O Pioneer!

by Frederik Pohl

  Evesham Giyt had never been in a power plant before. He had never thought much about what one might be like, either. Electricity was what you got when you turned a switch. Here inside the belly of the plant it was something else, something that shook the walls with low-frequency rumbling and hurt the ears with high-pitched whines. And , those, he knew, were only the sounds of the turbines that turned steam into electricity. The source of the infernal heat that distilled Ocean's water and then flashed it into steam to spin the turbines was silent. But it was there. Somewhere no more than a few dozen meters away, Giyt knew, incalculable numbers of hydrogen nuclei were madly coupling with each other to make helium. It was the same nuclear fusion that made the old H-bombs so terminally lethal—no, it was scarier than any H-bomb, because what was happening inside the biggest dome wasn't a single explosion. It was a process rather than an event, and it went on and on.

  It did not seem to Giyt that this was a thing that should be left to run itself, however good the automatic controls. But there seemed to be nobody in sight. As he and Rina walked along the golden corridors they passed a sleeping Kalkaboo, curled against a wall. He woke up long enough to glare at them, then returned to sleep. It was only after a ten-minute search that they heard a whirring sound. It came from where a human shift worker was watching a porn film on his handset as he followed the cleaning machines around.

  When Giyt asked the man for guidance he gave Giyt an injured look. "You don't recognize me, do you? Colly Detslider. I'm the relief driver on Pumper Three in the fire company."

  But after Giyt apologized and shook his hand, the man was happy enough for an excuse to leave the machines to do their job on their own. Yes, he told them, there was a full shift on duty—thirty persons, five of them human like himself. No, he didn't know where the others were. Sure, he'd show them around, although it was only fair to warn them that his own job here was janitorial and he didn't know much about the machinery.

  He knew enough, though, to keep them from going near the central chamber where the tokamak held its fusing plasma in an unbreakable magnetic grip. They saw the pumps that sucked cool water in from Ocean, to make steam and then to condense it when spent; they saw the gratings that kept the creatures of Ocean from being sucked in along with it; they saw the remarkably slim cables, wrapped in the chilling jackets that made them superconducting, that carried the power plant's output down under the strait to the community that used it. They even peeped into the control room, every wall a mosaic of screens and signals, where they saw Dr. Patroosh furiously arguing with a pair of uninterested Delt controllers. They would have seen more, probably, but Detslider was watching the time. He was due for his lunch break, he informed them, and they were welcome to come along if they wanted to.

  Lunch was machine-served in a large room filled with tables, couches, and Kalkaboo tree-rests, sparsely occupied by beings who paid no attention to the human visitors. To Giyt's displeasure the human lunch menu turned out to be creamed chipped beef on toast. "It's always something the machines can dispense. Real crap," Detslider told him. "Come on. Take your plate and we'll go someplace that smells better to eat it." A Delt, sipping some thick yellow liquid from a shallow bowl by the door, turned one eye to glare at Detslider as they left, but the man ignored him. Five meters down the corridor there was a smaller room, with two human women and a man playing pinochle at one table and space for the visitors at another. While Giyt doggedly ate his lunch Rina made polite conversation with all of them. Detslider came from Pasadena, he said, but left it for Tupelo because there was too much crime in California. Like his job? Well, it was all right, but boring. The others, respectively from Tucson, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Boston, agreed, the woman from Pottsville adding, "The damn Delts push you around here, like they owned the place." But it wasn't just the Earth humans that suffered, she conceded; the Delts acted superior to everybody.

  When they went back to the control room Dr. Patroosh spied them, snapped some final argument at the Delt controllers, and swept past them at the door. Over her shoulder she called, "Come on, we'll go home. I'm not doing any good here." And crossing the strait in the skimmer she was silent and morose. When Rina asked her sociably how her mission had gone. Dr. Patroosh snapped, "Lousy. They've got this whole fusion section locked up, nobody but Delts allowed in—because of radiation danger, they say, but for Christ's sake we know all about radiation danger." She glanced at the Delt pilot, who seemed to be paying them no attention, but lowered her voice. "I'm going home to report. We'll see what happens . . . but I'll bet we'll cave in again and dig their damn foundation for them." Then she was silent. So were Giyt and Rina until their pilot, sweeping the surface of Ocean with his glass, cried out joyfully and began pulling something heavy and harsh-looking out of a locker. With one hand he steered the skimmer toward dimples of disturbed water; with the other he was locking the object from the locker to a mount on the skimmer's rail.

