Outland

by Alan Dean Foster

  "What about Wooton?" Walters had returned to reducing his assigned section of wall, playing the cutter across the bare black rock with a skill that depended more on instinct now than forethought.

  "He's the shop steward. What'd he say? Union going to do anything to stop those loaders being installed?"

  "I'll tell you what he said. Zip." Hughes' cutter slashed a long vertical burn in the cliff face, a carbon-electro exclamation point. "That's exactly what he said when I asked him about it . . . total zip."

  Walters shook his head to indicate his disgust, though the gesture did not translate well through his suit. "They're always trying to pull something. Fucking company. Like they don't make enough profit out of this hole as it is. They have to try to keep cutting corners, try and push some other poor schmuck out of a job."

  "Yeah, well, it's a bunch of crap." Hughes made a rude noise over the intercom. "No way they can get away with it, no way. They got seven worker shifts on Fourteen and Twenty-three, ever since they installed those loaders. You know the by-laws as well as me. 'Eight workers for each shift.' In black and white, that's what it says. Eight workers." His voice lowered.

  "I knew the two who got replaced. Mariel and Dortmunder. Good people. It's a damned shame."

  Walters' energy level rose a trifle. "Yeah, well, they want to get cute, we can get cute, too."

  Hughes' cutter snapped off again and he looked across to his workmate. "You got something in mind?"

  "Damn right. I'm sick of being pushed around. I'm gonna tell Wooton I want a meeting. Maybe what we need is a new shop steward. By-laws are by-laws or they ain't worth shit." He picked at several dials set into the left forearm of his suit but they were aleady shoved as far over as they'd go.

  "Jesus, can't they regulate these suits? Minus a hundred seventy goddamn degrees out here and we broil our asses off." He looked past Hughes to where a third cutter was working another section of cliff face.

  "Ain't that right, Tarlow?" The other miner didn't reply. Walters grunted, turned disconsolately back to his own work. Mention of the men replaced by the autoloaders had made him more depressed than usual.

  Tarlow turned off his arc cutter, carefully setting it down in its cradle. Hughes and Walters paid him no notice.

  "Where's your other suit?" Hughes asked his friend.

  "In the shop, where else? Said they'd have it fixed two days ago." He made a noise, hesitated, then swallowed. "Know the worst thing about these damn metal overcoats? You can't spit."

  Hughes chuckled. "That depends on your personal hygiene factor, I suppose. Some do it anyway."

  "Not me," Walters replied. "I'm not that far gone. But I wish they'd fix my spare."

  "Don't blame the shop. They're always backed up."

  "Yeah, that's right, they are. How come they never put any automated help in there?"

  "Autoservs are for replacing people, not helping 'em." He peered closely at Walters' faceplate. "Hey, you really are getting hot in there, aren't you?"

  "That's a clever observation."

  "Put some mylar over the sensor. Translucent repair stuff, not the opaque. Does something to the heating coil, without fouling up the climate chip. You stay cooler and nothing's damaged."

  "Really?" Walters was genuinely surprised.

  "No, moron, I just made it up." The sarcasm passed quickly. "Yeah, it works. Some wall fracturer up on Top Level found it out by accident. Didn't report it in because the Company would forbid it."

  "Why?"

  Hughes grinned behind his faceplate. "Makes the suit draw more power. You know what the Company would think of that. The mylar fools the climate chip governor into thinking it's hotter outside than it really is, and so you get colder air. Most of the guys do it."

  Walters shut off his cutter, moving to inspect Hughes' helmet. "Yeah, I see the stuff," he finally declared. "That's all there is to it?"

  "That's all," Hughes replied, turning back to look at him. "Just make sure you peel it off before going back inside. Supervisor might catch it. Just throw the patch over the side. No problem getting mylar—it's all over the mine."

  "Thanks," said Walters gratefully. "I can't wait for the next shift to try it out." They both laughed at that one.

  The third cutter, Tarlow, stood shivering nearby while staring at the floor. He was mumbling something, but so softly that his words were lost in the static that filled the intercom channels.

