Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  There was ice under that much-abused ground, but Emerson’s hydrologist, who’d met him at the site, had warned him that the salt and metal content were too high to make it economical for the pipeline’s electroceramic filters to process. A geologist, who’d also flown up from Port Amundsen, had informed him that the depth and distribution of the deposits were all wrong. Extraction would cause a massive subsidence which might not only generate local quakes—and on tiny Pallas, the word “local” took in a lot of territory—but could also get him sued by neighbors whose surface water would drain into the resulting depression.

  The final straw—and he hadn’t needed a hired hand to tell him this—was that extending his network to reach this far east over the rugged terrain of the Pocks would yield a dead loss for the next ten years. Convincing the landowner that he wasn’t trying to drive the price down, and that he really didn’t want the land, had proven impossible. All the time Emerson had been there, inspecting the ruined claim stake, the man had kept the video in his ATV tuned to another interview with Gibson Altman. Clearly the homesteader agreed with the Senator on many points. They hadn’t parted company on amicable terms. Another unsatisfied “customer,” he thought wearily, more grist for Altman’s evil mill.

  Although there were many demands on Emerson’s time and he could have used the last forty-eight hours to good advantage either in his new offices in Curringer or at his still-growing Ngu Departure plant, where he had really wanted to be this morning was Port Amundsen, at a symposium on state-of-the-art spacecraft design given by Fritz Marshall and companies that maintained the atmospheric envelope and orbiting solar mirrors that kept the asteroid warmer than nature had intended.

  Or he could have been at a similar affair in Port Peary concerning recent experiments in the field of antigravity, the so-called “fifth force” locked inside the deepest recesses of the atomic nucleus. Mankind’s future—and his own, he was convinced—lay in space, and he was determined to involve himself in it somehow, if only the press of business left him enough time and energy.

  He couldn’t even visit Digger while he was down here at this latitude. The anthropologist’s cabin was on the other side of the Pocks, half a world away, and the man was rumored to be visiting Earth. In any case, he wasn’t answering calls.

  Instead, Emerson sat on the steps of a corrugated-steel line shack he’d stopped at for a rest—since he could hardly call on the hospitality of the landowner—and ate a snack from stored supplies. The shack marked the farthest reach of his pipeline in this area. Outside, the flies were mustard-colored and bit savagely if he wasn’t watchful. The rough, sparse ground cover was golden brown, punctuated by blue and yellow wildflowers, mostly mountain columbine. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a warm Coke—at least the weevils hadn’t managed to bore their implacable way into that—making virtue of necessity by enjoying the sunshine and the smell of sage and evergreen the breeze carried to him.

  There was considerable satisfaction, gazing down the slope along the die-straight path of the pipeline. Where it crossed the holdings of others, it was often painted camouflage colors to match the local surroundings. Here, it gleamed like liquid silver in the sun, reflecting perfectly the cheerful yellow of a tiny caterpillar tractor sitting alongside. The pipeline was a testimony to human purpose, which could be just as implacable as that of any insect and vastly more constructive. He knew what Altman and his friends would say about that shining length of stainless steel, but to Emerson, it was beautiful.

  In a few minutes he’d have to resume his journey to Curringer, where more unpleasantness awaited. An individual whose land had held ice of the proper quality was now convinced, mostly by Altman’s continuous barrage of innuendo, that Emerson had cheated him. He not only wanted his contract set aside, he wanted damages which he had publicly promised to donate to an Earthside animal rights foundation. Emerson’s lawyers—it still shocked him to realize that he had lawyers—had filed for dismissal and, under the Stein Covenant, were confident of getting it, but his own testimony was required, which meant the waste of at least another day.

  This wasn’t the first instance of his business practices and personality being called into question, and it wasn’t any accident. The real perpetrator to be watched on Pallas, Altman had warned an entire galaxy, it seemed, over and over in the past five years, was that ruthless industrialist Emerson Ngu. If one believed Altman, his fast-growing, world-embracing water network—“to name a single, typically exploitive undertaking”—now threatened to destroy millions of priceless Drake-Tealy Objects.

