The Loafers of Refuge Read Free

lifted a child in each arm, carrying them and their milkbags easily as he walked the short distance to the town with Tharee. He told her of his argument with his family and she nodded in grave sympathy.
    “Your people do not understand ours, Car-ree, but this will change. We are starting some children in your school next year, in the beginning grade. Our elders have decided that, although your people have much to learn of the mind and its powers, your accomplishments in the physical world deserve study. And if you succeed in becoming a Controller we hope to convince your elders of our ability to offer useful knowledge in return.”
    As they reached the first houses they heard the muffled, grumbling roar of a working grogroc somewhere deeper in the village, and Carey hastily put the children down and said goodbye to Tharee. He followed the sounds through thetwisting, curving paths between houses and soon located the great beast.
    A Controller was building a new home. The Loafers had various methods of securing housing, but one of their favourite was to select a grove of the giant
waquil
, a trailing plant which grew on the ground, and hollow out the interiors of the huge fruits. The waquil fruits looked something like oversize melons, as much as twelve feet high and thirty feet long, and their tough hides were several inches thick. Once the soft interior was removed and the walls scraped to prevent rotting a waquil-house could be used for years.
    He found Timmy and several other pre-initiates there, intently watching the work. Timmy was half a head taller than Carey but much lighter of frame, a lean, hard-muscled youth who usually wore a pensive, thoughtful expression on his thin face. He and Carey had been friends since early childhood, to the dismay of most of the Earth population.
    The Controller was standing calmly by the great shoulder of the ten-ton monster, directing it with a gentle voice and guiding hands. The heavy, ugly head, crowned with a circle of forward-tilted horns, plunged again and again into the waquil. The grogrocs were the largest land animals on Refuge. They had been fairly well cleared away from the areas inhabited solely by Earthmen, but the Loafers used them for many purposes.
    When the Controller had the door he was cutting outlined he guided the huge beast to the centre of the panel and had him lock his circular set of horns in it. A sharp twist of the massive head ripped the cut section loose. The grogroc backed away, snorting, and the Controller swiftly and expertly removed the fragmented mass. Then he led the giant herbivore back to the fruit and it began to eat the soft, pulpy interior. The door it had made was large enough to get the head and neck inside, and the hungry beast would eat half the pulp before the sun rose in the morning. The grogrocs had appetites as big as the fatbirds. The Controller would bring in smaller herbivores to finish the job of consuming the pulp and cleaning the walls. His wife and children would weavea curtain of the soft, heavy wirtl leaves, hang it over the door, and the family would be at home.
    There was a huge fire burning in the grove. A group of older women were sitting around it, singing in low voices a chant as ancient as the sea before them. As Carey and Timmy walked towards it Carey felt the hairy arm of his friend encircle his shoulders. Timmy and Carey had received most of their final coaching together, from Nyyub, Timmy’s father.
    Carey would be the first Earthman ever to take the manhood rites of the Loafers, but that too was right. Of the forty thousand humans on Refuge he was the eldest actually born on Refuge soil, the only one who had grown up with Loafers as constant companions. And he was quite certain that if he were not the only Earthman on Refuge who liked and respected the Loafers he was a member of a very small minority. They were generally looked upon with utter contempt by the industrious Earthmen busily engaged in turning Refuge into an