Orbit Unlimited

by Poul Anderson

  “That’s why you were so anxious to save the herd,” Mary said low. “Eva’s told us how you insisted.”

  “Oh, I didn’t have any definite ideas at that time,” Dan replied. “Only a—general principle.” His mood drooped. Trying to lift it, he said, “This doesn’t mean your father’s project has to be cancelled. Once the chemicals have been identified, I’m sure they can be taken out of the fuel.”

  “Indeed.” Ralph forced a smile. “You’ve done us a considerable favor, actually. Besides the rescue, you’ve saved us a number of further losses like this.”

  “But you didn’t know!” tore from Mary.

  Dan started half out of his seat. “What’s that?”

  “You didn’t know—then—and anyway, even if you had known, there are other herds—” She began to weep.

  Appalled, he went to her, knelt by her bunk, and gripped her hand. It lay cold and moveless in his. “Mary, what’s wrong?”

  “I was afraid of this … what Ralph and Eva were getting at … before you came … don’t you see? You, you care so greatly about this land … that to save a part of it … you’d risk—”

  “Not your life, ever!” he exclaimed.

  “No, I s-s-suppose not … but your own!”

  “Why shouldn’t I, if I want to?” he asked in his bewilderment.

  Her look was desperate upon him. “I thought—I hoped—All the years we might have had! You risked those!”

  “But … but Mary, my duty—”

  In long, shuddering breaths, she mastered herself enough to say, with even the ghost of a smile: “‘I could not love thee (Dear) so much, Lov’d I not honour more.’ Dan, I never really sympathized with that attitude. Or, at least, I think two people have to share the same, well, the same honor, if they really want to, to share each other. We belong to different countries, you and I. Can you understand?”

  He shook his head as he spoke, harshly. “No. I’m afraid I don’t.” He rose to go. “But you’re still exhausted, Mary. I’d better not keep after you about this, or anything. Let’s talk later, shall we?”

  He stooped above her bed, and their lips touched, carefully, as if they were strangers.

  Though the air outside was hot and damp, a rising wind roared in treetops; and over the lake came striding the blue-black wall of a rainstorm that would cleanse and cool.

  Nobody else was in sight when Dan and Eva left the guesthouse. Nonetheless they did not continue on among the neighbor buildings, but went down to the shore. The water chopped at their feet. Afar, lightning flashes were reflected off its steeliness, and thunder rolled around heaven.

  “Well,” he said at last, into the wind, “I guess that’s that.”

  “You’ll get over it,” said Eva, no louder or livelier than he. “You both will, and be friends when you happen to meet.”

  “Except why couldn’t she see—?”

  “She could, Dan. That’s precisely the trouble, or the salvation. She sees far too clearly.”

  “You mean, because I care about the land, she doesn’t imagine I care about her? No! She’s not that petty.”

  “I didn’t say she is, Dan. In fact, she’s very large, very wise and kind. Look, she can live here, never going outside of cages like a house and a helmet. But to make you stay all your days, or more than a bare fragment of them, where she can be—that’d cage you. You, who now have the whole world before you. Better to say goodbye at once, while you’re still fond of each other.”

  And you, Eva, inherit me, he thought in bitterness. He glanced down at her, but her head was averted from him and he saw only flying cinnabar locks.

  Wind skirled, thunder cannonaded. He barely heard, after a minute: “That’s what I had to tell Ralph before you arrived. When he asked me to marry him.”

  The breath went from Dan. The first stinging drops of rain smote him in the face.

  Then she turned back and took both his hands. In her eyes he saw—not a plea, not: an invitation—the challenge to make a new beginning.

  A FAIR EXCHANGE

  Nowhere on Rustum was autumn like that season anywhere on Earth. But on the plateau of High America it did recall, a little, the falls and Indian summers of the land whence this one had its name—if only because many plants from another mother planet now grew there. Or so the oldest colonists said. They had become very few. Daniel Coffin knew Earth from books and pictures and a dim star near Bootes, which his foster father had pointed out as Sol.

