Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  It was Rosalie who got up and went into the kitchen at the back of the house for Emerson’s coffee. As she passed by him, he inhaled the faintest possible trace of some subtle and pleasant perfume. He’d already noticed that she was considerably more attractive in person than she’d appeared on TV the previous day, and there was a lingering familiarity about her. He thrust the thought aside, however. Whatever her credentials, she still was only a girl, possibly in her late twenties, far too young for an old bird half a century old like himself.

  In response to Miri’s raised eyebrows, he explained how he’d happened to see them and the reason he’d had to return to town instead of flying out here immediately.

  “By the time I got to Curringer and discovered that my testimony wasn’t going to be necessary after all—god, I love lawyers—I’d wasted most of the day cooling my heels at the back of the same room where you and Rosalie held your history-making press conference. Aloysius and Nails and Mrs. Singh send their regards, by the way, along with three cheers apiece. I looked afterward, but neither of you was to be found anywhere in town, so I took a chance that you’d be out here, even though there’s a story circulating that Digger’s back on Earth.”

  “I am,” the old man chuckled. “This is just a hologram you’re talking to. I wish I’d seen the ladies in their moment of triumph. Did anybody think to make a recording?”

  Emerson explained that what he’d seen yesterday at the line shack had been a recording and that KCUF could probably supply a copy. “You probably ought to have one,” he told Miri and Rosalie as the latter handed him his coffee. “You two may just have saved a pair of worlds and the lives of everyone on them.”

  He knew that a UN fleet could have wiped Pallas out simply by destroying the atmospheric envelope. On the other hand, he was aware that the Pallatians weren’t without resources and that anyone with a small spaceship—Marshall, for instance—could have nudged a county-sized asteroid from one orbit into another, causing it to plunge down onto mankind’s mother planet, duplicating the catastrophe which had finished off the dinosaurs. There had been talk of doing exactly that among his acquaintances at both poles, and maybe even some preparations.

  He said as much now, omitting the fact that he’d diverted some of that hostility by contracting for an ice-finding survey to be conducted among the nearby lesser asteroids.

  “Well, before you wax too eloquent in your congratulations, young man,” Miri cautioned him, with the same sort of reference to their relative ages that had startled him in Digger’s case, “you should be advised that I was acting from no high-flown sense of duty or historic mission. I simply missed my husband and had to see this question settled before it split us up forever. I knew that, had Rosalie’s findings gone the other way, he would have accepted them out of respect for the same plain scientific truth that I am committed to. And even centenarians like Raymond and myself,” she added, “have their passions.”

  Digger laughed, remembering that he’d once said almost exactly the same thing to Emerson. “I don’t believe this relationship of ours was ever fated to go smoothly, my dear.”

  She nodded agreement. “Being misquoted by ax-grinders in the mass media did not help things much,” she told Emerson. “You may already know I heartily concur with Raymond’s notions about hunting and always have—among other reasons, because they tend to ensure the survival of individual liberty on Pallas. It is hard to oppress a population equipped to hunt animals the size of a man.

  “However, that was all theory. I was raised as a city girl on Earth, tainted, perhaps unconsciously, by fashionable attitudes toward life and death which have little bearing on reality anywhere, but especially on Pallas. I never quite adapted personally to some of the more sanguine aspects of the hunting life, and, after being crippled, never had a chance to try. The time I have spent in the town where William Wilde Curringer died, among people who hunt for a living, has helped me deal with problems that were strictly mine to begin with, and my trip to Earth, where hypocrites deplore hunting but wear leather shoes, finished the job.

  “Now I understand, as I never did before, the depth of that hypocrisy. Many of the animals bred to be hunted here on Pallas, deer, antelope, elk, moose—”

  “Rabbits,” Digger interrupted, counting off until he ran out of fingers, “squirrels, pikas, javelina, mountain goats, caribou, bison, bear, boar, elephant, buffalo, rhino, quail, pheasant, pigeon, wild turkey, grouse, even ducks and geese—”

  “Along with many of their natural predators and supporting species,” Miri regained the floor, “face extinction back on Earth where they are ‘protected,’ whereas here, there is talk of reviving mammoths by cloning and even a little speculation that the genes of dinosaurs may someday be salvaged from bird or reptile tissue.”

