The Houses of Iszm

XI

Aile Farr was dying. He was sinking into a red and yellow chaos of shapes that reeled and pounded. When the movement stilled, when the shapes straightened and drew back, when the scarlets and golds blurred and deepened to black—Aile Farr would be dead.

He saw death coming, drifting like twilight across the sundown of his dying… He felt a sudden sharpness, a discord. A bright green blot exploded across the sad reds and roses and golds…

Aile Farr was alive once more.

The doctor leaned back and put aside his hypodermic. “Pretty close shave,” he told the patrolman.

Farr’s convulsions quieted, mercifully he lost consciousness.

“Who is the guy?” asked the patrolman.

The bartender looked skeptically down at Farr. “He said to call Penche.”

“Penche! K. Penche?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Well—call him. All he can do is swear at you.”

The bartender went to the screen. The patrolman looked down at the doctor, still kneeling beside Farr.

“What went wrong with the guy?”

The doctor shrugged. “Hard to say. Some kind of female trouble. So many things you can slip into a man nowadays.”

“That raw place on his head…”

The doctor glanced at Farr’s scalp. “No. That’s an old wound. He got it in the neck. This mark here.”

“Looks like she hit him with a slap-sack.”

The bartender returned. “Penche says he’s on his way out.”

They all looked down at Farr with new respect.

Two orderlies placed stretcher poles one on each side of Farr; metal ribbons were thrust beneath him, clamping over the opposing pole. They lifted him and carried him across the floor. The bartender trotted alongside. “Where you guys taking him? I got to tell Penche something.”

“He’ll be at the Long Beach Emergency Hospital.”

Penche arrived three minutes after the ambulance had gone. He strode in and looked right and left. “Where is he?”

“Are you Mr. Penche?” the bartender asked respectfully.

“Sure he’s Penche,” said the patrolman.

“Well, your friend was taken to the Long Beach Emergency Hospital.”

Penche turned to one of the men who had marched in behind him. “Find out what happened here,” he said and left the bar.

The orderlies arranged Farr on a table and cut off his shoes. In puzzlement they examined the band of metal wrapped around his right shoulder.

“What’s this thing?”

“Whatever it is—it’s got to come off.”

They unwound the woven metal, washed Farr with antiseptic gas, gave him several different injections, and moved him into a quiet room.

Penche called the main office. “When can Mr. Farr be moved?”

“Just a minute, Mr. Penche.”

Penche waited; the clerk made inquiries. “Well, he’s out of danger now.”

“Can he be moved?”

“He’s still unconscious, but the doctor says he’s okay.”

“Have the ambulance bring him to my house, please.”

“Very well, Mr. Penche. Er—are you assuming responsibility for Mr. Farr’s care?”

“Yes,” said Penche. “Bill me.”

Penche’s house on Signal Hill was a Class AA Type 4 luxury model, a dwelling equivalent to an average custom-built Earth house of 30,000 dollars value. Penche sold Class AA houses in four varieties for 10,000 dollars—as many as he could obtain—as well as Class A, Class BB and Class B houses. The Iszic, of course, grew houses infinitely more elaborate for their own use—rich ancient growths with complex banks of interconnecting pods, walls shining with fluorescent colors, tubules emitting nectar and oil and brine, atmospheres charged with oxygen and complex beneficiants, phototropic and photophobic pods, pods holding carefully filtered and circulated bathing pools, pods exuding nuts and sugar crystals and succulent wafers. The Iszic exported none of these, and none of the three- and four-pod laborer’s houses. They required as much handling and shipping space, but brought only a small fraction of the return.

A billion Earthers still lived in sub-standard conditions. North Chinese still cut caves into the loess, Dravidians built mud huts, Americans and Europeans occupied decaying apartment-tenements. Penche thought the situation deplorable; a massive market lay untapped. Penche wanted to tap it.

A practical difficulty intervened. These people could pay no thousands of dollars for Class AA, A, BB and B houses, even if Penche had them to sell. He needed three-, four-, and five-pod laborer’s houses—which the Iszic refused to export.

The problem had a classical solution: a raid on Iszm for a female tree. Properly fertilized, the female tree would yield a million seeds a year. About half these seeds would grow into female trees. In a few years Penche’s income would expand from ten million a year to a hundred million, a thousand million, five thousand million.

To most people the difference between ten million a year and a thousand million seems inconsequential. Penche, however, thought in units of a million. Money represented not that which could be bought, but energy, dynamic thrust, the stuff of persuasion and efficacy. He spent little money on himself, his personal life was rather austere. He lived in his Class AA demonstrator on Signal Hill when he might have owned a sky-island, drifting in orbit around Earth. He might have loaded his table with rare meats and fowl, precious conserves, the valued wines, curious liquors and fruits from the outer worlds. He could have staffed a harem with the houris of a Sultan’s dream. But Penche ate steak and drank coffee and beer. He remained a bachelor, indulging himself socially only when the press of business allowed. Like certain gifted men who have no ear for music, Penche had only small taste for the accouterments of civilization.

He recognized his own lack, and sometimes he felt a fleeting melancholy, like the brush of a dark feather; sometimes he sat slumped, savage as a boar, the furnaces glaring behind the smoked glass of his eyes. But for the most part K. Penche was sour and sardonic. Other men could be softened, distracted, controlled by easy words, pretty things, pleasure; Penche knew this well and used the knowledge as a carpenter uses a hammer, incurious about the intrinsic nature of the tool. Without illusion or prejudice he watched and acted; here perhaps was Penche’s greatest strength, the inner brooding eye that gauged himself and the world in the same frame of callous objectivity.

He was waiting in his study when the ambulance sank to the lawn. He went out on the balcony and watched as the orderlies floated out the stretcher. He spoke in the heavy harsh voice that penetrated like another man’s shout. “Is he conscious?”

“He’s coming around, sir.”

“Bring him up here.”