Pallas (43 page)

Standing inside the doorway, Emerson was disappointed to hear murmurs of assent from the crowd. Drake-Tealy, looking like the Abominable Snowman in his ice-encrusted winter gear, gave him a knowing, cynical nod. Emerson shook his head.

“Suspend the Stein Covenant,” Altman went on, apparently not n
o
ticing their presence at the back. He looked like he was enjoying this. “Take over both TV
stations,
conscript an army which will overrun any resistance at the poles! By that time, I can have a war fleet on its way from Earth! We’ll force them to put up that other mirror, and if anything needs to be paid for to get it done, by God we’ll enact some tax law and screw it out of rich sons of bitches like Emerson Ngu!

“All in
favor,
say aye!”

Suddenly the barroom exploded with the all-enveloping thunder of Digger’s rifle going off into the ceiling, which responded by raining dust onto their heads and shoulders.

“I vote nay!” the anthropologist shouted, “and so does that rich son of a bitch, Emerson Ngu!”

Trying to ignore the ringing in his left ear, Emerson stepped forward, his pistol encrusted with frozen wolf blood.
He realized that he, too, was covered with it, and
that he must have been a horrifying sight to the people huddled in the room.

“The Stein Covenant is a unanimous consent agreement,” he told them all, “signed by every one of you. It can’t be cast off by majority vote, and I won’t let it be overthrown by a mob!” One-handed, he thumbed the hammer back on his empty automatic and pointed the muzzle at Altman’s face. “I’ll kill you first!”

Altman took a step backward. “Why, this is...this is unthinkable! You can’t...you can’t...”

“I can and I will,” Emerson told him. “And I’ll enjoy it!”

“So will
I
,” Digger added, leveling his rifle at the Senator. Emerson knew he had just fired the last round his .416 Rigby held in its magazine. Even if he had more in his pockets, the crowd would overrun them if he tried to reload.

“But I’ll do something else, if you let me,” Emerson added, putting into motion an idea he’d had on the way back from the Pocks. “This is all about an additional solar mirror, right? And, if I know Altman here, it’s about how to get the thing built and paid for by force. All right,
I’ll
build it. Anyone who wants to help can help pay me for it after it’s built. Ot
h
erwise, I’ll foot the bill myself. I’ll start as soon as I get Fritz Marshall on the phone. I think it can be done in a few weeks if you can all hold out that long.”

“He’s stalling,” Altman warned them. “He hasn’t solved the free-rider problem yet!”

Emerson laughed. “Yes I have, you idiot!” He lowered his gun and shoved it back in his pocket. He’d have to burn this parka, or it would stink once the blood thawed. “To prevent destruction of the Covenant, I’m willing to gamble everything I have and underwrite the construction myself. To hell with free riders, I want the mirror, not the dubious sati
s
faction of forcing others to pay for it!”

Afterward, he’d learned that the entire crowd had turned their backs on Altman and cheered.

He hadn’t seen them do it.

His eye had rolled back in his head, and he’d collapsed.

That government is best which governs someone else.

—Rex F.May

H
e was ready when the first of his flash-flares went off. Silhouetted momentarily in the almost blinding light, the lead attacker was confused because something bright and noisy had just happened
behind
him, and sought cover too late.

Emerson’s pistol sights rose and aligned themselves on the frozen target. When something happened
in front
of the thug—the blast of the Grizzly—he never knew it. A 260-grain softpoint took him square in the center—Emerson thought for an instant he could see light from the dying flare through a hole gaping in the man’s chest—and the thug pitched over on his face, dead before he hit the ground.

Emerson’s own short-lived shadow, thrown across the sandbags piled before him and followed by the slap of Rosalie’s Mark IV
Ngu
Departure, told him that another of Altman’s henchmen had tripped a wire on the other side of their perimeter. Her silence, rather than profanity, meant that she’d connected and that one less assassin would be collecting blood money from the Senator after this night’s work.

Why Altman had resorted to a strategy of outright sabotage and murder worthy of his long-dead son, now that the solar winter was finally ending, Emerson couldn’t say. He’d never understood why the man did anything. He only knew that these hirelings were here to contaminate the most important single water source on Pallas and that he, hi
m
self—thanks to one thug who’d wanted more money and didn’t care whether it came from the intended victim—was here to stop them.

