Pallas (36 page)

“With circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was,” Nails misquoted, peering over Emerson’s shoulder. He’d examined the objects brought from the Pocks. As a machinist, he was inclined to agree with Digger about them.

Mrs. Singh, on the other hand, was shaking her head. “You think the old boy’s lost it, don’t you?”

Miri nodded. “He is about to make an utter fool of himself and destroy a distinguished career. Although it is couched in cautious, scholarly language—for example, he grudgingly allows for the possibility that these things are no more than peculiar volcanic extrusions left over from the natural formation of the asteroid—his contentions are straight from Erik von Daniken.”

“Who the hell is Erik von Daniken?” Nails demanded, and Emerson would like to have known, as well, but the machinist’s question was i
g
nored by all the others.

“I dusted those damned things, these ‘Drake-Tealy Objects,’ as he and his hangers-on are calling them, for three decades.” Apparently, Emerson thought, Miri didn’t recall—or didn’t want to—that she had been the first to call the objects by that name, however sarcastically she’d intended it. “And I do not believe there is the remotest chance that they are artificial, the remains of an ancient, nonhuman intelligence, however weather-worn and time-distorted. What I am afraid of is that Raymond is desperate to make one last spectacular discovery, or perhaps worse, that—“

“He’s suffering senile dementia?” Mrs. Singh suggested.

Miri nodded sadly.

“Ah, but isn’t that what they’d have said of Heinrich Schliemann, in his day?” Aloysius mused. “An’ didn’t he wind up provin’ ’em all mi
s
guided by discoverin’ Troy?”

Nails laughed. “He discovered nine or twelve Troys too many, in the end, though, didn’t he?”

“Indeed he did, my boy, indeed he did—vastly enrichin’ our body of scientific knowledge in the process an’ bringin’ up more questions than he answered, which is the proper vocation of any conscientious an’ a
u
thentic scientist.”

Across the room, customers at the bar who’d been watching a soccer game from Earth—Aloysius, a champion pistol shot in his own time, endured this much exposure to collective sports only for the sake of business—suddenly fell silent as a few faces turned toward the innke
e
per’s table, then quickly back to the screen, buzzing a little among themselves. Emerson glimpsed the reason for their behavior just as his host yelled, “Turn that damned thing up an’ keep quiet!”

The color-saturated, three-dimensional image was of the latest blandly photogenic anchorwoman to visit Pallas. Emerson couldn’t remember her name or what network employed her. She stood, to all appearances, d
i
rectly on the airless, harshly lit surface of a spaceport crater bottom, without benefit of spacesuit. Emerson realized she must be standing in front of a big picture window set in the inward-facing cliff of the ring mountain, level with the crater floor.

On the other hand, it might just have been a matter of the simple if totally deceptive image manipulation at which Earth’s mass media seemed so talented. They often seemed to practice lying for
its own
sake.

But what caught and held his attention, and that of everybody else in the room, was neither the amply endowed newswoman in her shorts and halter top (which for some reason had become a sort of uniform for f
e
male correspondents visiting the asteroid, the way bush jackets and pith helmets had once been
de rigueur
in Africa) or the background she stood against, but the person she was interviewing.

Sitting beside him, Miri cringed at the picture of herself, looking rather old and shriveled, and somewhat ridiculous hanging there in her idling flying yoke.

“...reaction to the controversial anthropologist’s latest sensational claims,” the correspondent was saying, “which she refuses to discuss at present.”

Here, the camera viewpoint shifted briefly to a close-up of Miri, then
to luggage piled around her feet, and finally to her flying yoke, as the other woman continued in a voice-over.

“However, in the savage public battle that’s certain to follow once she does break her silence, it’s bound to emerge eventually that she harbors other, more personal resentments against the famous figure with whom she lived for so long.”

Now the image changed abruptly to old stock footage of a younger Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, seated at his word processor, lecturing a university class, handling a fossil skull, cutting wood in some rustic se
t
ting, and finally, stalking game on the African plains with the same big .416 Rigby Emerson was so familiar with.

“Apparently, Mirelle Stein’s original vision of a hyperdemocratic s
o
ciety didn’t include basing an entire civilization on what others now quote her as calling ‘primitive blood sports.’”

At the precise instant that the word “blood” was spoken, Drake-Tealy’s enormous rifle recoiled on his shoulder, spouting smoke, and the view cut to a tiny, delicate antelope which fell over and slid as if it had been hit by an invisible truck.

“This was entirely Drake-Tealy’s ‘contribution,’” the newswoman declared, “to match the philosophical insights of Stein herself and the financial and engineering input of William Wilde Curringer...and it a
p
pears she’s always been sickened by it.”

The camera was on Miri once again, looking tired and unhappy.

