Pallas (24 page)

He pushed past her through the door.

“Okay, don’t mind me,” she warned him as she followed him back to the assembly shed. BCH sniffed curiously at the truncated and abandoned chair base, complained vocally about it, and then hurried to catch up with them. “It’s your funeral.”

This time, trying to guess where the center of gravity would be when someone was sitting in the seat, Emerson duct-taped a fan to each arm of the chair where he could easily reach the three-speed controls, and turned both knobs to the lowest settings. He attached the rocker switch to the right arm, and, feeling a bit silly sitting on the floor in a legless chair, turned to Cherry, who was looking more uncertain about the whole thing with every minute that passed.

“Speaking of funerals,” he grinned at her, putting the cat off his lap, “would you care to come and get this animal and then plug in the exte
n
sion cord again?”

She shrugged and complied.

He depressed the rocker switch.

This time, Emerson’s ascent to the ceiling was less spectacular. The lowest setting wasn’t enough to lift his weight and that of the heavy chair. Careful to make both adjustments simultaneously, he turned the knobs to the middle speed and began to rise, swinging his legs back and forth to
balance the load.

He reached up gently and touched the ceiling. “This is great, Cherry! You should try it!”

“After they work the bugs out.”
She laughed nervously. “Don’t run out of extension cord!”

Emerson had pushed, tilting the motor housings a few degrees, and began to move forward. With Cherry’s advice in mind, he pulled on the housings and returned to his original position. Pushing and pulling at the same time allowed him to pivot. He pulled and pushed, reversing the process, and turned the other way.

This time, BCH had stayed to watch.

“Now it really is a swivel chair!”

Cherry had been keeping a cautious eye on the outlet. Now she turned her face up and looked at him. “Yeah, but how do you get down—besides the one obvious way?”

“Simple—I think.” Emerson turned the speed-control knobs—almost losing his balance in the process and tumbling out of the chair—to the lowest setting and descended smoothly to the floor. He switched the fans off and, feeling slightly weak in the knees, stood up. BCH stropped his ankles and buzzed at him.

“You’re right,
though,
there are a few bugs to work out. For one thing, having a seat in this chair only complicates things. All it needs is a back and a pair of arms. I can easily carry my own weight on my f
o
rearms—we’re only talking about twelve pounds, after all—and let my legs dangle as a counterweight, like the tail of a kite.”

“Swell.”

“For another, if this thing is going to be any use as transportation, I’m going to have to figure out another power source besides plugging it into the wall outlet.”

“Transportation,” she murmured, beginning to see the possibilities. “Do you realize that this could change everything, transform the face of Pallas almost as drastically as terraformation? Emerson, we could have other towns—more customers! Count me in for another fifth! When do we start making these things?”

It was Emerson’s turn for a dubious look. Even with all the talk about Henry Ford at the Nimrod tonight, it had never occurred to him that they might manufacture and sell something like this contraption.

But Cherry was right; it could change everything.

Everybody he knew had always been dissatisfied with the clumsy, expensive, inappropriate surface transport available on Pallas, which only had one road—if that was the word for it—from the North Pole to the South Pole via Curringer, with a side spur to the Greeley Utopian M
e
morial Project. Most Pallatians hated it so much that they traveled, when they had to, by the same ultralight aircraft—hardly more than underp
o
wered gliders, really—that had been used to seed the little planet after it had been terraformed, and which had won William Wilde Curringer his monument out there in the street.

According to Mrs. Singh and her husband’s books, Henry Ford had put an entire nation on wheels.

Maybe Emerson Ngu was going to send the population of a whole world into the sky.

His dubious look turned into a grin,
then
broke out in laughter. Cherry threw her arms around his neck and he whirled her around and around before he put her down. By that time, of course, the cat had given up and vanished all over again. Cherry seized the moment and locked her mouth on his until they both ran out of breath.

She let him go reluctantly.

“I wasn’t exactly telling the truth about why I came in,” she told him with her eyes on the floor. Her arms were still around his neck—she was perhaps half an inch taller than he was—and if she was wearing any perfume, he couldn’t detect it. He realized that his hands were resting on the bare flesh of her waist.

He swallowed hard and cleared his throat. “I kind of wondered why I didn’t hear the bell.”

“I didn’t let it ring.” She kept her eyes down and spoke softly. “I was sort of sneaking up on you. You’ve been avoiding it, but I was going to be real insistent this time. I’m tired of looking at you across a Monopoly board, Emerson. If I see one more little green plastic house or red hotel,
I’m going to scream. You won’t get out of jail free this time. I’m taking the next couple of days off and I’m going to drag you back home to my place and cheer you up!

He nodded, not knowing exactly what he was feeling, only that a certain heated tautness throughout his body, which he’d only felt once before, was coming back whether he wanted it to or not. “But I don’t need cheering up, Cherry.”

She looked up and dazzled him with her smile. The harsh lights of the shop made her hair glow like a golden cloud. “I know. Now you need to celebrate!
Please?
”

“I don’t deserve you, Cherry.” He reached up, took her arms from around his neck—then put his arms around her. An individual, he re
a
lized, could only withstand so much mourning, so much self-denial. He may even have known that a healthy young man can only withstand so much celibacy, especially under the pleasant onslaught of someone like Cherry. “But I’ll go home with you. How can I resist?”