  Red leaves of maple, yellow leaves of birch, gold-streaked scarlet leaves of gim tree, scrittled on the wind, while overhead tossed the blue featheriness of plume oak that does not shed for winter. The founders of Anchor were forethoughtful men and women, who laid out broad streets lined with saplings when they were huddling in tents or sod huts. The timber grew with the town. In summer it gave shade, today it gave radiance to pavement, to walls of brick and tinted concrete and what frame buildings remained from earlier times, to groundcars and trucks—and an occasional horse-drawn wagon, likewise a souvenir of the pioneers—that bustled along the ways.

  Children bound for school dodged in and out among elder pedestrians. Their shouts rang. Coffin remembered the toil and poverty he had lived with, like everyone else, and smiled a bit. Yes, there is such a thing as progress, he thought.

  Air flowed and murmured, cool on his face, crisp in his nostrils. The sky arched altogether clear, pale blue, full of southbound wings. Eastward, the early morning sun stood ruddy-orange at the end of street and town, above the snowpeaks of the distant Hercules range. Though Anchor’s hinterland was an entire planet, it was itself not large: about ten thousand permanent residents, more than half of them children. To be sure, this was a fourth of the world’s humanity.

  Glancing the opposite way, Coffin saw a tattered drift of smoke above the mostly low roofs. A flaw of wind brought a rotten-egg stench. He scowled. Progress can get overdone. Though he had never seen it in person, writings, films, and the tales of witnesses had driven into his bones what too much population and industry had done to Earth.

  And as for children—the cheerfulness of the weather departed. Here was the hospital. His heart knocked and he mounted the steps more slowly than was his wont.

  “Good morning, Mr. Coffin.” The nurse on desk duty was quite young. She addressed him with an awe which hitherto he had found wryly amusing. Him, plain Dan Coffin, lowland farmer?

  Well, of course he’d made a name for himself as a young man, one of the few who could explore the immensities down yonder and gain the knowledge of Rustum that all men must have. And, yes, he’d had experiences that made sensational stories. But he’d always winced at those, recollecting the ancient saying that adventure happens only to the incompetent—then excusing himself with the fact that in so much unknownness, it was impossible to foresee every working of Murphy’s Law.

  And anyhow, that was long behind him. He’d been settled down at Lake Moondance for—was it thirty-five years? (Which’d be about twenty Terrestrial, said an echo from his childhood, when people were still trying to keep up traditions like Christmas.) Oh yes, he did have by far the biggest plantation in those parts, or anywhere in the lowlands. He could be reckoned as well-off. His neighbors for three or four hundred kilometers around considered him a sort of leader, and had informally commissioned him to speak for them in High America. Nevertheless!

  “Good morning, Miss Herskowitz,” he said, bowing as was expected in Anchor, where they went in more for mannerly gestures than folk did on the frontier. “Uh, I wonder, I know it’s early but I have an appointment soon and—”

  The sudden compassion on her face struck him with terror. “Yes, by all means, Mr. Coffin. Your wife’s awake. Go right on in.”

  That gaze followed him as he strode: a stocky, muscular man, roughly clad for his field trip later today, his features broad and weathered, his black hair streaked with gray. He felt it on his back, in his heart.

  The door was open to Eva’s room. He closed it behind him.
For a moment he stood mute. Against propped-up pillows, sunlight through a window gave her mane back the redness it had had when first they knew each other. She was nursing their baby. On a table stood a vase of roses. He hadn’t brought them, hadn’t even known the town now boasted a conservatory. The hospital staff must have given them. That meant—

  She raised her eyes to him. Their green was faded by weariness and (he could tell) recent crying. For the same reason, the freckles stood forth sharply on her snub-nosed countenance. And yet she was making a recovery from childbirth that would have been fast and good in a much younger woman.

  “Dan—” He had long had a little trouble hearing, in the High American air that was scarcely thicker than Earth’s. Now he must almost read her lips. “We can’t keep him.”

  He clamped his fists. “Oh, no.”

  She spoke a bit louder, word by word. “It’s final. They’ve made every clinical test and there is no doubt. If we bring Charlie to the lowlands, he’ll die.”