  Emerson snorted derisively. He had as much trouble thinking of himself as an industrialist as he did about employing lawyers. He was just a guy who made guns, flying yokes, a few other items, and happened to run a pipeline because his factory and the little town that seemed to be growing up around it of its own accord needed water. To listen to the Senator, one might think he was another William Wilde Curringer.

  That seemed to stir an idea, something about mankind’s future in space, but the thought eluded him.

  As far as the Drake-Tealy Objects were concerned, Emerson was as romantic as anyone and honestly hoped Digger was right, that they were the product of an ancient alien civilization. It would be exciting, reassuring, and somehow would make the universe seem less hostile and lonely. But there was no telling where the damned things were going to turn up; they seemed to be buried everywhere, and if you tried to avoid the almost indestructible items, nothing would ever get done on Pallas. Which may have been the Senator’s point.

  Nothing substantially new had been discovered on that topic in the past five years. One world-famous popular “scientist,” more of a TV personality, in fact, who hadn’t done any original scientific investigation of his own for decades, had “reconstructed” the hypothetical nonhumans of Pallas, along with their airy, futuristic cities. This effort made as much sense to Emerson as trying to recreate the human race and its civilization from a handful of paper clips. The aliens stood about five feet tall, had enormous, lovable, moist brown eyes, and soft, glossy fur.

  Naturally, these wise and noble beings were pacifists and vegetarians—although, when it served the purposes of the pop scientist and his fans, the benighted creatures had also blown themselves and their planet to pieces in a nuclear war which unfortunately had left no physical evidence, but which must stand nevertheless as a dire warning to a foolish and untrustworthy humanity concerning the iniquities of individualism, capitalism, runaway technology, or whatever else the pop scientist and his fans happened to dislike this week.

  Those brown eyes had done the trick. While Altman appealed to what he termed the “collective conscience of humanity,” several countries, including East America and the People’s Republic of Britain, had outlawed the import of Drake-Tealy Objects, bypassing any need for conscience, making the choice for their subjects via the same deadly force so vehemently deplored by Altman and his allies on any other occasion. The UN was still pondering the Altman Plan. That it abrogated the concepts of national sovereignty, personal privacy, private property, and profit, on Pallas or anywhere else, was never conveyed to a public less hostile toward ideas like that than had been the case a century ago. By now they were growing bored with the subject anyway, and the media would find them as distractible by the next well-planned crisis as they always seemed to be.

  Emerson didn’t really blame them. In fact he didn’t really believe in anything that might properly be called “the public.” There were just billions of preoccupied individuals, coping with their own lives as he was attempting to cope with his. He knew the media lied about every issue he was familiar with, and as a consequence he assumed they lied about everything else, as well. But unless it bore directly on what he was doing, he lacked the time and energy to discover the detailed truth for himself. That was the advantage the media enjoyed, and the source of their power, but he didn’t know what to do about it any more than anybody else did.

  Meanwhile, the prolon
ged and inefficient assembly of a UN spacefleet to enforce an Emergency Antiquities Protection Act they hadn’t as yet ratified was proceeding in a bizarre kind of open secrecy, reminding Emerson of what he’d read of the decade of corruption and incompetence spent in the creation of the Spanish Armada.

  Nobody seemed to know whether the idea was to blockade Pallas, preventing export of any further Drake-Tealy Objects, or to seize control of the entire asteroid. The latter seemed far likelier to Emerson, since the Objects’ main value seemed to lie in the excuse they provided Altman and his ilk to destroy everything Curringer had ever accomplished. Once a fleet stood in orbit about Pallas, it was only a step from blockade to invasion. The art of wringing a credible provocation from an enemy unwilling to fight hadn’t changed since the time of Begin or Bush. Pallatians observed what little the media told them of these events in a sort of helpless disbelief, and made what preparations they could for war.

