“That’s why we did. You think of this section as being far from home, but to us, it’s no further than Anchor.”
The car came to a halt, then descended straight into a meadow. Coffin opened the door on his side. A thousand songs and soughings flowed in, autumn crispness and the fragrance of that forest which stood everywhere around, ripe. Grasses rippled, trees tossed their myraid colors, not far off blinked the lake.
“Marvelous spot,” Coffin said. “You’re lucky to own it.”
“Not lucky.” De Smet smiled, however worried he perhaps was. “Smart. I decided this ought to be the heart of my preserve, and claimed the maximum which the Homestead Rule allows.”
“You don’t mind that my gang and I camped here for a bit?”
“Oh, no, certainly not. You’d leave the place clean.”
“You see, in searching for clues to minerals on unclaimed land, we needed an idea of the whole region. So we checked here too. We made quite a discovery. Congratulations, Tom.”
De Smet grew less eager than alarmed. “What’d you find?” he snapped.
“Gold. Lots and lots of gold.”
“Hoy?”
“Mighty useful industrial metal, like for electrical conductors and chemically durable plating. Making it available ought to be a real social service.” Coffin’s thumb gestured aft. “You’ll want to see for yourself, no doubt. I brought the equipment. I knew you know how to use it, otherwise I’d’ve invited along any technician you named. Go ahead. Inspect the quartz veins in the boulders. Put samples through the crusher and assayer. Pan that brook, sift the lakeshore sands. My friend, you’ll find every indication that you’re sitting on a mother lode.”
De Smet shook his head like a man stunned. “Industry can’t use a lot of gold. Not for decades to come. The currency—”
“Yeh. That should be exciting, what happens to this hard currency you’re so proud of. Not to mention what happens to the wilderness, the majority of it that you don’t own, when the rush starts. And it’ll be tough to get labor for producing things we can merely eat and wear. You, though, Tom, you’ll become the richest man on Rustum.”
Coffin knocked the dottle from his pipe, stretched, and rose. “Go ahead, look around,” he suggested. “I’ll make camp. I’ve brought a collapsible canoe, and the fishing’s even better here than at Lake Royal.”
De Smet’s look searched him. “Do you … plan … to join the gold rush?”
Coffin shrugged. “Under the circumstances, we lowlanders won’t have much choice, will we?”
“I—See here, Dan—”
“Go on, Tom. Do your checking around, and your thinking. I’ll have lunch ready when you come back. Afterward we can go out on the water, and maybe dicker while we fish.”
He strode into the hospital room, grabbed Eva from her bed to him, and bestowed upon her a mighty kiss.
“Dan!” she cried low. “I didn’t expect—”
“Nor I,” he said, and laughed. “I never dared hope things’d go this fast or this well.” The sun stood at noon. “But they did, and it’s done, and from this minute forward, sweetheart, I am yours altogether and forever.”
“What-what—Dan, let me go! I love you, too, but you’re strangling me.”
“Sorry.” He released her, except to lower her most gently, bent over her, and kissed her again with unending tenderness. Afterward he sat down and took her hand.
“What’s happened?” she demanded. “Speak up, Daniel Coffin, or before heaven, I’ll personally wring the truth out of you.” She was half weeping, half aglow.
He glanced at the door, to make doubly sure he had closed it, and dropped his voice. “We’ve got our contract, Eva. Tom de Smet called in his counselor as soon as we returned, a couple hours ago, and we wrote a contract for the Smithy to come do work at Moondance, and you know Tom never goes back on his word. That’s one reason I was after him particularly.”
“You finally persuaded him? Oh, wonderful!”
“I s’pose you could call it persuasion. I—Okay, I’ve told you before, strictly confidentially, how my gang and I weren’t just doing research in the High American backwoods, we were trying for a mineral strike.”
“Yes. I couldn’t understand why the hurry.” Her tone did not accuse. Nor did it forgive. It said that now she saw nothing which needed forgiving, and merely asked for reasons. “I kept telling you, the minerals would wait, and the ecological trouble wasn’t that urgent.”
“But getting the contract I was after was.” He stared downward, and his free hand knotted into a fist. “I had to leave you mostly alone, and I knew it hurt you, and yet I didn’t dare explain even to you.”
She leaned over to kiss him afresh. When he could talk again, he said: “You see, machinery and engineers are scarce. The Smithy itself has none too big a supply. Any day, someone else might’ve instigated a project which’d tie everything up for years to come. And in fact, if word should leak out that we lowlanders might seriously bid, why, then chances were that somebody else would tie the Smithy up, and invent a project afterward. Not to suppress us or anything, but because it’s true that profits are higher here than amongst us.
“It wouldn’t’ve mattered if you, under anesthesia or whatever, if you let slip that I was quietly prospecting. I knew there’d be suspicion of that in Anchor; and what the hell, plenty of people go on such ventures, even if not quite that far afield. This other thing, though, this real aim of mine—”
“I see, I see. And you did succeed? You’re a marvel.”
“According to Tom de Smet, I’m a bastard.” He grinned. “Then after we’d talked awhile, he said I was a damn fine bastard who he was proud to call a friend, and we shook on it and have a date later today to go out and get roaring drunk.”
Puzzlement darkened her eyes. “What do you mean, Dan? First you talk about prospecting, but evidently you didn’t find your mine. Then you talk about getting this contract that you were actually after all the while. Didn’t you simply, finally, persuade Tom to give it to you?”
He shook his head. “No. I tried and tried, for lunations, and he wouldn’t agree. I grew sure he wanted to, down inside. But his silly social economic conscience insisted he stick by the dictates of economic theory. In the end, I told him I knew I’d gotten to be a bore on the subject, and I’d dog my hatch, and why not go fishing?”
“And—” she said like a word of love.
“This is a secret you and I take to our graves with us. Promise? Fine, your nod is worth more than most people’s oaths.
“I took him to a mother lode of gold I’d found on land of his. I explained that I hated, the same as him, how a gold rush would destroy the wilderness, let alone the currency, and draw effort away from things more useful. But I had a duty to my own community, I said, to my friends who’d asked me to speak for them. I offered my silence, and my fellow prospectors’—I’d picked them very carefully—I offered him that in return for his contract with us. We could write that in, as a provision not made public unless our blabbing gave him cause to cancel the deal. Take it or leave it, I said. A fair exchange is no robbery.
“He took it, and I really am convinced he was personally glad to have that excuse for helping us. Say, how about letting him and Jane foster Charlie? They’re more than willing.”
“Dan, Dan, Dan! Come here—”
He knelt by the bed and they held each other for a long while.
Eventually, calmed a little, he took his chair and she lowered herself back onto her pillows. Eyes remained with eyes.
One of hers closed in a wink. “You don’t fool me, Dan Coffin,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“That act of yours. The simple, hearty rural squire. Nobody gets to lead as many people as you do without being bloody damn shrewd.”
“Well. …” He looked a trifle smug.
“My love,” she said, barely audible, “this may be the first time in history that anyone salted a mine which the victim already
owned.”
“I have my contract, which Tom de Smet will honor in word and spirit both. Further than that, deponent saith not.”
Eva cocked her head. “Have you considered, Dan, that the possibility may have occurred to Tom, and he decided not to check the facts too closely?”
“Huh?” Seldom before had she seen or enjoyed seeing her husband rocked back hard.
But when at last he left her—for a while, only a while—he walked again like a young buccaneer. The wind outside had strengthened, a trumpet voice beneath heaven, and every autumn leaf was a banner flying in challenge.
Buy New America Now!
About the Author
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, mysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Besides winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1961 by Trigonier Trust
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4976-9430-9
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Orbit Unlimited Page 25
