Pallas (30 page)

When he’d discovered what he had to do, he’d most dreaded leaving Cherry behind—or rather telling her he had to go—but he needn’t have worried. Of all the people he’d known and cared for in the little town of Curringer, she’d understood him with the least explanation. Although she loved him in her own peculiar way—or possibly
because
she loved him—she’d encouraged him to go.

Their last night together had been full of miracles.

About now, looking into the lost eyes of this old woman who was Cherry’s precise opposite in so many ways (or Gretchen’s, although the two girls couldn’t have been more different from one another), and a
l
though he sensed that he was far from finished with his wanderings, he’d have given anything to be with the little blond.

“Yes,” Stein told him. “I know.”

Know what? Emerson had to struggle to remember what he’d just said to her. He suddenly realized that she was opening up to him this way (if that was what was happening) because she identified his temporary need to be away from civilization with her own, more permanent affliction. Perhaps she was justified in that. In his own way, at the moment, he was just as crippled as she was.

“And now stories filter back of this brilliant young fellow’s exploits and discoveries. He is in
danger,
it appears, of becoming another Daniel Crockett or David Boone—”

“That’s Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett,” Digger corrected her from
the kitchen. Although his words were bantering, there was something ominous in his tone that Emerson hadn’t heard before. He had no idea who these people were talking about, Boone and Crockett, old friends of theirs? Nevertheless, with each moment that passed, he felt more and more that he was about to be trapped—and pulped—between the u
n
stoppable gears of some massive piece of ancient machinery.

“Another Pierre Radisson, then,” she went on, “although a certain former United States Senator, who seems to blame this brilliant young fellow for every failure in his own life, attempts to ridicule these stories in the media he influences, and demands that the brilliant young fellow be tracked down and dragged back, possibly even to Earth, to be tried on charges which he somehow always avoids specifying.”

Emerson’s eye widened and his blood raced at the mention of Altman. Was the Chief Administrator blaming him for what had happened? Of course he was, don’t be silly. But Stein had raised so many other que
s
tions that he didn’t know where to begin asking them.

What exploits and discoveries?

He’d done nothing and seen practically nobody since he’d headed for the wilderness months ago. Pallas had about thirty thousand people living on it, a third of them concentrated in the Project, a few thousand more on the opposite shore of Lake Selous, the rest scattered over the asteroid’s surface, usually in larger groups—but only slightly larger—than typified by Digger and his wife.

Maybe the media were talking about that pack of feral dogs he’d helped drive away from a tiny settlement at the foot of Mount Jack O’Connor, but if so, they were exaggerating horribly. It had needed doing and he’d done it.
Nothing heroic about that.

And what media?

Had KCUF suddenly taken to interviewing their worst enemy?

“It is said”—and now Stein watched her husband, whose back was turned as he worked at the counter, while she continued to address Emerson—“that in his wanderings, this brilliant young fellow has e
n
countered the legendary R.L. Drake-Tealy himself—”

Stirring utensil in hand, Digger turned abruptly. “Miri—”

“—long rumored,” Stein went on relentlessly, “to have died or d
e
parted Pallas years earlier. Instead, he is living in seclusion in the ‘Pocks,’ an empty, heavily cratered wasteland far to the southeast of Curringer, with the woman he married—”

“Miri, stop it!”

“Growing in detail and drama as alleged eyewitnesses from the ast
e
roid’s pioneer days are discovered, the story has it that she was seriously injured in the same aviation accident that killed William Wilde Curringer. For all these decades she has been confined to a wheelchair, cared for by the selfless anthropologist, who somehow escaped the same aerial mishap without so much as a scratch.”

Shoulders bowed, Digger turned back to the counter, resting both hands on its edge. Whether he was trying to control his temper or his tears, Emerson couldn’t tell.

Mostly, it just looked to Emerson as though he were exhausted right down to his bones.

“Will the legendary founding couple return to human ken, the media want to know, now that this brilliant young fellow—
damn him!
” M
o
mentarily, she whirled on Emerson with hatred burning in her eyes. “—has
ferreted
them out? Is that what you truly wish for, Raymond, the adulation you deserve and never received?”

By now Emerson was more than
confused,
he was utterly lost and deeply embarrassed. What was happening here? Why were his new friends turning on each other this way? Were they always like this when they were alone, and had they merely run out of company manners in a week’s time? If so, how had they survived all these years?

If Mirelle Stein hated Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy as much as she seemed to at this moment, why did she stay with him?

And how much of what she’d said about the radio had been true?

Suddenly he felt very tired, himself.

People—pardon me, journalists and politicians—have often accused
me of believing that I’m above the law. And yet, who isn’t? Ev
e
rywhere you prod it, even with the shortest stick, the established system isn’t simply corrupt,
it’s
unequivocally putrescent. The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonst
r
ably criminal purposes. Of course I’m above the law. And so are you.