  "Ohhhhh . . . I hate spiders. Spiders . . . all over . . ." He started stamping on the metal platform, trying to smash something that wasn't there.

  "Eight workers for eight jobs," Hughes was saying, having turned his attention back to the rock. "That's the contract Con-Amalgamated signed in order to get the mineral rights here. They'd damn well better live up to it or there's gonna be trouble."

  "Maybe our shop steward should read the contract. He sure as hell reads his paycheck entry before they put it through the computer into his account." Walters paused stared past his friend and frowned.

  "Hey, Tarlow," he called out, "what's eating you?"

  The other cutter was now stamping and dancing with both feet. There was a hint of real terror in his squealing voice. "Kill it, kill it! For God's sake, don't let it get me!"

  "Kill what?" Hughes had also turned around. "Don't let what get you, man?"

  "Oh God . . . I hate spiders!"

  "Spid . . ." Walters looked uncertainly at Tarlow. "You shittin' us?" He glanced over at Hughes, who shook his head inside the helmet.

  "Oh God, get it off my leg! It's on my leg. Get it off, get it offfff!"

  Tarlow had ceased his stomping. Now he was flailing with both cumbersome arms at the right leg of his suit, pounding frantically at something only he could see.

  "Tarlow, what's the matter with you? Get what off?" The humor was fading quickly from the situation as far as the other two miners were concerned.

  "Spider! Please help me!" Tarlow, no longer groaning, was screaming now, his tone way up in the panic range.

  "Spider?" Hughes was worried, but also mindful that Tarlow might be putting them on. The humor at the mine was usually as rough as the living conditions. Hughes had no desire to play the sucker for somebody else's crude idea of a practical joke.

  "Have you popped your cork?" he asked the seemingly desperate miner. "How can there be a spider here? There's nothin' alive here and no bug's got a chance in hell of surviving all the multiple decontaminations all the way out from Earth."

  "He's putting us on," Walters decided with assurance, turning back to his job.

  Tarlow's frantic hands had worked upward and now were slapping at his chest. Behind the faceplate his eyes bulged in terror as something invisible approached them.

  "Godddd. Get it offfffff!"

  "Very funny, Tarlow." Hughes came to the conclusion that his friend was right. Tarlow was having a laugh at their expense. The act was badly overdone.

  "We're not falling for nothing. Cut the garbage and get back to work. We've got a shift quota to fill, you know, and Walters and I ain't gonna make up no shortfall of yours."

  Tarlow did not respond. He was suddenly grabbing at the base of his helmet, near his throat. His frantic screams were louder than ever.

  "It's getting inside, it's getting inside!"

  He was digging at his suit with a clumsy, heavily gloved hand, scratching and pawing at his left shoulder. "Get it outtttt! Oh Goddddd!"

  Lurching forward he grabbed at a tool bin. Among other things the bin contained a brace of the fine-pointed carbon-alloy projector nozzles from which emerged the pure energy beam that ate away the Ilmenite. The point had to be needle-fine to insure proper focus. In a sense, it was a drill bit which never actually touched the rock it cut.

  Tarlow pulled one out and started stabbing repeatedly at the shoulder of his suit. Hughes and Walters were suddenly awake.

  Hughes lurched toward him, his own eyes going wide. "Holy . . . Tarlow, don't!"

  They were too late. Lack of gravity defe
ated them, ironic as hell in the shadow of Jupiter.

  The mine suits were tough enough to stand a lot of casual abuse, to turn the points of rocks and metal edges, to shield a man from a terribly hostile environment. They were not designed or intended to stand up against a deliberate, desperate attempt to defeat them by an andrenalin-energized man armed with a needle-pointed shaft of unbreakable metal.

  The gash Tarlow made in his suit was above the shoulder and close to the base of his helmet, shearing through all four layers of suit material. What followed took about a second.

  There was no pressure to speak of outside the suit. Hughes and Walters heard the terrible whoosh of escaping air over their intercoms, the death whistle every worker dreads will someday sound in his own ears.

