Heap Big Medicine
Original Science Fiction Stories – July 1959
(1959)*
Robert Silverberg
It was an ironic reversal of the usual course of things. Instead of the colonists corrupting the simple-minded natives with whiskey, the natives were undermining the colonists with their powerful hooch!
-
I
I STARED broodingly out the window of the colony administration hut and watched two of my best men come rolling home, dead drunk, by the light of the silvery moons. They were the sociologists, McGuire and Crawford, who had gone over to the Berangii village in the morning to carry out some field work.
Well, they had carried out field work, all right. They came staggering across the meadow arm in arm, bellowing raucously about a Venusian wench named Nell. Projecting from the left-hand hip pocket of Crawford's leather jerkin was the blunt, corked snout of a Berangii whiskey-flask. Both men looked as if they had really tied one on.
I was sore. I have nothing against drinking as such, even though I'm personally a teetotaler; I simply don't like the way the stuff tastes. But I do object to drinking when it interferes with the work of building a colony. And I also object when two staid and respectable sociologists come home yodelling barroom ditties and waking up the entire settlement.
Springing out into the compound, I collared McGuire and Crawford and felt them go jelly-limp in my hands, as if they were happy that somebody else was assuming the burden of keeping them perpendicular. McGuire is six inches taller than I am, and Crawford five inches shorter, so the job of propping them up nearly overbalanced me, and we came within a smidgeon of tumbling to the ground.
-
I SHORED them up, leaned them against each other, and gave them my best top-sergeant glare. "Where have you two ninnies been?"
"In th' Berangii village," Crawford mumbled.
"Interviewing the chief," McGuire added. "Sociological data. Determining cultural matrices." At least, that's what I think he was saying.
I yanked the flask from Crawford's pocket, uncorked it, and took a whiff. It had the remarkable sour-milk odor of the Berangii rotgut. Ignoring Crawford's anguished moan, I upended the flask and contributed about half a liter of native whiskey to the nutrition of the flora underfoot. I tossed the flask into a refuse-bin. I glowered at the weaving and wobbling duo of sociologists. "Fine pair of scientists you two are! Go out on a research mission, you come home tanked!"
They giggled.
"I don't see anything funny about it! It's past midnight, and you've awakened half the settlement with your damned yawping. Go along, you rum-pots! Think you can find your way to bed without help?"
Arm in arm, they staggered across the compound clearing and uncertainly threaded their way into their dormitory hut. Shaking my head, I sadly returned to my own shack. It was, I thought gloomily, a "hell of a way to colonize a planet.
-
I PULLED out the roster sheet and put little checkmarks next to the names of McGuire and Crawford. Then I added up. Out of the hundred fifty-three members of the colony, forty were now checked off as being dangerously susceptible to the Berangii whiskey. About a dozen others, including me, were ticked off as hard-core teetotalers who weren't likely to succumb.
That left a hundred colonists still awaiting their first sip of the sauce. But it wouldn't be long before they had had their chance; the Berangii were wondrously generous with their brew.
In the old days, according to the history tapes, it worked the other way around. The white man arrived, bringing civilization and firewater, and lo, the poor sozzled Indian! But here it operated in the other direction. The natives brewed the joy-juice, and the settlers imbibed. The Berangii whiskey was a greater menace to the success of our colony than any quantity of spears or flaming torches. It threatened to paralyze our entire enterprise.
I decided to call a general meeting of the colony the next morning, before work began. The situation was getting out of hand. Before long, there might be only a handful of sober Earthmen left on Berang, with all the rest happily swilling away.
My frame of mind was anything but cheerful just then. If I had been a drinking man, I might have had a nip or two. Instead I consoled myself with a tranquilizer. My fears melted gradually away as I sank into a dreamless sleep.
-
CRAWFORD and McGuire both looked fine at the general meeting at 0800 the next day. They didn't even have the traces of hangovers. The Berangii firewater was heap big medicine; a few slugs provided a gloriously salubrious drunk, with none of the usual consequences th; morning after. No wonder my men were taking to it so readily.
I eyed the bunch of them—a hundred fifty-two of Earth's finest, sent out here to carve a new world out of the wilderness. I said, "You know why I've called you all together this morning."
Nobody moved. I clamped hands to hips and looked them over sourly. "Last night, two more members of this outfit came home drunk. I don't need to mention any names. In the last couple of weeks, forty of you have gotten lit up on the Berangii brew. If this keeps up, we're finished here. Finished."
