Pallas (34 page)

Now, standing on the unforgivingly rugged and sterile rock of which Vesta was composed, death by freezing lurked in the shadows, with the faraway but cruel sun beating down on his armored head and shoulders. Emerson was grateful that he’d spent all those hours, essentially locked in a closet, getting to know his equipment. No technology was perfect. Whenever he looked away from the sun, into the profound blackness that only an airless world engenders, incredibly lacy crystals began to form at the bottom edge of his visor until it became necessary to prompt the tiny computer and get the helmet blower working.

“This is
Darling Clementine,
gentlemen, with a regular time-check.”
Marshall was calling from where he orbited a few miles over their heads.
“It says here you’ve got two more hours of air left. Sounds awful quiet down there to me. Come back.”

“Hello,
Darling Clementine
,” Emerson answered. “We’re quiet b
e
cause there isn’t much to say. How do you describe an airless ball of sunbaked frozen rock, and why would you want to try? We’ve found signs of what we’re looking for—signs literally, I mean—but no indic
a
tion of life so far, which is another reason it’s quiet down here. We’re just inside the front gate, in a manner of speaking, and there’s some sort of formless heap about fifty yards ahead.
Over.”

“Probably all that remains of their airtent after a couple of months of micrometeorite bombardment,”
Aloysius guessed.
“Cheap equipment, but we knew that, did we not?”

“We’re going to check it out,” Emerson added, not feeling enthusiastic at the prospect.

“Roger that,”
Marshall replied.
“I can see you in my little spyglass, now that you’re out of the shadows.”
Not certain how they’d be greeted if there were any survivors, they’d dropped to the surface in slightly rougher country than this, a mile or so from the camp.
“Try and keep in touch a
little better.
Over.”

“We’ll do it,” Emerson told him. He looked back to make sure Alo
y
sius was following him—he worried a little about the man’s age and the fact that one of his legs was a prosthetic. Then he reluctantly made his way toward the object he and his older companion had described, knowing long before they reached it what they were about to find.

“As an anonymous urban guerrilla once put it,”
observed Aloysius, drawing beside him and looking down at the heap of rubbish before them,
“y’can’t dig a foxhole in a sidewalk.”

Marshall’s guess had been correct. What they were looking at a
p
peared to be the remains of a plastic airtent suitable only for the briefest use by people like tourists. It was exactly the kind of thing, according to Aloysius, that some of the less scrupulous concessionaires rented to vi
s
itors at Port Amundsen and Port Peary. Its brilliant toy colors had already faded and it was in worse shape than the banner they’d seen earlier. Emerson was sure that most of the meteorite holes in the thing were m
i
croscopic and that there were likely to be millions of them. Naturally, that hadn’t stopped the air from leaking out, and it had given the destructive effect of ultraviolet light that much more surface area to work on.

What he didn’t really want to investigate more closely, or even think about very much—although he would force himself to the task, since it was the reason they were here on Vesta—were the two dozen or more motionless lumps lying beneath the flattened plastic. Emerson gulped, suddenly very conscious of what it would be like to lose control of his stomach inside a spacesuit.

With every nerve screaming at him not to, he bent down to lift one corner of the collapsed plastic tent. He’d never seen a dead human body before—at least he had no conscious memory of it—and he deeply dreaded having to see one now. It was possible that the bitter cold of the shadows had preserved these lumps of once-human flesh, if that was what they were. That would be bad enough. It was equally possible that the sunlight and heat had gotten to them through the cheap material, allowing them to slow-cook inside their sealed spacesuits.

That would be infinitely worse.

Emerson gulped again.

In the end, it proved necessary to rip the plastic corner to get into it and, with Aloysius’s uncharacteristically quiet assistance, to spread it out over the adjacent rock. There, huddled face down in suits of about the same quality as the tent, were all that was left of the People’s Economic Democracy of Vesta.