  “Or from blood preserved in the guts of biting insects trapped in amber—somebody wrote a book about that, once. Damned clever it was, too.” Digger grinned, obviously thinking about his .416 Rigby. “Wouldn’t that be a grand hunt?”

  Miri smiled. “All I want right now, however, is to be with Raymond and enjoy the time we have left.”

  Rosalie sighed. “You love this place, don’t you, Emerson?”

  He stood with his hands in his pockets, his toes dangerously close to the edge of an intimidating precipice at the southern end of Digger’s homestead claim. Off to one side, the stream running through the anthropologist’s land plunged off the cliff-edge into the crater valley below, which at this time of evening was filled with colored mists and shadows. He wondered what it must have been like to walk rather than fly out here from what passed for civilization in the early days. The thought was more intimidating than the cliff-edge at his feet.

  “I love all of the wild, untamed places of Pallas,” he told Rosalie, “and the violent topography of small planets in general.” He continued thinking out loud. “On Earth, because of the gravity, I guess, the pioneers traveled the valley bottoms, mountain passes, and so forth, to get from one place to another. Here, they had to follow the ridges, partly because the low gravity allows it, partly because the valleys are all circular, having been blasted out by impact with smaller asteroids, and don’t necessarily connect with one another.”

  From this unexpected plateau, even with the sun threatening to set over their right shoulders, they could see not only into the twilit valley below them, but over the next one and the one after that, taking in at a single, sweeping glance perhaps a hundred miles of rugged Pallatian geography which, for the most part, only Emerson had so far explored, and then, mostly from the air.

  He felt rather than saw her nod in acknowledgment. They’d hardly looked at one another since they’d made their way through the dense woods following dinner to get to this spectacular sight. The idea had been Digger’s, with Miri’s enthusiastic approval. They both had realized what the elderly couple had been after, aside from the chance to be together for a little while, but they’d gone along, Emerson because the idea appealed to him despite what he thought he ought to feel.

  They’d left their flying yokes at the cabin, but they both wore their pistols. This place wasn’t safe and never would be. It hadn’t been meant to be safe. Despite the scenery, Emerson would have liked very much to gaze deeply into the girl’s eyes if the idea hadn’t also embarrassed him. To his amazement, the middle-aged bachelor had immediately found himself failing in love with Rosalie. He was old enough, he lectured himself, to be her father, and the fact that simply being with her like this evoked a fierce burning within his loins was only a perversion on his part, to be suppressed and ignored at all costs.

  “Yes, I love this place,” he added, as much to bar the forbidden path his thoughts had been taking as anything else. He touched the fabric patch that covered his right eye socket. “I was hurt the first time I came here, in mind as well as body. I’d not only lost everything I had, and everything I’d ever wanted, I’d lost everything I believed in. I was healed here, and I probably grew up.”

&nb
sp; A faint breeze stirred and she moved closer until she took his left arm, as if merely against the coming chill of the night air. “I know all about that, Emerson,” she told him. “A lot of people do, back home on Earth. You may not realize it, but you’ve become something of a folk hero in certain quarters, especially in West America, where I did most of my growing up, as well as my own...”

  Her voice trailed off. He turned to look at her—she was so beautiful to him that it hurt—wondering what she’d been about to say, but didn’t say anything himself.

  “As well as my own personal hero,” she went on, visibly mustering courage. Suddenly she was not the competent, self-confident professional he’d seen and begun falling in love with yesterday, but a small, frightened girl he also found terrifyingly irresistible. “I think the reason I came to Pallas was for the chance of meeting you—”

  He ran a nervous hand over his face, feeling the lines and scars of a lifetime of...what? Action and adventure? Accidents and mistakes, more likely. “Not to discover a lost alien civilization, that didn’t have anything to do with it?”

