By now Lou found himself taking the appearance of such a thing almost casually. But what he was not ready for was the awful still heat that assaulted him once the draft of the propeller was gone.
"How do you stand this heat?" he groaned as they climbed out onto the fried brown earth. He had never known there could be heat like this—dry and windless and hot as the mouth of a furnace.
"It drops a little when the sun goes down," Harker said. "During the day, we stay indoors where it's cool and pleasant."
"Where it's what?"
But the petroleum cart had come to a halt in front of them, rumbling and rasping, heat waves shimmering above the hot metal of the engine, and Harker was already climbing up beside the driver under the inviting shade of the awning.
Lou climbed up onto the rear bench beside Sue; the sun no longer glared down on them, but the heat was not much less intense.
"Just take us to the dome and let's get indoors as quickly as possible," Harker told the driver, and a moment later the petroleum cart was tearing along up a concrete roadway toward the big greenhouse dome, the wind of passage supplying some small relief from the heat. Lou wished the driver would take his time about it. He couldn't imagine why Arnold Harker was so damned eager to bake indoors.
By the time the cart reached an entrance to the greenhouse dome, Sunshine Sue was sweating even in the bone-dry desert air, her eyes were smarting from the cruel glare of the sun, and forlorn images of cool mountains and shaded forests teased sardonically at her mind. How did the Spacers survive in this horrid climate that seemed totally unfit for the human species?
Harker opened a metal door in the side of the dome, and as they stepped inside, Sue was stunned by the sudden coolness. It should have been like the inside of an oven under the big glass bubble, where brilliant sunlight illumined endless rows of tall green corn. Instead, it must have been thirty degrees cooler inside the greenhouse, and there was a strange foreign tang to the air, an illusive wrongness she couldn't quite place.
Harker was grinning smugly at the effect this sorcery was having on his visitors. "Air conditioning," he said. "All of Starbase One is a sealed environment, something like a space station. We cool the air electrically to 70 degrees, an optimum temperature for human functioning."
"You cool the air electrically?" Sue said. "What kind of sorcery is that?"
"A spin-off from the life-support system of the Enterprise," Harker said enigmatically. "Before the Smash, every dwelling had it."
Lou was inspecting the nearest stand of corn. The plants were growing in a long shallow metal tray, and on second look, the entire floor of the dome was a series of such trays, connected by a complicated-looking system of valves and piping. "There's no soil in here!" Lou exclaimed. "These plants seem to be growing in water!"
"Actually a scientifically controlled nutrient solution," Harker said. "It maximizes yield and eliminates the absorption of radioactive isotopes from the soil. Pure cattle fodder, pure meat."
With that he led them across the floor of the greenhouse where here and there, men and women stooped like farmers among the rows of corn doing things to the valves of the piping. There was something totally un-bucolic about the scene. This didn't seem like a farm, it was more like... a food factory. Somehow, it seemed to epitomize the Spacer spirit, alienated from the natural world and yet triumphant over it.
Harker opened a door at the other side of the greenhouse, and a rich ripe manure stench assailed Sue's nostrils. She peered down the length of a long dark shed where rows of gross placid animals stood dumbly in the gloom, confined in endless tiny stalls hardly bigger than their bodies.
"Cattle," Harker said. "We feed them hydroponically grown corn and distilled water, and the result is beef fit for human consumption. Milk and butter and cheese too. Concentrated protein."
"They don't look very happy to me," Lou said dubiously.
Harker eyed him peculiarly. "They're just dumb animals," he said uncomprehendingly. "Hardly capable of either happiness or its opposite."
Then he closed the door on the unsavory spectacle and the smell of shit, and led them around the curve of the dome wall to yet another door, and into a long tunnel with curved walls of some dull silvery metal brightly lit by a line of electric globes running down the center of the ceiling. "This leads to the living quarters," he said. After about forty yards, the tunnel opened out into a giant hallway, a long, wide indoor concourse that seemed like a grim Version of the main street of some small Aquarian town.
