Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  Tears escaped her tightly shut eyelids as she held him as hard as he knew she could. At last he led her by the hand to the apartment he was using, where he fried her a steak while she showered. The little suite was fully suited for human habitation, but the food in the refrigerator was the only thing personal he kept there. Everything else, including a change of clothes, was in his office.

  He realized, sooner or later, that he was going to have to tell her about Cherry. And Cherry about her, which was going to be more difficult.

  She emerged from the little prefabricated bathroom unit wearing a big cotton towel wrapped around her body and another wrapped around her head. Their bleached institutional whiteness contrasted strikingly with the natural color of her skin.

  “I forgot to tell you.” She inhaled the aroma of the cooking food and gave him the same look as when she’d lit the cigarette. It was the same look, he remembered now, that she’d had on her face that first time when, straddling his hips, she’d—

  He shook the thought off. “What did you forget to tell me?” He flipped the contents of the pan—African Cape buffalo steak, wild onions chopped with wild garlic and mushrooms—onto a plate and added hash browns he’d fried in a separate pan.

  She sat on a stool at a counter which was the apartment’s only table—he’d forgotten how long her legs were—pulled the towel from her head, massaged her shortened hair with it, and laid it across her lap, giving her other towel a strategic tug that did more damage than it had been meant to repair. She lit another cigarette, inhaled, and exhaled. “I’ve been to your secret cave.”

  “What?”

  “The little hollow in the crater wall under the Rimfence where you built your crystal radio? It’s the only time I ever felt safe out there, a stolen minute hidden among things you’d made with your own hands. It’s still there, artfully concealed by sagebrush, and so are all your treasures. I wish I could have brought them with me.”

  He grinned, slid the steaming plate toward her across the counter, poured her a cup of coffee from the fresh pot he’d just made, and began to dish a plate up for himself.

  “Believe me, you did.”

  As she smiled back and reached for her cup, her towel gave in and fell gracefully to her waist in the Pallatian gravity. She looked up at him, over the rim of her cup, from beneath her impossibly long eyelashes. “You know,” she observed quietly, not looking up from her plate, “if I’m coming back out tonight, I should wait until about three, when Junior’s passed out thoroughly and the goons are cooping. We’ve got a couple of hours—think we can find some way to use them?” He looked straight back at her, enjoying what he was seeing, and nodded.

  She forgot the towel and finished the meal as she was.

  Afterward, he could never remember having tasted his own food.

  In the end, Gretchen’s self-deprecatory remarks about her physical shape proved to be exaggerated. Free of her bulky denims, she was just as beautiful as he’d remembered, and his memory was good. Five miles had seemed like more because she’d walked across country in slippers meant for sidewalks and soft soil. The same kind of slippers he’d escaped in. She had the same blisters on her feet.

  To him, her shoulders and collarbones and the flawless skin that lay over them were still the same fine work of sculpture. The graceful intersecting curves of her breasts made them seem larger than they were. He didn’t know how to tell if she’d fed a baby with them. Her belly was flat, exactly as it had been before, descending in a breathtaking but inviting rush past many another scenic feature, and her hips, while narrow, were also unmistakably female.

  This time, it was she who seemed to appreciate what he knew, although, like him, she never asked how he knew it. She knew how he knew. Again they made love several times, each better than the one before. In between, at odd moments, she was able to tell him something of the conditions under which she’d been living. The rumors they’d been hearing on the Outside were true, as far as they went. The details were worse than even he had imagined. What he remembered as a steady but negligible trickle of vandalism, petty crime, and violence had become a deluge. No one was immune anywhere, at any time of the day. In the two years she’d been there, the security contingent had been doubled, redoubled, and doubled again, and it only seemed to make things worse. The personnel being sent up from Earth each time were more corrupt and brutal than their predecessors.

  But they weren’t the only source of brutality. Low on her back above her right hip, he was horrified to discover half a dozen thin, white parallel scars, each perhaps five inches long and no more than an eighth of an inch wide.