  She shared his laughter. “Well, that might have been part of it. Whatever the reason, Miri didn’t have to be any more persuasive than she and Digger were tonight. But you’re interrupting, and I’m pretty certain I can only work up to this the one time: Emerson Ngu, I think I’ve been in love with you, or at least with stories about you, since I was a little girl.”

  He felt an almost painful tension in his body that hadn’t been there for years, perhaps even decades. Most of all, it hurt him—and at the same time stirred him—in a very private, secret place he thought had been permanently scarred over, thoroughly numbed to any possibility of sensation, a place where no one, not even Cherry, had been able to touch him in a long, long time.

  “There’s usually a difference,” he told Rosalie sadly, “between stories and reality.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, pulling his face down to hers, “and in this case, it’s entirely to your advantage.”

  That was all it took to blast his bitter resolve to bits, along with his embarrassment. In a matter of seconds, he and Rosalie lay together on the dried leaves at the edge of a quarter-mile drop into oblivion—which he felt was ironically symbolic of the circumstances. His mouth was still on hers as he slipped the khaki bush shirt off over her shoulders, his fingers having seen to its half-dozen buttons without his conscious attention. He would reflect later that it was nice to be middle-aged after all, to know what the hell you were doing.

  She wore nothing underneath, and while he felt her nipples rise and stiffen beneath his palms, and reveled in the scent of her, she struggled, first with the awkward buckle of his heavy gun belt, then with the fastenings of his Levi’s. Women, he had long since come to believe, always knew what they were doing, regardless of age.

  They melted together for the first time in the heat and blazing light of freshly discovered passion, and to them it was more than a matter of mere coupling, it was as if the subatomic particles which constituted their bodies, their minds, their very beings, mingled and fused. She cried out with welcome, long-anticipated pain as he exploded, letting go of a lifetime of grieving, anger, loneliness, despair, and frustration he’d never fully realized he’d been carrying around inside him. Everything was right, the feel of her body beneath his, the sound of her voice, the texture of her firm young flesh, everything.

  He held her afterward without a word, and, in a surprisingly short time, their second moment of passion was slower, gentler, more relaxed and deeply satisfying. They smoked a cigarette and watched the violently multicolored sunset for which Pallas was famous, then the moon rise over a hundred miles of alien landscape.

  There would have been a third moment, but, as he was about to take her again, and she was about to give herself, he heard a low cough behind them at the edge of the trees and tumbled off her awkwardly to snatch up his pistol, expecting to see a chagrined Drake-Tealy with some reason for having interrupted them.

  It had better be a very good reason.

  The pistol had been only a precaution, but it was well advised. Over the moonlit front sight of the massive automatic, he was looking straight into the luminous eyes of an African leopard.

  Behind him, he heard the hammer of Rosalie’s pistol clicking back to full-cock.

  They must have been a hell of a sight, he thought, the two of them, completely naked, guns in hand, startled by the big cat who gave them another polite, if somewhat sarcastic-sounding coughing noise, turned on itself like a rope of silk, and vanished without another sound into the utter blackness beneath the trees.

  Neither of them could stop laughing as they put their clothes on in the dark and gathered up their belongings to go back to the cabin, leopard or no leopard. Perhaps, he thought, there wouldn’t be a problem now about that living room couch.

  There wasn’t, and they were married within a week.

  Home to Roost

  TV—chewing gum for the eyes.

  —Frank Lloyd Wright

  “I’m Ned Polleck and this is DarkTalk, a feature of the East American Television Service, coming to you on this particular occasion from the studied of KC—of a TV station in Curringer, the principal town on the asteroid Pallas.”

  The famous newsman was sitting at a table, shuffling papers, in what was recognizable to any Pallatian as His Master’s Voice, the saloon that was also home to KCUF. Around him, the patrons and staff of the place were carrying on with business as usual, although somehow, with lighting or camera angles, the whole scene had been made to look like something from a Robert Service poem about the Yukon. Watching from his apartment at the Ngu Departure plant, Emerson expected the camera to pan down at any moment for a view of the Face on the Barroom Floor. Rosalie’s hand, where it clutched his, was cold and a little damp. He glanced at the automated camera perched atop the TV set like the intrusive parasite it was, and tried to suppress the sour look it engendered and which could only add to the overall disreputable impression given by his scars and eye patch.

