsed. “McCord 1” he spat. “Put him on!”

Captain Wilkins beckoned to McCord who seemed as calm as a spring morning as he walked between the threatening crew members towards the thunderous image of Thorgersen.

“Yes?” said McCord.

“McCord, what’s the meaning of this ? Isn’t there some way out besides what Wilkins says you suggest ?”

“None at all, Mr. Thorgersen. There is something else you should know', too: I took a bath.”

Thorgersen seemed to go pale on the screen, but he blustered, “Your personal pathologies are nothing to me.”

“You know what I mean,” said McCord evenly and there was a tone in his voice that we had never heard before. “I took a bath.”

“I want to know what this is all about!”

“I’ll take care of this situation on Merans so that you will never have to worry about your supply of Jewelworlds again. You will be able to get all you want.”

“Go ahead,” said Thorgersen. “Slaughter the whole bunch of Arthoids if necessary as long as Barter, Inc. is not connected with it.”

“There are certain concessions that I want,” said McCord, “before I save your precious Diomedes. I want my share of the profits from the Jewelworlds which you have robbed me of during the last eight years. I want a return of my share in the trading company we formed. In exchange for this I’ll save your main asset of Barter, Inc. and forget that you tried to murder me.”

Thorgersen sputtered with incipient apoplexy, but before he could speak, McCord went on again. “All the agreements I want you to sign are in the hands of my lawyers along with the murder charge that will be released if you fail to comply. There are about five hundred witnesses to your attempted murder and they are all living.”

“You’re crazy! You can’t threaten—”

“I can and am. The Diomedes are intelligent creatures, and now that I can speak vocally with them their testimony will be admitted in any court. I’ll keep the Arthoids from killing the five hundred I need until they can testify against you. Better call my lawyers and make up your mind fast. I’ll give you a half hour.”

McCord gave the name of his law firm and clicked off.

The rest of us stared openmouthed at McCord, the changed McCord. He had browbeat the one man we all feared because of the arbitrary control he exercised over us.

But now McCord seemed to sag as if some great energy had gone out of him and he sank down on a chair.

"What are you trying to do?” asked Captain Wilkins. “You can’t blackmail Thorgersen. That’s suicide to try to pull a stunt like that on him.”

"It’s not blackmail,” said McCord in a tired voice. “It’s merely an attempt at justice. When Thorgersen and I landed on this planet eight years ago we had a joint interest in the trading company that we had formed.

“Sure, I had a reputation then of being a drunken bum and not caring about anything. I admit it. I was young and didn’t have a brain in my head, I guess. Thorgersen was older and more settled. He took this trading business seriously and I was in for the fun of it. He was determined to roll the thing into a big corporation with great fleets of trading ships like he finally got. But that seemed too much like business red tape to me. I would have been content with a half dozen ships and a bottle of good whiskey on Saturday nights. Thorgersen saw me as just an anchor to him.

“Then I found the Jewelworlds here on Merans and saw their possibilities. I knew they’d be worth a fortune if we exploited them right. Thorgersen admitted I had a good idea, so good that he tried to murder me in order that he wouldn’t have to share the profits with me.

“I celebrated the discovery of the Jewelworlds with an extra quart and while I was half cockeyed Thorgersen tapped me on the head and threw me in the pool out there where the Diomedes swim. That’s what gave me my psychosis.”

Dunc Edwards snorted. "You aren’t going to try to tell us that you actually had a hydrophobia that kept you away from water!”

“I’m telling you,” said McCord evenly. “The Diomedes fished me out and brought me around. That was when I worked out a sign language with them and they became so friendly because I showed them how my pocket visor worked. The little devils took it apart and made a death ray out of it that they turned on the Arthoids until the power ran out. I later gave one to the Arthoids to get in solid with them.

“Thorgersen kept trying to hang around and get a load of Jewelworlds, but I told the Diomedes not to give him any. When I finally confronted him, he thought he was seeing a ghost, but when he found out about my psychosis he thought I was crazy and that it would be safe enough to take me back, which I bargained for by getting some of the Jewelworlds for him.

“For eight years I’ve been trying to get up courage to go back into that pool where he tried to drown me. I knew it was the only thing that would cure me, and that if I didn’t make it this trip I never would. So I made arrangements before we left to bargain with Thorgersen for what he stole from met”

Captain Wilkins was about to . break in when the gong sounded and Thorgersen was back. His apoplectic face was pale now and his jowls sagged. “I’ve signed,” he said. “You see that you take care of your end. Come in and see me when you get back.”

He cut off without giving McCord a chance to speak. McCord checked with his lawyers and found that Thorgersen had kicked through. He had complied in every detail.

McCord rose then and gathered into himself some of the new energy he seemed to possess.