  “Oh, those,” she answered. “I got them the same night I got Gwen-Rose, along with a lot of fairly nasty bruises. He had the cuffs on me before I knew it, fastened through the bed frame. The whip was made of some kind of wire. Good thing we make such flimsy furniture on this planet—he just had time to do this before I ripped the bed apart, blackened both his eyes and broke his nose. I would have had his dick out by the roots, too, but he hit me with a lamp—you can’t see that one, it’s hidden in my hair—and your mother was at the door, which interrupted anything else he planned to do after that. I can’t say it was the end of a beautiful friendship, but it was the end of something.”

  He felt like vomiting, sickened that she’d had to go through something like this—for his sake.

  “Don’t look that way,” she told him gently, brushing his cheek with her fingertips. “It’s over now, and I got off easy. His father’s had to smooth over several messes with colonist girls. There’s a rumor that he killed one of them. Besides—” she glanced up at him from beneath her long eyelashes “—some of it—the handcuffs, not the whip—might have been fun with the right person.”

  For the next half hour, she showed him what she meant.

  And then it was time to go.

  When she was ready, he carried his yoke, along with a spare prototype, out to the parking lot, cross-connected their control panels the way he’d suddenly thought of earlier, and assured himself that they operated in the manner he’d anticipated. Duct-taping the yokes together, he switched their impellers on without taking his place within either machine. Obedient to the adjustments he’d made, they rose three feet into the air above the unpaved surface and stayed there.

  Giving her a reassuring smile, he helped her step into one yoke, then stepped into the other himself. She weighed about the same as he did, and he had no plans more ambitious than ferrying her back to the Project at a modest altitude and speed, so they shouldn’t have any power problems like he’d experienced earlier, despite the added weight of the Grizzly on his thigh.

  Keeping her hands off the panel of her machine, she donned the goggles he handed her, checked the chamber of the pistol he’d found for her in his office—his first Ngu Departure—and nodded. He advanced a lever. Together they rose, side by side, into the night sky. At rooftop height, he oriented himself, turned carefully, and they began to move ahead at about thirty miles an hour.

  “Wonderful!” she shouted. “I want to learn to do it myself!”

  “That should take you about thirty seconds!” He grinned as the night-black prairie slipped beneath their dangling feet, proud that something he’d built made her so happy. “How about tomorrow night?”

  “It’s a date!” She grinned back, then turned to peer through her goggles at the country ahead. The breeze made conversation difficult. Before they realized it, they were more than halfway to a destination neither really wanted to reach. Abruptly, she spoke again. “What are those green lights down there ?”

  Just as abruptly, he felt something slap his face, as if he’d collided with a large, fast-flying insect. A cold, stinging sensation at his hairline above his right eye was followed by a warm liquid trickle—sweat, he thought at first—running into his eye, momentarily blinding him. He brushed at it and his fingers came away blackened in the silvery moonlight, smelling of salt and iron.

  A sharp crack followed, a
nd another. He was aware she’d drawn the pistol he’d given her. One of their impellers began to disintegrate in its housing. He realized he was hearing—and feeling—the effect of supersonic bullets as they passed close by. He leaned on a joystick, spiraling them down out of the moonlit sky and leftward, away from whoever was shooting at them. He’d seen no flashes, heard no gunfire from the ground, only the noise of the passing projectiles.

  They hit with a muffled crash in chest-high sagebrush. Gretchen stifled a scream. In a shallow bowl, in the moon-shadow of a low hill, they were less visible than before, but it was hard to see what they were doing. Beside him, she was already struggling to disentangle herself from the complaining flying yokes—which he shut off—and sit up. He was blind again in his right eye, and this time he didn’t think it was the blood from his scalp wound but the wound itself.

  “Damn!” she whispered, “I’ve either sprained my knee or broken it!”

