Pallas (38 page)

“...
gonna repeat now, an important news conference recorded
live ea
r
lier this morning here in Curringer and broadcast over
KCUF. We don’t
get to do this kinda stuff very often, folks, so we’d
really appreciate it if you’d pay attention.”

The announcer was replaced by a scene Emerson recognized, the i
n
side of the Nimrod Saloon & Gambling Emporium. Aloysius’s people had set up a table by the wall with the enormous antlers, cluttered with large pieces of poster board displaying photographs and computer pri
n
touts. There were also items of physical evidence, some of which he’d handled himself. Behind that, and a fat cluster of microphones duct-taped together, stood two women. The one who hung suspended in a flying yoke, he knew. As the unseen camera focused in, Miri Stein spoke.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to introduce Dr. Ros
alie Frazier, who has come to Pallas through the auspices of the
Curringer Foundation, an organization few are likely to have
heard of since it was set up in secret, independent of the Curringer Trust, to safeguard the Covenant which bears my name and which some claim is responsible for the unique way of life we share and
enjoy on this asteroid.

“Before you ask, I am responsible for having brought this
young scientist to Pallas. I believed her presence to be urgently nec
essary, with warships being prepared, even as I speak, to impose
the political will of Earthside politicians on all of us. She is one of a tiny band of ‘xenoa
r
chaeologists,’ an expert on nonterrestrial ar
tifacts, and she wields i
m
pressive credentials, even if her field has so
far been forced to struggle along without a tangible object of study. At my request, she has been commi
s
sioned by the Curringer Foun
dation to settle this dispute over the so-called Drake-Tealy Objects
once and for all. Dr. Frazier
...
?”

He’d never seen the young woman before, but as the screen shifted to a close-up, he knew she was too beautiful and lively for the Earthside m
e
dia to ignore. Looking flushed and excited, she had dark, glossy, shou
l
der-length hair, large, appealing blue eyes, nice cheekbones, and a nose turned up a little at the end. A good mouth, but it was her self-confident manner he found most attractive. She was slim, in tight-fitting coveralls a movie director might consider appropriate to digging artifacts in a desert, and at the same time intriguingly rounded in the right places.

Best of all, from the standpoint of the Pallatians she addressed, she
carried a heavy autopistol in a broad belt slanting across her hips.

Obviously a bit nervous, she cleared her throat.
“Thank you, Miss Stein. To relieve the suspense, I’ll begin by saying that
the Drake-Tealy Objects I’ve examined on Earth by neutrino-scan
and other recent tec
h
niques are not only indisputably the product of
intelligent fabrication, billions of years old, they were apparently assembled atom-by-atom to assume whatever shape they have and perform whatever function they once served, in a manner beyond our present technology.”

She held up a hand, trying to silence the uproar she’d provoked.
“There isn’t much more to say about that aspect, ex
cept to note that ce
r
tain of my colleagues have been somewhat pre
mature, inferring such things as the makers’ size, body shape, hair and eye color—not to mention party affiliation and softdrlnk pref
erence from a few badly worn tool specimens...”
There was general laughter.
“I do, however, have som
e
thing to say about the disposition of these objects.

“The legislative program put forth by ex-Senator Gibson Altman is not in the interests either of the people it affects or of science. It’s nothing more than backdoor socialism, blatant and regressive, a last grab at power by collectivist politicians on Earth and elsewhere whose time in history is over. I urge Pallatians to take arms
—
I see you’ve done that already
—
and resist this reactionary stupidity. I urge the people of Earth to remove the self-aggrandizing hacks responsible for taking them to the brink of history’s first interplanetary war.”

The room rocked with cheering and applause and it was some time before it could be quieted down.

“It should be clear to everyone else by now, after the disasters
of the last century, that coercion isn’t the answer to this or any
other problem. Instead of fabricating another statist excuse to beat
people up and kill them, I propose to educate Pallatian Object-find
ers, so that what they bring back from the wilderness will retain its
archaeological ‘context’ and be of greater value to science and the
market.

“To Senator Altman and his allies, if they’re so worried about pr
e
serving the prehistory of this asteroid, perhaps they should dig deep in their own pockets—rather than those of the taxpayers—
and buy as many
Drake-Tealy Objects as possible. They can put
them in museums—or wherever else they think advisable.

“Thank you.”

A man is only as old as the woman he feels.

—Groucho Marx

E
merson grinned.

“Well, I can see my help wasn’t needed.
Inconsiderate of you to conduct your lives without it!”

He’d traveled halfway around the little globe for the second time in as many days in an attempt to persuade Drake-Tealy to see his wife. He’d tried hard to stay out of the archaeological free-for-all when it had been a public matter, but he’d immediately recognized what Miri had really been up to yesterday, and why.

