Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  On Pallas, the frequency band had been chosen specifically to bounce off the atmospheric envelope—Emerson remembered that KCUF used the same idea, which was why it could be heard now, even out here in the Pocks—and it was theoretically as easy to talk to someone anywhere on the surface as to someone at the South Pole.

  It turned out that it was just as easy for the dispatcher to “patch” them into the Curringer system. Apparently it was an everyday procedure which Drake-Tealy didn’t know about because, living in deliberate isolation as they had for so long, they didn’t know anyone in Curringer and had never had reason to ask before this.

  “Aloysius?” Emerson couldn’t help shouting, although the connection was perfectly clear. He could even make out the normal background noises of the Nimrod.

  “Well, speak of the devil! Emerson, me boy, how have ye been? We were just talkin’ about ye. It’s a shame this isn’t a visual hookup. I’d like t’see how yer beard’s—”

  “I’m sorry, Aloysius,” Emerson interrupted impatiently, “I need to ask you a big favor—”

  Drake-Tealy tapped him on the shoulder. “He’s still talking and can’t hear you. You both need to say ‘over’ when you’re through talking. Tell him that when you get a chance.”

  Emerson nodded.

  “—comin’ along. We’re all here, Nails, Henrietta, an’ meself—not t’forget the lovely Miss Cherry. I assume ye have a reason for callin’ us up. What can we do?”

  Drake-Tealy nodded toward the microphone on its stand in front of the knob-and-dial-cluttered radio. For such a small object, it suddenly looked rather intimidating.

  Emerson leaned forward. “We have to say ‘over’ when we’re done talking, Aloysius, since this is a one-way-at-a-time system. I need that list of names you once gave me of people you know at the South Pole, connected with asteroid mining. Or anybody else who can rent me a spaceship. I’ll also need a letter of credit from the bank.”

  He waited for a reply.

  And waited.

  “Over,” he finally remembered to add.

  “Rent ye a spaceship, is it? Bound fer Vesta, I presume. Well, I’ll waste no airtime tryin’ t’talk ye out of it, although there’s others here who might give it a try. I know ye too well, me hot-blooded young friend. Look up a fella name of Fritz Marshall. He owns Advocate Minin’ an’ Salvage an’ might be after takin’ ye where ye hafta go. I’ll transmit a letter of credit to ye direct t’his bank. It’ll be there in the mornin’ or we’ll sue the bejabbers out of ’em. Over.”

  Drake-Tealy whispered that South Polar Central Dispatch could handle a letter of credit. Emerson nodded, leaned forward again, and passed the word to Aloysius. “I may not be there in the morning. I’m still up in the Pocks with...” He paused at the sudden, apprehensive look on Miri’s face, reflected on Digger’s, as well. “With some new friends I hope you’ll get to meet someday. The flying yokes were for them. I’ll get down to the Pole as quickly as I can. Over.”

  This time Miri and her husband showed him a pair of grateful expressions. Apparently they weren’t quite ready yet to rejoin the world. He’d hoped to help them more in this regard than he’d done with his gift of flight, but now there wouldn’t be time.

  It wasn’t his only regret, as he soon discovered.

  Aloysius had a lot more to say, and Emerson spoke briefly in turn with Mrs. Singh, Nails, and Cherry. He found that he missed Cherry more than he’d realized, an empty aching that wasn’t quite love, perhaps, but an empty aching all the same. There wasn’t much they could say in public, on the radio, and that made it worse. Finally, just as he thought the conversation was over, Aloysius was back on again.

  “One more thing ye’ll need t’know, Emerson. Junior’s little band of adventurers are into the deep shit already, accordin’ t’LiteLink an’ GIGO, who concern themselves with such things. Their air an’ power are about gone. By the time ye arrive, he may be in no condition to appreciate what y’plan doin’ to him. Over.”

  Emerson shook his head violently, but what he said was, “I understand, Aloysius, and thank you. You might call your friend Marshall and have him make preparations while I’m on the way. I’m leaving as soon as we’re finished talking. Over.”