Brilliant sunlight streamed into the gallery from a row of high windows along the right-hand wall which, however, afforded no view of the world outside. The walls themselves were painted forest green and festooned with unhealthy-looking potted ivy. The ceiling was sky blue, and the tile floor a simulated earth brown. A line of shops and public rooms ran the length of the left-hand wall sans emblems or signs or idiosyncratic embellishment.
"The habitat is an entirely self-contained living module," Harker said proudly as he led them past a dining room, clothing shops, a nearly empty tavern. "The amenities are down here on the first level, and the upper floors contain housing for three thousand people."
"You mean all your people live indoors all of the time?" Lou asked incredulously.
Harker nodded. "This optimized habitat is preferable to the hostile outside environment," he said. "It's also an ideal model of what self-contained space habitats will someday be like, a foretaste of the human future."
"Let us hope not," Lou muttered sourly, and Sue could sympathize with what he felt.
You had to admire the ability of the Spacers to craft this little self-contained world and maintain a bubble of habitability in a hostile environment. You had to admire it, but she couldn't imagine how anyone could like it.
It didn't feel like indoors, but it didn't feel like the outdoors either. Yet people wandered around in here as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Young, old, men, women, wearing utilitarian clothing of an almost uniform design, they went about their business like the folk of any natural town, to the pervasive but subtle rhythm of music that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, so soft and bland that it took Sue long minutes to even notice it. Clean, pallid of complexion but healthy and purposeful looking, moving along to ghostly music they probably weren't even aware of, the inhabitants of Starbase One seemed almost like an idealized version of humanity, fitting denizens of this flat simulation of reality. Like the environment itself, they were clean and shiny and spotless; not a dirty face or a grimy hand or a soiled garment was to be seen. Crowded though it was, murmuring with unreal ghostly music, the place somehow didn't seem lived in, and the people themselves seemed to have banished the dirt and sweat of living from their own karma.
There was no word for the strange feeling this aroused in Sunshine Sue. Admiration mixed with disgust. Superiority combined with personal diminishment. Like the soulless magic of the musicianless music, it seemed somehow coldly seductive and utterly repellent at the same time.
It had been an amazing display of the unguessed wonders of black science and a dismaying exhibition of its twisted spirit. The more that Clear Blue Lou saw, the more knowledge he obtained, the less he understood of the soul of Space Systems Incorporated.
Arnold Harker proudly conducted them on a grand tour of this little secret world of sorcery. Huge windowless manufactories where teams of craftsmen and incomprehensible machinery created the electronic components that later turned up in the goods flowing out of La Mirage. Smelters for steel and aluminum and copper. Workshops turning out "airplanes" and petroleum carts and mighty machineries.
Electric lights were everywhere. Tools and machinery were run by electricity, the air in every building was cooled by electrical power, and even stairs were replaced by cable-lifts powered by huge electrical engines.
Starbase One was an overwhelming demonstration of the wonders that forthright use of black science could create. Given enough electrical power, it seemed there was
nothing that the Spacers could not do to lessen human effort and increase human ease. Out of the deliberate and systematic defiance of the law of muscle, sun, wind and water, sorcery had built a little sealed world where magic seemed utterly ordinary after a while.
Anything that can be done, will be done, seemed to be the rule, and there seemed to be no consideration whatsoever of the karmic consequences. Starbase One must use more electricity than all of Aquaria and then some. Lou had to admit that this naked and lavish sorcery had created a world that appealed to his distaste for wasted person effort. "Never make a man do the work of a machine" had been Arnold Harker's "first lesson in the morality of sorcery." In Star-base One, this seemed to have been pushed to its logical extreme: "Make a machine do any work that makes a man sweat" seemed to be the true principle here, and if he didn't feel the temptation of that, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou.
But if he didn't wonder at what cost all this wonderful electrical power was produced, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou either. And if he hadn't guessed the answer long before he was told, he would have been just plain stupid.