  "Now what?" Dr. Patroosh demanded irritably.

  Giyt had no answer for her, but Rina piped up. "Do you know what that looks like. Shammy? That long gold thing with the barbs on the head?" And then of course he did. It was a harpoon, and the Delt proved it a moment later by firing it at the little whirlpools—no, at something under the whirlpools, something red and many-eyed that gasped and snorted as the shaft struck home and it rose briefly to the surface.

  The pilot shrieked in exultation, something that the translator did not even try to put into English. The creature sounded, pulling a hundred meters of supple, braided cable out of the harpoon's reel. The pilot made an adjustment on the reel, darted to the controls, and started the skimmer at high speed toward the coast. Then he turned to his passengers, grinning. "Good eating, you bet! But maybe too far out for any good."

  "Too far out for what good?" Rina asked, but the Delt had already turned away. He was talking rapidly on the communicator to someone ashore, keeping one eye on the skimmer's wake, where the cable was stretched out almost horizontally. At the end of it Giyt could see the quarry flailing about for a moment, then it disappeared below the surface. Ominous whirls appeared all around it, and then something else was in the water. Blood?

  It was blood, all right.

  By the time the skimmer reached the river's mouth a Delt vehicle built like an armored car was waiting for them, but it was too late. When the pilot hauled his catch in to retrieve his harpoon most of the creature was gone, slashed away by the horde of predators.

  The pilot laughed and spoke into the communicator; the tanklike thing lumbered away as he turned the skimmer upstream toward the town. He said philosophically, "Too far out, you understand? Too bad. Wonderful to eat, only not just for Delts." Then he pursed his everted lips, as though trying to remember something, then brightened. "Hey, I know Earth thing! You know Earth-human liar Kepigay?"

  "Who?" Giyt asked, and the Delt tried the name several times more before Rina said, "Oh, do you mean Ernest Hemingway?"

  "Yes. Excellent liar, Kepigay. Greatly enjoy Earth-human lies; Earth humans such excelling liars. You know Kepigay old Earth romance lie, Man Approaching Death in Relationship to Ocean?"

  "I think he means The Old Man and the Sea," Rina offered. "We had it in American lit in Wichita."

  The pilot nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, I had volume also in aboriginal folk lie study. Damn good lie, that one. You see? Same thing here; catch fish too far, sharks eat. Aboriginals have much native lore which persons can learn from, I say always—though not," he added, with one eye wandering over to fix on Dr. Patroosh, "on subject nuclear fusion."

  And all the way back to the town their pilot entertained them with stories of his fishing exploits while Dr. Patroosh glowered silently into space. When the pilot let them out on the shore of Crystal Lake, he said cheerfully, "Survive well until dark."

  Rina giggled. "I think he means have a nice day."

  "Yes, exactly. Do not shoot brain fragments all over house like famous Earth-human liar Kepigay."

  They d
ropped Dr. Patroosh off at the Hagbarth home. Then, in the cart going to their own house, Rina said thoughtfully, "You know what's funny, hon?"

  "What?"

  "Well, Colly's from California, right? We're from Kansas. Matya comes from a little town on the Jersey shore, Lupe from just outside of Albuquerque, those other guys—"

  "What's funny about that? Everybody has to come from someplace."

  "Well, sure, Shammy, but they're all from America. Wouldn't you think there'd be some people from South America or Asia or somewhere?"

  He thought for a moment, then brightened. "What about Dr. Patroosh? She said she was from some island in the Indian Ocean."

  "No, not exactly. She said her grandparents were. She's an American, all right. So I just think it's funny that there isn't anybody from the rest of the world, that's all."

  X

  The celebrated inventor of the faster-than-light transmission portal, Dr. Fitzhugh Sommermen, remains in a coma after suffering a major stroke. The attack occurred while the scientist was being interviewed on European network television. His physicians have declined to offer any prognosis for his recovery, saying only that he is resting comfortably and that all possible measures are being taken. In a related story, U.S. President Walter P. Garsh interrupted a news conference this morning to deliver a typically outspoken attack on the European reporters who were questioning Dr. Sommermen at the time. "When will they stop badgering this, poor man?" the president demanded. "No one can pretend that it is only scientific curiosity that continues to impel them. They want secrets, and they want them for their own use. Well, they won't get them. These secrets belong to America, and we aren't giving them away."

  —EARTH NEWS TRANSMISSION TO TUPELO

  Once his wife had called it to his attention, Giyt began to ponder the question himself. It seemed to be true. There weren't any Tupeloyian humans from anywhere on Earth but the U.S.A., and why was that?

  The person to ask, of course, was Hoak Hagbarth. The Ex-Earth man shrugged it off. "America's where our funding comes from, right? So I guess that's where they do the recruiting, too. Probably they'll get around to the rest of the world sooner or later. Make sense?" And when Giyt nodded, Hagbarth pressed on. "Listen, Giyt, I need to talk to you about something else. I wanted you to take that trip to the island for a reason. You saw those monsters in Ocean, right?"

  "Yes?"

  Hagbarth gave a rueful sigh. "Mean-looking bastards, weren't they? I have to admit, every time I take the chopper over there they scare the crap out of me. Can you imagine what would happen if the chopper broke down over Ocean and had to come down in the water?"

  "I think it has flotation devices," Giyt said.

  "Sure it has, if they work. But can you imagine what it would be like to be waiting for rescue out there? With the damn shark things doing their best to climb aboard for dinner? They're big, Giyt, They'd probably swamp the thing, trying to get at the passengers—and lots of women and children take that flight, Giyt. And there'd be the damn monsters, tipping the chopper over and everybody screaming and—"

  "Yes, yes. I get the picture."

  "So What we need," Hagbarth said, getting to the point, "is some kind of protection. A couple of guns for the pilot to carry. To shoot the animals so they can stay alive out there waiting for help."

  He paused, inviting a response from Giyt. "I guess that makes sense," Giyt said cautiously.

  "Only the trouble is, the eeties have this damn rule against importing weapons. So what I think you should do, at the next meeting of Joint Governance, you could make a motion to let us import one or two guns for the pilots to carry. For defense against the sharks. Do you think you could do that?"

  Giyt considered the question for a moment. It didn't sound entirely unreasonable. It didn't sound entirely kosher, either. He said cautiously, "I guess I could try."

  "Good, Evesham! I knew we could count on you. And listen, try not to be too specific about the number of weapons, all right?"

  If there was one thing Evesham Giyt had learned in his time on Tupelo, it was that he had a lot to learn. So whenever he found a moment—which is to say when he wasn't asleep or doing his household chores or fending off the demands of his constituents—whenever there was a crumb of unbudgeted time at Giyt's disposal he used it to work on Tupelo's immense database.

  His best time for that sort of homework was first thing in the morning, when an Earth-conditioned human being would have slept his full eight hours and still had the remainder of the long Tupelo dark before the sun rose and the workday began. Those were the hours Giyt spent filling the voids in his knowledge—some of the voids, anyway. Prohibition against importing weapons? Oh, yes, there was one. As far as Giyt could tell there had never been any exceptions allowed, though he supposed it could do no harm to ask. Electric power? Yes, the Delt pilot had spoken truth: When the Delts discovered the planet they earned their way into the communality by building the fusion plant. Utilities in general? There were surprises there for Giyt, who had not given much thought to how the various races divided up the chores of building and maintaining the community's infrastructure. It turned out that Petty-Primes handled waste disposal, at least until everything solid had been mulched and diluted and the resulting sludge poured into the sewage lines, which were Slug. Power was Delt, of course. Building and maintaining the little carts everyone used to get around was a Centaurian task. Kalkaboos controlled the weather satellites and the polar rocket.

