Orbit Unlimited

by Poul Anderson

Svoboda stood where he was, in wind and darkness, turning the idea over. A thought was as heavy as a millstone. He turned it and turned it, until the noise was like wind and great wings beating, until the mill ground the ocean full of salt. When he spoke, it was as if someone else talked for him, a whisper amid whirling and grinding. ‘Danny! Danny, can you hear me? Listen! Are you awake? I can get you down!’

  The flashbeam picked the small pinched face out of the murk. Danny roused himself from the half faint of exhaustion and despair. ‘Sure,’ he mumbled. Then, more clearly: ‘Gee, you’re swell, sir. What’ve I got to do?’

  ‘Listen. Both of you,’ Svoboda called. ‘Danny, you’ve got to be brave. You’ve been brave so far. One last time, sport. Play dead. That’s what you do. Play dead and let the spearfowl land beside you. Then grab its legs. Grab tight and hang on. Got me, Danny? Can you do that?’ The millstone groaned and sundered. He thought the boy had answered, but wasn’t sure. He couldn’t even be certain that Coffin had understood it. He snapped off his light and clung where he was, death still.

  Now the bird was too low for the radiance lingering on the heights to touch it. Against the deep purple of the sky, which they seemed to fill, the wings were as black an outline as the rock. He drew his pistol. Shadows hid him. He could scarcely see the weapon himself.

  The bird called challenge. There was no response. Too late, Svoboda realized he should have explained his idea in more detail. No time now. The spearfowl landed on the side of the nest. The vast wings folded. It looked over Danny like a hunchbacked giant.

  The boy sprang and caught it by the legs.

  As the bird shrieked and took off, Svoboda fired. He was never conscious of having aimed. But the spearfowl screamed once again. Danny hung athwart the sky like a bell clapper in the wind. The bird’s blood pumped over him.

  A final time the spearfowl struggled to rise. It won so much distance that Svoboda saw light again on its wings. They threshed more weakly. The spearfowl sank, braking itself, going down into darkness to do battle with the monster.

  Svoboda slid along the rope so fast he skinned his hands.

  A gun barked twice. When Svoboda arrived, the spearfowl was dead. Coffin threw pistol and flashlight aside. ‘Danny,’ he wept. ‘Danny, son.’ They fell into each other’s arms.

  9

  Sunshine came through crisp white curtains, reflected off a bowl of water, and made waves on the opposite wall. A cool gust followed into the bedroom. Outside, the lawn was still green but the gimtrees had turned color, scarlet streaked with gold, and the Hercules Mountains were blue and dim through a haze not unlike Earth’s Indian summer.

  Judith opened the door for Theron Wolfe. Svoboda laid his book on the blanket. ‘Well,’ said the mayor, ‘how are you today?’

  Fine,’ grumbled Svoboda. ‘I don’t see why I have to stay here. Damn it, I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘The doctor said strict bed rest till tomorrow,’ Judith reminded him sternly. ‘You can’t laugh off a case of exhaustion.’

  ‘If it consoles you any, Joshua’s been ordered a full day more than you, and is being even meaner about it,’ said Wolfe. He planted his large bottom on a chair and took a cigar from his shirt pocket.

  ‘How’s Danny?’ Svoboda asked.

  ‘Oh, he’s quite recovered and having the time of his life,’ Judith said. ‘Teresa’s kept me posted. If you’ll excuse me, mayor, I must get back to work. We are positively going to have that wedding day after tomorrow, as soon as Josh can come.’

  The door closed behind her. Wolfe pulled a flat bottle from beneath his jacket. ‘Aged in the wood,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘My best run so far.’

  Svoboda took the present without feeling unduly grateful. ‘I trust you came to make some explanations,’ he said.

  ‘Ahem! If you wish. Not that I see what there is to explain. You and Josh brought the kid back. So you’re both heroes. And, while it’s none of my business, I think Josh solved a few personal difficulties in the course of the trip.I’ve never seen him look honestly happy before today.’ Wolfe lit the cigar and puffed ostentatiously before adding: To be sure, you’ll be interested in the medical report on Danny.’