Two more simpletons fell to a combination of flares and carefully aimed gunfire before it finally occurred to them to fall back and come up with some other plan.

This wasn’t the first assassination attempt foiled by Emerson’s adeptness at self-defense. Perhaps worse, the barrage of injunctions, r
e
straining orders, lawsuits, and other—what had Aloysius called it, ch
i
canery?—had never let up, even while the rest of the planet had been locked in its arctic nightmare.

At one point, working through Earthside holding companies, Altman had even tried to ruin Emerson by manipulating the outstanding loans which construction of the solar mirror had made necessary. Without warning, however, small ice-asteroids, propelled by an experimental application of Fritz Marshall’s new fusion/ion drive, had begun arriving at both polar spaceports. It was the payoff on an old investment which, during the emergency, Emerson had almost forgotten. Meant to utilize his
already existing pipeline network, it had bailed him out, saving him from Altman’s machinations.

Over the next few years, again drawing on Earth-based resources, Altman had tried to launch a series of businesses to compete with and destroy the inventor-entrepreneur. Altman, however, had never under
s
tood the workings of free enterprise, and none of his fledgling companies had even made it past the feasibility-study stage. Ironically, Emerson would have welcomed competition, feeling that it would have been just what he needed to keep his managers on their toes.

In any other legal venue, Altman’s unceasing campaign would have rendered Emerson’s company operations impossible, exactly the way that nuclear fission had been rendered all but impossible in the old United States back in the twentieth century. The Covenant had stopped him short every time, and saddled him with all the costs. Emerson wondered—but only a little—where the man was getting money for lawyers. Maybe he wasn’t any more. Maybe that accounted for this swing to outright v
i
olence.

Perhaps it was cheaper.

This time, Emerson and Rosalie had entrusted their four youngest children, Mirella, Brody, Teal, and baby Cherry, to the ancient Mrs. Singh. Two of the kids, Henrietta and Gretchen, were in school on Earth, an extremely unpleasant necessity Emerson hoped to do something about someday. Drake was managing company interests in Curringer. And the eldest was somewhere the other side of the line shed, only yards away. They’d stood guard at the pipeline head six days and nights now, almost without sleep. Considering that Altman’s hired guns hadn’t expected opposition, the bastards had taken long enough to work up their courage.

He heard the whine of the camp’s little caterpillar tractor coming up to speed, as well as painful clanking and grinding sounds of men unfamiliar with machinery trying to get its earth-moving bucket into a position they desired. Once it started forward, the vehicle inevitably tripped one of his wires and betrayed itself in a resulting flash, bobbing over uneven ground, crawling slowly toward him.

Casually, Emerson satisfied his curiosity, firing at the tractor, hearing
the softpoint clank and splatter harmlessly off the tough metal bucket the way the same kind of bullet, fired for recreation, had on the metallic silhouettes he’d played with as a kid.

In one way, it all seemed so long ago, and in another way it didn’t seem so long ago at all. He could still recall the night when his oldest son was born, the very same night he’d crash-landed in the snow, fought a desperate battle with the hungry wolves, staggered covered with their frozen blood into the White Rose Tattoo, and he and Digger had saved the Covenant—with empty guns.

He’d awakened at Doc Sheahan’s, knowing instantly where he was and why. She’d warned him on several occasions about the general co
n
dition his heart was in, with pointed reference to his habit of working long nights and especially to the cigars he was so fond of. Told that he had to give up every bad habit he loved, he’d retorted, “One quality of life I’ve pursued with absolute consistency is the liberty to do whatever the hell I want. I was always willing to die for that liberty and now you’re saying that’s what I’ve got to do? Well, I was prepared for it all along—now gimme back my goddamned cigar!”

He hadn’t really lied to himself about those chest pains earlier this evening; he’d just put off thinking about them because there were things tonight that had to be done.

His first conscious thought was that, if they’d done nothing else right on Pallas, they’d finally combined medical and veterinary practice under the same roof. His second thought was of Rosalie. He’d left her at the
Ngu
Departure plant almost alone. He tried to sit up. Strong, slender hands pushed him back into the bed.

“You’re not going anywhere, Emerson Ngu. Better relax and try to sleep. You’ve finally had the attack I warned you about, and you’re damned lucky it wasn’t a bad one.”