—William Wilde Curringer,
Unfinished Memoirs

“D
igger?”

“Shh!”

Emerson shook his head with exasperation. The old man hadn’t turned, but had continued to sit on his poncho on the creek bank at a spot where a beaver dam lower down had widened the little stream into a pond. He was holding a fishing pole, line hanging limply into still water. A wicker creel sat open beside him, empty so far.

Across his back were the straps of a shoulder holster in which he ca
r
ried his Webley Mark VI. They’d seen what he’d identified as African leopard sign in the neighborhood yesterday afternoon, and it never paid, the anthropologist had warned, to be blasé about mankind’s ancient enemy. He had proprietary feelings toward the beast since it had been he, over the strenuous objections of some of the other planners, who’d i
n
sisted on bringing large, dangerous predators to Pallas.

They were about a mile from the cabin, and Emerson was feeling impatient. His work had been stopped—and his concentration br
o
ken—for lack of the simplest of tools.

“Digger, I’m sorry, but do you have a three-eighths-inch hex wrench I could borrow?”

Drake-Tealy sighed and began to reel his line in. He set his pole aside and turned to face Emerson. “D’you
mean
an Allen key? I’ve a nine-and-a-half millimeter that’ll serve. I thought you carried a tool kit in that velocipede of yours. What are you about, anyway? Why don’t you give up on mechanics this afternoon and
come
fishing? I’ve another pole—Miri’s, actually, but she never uses it.”

“Digger, you’re an exceptionally kind host.” Emerson grinned down at
this man who’d wanted him to hush up. “But if I wanted fish, I’d jump in and shoot them rather than dangle a string from a stick, hoping some animal you can’t see will be dumb enough to get pulled in. I can’t think of a less intelligent or productive way to waste time.”

Drake-Tealy got slowly to his feet. “That’s only because you’ve never seen golf.” Grunting a little, he bent to pick up pole, poncho, and creel. “Besides, what’s the point of wasting time, if you do it intelligently and productively?”

Emerson laughed. “I guess I never looked at it that way before. I do have a tool kit, Digger, but only for emergency repairs. I never anticipated what I’m doing now.”

“Which is what?” With an eye out for dangerous predators, they began walking back toward the cabin. Emerson had to admit that it did add a certain zest to life, something like having to watch for the goons when he listened to his clandestine radio—except that he could admire a leopard at the same time
he
was wary of it.

“Separating the two halves of my flying yoke by pulling them apart at the hinge.
The wrench is for the hinge pin.
Which reminds me...
” Eme
r
son hesitated, uncertain how to continue. “It might be best—I mean
,
it might be a good idea...”

The old man answered with a low chuckle, not altogether humorous in character, “If I made myself scarce when you’re ready to try out whatever scheme you’re working on? Emerson, if you’re up to what I think you are, I couldn’t agree more.”

Emerson was surprised—and relieved. “I’m sorry—”

“No need to be. It’s certainly no fault of yours.” Drake-Tealy shook his shaggy head. “Miri and I made our bed—an unfortunate turn of phrase if ever there was one—thirty years before you were born, and we’ve been lying in it ever since.”

Emerson didn’t know what to say. Digger and his wife hadn’t repeated their strange fight, if that’s what it had been, in the five weeks following that uncomfortable evening. Dinner had probably been magnificent, but none of them had really tasted it.

Perhaps millions of young people would have been completely disi
l
lusioned to discover that their heroes were human, that they suffered human feelings and made human mistakes. Emerson had never assumed otherwise. It made Stein, Curringer, and Drake-Tealy no less heroic in his eye, rather the contrary. Individuals who were never afraid, who never felt fatigue and despair, were automata or lunatics, not heroes. Individuals who were moved by all of those considerations and managed to forge ahead in spite of them—those were Emerson’s heroes.

Five weeks—six altogether.
He hadn’t meant to stay this long. In fact, he’d been determined to trudge on the next morning, toward the South Pole, the destination he’d always had in mind. But the old man had pe
r
suaded him to give them a second chance. Even his wife had thawed sufficiently to argue that he was less than well and needed the kind of shelter, food, and rest he could get with them. Both of them had pro
m
ised—in so many words, and when the other wasn’t around—that they wouldn’t tear into one another in his presence again.

The whole affair made him feel vaguely ridiculous whenever he gave it any thought, like a parent being successfully wheedled by two elderly children who’d misbehaved. It was their own business if they wanted to disembowel each other verbally. He simply didn’t want to be an unwilling witness or referee. But he’d had to admit that Stein was right. His recent practice of dozing off while
flying mountain
passes or hunting wild boar was not exactly conducive to survival.