  He slumped on a chair at the bedside and groped for her hand. She didn’t give it to him. Holding the infant close in both arms, she stared at the wall before her and said, flat-voiced: “That was twelve or thirteen hours ago. They tried to get hold of you, but you weren’t to be found.”

  “No, I—I had business, urgent business.”

  “You’ve had a lot of that, the whole while I was here.”

  “Oh, God, darling, don’t I know it!” He barely, lightly grasped her shoulder. His hand shook. “Don’t you know it, too?” he begged. “I’ve explained—”

  “Yes. Of course.” She turned to him with the resolution he knew. She even tried to smile, though that failed. “I’ve just … been lonely. I’ve missed you. …” Then she could hold out no longer, and she bent her head and wept.

  He rose, stooped over her, gathered clumsily to his bosom her and the last child the doctors said she could ever have. “I know half a dozen fine homes that’d be happy to foster him,” he said. “That’s one thing that kept me busy, looking into this matter, in case. We can come see him whenever we want. It’s not like him being dead, is it? And, sure, we’ll adopt an exogene as soon as possible. Sweetheart, we both knew our luck couldn’t hold out forever. Three children of our own that we could keep may actually have bucked the odds. We’ve a lot to be glad of. Really we do.”

  “Y-yes. It, it’s only that … little Charlie, here at my breast, m-m-milking me this minute—Could we move here, Dan?”

  He stiffened before answering slowly: “No. Wouldn’t work. You’ve got to realize that. We’d lose everything we and—the rest of our kids—ever hoped and worked for. We’d be too homesick—”

  —for soaring mountains, rivers gleaming and belling down their cliffs; for boundless forests, turquoise, russet, and gold, spilling out to boundless prairies darkened by herds of beautiful beasts; for seas made wild by sun and outer moon, challenging men to sail around the curve of the world; for skies argent with cloud deck, or bright and changeable when that broke apart, or ablaze with lightning till the mighty rains came cataracting; for air so dense and rich with odors of soil and water and life, that the life in humans who could breathe it burned doubly bright, ran doubly strong; for the house that had grown under their hands from cabin to graciousness, the gardens and arbors and enormous fields that were theirs, the lake like a sea before them and wildwoods elsewhere around it; for friends with whom roots had intertwined over the years until they were more than friends and a daughter of theirs became the first love of a boy called Joshua Coffin—

  “You’re right,” Eva said. “It wouldn’t work. I, I, I’ll be okay … later on But hold me for a while, Dan, darling. Stay near me.”

  He let her go and stood up. “I can’t, Eva. Not yet.”

  She stared as if in horror.

  “The whole community depends on, well, on me,” he said wretchedly. “The negotiations. We’ve discussed them often enough, you and I.”

  “But—” She shifted the gurgling baby, in order to hold out one arm in beseeching. “Can’t that wait for a while? It’s waited plenty long already.”

  “That’s part of the point. Everything I’ve been working for is coming to a head. I dare not hesitate. The time’s as good as it’ll ever be. I feel that. I can’t let…my man…cool off; he’ll back away from the commitment he’s close to making. I’ve gotten to know him, believe me. In politics, you either grab the chance when it comes, or—”

  “Politics!”

  He consoled her for the short span he was able. At least, she accepted his farewell kiss and his promise to come back soon, bearing his triumph and their people’s for a gift. He did not tell her that the triumph was not guaranteed. Doubtless she understood that. Her brain and will had been half of his throughout the years. In this hour she was worn down, she needed him, and he had never done anything harder than to leave her alone, crying, while he went to do his damned duty.

  Or try to. Nothing is certain, on a world never meant for man.

  Consider that world, its manifold strangeness, and the fact that no help could possibly come from an Earth which a handful of freedom-lovers had left behind them. Consider, especially, a gravity one-fourth again as great as that under which our species, and its ancestors back to the first half-alive mote, evolved.

  Hardy folk adapted to the weight. Children who grew up under it became still better fitted. But the bearing of those children had not been easy. It would never be easy for most women, until natural selection had created an entire new race.

