Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  Emerson raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s the mirror you’ve been talking up—to reflect sunlight to the surface and raise the temperature?”

  “That’s right,” Emerson replied. “I was at a space-investment seminar in Port Amundsen when the subject first came up. I think that we’ve been lucky until now, but that our luck isn’t likely to hold much longer. We already have a couple of solar mirrors orbiting the asteroid, several hundred square miles of aluminized microplastic, maintained by the same commercial contractors who manage and repair the atmospheric envelope. What we need now is at least one more to warm—”

  “Whoa, pardner, you don’t need to sell me! I favor anything that keeps my precious ass from freezing solid. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but somebody should tell you that Altman has been using your idea as a political springboard.”

  “What?”

  The newsman nodded. “He’s blasting Wild Bill Curringer—and you, by an association I’d be proud to claim, myself—for not having foreseen this tragedy, and claims that only a Man with a Plan can do something about such an obvious failure of the market system. Unfortunately, he seems to be finding a whole new constituency among desperate settlers who don’t like chilblains and frostbite!”

  Although he hadn’t voiced his suspicions to anyone, Emerson believed Altman was ultimately behind the series of well-timed strikes and boycotts on Earth which were currently interfering with interplanetary trade, hampering Pallatian efforts at recovery. What Polleck was telling him about now was exactly the kind of thing he thought the Senator would follow up with here on Pallas.

  He thought back to the morning conversation with his wife, who was under doctor’s orders to alternate two hours of complete bed rest with half an hour of limited activity. The asteroid’s one flaw was that it wasn’t a good place for having babies. Perhaps nature—or, rather, natural selection—would eventually correct that. Perhaps it was being corrected now. Despite all their careful precautions, Rosalie had experienced minor, but very frightening, bleeding, and they’d spent their time on the radio reassuring one another, as expectant parents will.

  Later in the day, Mrs. Singh had told him about the hoodlums she’d run off in a hail of carefully misplaced gunfire. Neither had mentioned Altman. Perhaps they were preoccupied with their own problems, although that wasn’t like either of them.

  Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to worry him.

  But Polleck was still talking. “...in your absence. I’m astonished that nobody else has told you about this, Emerson. Altman’s been saying that he agrees with you about the need for an additional solar mirror, but that the only way Pallas can avoid ‘free riders’—people who will benefit from the mirror but are unwilling to pay for it—is to set aside the Hyperdemocratic Covenant ‘for the duration of the emergency,’ in order to levy taxes for its construction.”

  Emerson had to bite his tongue to keep from saying What? again.

  “In any case, he claims that Curringer’s failure to anticipate the crisis invalidates the agreement represented by the Stein Covenant, and he’s broadly hinting that the UN spacefleet is standing ready to back up his interpretation of it.”

  “I see.” Emerson handed his mug to Nails and began pushing an arm into his coat while looking around to see where he’d left his flying yoke. “If anybody calls or comes looking for me, tell them I’m headed back to Curringer, will you?”

  “Sure,” Polleck answered. “What are you going to do?”

  With an effort, Emerson pushed the door flap aside and pushed his face into the blizzard. If anything, the weather was worse than when he’d come in half an hour ago.

  He shouted over his shoulder.

  “I’m going to kill that bastard!”

  Christmas Forever

  At least the Nazis burned books in public. Liberals suppress opinions that differ from their own through influences they want kept secret. The right wing destroyed books. The left destroys authors.

  —William Wilde Curringer, Unfinished Memoirs

  Only another three hundred miles to go, Emerson told himself, as the vicious, freezing wind slapped at him as if he were a mosquito. In an instant he lost a hundred feet of altitude and was nearly tumbled upside down, both motors of his flying yoke straining with a noise that was audible even above the wind. Level once again, and climbing to avoid trees he knew were there but couldn’t see, he tapped at his power gauge. Only another three hundred miles to go!

  He woke up with a start, surprised he’d managed to doze off for—what, more than an hour? He certainly didn’t feel rested enough to corroborate the testimony of his watch. He was equally surprised to find that he wasn’t flying around in circles or hadn’t flown right into the ground like William Wilde Curringer.

  Only two hundred and fifty miles to go—maybe less!

  He was grateful he’d thought to bring a radio along, the little one with a clock he normally kept beside the bed. Compasses were useless on Pallas, but he could tune in, now and then, to either of the stations in Curringer and correct his flightpath. Even so, he might overshoot and have miles to double back unless he were careful, and he was rapidly becoming too cold and tired to be careful.

  With that thought, he had to shake himself awake again, chagrined and a little afraid. Another forty minutes gone in a twinkling. He’d worked a long full day in the rugged territory around the camp, after a bad night’s sleep, and now he’d traveled an estimated four hundred frozen miles against the wind. He might be no more than eighty or a hundred miles from home by now—but it was still a question of which would fail him first, the much-abused batteries in his flying yoke...

  Or his own strength.

  Come, now, he lectured himself, who else can stop Altman? And besides, Rosalie and your unborn child are depending on you, too. You want to die and never see your—

  Angrily he rejected the thought and turned on the little radio as he’d begun to do so long ago, holding the tiny plug to his ear. He was almost angry to discover that KCUF was playing Christmas songs until he thought it over and began to laugh. The hell of it was, this particular Christmas might last fifty years, on Pallas.