Happily, he was too late. Miri and Digger were sitting on the front porch of their cabin, holding hands and swinging gently back and forth in a rustic glider the anthropologist had built by hand. Now that he’d alighted in the yard in front of the house, Emerson could see that there was a third individual, Miri’s video protégé,
a
beautiful young girl of about half his age, occupying an equally handmade-looking armchair in a nearby corner formed by the porch railing. It had been difficult to tell from above, in the late afternoon sunlight.

With a houseguest ready to occupy the living room couch he’d slept on during his own first stay here, he realized he’d have to sleep out under the trees tonight or fly all the way back to the plant. Well, why not? His work was already done here, wasn’t it?

Digger laughed. “Come on up and make yourself to home, son! We’ve got a venison stew simmering on the back of the stove and Miri just put on a fresh pot of coffee.”

Emerson did as he was bidden, leaning his flying yoke against one side of the steps and reflecting that R.L. Drake-Tealy was one of the few
people on this little world who would think to call him “son.” During his stopover—not brief enough to suit him—in Curringer, Mrs. Singh had reminded him that the previous day had been his birthday, his fi
f
ty-second, if he remembered it correctly.

Miri smiled at him as he hunkered down on the padded top of a very old-fashioned wooden keg they kept around as a stool. “You haven’t met our other guest. Rosalie Frazier, this is Emerson Ngu. Emerson, meet Rosalie. She’s recently arrived from Earth to—”

“I saw you both on TV, Miri. It was a pretty startling and impressive performance.” He nodded cordially at the younger woman.
“Nice to meet you in person, Dr. Frazier.
How does it feel to have prevented history’s first full-scale interplanetary war while saving Pallatian sovereignty and hyperdemocracy itself?”

She shrugged. “The reviews aren’t in, Mr. Ngu. Possibly I’ve pr
o
voked rather than prevented it, which would make me feel a great deal like Harriet Beecher Stowe. And I prefer to be called Rosalie by friends of Miri’s and Digger’s.”

“Then make mine Emerson,” he responded, “and I could use a cup of coffee, if you don’t mind, after the miserable day I spent in Curringer and the long flight out here.”

It was Rosalie who got up and went into the kitchen at the back of the house for Emerson’s coffee. As she passed by him, he inhaled the faintest possible trace of some subtle and pleasant perfume. He’d already noticed that she was considerably more attractive in person than she’d appeared on TV the previous day, and there was a lingering familiarity about her. He thrust the thought aside, however. Whatever her credentials, she still was only a girl, possibly in her late twenties, far too young for an old bird half a century old like himself.

In response to Miri’s raised eyebrows, he explained how he’d ha
p
pened to see them and the reason he’d had to return to town instead of flying out here immediately.

“By the time I got to Curringer and discovered that my testimony wasn’t going to be necessary after all—god, I love lawyers—I’d wasted most of the day cooling my heels at the back of the same room where you
and Rosalie held your history-making press conference. Aloysius and Nails and Mrs. Singh send their regards, by the way, along with three cheers apiece. I looked afterward, but neither of you was to be found anywhere in town, so I took a chance that you’d be out here, even though there’s a story circulating that Digger’s back on Earth.”

“I am,” the old man chuckled. “This is just a hologram you’re talking to. I wish
I’d
seen the ladies in their moment of triumph. Did anybody think to make a recording?”

Emerson explained that what he’d seen yesterday at the line shack had been a recording and that KCUF could probably supply a copy. “You probably ought to have one,” he told Miri and Rosalie as the latter handed him his coffee. “You two may just have saved a pair of worlds and the lives of everyone on them.”

He knew that a UN fleet could have wiped Pallas out simply by d
e
stroying the atmospheric envelope. On the other hand, he was aware that the Pallatians weren’t without resources and that anyone with a small spaceship—Marshall, for instance—could have nudged a county-sized asteroid from one orbit into another, causing it to plunge down onto mankind’s mother planet, duplicating the catastrophe which had finished off the dinosaurs. There had been talk of doing exactly that among his acquaintances at both poles, and maybe even some preparations.

He said as much now, omitting the fact that he’d diverted some of that hostility by contracting for an ice-finding survey to be conducted among the nearby lesser asteroids.

“Well, before you wax too eloquent in your congratulations, young man,” Miri cautioned him, with the same sort of reference to their relative ages that had startled him in Digger’s case, “you should be advised that I was acting from no high-flown sense of duty or historic mission. I simply missed my husband and had to see this question settled before it split us up forever. I knew that, had Rosalie’s findings gone the other way, he would have accepted them out of respect for the same plain scientific truth that I am committed to. And even centenarians like Raymond and
myself
,” she added, “have their passions.”

Digger laughed, remembering that he’d once said almost exactly the
same thing to Emerson. “I don’t believe this relationship of ours was ever fated to go smoothly, my dear.”

She nodded agreement. “Being misquoted by ax-grinders in the mass media did not help things much,” she told Emerson. “You may already know I heartily concur with Raymond’s notions about hunting and always have—among other reasons, because they tend to ensure the survival of individual liberty on Pallas. It is hard to oppress a population equipped to hunt animals the size of a man.