  ‘Huh?’ Svoboda sat straight. ‘You said he was okay.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But he got a thorough checkup, and it turns out his tolerance to high air-pressures is more than usual. It’s fantastic. Oh, none of this mutant superman nonsense. He simply lies at one extreme end of the normal distribution curve. But he can live quite comfortably at sea level if he chooses. I suppose,’ Wolfe continued thoughtfully, ‘that’s why he was always inclined to build bright daydreams about the world below the clouds. He never associated descent with discomfort, even to the subliminal degree that you and I do in the course of walking downhill on this plateau. He must have noticed that other children did get cranky when they had gone too far down the northern slope of the tableland. So, since they made him an outcast, his imagination looked toward the place they couldn’t enter.’

  Svoboda took a pull at the bottle and passed it over. ‘I wish something could be done about the way that kid is teased. He’s got too much guts and intelligence to rate it.’

  ‘Oh, that’s no longer a problem,’ Wolfe answered. ‘Since he played Robinson Crusoe where nobody else could have survived, Teresa says his schoolmates hang on his every word. Furthermore, I intend to publicize his true importance. He’s the most important human being on Rustum. Let’s hope it doesn’t go to his head.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Use your own head, man. Danny’s the first real Rustu-mite. When he’s grown, he can go anywhere and do anything on the whole damn planet. His descendants will outnumber everybody else’s, by virtue of being so much better fitted to survive. I hope and expect that among the other exogenes there’ll be some more like him. The sperm and ova donors were chosen with such a possibility in mind. But even if nobody in this generation quite matches Danny, he can take the lead. Long before High America gets too crowded, there’ll be people pioneering the lowlands. They’ll keep the spirit of liberty alive on behalf of everyone else.’

  Slowly, Svoboda nodded. ‘I see. Should have thought of that myself, if there hadn’t been so much distraction.’

  Wolfe clapped him on the arm. ‘And you, Jan, saved this priceless treasure for us,’ he declaimed. ‘Even if the simple fact of your heroism were not sufficient, which it is, the value of your service to the future is going to make you the most admired figure on the planet. Write your own ticket, boy. Would you like to be the next mayor? Would you like a hundred skilled workers to start a new mine for you? Name it and it’s yours. So aren’t you glad I pushed you?’

  Svoboda shook the hand loose. Anger clouded his face. ‘Come off that,’ he said.

  ‘Why, Jan.’ Wolfe raised his brows. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘Well … I’m glad title boy was saved and so forth. I’m even glad I went myself. It’s something to remember. But I don’t want any stupid publicity.’

  ‘You’ve got it. Willy-nilly, you’ve got it.’ Wolfe laid his finger along his nose. ‘Can’t be helped. All High America knows of your deed. Hasn’t Judith told you how many ‘phone calls she’s gotten? The flowers and deputations will start arriving as soon as you’re on your feet.’

  ‘Look here!’ Svoboda rapped. ‘I know you, Theron. You’re a nice, intelligent, obliging, cheerful, free-wheeling son of a bitch. You didn’t know about Danny’s chromosomes when you blackmailed me into going after him. All you knew was, Josh and I were valuable citizens in a severe labor-shortage economy; and Danny was one small boy, with plenty more where he came from. Why did you send me down there?’

  ‘Well, now.’ Wolfe stroked his beard. ‘Ordinary altruism. Human decency. I’d have gone myself, were I not so old and fat.’

  Svoboda said a nasty word. ‘The devil you would,’ he added. ‘You had some other purpose in mind. Okay, you’ve led the colony better than anyone else would have, I suppose. We haven’t needed
a pleasant little humanitarian to guide us; we needed exactly the kind of ruthless bastard you are. So Josh and I were your pawns. Okay. But I demand to know why.’

  Wolfe studied his cigar ash. ‘You probably do have the right,’ he said. ‘And I can trust you to keep a secret. Trouble is, my reasoning’s rather hard to explain. I feel it, sharp and hard as a knife. But the words are fuzzy.’

  Svoboda settled back. Tm waiting,’ he said.

  Wolfe chuckled. He crossed one leg over the other and blew a plume of smoke. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘remember that Josh’s neighbors would only help him scout the plateau, where they were safe. To a man, they refused to enter the Cleft, though Danny had obviously gone in that direction. They pleaded harvest time. That is, their precious crops were more important than that boy’s life.’

  ‘Uh—’ Svoboda blushed. ‘Uh— If the crops had been spoiled by a rainstorm, the whole community would’ve had a lean year.’

