Outland

by Alan Dean Foster

  In orbit out from Jupiter

  in view of its malignant red eye is

  Here on Io—moon of Jupiter,

  hell in space—men mine ore to

  satisfy the needs of Earth.

  They are hard men, loners for

  whom the Company provides the

  necessities: beds, food, drink

  and women for hire. Now, in

  apparent suicide or in frenzied

  madness, the men are dying . . .

  To OUTLAND comes the new U.S.

  Marshal O'Niel, a man with a

  sense of duty so strong it

  drives him to ferret out evil, greed

  and murder regardless of the cost.

  If he must, he will forfeit love,

  livelihood—even life itself

  Books by

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  Alien

  Clash of the Titans

  Outland

  Krull

  Spellsinger

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1981 by Peter Hyams Productions, Inc., and

  The Ladd Company.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  75 Rockerfeller Plaza,

  New York, N.Y. 10019

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing; March, 1981

  ISBN 0-446-96829-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Books

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  OUTLAND

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  EPILOGUE

  For Emery Morris of Shackleford County, Texas,

  My favorite ex-sheriff,

  Who would understand O'Niel . . .

  I

  Nearly everything had to be imported to Io, including love.

  It wasn't a duty station that inspired fond memories among those who served there. The men and women imported to exploit its surface felt no affection for their temporary home. Merely to tolerate Io required real effort because human emotions and attitudes underwent drastic changes so far from the warm Earth, and rarely for the better.

  Surely it hasn't changed me that much, O'Niel thought. Sure the past several years have been tough. He was used to places like Io, though. As used to them as any man could get.

  He was lying in the bed in the darkened room, hands behind his head as he gazed upward. Nearby a digital clock glowed a soft, mocking green. The ceiling was a sooty black parodying the space that lay beyond, a dark veil mirroring the smaller domesticated shadows that populated the bedroom.

  Usually O'Niel was able to concentrate fully on his job, but tonight the shadows had seeped into his head, to muddle and worry him. They buzzed his thoughts, little worries obscuring purpose, indecision and uncertainty mottling the color of the future.

  It was a future tied tightly to the supple, silhouetted form that slept next to him. He rolled over and rested on an elbow as he stared at the familiar curves masked by the loose folds of the thin blanket.

  Why can't I ever tell you all that I feel, he wondered? Do you know, Carol, how much I depend on you? How much I love you and Paulie? I know I'm not eloquent and I'm sure as hell no poet. But I'd be lost without you. I wish I was confident enough to wake you to tell you that.

  It was cold outside, colder than most men could imagine, let alone would ever experience. Inside: here, now, in this quiet bed it was warm and comfortable and reassuring. How nice it would be to have that feeling all the time instead of just for a few hours each day and during the unconsciousness of night!

  That wasn't possible, he reminded himself. His was a cold job, one that matched the nature of Io's environment. Some day soon, perhaps. He promised himself, as he promised the woman sleeping alongside him. Just one more tour, Carol. Just one more.

  He reached out and ran a hand along the curve of her hip, down the gentle swell of her side, up to her shoulder, the tips of his fingers touching lightly her cascading hair and then on to her cheek. At the touch she stirred lightly in her sleep.

  So beautiful, he thought. Even when she's turned away from me, even when she's asleep, so beautiful. I can't lose her, can't risk it.

  Definitely the last assignment. The Company and the rest of them could all go to Hell. Some things were more important than a lousy job.

  A part of him was dimly aware that he'd said that before, only for resolution to slip stealthily away, for committment to vanish. But this time I'll mean it, he told himself, this time will be the last.

  He touched her again, his hand moving lower, the heat of her bare back communicating like a mild shock through his fingers. She stirred again, pulled the blanket higher around her neck.

  O'Niel turned away, closing his eyes. Slowly the shadows haunting his thoughts broke up and went away, to merge with the shadows that filled the bedroom, and he dropped into the light, infrequent sleep that was both trademark and necessity in his work . . .

  Mankind had pushed and kicked his frontiers beyond the confines of a single world, beyond his primordial bubble of air. He sent probes searching the moons of Neptune and burrowed deep beneath the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. He mined the floating wealth that drifted between the red planet and giant Jupiter.

  All were harsh and bleak and dangerous. But of them all, none was worse than Io.

  There was very little sky and what there was of it was black as the dark side of Pluto. Instead of sky, there was a Presence. Tourists might have found the Presence inspiring and beautiful and even awesome but tourists did not come to Io. Io was a place to work, and to do your best to survive.

  The Presence took the form of a monstrous, bloated globe of banded yellow and orange hell. Long ago man had named it Jupiter, after the then king of his gods. Man's gods were transitory. Jupiter was not.

  The men and women who toiled on Io made up other names for the giant planet, names equally colorful, often scabrous, sometimes scatalogical. To them it was nothing to admire. It constituted an inescapable reminder of the precariousness of their position and of the enormous distance between them and warm homes on Luna or Mars or Earth.