Emerson glanced up at Aloysius. The man’s face couldn’t be seen through his sun-darkened visor, but his theatrical shrug was visible even through the bulk of his suit.
“Sure, an’ yer the glorious leader of this expedition, me boy. ’Twas all yer idea—an’ yer privilege t’turn over the first corpse.”

“Thanks a billion, Aloysius.” Emerson grimaced, bent over against the resistance of his suit, put his hand on the shoulder of the nearest body, and rolled it over.

To his relief, the tent had apparently retained its insulative properties and the body was frozen, having probably died of oxygen deprivation. He went to the next body and turned it over, and the next. Aloysius began to help, as well.

Before they were through, he and Aloysius counted twenty-seven dead in all, of all races and both sexes, ranging in age from about eighteen to somewhere in the region of sixty.

Junior was easily identifiable. He lay where he’d died, clutching an empty air cylinder to his chest.

Emerson was glad to see him.

And not a bit sorry he was dead.

“My God,”
Marshall exclaimed, still watching them from orbit. His voice coming suddenly that way startled Emerson.
“It’s like Scott’s A
n
tarctic expedition!”

“My ass,”
Aloysius retorted angrily.
“It’s a hell of a lot more like Jonestown!”

Emerson didn’t know what the two men were talking about, and he didn’t particularly care. What he could see most plainly was that, in a gesture completely typical of him, Gibson Altman Junior had thrown his life away on a venture which anyone else could have seen was obviously
doomed from the outset.

“
‘Do
every man equal justice,’”
Aloysius quoted.
“‘Let no innocent man suffer, let no guilty man escape,’ Wise words of a nineteenth century predecessor of mine, Isaac Charles Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas, otherwise known as the ‘Hanging Judge’.”

Equal justice, Emerson thought. The three of them had arrived at the lifeless rock which was Vesta, too late to do anything but bring back frozen bodies to their families.

To the Senator.

A wise man once pointed out that the American eagle eats carrion, never picks on anything its own size, and will soon be extinct. That being so, perhaps Americans ought to select a symbol more in keeping with their current condition, like a milked cow, a sheared sheep, a plucked chicken, or a slaughtered steer.

—William Wilde Curringer,
Unfinished Memoirs

Former Senator Gibson Altman took his first sip of coffee and sat back, bifocals temporarily folded. The elm tree he’d planted with his own two hands over Gibson Junior’s grave—had it really been ten years ago?—cast a pleasant shade on this end of the verandah, and the breeze coming off the fields was warm.

As he had each morning for the last twenty-five years or so, since he’d first been appointed Chief Administrator of the Greeley Utopian M
e
morial Project, Altman was reading the overnight mail relayed electro
n
ically from Earth. He took another sip of coffee before he began again, yawned, and stretched.

If you’re over a certain age
, the thought ran through his mind, not for the first time,
and you wake up in the morning and nothing hurts, then you’re probably dead
.

It was an excellent quotation, and he’d been tempted to use it publicly, perhaps as a humorous opening remark to one of his speeches (not about
Social Security, of course), until his research staff discovered that it had first appeared in the writings of some twentieth-century right-wing crank, a retired Marine colonel who had apparently hated everything Altman’s predecessors stood for—public health and safety, social responsibility, ecological sanity, reverence for life and for the Earth in general—and had called them the “rabbit people.”

In any event, the quotation didn’t seem to apply here, in the kindly gravity of Pallas. In fact, one of the items in this morning’s mail was another of the scientific reports he’d been receiving recently from the UN on the positive effects of advancing technology—and, in a footnote which was the reason he was included on the mailing list, of the asteroid’s u
n
demanding gravity—on human longevity.

He didn’t know if that was the reason he felt so good this morning, but he wouldn’t be suspicious of the feeling if he could avoid it. Perhaps it was because this was his birthday, although birthdays were usually far more likely to depress him. Thinking about Social Security, he was—he realized with a little start similar to the one his elm tree always gave him—sixty-five years old today.