  Which was another reason Emerson had flown to the southern terminus of his pipeline, on which all of Pallas had come to depend for its health and growth. He wanted to estimate for himself how defensible it might be. The answer, he admitted gloomily, was that it wasn’t defensible at all. How could it be? It had been built in a time of peace for peaceful purposes. It had been meant to bring life to otherwise lifeless regions of the asteroid. Pallas was a growing concern, but it wasn’t growing fast enough to make the pipeline profitable if it had to be—what was the word?—hardened for war. Somehow, without giving up what Pallas really stood for, that war had to be prevented.

  Idly, because he was still looking for an excuse to postpone his journey back to Curringer, Emerson stubbed out his cigarette. He’d also run short of cigars this morning, which might at least have kept the damned flies away, and the thin, acrid smoke was getting in his own eye. He leaned inside to turn on the shack’s all-purpose communicator. He didn’t really expect it to be in any better condition than the coffee and biscuits had been, so he was actually surprised when a perfect polychrome three-dimensional picture of the familiar bartender-announcer from His Master’s Voice sprang into life across its screen.

  “...gonna repeat now, an important news conference recorded live earlier this morning here in Curringer and broadcast over KCUF. We don’t get to do this kinda stuff very often, folks, so we’d really appreciate it if you’d pay attention.”

  The announcer was replaced by a scene Emerson recognized, the inside of the Nimrod Saloon & Gambling Emporium. Aloysius’s people had set up a table by the wall with the enormous antlers, cluttered with large pieces of poster board displaying photographs and computer printouts. There were also items of physical evidence, some of which he’d handled himself. Behind that, and a fat cluster of microphones duct-taped together, stood two women. The one who hung suspended in a flying yoke, he knew. As the unseen camera focused in, Miri Stein spoke.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to introduce Dr. Rosalie Frazier, who has come to Pallas through the auspices of the Curringer Foundation, an organization few are likely to have heard of since it was set up in secret, independent of the Curringer Trust, to safeguard the Covenant which bears my name and which some claim is responsible for the unique way of life we share and enjoy on this asteroid.

  “Before you ask, I am responsible for having brought this young scientist to Pallas. I believed her presence to be urgently necessary, with warships being prepared, even as I speak, to impose the political will of Earthside politicians on all of us. She is one of a tiny band of ‘xenoarchaeologists,’ an expert on nonterrestrial artifacts, and she wields impressive credentials, even if her field has so far been forced to struggle along without a tangible object of study. At my request, she has been commissioned by the Curringer Foundation to settle this dispute over the so-called Drake-Tealy Objects once and for all. Dr. Frazier...?”

  He’d never seen the young woman before, but as the screen shifted to a close-up, he knew she was too beautiful and lively for the Earthside media to ignore. Looking flushed and excited, she had dark, glossy, shoulder-length hair, large, appealing blue eyes, nice cheekbones, and a nose turned up a little at the end. A good mouth, but it was her self-confident manner he found most attractive. She was slim, in tight-fitting coveralls a movie director might consider appropriate to digging artifacts in a desert, and at the same time intriguingly rounded in the right places.

  Best of all, from the standpoint of the Pallatians she addressed, she carried a heavy autopistol in a broad belt slanting across her hips.

  Obviously a bit nervous, she cleared her throat. “Thank you, Miss Stein. To relieve the suspense, I’ll begin by saying that the Drake-Tealy Objects I’ve examined on Earth by neutrino-scan and other recent techniques are not only indisputably the product of intelligent fabrication, billions of years old, they were apparently assembled atom-by-atom to assume whatever shape they have and perform whatever function they once served, in a manner beyond our present technology.”

  She held up a hand, trying to silence the uproar she’d provoked. “There isn’t much more to say about that aspect, except to note that certain of my colleagues have been somewhat premature, inferring such things as the makers’ size, body shape, hair and eye color—not to mention party affiliation and softdrlnk preference from a few badly worn tool specimens...” There was general laughter. “I do, however, have something to say about the disposition of these objects.