  “Roger that, as the vernacular has it. Personally, I’d as soon the bugger were already dead. I don’t know whose jurisdiction Vesta falls under. Certainly not me own. I’d hate t’see y’tried for the murder of such as Junior Altman. On the other hand, I promised I wouldn’t give ye a hard time. Good luck. Over.”

  Emerson grinned, trying to ignore the welling tears. “Thanks again, Aloysius, and good-bye.”

  “I believe the customary phrase is ‘over an’ out.’ Good-bye. Come back to us well an’ whole.”

  “I’ll do my best. Over and out.” Emerson sat back from the microphone, desperately fighting what he regarded as inappropriate sentimentality and already planning the details of reassembling his flying yoke and packing his few belongings. Although it was past noon, he wanted to leave today, before dark, and said so to his hosts.

  There was a long pause.

  Digger looked to his wife, and then nodded. “We thought you’d feel that way, but we’d appreciate it if you stayed until morning. We can leave before sunup if you like, but that way we can fix some decent food and get a good night’s rest.”

  There was an even longer pause.

  “We?” Emerson frowned.

  “We,” Miri repeated. “We discussed this on the way back from the meadow, because we knew you were about to leave, even before you got that letter from your friends. Raymond knows some people at the South Pole who can help you, and we both think it is high time that we took a little break from our lifelong vacation.”

  “’Struth,” agreed Drake-Tealy. “If you don’t mind, we’d like very much to go with you.”

  “Only if you promise to bring that with you,” Emerson nodded at the heavy rifle hanging over the mantelpiece. “There’s African leopards out there, you know.”

  Digger grinned. “And lions and tigers and bears.”

  “Oh, my!” Miri added.

  At the South Pole

  Universally, instinctively, individuals hate and fear the state. The staunchest, most paternalistic conservative, the most intrusively maternalistic liberal, each blanches at a phone call from the government’s collection agency and palpitates for hours afterward, no matter how sincerely he advocates coercive politics at other times or tries to comply with the letter and the spirit of the law. Should either ever acquire the integrity to recognize what that means, and the courage to do something about it, the world will change materially for the better.

  —Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, Hunting and Humanity

  “Do we knock, or what?”

  The plaque set over the tunnel entrance, if that was the proper word for a monumental, ribbonlike slab of foot-thick native blue-black steel affixed with thirty-six equally thick stainless-steel characters at least six feet high, read:

  PORT AMUNDSEN AIRLOCK NUMBER TWENTY-NINE

  The thing had been visible—easily legible—for the past half hour of their flight down here. Even though he knew perfectly well that the permanent population hereabouts was actually smaller than that of Curringer, Emerson felt like a rustic on his first excursion to the big city. He looked from one of his two older companions to the other, suddenly very glad they’d insisted on coming along.

  Perhaps they knew what to do now.

  And perhaps the gracefully curving six-lane concrete highway that emerged from the shade-blackened maw in the side of the partly artificial mountain standing before them would someday do more than simply peter out a few hundred yards away from the entrance, lost abruptly to the trackless, crater-broken landscape surrounding the asteroid’s South Pole. For the time being, however, anything even remotely resembling genuine civilization in this particular neighborhood of Pallas lay within those titanic, multistory metal doors they were about to enter.

  Naturally, E
merson hesitated.

  Outside, in the sunlight, this was a region of scrub oak and palmetto. Even from the air, they’d spotted the tracks of wild pigs and other large animals all along the way, and at the moment he could hear the twittering of birds, the buzzing of insects. He didn’t know exactly what he’d expected—penguins, maybe?—but it was no colder down here than it had been hundreds of miles further north. The total volume of the atmosphere of Pallas was small compared to that of the Earth, and its circulation around the little globe was many times more efficient.