  “I wouldn’t advise standing up, anyway,” he told her just as quietly. He slid from the yoke and drew the Grizzly. His head had begun to hurt. Worse than that, a broken string of bobbing green lights had come over the hilltop and was starting down in their direction.

  “Goons!” they both hissed at the same time.

  He added, “What are they doing here? We didn’t fly over the Rimfence. We’re two miles from the gate.”

  “Junior’s thugs,” she replied. “He’s sent them after me.” Moaning under her breath from the pain of her knee as she ground it against the turf, she leveled her pistol and fired. One of the lights fell into the sagebrush and went out.

  Someone hollered, “There he is!” Someone else yelled, “Grease the sonofabitch!” A dozen other voices shouted in anger and confusion, then all the lights went out.

  “Correction,” she whispered, “they’re after you!” Hearing muffled curses as the men stumbled over unfamiliar ground, they crawled quickly from where they’d landed, their position given away by Gretchen’s shot, and waited.

  The noise grew louder. The setting moon was no help. He couldn’t tell whether he was really blind in his right eye or it was just the darkness. He listened to his heartbeat—he could almost hear hers as they arranged themselves back to back, pistols leveled across their knees—and the amazing clamor of the advancing thugs.

  Finally there came a footfall in front of him, no more than three yards away. Raising his gun, he pulled the trigger. The Grizzly bellowed and illuminated the night. The sights had been centered on the torso of a man wearing a pale blue uniform and carrying an awkward-looking rifle. The forms of three or four more, crowding up behind him, had been visible for an instant just before Emerson was truly blinded by his own muzzle flash. He fired at where he thought they were—knowing he was breaking a cardinal gunman’s rule—and fired again.

  Gretchen, too, had begun shooting. Beyond knowing that, everything else was confusion. He heard and felt the hypersonic bullets zipping past his head, heard the screaming of the men he’d shot or of those who were trying to shoot him. For that matter, it might have been his own screaming.

  He fired three more shots in quick succession, then became aware that she’d stood up behind him. As he rose and turned, the muzzle of his weapon hit something yielding which grunted. Pressing it further, he pulled the trigger and watched its muzzle-flash light up a man’s face—just before his head exploded. Something hot and cold hit him in the hip and he was down again, flailing, as three or four men yelled and started to kick him in the back, the ribs, and the head.

  She screamed, but it was choked off. He was aware that somebody turned him over with a toe and stepped on his throat. A sickly green light flared briefly.

  “Yeah, this is the guy!” growled a voice. “Nasty little slope with a Fu Manchu. This way we won’t have to slog it over to the factory. Junior may have been shitfaced, but he isn’t stupid. He said finish him quick, nothing fancy. We gotta get these hot-wired weapons back to the armory and into legal config before they’re missed.”

  Somebody mumbled. Emerson didn’t understand. It was followed by the laughter of several men.

  “Yes, asswipe, I do know who the cunt is! Who gives a shit? She’s his girlfriend, an Outsider whore. Do whatever the fuck you want with her, the whole squad of you. Just do it fast and make goddamn sure you finish her off afterward.”

  The last thing Emerson remembered was hearing Gretchen struggle. One man stumbled back from her, howling like a gutted animal, fell atop him, scrambled off, and collapsed.

  Emerson hardly felt it. He never felt the muzzle jam against his temple and slide, just as it went off.

  The Pocks

  “I’m going to put the ship about, Mr. Cargill,” he said...He felt the tension, he felt the beating of his heart, and noticed with momentary astonishment that he was enjoying this moment of danger...The hands were at their stations; every eye was on him. The gale shrieked past his ears as he...watched the approaching seas...Despondency for the sake of despondency irritated Hornblower...he knew too much about it.

  —C. S. Forester, Hornblower and the Hotspur

  “Hello the house!”