“Kylie Kennedy at Port Peary, the North Pole of Pallas, for the East American Radio Service.”

A thousand years hence, perhaps in less, America may be what E
u
rope is now...the noblest work of human wisdom, the grand scene of human glory,
the
fair cause of freedom that rose and fell.

—Thomas Paine

E
merson trudged the long, weary road back to Mrs. Singh’s.

Alone.

Ordinarily, it was a brief, pleasant stroll beside a freshly paved road quite unlike the dusty gravel track he’d first followed to freedom many years ago. He’d turned down the offer of a ride in Mrs. Singh’s three-wheeled contraption. Nobody had ever come up with a satisfactory generic name for the damned things, although they were in use all over the Curringer area and Nails was getting quite rich manufacturing them. Usually they just sat out on a sales lot or were displayed on a video screen, requiring no more label than a price tag.

Instead, Emerson had chosen to be by himself for a while. While he was in town—they’d all come in to see Cherry off—he was staying in his old room, which happened to be vacant. By tomorrow it wouldn’t be, since Miri was moving in, apparently as a long-term resident.

How odd,
he thought,
and how discouraging.
Here I am, very
nearly half a century old, two-thirds of my normal Earthside actu
arial life span over with
(although nobody could say for sure how long he might expect to live on Pallas),
and I still can’t sort my feelings out a bit better than I could when I was fourteen, And everything still hurts just as much as it did when I was that age
.

Maybe even more.

He lit a cigar, inhaled, and blew the smoke out in front of him.

He wouldn’t have admitted that he nearly worshipped Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy as a hero, and was almost as uncritically fond of the warm, kindly individual Mirelle Stein had turned out to be underneath that crusty layer of bitterness and anger which seemed to have crumbled away the very minute she’d discovered a reason to hope again. But it was true. It had broken his heart to learn that they were at odds with one another, had separated after all these years, and, if that bubble-head on TV had her way, would soon be arguing the whole thing out in public.

The one thing he had managed to learn in his forty-seven years was that you can’t live other people’s lives for them, that trying only makes you—and them—even more miserable. Not that this insight, for whatever wisdom it contained, offered much satisfaction. On the contrary, it was simply the sort of thing you resigned yourself to.

As always, when confronted with this kind of mentally immovable object, the subject seemed to change itself before he’d made any co
n
scious decision in the matter. For some reason that defied analysis, he found he was thinking more and more often these days about Gretchen, and he was very confused about Cherry. Part of him wished her nothing but well, sincerely hoped that she’d succeed fabulously in her new career, as she deserved to. Yet another part hoped, not without a pang of guilt, that she would “fall flat on her face” and come right back to him.

But if he really loved her, he’d never have let her go back to Earth, at least not without him.

Right?

And if she really loved him, she’d never have gone.

Oh the other hand, maybe they loved each other enough to let each seek his or her own destiny.

And on the third hand, maybe that was bullshit.

With a rueful grin, he remembered an old poster he’d once seen: “If you love somebody, let them go—then, if they don’t come back, hunt them down and kill them.”

And with that grin, his mind refocused itself once again on something safer, although no less confusing: what were the Drake-Tealy Objects, anyway, and where the hell had they come from?

For that matter, the same question could be asked about the asteroids themselves. Emerson knew that the question of their origin had never been satisfactorily settled. Some scientists, mostly Earth-based astron
o
mers and astrophysicists relying on mathematical models, had held for centuries that they were simple accretions of nebular matter—dust and gases—which, owing to the disturbing influence of massive Jupiter’s gravity, had never coalesced into the planet this region of the solar system should have given birth to.

Others, mostly chemists and geologists, argued back (perhaps a trifle romantically, although they had physical evidence, meteors in the b
e
ginning and now actual samples, to support them) that the asteroids were remnants of a planet which, for some unknown reason—possibly Jup
i
ter’s gravity again—had shattered into millions of fragments. They also
pointed out that the advocates of another romantic theory, continental drift, had been unjustly ridiculed as crackpots by established scientists for a century before not only being proven correct, but seeing their concept become the fundamental fact of Earthside geology.

Their opponents countered, quite logically, that just because Colu
m
bus had been made fun of and later proven right, that didn’t mean Vel
i
kovski was right, too.

For the most part, until recent years, those individuals actually living and working among the thousands of tumbling mountains hurtling through space between Mars and Jupiter had been far too busy simply surviving to worry very much about where the asteroids had come from, let alone some useless curiosity like the Drake-Tealy Objects which, in any case, had only recently come to light.

Now times were better and people could afford to be curious.

