Exploiter's End, James Causey [best sci fi novels of all time txt] 📗

PEOPLE OR TERMITES, IT'S ALL THE SAME.

THERE'S A LIMIT TO HOW FAR YOU CAN DRIVE THEM!

We time-studied the Term. It moved with a pliant, liquid grace, its four arms flickering over the instrument panel, installing studs, tightening screws, its antennae glowing with the lambent yellow that denoted an agony of effort.

"See?" Harvey's freckled face was smug. "He rates an easy hundred and ten. Whoever took that first study—"

"I took it," I said, squinting at the stop watch.

You could hear him bite his lip. After only two weeks on the job, on a strange planet ninety light-years from home, you don't tell your boss he's cockeyed.

The Term hurried. Its faceted termite eyes were expressionless diamonds, but the antennae gleamed a desperate saffron. If bugs could sweat, I thought wryly. Now the quartz panel installation. Those four arms moved in a blinding frenzy.

But the stop watch was faster. The second hand caught up with the Term. It passed him. Rating: Seventy-four per cent.

I tucked the clipboard under my arm, squeezed through the airlock, and down the ramp. Harvey followed sullenly. The conveyor groaned on, bringing up the next unit, a sleek little cruiser. The Term seized a fifty-pound air wrench, fled up the ramp to the airlock.

"A dozen feet back to the operation," I pointed out. "After the next job he'll have to return forty feet. Then sixty. He's in the hole."

Harvey looked at his shoes. John Barry, the trim superintendent, came puffing down the line, his jowled face anxious about direct labor cost, the way every good super should be. "Anything wrong, Jake?"

"He can't cut it," I said.

Barry frowned up through the airlock at the Term. Those antennae now shone the soft sad purple of despair.

We walked past the body jigs. The air was a haze of blue smoke, punctuated with yellow splashes of flame from the electronic welding guns. Terms scuttled like gigantic spiders over the great silver hulls, their antennae glowing in a pattern of swift bright harmony, right on standard, good cost. Harvey's face was rapt as he watched them. I said harshly:

"Give me your third Production Axiom."

Harvey's shoulders squared. He said stiffly: "Beauty is functional. The quintessence of grace is the clean, soaring beauty of a spaceship's hull—"

"Extrapolate, Harvey."

His lips were tight. "What I see is ugly. Terms must be taught individuality. What I see is a fascinating, deadly beauty—deadly because it's useless. We must sublimate it, grind it down, hammer it out into a useful pattern. Waste motion is a sin...."

"Excellent."

We turned into the administration lift, leaving the iron roar behind us, and on the way up Harvey didn't say a word. I listened for the tinkle of shattering ideals, and said patiently, "You're here to build spaceships. To build them better and cheaper than Consolidated or Solar. Hell, we've even set up a village for the Terms! Electricity, plumbing, luxuries they wouldn't normally enjoy for the next million years—"

"Will they fire him?" Harvey's voice was flat.

My temper was shredding. "Four-day layoff. His third this month. Terms kick in most of their salary for village maintenance. They can't afford a part-time producer."

I could see that Term read out of the gang, leaving the company village, stoically, while his fellows played a wailing dirge of color on their antennae. The farewell song. I could see him trudging over the windswept peak of Cobalt Mountain, staring down at his native village, and shaking with the impact of the Stammverstand, the tribe-mind, the ache and the longing. A wheel, shaken out of orbit. The lonely cog, searching for its lost slot. I could see that Term returning to his tribe. And how they'd tear him to pieces because he was a thing apart, now, an alien.

We walked down the gray corridor, past Psych, past the conference hall, to the silver door marked Methods and Standards. Harvey's blue eyes were remote, stubborn. I clapped him paternally on the shoulder. "Anyone can call one wrong, lad. Forget it."

Harvey slumped down at a computor, and I walked into my private office and shut the door. Harvey's personnel dossier was in my desk. I.Q. 178, fair. Stability quotient two point eight, very bad. Adaptability rating point seven, borderline. Those idiots in Psych! Couldn't they indoctrinate a new man properly?

I waited.

In a moment Harvey came in without knocking and said, "Mr. Eagan, I want to quit."

I took my time lighting a cigar, not raising my head.

His defiant, pleading look.

I blew smoke rings at the visicom and finally said, "Since you were sixteen, you've dreamed of this. Elimination tests, the weeding out, ten thousand other smart, hungry kids fighting you for this job." I tasted the words. "When your contract's up you can write your own ticket anywhere in the system."

He blurted: "I came here full of ideas about the wonderful work Amalgamated was doing to advance backward civilizations. Sure, the Terms have a union. They're paid at standard galactic rates for spacecraft assembly. But you make them live in that village. It costs to run that village. You give it to them with one hand and take it back with the other. All the time you're holding out the promise of racial advancement, individuality, some day the Terms will reach the stars. Nuts!"

"That's Guild propaganda," I said softly.

"The Guild is just a bogey you created to keep the Intersolar Spacecrafters Union in line. There's a Venusport liner due in next week. When it leaves I'll be on it!"

I played Dutch Uncle. I told him he wasn't used to Terminorb's one-and-a-half gravs, that this was just a hangover from the three to five oxygen ratio he wasn't used to. But he said no. Finally I shrugged, scribbled something on an AVO and handed it to him. "All right, Harvey," I said mildly. "Take this down to Carmody, in Psych. He'll give you a clearance."

Harvey's face went white. "Since when do you go to Psych for a clearance?"

I pressed a stud under the desk and two Analysts came in. I told them what to do and Harvey screamed; he fought and bit and clawed, he mouthed unutterable things about what we were doing to the Terms until I chopped him mercifully behind the ear.