  ‘That’s a crappy argument. So what? No one would have starved. We’d have tightened our belts for a Rustunrite year, eight or nine Terrestrial months. Do you seriously mean you’d have let a child die, alone, possibly in great pain, so you could have an extra serving on your plate for the next eight months?’

  ‘N-n-no. If you put it like that. Nobody did, however. I myself … I mean, the likelihood of success wasn’t in proportion to the hazard.’

  ‘Again, so what? In early times on Earth, a hundred men would have been honored to risk their necks on the off chance that one life could be saved. You’d have gone after a child of your own, wouldn’t you? No tepid calculation of probabilities in that case, eh? So did Danny have less claim on you because he wasn’t your personal flesh and blood?

  ‘What did we come to Rustum for? To live our own lives as we see fit, without official nosiness. Good enough. But we’ve carried it too far. Now that the initial struggle to survive is past, each family has retreated more and more into its own selfish concerns. We can’t have that. Man can’t live alone. The lost, and sick, and weak, and poor have got to be helped, or how can we depend on their help when our own luck runs out? If we won’t voluntarily do this, then in the end, inevitably, there will be laws and police to make us do so. A community can’t exist without public service.

  ‘I want to curb that tendency on Rustum. The more citizens who perform public duties of their own free will, out of a sense of responsibility, the less government and the fewer coercive laws we’ll need. Nor will we get so slack and indifferent that laws can be tied onto us when we aren’t looking. We need a tradition of mutual help. Our heroes have got to be not the men who gained the most, but those who gave the most.’

  Wolfe broke off, red-faced. ‘Pardon me,’ he finished. ‘I didn’t mean to preach. We need a workable psycho-dynamic symbology. Words are too imprecise. What starts out to be a sociological observation turns into a sermon.’

  Svoboda grinned. ‘You’re a frustrated do-gooder yourself, Theron. Go on.’

  ‘Not much else to say,’ Wolfe answered. ‘I’d been watching for an opportunity like this. Now you’ve set an example. By unmerited good fortune, your attempt succeeded spectacularly, which underlines the lesson in red. I shall make sure that everybody has their noses rubbed in it. This is going to be one community most powerfully ashamed of itself. I’ll use the mood to talk more people into setting still more examples. Maybe in a few years the seed we’ve planted will start to grow.’

  He lumbered to his feet. ‘I’m sorry you had to be the goat, though, Jan.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Svoboda grimaced. ‘Except – Judas priest! – do you mean I have to pose as some bloody kind of shining knight?’

  ‘’Fraid so. That’s the real service you can render us. And the hardest.’ Wolfe chuckled. ‘Courage. Whatever the world may think of you, remember, in your most inmost soul you’re rotten.’

  Svoboda laughed with him. Wolfe bade adieu. Svoboda didn’t return to his book at once. He lay for a while gazing out the window, toward the horizon where the snowpeaks of Hercules upheld the sky.

  Turn the page to begin reading from the follow-up to Orbit Unlimited

  MY OWN, MY NATIVE LAND

  The boy stood at sunrise on the edge of his world. Clouds torrented up along the gap which clove it. They burned in the light. Wind sang, cold and wholly pure.

  A spearfowl broke from those mists to soar further aloft, magnificence upon wings the hue of steel. For an instant the boy did not move. He could not. Then he screamed, once, before he fled.

  He took shelter in a thicket until he had mastered both tears and trembling. Boys do not tell anyone, least of all those who love them, that they are haunted.

  “Coming in, now,” said Jack O’Malley over the radio phone, and got to work at a difficult approach.

  On its northeastern corner, that great tableland named High America did not slope in mountains and valleys, to reach at last the sea level which lay eight kilometers straight beneath. Here the rim fell in cliffs and talus until vapors drowned vision. Only at one place were the heights climbable: where a fault had driven them apart to make the Cleft. And the drafts which it channeled were treacherous.

  As his aircar slanted toward ground, O’Malley had a clear view across the dropoff and its immense gash. At evening, the almost perpetual clouds that lapped around the plateau were sinking. Rock heaved dark and wet above the ocean, which billowed to the horizon. Their whiteness bore a fire-gold tinge and shadows were long upon them; for the Eridani sun was low in the west, barely above the sierra of the Centaurs. The illusion of its hugeness could well-nigh overwhelm a man who remembered Earth, since in fact its disc showed more than half again the width of Terrestrial Sol. Likewise the ruddier hue of its less ardent G5 surface was more plain to see than at high noon.