  Worse, that gravity held down immensely more atmosphere than did Earth’s. Because this was more compressed, men could breathe comfortably near the tops of the loftiest mountains. As they descended, however, the gas concentration rose sharply, until it became too much for most of them. Carbon dioxide acidosis, nitrogen narcosis, the slower but equally deadly effects of excess oxygen: these made the average adult sick, and killed him if he was exposed overly long. Babies died sooner.

  Now the human species is infinitely varied. One man’s meat can quite literally be another man’s poison. Such variability requires a gene pool big enough to contain it. The original colonists of Rustum were too few—had too few different chromosomes between them—to assure long-range survival in an alien environment. But they could take with them the sperm and ova of donors, preserved in the same fashion as were those of animals. These could be united and brought to full fetal development in exogenetic “tanks,” on whatever schedule circumstances might allow. Thus man on Rustum had a million future parents.

  And: as far as practicable, the donors back on Earth had been chosen with a view to air-pressure tolerance.

  Some of the original settlers could stand the conditions at intermediate altitudes; some could actually thrive. But exogenes like Daniel Coffin and Eva Spain could live well throughout the entire range, from ocean to alp. To them and their descendants, and whoever else happened to be born equally lucky, the whole planet stood open.

  The human species is infinitely varied. A type on the far end of a distribution curve will not always breed true. There will be throwbacks to the median—perfectly normal, healthy children, perfectly well suited to live on Earth. Certain among them will be so vulnerable to unearthliness that they die already in the womb.

  Because of that possibility, every woman who could manage it spent the latter halves of her pregnancies on High America. In earlier years, Coffin had often been able to visit Eva there. During this final wait she had seen little of him, in spite of all the time he spent on the plateau.

  Thomas de Smet was a fairly young man; the accidental death of his father had early put him in charge of the Smithy. He ran it well, producing most of the heavy machinery on Rustum, and planned to diversify. Thus far, businesses were small, family affairs. They were, that is, with respect to number of employees. Since machines had started to beget machines, the volume of production—given the resources of an entire unravaged world—was becoming impressive. Manpower was the worst bo
ttleneck, and the settlers were doing their lusty best to deal with that.

  Coffin had known de Smet since their youth, albeit slightly. On Rustum, everybody of the least importance knew everybody else of the same. When the first glimmerings of his scheme came to him, Coffin decided that this was the man to zero in on. He had spent as much of the past year as he could, cultivating his friendship.

  The worst of it is, Coffin thought, I like the fellow. I like him a lot, and feel like a hound for what I hope to do.

  “Hi, Tom,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Who cares?” de Smet replied. “This is my day off.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Dan, you don’t mean to propagandize me again, do you? I thought we were going fishing.”

  “First I want to show you something. It’ll interest you.”

  De Smet, a lanky towhead, studied Coffin for a second. Nothing in the lowlander’s squint-eyed smile, relaxed stance, and easy drawl suggested a serious intent. However, that was Coffin’s way at the poker table. “As you wish. Shall we flit?”

  They entered the aircar. Since Coffin would be guide on the first stage of the outing, de Smet waved him to the pilot’s seat. The vehicle quivered and murmured up from the lot behind the Smithy. Anchor became a collection of dollhouses, where the Swift and Smoky rivers ran together to form the Emperor and all three gleamed like drawn swords. The countryside spread brown in plow-land and stubblefields, amber in late-ripening crops, fading green in Terrestrial grasses and clovers, blue-green in their native equivalents, multihued in timberlots and woods, one vast subtle chessboard. Dirt roads meandered between widely spaced farmsteads. Far to the north, where the tableland dropped off, a white sea of cloud deck shone above the low country. Eastward reared the Hercules; southward, the yet mightier Centaur Mountains came into sight above the horizon; westward, cultivation presently gave way to wilderness.

  Coffin aimed in that last direction, set the autopilot, leaned back, drew forth a pipe and tobacco pouch. He hadn’t commanded a high speed of the machine. Equinox was barely past; daylight prevailed for better than thirty hours.