“Good!”
She gave him a rough kiss on the cheek, stood back from him abruptly, clapped her hands with joy, then seized one of his hands and pulled him toward the door. “We’ll have fun. You don’t remember asking me about the little mermaid on my dressing table, do you? And I know damn well that you don’t remember how I answered you. This time, Emerson Ngu, I swear you’ll remember everything!”

He didn’t know whether to take that as a promise or a threat.

But he took it.

But the growing of the moustache is an art, Hastings. I have sy
m
pathy with all who attempt it.

—Hercule Poirot in
Double Sin,
Agatha Christie

E
merson plummeted like a stone.

The wind screamed past his ears, whipping at his long silk scarf and forcing his cheeks into a frightful grin beneath the lower rims of his
goggles. He could feel it riffling the sparse hairs he was encouraging to grow along his upper lip.

He’d have been grinning even without the wind’s help. He had just reached up and touched the sky, fulfilling in every detail his boyhood dream of flight.

He remembered it perfectly.

It hadn’t been that long ago, after all.

The plastic atmospheric envelope beneath his fingers had felt exactly as he’d expected. In fact, it had been
above
his fingers, and he’d almost lost his balance and tipped over into an unplanned dive when he’d reached up to touch it.

It had even gone
blimp!
when
he’d flicked it.

The one thing he’d missed, which would have made it perfect, would have been to surprise one of the spacesuited maintenance contractors on the other side of the transparent “smart” material that sheltered the ast
e
roid and gave it such spectacular sunsets, but the odds had been against it. Repair crews from the North and South Poles had a lot of territory to cover in their never-ending rounds.

In the end, he’d been satisfied just to look up at the stars, visible in broad daylight this close to the envelope, to regard the miniaturized fe
a
tures of the surface beneath his swinging heels, and to surprise the occ
a
sional passing bird. All too soon, the battery-level indicator under the palm of his right hand told him he had just enough power left to return safely to the ground, five miles down.

Five miles.

Far beneath him lay the not-quite-finished
Ngu
Departure weapons factory, surrounded by stacks of plastic-covered construction material and piles of leftover scrap. It was a flat-roofed, single-story L-shaped building, built from the same folded sheet-steel strips as Brody’s tavern, as long and wide as the
asteroid’s
only rolling mill could manage. The larger of the two wings served as the factory proper. The smaller afforded ample space for storage, the boss’s—Emerson’s—office, and three small apartments for himself and overnight stays by his partners, who still lived most of the time in Curringer. Whenever Cherry came out to the plant,
which wasn’t often, she stayed with him and helped make endurable the few nonworking hours he allowed himself.

Four miles.

He could even make out the gleaming tubular structure of Mrs. Singh’s “tricycle,” standing by itself in the unpaved, work-churned ground they all optimistically called the “parking lot.” Around the fa
c
tory, houses had begun to spring up, soon to be
followed,
Emerson was certain, by stores and bars and other amenities.

Three miles.

Progress was on the march here on the prairie.

Two miles.

In a long, slanting swoop, he aimed for the factory rooftop, which at the moment looked much smaller than any postage stamp. Unanticipated crosswinds had blown him several miles from the vertical during his ascent and he hadn’t cared to waste power by correcting for them. To save weight, he wasn’t even carrying a weapon.

It would have been different, of course, if he’d been carried unarmed over the Rimfence into Project airspace. The front gate of his former home lay only five miles from the
Ngu
Departure site, and in that case, he’d have aborted his climb and waited for better conditions. Even now, the idea of falling back into the hands of Gibson Altman and his blue goons made him shudder.

One mile.

Flying free as he was, however, no negative mood could last very long. Two-thirds of the way along this long diagonal flightpath, Emerson took a sudden tumble and fell a thousand vertical feet before he regained control only a few hundred yards above the ground. Intently focused on the rapidly dwindling figures in his power display, he’d been caught off-guard by another phenomenon of nature on Pallas, having flown over an unmapped “mascon,” a hidden deposit of material, probably nic
k
el-iron, denser than the average mass of the asteroid.

Pallas was, after all, an “accretion body,” the accumulated result of millions of collisions, over billions of years, between whirling worldlets of dissimilar composition, three-quarters of them carbonaceous chondrite
(nobody knew why it should be that particular ratio) and the remaining quarter mostly granite of one type or another or a cosmic, naturally o
c
curring high-grade steel alloy.

Five hundred feet.

Drying his sweaty palms, one after another, on the opposite shoulders of his work shirt, he made a mental note to mention the location of this near-fatal mishap to Mrs. Singh, who was attempting to chart the mascons in the Curringer-Project area, not only for the benefit of future purchasers of the “Ngu Departure Flying Yoke” but as possible revenue-enhancing claimstakes for mining operations. Over the past several months, Eme
r
son’s latest invention had evolved radically from the crude assembly of duct tape and purloined components he’d begun with into a sleek, eff
i
cient means of individual transportation.