"Poor devil," panted one of the Analysts. "Obviously insufficient indoctrination, sir. Would you mind if I spent an hour in Psych for reorientation? He—he upset me."

My eyes stung with pride. Sam had loyalty plus. "Sure thing, Sam. You'd better go too, Barney. He said some pretty ugly things."

They dragged Harvey out and I went over to the visicom, punched a button. I was trembling with an icy rage as Carmody's lean hawk face swam into view. "Hello, Jake," he said languidly. "How's Cost?"

I told him curtly about Harvey. "Another weak sister," I rasped. "Can't you screen them any more? Didn't you note his stability index? I'm going to report this to Starza, Don."

"Relax," Carmody smiled. "Those things happen, Jake. We'll do a few gentle things with scalpel and narcosynthesis, and he'll be back in a week, real eager, the perfect cost analyst."

I'd never liked Carmody. He was so smug; he didn't realize the sacredness of his position. I said coldly, "Put Miss Davis on."

Carmody's grin was knowing. The screen flickered, and Fern's face came into focus. Her moist red lips parted, and I shivered, looking at her, even on a visicom screen. The shining glory of her hair, those cool green eyes. Three months hadn't made a difference.

"How was little old Earth?" I said awkwardly.

"Wonderful!" She was radiant. "I'll see you for lunch."

"Today's grievance day. Dinner?"

"I promised Don," she said demurely.

I swallowed hard. "How about the Term festival tomorrow night?"

"Well, Don sort of asked—"

I tried to laugh it off and Fern said she'd see me later and the screen went blank and I sat there shaking.

The screen flickered again. Starza's great moon face smiled at me and said sweetly, "We're ready to start grieving."

I picked up the time studies that were death sentences for two Terms, and went down the hall to ulcer gulch, the conference room.

Lure a termite away from his tribe. Promise him the stars. Make him bust his thorax on an assembly line. He makes a wonderful worker, with reflexes twice as fast as a human's, but he still isn't an individual. Even when putting a spaceship together, he's still part of the tribe, part of a glowing symphony of color and motion. That's bad for production. Accent on individuality, that was the keynote. The Terms and their union representatives could argue a grievance right to the letter of the contract, but when it came to production standards we had them. Terminorb IV was ninety light-years from the system, and the Terms couldn't afford a home office time and motion analyst. It wasn't worth it. Terms were expendable.

Los Tichnat was committeeman at large for the Term local. He sat regally at the head of the conference table, seven gleaming chitinous feet of him, with his softly pulsating antennae and faceted eyes, and said in a clicking, humorless voice, "The first item is a second-stage grievance. Brother Nadkek, in final assembly, was laid off for one day. Reason: He missed an operation. The grievance, of course, is a mere formality. You will deny it."

Dave Starza winked at me from behind horn-rimmed glasses. He sat like some great bland Buddha, Director of Industrial Relations, genius in outer psychology, ruthless, soft-spoken, anticipator of alien trends. He said in that beautiful velvet voice, "Ordinarily, yes. In this case Nadkek wished to ask his foreman about omitting a welding phase of the operation. While the suggestion was declined, Nadkek showed unmistakable initiative." Starza stressed the word. "We appreciate his interest in the job. He will receive pay for the lost day."

Around the table, antennae flashed amazed colors. A precedent had been set. Interest in the job transcended even the Contract.

"Management sustains the grievance?" Tichnat droned incredulously.

"Of course," Starza said.

Nadkek left the conference room, his antennae a puzzled mauve.

"Next," Starza said pontifically.

The next grievance was simply that a foreman had spoken harshly to a Term. The Term resented it. In his tribe he had been a fighter, prime guardian of the Queen-Mother. Fighters could not be reprimanded as could spinners or workers.

Starza and Tichnat split hairs while I dozed and thought about Fern.

Starza finally promised to reprimand the foreman. It was lovely, the way he thumped on the table, aflame with righteousness, his voice golden thunder, the martyr, hurt by Tichnat's unfairness, yet so eager to compromise, to be fair. The next grievance was work standards. Starza looked at me. This one mattered. This was cost.

I pulled out my study proofs, said, "Radnor, in final assembly. Consistently in the hole. Rating, seventy-four percent—"

"The operation was too tight, Jake. Admit it!"

The thought uncoiled darkly, thundering and reverberating in the horrified caverns of my brain.

A thoughtcaster. So the Guild had thoughtcasters now. The Guild had finally come.

I sat in the dank silence, shaking. A drop of ice crawled slowly down my temple. I stared around the conference table at Starza's frown, at those Term faces, the great faceted eyes.

"We gave this worker every chance," I said, licking my lips. "We put him on another operation. He still couldn't cut it. Even though we've got production to meet, we still give as many chances—"

The thought slashed. It grew into a soundless roar.

"Stop it, Jake! Tell them how Amalgamated, under the cloak of liberation, is strangling the Terms with an alien culture. Tell them what a mockery their contract really is! Tell them about that Term you condemned this morning!"

I fought it. Feeling the blood run from my lip, I fought it. I'd seen strong men driven insane by a thoughtcaster within seconds. My stability index was six point three. Damned high. I fought it. I got to my feet. The room reeled. Those damned Term faces. The shining antennae. I stumbled towards the door. The thought became a whiplash of molten fury.

"Uphold that grievance, Jake! Tell them the truth. Admit the standard was impossible to meet—"

I slammed the door. The voice stopped.

My skull was a shattered fly-wheel, a sunburst of agony. I was retching. I stumbled down the corridor to Psych. Fern was there. I was screaming at her. The Guild was here. They had thoughtcasters. My brain was melting. Fern was white-faced. She had a hypo. I didn't feel it. The last thing I saw was the glimmer of tears in her green eyes.

"... the neuron flow." Starza's voice. "No