| Seth joined them shortly after they’d finished their meal. Taking a
chair, he wiped condensed steam off his face, looked them over
calculatingly.
‘How much do you two know?’
‘Enough to fight over it,’ put in Elissa. ‘They are bothered about
duties, who defines them and who performs them.’
‘With good reason,’ Harrison counter-attacked. ‘You can’t escape them
yourselves.’
‘Is that so?’ said Seth. ‘How d’you make that out?’
‘This world runs on some strange system of swapping obligations. How
would any person cancel an ob unless he recognized it as his duty to do
so?’
‘Duty nothing,’ declared Seth. ‘Duty hasn’t anything to do with it. And
if it did happen to be a matter of duty every man would be left to
recognize it for himself. It would be outrageous impertinence for anyone
to remind him, unthinkable that anyone should order him.’
‘Some guys must make an easy living,’ interjected Gleed. ‘There’s
nothing to stop them that I can see.’ He studied Seth briefly before he
asked, ‘How can you cope with a citizen who has no conscience?’
‘Easy as pie.’
Elissa suggested, ‘Tell them the story of Idle
Jack.’
‘It’s a kid’s yarn,’ explained Seth. ‘All children here know it by
heart. It’s a classic fable like . . . like—’ He screwed up his face.
‘I’ve lost track of the Terran tales the first-comers brought with
them.’
‘Red Riding Hood,’ offered Harrison.
‘Yes.’ Seth seized upon it gratefully. ‘Something like that one. A
nursery story.’ He licked his lips, began, ‘This Idle Jack came from Terra
as a baby, grew up in our new world, gained an understanding of our
economic system and thought he’d be mighty smart. He decided to become a
scratcher.’
‘What’s a scratcher?’ asked Gleed.
‘One who lives by accepting obs but does nothing about wiping them out
or planting any of his own. One who takes everything that’s going and
gives nothing in return.’
‘We’ve still got ’em,’ said Gleed.
‘Up to age sixteen Jack got away with it all along the line. He was
only a kid, see? All kids tend to scratch to a certain extent. We expect
it and allow for it. But after sixteen he was soon in the soup.’
‘How?’ urged Harrison, more interested than he was willing to
admit.
‘He loafed around the town gathering obs by the armful. Meals, clothes
and all sorts for the mere asking. It wasn’t a big town. There are no big
ones on this planet. They are just small enough for everybody to know
everybody—and everyone does plenty of gabbing. Within a few months the
entire town knew that Jack was a determined and incorrigible
scratcher.’
‘Go on,’ said Harrison impatiently.
‘Everything dried up,’ responded Seth. ‘Wherever Jack went people gave
him the, “I won’t.” He got no meals, no clothes, no company, no
entertainment, nothing. He was avoided like a leper. Soon be became
terribly hungry, busted into someone’s larder one night, treated himself
to the first square meal in a week.’
‘What did they do about that?’
‘Nothing, not a thing.’
‘That must have encouraged him some, mustn’t it?’
‘How could it?’ asked Seth with a thin smile. ‘It did him no good. Next
day his belly was empty again. He was forced to repeat the performance.
And the next day. And the next. People then became leery, locked up their
stuff and kept watch on it. Circumstances grew harder and harder. They
grew so unbearably hard that soon it was a lot easier to leave the town
and try another one. So Idle Jack went away.’
‘To do the same again,’ Harrison prompted.
‘With the same results for the same reasons,’ Seth threw back at him.
‘On he went to a third town, a fourth, a fifth, a twentieth. He was
stubborn enough to be witless.’
‘But he was getting by,’ Harrison insisted. ‘Taking all for nothing at
the cost of moving around.’
‘Oh, no he wasn’t. Our towns are small, as I said. And people do plenty
of visiting from one to another. In the second town Jack had to risk being
seen and talked about by visitors from the first town. In the third town
he had to cope with talkers from both the first and second ones. As he
went on it became a whole lot worse. In the twentieth he had to chance
being condemned by anyone coming from any of the previous nineteen.’ Seth
leaned forward, said with emphasis, ‘He never reached town number
twenty-eight.’
‘No?’
‘He lasted two weeks in number twenty-five, eight days in number
twenty-six, one day in twenty- seven. That was almost the end. He knew
he’d be recognized the moment he showed his face in number
twenty-eight.’
‘What did he do then?’
‘He took to the open country, tried to live like an animal feeding on
roots and wild berries. Then he disappeared-until one day some walkers
found him swinging from a tree. His body was emaciated and clad in rags.
Loneliness, self-neglect and his own stupidity had combined to kill him.
That was Idle Jack, the scratcher. He wasn’t twenty years old.’
‘On Terra,’ remarked Gleed virtuously, ‘we don’t hang people merely for
being shiftless and lazy.’
‘Neither do we,’ said Seth. ‘We give them every encouragement to go
hang themselves. And when they do it’s good riddance to bad rubbish.’ He
eyed them shrewdly as he went on, ‘But don’t let it worry you. Nobody has
been driven to such drastic measures in my lifetime, leastways, not that
I’ve heard about. People honour their obs as a matter of economic
necessity and not from any sense of duty. Nobody gives orders, nobody
pushes anyone around, but there’s a kind of compulsion built into the
circumstances of this planet’s way of life. People play square—or they
suffer. Nobody enjoys suffering, not even a numbskull.’
|