  “The legislative program put forth by ex-Senator Gibson Altman is not in the interests either of the people it affects or of science. It’s nothing more than backdoor socialism, blatant and regressive, a last grab at power by collectivist politicians on Earth and elsewhere whose time in history is over. I urge Pallatians to take arms—I see you’ve done that already—and resist this reactionary stupidity. I urge the people of Earth to remove the self-aggrandizing hacks responsible for taking them to the brink of history’s first interplanetary war.”

  The room rocked with cheering and applause and it was some time before it could be quieted down.

  “It should be clear to everyone else by now, after the disasters of the last century, that coercion isn’t the answer to this or any other problem. Instead of fabricating another statist excuse to beat people up and kill them, I propose to educate Pallatian Object-finders, so that what they bring back from the wilderness will retain its archaeological ‘context’ and be of greater value to science and the market.

  “To Senator Altman and his allies, if they’re so worried about preserving the prehistory of this asteroid, perhaps they should dig deep in their own pockets—rather than those of the taxpayers—and buy as many Drake-Tealy Objects as possible. They can put them in museums—or wherever else they think advisable.

  “Thank you.”

  A Precipice at His Feet

  A man is only as old as the woman he feels.

  —Groucho Marx

  Emerson grinned.

  “Well, I can see my help wasn’t needed. Inconsiderate of you to conduct your lives without it!”

  He’d traveled halfway around the little globe for the second time in as many days in an attempt to persuade Drake-Tealy to see his wife. He’d tried hard to stay out of the archaeological free-for-all when it had been a public matter, but he’d immediately recognized what Miri had really been up to yesterday, and why.

  Happily, he was too late. Miri and Digger were sitting on the front porch of their cabin, holding hands and swinging gently back and forth in a rustic glider the anthropologist had built by hand. Now that he’d alighted in the yard in front of the house, Emerson could see that there was a third individual, Miri’s video protégé, a beautiful young girl of about half his age, occupying an equally handmade-looking armchair in a nearby corner formed by the porch railing. It had been difficult to tell from above, in the late afternoon sunlight.

  With a houseguest ready to occupy the living room couch he’d slept on during his own first stay here, he realized he’d have to sleep out under the trees tonight or fly a
ll the way back to the plant. Well, why not? His work was already done here, wasn’t it?

  Digger laughed. “Come on up and make yourself to home, son! We’ve got a venison stew simmering on the back of the stove and Miri just put on a fresh pot of coffee.”

  Emerson did as he was bidden, leaning his flying yoke against one side of the steps and reflecting that R.L. Drake-Tealy was one of the few people on this little world who would think to call him “son.” During his stopover—not brief enough to suit him—in Curringer, Mrs. Singh had reminded him that the previous day had been his birthday, his fifty-second, if he remembered it correctly.

  Miri smiled at him as he hunkered down on the padded top of a very old-fashioned wooden keg they kept around as a stool. “You haven’t met our other guest. Rosalie Frazier, this is Emerson Ngu. Emerson, meet Rosalie. She’s recently arrived from Earth to—”

  “I saw you both on TV, Miri. It was a pretty startling and impressive performance.” He nodded cordially at the younger woman. “Nice to meet you in person, Dr. Frazier. How does it feel to have prevented history’s first full-scale interplanetary war while saving Pallatian sovereignty and hyperdemocracy itself?”

  She shrugged. “The reviews aren’t in, Mr. Ngu. Possibly I’ve provoked rather than prevented it, which would make me feel a great deal like Harriet Beecher Stowe. And I prefer to be called Rosalie by friends of Miri’s and Digger’s.”

  “Then make mine Emerson,” he responded, “and I could use a cup of coffee, if you don’t mind, after the miserable day I spent in Curringer and the long flight out here.”