This morning, in addition to fulfilling fantasies, he’d been trying to find out
how
efficient.

Gone were the electrical conduit and the temporarily dismembered office chair, replaced now with a two-foot hoop of hollow, glass-reinforced plastic tubing just large enough to be filled, around most of its circumference, with rechargeable batteries. A short nylon strap attached at the front and back, passing between his legs, kept him from falling through, while a panel of rudimentary instruments showed the status of a pair of small, powerful, ducted fan motors located outboard at the ten and two o’clock positions. Their speed and pitch were controlled by two joysticks, slaved to one another, on either side of the panel.

To supplement the batteries, which Emerson was unhappy with, he was presently considering a modest photovoltaic collector where the backrest of a chair would have been, but he wanted to keep the whole contrivance light and hand-portable, and his experience with solar power made him dubious about its value, in any case.

Fifty feet.

The graveled rooftop of the factory building expanded beneath his soles just as a flock of startled pigeons arose all around him. Ignoring the birds, he alighted with practiced ease, shut the power off—the display read straight zeroes anyway—and stepped out of the yoke, carrying it in
one hand like the tire of a bicycle.

Pushing through a steel door which led to a short stairwell, he was met by Mrs. Singh carrying his pistol belt.

“Well, how’d it go, Junior Birdman?” Tipping her head down toward him, she ran a hand through her hair. “See any new gray ones? I swear I could feel ’em sprouting one by one. I sure wish you’d taken some kind of walkie-talkie with you.”

“It would have to be a ‘
flyie-cryie,’
or something like that, wouldn’t it?” He grinned at her affectionately, set the hoop against a wall, strapped on his Grizzly, checked both magazine and chamber beneath her a
p
proving gaze, picked up his flying yoke again, and started down the stairs. “Anyway, I couldn’t afford the extra weight. I made it, though—just barely—and I found another mascon on the way down. Let’s go to the office and I’ll show you on the map.”

Almost everyone knew that the gravity of Pallas varied from spot to spot, from a tenth of the pull of Earth to about a twentieth, due to its v
a
rying geological composition.
A big man like Aloysius Brody “weighed” somewhere between ten and twenty pounds, depending on where he was standing.
Emerson wasn’t a big man himself and never would be, “weighing” somewhere between five and ten pounds.

He was willing to bet the map they needed had already been made long ago, probably from orbit during an initial survey, and was sitting in some filing cabinet or computer memory back on Earth, inaccessible because it had been lost and ultimately forgotten in the bureaucratic jumble gene
r
ated by any large organization, even a relatively benign one like Cu
r
ringer’s Two Lions Corporation.

As they reached the ground floor, Mrs. Singh shook her head. “I’m afraid it’ll have to wait, Emerson. I heard from Aloysius just before you landed, and he’s still on the line, waiting to confer with you. It seems our friendly neighborhood dictator’s raising hell about your plan to hire people from the Project.”

Emerson laughed.

He’d been expecting this. It was only the latest development in what was turning out to be a prolonged conflict. This particular phase had
begun with his campaign to “persuade” the reluctant operators of KCUF—principally by threatening to start his own radio station—to dramatically increase their broadcast range. Despite their frequent, grandiose promises of improvement, they’d been content for years with a low-power transmitter and an antenna mast that was no more than a bit of heavy-gauge copper wire thrust up a few feet above the roof of His Master’s Voice, the bar in which their studio was located. He was still surprised that he’d been able to receive their signal almost seventy miles away, probably because most of it was across the open space over Lake Selous.

As usual, Emerson had a public reason and a personal reason for what he’d done. Publicly, he’d wanted his workers to be able to keep in touch with the radio voice of Curringer at his new factory site and along the road running to it, where he anticipated that development and population were now likely to expand. Also, a higher antenna could be used for private communications over the same distance.

Personally, never having forgotten his principle of r
e
venge-only-at-a-profit, he’d been experimenting lately with a prototype receiver even simpler than his first handmade crystal set, a tiny, unp
o
wered device permanently tuned to one frequency, designed to be ma
n
ufactured almost for nothing, which could be given away at a minimal loss, greatly enlarging the listenership of KCUF all over this hemisphere of Pallas, especially among the peasants at the Project, who, one way or another, would be the very first recipients of his free radios.

He still hadn’t figured out how to persuade somebody—he had the owners of KCUF in mind again, but that would have to wait until they’d gotten over being annoyed with him about the mile-high antenna he’d “inspired” them to build—to back the manufacture of his little receivers. It was certain that he couldn’t afford to do it himself, not with every spare ounce of gold his little company was earning from making and selling guns going to pay for the factory building or being plowed back into development and eventual production of flying yokes. It often frightened him how much Cherry, Mrs. Singh, Nails, and Aloysius trusted him.

Nor had he figured out how to get his radios efficiently distributed to
the inhabitants of the Project, but he’d already done a fair amount of damage by giving away dozens of semiproduction prototypes to the ro
l
labout drivers who made weekly deliveries to Curringer. Doubtless, since Emerson went to a great deal of trouble to make the supply of free r
e
ceivers seem endless, they bartered them away inside the Project for food or sexual favors or something else.