The Big Front Yard

“Told you!”

“I told you we been talking. There, I can see them, too.”

They were far off, but they were coming fast—three dots that rode rapidly up out of the desert.

He sat and watched them come and he thought of going in to get the rifle, but he didn’t stir from his seat upon the steps. The rifle would do no good, he told himself. It would be a senseless thing to get it; more than that, a senseless attitude. The least that man could do, he thought, was to meet these creatures of another world with clean and empty hands.

They were closer now and it seemed to him that they were sitting in invisible easy chairs that traveled very fast.

He saw that they were humanoid, to a degree at least, and there were only three of them.

They came in with a rush and stopped very suddenly a hundred feet or so from where he sat upon the steps.

He didn’t move or say a word—there was nothing he could say. It was too ridiculous.

They were, perhaps, a little smaller than himself, and black as the ace of spades, and they wore skin-tight shorts and vests that were somewhat oversize and both the shorts and vests were the blue of April skies.

But that was not the worst of it.

They sat on saddles, with horns in front and stirrups and a sort of a bedroll tied on the back, but they had no horses.

The saddles floated in the air, with the stirrups about three feet above the ground and the aliens sat easily in the saddles and stared at him and he stared back at them.

Finally he got up and moved forward a step or two and when he did that the three swung from the saddles and moved forward, too, while the saddles hung there in the air, exactly as they’d left them.

Taine walked forward and the three walked forward until they were no more than six feet apart.

“They say hello to you,” said Beasly. “They say welcome to you.”

“Well, all right, then, tell them—Say, how do you know all this!”

“Chuck tells me what they say and I tell you. You tell me and I tell him and he tells them. That’s the way it works. That is what he’s here for.”

“Well, 111 be—” said Taine. “So you can really talk to him.”

“I told you that I could,” stormed Beasly. “I told you that I could talk to Towser, too, but you thought that I was crazy.”

“Telepathy!” said Taine. And it was worse than ever now. Not only had the ratlike things known all the rest of it, but they’d known of Beasly, too.

“What was that you said, Hiram?”

“Never mind,” said Taine. “Tell that friend of yours to tell them I’m glad to meet them and what can I do for them?”

He stood uncomfortably and stared at the three and he saw that their vests had many pockets and that the pockets were all crammed, probably with their equivalent of tobacco and handkerchiefs and pocketknives and such.

“They say,” said Beasly, “that they want to dicker.”

“Dicker?”

“Sure, Hiram. You know, trade.”

Beasly chuckled thinly. “Imagine them laying themselves open to a Yankee trader. That’s what Henry says you are. He says you can skin a man on the slickest—”

“Leave Henry out of this,” snapped Taine. “Let’s leave Henry out of something.”

He sat down on the ground and the three sat down to face him.

“Ask them what they have in mind to trade.”

“Ideas,” Beasly said.

“Ideas! That’s a crazy thing—”

And then he saw it wasn’t.

Of all the commodities that might be exchanged by an alien peope, ideas would be the most valuable and the easiest to handle. They’d take no cargo room and they’d upset no economies—not immediately, that is—and they’d make a bigger contribution to the welfare of the cultures than trade in actual goods.

“Ask them,” said Taine, “what they’ll take for the idea back of those saddles they are riding.”

“They say, what have you to offer?”

And that was the stumper. That was the one that would be hard to answer.

Automobiles and trucks, the internal gas engine—well, probably not. Because they already had the saddles. Earth was out of date in transportation from the viewpoint of these people.

Housing architecture—no, that was hardly an idea and, anyhow, there was that other house, so they knew of houses.

Cloth? No, they had cloth.

Paint, he thought. Maybe paint was it.

“See if they are interested in paint,” Taine told Beasly.

“They say, what is it? Please explain yourself.”

“O.K., then. Let’s see. It’s a protective device to be spread over almost any surface. Easily packaged and easily applied. Protects against weather and corrosion. It’s decorative, too. Comes in all sorts of colors. And it’s cheap to make.”

“They shrug in their mind,” said Beasly. “They’re just slightly interested. But they’ll listen more. Go ahead and tell them.”

And that was more like it, thought Taine.

That was the kind of language that he could understand.

He settled himself more firmly on the ground and bent forward slightly, flicking his eyes across the three dead-pan, ebony faces, trying to make out what they might be thinking.

There was no making out. Those were three of the deadest pans he had ever seen.

It was all familiar. It made him feel at home. He was in his element.

And in the three across from him, he felt somehow subconsciously, he had the best dickering opposition he had ever met. And that made him feel good, too.

“Tell them,” he said, “that I’m not quite sure. I may have spoken up too hastily. Paint, after all, is a mighty valuable idea.”

“They say, just as a favor to them, not that they’re really interested, would you tell them a little more.”

Got them hooked, Taine told himself. If he could only play it right—

He setded down to dickering in earnest.

Hours later Henry Horton showed up. He was accompanied by a very urbane gentleman, who was faultlessly turned out and who carried beneath his arm an impressive attache case.

Henry and the man stopped on the steps in sheer astonishment.

Taine was squatted on the ground with a length of board and he was daubing paint on it while the aliens watched. From the daubs here and there upon their anatomies, it was plain to see the aliens had been doing some daubing of their own. Spread all over the ground were other lengths of half-painted boards and a couple of dozen old cans of paint.

Taine looked up and saw Henry and the man.

“I was hoping,” he said, “that someone would show up.”

“Hiram,” said Henry, with more importance than usual, “may I present Mr. Lancaster. He is a special representative of the United Nations.”

“I’m glad to meet you, sir,” said Taine. “I wonder if you would—”

“Mr. Lancaster,” Henry explained grandly, “was having some slight difficulty getting through the lines outside, so I volunteered my services. I’ve already explained to him our joint interest in this matter.”

“It was very kind of Mr. Horton,” Lancaster said. “There was this stupid sergeant—”

“It’s all in knowing,” Henry said, “how to handle people.”

The remark, Taine noticed, was not appreciated by the man from the U.N.

“May I inquire, Mr. Taine,” asked Lancaster, “exactly what you’re doing?”

“I’m dickering,” said Taine.

“Dickering. What a quaint way of expressing—”

“An old Yankee word,” said Henry quickly, “with certain co

“Interesting,” said Lancaster. “And I suppose you’re out to skin these gentlemen in the sky-blue vests—”

“Hiram,” said Henry, proudly, “is the sharpest dickerer in these parts. He runs an antique business and he has to dicker hard—”

“And may I ask,” said Lancaster, ignoring Henry finally, “what you might be doing with these cans of paint? Are these gentlemen potential customers for paint or—”