His one eye was wide open now, and he remembered everything. “Let me up, Heidi—I’ve got to talk to my wife!” He’d told her before he left the Pocks that he was going back to Curringer to deal with Altman, and he didn’t want her worrying.

Doc Sheahan smiled down at him. For some reason, there seemed to be a lot of noise in the hall outside his room, as if a dozen people were gathered there, all arguing with one another. It was funny how he hadn’t noticed until now that her hair had gradually turned as white as the snow piling up outside. She’d been one of those Scandinavian blonds whose hair was very nearly white already.

Maybe that was it.

“Any louder,” she stage-whispered, “and you’ll be doing it through the wall, but I’d
advise
against it. She’s busy now, and I need you to behave so I can get back to her.”

Emerson gasped, unbelieving. “What the hell are you talking about? She—Rosalie came all the way here, two hundred miles, in that...that mess outside?”

“She didn’t consult me about it.” Doc Sheahan shook her head. “You’ve been a bad influence on her, Emerson. At least she didn’t try to fly it, like you did. She came in one of those three-wheeled contraptions, in labor—telling me the road was clear because it had been blown clean by hurricane-force winds.”

“In labor?
But it’s only—”

The doctor smiled tolerantly. “These things happen in their own time, especially on Pallas. Now, will you please settle down and let me get back to her?”

The racket outside the door had swelled to an angry babble he almost had to shout over. Vaguely, he wondered what was going on. “Can I see her? Can I help?”

“You can help by not having another heart attack, tonight anyway. And you can see her soon. Like you, I’m afraid she’s in amazingly good shape considering what she’s been through. Personally, I don’t unde
r
stand these hardy pioneer types. But if she gets a breather, she’d probably like to see you, and believe it or not, current wisdom says that once you’re stabilized it’s better to have you on your feet. For now, I want you to rest until your readings settle down.”

The noise outside had died abruptly.

“Okay.” Emerson finally lay back against the pillows, noticing for the
first time the plastic tubes sticking out of his arms, connected to a pump because transfusions wouldn’t flow by gravity alone on Pallas. On a table against the wall, some electronic device was counting his heartbeats. “Tell me when—”

“I will, don’t worry.” She straightened, walked to the door, and left. By reflex, he patted his chest, looking for a cigar,
then
wondered what they’d done with his clothes.

The door swung, and Digger stuck his snowy head inside. “You look like secondhand hell, old son. I’m going back to Mrs. Singh’s house to pick up the womenfolk, who insist that babies can’t get born without them. Anything I can bring you?”

“Yeah—a Senator’s head on a pike.”

Drake-Tealy laughed. “Funny you should ask. How would the raw materials do, with some disassembly required?” He reached out into the hall, dragged a figure into the room, and pushed it roughly toward a chair. “Now be good, dearie, understand? Or old Digger’ll come back and stuff both your legs up your arse!”

The figure slumped compliantly into the chair. At the center of several layers of improvised cold-weather clothing, Emerson recognized his old enemy, Gibson Altman.

Emerson remained silent; it was up to the Senator to say something. Finally: “The clinic’s crowded from wall to wall—it’s the storm, I think—and there wasn’t anyplace else to wait.” He was sullen, appr
e
hensive, as if he expected Emerson to rise from his bed and throttle him. Emerson thought about it, but decided he wasn’t strong enough.
Yet.
Besides, Rosalie might need a husband tonight.

“To wait for what?”

Altman peeled off the first layer, an oversize sportcoat he was wearing over another almost exactly like it. “Maybe she’s your wife, but she’s my granddaughter. Like it or not, that’s my great-grandchild being born in there.”

“I’ll try hard not to hold it against him—or her.”

“How very generous of you, Emerson.
You can afford it. You won tonight—by brute force.”

“Let’s not quibble,
Gibson.
” Emerson tried not to get angry. “You were more than willing to try a military coup yourself, backed by a nu
c
lear-armed UN spacefleet, to throw out the Covenant, return to majorit
a
rianism, and force any number of unwelcome changes on Pallatians. Anyway, no one’s ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It’s just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.”

He tried to think of something else to talk about, but what could there be between him and this man, except a difference of principle which had driven their enmity for half a century? Apparently Altman had the same problem, because he didn’t argue with Emerson’s analysis.