I was pausing simply for dramatic effect, and I didn't expect anyone to speak out. But someone did. He was Mart Romayne, the elongated biochemist who had run the initial tests on the Berangii whiskey and pronounced it fit to drink. Romayne drawled, "You don't drink, Chief, so you don't know how tempting this stuff is. It puts you up on a cloud, and there's no hangover afterward. And the natives keep plying us with flasks of it. I think it makes them feel good to see us happy."
"Anyway," pointed out Dan Campalla. one of the construction engineers, "the Earth stuff is rationed so tight we can't get more than a couple of drops a week. Can you blame us for accepting the Berangii handouts?"
"We don't have any women, and We don't have any entertainment," muttered another of the construction men. "So the aliens come along and they give us free booze. Chief, we're only human!"
-
I FIGURED that was about enough by way of interruption. I snapped, "Sure, you're only human! And that's what the aliens are taking advantage of. Can't you goons see that they're fighting a war against us?"
"War?" grunted the medic, Dave Wesley.
"Yeah, war. Okay, the Berangii signed a treaty allowing us to build a colony on their planet. And yeah, they're friendly and cooperative. Too cooperative. Don't you see," I shouted, "that their whole idea must be to get us all so drunk we can't build the colony? It's sabotage by sociability, that's what it is! We're three days behind schedule now—and falling further behind every time somebody else decides to knock off and get tanked. Don't you think the aliens know what they're doing? They're greasing the skids for us!"
I watched their faces darken, and knew that I was rubbing them the wrong way. They liked the Berangii, and they especially liked the free Berangii booze. They didn't see the big picture, the steady slackening of work in the last few weeks.
"Let me wrap this up for today," I said. "You're all grown men and I'm not going to slap any silly curfews or prohibitions on you. I'm just warning you to go easy on the joy-juice. Even if you have to hurt their feelings, learn how to say no when they hand you the flask. All clear? I hope so."
-
I POINTED to Rollins, our quartermaster. "Roily, tonight at mess you can issue a special round of Earth liquor to anyone who's interested. At least that doesn't knock you as silly as the local stuff. But smell their breath first. Anyone who touches the Berangii booze today is counted out tonight." I took a deep breath. "Okay. Regular assignments, as before. Dismissed!"
They straggled off to their daily tasks. Only Rollins remained. The quartermaster was a short, heavy-set fellow who usually wore an amiable lopsided grin. He wasn't grinning now. " that order, sir ..."
"Special round of liquor tonight, Roily. Wasn't that clear enough?"
"Clear enough, sir. Only—I thought you ought to know—we're running a bit low on the liquor supply, sir. I checked inventory last night. We have ten more days of Scotch, two weeks of gin, eight days of rye. Lesser supplies of other things."
I chewed my lip for a moment. "Okay, Roily. I'll take that into consideration when ordering supplies from Earth. The arrangement for tonight still stands."
"Right, sir."
-
HE HEADED for the mess hall and I started my daily inspection tour. I wasn't surprised to learn that our supply of liquor was running out. Storage space is limited on a ship, and it's assumed that the members of a colonizing outfit can get along without vast supplies of hooch. If there's room after 'the tools go aboard, a few cases of refreshments are included in the cargo.
But something unexpected was happening here. Men who didn't want to tangle with the potent local brew were dipping into our small stock of Earth liquor instead, as a sort of compensation. Everybody was drinking a lot more than normal, except the few total abstainers like myself. And when the Earth liquor was gone, the men who had been drinking it would turn to the Berangii brand.
I went about my rounds dolefully. As usual, there were aliens snooping on the premises—friendly little creatures, half the size of a grown man, shaped like small blue barrels with arms and legs and heads. I couldn't very well order them off the colony grounds; this was their planet, after all. But I knew that most of them had brought flasks along and were surreptitiously inviting my men to join them in a wee nip or two. I wondered how effective my early-morning pep talk was going to be.
I found out. At 1315 hours I paid a visit to the north end of the colony area, where four men under the supervision of Dan Campalla were supposed to be damming a creek. Two of the men were flat on their backs with their legs dangling in the water; the other two were in varying states of alcoholic daze. As for Campalla, he was gamely carrying on alone, digging a channel for the dam. But he was half crocked himself, and the channel he was digging was about 110 degrees out of skew with the creekbed. Empty Berangii flasks lay scattered all around.