  “With us tonight from their respective homes on Pallas are former U.S. Senator Gibson Altman, longtime Chief Administrator of the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project, and Mr. and Mrs. Emerson Ngu. Mrs. Ngu is better known as Dr. Rosalie Frazier, a xenoarchaeologist associated with North California’s Stanford University. Her husband is also famous, the inventor and Industrialist Emerson Ngu, a man who, in his own way, has become as controversial as the industrialist who founded the asteroid colony, William Wilde Curringer.

  “Senator Altman—”

  The camera’s-eye view, which had switched briefly from the bar to a picture of themselves, to a picture of Altman, and then back for a moment to Polleck at His Master’s Voice, showed Altman’s office at what was left of the Project again.

  “Good evening, Ned.” Despite his years, Altman looked as photogenic, calm, and composed as ever.

  “Senator, for years, you’ve been advocating a plan under which the United Nations would take charge of alien artifacts found on Pallas, the so-called ‘Drake-Tealy Objects,’ to ensure that their scientific value is preserved. More than a dozen nations have forbidden their importation, yet a multibillion-dollar business continues to thrive, mostly through Japan, South Africa, and West America. There are rumors that a UN military force stands ready to enforce a global ban, and yet that international body has yet to ratify your plan. Why is that, Senator?”

  Altman leaned back casually in his chair and steepled his fingers. “In the first place, Ned, let me say I’d never have agreed to appear on this broadcast if I’d known that Emerson Ngu and his wife were going to be on it, too. They’re simply the most visible portion of a vicious and obscenely well-financed lobby which has been able to block appropriate action in the UN. They represent interests which have only profit in mind, rather than the benefit of mankind as a whole. As such, they have no legitimate right to speak on this issue.”

  Polleck gave the viewers the boyish grin he was
famous for, then assumed a serious expression. Emerson could never decide whether he more closely resembled Alfred E. Neuman or Howdy Doody, two American institutions which enjoyed periodic revivals.

  “I see. That’s a rather unique interpretation of the First Amendment, wouldn’t you agree? Or doesn’t the First Amendment apply on Pallas? And yet those on the other side of the argument freely acknowledge the scientific and historical value of the Drake-Tealy Objects and claim that their free-market methods do more to preserve those scientific and historical values, while at the same time protecting the rights of the individuals concerned. What would you day to that, Senator?”

  “Why, I’d say that’s Rosalie Frazier talking.” Altman leaned forward, frowning. “She was employed in the first place by Mirelle Stein and the Curringer Foundation to act as their scientific mouthpiece, to lend an air of respectability to the blatant profiteering going on up here on Pallas. If you want more proof, look at the way she married Emerson Ngu almost the instant she arrived. Since then, she’s generated one publication after another, apologizing—”

  Polleck interrupted. “Dr. Frazier, the Senator has leveled serious charges concerning your scientific and academic integrity. What do you have to say in reply?”

  Emerson had felt Rosalie stiffen for a moment, then force herself to relax. “I’d say he’s lucky I do believe in free speech, which is protected on Pallas by the Stein Covenant, and that I’m not the kind who initiates lawsuits at the drop of an unkind word.”

  Emerson knew that she was privately furious about the lies Altman had been spreading about her, but had stoically refrained from public comment until now. He wasn’t at all sure why she’d talked him into this particular charade.

  She took a breath. “The fact is that I was invited here by Miss Stein and the Curringer Foundation to confirm or deny the scientific authenticity of the Drake-Tealy Objects, and that they didn’t care which way it happened to turn out. I’ll also add that SUNC issues my salary checks, and that I don’t work for anyone but them. The fact that I met and fell in love with Emerson shortly after I arrived on Pallas is a happy coincidence I don’t intend to apologize for.”