Pallas was still the only body in the Asteroid Belt with a permanent population. However, ship-based mining, such as that pursued by Alo
y
sius’s friend Fritz Marshall, was being carried out on an everyday basis elsewhere in the Belt, just as sixteenth century European fishermen had once harvested the Grand Banks off North America, returning home after each trip, never really setting foot in the New World. And, as Emerson had observed on many occasions before, there was always talk of new colonial enterprises being launched from Earth, or even from Pallas itself.

There was always
talk
...

“I’m Hugh Downey, Junior, and this is
Fifty/Fifty,
part of LiteLink’s never-ending struggle to get at the real truth no matter what the facts may be. With us this evening, via interplanetary video and a bit of careful editing to reduce the time it takes for signals to get back and forth from world to world, is the distinguished former United States Senator—and onetime Union Democratic Presidential hopeful—Gibson Altman, pr
e
sently Chief Administrator of the United Nations’ Greeley Utopian Memorial Project on the asteroid Pallas.

“Good evening, Senator Altman. We feel we were very lucky to get this interview, and we’re grateful, with all the other networks anxious to
consult you on the current crisis.

That wasn’t true, of course, but it would be after this—and worth every cent it had cost.

“Good evening, Hugh—although it’s morning where I happen to be at the moment.”

Even so, he had the drapes drawn here in his office—the one room he’d been able to maintain by himself, now that he was all alone, living in the moldering remains of what had once been his official Residence—so that the brown, dying fields surrounding the building would not be visible to billions of viewers back on Earth. It would be late afternoon before the interview—consisting of questions and
answers separated by half an hour’s wait each time—was
over. It would be a long, arduous process which would leave him exhausted for the next couple of days, but it might well prove to have been worth the effort.

Downey briefly detailed Altman’s personal history—brushing only very lightly over the scandal which had taken him to Pallas in the first place—but bearing down on the “beastly pattern of treatment” the Se
n
ator and his Project had received at the hands of the brutish colonists, whom he compared to the Boers of South Africa.

“Senator, public curiosity here on Earth—as well as there on Pallas, I understand—has recently been piqued by the mysterious so-called Drake-Tealy Objects, which may or may not be remnants of a lost alien civilization. Even before the infamous and colorful anthropologist wrote his book about them, they were commanding higher prices among this planet’s fashionable elite than finds of precious metals. A number of very emotional controversies centering on those objects has begun raging. First and foremost, of course, there’s the question of what to do with them.”

“Yes, Hugh, that’s the crucial question. According to a long-standing position taken by the United Nations General Assembly and broadly shared by academic and government authorities on Earth, such objects are the common property of all humanity, and should be treated as such, rather than being permitted to fall into the hands of unscrupulous ind
i
viduals, no different from archaeological pot-hunting criminals anywhere
else, really, willing to exploit or even obliterate these fragile and myst
e
rious relics, simply to make money for themselves.”

Downey nodded sympathetically for the benefit of his Earthside a
u
dience rather than for the Senator, who didn’t see the gesture until half an hour after he’d made the statement that inspired it. “However, I gather that this position, as you say, broadly shared among civilized people everywhere, has been discarded on Pallas, although it still finds local support in the person of a certain courageous, respectable, but tragically unappreciated elder statesman.”

That was laying it on pretty thick, even for this notoriously effusive telejournalist, Altman thought, but Downey knew his own constituency and perhaps he knew what he was doing. He’d been paid enough that he’d
better
know.

But before he could make a suitably modest disclaimer, the man was going on. “Some advocacy media figures and entertainer-activists here on Earth have gone so far as to portray Pallatian colonists as thick-witted, savage louts. I’ve heard comparisons being drawn between them and the whale hunters of ages past, as well as baby-seal harvesters, commercial loggers, and even industrial polluters.”

Stand-up comics, TV and radio talk-show hosts, each had played a part in an overall scheme the purpose of which was to make Altman appear moderate and reasonable.

“Hugh, I think the media may be making a mistake in that regard. I admit there are times when I’m tempted to compare my fellow Pallatians to the barbarians who burned the Alexandrian Library, but in general, I think it’s a waste of time to call names or point fingers. What we must all do, instead, is encourage the General Assembly to pass the Emergency Antiquities Protection Act I’ve proposed, no matter how much or how loudly it—or I, for that matter—may be repudiated by certain short-sighted individuals making a fortune here on Pallas.”

Downey grinned. Like Altman, he knew that, for all practical pu
r
poses, and with only one significant exception, the interview was over, that it had already achieved what it had been arranged for, and that the rest of the conversation would be a matter of consolidating that achievement
or merely filling airtime.

“And what of the argument we’ve been hearing lately that what began as a matter of mere paleontological curiosity could now become a fu
n
damental question of cultural conflict and political sovereignty? Does the Emergency Antiquities Protection Act you’ve proposed threaten to trample human rights wholesale, as its opponents claim, and even raise the terrible possibility of interplanetary war?”