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Updated: May 23, 2025
None of the other supervisors on The Chief's land came even close to beating out Anketam or Jacovik, so it was always between the two of them, which one came out on top. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other. At the last harvest, Jacovik had been very pleased with himself when the tallies showed that he'd beaten out Anketam by a hundred kilos of cut leaves.
He and Jacovik and some of the others would go down to the river and sit under the shade trees, out of the sun, and dangle their lines in the water. It really didn't matter if they caught much or not; the purpose of fishing was to loaf and get away from the heat, not to catch fish. Even so, they always managed to bring home enough for a good meal at the end of the day.
His eyebrows, his beard, and the fringe of hair that outlined his bald head made an incongruous pale yellow pattern against the sunburnt darkness of his face. In his youth, Jacovik had been almost pathologically devoted to boxing even to the point of picking fights with others in his village for no reason at all, except to fight.
Instead of cataca, he and Jacovik planted food crops, doing on a larger scale just what they had always done in the selected sections around the villages. They had always grown their own food, and now they were doing it on a grand scale. No news came from off-planet, except for unreliable rumors. What the rest of the galaxy was doing about the war on Xedii, no one knew.
And he thought he could detect a faint scent of fear and apprehension in that atmosphere. Or was that just his imagination, brought on by Jacovik's pessimism? He opened his lips to say something to Jacovik, but his words died unborn.
There was a long silence while the men walked six paces. Then Jacovik said: "I'll do whatever I can, Ank. Whatever I can." There was honest warmth in his voice. Again there was a silence. "Blejjo," Anketam said after a time, "do you mind coming out of retirement for a while?" "Not if you need me, Ank," said the old man. "It won't be hard work," Anketam said.
He could see their bent figures outlined against the horizon, just at the brow of the slope, and he grinned to himself. He had beaten Jacovik out again. Anketam and Jacovik had had a friendly feud going for years, each trying to do a better, faster job than the other.
He was not a handsome man, Jacovik; his great, beaklike nose was canted to one side from a break that had come in his teens; his left eye was squinted almost closed by the scar tissue that surrounded it, and the right only looked better by comparison.
Young Basom proved to be a reasonably competent supervisor. He was nowhere near as good as Anketam or Jacovik, but there were worse supers in the barony. Anketam found that the biggest worry was not in the handling of the farmers, but in obtaining manufactured goods. The staff physician complained to Kevenoe that drugs were getting scarce. Shoes and clothing were almost impossible to obtain.
Are they going to simply smile and shake hands with the invaders and say: 'Go ahead, take all our property, reduce us to poverty, smash the whole civilization we've built up, destroy the security and peace of mind of millions of human beings, and then send your troops in to rule us by martial law. Are they going to do that? Are they?" Jacovik spread his big, hard hands. "I don't know.
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