The climax of Harker's day tour was a tense dinner in a grim little commissary with three of Starbase One's "Section Managers." The food, like the irritatingly anonymous background music, might have been made in one of the Spacer factories—six platters of cow steak, fried potatoes and corn, identical down to the shape of the steak and the size of the portions.
"The diet of Starbase One is a scientific balance of all necessary nutrients," Life Support Manager Marta Blaine assured him as he picked listlessly at the grim fare. A plain-looking woman of middle age, she shoveled away the stuff with all the gustatory delight that this glum endorsement could be expected to call forth. Harold Clarke, the tall, blond, sallow Export Manager, and Douglas Willard, the wizened, quite ancient-looking Enterprise Production Manager, also packed it away without seeming to taste it. Only Harker himself seemed to display any lip-smacking enthusiasm, and that seemed calculated for effect.
Lou found himself laying back sourly and letting Sue ask most of the obvious questions.
"What do you export and to whom?"
Clarke smiled somewhat fatuously at her. "Virtually all my Section's production goes to Aquaria," he said. "I'm really responsible for maintaining your culture's so-called white technology. Over a million solar cells a year, the total supply of advanced electronic components. Your own radios. Control circuits for solar eagles." He bobbed his head at her in ironic greeting. "Meet your secret benefactor."
"It sounds like very expensive altruism to me," Sue said dubiously.
"Oh indeed it is," Clarke said. "More expensive than you can even imagine in terms of man-hours and energy units. More man-hours than anything we do, save production for Operation Enterprise. Perhaps double or triple Aquaria's total annual electrical production."
"Why?" Sue asked.
Why? Because it takes that much work and energy to—"
"I mean why do you do it at all?"
"For the greater good of all," Clarke said evenly.
Sue snorted. The Export Manager's expression hardened.
"Well then, because you people are benighted superstitious fools," he snapped. "Without our so-called black science, your so-called white technology would swiftly fall apart."
"But why should you give a damn?"
Something seemed to pass between Harker and Clarke, and when the Export Manager spoke again, his composure was carefully restored, and if he wasn't being sweetly sincere, he was giving a good imitation. "There are only a relative handful of us, and Aquaria, for all its faults, is probably the highest civilization of any significant size remaining on this planet," he said earnestly. "We help you despite your low opinion of us because Aquaria is the only possible base upon which to build a new Age of Space when—"
A glance from Harker seemed to cut him short, and old Willard, as if on psychic cue, picked up the response in seamless mid-sentence.
"—when Operation Enterprise creates the basis for a new unified planetary culture. The ability to see the Earth once more as a world entire. To search out all the remaining pockets of humanity on our blighted planet, to bring our scattered peoples back together through your own vision of a world satellite broadcast network." The Enterprise Production Manager fixed Sue with an intense stare that seemed quite sincere to Lou. "On a certain level, we dream the same dream," he said.
Sue seemed to be as impressed by this as Harker had no doubt intended, but as far as Lou was concerned, this all seemed like a carefully crafted little exercise, all talk and no spirit, designed to justify the what of black science while skirting the true essence of the how or why. None of it seemed really relevant to the justice they were ostensibly requesting him to render.
It wasn't till they were down to picking over the remains of the filling but unappetizing meal that Harker seemed to notice his hooded indifference. "Don't you have any questions?" he finally asked. The other Spacers dutifully regarded Lou with rapt interest, and even Sue seemed to be studying him for some clue as to what was behind his non-reaction.
"Yeah, I've got two questions," Lou said grimly, leaning back in his chair and steepling his hands in front of him. "And I'm afraid I already know the answer to the first one. You're using atomic power here, aren't you?"
Harker's eyes widened. "I congratulate you on your scientific perception," he said approvingly.
"Atomic power?" Sue exclaimed. She looked at Lou peculiarly. "How do you know that, Lou?"
"How else are they going to generate all the electrical power we've seen here?" Lou said, shrugging at her. "Isn't that right, Harker?" he snapped, glaring at the sorcerer. "All these wonders are built on radioactive death, aren't they?"
"That's putting it a bit melodramatically," Harker drawled.