  Further up, O’Malley’s gaze had savored a sweep of country from Centaurs to Cleft, from Hercules Mountains to Lake Olympus, and all the grasslands, woodlands, farmlands in between, nourished by the streams out of yonder snow-peaks. Where the Swift and Smoky Rivers joined to form the Emperor, he should have been able to make out Anchortown. But the rays blazed too molten off their waters.

  Instead, he had enjoyed infinite subtleties of color, the emerald of man’s plantings mingled in patchwork with the softer blue greens of native growth. Spring was coming as explosively as always on Rustum.

  Raksh, the larger moon, stood at half phase in a sky turning royal purple. About midway between the farthest and nearest points of its eccentric orbit, it showed a Lunar size, but coppery rather than silver. O’Malley scowled at the beautiful sight. It was headed in closer, to raise tides in the dense lowland air which could make for even heavier equinoctial storms than usual. And that was just when he wanted to go down there.

  His pilot board beeped a warning and he gave his whole attention back to flight. It was tricky at best, in this changeable atmosphere, under a fourth more weight then Earth gives to things: Earth, where this vehicle was designed and made. He wondered if he’d ever see the day when the colony manufactured craft of its own, incorporating the results of experience. Three thousand people, isolated on a world for which nature had never intended them, couldn’t produce much industrial plant very soon.

  Nearing ground, he saw Joshua Coffin’s farmstead outlined black against sky and some upsurgings from the cloud deck. The buildings stood low, but they looked as massive as they must be to withstand hurricanes. Gim trees and plume oak, left uncut for both shade and windbreak, were likewise silhouetted, save where the nest of a bower phoenix phosphoresced in one of them.

  O’Malley landed, set his brakes, and sprang out: a big, freckle-faced man, athletic in spite of middle age grizzling his red hair and thickening his waist. He wore a rather gaudy coverall which contrasted with the plainness of Coffin’s. The latter was already, courteously, securing the aircar’s safety cable to a bollard. He was himself tall, as well as gaunt and crag-featured, sun-leathered and iron-gray. “Welcome,” he said. They gripped hands. “What brings you
here that you didn’t want to discuss on the phone?”

  “I need help,” O’Malley answered. “The matter may or may not be confidential.” He sighed. “Lord, when’ll we get proper laser beams, not these damn ’casts that every neighborhood gossip can listen in on?”

  “I don’t believe our household needs to keep secrets,” said Coffin a bit sharply. Though he’d mellowed over the years, O’Malley was reminded that his host stayed a puritanical sort. Circumstance had forced this space captain to settle on Rustum—not any strong need to escape crowding, corruption, poverty, pollution, and the tyranny on Earth. He’d never been part of the Constitutionalist movement. In fact, its rationalism, libertarianism, tendency toward hedonism, to this day doubtless jarred on his own austere religiousness.

  “No, I didn’t mean that,” O’Malley said in haste. “The thing is—Well, could you and I talk alone for a few minutes?”

  Coffin peered at him through the gathering dusk before he nodded. They walked from the parking strip, down a graveled path between ornamental bushes. The Stellas were starting to flower, breathing a scent like mingled cinnamon and—something else, perhaps new hay—into coolness. O’Malley saw that Teresa Coffin had finally gotten her roses to flourish, too. How long had she worked on that, in what time she could spare from survival and raising their children and laying the groundwork of a future less stark than what she had known of Rustum? Besides science and ingenuity, you needed patience to make Terrestrial things grow. Life here might be basically the same kind as yours, but that didn’t mean it, or its ecology, or the soil that that ecology had formed, were identical.

  The small stones scrunched underfoot. “This is new, this graveling,” O’Malley remarked.

  “We laid it two years ago,” Coffin said.

  O’Malley felt embarrassed. Was it that long since he’d had any contact with these people? But what had he in common with farmers like them, he, the professional adventurer? It struck him that the last time he’d trodden such a path was on an estate on Earth, in Ireland, an enclave of lawns and blossoms amidst rural bondage and megalopolitan misery. Memory spiraled backward. The sound of pebbles hadn’t been so loud, had it? Of course not. His feet had come down upon them with only four-fifths the weight they did here. And even on High America, the air was thicker than it was along the seashore of Earth, carried sound better, made as simple an act as brewing a pot of tea into a different art—