  From this close to the mountainside, it seemed to Emerson that the slope soaring steeply before him touched the sky—which, in a manner of speaking, was precisely what it did. Along the top of the escarpment, actually the circular rim of a deep crater ten miles in diameter chosen especially for this purpose, were set tens of thousands of anchors for the asteroid’s atmospheric envelope, too far back from the lip to be seen from this angle. But it was here, and at the North Pole six hundred miles away, that the envelope reached the ground, leaving twin ten-mile circles enclosed within impact-created walls, exposed to the harsh vacuum and the bitter cold of the interplanetary void.

  The facility at the North Pole was called Port Peary.

  Spaceships landed here!

  Emerson hesitated. It was the massively inhuman scale of the architecture, of course, which bothered him, a humbling effect imposed here entirely by an accident of engineering necessity—but which had been used deliberately against the individual for thousands of years by governments and organized religions on Earth. He wasn’t aware that this was why Pallatian trials were conducted in places like the Nimrod and there were no public buildings, but his two companions certainly were.

  They’d planned it that way.

  “As I recall,” Digger told him, visibly trying to stretch his memory back over thirty years to matters which had never directly concerned him anyway, “there’s a smaller, people-sized door set into the side over there, and you just go in.”

  The old man’s powerful .416 Rigby Magnum rifle lay across the hoop of his flying yoke, secured by its sling and ready for whatever it was called upon to do. He’d had no use for it so far, but all the way down here he’d grumbled about how awkward the customized Enfield was to fly with, and was currently threatening to retire his ancient .455 Webley to the cabin mantelpiece as well, replacing both weapons, for most everyday purposes, with a pair of Ngu Departure 10 millimeter semiautomatic pistols, provided they were available at Port Amundsen.

  When Emerson had offered to present him with two of his factory’s popular handguns, one for the anthropologist himself and one for his wife, he’d become extremely angry, or at least put on a convincingly intimidating demonstration of it, and stubbornly insisted that it was his fundamental Pallatian right to buy them.

  Emerson had understood and shut up.

  The huge metal doors presently looming before them in the tunnel shadows, Drake-Tealy had already explained, were not so much for future use—Pallas was never supposed to grow the way Earth had, or at least not in the same directions—as for bringing in massive earth-moving machinery and megatons of raw materials which had been employed in the original terraformation process. Similarly, the “highway” they were standing on at the moment had served mostly as an airstrip for the hundreds of ultralights which had bestowed life on the little planet.

  “Of course,” Digger offered an afterthought, “it’s been rather a long while since we were last down here, and procedures may have changed a trifle over the years.”

  “He is right,” Miri agreed. “Now you simply walk up, hammer on the door, and demand to see Jabba the Hutt.” Despite her words, her voice sounded weak and shaky to Emerson. He knew she was tired and nervous. This was her first trip—almost her first excursion outside her own cabin door—in something like three decades. She was sunburned and exhausted from what must have been to her an ordeal. Moreover, in all that time, she hadn’t seen another human being besides Digger and the occasional—sometimes hostile—passerby, and never more than two or three other individuals at the same time. Now she was about to see hundreds.

  “Well,” Digger sighed, apparently suffering trepidations of his own, “there’s no time like the present.”

  Miri seemed to blink back tears and nod.

  Emerson swallowed.

  Together, they lifted gently from the concrete underfoot and drifted on their flying yokes toward the daunting tunnel entrance. Just as Digger had predicted, there was a much smaller door, with a much smaller sign welcoming the traveler to the South Pole of Pallas. To nobody’s astonishment, there was also a dusty tangle of leaf-littered brush and old spider webbing around and over the door which Miri insisted must be cleared away before they could enter. For Emerson, the whole thing greatly resembled stumbling upon a lost civilization.

  At last he turned a spoked metal wheel, threw his weight against the door, and practically fell in, discovering, as he did, a clean, well-lit chamber roughly the size of a small bedroom, in which they were compelled to close the outer door before the inner door, cleverly set at right angles to it, was physically free to open.

  “That’s Wild Bill’s engineering touch, all right,” the anthropologist observed, trying to manage his flying yoke and the long-barreled rifle at the same time. His voice echoed oddly from the smooth, hard walls around them. “Mud-simple, dirt-cheap, and foolproof. It takes an advanced degree to fuck things up well and truly.”