  The meadowlarks and pine buntings fell silent, but the squirrels began to chitter. The old man set down the stainless steel bucket he’d been about to carry to the spring and picked up the heavy rifle he’d just leaned against the high end of a short ramp leading up to the cabin’s porch. The turnbolt of the weapon, its hollow knob polished by decades of use, worked smoothly under his practiced hand, sliding one of the huge brass cylinders from the magazine into the chamber.

  “Hullo, yourself!”

  He raised the rifle to his shoulder.

  It wasn’t the friendliest of greetings he knew, but experience had proven it necessary. Perhaps this was merely the pilot of the ultralight which had just dropped them their supplies for the month. Although he’d spoken to them many times, he’d yet to see one of them in the flesh. Perhaps the unfortunate chap had suffered some aviator’s mishap and required assistance. The old man knew all about those little aircraft and was astonished, now that he gave it thought, that accidents hadn’t happened many times before over the last thirty years.

  Then again, it might well be the vanguard of a marauding band of runaways from the never-to-be-sufficiently regretted Greeley Utopian Memorial Project settlement a thousand miles to the northwest. The asteroid’s low gravity made travel relatively easy, and sometimes the miserable wretches got this far. They usually didn’t last long, but they could be a lot of trouble before the wild country ate them up.

  Whoever this fellow was, he appeared inhumanly steadfast—or simply too damned stupid to live. The average individual showed a trifle more reaction at having the gaping business-end of a .416 Rigby Magnum leveled on his solar plexus. By no means the most powerful of the classic African hunting rifle cartridges ever developed, it was merely the best. The softpointed 410-grain projectiles, traveling at something exceeding twice the speed of sound, gave up over two and a half tons of kinetic energy at close range—rather more than sufficient for any organism that had ever evolved on Earth—and could tear a big man in half.

  This wasn’t any big man centered over the rifle’s express sights, but a young, wiry, rather sinister-looking Oriental with a thin, scruffy beard and a black fabric patch covering his right eye. Off his left hip, low-slung and floor-plate forward, hung an enormous black semiautomatic pistol. Over his shoulders he carried the limp, antlered carcass of a mule deer very nearly as big as he was.

  In answer to the challenge, the stranger merely smiled. He’d appeared as if by magic out of the dense cover of evergreens surrounding the cabin on all sides, and stood now on the opposite bank of the rocky-bottomed creek whose nearby source was the cold, clear little spring the old man had been headed for with his bucket.

  “I’m not hiding out,” the stranger declared quietly, “and I’m not running away from anybody—except maybe from myself a little. I haven’t come to hurt anybody.”

  “Too
bloody right you haven’t,” replied the old man. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Before he received an answer, there came the all-too-familiar clatter of worn wheel bearings from the cabin behind him. “Raymond, what the hell is going on out there?”

  The old man didn’t need to look back over his shoulder to know that the old woman had appeared in the cabin door, erect and proper in her wheelchair, its chromium parts gleaming from the relative darkness of the interior. His ancient .455 Webley Mark VI—quite possibly the only revolver on Pallas—would be lying in her lap. He could even hear its lanyard ring tinkling as she moved. He wondered idly what the young stranger made of that. It must be a bit like having a flintlock pointed at him, no less deadly for all that it was ridiculous.

  He answered without turning, never taking his eye from the front sight. “It seems that we have a visitor, Miri. We’re in the process of discovering what he’s here for.”

  “I’m just a traveler,” the young stranger told them, apparently unable to take his good eye off the cabin. Likely he’d been born on Pallas and never seen anything like it. The end walls and chimney were constructed entirely of unshaped stones epoxied together, as were the front and back walls up to about shoulder height. In all likelihood it was the only building on the asteroid made even partially of wood—whole logs with the bark spokeshaven off, laid in the traditional West American manner under a shake-shingled peak—having been erected atop their original dugout as stones were gathered and the trees around it had grown large enough to harvest. “I’m only looking for a chance to spend the night under a real roof for the first time in six months. I brought this deer to make up for any trouble I might be, but if I’m imposing I’ll move on.

  “My name is Emerson Ngu,” he added.