But now, he was beginning to feel embarrassed again. “Look, Digger, it isn’t any of my—”

“Half a minute.”
Drake-Tealy stopped walking, turned to face him, and put up a free hand. They weren’t quite within sight of the house. “As difficult as it may prove, I’ve a mind to clear the air now, before this goes another step further, because I believe I know what you intend doing this afternoon, and I approve, very, very much. We needed you to come along, Emerson, quite desperately. We could have used someone like you ten years ago—no, make that twenty years ago.”

Feeling a peculiar panic rising within him, Emerson put up both of his hands. “Digger, you don’t have to—”

Drake-Tealy was firm. “Yes, Emerson, I’m afraid I do. You
see,
even
old fossils like Miri and I, with one foot in the mortuary metaphor and the other on a tropical cliché, have our passions—or at least our memories of them. And, as I’m certain you’ve already discovered for yourself, som
e
times memories can be a burden.”

Emerson had never thought of Digger and his wife as fossils, any more than he had ever thought it of Aloysius or Mrs. Singh. Most of his Ou
t
sider friends, it seemed, had gray hair and ages closer to three figures than to one. But this didn’t appear to be the time to protest that aspect of what Drake-Tealy had said. And yes, he acknowledged inwardly, he knew burdensome memories all too well.

“All right.”
He looked the old man in the eye. “Say what you have to say, Digger. I’ll listen.”

“Good on you.” There was relief in Drake-Tealy’s expression. “Miri’s burden, all these years, and it’s weighed as heavily on her as her injuries, is that she was engaged to Wild Bill Curringer in the old days. They were to be married in a splashy public ceremony—the first wedding on Pa
l
las—when the immigrant ships began arriving from Earth. But by the time we’d done with the terraforming and had begun seeding the planet with the life you see all around you now, things had changed. She’d fallen in love with Curringer’s best friend.”

“You.”

“Guilty.” Drake-Tealy shrugged. “It happens. We’d been planning to have a talk with Bill about it after we’d finished seeding operations around what’s now called Lake Selous, but a thing like that is rather hard to hide, and he must have had some idea of what was going on, possibly even before we did ourselves.”

Both of them began walking again, although at a slower pace. “Bill was the sort of chap who simply had to have his hands in anything he was connected with,” Digger explained, “and Miri and I couldn’t be satisfied unless we were right there beside him, up to our own elbows in the muck, as well. Each of us was flying a little ultralight that day—the professional horticulture crew, quite understandably, had tried to talk us out of it. We were spreading our precious consignment over the landscape, soil molds, buffalo grasses, and earthworm eggs, each particle with a special protein
coating to assure that the timing would work out right.”

Emerson shook his head. He knew, of course, how this story was going to turn out. He’d examined Curringer’s statue and read the i
n
scription on the base too many times to forget. But it was the first time he’d heard it from someone who’d been there.

“You know what a World War I biplane looked like?” Drake-Tealy asked him. “Well, these were rather like that, our little aeroplanes, only smaller, with transparent wings, and a deal more fragile. Bill snapped a wingspar, the gods alone know how, and plummeted like any bird with a broken wing. Most likely he’d have survived a fall, given what we’ve got for gravity hereabouts, but by the time he hit the ground, headed in under full power, he was doing almost two hundred miles an hour.”

Drake-Tealy stopped again, just within sight of the cabin.

“Miri came to believe afterward that it couldn’t have been an accident. I’ve never been convinced one way or the other, altogether. It is a difficult mishap to explain, but I find it endlessly more difficult to believe that Bill committed suicide.”

“Could it have been murder?” Emerson asked.

“I’ve given it some thought. Wild Bill was by no means the most popular fellow in the solar system. One fact is incontrovertible: it was a bitterly unhappy man at the controls that day, and we were the ones who’d made him that way. At the time, Miri followed him down, de
s
perately trying to catch him up and get his nose up or nudge him into the lake. Instead, they packed it in together as I circled, watching helplessly. Truth to tell, old chap, neither of us has ever learned how to live with the guilt we still feel every day over what happened.”

“So instead,” Emerson suggested, glad to get the words out, “you’ve spent the past several decades together, hating yourselves and making each other miserable.”

“You’re very wise for one so young, my boy,” Drake-Tealy replied. “I may let you live, anyway.”

They found the wrench Emerson needed in the toolshed, actually more of an outdoor
closet, that
comprised one end of the greenhouse. Digger,
complying with Emerson’s earlier request, ducked inside the house briefly for his rifle and immediately hurried off on an errand of his own. He didn’t intend doing anything about the African leopard, he explained, but he wanted very much to see it.

“What’s life,” he grinned as he turned to march back into the forest, “without a little danger?”