  The sudden rush of blood trying to burst out through restraining veins turned Tarlow's face crimson. Though he was already screaming, the sound didn't have time to emerge from his throat. Eyes exploded from their sockets to pulp against the inside of his faceplate. Red and gray mush erupted from the holes in his skull, filled the helmet with a moist syrup. Some was already spewing from the tear in the suit.

  The violent gush of escaping air and blood propelled the cutter's body backward and over the thin railing. In slow motion the corpse tumbled toward the blackness that masked the crater's bottom.

  It was still attached to its safety tether, which could do nothing to help its owner now. The suited body jerked to a stop, bounced at the end of the cable with a horribly animate parody of life. It hung there soundlessly at the end of the long green line, oozing a thick red fluid.

  Hughes and Walters leaned over the railing, staring, the only sounds in their ears the steady babble of hundreds of other busy, still unknowing miners . . .

  II

  Compared to the quarters of the average mine worker, those of the O'Niel's were luxurious. Nothing could be done to camouflage the exposed ventilation system piping, of course. It ran exposed beneath the low ceiling, thin conduits of life that supported everyone in the mine, a constant reminder of the tenuous hold oxygen had staked on Io.

  The walls were metal save where the warmth of pastel plastics had been used to mute the harshness and provide a little color. There were polyethylene plants and silk flowers, but no wood. Metal and plastic components could be manufactured nearby, in the zero-gee industries of the asteroid belt. Wood had to come all the way from the other side of the Universe, from Earth.

  Still, there were a few hastily added attempts at hominess, attempts to conquer sterility with imagination. Beyond the bright silk flowers there were multi-hued chair covers, personal artifacts, framed photographs. And paint. Paint was a great humanizer of metal. It couldn't mask the ventilation pipes or circuit conduits, but it could soften the cold walls and force back the proximity of a hostile environment another few meters, if only in the mind.

  There were two cIaustrophobic bedrooms, tiny compared to what was available on Earth but enormous in comparison to what was available to the average worker on Io. There was a separate, private bathroom that boasted a stall shower. The family room doubled as dining alcove, kitchen area, lounge, and work room.

  Standard furniture would have filled all four rooms to capacity and left no room for inhabitants, but everything possible was built into the walls. None of the appliances were colored. Enameling was expensive. A millimeter-thick layer of enamel was weight, and weight transshipped to Io was money lost to the Company. The O'Niels didn't rate the extra millimeter, and couldn't afford to ship in their own appliances.

  One wall was taken over by a pair of large video screens, a computer terminal, and a swarm of environmental control and monitors. The fact that the room had its own environmental controls attested to the status of its occupants. Most of the workers tolerated the temperature and breathed the atmospheric mixture that the central monitoring computer saw fit to dish out.

  A lean dark-haired woman in her middle thirties was placing frozen waffles and a cup of coffee into a microwave oven. Her coiffure was a little too perfect, her attire a shade too trendy for her to blend properly with her surroundings. She didn't fit with the bare metal and exposed piping. One might say that she glowed with the extra millimeter of enameling that the rest of the room was missing. She was pretty, a raw sort of beauty. Once she'd been prettier still, but the past years had knocked all the edges off. The facets still gleamed, but they'd been battered and scratched.

  She moved slowly around the room, a special kind of slowness which revealed that it was her mind and not her body that was tired. She leaked a kind of sadness of the spirit, a melancholy just perceptible enough to be noticed. What was really sad was that she felt the need to do her very best to conceal it.

  Waiting on her with the usual impatience of any alert eleven-year-old was Paul O'Niel. His life was simpler and did not reflect his mother's fatigue, revolving as it did mostly around food and sleep, with occasional unpleasant intrusions by scolding and schooling.

  His eyes were never still, hinting at burgeoning knowledge somewhere within. Too much knowledge, perhaps. The intelligence and quickness he displayed were promising. He also revealed considerable sophistication at times. Sophistication in an eleven-year-old is disconcerting

  Carol O'Niel noticed the anticipatory, hopeful stare. She sighed and managed to smile at him. "Be ready in two minutes, Paul. I promise."