Most of the time lately, he conceded, he felt lousy. To begin with, he was alone in life and less prepared to deal with it than many other people he knew. He’d always been suspicious of those who preferred solitude. For most of his sixty-five years he’d never been able to stand being by himself for more than five minutes at a time.

But here he was, ironically enough, far more profoundly alone than most of those who wanted to be. His wife, Gwendolyn—often he had to struggle for an instant to remember her name, and her face had been an indistinct blur in his memory for a long while—had left him years ago, taking two of their children with her. What had transformed her from a near-perfect political wife into a petulant, selfish, useless...
individualist
, he never knew. He’d never seen or heard from them again, or tried to.

His elder son, who’d loyally remained with him, had gotten mixed up with that wild colonial girl. Then she’d been killed. And then he’d been killed. And neither calamity would have happened if it hadn’t been for Emerson Ngu, still disgustingly alive and well—and obscenely wea
l
thy—after all these years. After all the trouble and heartache he’d i
n
flicted on everyone around him. That seemed to be the way it always worked, didn’t it?

Their baby daughter, Junior’s and—what had her name been, now, Ingrid, or Hilda, something like that?—who could never have been an
y
thing to her once-famous grandfather but a terrible living reminder of the tragedies and failures of his life, had been bundled off, back to the mother planet. He’d taken her up to the North Polar spaceport
himself,
put her on an Earthbound ship with the same two hands that had buried his son, to be raised by sister and her husband.

How old would she be now?

And what was her name?

Even his faithful old foreman, Walter
Ngu
, was gone, savagely beaten to death by one of the youth gangs that roamed the Project these days, simply because he’d spoken sharply to one of them that morning in the fields. The poor little man had only been doing his duty. What could you do? Watch over people. Encourage them to take care of one another. Offer them every opportunity to live a safe, healthy, orderly, productive life. And they still turned out to be animals.

Rabbit people, indeed. More like degenerate, treacherous, needle-toothed ferrets. Sometimes he looked out over the fields and hated each and every one of them. Sometimes he wanted to—he shook the thought off hastily, before it could consume him.

He’d considered notifying Emerson, who’d been Walter’s eldest son, after all, but had finally decided against it. That traitorous, conniving ingrate either wouldn’t give a damn that his father had died, or else he’d find some way to twist things, to blame the whole affair on his old enemy, the Senator, just as he’d publicly blamed Junior for what had ha
p
pened—entirely at the hands of a few drunken, irresponsible Education and Morale counselors—to that little colonial tramp. Altman couldn’t always remember his wife’s face, but he’d never forget Emerson’s when he’d brought Junior’s lifeless body back from Vesta. It had been frozen, expressionless. But inside, he’d known, the boy had been gloating.

Ten years.

And now the only one he had left was Alice, Emerson’s mother, ironically enough, who brought him a fresh cup of coffee as she always did at about this time, took the cold one away mostly unconsumed, went back into the Residence, and left him alone.

Alone.

He and Emerson Ngu now had more than enough reason to hate each other for the remainder of their normal life spans, and perhaps, if they were “lucky,” if this UN science report meant anything at all, they could manage to do it even longer than that.

He felt a sudden chill.

Why had he thought earlier that he was feeling so good?

“Senator, are you ill?”

Irritably, Altman shook his head. He wasn’t
ill,
merely preoccupied with what he was gradually realizing amounted to a severe attack of culture shock. Nevertheless, it took his attorney, shipped out here to the Asteroid Belt from Colombo especially for this occasion, several more attempts to get his full attention.

The hearing was almost over. All that remained to be heard now was the disposition. Each side had exercised its opportunity to state its case over the past few hours, and Judge Aloysius Brody appeared ready to render his decision.

How laboriously—and vainly, as it had turned out—had the Senator striven to get this matter taken out of that old buffoon’s hands, even to the extent of attempting to import an arbiter from Earth. Brody had no background in the law. Before setting himself up as a tavern keeper, he’d been a common laborer. Even now, he had no sense of the importance of his position as the only available jurist on Pallas (three others having refused to hear the case at all), and seemed to enjoy making things more difficult for anyone else who exercised authority.

