Pallas Read online

  “Ngu comma Emerson: unauthorized enterprise!”

  He straightened his back and strode through the ranks of his fellow peasants toward the Residence.

  Again.

  The Rimfence

  The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

  —Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

  “Ready, Senator?”

  He hadn’t come to admire the fence, but admire it he did. Sixteen meters high, 245 kilometers long, it enclosed just short of two million hectares—1.6 percent of the asteroid’s surface—along with ten thousand colonists, their UN sheepdogs, and his family.

  He wasn’t sure why, but it made him feel secure for the first time in his life. This morning’s confrontation with Alice’s young son, an otherwise undistinguished youngster about the same age as his own, had left him with a hollow feeling and he needed a little reassurance. The boy’s transgression was always the same—unauthorized enterprise—differing in an ominous way from Gibson Junior’s pranks and the general run of juvenile delinquency they’d been having so much trouble with recently.

  “Senator?”

  He turned to the reporter who was his real reason for being here this morning. Her impossibly long eyelashes, moist, full lips, long, clean legs revealed by a pair of tight khaki safari shorts, her narrow waist, slender hips, and assets that strained the buttons of a self-consciously proletarian work shirt all hinted, and not very subtly, that she might be willing to stay for another day or two if the famous sexy Senator could just find something to do with the wife and kiddies.

  He’d carefully deafened himself over the years to overtures like this—from bitter experience traversing the sexual minefield that was Washington—deliberately blinded himself, concentrating instead on the Project. It would have taken someone considerably more attractive to him than this shopworn young woman to change that.

  Today the youthful-looking Senator wore the same running shoes, faded jeans, and plaid sport shirt open at the neck that a series of relaxed and wildly successful campaign spots had made him famous for. His attention—and his best political smile—were on the reporter. The shoulder-stocked camera her assistant pointed at him looked uncomfortably like a weapon. Then again, he supposed it was more powerful and destructive than any gun. So far the idiot, awkward in low gravity, had spent his time tripping over furrows and had already ruined several plants, angering the workers. But it was a small price to pay for publicity friendly to the Project.

  “Ready when you are, Martie.”

  She nodded cheerfully into the camera. “We’re here, two hundred fifty million miles from Earth, for the Global Information Gathering Organization. With us is former United States Senator Gibson Altman, Chief Administrator of the United Nations’ Greeley Utopian Memorial Project on Pallas—and oh yes, his little son, Gibson Junior.”

  Altman glanced at the sour-faced child fidgeting beside him, tousled the boy’s hair, tried to look paternal—something he’d never been much good at—then up again, more at the reporter than the camera. It was obvious that the boy hadn’t been dressed by his nurse. This was Gwen’s kind of joke, outfitting her son in Levi’s, Kevlar shoes, and a shirt identical to his father’s. Having the boy with him was a good idea, given past publicity. Having Gwen, their daughter, and baby son would have been even better, but he didn’t want them out here in the fields.

  “Pallas,” the reporter continued, reading from a smart-card concealed in her palm, “is six hundred eight kilometers in diameter and follows a mildly eccentric orbit in a broad band between Mars and Jupiter containing tens of thousands of such miniature planets. Its surface area is 1,161,820 square kilometers, about the same as Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico—the so-called West American ‘four corners’ states—combined, with maybe a quarter of Wyoming thrown in for good measure.”

  Martie Mough was unquestionably pretty, tall, blond, voluptuous in the extreme—and utterly sexless. He’d noted this before with female reporters, supposing it must be a professional asset in a trade where half the customers were men, subconsciously (or otherwise) dissatisfied with their domestic arrangement, and the other half women, innately jealous and suspicious. Her name, pronounced “moe,” was often mangled, most often by her colleagues, in accordance with her physical assets (and some said her intelligence), to rhyme with “cow” or “moo.” Personally, he thought “muff” would have been funnier, but at a little under thirty, he guessed, she was at least ten years too old to interest him that way.

  “Second largest of the asteroids, Pallas was the first to be explored and settled, thanks to its unique combination of resources: soil, water, and low gravity. Vesta, next-largest of the so-called Big Five Asteroids, is brighter and more easily seen from Earth, but it’s composed of granite, is therefore lifeless, and will probably remain so forever, having none of what Pallas has to offer humanity.”

