Lon Simpson heard the click as he began to describe, heatedly, what was in his mind. He said it anyhow. Then Cathy's voice came from the exchange. She sounded shocked but sympathetic.
He swallowed a particularly inventive description of the manners, morals and ancestry of all the directors and employees of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. Then he said, still fuming, "I told you not to listen!"
His wrongs overcame him again. "It's robbery! It's peonage! They've got every credit I had! They've got three-quarters of the value of my crop charged up for replacements of the lousy machinery they sold me--and now I'll end the growing season in debt! How am I going to ask you to marry me?"
"Not over a beamphone, I hope," said Cathy.
"That was a slip," he admitted. "I was going to wait until I got paid for my crop. It looked good. Now--"
"Wait a minute, Lon," Cathy said. There was silence. She gave somebody else a connection.
The phone-beams from the colony farms all went to Cetopolis and Cathy was one of the two operators there. If or when the colony got prosperous enough, there would be a regular intercommunication system. So it was said. Meanwhile, Lon had a suspicion that there might be another reason for the antiquated central station.
"I'll come in to town tonight," he said darkly. "Date?"
He hung up and went back out to the field and the tractor. He began to think sourly of a large number of things all at once. There was a law to encourage people to leave Earth for colonies on suitable planets. There was even governmental help for people who didn't have funds of their own. But if a man wanted to make something of himself, he preferred to use his own money and pick his own planet and choose his own way of life.
Lon Simpson had bought four hectares of land on Cetis Gamma Two. He'd paid his passage out. He'd given five hundred credits a month for an instruction course on the Company's plantation, during which time he'd labored faithfully to grow, harvest, and cure _thanar_ leaves for the Company's profit. Then he'd bought farm machinery from the Company--and a house--and very painstakingly had set out to be a colonist on his own.
Just about that time, Cathy had arrived on a Company ship and taken up her duties as beamphone operator at Cetopolis. It was a new colony, with not more than five thousand humans on the whole planet, all of them concentrated near the one small town with its plank sidewalks and prefabricated buildings. Lon Simpson met Cathy, and his labors on his _thanar_ farm acquired new energy and purpose.