Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One

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Authors: Jack Vance
enough to distract our attention.
    “As long as that pyramid sat out there, with me focusing all my mental energy on it, they were safe—and how they must have laughed. As soon as Landry broke in and discovered the fraud, then it was all over…
    “That might have been their miscalculation,” mused Root. “Assume that they knew nothing of crime, of anti-social action. If everybody did what he was told to do their privacy was safe forever.” Root laughed. “Maybe they didn’t know human beings so well after all.”
    The captain refilled the glasses and they drank in silence. “Wonder where they came from,” he said at last.
    Root shrugged. “I suppose we’ll never know. Some other hot dry planet, that’s sure. Maybe they were refugees or some peculiar religious sect or maybe they were a colony.”
    “Hard to say,” agreed the captain sagely. “Different race, different psychology. That’s what we run into all the time.”
    “Thank God they weren’t vindictive,” said Root, half to himself. “No doubt they could have killed us any one of a dozen ways after I’d sent out that emergency call and they had to leave.”
    “It all ties in,” admitted the captain.
    Root sipped the brandy, nodded. “Once that ULR signal went out, their isolation was done for. No matter whether we were dead or not, there’d be Earthmen swarming around the station, pushing into their tunnels—and right there went their secret.”
    And he and the captain silently inspected the hole across the pond where the tremendous space-ship had lain buried under the spine-scrub and rusty black creeper.
    “And once that space-ship was laid bare,” Root continued, “there’d be a hullabaloo from here to Fomalhaut. A tremendous mass like that? We’d have to know everything—their space-drive, their history, everything about them. If what they wanted was privacy that would be a thing of the past. If they were a colony from another star they had to protect their secrets the same way we protect ours.”
     

     
    Barbara was standing by the ruins of the station, poking at the tangle with a stick. She turned and Root saw that she held his pipe. It was charred and battered but still recognizable. She slowly handed it to him. “Well?” said Root.
    She answered in a quiet withdrawn voice: “Now that I’m leaving I think I’ll miss Dicantropus.” She turned to him, “Jim…”
    “What?”
    “I’d stay on another year if you’d like.”
    “No,” said Root. “I don’t like it here myself.”
    She said, still in the low tone: “Then—you don’t forgive me for being foolish…”
    Root raised his eyebrows. “Certainly I do. I never blamed you in the first place. You’re human. Indisputably human.”
    “Then—why are you acting—like Moses?”
    Root shrugged.
    “Whether you believe me or not,” she said with an averted gaze, “I never—”
    He interrupted with a gesture. “What does it matter? Suppose you did—you had plenty of reason to. I wouldn’t hold it against you.”
    “You would—in your heart.”
    Root said nothing.
    “I wanted to hurt you. I was slowly going crazy—and you didn’t seem to care one way or another. Told—him I wasn’t—your property.”
    Root smiled his sad smile. “I’m human too.”
    He made a casual gesture toward the hole where the Dicantrop spaceship had lain. “If you still want diamonds go down that hole with a bucket. There’s diamonds big as grapefruit. It’s an old volcanic neck, it’s the grand-daddy of all diamond mines. I’ve got a claim staked out around it; we’ll be using diamonds for billiard balls as soon as we get some machinery out here.”
    They turned slowly back to the Method .
    “Three’s quite a crowd on Dicantropus,” said Root thoughtfully. “On Earth, where there’s three billion, we can have a little privacy.”
     
     

Afterword to “The Masquerade of Dicantropus”
     
    As a rule, seamen enjoy a great deal of spare time. I used this spare time

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