“However, that was all theory. I was raised as a city girl on Earth, tainted, perhaps unconsciously, by fashionable attitudes toward life and death which have little bearing on reality anywhere, but especially on Pallas. I never quite adapted personally to some of the more sanguine aspects of the hunting life, and, after being crippled, never had a chance to try. The time I have spent in the town where William Wilde Curringer died, among people who hunt for a living, has helped me deal with problems that were strictly mine to begin with, and my trip to Earth, where hypocrites deplore hunting but wear leather shoes, finished the job.

“Now I understand, as I never did before, the depth of that hypocrisy. Many of the animals bred to be hunted here on Pallas, deer, antelope, elk, moose—”

“Rabbits,” Digger interrupted, counting off until he ran out of fingers, “squirrels, pikas, javelina, mountain goats, caribou, bison, bear, boar, elephant, buffalo, rhino, quail, pheasant, pigeon, wild turkey, grouse, even ducks and geese—”

“Along with many of their natural predators and supporting species,” Miri regained the floor, “face extinction back on Earth where they are ‘protected,’ whereas here, there is talk of reviving mammoths by cloning and even a little speculation that the genes of dinosaurs may someday be salvaged from bird or reptile tissue.”

“Or from blood preserved in the guts of biting insects trapped in amber—somebody wrote a book about that, once. Damned clever it was, too.” Digger grinned, obviously thinking about his .416 Rigby. “Wouldn’t that be a grand hunt?”

Miri smiled. “All I want right now, however, is to be with Raymond
and enjoy the time we have left.”

Rosalie sighed. “You love this place, don’t you, Emerson?”

He stood with his hands in his pockets, his toes dangerously close to the edge of an intimidating precipice at the southern end of Digger’s homestead claim. Off to one side, the stream running through the ant
h
ropologist’s land plunged off the cliff-edge into the crater valley below, which at this time of evening was filled with colored mists and shadows. He wondered what it must have been like to walk rather than fly out here from what passed for civilization in the early days. The thought was more intimidating than the cliff-edge at his feet.

“I love all of the wild, untamed places of Pallas,” he told Rosalie, “and the violent topography of small planets in general.” He continued thin
k
ing out loud. “On Earth, because of the gravity, I guess, the pioneers traveled the valley bottoms, mountain passes, and so forth, to get from one place to another. Here, they had to follow the ridges, partly because the low gravity allows it, partly because the valleys are all circular, having been blasted out by impact with smaller asteroids, and don’t necessarily connect with one another.”

From this unexpected plateau, even with the sun threatening to set over their right shoulders, they could see not only into the twilit valley below them, but over the next one and the one after that, taking in at a single, sweeping glance perhaps a hundred miles of rugged Pallatian geography which, for the most part, only Emerson had so far explored, and then, mostly from the air.

He felt rather than saw her nod in acknowledgment. They’d hardly looked at one another since they’d made their way through the dense woods following dinner to get to this spectacular sight. The idea had been Digger’s, with Miri’s enthusiastic approval. They both had realized what the elderly couple had been after, aside from the chance to be together for a little while, but they’d gone along, Emerson because the idea appealed to him despite what he thought he ought to feel.

They’d left their flying yokes at the cabin, but they both wore their pistols. This place wasn’t safe and never would be. It hadn’t been meant
to be safe. Despite the scenery, Emerson would have liked very much to gaze deeply into the girl’s eyes if the idea hadn’t also embarrassed him. To his amazement, the middle-aged bachelor had immediately found himself failing in love with Rosalie. He was old enough, he lectured himself, to be her father, and the fact that simply being with her like this evoked a fierce burning within his loins was only a perversion on his part, to be suppressed and ignored at all costs.

“Yes, I love this place,” he added, as much to bar the forbidden path his thoughts had been taking as anything else. He touched the fabric patch that covered his right eye socket. “I was hurt the first time I came here, in mind as well as body. I’d not only lost everything I had, and everything I’d ever wanted, I’d lost everything I believed in. I was healed here, and I probably grew up.”

A faint breeze stirred and she moved closer until she took his left arm, as if merely against the coming chill of the night air. “I know all about that, Emerson,” she told him. “A lot of people do, back home on Earth. You may not realize it, but you’ve become something of a folk hero in certain quarters, especially in West America, where I did most of my growing up, as well as my own...”

Her voice trailed off. He turned to look at her—she was so beautiful to him that it hurt—wondering what she’d been about to say, but didn’t say anything himself.

“As well as my own personal hero,” she went on, visibly mustering courage. Suddenly she was not the competent, self-confident professional he’d seen and begun falling in love with yesterday, but a small, frightened girl he also found terrifyingly irresistible. “I think the reason I came to Pallas was for the chance of meeting you—”