Fletcher Pratt Read Online Free Page B

"Gramercy for your courtesy, my friends," he went on with a smile, "I do not well understand the meanings of your primitive institutions. They give you gold for sell these promises to pay back money lended?"
    "That's it," I said. "You see, it's not always easy to sell bonds. The men who have money may not want to lend it or they may not know anything about the man who is going into business. So I have to tell them how good a thing it would be for them to loan the money on these bonds." "No scientific board is yours? Improbable! You sell them something they do not want and they give you gold for doing it. Your world is strange....I do not understand. On my world, when man would go into the business he must be permitted by scientific board, who look at his attainment of art of business and ask, 'Is the business necessary?' If he need articles, scientific board produces them, but not make him pay out his profits on work to parasites."
    It seemed about time to draw the conversation to a close.
     
    We sat on a ledge of rock among green-black shadows from the pines. All about was the fluid splendor of late summer, hot and unquiet, with an indefinable feel of life and movement even in its silences. Ashembe, uncomfortably warm, dipped his hand in the water and drew it across his forehead.
    "Yours is the hot nation," he said.
    Merrick grinned. "You ought to be in New York," said he. "This is just cool enough to be pleasant."
    "In my world is colder," our visitor went on, as though he had been interrupted while telling something. "Gabo is great necessity. We shall how otherwise keep ourselves warmed and lighted. Our sun burns small with resultant decrease in illumination and calories. Locked in all atoms are reservoirs of power and light, but only from the atom of gabo do we secure the means of release ec—ec—economically. Therefore of our little mine of gabo we expend much in sending scientific to other worlds for great quantity."
    "So that's why you came," I said. "I wondered, but it wasn't quite polite to ask."
    "Which is polite?" inquired Ashembe innocently. "Is it the local moral code? In my country, if man wishes to know informatively he asks."
    "Not a moral code," I attempted to explain (I was always being caught in something like this by our wide-awake and inquisitive visitor) "but a code of—well, manners. Politeness indicates that one is of good breeding, of good behavior, will not do things that offend other people. It's a social code."
    "But you have those who offend others because they are not of the good breeding?" asked Ashembe, dabbing his hand in the water. "Astonish! In my country the social code is more simplicity. It is the rule always to be fair. Your polite code must be very complication."
    "It is," Merrick chipped in with feeling. "It is not polite to ask people about their reasons for doing things because a good many people do things or have reasons for doing things that they do not care to admit. They might feel them a trifle discreditable."
    "Improbable!" said Ashembe. "In my country could not be. Attend—my entire name are Koumar Ashembe Bodrog Fotas. Koumar Ashembe are merely personal. Bodrog indicates I am of the hereditary exploring * or war-fight science. Fotas indicate my rank in identical class. All the people thus named in my country. But speak—actions of crime are they still so many that people conceal not only thoughts but also actions? You do not eliminate crime tendency children?"
     
    * Evidently Ashembe, in his ignorance of English, did not quite mean what he said here. Later on in the narrative, Mr. Schierstedt makes it abundantly clear that hereditary classes, as such, have no existence on Ashembe's planet.
     
    "How can we?" asked Merrick. "A man may be perfectly all right till he gets to be thirty years old, and then blooey! He blows off and murders somebody or commits some other crime."
    "Not. Never." Ashembe was positive. "Psychology is behind science with you. I tell you what we