  It might last forever.

  The whole goddamned planetful of them might wind up just like Gibson Altman, Junior.

  At the last moment he remembered what he’d started to do—at least he hadn’t fallen asleep again that time—and turned the little receiver until it nulled out and KCUF could only barely be heard. According to the seam along the plastic case, which he was using as a sight, he was still flying in as close to the right direction as was humanly possible. It was both gratifying and amazing, but if he lived through it, he’d do something about this absurd situation, perhaps with radio beacons installed on the atmospheric canopy itself. It shouldn’t take—

  Abruptly, the radio signal vanished from the air. He could still hear a static crackle, which he guessed meant that KCUF was at fault, so he started looking for WRCS, but it seemed to be off the air, as well. That was a bad sign. Curringer had no municipal power and lighting system. Most buildings, residential or otherwise, were equipped with their own small deuterium fusion reactors, the way houses a century earlier had all had furnaces in their basements.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it would take to kill the power simultaneously at two radio/TV stations, even across the street from one another.

  Too bad these household fusion reactors weren’t small enough to power a flying yoke, he thought, and gave the power gauge a tap. His heart sank with the needle, which apparently had been frozen in place. If the damned thing could be trusted even now, he had less than half the flying time left he’d earlier believed he had.

  And up ahead, through the blizzard all around him, which was bad enough, he thought he saw the ominous black wall of an even more terrible storm, hanging like a funeral drapery almost from the canopy above to the ravaged ground beneath him.

  Fighting off a horrifying urge to sleep, even as full o
f adrenaline as he was, it slowly began to dawn on him that he might still have a chance. The storm front, which he could make out between occasional rifts in what he’d thought of as a terrible storm itself until now, seemed to be receding from him. If the timing was right, and his power held up, he might make it home tonight, after all.

  And maybe only another fifty miles to go!

  It was at this point that the whine of his ducted fan motors began to drop in pitch and he realized he’d be lucky if he made it to the ground in one piece.

  Emerson never panicked.

  He calculated that, with Pallas’s minimal gravity and a deep bed of snow almost certain to be covering the ground below, he could easily survive a fall from this altitude. He also remembered that he couldn’t be much more than fifty miles from Curringer, and that, even asleep, he’d been staying on course with reasonable consistency.

  He had warm clothing and the means of making a fire. He was armed; a brief, unpleasant thrill shot through him as he recalled how much of his now-precious ammunition he’d consumed, humanely dispatching wild game animals over the past several days. If he remembered correctly, he was down to what was left in two full magazines and the chamber of his Grizzly.

  Mostly he was worried about human predators. But there were other things down there to worry about, as well. Things driven mad by cold and hunger.

  The landing, when it came, wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it might be. Good luck placed him precisely between two big evergreen trees. Bad luck dumped him into the middle of a saddle-shaped snowdrift between them, at least a dozen feet deep, where he floundered for some while, sweating under his heavy clothes—which he correctly reasoned was a dangerous thing to do—until he was free of it.

  At least he could still move everything, and without pain. He’d been afraid that his legs had been frozen in the air—it had been increasingly difficult to feel them—and even more worried about breaking something when he landed.

  He was reluctant to leave his flying yoke, but there was nothing to be salvaged from it that could keep him alive, and its weight and bulk might kill him. He thought suddenly, I make the goddamned things! I can always get another one—that is, if I don’t get fitted for wings and an accompanying harp and halo first! Actually, the mythical alternative location appealed to him a lot more at the moment, brimstone and all, but unfortunately he’d never believed in mythology.

  What he did believe in—and fear—was this tendency he’d developed to wool-gather when he should be in motion. He shouldered the knapsack he’d had tethered to the yoke and looked around. It almost seemed calmer down here on the ground, and it was certainly warmer. He trudged off in the direction of a low, dense clump of oddly familiar trees that might possibly provide both shelter and firewood.

  Suddenly, and before he’d taken more than a dozen steps, his worst nightmare was fulfilled as he heard the same snarling and barking which had set the hair on end of the remotest ancestors any human being can claim, a sound which, all by itself, may have propelled humanity from the paleolithic to an age which provided weapons like the Grizzly. To his right, plummeting and plunging through the drifts to get between him and the copse he’d headed for, was an indeterminate number of noisy, furry shapes, black as death in the half-light of the storm.

  Emerson struggled to draw the Grizzly from under several layers of clothing, tangled the long tang, hammer, and rear sight for an anxious moment, then shook it free and leveled it on the pack leader, thumbing the hammer back. He couldn’t tell yet if they were wolves or simply feral dogs abandoned by their owners with the onset of foul weather. Since there could be no doubt as to their intentions, he squeezed the trigger. The weapon bellowed, the sound oddly muffled by the snow on the ground, and the leader leaped and twisted, not making any noise Emerson had expected, not even twitching after it hit the ground.

  Immediately, the pack surrounded their fallen leader and began to rend its gunshot body to pieces, growling and snapping at one another, breaking into a savage fight at one point which left another of the beasts crippled and being torn apart before it died.