  Its initial impact on new arrivals was always noted with interest by the experienced Ioites. There was an unwritten, informal test known as "degree of flinch" to which the shuttle station operators, the first to greet newcomers, always subjected them.

  It is one thing to view Jupiter from the inside of a spacecraft, secure in the knowledge that powerful engines stand ready to push you safely clear of that tremendous gravity. It's quite another to step out of a shuttle into Io Station, glance upward through the transparent access corridor, and see billions of tons of mass floating just overhead, seemingly poised to obliterate you the way a man would an ant.

  So the station crew would watch with interest to see how sharply and how often a new arrival would flinch away when first confronted with that psychologically devastating sight. The quicker and more extreme the flinch, the more often it occurred, then the less time that individual was likely to spend on Io.

  Of course, if you'd signed a time contract, as most of the transient workers did, then you were stuck. You didn't break a contract with the Company.

  There was one other test, usually applied later. The Jump Test. The Station crew assured newly arrived visitors that you could actually feel the pull of Jupiter's immense gravity out on Io's surface. Given Io's light gravity, they assured you, would
enable a strong and careless jumper to leap so far off the surface that Jupiter's gravity would take over and suck you helplessly out into space.

  And that would be the end, because as the workers of Io well knew, Hell wasn't red. Dante had it all wrong. Hell was yellow-orange, striped like the eyes of a dozen angry tigers, with one big, ugly red eye always glaring unwinkingly down on you.

  A meteor, an ambling chunk of long-ago, had made the crater. More recently, mankind had made the mine that rested inside it. The mine was the reason for his continued presence in a place which actively discouraged it.

  The explorers had come and touched down, raised their flags and made their speeches and gobbled their ounce of glory and moved on. Others had followed. They were not speech- makers. Most found nothing, but one tired group of bored searchers had made a discovery inside this particular crater—a discovery of more than passing interest.

  What they found was a huge body of ore, a hard black mineral called Ilmenite, a product of Io's volcanic upheavals. Ilmenite happens to be the principal ore of a certain metal, titanium, which is used for, among other things, the skin of spaceships. The presence of Ilmenite in vast quantities on Io paid for a great deal of trouble, a number of deaths, and the eventual establishment of the mine.

  It was a big mine, indicative of its importance to the vast international conglomerate that owned and operated it. It had gone up fast and would die with equal rapidity once the Ilmenite ran out. But at the moment it was a breathing, functioning entity. It lived.

  The men and women who made it a temporary home called the time they were compelled to spend there by another name. The fecundity of the human vocabulary when confronted with isolation and hard work and danger is truly astonishing.

  Like some lazy cephalopodian monster, the mine crawled up the sheer wall of the crater, stretching metal tentacles to its rim and dipping steel ovipositors deep into its bottom and flanks. From a distance the mine looked like the creation of an inspired cubist, a grand Christmas celebration of lights and glowing towers. Up close the illusion vanished and it became simply another tool.

  Translucent tubes and accessways connected the major structures. The thin filaments of metal and plastic seemed barely strong enough to hold in the pressure of precious atmosphere that made life possible on Io. They cracked and leaked and were hastily patched with epoxies and welds. Great care was expended in those repairs, more so than was spent in the fixing of mining equipment. Broken machinery meant red ink. Broken accessways meant death.

  The shadows of the actual mining area were sharper than its design, but it was efficient if not graceful. Scaffolding stretched over a hundred meters down the side of the crater wall. The lower levels were soaked in darkness. The scaffolding seemed too thin to hold men, let alone their heavy equipment. In that respect, the light gravity of Io was a blessing.

  Jupiter hung suspended overhead and blackness swallowed the crater's bottom. With such numbing alternatives competing for his attention, it was easy for a man to concentrate wholeheartedly on his work.

  The scaffolding was formed from a heavily oxidized metal whose orange hue matched that of Jupiter, an unintentional mimicry. Most of the men and women who crawled and swung like their ancestors from the struts and braces did not know the name of the metal that gave them support.

  Of one thing they were pretty certain, however: the scaffolding contained little if any titanium. That precious metal was too valuable to be used simply to give support to a expendable miners.

  One year, they told you. Just one year of hard work and your duty tour was over and you could go home, rich and satisfied with a job well done. It didn't seem like so long when you signed the contract. One lousy year, for more money than most of them could hope to earn in five on Earth.

  Alter a month, you began wondering if it was really such a good deal. After two, you wished you hadn't signed. After six, you didn't much care about the contract or anything else anymore. After nine, you found yourself counting the minutes remaining to your year instead of the days.

  After eleven months you spent much of your time trying not to scream. You watched longingly each time the shuttle departed without you. If you'd been lucky enough to have survived eleven months, that is.

  There was no graveyard, no boot hill on Io. Excavation was expensive, and the great gouges left in the Ilmenite didn't lend themselves to gravesites. The running joke was that if you died while on Io, the Company treated you to an all-expenses paid tour of the solar system, concluding with a one-way tour of the Sun. It wasn't much of a joke, but any humor was welcome at the mine.