-
CAMPALLA saw me and stopped digging long enough to salute. "G'd afternoon, sir.""
"What the hell's going on here, Campalla?"
"The men had some refreshment during the lunch break. They don't seem fit to work right now."
A flood of mixed obscenities and profanities bubbled up toward the front of my mouth. But before I could get them out, a native stepped out of a clump of tangled shrubbery and extended a brown earthenware flask with one of his skinny double-elbowed arms.
"Earthman boss want a drink?"
"Earthman boss no want a drink," I snapped in my pidgin-Berangii. "Thanks all the same."
The Berangii looked crestfallen. "Drink-stuff make you feel happy-happy. You like."
"I feel happy enough as it is," I muttered darkly, mostly to myself. Campalla had gone back to digging his cockeyed ditch. The alien seemed to be pouting. One of Campalla's workmen came to life long enough to grab the bottle from the Berangii. He took a deep pull and subsided again, wearing an expression of deep content.
I saw I wasn't going to get anywhere by raising a fuss right now. I walked away. The situation, I thought glumly, was getting completely out of hand.
-
II
THAT NIGHT, ten of the men had to be carried back to camp. A couple of dozen more were pretty wobbly on their pins. At least thirty others had been imbibing during the day, and showed it to some degree. Close to half the camp had that inebriated glow, and only forty men were interested in the extra ration of Terran liquor that Rollins was handing out.
After mess, there was a two-hour twilight period in which Berang's big yellow sun slipped below the horizon, and the three small moons came dancing upward across the sky. Some of the men organized a baseball game, with an audience of a few dozen Berangii. Others congregated for the nightly poker game in Dormitory B. I locked myself in my office and pounded out my weekly report to Earth.
It wasn't much of a report.
I was concealing the booze problem as best as I could, but there was no disguising the fact that we were trailing schedule. The way the colonization system works: a couple of hundred skilled specialists are sent out to get a planet shaped up; once they've organized things, got the plumbing installed and the electricity working, the w omen are shipped out and the colony is ready to function as a self-perpetuating, self-sufficient enterprise.
-
USUALLY, the celibate shaping-up period is six months; that gives us time to get things ready and under control. The idea is not to send womenfolk to an alien world until the men have dealt with any unexpected dangers that might have been overlooked by the survey-scout people.
We had been on Berang for seven weeks. Up till three weeks back, the natives had kept their distance, and work had gone along smoothly. But of late there had been plenty of fraternizing, and the results—or lack of them—were beginning to show. The lag in operational scheduling was growing from day to day. And, I figured, at this rate it wouldn't be long before we passed a point of no return, when more men were out of commission than were working. It might be years before I could send the okaying signal that would allow the women to come out here.
It might be never.
In my report to Earth, I re-marked that socializing with the natives was impairing our efficiency somewhat. The "somewhat" made me laugh despite myself. The happy, fun-loving Berangii were quite thoroughly fouling up the works by turning my crew into hard drinkers instead of hard workers
The survey report on Be rang noted that the natives were unusually friendly. Friendly? Hell, yes! They were efficiently murdering us with hospitality!
Something had to be done. The following morning, after breakfast, I sent for Hansen, the linguistics man. He came out of his tent looking peevish and irritable. Like me, Hansen was a teetotaler.
"I'm working the Berangii verbs through the computer, Chief," he grumbled. "Did you have to interrupt me when ..."
"The verbs can wait," I told him. "I want you to accompany me to the Berangii village. I'm going to have to have a little talk with the native chieftain, and I need you as an interpreter."
-
THE BERANGII village was about ten miles from our settlement. It was a smallish agglomeration of two-story mushroom-shaped huts sprouting on both banks of a river. The Berangii don't have a very elaborate culture; they're only a few thousand years into the food-growing and tool-making era, and their folkways are accordingly simple. They were smart enough, though, to be able to think up this devilish way of driving us off their planet.
Hansen and I squatted cross-legged in front of our parked jeep while I talked, via Hansen, with the Berangii top man. The native was so old that his blue skin had taken on a coppery green tinge, and his knobby limbs were encrusted with what looked like barnacles. But his round little eyes were beady and full of life.
I said, "It isn't that we don't appreciate your friendliness. The trouble is that we can't get our colony built if my men are drunk all the time."
...
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]