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.
But he was up against a shrewd organization. His inordinately expensive farm machinery broke down. He repaired it. After a time it could not be repaired any longer and he had to buy more. Before the thanar plants were half grown, he owed more than half his prospective crop for machinery replacements.
Now he could see the method perfectly. The Company imported all machinery. It made that machinery in its own factories, machinery that was designed to break down. So this year—even if nothing else happened—Lon would wind up owing more for machinery replacements than the crop would bring.
It was not likely that nothing else would happen. Next season he would start off in debt, instead of all clear, and if the same thing happened he would owe all his crop and be six thousand credits behind. By harvest after next, his farm and house could be foreclosed for debt and he could either try to work for other colonists—who were in the process of going through the same wringer themselves—or hire out as a farmhand on the Company's plantation. He would never be able to save space-fare away from the planet. He would be very much worse off than the assisted emigrants to other planets, who had not invested all they owned in land and machinery and agricultural instructions.
And there was Cathy. She owed for her passage. It would be years before she could pay that back, if ever. She couldn't live in the farmhand barracks. They might as well give up thinking about each other.
It was a system. Beautifully legal, absolutely airtight. Not a thing wrong with it. The Company had a monopoly on thanar, despite the law. It had all the cultivated land on Cetis Gamma Two under its control, and its labor problem was solved. Its laborers first paid something like sixteen thousand credits a head for the privilege of trying to farm independently for a year or two, and then became farmhands for the Company at a bare subsistence wage.
Lon Simpson was in the grip of that system. He had taken the generator apart and put it back together eighteen times. There was nothing visibly wrong with it. It had been designed to break down with nothing visibly wrong with it. If he couldn't repair it, though, he was out fifteen hundred credits, his investment was wiped out, and all his hopes were gone.
He took the generator apart for the nineteenth time. He wondered grimly how the Company's designers made generators so cleverly that they would stop working so that even the trouble with them couldn't be figured out. It was a very ingenious system.