  Astronomers had known for a century that Pallas’s low reflectivity indicated that it was probably composed of carbonaceous chondrites, rather than meteoric stone or nickel-iron, which meant that somewhere between five and ten percent of its mass could be expected to be water, chemically locked into its substance. As a result, with little effort or expenditure of energy, the hydrocarbon-rich surface could be processed into soil. In some senses, it already was soil.

  Pallas’s size, however, and its consequent attraction, implied that it was an “accretion body”—the little world had proven to be heavily cratered—which for billions of years had collected smaller asteroids of differing composition. Impacting on its surface, they’d left large, discrete deposits of useful minerals and metals. Moreover, certain twentieth-century astrophysicists had held that petroleum did not stem from biological sources—dinosaurs or Carboniferous plants—as popularly believed, but had been produced by the titanic events in which the solar system had created itself from a swirling cloud of interstellar dust and gases. Their theory had been confirmed when oil was discovered within the structure of a body which presumably had never known life of any kind.

  The reporter looked up just in time to catch the Senator’s eye and warn him wordlessly that Gibson Junior, who had quietly left his father’s side, was just as quietly sifting a handful of fine dirt into the big galvanized tub containing the workers’ drinking water. Hoping she’d have the decency to edit this little drama out, he reached for the boy, snagged the neck of his shirt, and dragged him back.

  The reporter suppressed a grin.

  Maybe she had children of her own.

  “But enough of these dry, flavorless statistics. Senator, once one gets past that gorgeous sunrise we stopped to record this morning on the way out here, this doesn’t look all that different from, say, Iowa. What makes it worth all the trouble and expense to build a farm community a quarter of a billion miles from Earth?”

  The fact was that she and her assistant had staggered out of their guest quarters well after sunrise, almost terminally hung over, and the gorgeous sunrise they’d “recorded” would come from stock footage. They’d arrived the previous evening after an apparently uproarious time spent at Aloysius Brody’s sleazy establishment across the lake. This time, however, Altman’s smile was completely sincere, and for good reason: from here, countless perfect furrows swept away in beautiful, green concentric circles, following the shape of the meteoric bowl the Project lay in and delaying runoff before it settled into a sort of shallow moat around the vast crater’s low central peak—or in one of thousands of lesser astroblemes that also marked the landscape and served as irrigation reservoirs.

  The green was broken only by white dots, dwindling in the distance before the eye met the horizon, of colonists silently laboring between the furrows, and by the occasional pale blue of one of their E&M counselors spurring them on in the endless battle against insects and weeds which were never supposed to have been permitted in this controlled environment in the first place, but which had taken t
o the rich soil and moderate climate in the same wholehearted manner as the crops—just another little phenomenon Curringer and his people hadn’t predicted.

  Even so, saying before a world audience that the place looked like Iowa was tremendously flattering, and, in addition, she’d handed him a wonderfully open question.

  “Well, Martie, as you know, the South African billionaire William Wilde Curringer intended Pallas to be a country club for rugged individualism. Just to be here, its mostly middle- and upper-class settlers all paid an amount far beyond the reach of Earth’s underprivileged—on average, about four million New American Dollars.”

  “About the same, allowing for inflation, as the Mayflower’s passengers.” The reporter smiled without wrinkling the delicate tissues around her eyes, a long-term media survival tactic he’d first heard about in the revival of an old Broadway play. “And for that price, they were all assigned plots of land by random drawing?”

  “In those areas Curringer and his people deemed suitable for immediate habitation, yes.”

  He had to stop again. Now his fifteen-year-old was following along behind the workers, pulling up young soybean plants the same way he’d seen them pull up the weeds. It appeared that all of the white-clad colonists were afraid to say anything about it.

  “And they all vote equal shares”—the reporter diplomatically turned to the camera—“on the rare occasions when they’re allowed to vote at all.” She turned back to him once he’d dealt with Gibson Junior. “Under a contract requiring the unanimous consent of all the settlers for any significant changes to occur?”

  “Any changes at all,” he answered. