Or so the founders hoped.
However, somebody was needed to administer what laws there were, preside over debates, judge disputes, oversee such public services as medicine and education, and collect a tax to pay for them. This was the mayor, a full-time official elected every seven years (four and one-tenth Terrestrial years) if he didn’t lose a vote of confidence in the interim. So far Theron Wolfe had kept that seat.
His office was on the second floor of the library, overlooking the Swift, which by day brawled green under a wooden bridge. Now at night, with neither moon up, he couldn’t see the river. But his window stood open and he heard it. The plateau cooled off fast after dark, so it was as if the glacier-fed chill of the water blew in.
Joshua Coffin pulled his leather jacket more tightly about him. Wolfe, bulky and comfortable in a wool robe lined with slimspringer fur, cocked an eye toward the window. ‘Close that if you wish,’ he invited.
Coffin wrinkled his nose. ‘Frankly, I’d rather be cold than breathe your smoke,’ he said.
Wolfe looked at the stogie in his plump fingers. ‘You must give us time,’ he said. ‘This is only the third season anyone has grown tobacco. I know it’s strong enough to walk, but after so many years of abstention — Give us time to modify the soil, or the leaf, or something.’
‘I should think the effort might better be put into improving our wheat.’ Coffin compressed his lips. ‘Never mind. I suppose you know why I have come.’
‘Your kid is missing. I’m very sorry.’
‘And no one will help look for him.’
‘Oh, come. I was informed —’
‘Yes, yes, yes. My neighbors beat the surrounding territory last night and today. But now they’ve quit.’ Coffin struck one bony fist on his black-clad knee. ‘They refuse to continue the search.’
Wolfe ran a hand through his hair, of which little remained, and adjusted the old-style spectacles on his nose. Anchor’s lone optician was not yet prepared to make contact lenses. He puffed for a moment before he replied, ‘If, as you say, bloodhounds failed to trace him past the rim of the Cleft, and no signal from his bracelet has been picked up—’
Coffin’s voice grew as harsh as his features. He twisted his neck to look out the window, into darkness. ‘I’ll concede the dogs might lose his trail,’ he said. ‘It’s so wet there, the odor probably would be washed off in a few hours. But the bracelet would not go out of order.’
‘Even if – pardon me – he strayed into the woodlands and was set on by a catling? It might have swallowed the bracelet whole, and stomach acids —’
‘Ridiculous!’ Coffin’s grizzled head swung back. The ceiling fluroros cast his eyes into shadow and gullied his face. ‘The last big predator in that area was probably shot five years ago. If one had strayed in from the wilderness, the dogs would have known. They’d have raised a yell loud enough to wake Lazarus. And there’s no plausible reason for the transmitter to stop functioning. The working parts are cased in steel which is cased in teflon. The unit is self-charging from solar energy. That’s all the thing is: a device to convert incident radiation into a particular radio frequency. At night it runs on microcapacitors which have been sun-charged during the day. A portable locator unit can detect its emission at ten kilometers.’
‘You needn’t tell me,’ said Wolfe mildly. ‘I have grandchildren.’ He stroked his beard. ‘What is your explanation, then?’
‘That he went more than ten kilometers from home before he was missed, and never got back any closer to our extreme search point.’ Coffin’s finger stabbed at the mayor. ‘And since we covered the plateau in a fifty-kilometer radius, that means he went down into the Cleft. My wife says he often sat beside it, daydreaming.’
‘I know Danny,’ said Wolfe, who knew everyone. ‘He’s got too high an IQ for his own good, but he’s basically sensible. Would he go in that direction? I’m sure you’ve warned him.’
‘Again and again.’ Coffin looked away, braced himself, and looked back. ‘My wife tells me he was in an unhappy mood when he left. The other children had been teasing him, and since he had forgotten to close a gate he … he was afraid of my anger when I got back from harvesting. If he’d often indulged in fantasies about the land below the clouds —’ He couldn’t continue.
‘Yes, that sounds plausible.’ Wolfe squinted at the smoke which streamed from his lips before he added, ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve already telespoken with several of your neighbors. They’ve explained their refusal to go very far down those cliffs. The risk is atrociously high. Especially now,, in harvest time. If a rainstorm spoiled grain in the fields, the whole colony would have a hungry winter.’
‘I’m prepared to risk my life and crops.’ Coffin checked himself. Redness went up his gaunt cheeks. ‘Forgive me,’ he mumbled. ‘My besetting sin. Spiritual pride. I appeal to you, Mayor, as … as a father.’
‘Spare the sentiment,’ said Wolfe rather coldly.
‘If you prefer. I’m prepared to do my duty by the boy, and I don’t think I’ve yet gone to the limits of my duty. Is that an acceptable formulation?’
‘Well … what do you want me to do?’
‘An aircraft —’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. You know what the turbulence is like in the clouds – and with this air pressure behind it! None of those clumsy buses we use, stuck together in their old age with spit and baling wire, could survive. We do have some high-powered aircars, in pretty good shape; but we haven’t the pilots. People like you and me have done so little flying since we came here, except for the most routine stuff, that we’d be sure to run afoul of the updrafts on the mountain slopes. Even our regular bus pilots would. I’ve consulted a few already. They tell me they could doubtless flit down to sea level if they didn’t have to stay within ten kilometers of the slopes. Which, of course, an aerial searcher would have to. It’s barely possible that O’Malley, Herskowitz, and van Zorn could survive a stunt like that. But they, as bad luck would have it, are off prospecting for copper in Iskandria. Half a planet away. Beyond reach of any radio apparatus or aircraft we’ve got here. Our transmitter can send a message that far, but their receivers wouldn’t pick it up, except by some unlikely atmospheric freak.’
‘I know!’ Coffin interrupted the quick, smooth, political voice with a near shout. ‘You think I haven’t looked into the details? Certainly the searchers will have to go on foot. I’m ready to do so myself. But I realize it would be suicidal alone. Can you persuade someone to accompany me?’ With evident distaste: ‘You have considerable arts of persuasion.’
‘It could be suicide for two, also,’ said Wolfe, less surprised than Coffin had expected.
‘Men have ventured several kilometers down into the Cleft before now, even below the clouds, and returned.’
‘Proceeding carefully along the safest routes. You’d strike out in any direction you detected the signal.’ Wolfe scowled. ‘I’m sorry, Joshua, but the boy is probably dead. If he really went to a much lower altitude – and the gradient of the Cleft is so steep that ten kilometers of straight-line travel would drop him at least five kilometers – if he did that, then the air would get him.’
‘No, Five kilometers below here, the pressure’s enough to produce a degree of carbon dioxide intoxication in most people, I admit. But Daniel has a higher tolerance than average. He doesn’t start yawning in a stuffy room, for instance. In any event, the poisoning isn’t yet severe at that level, nor has nitrogen narcosis begun.’
‘How about further on, though? Renjember, air pressure rises almost exponentially as you approach sea level. Once he began to get weak and dizzy, he’d be nearly certain to stagger on downward till he dropped, rather than try to climb back up. Then there’s the matter of food. By now he’d be so famished that death was a mercy.’
Coffin answered with equal grimness, The boy has been missing for a hundred hours, more or less. Allow another hundred for the searchers to overtake him. That may or may not be too short a time t
o starve to death, at his age. I’m sure he’d remember not to eat anything. I can pray God he’s had sense enough, once he realized he was lost, to sit down and wait and conserve his strength. Can’t I?’
Silence waxed in the room, except for the loud cold noise of the river. Then a circular saw in the lumberyard screamed. No one else was disturbed. The common pattern of life on Rustum had become an alternation of ten or eleven hours asleep with about twenty hours awake. Anchor was at work under the stars. But that shriek in the night made Coffin jerk where he sat, and roused Wolfe from his thoughts.
‘I’’ve been keeping track of this affair,’ the mayor said. He had, indeed, carefully checked the records on Daniel Coffin, genetic, medical, school, and gossip. In an unobtrusive way, he kept track of everything. ‘I expected you to come see me and suggest what you have. If I’ve spoken discouragingly, it was only because I wanted to make sure you really meant it.’
‘If not, I wouldn’t have come.’
Wolfe elevated his brows but answered merely: ‘I’ve tried to get a man or two to stand by for such an expedition. Every farmer refused, pleading the harvest season as well as the hazard to his own life. They all see their first duty as being to their own families. Particularly when you, to be frank, have not made yourself the most. popular man in High America. But now I’d like to approach someone in a non-agricultural profession. Jan Svoboda to start with.’
The iron miner?’ Coffin rubbed his long chin. ‘I scarcely know him myself. My wife is friendly with his, though.’
‘I bore that in mind when thinking about this, before you arrived. Chiefly, however, I considered the location of Svoboda’s pit. It’s on the northeast shoulder of the plateau, at three kilometers’ lower altitude. He’s used to higher air pressure, which will help some, and to the upper cloud environment, which will help still more.’
Wolfe shook his head. Light gleamed off the scalp. ‘We know so very little about Rustum,’ he mused. The first expedition barely scratched the surface of this one upland raised above this one continent. We colonists have been too busy establishing ourselves and surviving to explore beyond. I remember how glibly they used to talk on Earth about this planet or that planet, as if it were a kind of city – an entire world! Svoboda’s special knowledge, his years of experience, may fill one paragraph in the hundred-volume geographical text which may someday describe Rustum.’
‘Stop fiddling around with the obvious!’ Coffin grated.
‘Okay.’ Wolfe’s big-bellied form rose behind the desk and moved with surprising lightness toward the door. ‘My official aircar’s parked outside. Let’s go see Svoboda.’
4
Raksh, the outer moon, was rising as Wolfe landed. Being at closest approach and nearly full, it showed twice the angular diameter of Luna seen from Earth, a mottled coppery shield whose light limned the distant snowpeaks and glittered off hoarfrost on grass. And it came from the west. Slowly, slowly; it needed 53 hours to complete an apparent period, almost twice as long as its orbital time around Rustum – so that you saw it change size and phase while hanging in the sky. Tiny Sohrab would come from the west too but cross low in the south, and fast enough for a man to watch.
With such a double spectacle up there, one might have expected the stars to write Alpha and Omega. But they were only somewhat dimmed by the thicker air. Except for the Eridanus region, not visible from High America anyway, the constellations were Orion, Draco, the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, all the remembered images of night on Earth. An astronomer would have been needed to spot the slight distortions. (Well, Sol itself did lie just above Bootes, when Raksh didn’t swamp its feeble glimmer.) Twenty light-years, four decades of travel, amounted to little in the galaxy.
Coffin shivered as he stepped from the car. His breath was white under the moon. The luminance poured cold and unreal across the garden surrounding the house, edged the long leaves of a plume oak with silver, and cast the shadow of a gimtree copse over a thinly frozen pond. Abandoned in autumn but with some of its luminous fungi still alive, the nest of a bower phoenix hung in that grove like a goblin lantern. A glow wing flitted blue across the forest background, from which came the trill of a singing lizard, eerily like three bars of some old Scotch melody. The wind, slow and heavy, rustled withering leaves with a sound which was not like October in New England, nor like anything Earth had ever heard.
Nonetheless – in contrast to spring and summer, when the wildlife of Rustum filled each night with trilling and calling and croaking – it was quiet. Boots rang loud on the frosty soil. Coffin was more grateful than he cared to admit when the door of the house opened and warmth and yellow light spilled over him.
‘Why … come in,’ said Judith Svoboda. ‘I wasn’t expecting—’
‘Is Jan home?’ asked Wolfe.
‘No, he’s at the mine.’ She watched them for a moment which grew. The color began to leave her face. ‘I’ll call him,’ she said.
While she was at the visiphone, Coffin sat down on the edge of a chair. Wolfe, more at ease, made a couch groan beneath his weight. This living room was larger than average, so much like memory with its rough ceiling beams and stone fireplace and rag rugs that Coffin must bite his lip and remind himself that such homes had vanished from Earth. Now that a photoprinter was available to make full-size copies of micro material, private libraries were coming back. The Svobodas had well-filled shelves, though this was offset by authors like Omar Khayyam, Rabelais, and Cabell, right out where children could read them.
Judith looked in. ‘He’ll be back as soon as he can,’ she said. ‘He has to shut down the automatic scoop himself, because Saburo’s busy on the digger pilot. Something wrong with its computer.’ She hesitated. ‘Can I make you some tea?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Coffin.
‘Yes, by all means,’ said Wolfe. ‘And if any of your famous berry biscuits happen to be lying neglected—’
She threw him a smile more grateful than gracious. ‘Surely,’ she said, and vanished into the kitchen. Wolfe stretched out an arm to the nearest bookshelf, chose a volume, and lit a fresh cigar. ‘I don’t imagine I’ll ever understand Dylan Thomas,’ he said, ‘but I like the words and anyhow I doubt if he intended to be understood.’
Coffin sat straight and looked at the wall.
Presently Judith came back with a tray. Wolfe sipped aloud. ‘Excellent,’ he declared. ‘You, my dear, have the honor of being the first lady on Rustum to re-invent the true art of making tea. Quite aside from the fact that the leaves acquire peculiar flavors when grown here, one must allow for a twenty-degree difference in the boiling of water. What blend do you use? Or is it a secret?’
‘No,’ she said absently. ‘I’ll copy the recipe for you Excuse the mess. Wedding preparations, you know. Party tomorrow after sunrise. But of course you both have your invitations —’ She broke off. ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Coffin.’
‘No offense,’ he said, realized that was the wrong thing, and couldn’t find any way to make it up.
She didn’t seem to notice. ‘I’ve been in touch with Teresa,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could take such news as bravely as she has.’
‘If this had to happen,’ said Coffin, ‘thank God it was not to a natural child.’
Judith flushed indignantly. ‘Do you think that makes any difference – to her?’ she exclaimed.
‘No. Pardon me.’ He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. ‘I’m so tired I hardly know what I’m saying. Don’t get me wrong. I intend to keep searching till … at least till we find out what happened.’
Judith glanced at Wolfe. ‘If Danny is dead,’ she said in a voice not quite level, ‘I think you should arrange for Teresa to get another exogene as soon as possible.’
‘If she wants one,’ said the mayor. ‘He lived past the minimum required age. She doesn’t have to take another.’
‘She does, down inside;. I know her. If she doesn’t ask, force her to. She’s got to see that she didn’t … didn’t fail.’
>
‘Think so, Josh?’ inquired Wolfe.
Coffin’s ears felt hot. They were discussing his private business. But they meant well, and he dare not offend Jan Svoboda’s wife. ‘In any event,’ he managed to say, ‘I believe such an adoption would be our duty.’
‘Duty be damned!’ she flared.
In his weariness, the old habit of a celibate spaceman took over, treating women like retarded children, and he said, ‘Don’t you understand? Three thousand colonists don’t furnish a large enough gene pool to insure species survival. Particularly on a new planet, where a maximum variety of human types is needed so the race can adapt itself in the minimum number of generations. The exogenes, as they are begotten and adopted and reach maturity, will eventually total a million additional ancestors for the ultimate human stock. They are necessary.’
‘Judith does have an education,’ said Wolfe.
‘Oh. Of course. I didn’t – I mean—’ Coffin clenched his fists. ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs. Svoboda.’
‘Quite all right,’ she said, though without warmth. He didn’t think she was miffed at his faux pas. But what, then? That he had called the exogenetic babies a duty? Well, weren’t they?
Silence stretched. It was a relief to hear Jan Svoboda arrive. The sound was a descending whine, which became a steady murmur as the rail car balanced on its gyros. With transportation aforethought, he had built his house next to the ore-carrying line between his iron pit and the steel mill in Anchor.
The whine resumed and dwindled as he sent the car back..He stalked in. His pants were smeared with oil, his tunic red with hematite. ‘How do you do,’ he said roughly.
Coffin rose. Their handshake was brief. ‘Mr. Svoboda—’
‘I heard about your boy. It’s very sad. I’d have come and helped look for him myself, but Izzy Stein told me your neighbors could cover the possible territory.’
‘Yes. If they had been willing to do so.’ Coffin blurted out what he had said to Wolfe.
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