  They all carried little suns of their own, the miners did. Sun-powered suns, work lights of pure white powered by the huge solar concentrators. Those vast panels managed to draw energy even from the distant, tiny star called Sol. The work lights playing over the crater wall made the mine look as though it were being worked by fireflies.

  On Earth, where it had been designed, the mining equipment had looked gigantic. Jupiter took care of that fast, as it reduced all matters of scale.

  In the mine the gargantuan cranes and crawlers looked like toys. They scuttled over the shrinking rim and the crater sides like fat gray beetles, gnawing away at the rock while pumps and generator emitted hums none could hear. But you could feel their vibration through the feet and gloves of your environment suit.

  The miners grew quite sensitive to vibration. If it stopped unexpectedly it might mean that some crawler operator had paused for a quickie with his codriver. Or it might mean an overhead drill had shattered. That meant run like hell for safe cover before the flying bits of steel and plastic came hunting for your suit.

  Everyone had a buddy out in the mine. You watched out for him or her. If you didn't, they might not watch out for you. Then there'd be no one to warn you of the silently falling, sharp rock that could tear your suit, exploding you out through the hole, guts and blood flying in slow motion toward the crater floor so far below.

  Crane or screwdriver, everything in the mine had a use. Even the colors of the environment suits had purpose, and nothing to do with aesthetics.

  Crater miners wore yellow suits. Equipment drivers favored red, while maintenance personnel were always blue-clad. Management wore white. The last was the subject of many jokes among the other workers. There was no purity on Io, save for the blackness overhead.

  Additional identification of a more personal nature was provided by the nametags stitch- welded to everyone's left breast pocket. To management the suit colors carried more meaning than the letters.

  Experienced workers could be seen disdaining the elevators and jumping from one level to the next, ignoring the vast drop. In the light gravity, leaps of prodigious size were within the ability of the puniest worker.

  The Jove-jockies, as the multiple-tour workers were called, delighted in testing the limits of their expanded athletic abilities, They horrified newcomers wtih jumps that teased death, pushing their safety tethers to the limit.

  One legendary miner, a four-year old-timer by the name of Gomez, supposedly had made the jump into Jupiter's waiting gravitational field. He'd jumped so high so hard that his tether had busted. His fellow workers had gathered below to watch him soar upward toward a yellow-orange death. His last word had been "mierda!" spoken in the self-amazed drawl of his native home state of Chiapas.

  His comrades had watched because that was all they could do. There were no ships stationed at the mine, none which could have affected a rescue. There was only the shuttle, and it came but once a week.

  Every so often a Jove-jockey would retell the story of Gomez, supplying his own details and embellishments. The new workers would listen, and deprecate, and then when they were alone would wonder if it had really happened. They'd glance up at the roiling, awesome mass of Jupiter pressing down overhead, and shiver, and hurry back to their work. It was better to concentrate on the rock.

  Each colored environment suit was a little world, crammed full of liquid food,
water, atmosphere, and the babble of many conversations relayed over open channels.

  On the ninth level brilliant white arc cutters lanced the rock, separating chunks of ore from the crater wall. One of the miners pushed off and floated up toward Level Ten. Everyone moved carefully, always conscious of his or her individual safety tether. They seemed to be moving through water, when they were actually moving through nothing.

  In contrast to physical movements, conversation proceeded at a frenetic pace. Mine-talk was a time-worn buzz of rumor, commentary on the ancestry of the supervisors and foremen, ribald jokes, curses, complaints, and quips, all counterpointed with the grunts and wheezes of people striving harder with their muscles than their minds.

  "No way," the man with the name WALTERS stenciled on his suit was grumbling softly. "I told them, no way they're gonna bring an automated vacuum loader in here. Cost too many jobs and besides, the old jockies would never let 'em get away with it."

  His companion, a bucolic individual named Hughes, laughed derisively. The sound came hollowly over the suit intercom units and possessed a faint echo.

  "Wanna bet? When they installed them on Fourteen and Twenty-three they said it was just a temporary experiment. Well, they're still in there, on both levels, puffin' away all by their damned robotic lonesomes. That's some temporary if you ask me." He flipped a null switch on his cutter, gesturing to Walters' left.

  "Hand me that connector, will you? Arc's sputtering. I'd better go to a new line."

  Walters turned, picked up a thin metal tube from a cluster and carefully placed it in Hughes' glove. His faceplate was partly fogged over. Perspiration dribbled down his cheeks and chin. In-suit perspiration produced a clammy, hot-moist sensation that one worker had likened to drowning in recently dipped sheep. The smell that went with it only served to intensify the analogy.

  Perspiration did not endanger a worker, however. Therefore it did not warrant additional Company investment in upgrading and improving suit design. And if the workers didn't have the heat to complain about, so the reasoning went, they'd find something else to complain about, wouldn't they?