Free Nightmares & Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown Page B

hundred years ago they went to war over this, and the Galactic Federation arbitrated the war and ended it by getting both races, the Humanoids and the Horses, to agree that one individual of either race could stake claim, for his lifetime, to one asteroid and only one asteroid.”
    “Yes, sir. I remember reading about it in Galactic history.”
    “Excellent. Here is the problem. We have a complaint from the Humanoids claiming that the Horses are breaking this treaty, claiming asteroids under false names of nonexistent Horses in order to get more than their share of the minerals.
    “Your orders: Land on the Horses’ planet. Use your trader identity; it will not be suspect since many traders go there. They are friendly; you’ll have no trouble. You’ll be welcome as a trader from Earth. You are to prove or disprove the assertion of the Humanoids that the Horses are violating the treaty by staking claims to more asteroids than their numbers justify.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You will report back to me by tight beam as soon as you have accomplished your mission and left the planet.”
    The screen went blank. Garn Roberts consulted his guides and charts, reset the automatic controls and went back to his bunk to resume his interrupted sleep.
    A week later, when he had accomplished his mission and was a safe ten light-years out from the Novra system, he sent a tight-beam signal to the Special Assistant to the President of the Galactic Federation, and in minutes Daunen Brand’s face appeared on the screen of the telecom.
    “K-1356 reporting on the Novra situation, sir,” Garn Roberts said. “I managed to get access to the census statistics of the Horses; they number a little over two million. Then I checked the claims of the Horses to Asteroids; they have filed claims on almost four million of them. It is obvious that the Humanoids are right and that the Horses are violating the treaty.
    “Otherwise, why are there so many more Horses’ asteroids than there are Horses?”

DEATH ON THE MOUNTAIN
    He lived in a hut on the side of a mountain. Often he would climb to the peak and look down into the valley. His red sandals were drops of blood upon the snow of the peak.
    In the valley people lived and died. He watched them.
    He saw the clouds that drifted over the peak. The clouds took strange shapes. At times they were ships or castles or horses. More often they were strange things never seen by anyone save him, and he had seen them only ill his dreams. Yet in the strange shapes of drifting clouds he recognized them.
    Standing alone in the doorway of his hut, he always watched the sun spring from the dew of earth. In the valley they had told him that the sun did not rise but that the earth was round like an orange and turned so that every morning the burning sun seemed to leap into the sky.
    He had asked them why the earth revolved and why the sun burned and why they did not fall from the earth when it turned upside down. He had been told that it was so today because it had been so yesterday and the day that was before yesterday, and because things never changed. They could not tell him why things never changed.
    At night he looked at the stars and at the lights of the valley. At curfew the lights of the valley vanished, but the stars did not vanish. They were too far to hear the curfew bell.
    There was a bright star. Every third night it hung low just above the snow-covered peak of the mountain, and he would climb to the peak and talk to it. The star never replied.
    He counted time by the star and by the three days of its progress. Three days made a week. To the people of the valley, seven days made a week. They had never dreamed of the land of Saarba where water flows upstream, where the leaves of trees burn with a bright blue flame and are not consumed, and where three days make a week.
    Once a year he went down into the valley. He talked with people, and sometimes he would dream for them. They called him a prophet, but the