He didn’t even demand that everyone rise as he stumped back into the room—the same barroom he always used for these proceedings—on his cane and artificial leg.

Beside him, Altman felt his UN-supplied lawyer tense as his profe
s
sional involvement overrode his professionally assumed detachment. Perhaps he’d done an adequate job; he’d certainly spent enough time at it, taking ten minutes to every two the defense had seemed to require. The Senator had never been a trial lawyer himself and didn’t feel qualified to evaluate. The man couldn’t help it if he looked like a weasel, with that long, sharp nose and a case of five o’clock shadow that seemed to afflict him ten minutes after he shaved in the morning. But his suit—cheap and ill fitting as the fashion among his peers on Earth currently dictated—and his clumsiness in the low Pallatian gravity didn’t help matters.

For his part, Altman wasn’t sure he cared any more how this farce played itself out. After all these years, after his long and faithful service, he’d hoped for more support than this from Colombo. And he could a
l
ways try again, later on. In the meantime, like it or not, he had other, more visceral items to concern himself with. In the first place, he hadn’t been outside the Rimfence since Junior had been killed—had it really been seventeen years ago?—and the way things had changed had almost come as a mortal blow. The two hundred miles of rough gravel from Curringer to the Project (more accurately, between the town and the Ngu Departure plant five miles short of it) were now smoothly engineered and paved in some plastic substance which, excepting lubricants, now represented the only use a fusion-powered civilization seemed to have for petroleum products.

Seventeen years.

Nearly as shocking, the dilapidated rollabout—there had been no more gifts of vehicles or other major equipment from Earth—was pleasant to ride in and managed the trip, which once had taken more than half a day, in just under four hours. It helped that the machine had been retrofitted with a catalytic fusion reactor, but it meant, of course, that his drivers had been deceiving him for years about the need for an overnight layover. He was almost pleased enough over missing the arduous journey he’d e
x
pected to overlook it.

Almost.

Along the much-improved road lay one enormous, neatly developed homestead after another of a kind once limited to the town’s dusty ou
t
skirts, punctuated, at wider intervals than would have been the case on Earth, by clusters of shops, stores, and taverns. He saw nothing rese
m
bling a town hall, hospital, firehouse, post office, police station, or school. The Outsiders seemed more determined than ever to do without what every other member of the human race regarded as the minimal amenities of civilized existence. Not for the first time, Altman wondered how they survived, and cheerfully envisioned a series of unmanaged catastrophes for which any physical evidence seemed remarkably (and regrettably) lacking.

Seventeen years.

Almost before it had begun, it seemed, the ride was over. His intention to review the case a final time had been forgotten, along with his fellow passenger, the lawyer from Earth, until it was too late. The center of the Outsiders’ pioneering efforts on Pallas and that of his own had never strongly resembled one another. But even here, the basic nature of the contrasts between Curringer and the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project seemed to have changed dramatically.

It was more than just the fact that the town had grown while the Project had not—and, in all frankness, seemed to be withering. He had once thought of it (and who had told him he had no poetry in his soul?) as the difference between corruptible metal and undying stone, specifically between sheet steel, easily derived from native ores, from which Cu
r
ringer was mostly constructed, and concrete, also manufactured locally, which had gradually replaced the temporary plastic construction of the Project. Now it appeared, however, that hardwood was coming into v
o
gue among the Outsiders as a building material, as trees sown decades ago all over the asteroid were beginning to be harvested.

In some ways, this trend struck him as a curious regression, but whatever it actually represented, the Senator thought with a pang, Cu
r
ringer, with its brightly painted facades and smoothly paved streets, a
p
peared fresh and new, whereas his official Residence, along with the increasingly shabby buildings in the compound surrounding it, covered as they were with overlapping layers of spray-painted graffiti, were slowly starting to crumble back into the soil from which they’d come.