  Emerson wished briefly that he had full metal jackets in his pistol, rather than softpoints, so that he could shoot through two or more of the animals when they were clumped up like this. He knelt and silently counted two dozen of what he now was certain must be wolves before the majority, left out of the cannibal feast, began to notice that the object of their original attentions still existed.

  “Sorry, boys,” he told them in a firm, level tone, hoping that the sound of a human voice would make them hesitate. “I’m still the uncooperative pain in the ass that I always was, and I refuse to be dinner!” He also responded by rising slowly as he spoke and backing toward the trees he’d been headed for, keeping the Grizzly leveled at whatever animal seemed to be the bravest and brightest at the moment.

  As he made his slow, backward progress toward the trees, he saw that they were beginning to spread out, those on the flanks trying to get behind him. He’d never known that wolves were this intelligent, but it didn’t surprise him to be learning it the hard way.

  He always seemed to learn everything the hard way.

  “But you’re too young,” he’d protested just after the Polleck broadcast, “to be Gretchen’s daughter! She was born in 2036, which would make you—”

  “Thirty-eight,” Rosalie finished for him smugly. “Not too bad for a middle-aged broad, you think?” She stroked the hand she held with her other hand.

  “But you can’t be more than—”

  “Twenty-seven. That’s what my biological clock says, anyway. Don’t worry about being confused, Emerson—it confuses me, sometimes. Especially since, in some ways, it’s always felt to me like you were my father. You should have been, you know. Do you mind?”

  Emerson was lost, but he knew one thing for certain; “I don’t mind anything that ended up here, with us together. And you know they say that incest is a game the whole family can enjoy. But how—?”

  She blinked, her face having suddenly lost its humorous expression. “Simple. When you’re stuck with an inconvenient granddaughter, send her back to Earth and have her put into cold storage! It was the Senator’s sister’s idea, really. They excused it by claiming they couldn’t predict the result of returning an infant to a one gee field.” She stopped and stared down thoughtfully at their hands where they lay interlocked in her lap.

  “And?”

  “And,” she looked up at him suddenly with tears in her eyes. “That’s where I stayed, an experimental cryogenics subject, for eleven years.”

  It was Emerson’s turn to sit in silence. Finally: “Eleven years...”

  “Until my Grandma Gwen hired a detective to find me, and a squad of mercenaries to get me out. She raised me, Emerson, that wonderful, sad old woman. She had no choice but to move the family to West America, where her ex-husband’s lawyers couldn’t get to me. In the end it was my Uncle Terry—Altman’s younger son—who steered me toward xenoarchaeology. He was really only four years older, but...”

  Emerson nodded. “I get it.”

  “Well, from the beginning I intended to get back to Pallas somehow, at first to repay Grandma Gwen—I figured if I could make up for what she’d always felt was her failure as a pioneer woman...and then there was the matter of confronting a grandfather who let something like that happen to me.”

  Another reason, Emerson thought, to hate Gibson Altman for the rest of his life.

  She laid a palm on his cheek, very gently, having seen the pain she was putting him through. “And then there was you.”

  He turned his head and kissed the gentle hand that caressed his face. He touched her still-flat belly. “I loved your mother,” he told her, “but you’ll never know how glad I am that I’m not your father!”

  She smiled and folded herself into his arms.

  Suddenly, he was struck in the back—for an instant he thought one of the wolves had jumped him, but he’d hit a tree trunk which ha
d either been much closer or which he’d been approaching faster than he’d estimated—and only barely held onto his gun. The tree shivered and dumped a tremendous load of snow on him, blinding him momentarily, which the wolfpack, its numbers augmented now by those who’d finished with their dead mates, took as a signal to attack him.

  Again the leader died as Emerson’s pistol thundered, but this time, it was much closer. Too close for Emerson to let the rest of the animals come devour him. A few tried, and a few more died. The thought ran through his mind that he hoped these weren’t the last wolves on Pallas—then he laughed out loud, changed magazines with a single round still left in the chamber, and shot another, and another.

  And another.

  Five rounds left.

  Then four.

  Then three.

  The enemy closed in.

  Forget heaven and hell, he thought; it looked like he was going to Valhalla.

  With a pack of wolves for pets!

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures!”

  Gibson Altman paced back and forth at the front of the saloon, trying to give emphasis to what he’d said and stay warm at the same time. He was angrier than he could ever remember being—odd, how good it felt—because he and everybody else on Pallas had been betrayed. This was just like the business with the sunrises and sunsets nobody had predicted, only, of course, it was far worse.

  That old bastard Brody hadn’t let him in the Nimrod, where people had gathered to sit out a storm they weren’t sure was ever going to end, but the crowd here in the White Rose Tattoo would do nicely. He’d had to come into town anyway, since the Residence, where nothing remotely like nuclear fusion had been tolerated for many years, was like a meat locker. It was that or begin living in the rollabout, which did have its own reactor. Someone was going to pay for what was happening here. Since William Wilde Curringer had escaped justice, it would have to be someone else. Altman knew just who that someone else would be, too.