"Damned clever,” Captain Wilkins muttered. “I’ve never seen a deal put over like that before.”

“You think I’m lying?” McCord said.

“Sure. I don’t care how drunk you were or how hard you were hit. Merely being thrown in a pool wouldn’t give you a psychosis for the rest of your life that would make you afraid to drink a glass of water.”

“There were five hundred Diomedes swimming in the pool at the time,” said McCord patiently. “They were responsible for it indirectly.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Have you ever seen the demonstration where supersonic waves are set up in an oil bath by a crystal vibrating at such frequencies being immersed in the bath?”

“I’ve heard of such.”

“You stick your finger in the oil and it will nearly burn it off. Remember?”

“Sure, but—”

“There were five hundred Diomedes in that pool, some under the surface, some swimming on top. They were chattering and gossiping their heads off—at supersonic frequencies. It was like being thrown in a vat of boiling oil. The hundreds of frequencies beat together and produced waves that hammered and tore at me and others that burned. It didn’t bother the Diomedes, of course. They’re built for it. But I thought I was being boiled alive.

“The Diomedes fished me out of there, but from then on every time I saw so much as a glass of water I felt that burning and tearing energy again. I couldn’t help it. It would drive me crazy to hear water dripping from a tap even. I could only drink something I knew was not water, and whiskey nearly finished the job it had begun.

“I knew I had to get back into that pool without the Diomedes in it. Nothing else would cure me, but it took eight years to get courage enough to do it.”

No one spoke when McCord was through. No one had a moment’s doubt now of the truth of his story. He spoke simply and with the ingratiating honesty that he had always tried to project through his drunkenness though the knowledge of what others thought of him must have been torture.

He went out of the room and after a moment we followed silently behind him.

He stepped out of the hatch and we all caught the overpowering smell of the ologenerator going full blast again. We wondered why in the world he had that thing on again.

But there was an obvious change in the Diomedes now. They rose from their cowering attitude and flocked around him worshipfully.

We saw the little gadget in his hand which he had built during the trip out. It was connected with a little microphone at his lips. We knew now what it was: A device for speaking and listening to the supersonic voice frequencies of the Diomedes. The creatures were quiet, listening to him and when he finished they trooped past him in single file and he handed out several dozen ologenerators which we didn’t even know he had. When they were all gone he left us and crossed the dark plain to the holes of the Arthoids in the cliffs opposite. An hour later he was back.

“What’s the score?” asked Captain Wilkins finally.

“There’s a truce,” said McCord. “It’s an armed truce, but I don’t think it will ever be broken. The Arthoids have got the supersonic pens to annoy the Diomedes’ hearing organs, and the Diomedes have got the ologenerators.”

“What good are they?” asked Dunc.

“Haven’t you ever noticed the smell around the Arthoids’ caves? Like roses and orchids? The Arthoids communicate  too—by means of a sense of smell, using their olfactory organs. The ologenerators will raise the merry devil with them if the .Diomedes turn them on. But each side knows better now than to turn on its weapons. If it does, retaliation will be quick. I had to go over and make the Arthoids understand that. They’re sore, but very agreeable.”

“Won’t these things kill the creatures?” I asked.

“Of course not! The Diomedes and Arthoids are my friends!” McCord turned his wide, blue eyes on me in that hurt expression again. “The pens and the ologenerators are annoying as the devil to them, but they won’t harm them.”

“How could you talk to the Diomedes even if you could use supersonics? You hadn’t learned their vocal language,” I said.

McCord shook his head. “I wasn’t sure I could, and don’t ask me how. Their heads are like Jewelworlds. Any language creates the pictures it was meant to convey and their words do the same to me. No abstractions, of course, but we managed.”

We felt better now. All but Captain Wilkins. He sat in his chair as morose as ever. I asked what the trouble was.

He looked up. “Do you think Thorgersen is going to take this lying down? He may be a crook and a murderer and McCord may be safe enough from him, but look what he’ll do to us! He’ll take it all out on us as soon as we get back. I think we might as well resign and find a new trade right now.”

McCord brightened. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that, Captain. Didn’t I tell you? The transfer of the ownership of the Cassiopeia was one item of my conditions that Thorgersen signed. You fellows all work for me now.” He looked around hopefully at the ring of men. “I hope you don’t mind, fellows,” he said.

Wide grins gave him his answer. Anybody that could come out on top of a deal with Thorgersen was a good man.

“I think we should celebrate now,” McCord said. He leaned towards an audio panel on the wall and called the galley. “Send up a couple of dozen quarts right away!” There was a moment’s pause as he listened, then he exploded in indignation.

“No!” he roared. “Water!”

THE END.

Content

Utility
by David Anderson