  Both he and his wife, of course, had PhDs.

  They emerged into a quiet, apparently little-used corridor which was also well lit and featured a large, colorful, liquid-crystal signboard on the wall opposite the miniature airlock. A series of animated arrows pointed toward Main Airlock Twenty-Nine, immediately to their left, as well as to Main Airlock Twenty-Eight, a mile around the circumference of the hollow mountain, to their right. There were also directions for getting to South Polar Central Dispatch, Spaceflight Traffic Control, something called “Freight Routing,” Port Amundsen Security, and several bars, hotels, and restaurants with names Emerson recognized.

  A flickering line at the bottom of the sign showed yesterday as the last time it had been updated.

  “The bright lights at last!” Digger grinned at his wife, offering her an arm which she took for a moment and held tightly. “Let us partake of the fleshpots, my dear!”

  Emerson didn’t know what fleshpots were and wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. He knew about restaurants, hotels, and bars, many with the same names being advertised on the sign across the corridor, from the movies he’d seen, and was curious to learn more about them, but he was also on a tight schedule. His intended victim might be dead already and beyond reach of the justice he planned to dispense.

  “Well,” he told the elderly couple, suddenly very reluctant to see the last of them, “I guess I’m headed for Spaceflight Traffic Control. That’s where I’m supposed to meet this guy, Fritz Marshall. Try and have a good time, you two.”

  Miri smiled. “We will see you at least as far as that, Emerson. We are in no hurry, are we, Raymond?”

  “Indeed not, my beloved, after a mere thirty years of abstemious self-mortification.” If Emerson hadn’t known better, he’d have suspected that Digger was already a bit drunk. “Let’s see how these Buck Rogers flying belts work indoors, shall we?”

  His wife nodded.

  Motors thrumming, they skimmed off down the corridor in the direction given by the sign.

  “Okay, where are we now?”

  Emerson and his friends soon discovered that the mountain they’d entered was moth-eaten rather than hollowed out. Otherwise, it might have lacked the structural strength required to withstand the enormous stresses imposed on it by the constant pull of thousands of steel cables, each of them hundreds of miles long, which were lifted by the atmospheric envelope and held it in place.

  Port Amundsen was a maze, but it was a maze that made sense. Each level within the massive ring-mountain cons
isted of a series of tunnels or corridors arranged in concentric circles, connected by radiating spokelike passageways. The crater wall, naturally, was broadest at its base where it contained there the greatest number of circular corridors. (There appeared to be no subsurface levels, which surprised Emerson, as that was the way he would have chosen to service ships and load and unload cargo.) Every level above it—reachable by gently sloping ramps rather than stairs or elevators—had fewer corridors and shorter spokes.

  The directions on the wall screen, and others they found along the way, led them deeper into the mountain and higher at the same time. They had to go inward, toward the crater’s center, the equivalent of fifty city blocks, and up more than a hundred stories, each section, horizontal as well as vertical, separated by hundreds of feet of steel- and concrete-reinforced rock as solid as ever it got on Pallas.

  Emerson couldn’t imagine how anyone got around this establishment without something like his flying yoke—until he and his companions finally began to encounter people, more and more of them on upper and inner levels, hurrying purposefully from one place to another with wheels attached to the bottoms of their feet.

  “Roller skates!”

  He’d recognized what he was seeing from various books and movies he’d enjoyed. Individuals skimming past them down the corridors nodded and smiled pleasantly, some of them sparing a curious glance at the flying yokes.

  “Roller blades,” Digger corrected. “Fore-and-aft instead of square-rigged, if you follow my meaning. Much more pleasant and efficient—and blessedly quiet. I used to be pretty good with them myself, once upon a time.”

  Emerson laughed at a peculiar momentary vision he had of Drake-Tealy as a small boy—complete with ivory handlebar moustache, for some reason—wheeling across the African veldt, flushing startled antelope, wildebeests, and hyenas.