  And the Earth humans?

  Giyt was somewhat taken aback to discover that the only communal task reserved for Earth humans was clearing land and preparing it for agriculture. Every species had its own farm plots, of course. Humans had cattle and goats, some of the other races maintained fish farms, while the Delts and the Kalkaboos alone occasionally fished in Ocean. The Kalkaboos also practiced a sort of vermiculture, maintaining flocks of wormlike creatures that lived and grew underground and returned to the surface only to spawn—and to be captured for food. But the drudgery of digging out places for the fish farms or chopping down the trees to make new farmland—that was for human beings. Dr. Patroosh hadn't been out of line when she complained. It was true. The other races treated Earth as a kind of Third World planet.

  The whole question of infrastructure was unfamiliar to Giyt. Just as you got electricity by turning on the switch, the way you got food, for example, was to take an autocab to the nearest restaurant. It didn't matter whether the food originated in a garden plot next door or on some agrotech industrial farm ten thousand kilometers away. All you needed to get the food was money, and the way you got money was by holding a job. Or by living on the government grants, like most of the people in Bal Harbor. Or, in Giyt's own case, by milking it out of some corporation's files.

  Thinking of money made him think of the spendthrift way the Delts treated gold. That, the datafiles informed him, was a consequence of their home planet's geology. The Delta Pavonis planet was unusually well endowed with heavy metals in general. There was plenty of uranium, for instance, rich in its fissile isotopes—so no wonder they were good at nuclear power—and an inordinate amount of precious metals, including gold. The Delts didn't prize the gold for its beauty, it seemed, but because it was so easily worked and so unlikely to corrode. And, of course, so plentiful.

  Giyt grinned to himself. Cortes, he thought, would have had a hell of a fine time on the Delt planet. He probably wouldn't even have had to hold the Delt General Manager in a cell, as Cortes had Montezuma, to force him to cough up his treasures. He probably just could have picked up all the precious metal he could carry as chunks of street litter.

  Which led Giyt to wonder what the Delt planet was like, exactly, and that was when he got the greatest surprise of all.

  No human being had ever been allowed to visit the Delt planet.

  Nor had any human ever set foot on the home planet of any of the other races on Tupelo; and none of those other races had ever visited Earth, either. The races never had any f
ace-to-face contact at all except what occurred right here on Tupelo when, every one hundred and thirteen Tupelo days, representatives of each of the six planets came together here to talk.

  And the next scheduled meeting of that sort was only a few weeks ahead.

  The Kalkaboo dawn racket made him realize that it was getting light outside. He winced as a particularly loud firecracker went off somewhere nearby—some Kalkaboo was expiating some particularly nasty sin by blowing it to bits—and went looking for Rina to tell her his discovery.

  He found her in the kitchen, carefully feeding some sort of mashed vegetable to the baby from next door. Matya was at work, she explained, and Lupe had taken the older ones to the lake for an early-morning swim. The conference of the six races? Oh, sure, she told him, that was what Matya was doing this morning, overseeing construction of new and better quarters for the dignitaries from Earth. She thought Giyt must have known about that. Everybody did. And listen, as long as he was here, what would he think if they invited Lupe and Matya over for dinner some evening soon?

  He paused in the middle of lifting the lid of something that was simmering on the stove. Here was another surprise; they had never had dinner guests before. "With the five kids?"

  "Maybe after the kids are asleep; they get one of the Donar girls to babysit for them sometimes. Or we could bed the kids down here, for that matter." She picked up the baby and held it to her shoulder, gently massaging its back as she-studied Giyt's face. "I'm just thinking we ought to get to know more people socially. Of course, if you don't want to—"

  "No, that would be fine," he said hastily. "Maybe we should invite the Hagbarths, too."

  The baby emitted a moist burp; satisfied, Rina replaced it in its chair and resumed the feeding. After a moment she said, "Maybe . . . Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not that crazy about the Hagbarths."