  "Is it the buttermilk kind?" The voice, at least, was open and guileless, devoid of the enforced maturity he'd acquired during the past two years. She was glad of that. He'd be grown soon enough. She knew what the frontier did to children, sending them directly from infancy to adolescence. Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Childhood. She didn't want that for her son. She wanted him to be a boy, for a little while, at least.

  "I'm afraid so," she answered.

  "Yuck." Pure eleven-year-old response, that, she thought gratefully.

  She turned away from him, from the table, pretended to study the readout ticking away on the oven. She did it so he couldn't see her face. It's awkward to have a son who can read adult expressions so clearly, she thought. That comes from associating primarily with adults. Also from learning to read eyes and mouths through transparent environment suit faceplates.

  "I tried to get some of the maple-flavored," she told him apologetically, "but Supply said they ran out of them. The other flavors, too."

  Eleven-year-old minds have the wonderful ability to switch from one subject to another without any hint of transition. Paul whistled as he spoke because his fingers were playing with his teeth.

  "I can hardly talk with these braces, mom. And the long-range broadcast when the Shuttle Tower's talking to the ships hurts my teeth."

  "Now Paul, you know that's only your imagination," she chided him.

  "S'not," he rotested. "Anyway, I can't talk right. The Teaching Program hardly understands me during lessons."

  "I know, I'm sorry." She turned a sympathetic smile back to him. "In any case, it won't be for too much longer, if the dental program says they've done their job."

  He perked up, braces and buttermilk forgotten. "Really? How, much, longer?"

  "Pretty soon." She ran fingers across her forehead, brushing back a strand of black.

  "How soon?" they said simultaneously, Carol anticipating her son's next question and echoing him. He smiled up at her. He was such a bright, even-tempered boy, she mused. Hardly ever gave them any trouble, though he had a perfect right to. During the usual tests that preceded transfer, the doctor had called him one of the best adjusted pre-adolescents he'd ever seen.

  But he was stifled by Io, she knew. Mentally as well as physically. Corridors and accessways were fine places for young rats to mature, not young men. Even the doctor's reluctant, encouraging smile hadn't been able to hide that fact from her.

  "How soon for what?" a new, familiar voice wondered.

  William Thomas O'Niel strode into the room. He always strode, never walked. Like a jogging thoroughbred, he was. Watching him you a
lways had the feeling that he might break into a gallop at any moment. He moved with the loose, almost liquid motion of the natural athlete.

  It was the stride of a man twenty years younger than his true age, graceful and unaffected. He was tall without being overbearing, though there was something about him that seemed too massive to be held in by chairs or rooms. It was a special quality that came not from his looks but from the way he regarded his surroundings.

  His thinning hair was full of white and you had the feeling that there was meaning to each streak of silver. The lightness had crept down into the neatly trimmed beard he wore. Most of all he looked like a man who'd lived all his life outdoors, when exactly the opposite was true. His perceptions extended beyond his immediate surroundings, and it showed in his manner and his eyes.

  It was a look common to all those who'd spent much time Outland.

  "How soon 'til I get my braces off?" his son asked with a mix of anxiety and hope.

  O'Niel didn't smile with just his lips. His whole face shifted slightly. An observer would get the feeling that this man had never learned how to smile properly. Or else something had made him forget.

  He moved past the table to a small alcove like a shallow closet with no door and snapped on one of the video screens. He didn't have to look at the keys as he instinctively entered his personal call code.

  "You want crooked teeth?"

  "I don't mind them," Paul replied with the self-assured bravado that only an intelligent pre-adolescent can muster. He folded his arms, looked defiant.

  "You're going to be missing some teeth in a minute if you don't eat your breakfast." O'Niel turned his attention back to confront the monitor. He'd punched for video response only, so it didn't talk to him. Few of the personal terminals on Io possessed that capacity. Voice circuitry was expensive.

  PROCEED, it said in bright letters.

  He entered the requisite response.