"The reactor's well away from the main installations, radiation leakage is minimal, and it has a triply redundant safety system," the Life Support Manager said as blandly as she had endorsed the nutritional quality of the food. "We've used nuclear reactors for centuries and we've had only ten core meltdowns, nine of which were successfully contained."
"The risk is well within acceptable parameters," Harker added, a shade more sharply, "and you've already seen the advantages."
Clear Blue Lou had heard just about enough. "Atomic power is just going too far, Harker," he said angrily. "For any reason. I need know no more to speak my justice on this evil!"
There was a long moment of hostile silence. The Spacers glared at him with what seemed like contemptuous superiority. Even Sue seemed dubious about his firm decision.
"You're wrong," Harker finally said in a tightly controlled voice.
"Really? Then suppose you answer my second question. How do you justify all this to yourselves? Manipulating the karma of Aquaria with your scenarios, living out here in a hostile wilderness in air-cooled boxes, risking atomic death not only for yourselves but for the rest of the world. As far as I'm concerned, all this is evil and pointless, even self-torture. But I don't believe that even sorcerers act without reasons that make sense, at least to themselves. Why, Harker, why? What really moves your spirits?"
"Operation Enterprise—"
"You're lying to me!" Lou snapped. "All this just to send a spaceship to some ancient space station? Just to make an empty gesture? If that really is the truth, then you people really are insane!"
"It's no empty gesture," Clarke insisted in a clipped tense voice. "It will be the beginning of a new human renaissance..."
"One spaceship flying into outer space in the face of a whole world's hostility?" Lou said scornfully. "That's supposed to turn human history around? I don't believe it, and I don't believe you believe it either!"
Willard's old eyes suddenly blazed with a strangely youthful intensity. "When we get to the Ear, human history will not merely be turned around, it will truly begin!" he said fervently. "Even you will understand when the songs—"
"Willard!" Harker snapped angrily.
/> "Oh, why not tell him?" the old man said. "Why not—"
"Because now is not the time!" Arnold Harker said harshly, shooting the Enterprise Production Manager a glance of such poisonous intensity that Willard seemed to wither into silence under its force. Clarke's eyes became hooded and he drummed his fingers nervously on the table. Marta Blaine seemed somehow confused and left out. What was Harker hiding? And was he hiding it even from some of his own people?
Harker seemed to make a conscious effort to control himself. "Tomorrow all your questions will be answered," he told Lou more calmly. "You promised to withhold your justice until you had learned all. Do try to keep an open mind until then."
"And if I don't... ?"
Harker glared angrily at him for a moment. Then his lips creased in a sardonic smile. He shrugged. "It doesn't really matter, does it?" he said. "The scenario is behavioristic. And you've followed it too far to be allowed to turn back now."
"Should I consider that a threat?" Lou said, challenging the sorcerer with his eyes.
"Threats are unnecessary," Harker told him. "Consider it a promise."
"At last we're alone," Sunshine Sue said sarcastically, sitting down on the edge of the severely functional bed next to Lou. "Now would you mind telling me what that was all about?"
"What was what all about?" Lou said evenly.
Great gods, is he really this dense, or is he just trying to be difficult? Sue wondered. "What was the point of being so difficult at dinner?" she said. "I mean, like it or not, one way or the other, we are in their power."
Lou sighed. He waved his arm in the air wearily. "Look at this place," he said, "and tell me that black science isn't deadly to the spirit!"
Sue dutifully scanned the small bedroom, with its sterile pastel blue walls, its plain steel-framed bed, its cold electrical lighting. After the loathsome dinner had ended, Arnold Harker had ushered them to these quarters, telling them that this was a temporarily vacant "standard couple apartment." This grim unromantic bedroom. A sitting room with angular metal sling chairs and couch, a bathroom with cold metal fixtures, windows that looked out over ugly gray buildings and a stark wasteland. Not even a kitchen. She tried to imagine lovers turning this impersonal place into a home, but she had to admit her imagination failed her utterly.
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