The Green Hills of Earth

I hear twelve?»

The heavy-set man flicked a thumb upward. «Twelve hundred from Patron van Huysen. I see I've made a mistake and am wasting your time; the intervals should be not less than two hundred. Do I hear fourteen? Do I hear fourteen? Going once for twelve ... going twi – »

«Fourteen,» Rigsbee said sullenly.

«Seventeen,» Van Huysen added at once.

«Eighteen,» snapped Rigsbee.

«Nooo,» said the agent, «no interval of less than two, please.»

«All right, dammit, nineteen!»

«Nineteen I hear. It's a hard number to write; who'll make it twenty-one?» Van Huysen's thumb nicked again. «Twenty-one it is. It takes money to make money. What do I hear? What do I hear?» He paused. «Going once for twenty-one ... going twice for twenty-one. Are you giving up so easily, Patron Rigsbee?»

«Van Huysen is a – « The rest was muttered too indistinctly to hear.

«One more chance, gentlemen. Going, going, ... GONE! – « He smacked his palms sharply together. « – and sold to Patron van Huysen for twenty-one hundred credits. My congratulations, sir, on a shrewd deal.»

Wingate followed his new master out the far door. They were stopped in the passageway by Rigsbee. «All right, Van, you've had your fun. I'll cut your losses for two thousand.»

«Out of my way.»

«Don't be a fool. He's no bargain. You don't know how to sweat a man – I do.» Van Huysen ignored him, pushing on past. Wingate followed him out into warm winter drizzle to the parking lot where steel crocodiles were drawn up in parallel rows. Van Huysen paused beside a thirty-foot Remington. «Get in.»

The long boxlike body of the crock was stowed to its load line with supplies Van Huysen had purchased at the base. Sprawled on the tarpaulin which covered the cargo were half a dozen men. One of them stirred as Wingate climbed over the side. «Hump! Oh, Hump!»

It was Hartley. Wingate was surprised at his own surge of emotion. He gripped Hartley's hand and exchanged friendly insults. «Chums,» said Hartley, «meet Hump Wingate. He's a right guy. Hump, meet the gang. That's Jimmie right behind you. He rassles this velocipede.»

The man designated gave Wingate a bright nod and moved forward into the operator's seat. At a wave from Van Huysen, who had seated his bulk in the little sheltered cabin aft, he pulled back on both control levers and the crocodile crawled away, its caterpillar treads clanking and chunking through the mud.

Three of the six were old-timers, including Jimmie, the driver. They had come along to handle cargo, the ranch products which the patron had brought in to market and the supplies he had purchased to take back. Van Huysen had bought the contracts of two other clients in addition to Wingate and Satchel Hartley. Wingate recognized them as men he had known casually in the Evening Star and at the assignment and conditioning station. They looked a little woebegone, which Wingate could thoroughly understand, but the men from the ranch seemed to be enjoying themselves. They appeared to regard the opportunity to ride a load to and from town as an outing. They sprawled on the tarpaulin and passed the time gossiping and getting acquainted with the new chums.

But they asked no personal questions. No labor client on Venus was ever asked anything about what he had been before he shipped with the company unless he first volunteered information. It «wasn't done.»

Shortly after leaving the outskirts of Adonis the car slithered down a sloping piece of ground, teetered over a low bank, and splashed logily into water. Van Huysen threw up a window in the bulkhead which separated the cabin from the hold and shouted, «Dumkopf! How many times do I tell you to take those launchings slowly?»

«Sorry, Boss,» Jimmie answered. «I missed it.»

«You keep your eyes peeled, or I get me a new crocker!» He slammed the port. Jimmie glanced around and gave the other clients a sly wink. He had his hands full; the marsh they were traversing looked like solid ground, so heavily was it overgrown with rank vegetation. The crocodile now functioned as a boat, the broad flanges of the treads acting as paddle wheels. The wedge-shaped prow pushed shrubs and marsh grass aside, or struck and ground down small trees. Occasionally the lugs would bite into the mud of a shoal bottom, and, crawling over a bar, return temporarily to the status of a land vehicle. Jimmie's slender, nervous hands moved constantly over the controls, avoiding large trees and continually seeking the easiest, most nearly direct route, while he split his attention between the terrain and the craft's compass.

Presently the conversation lagged and one of the ranch hands started to sing. He had a passable tenor voice and was soon joined by others. Wingate found himself singing the choruses as fast as he learned them. They sang Pay Book and Since the Pusher Met My Cousin and a mournful thing called They Found Him in the Bush. But this was followed by a light number, The Night the Rain Stopped, which seemed to have an endless string of verses recounting various unlikely happenings which occurred on that occasion. («The Squeezer bought a round-a-drinks – «)

Jimmie drew applause and enthusiastic support in the choruses with a ditty entitled That Redheaded Venusburg Gal, but Wingate considered it inexcusably vulgar. He did not have time to dwell on the matter; it was followed by a song which drove it out of his mind.

The tenor started it, slowly and softly. The others sang the refrains while he rested – all but Wingate; he was silent and thoughtful throughout. In the triplet of the second verse the tenor dropped out and the others sang in his place.

«Oh, you stamp your paper and you sign your name,

(«Come away! Come awayl)

«They pay your bounty and you drown your shame.

(«Rue the day! Rue the day!)

«They land you down at Ellis Isle and put you in a pen;

«There you see what happens to the Six-Year men —

«They haven't paid their bounty and they sign 'em up again!

(«Here to stay! Here to stay!)

«But me I'll save my bounty and a ticket on the ship,

(«So you say! So you say!)

«And then you'll see me leavin' on the very next trip.

(«Come the day! Come the day!)

«Oh, we've heard that kinda story just a thousand times and one.

«Now we wouldn't say you're lyin' but we'd like to see it done.

«We'll see you next at Venusburg apayin' for your fun!

«And you'll never meet your bounty on this hitch!

(«Come away!»)

It left Wingate with a feeling of depression not entirely accounted for by the tepid drizzle, the unappetizing landscape, nor by the blanket of pale mist which is the invariable Venerian substitute for the open sky. He withdrew to one corner of the hold and kept to himself, until, much later, Jimmie shouted, «Lights ahead!»

Wingate leaned out and peered eagerly toward his new home.

Four weeks and no word from Sam Houston Jones. Venus had turned once on its axis, the fortnight long Venerian «winter» had given way to an equally short «summer» – indistinguishable from «winter» except that the rain was a trifle heavier and a little hotter – and now it was «winter» again. Van Huysen's ranch, being near the pole, was, like most of the tenable area of Venus, never in darkness. The miles-thick, everpresent layer of clouds tempered the light of the low-hanging sun during the long day, and, equally, held the heat and diffused the light from a sun just below the horizon to produce a continuing twilight during the two-week periods which were officially «night,» or «winter.»

Four weeks and no word. Four weeks and no sun, no moon, no stars, no dawn. No clean crisp breath of morning air, no life-quickening beat of noonday sun, no welcome evening shadows, nothing, nothing at all to distinguish one sultry, sticky hour from the next but the treadmill routine of sleep and work and food and sleep again – nothing but the gathering ache in his heart for the cool blue skies of Terra.

He had acceded to the invariable custom that new men should provide a celebration for the other clients and had signed the Squeezer's chits to obtain happywater – rhira – for the purpose – to discover, when first he signed the pay book, that his gesture of fellowship had cost him another four months of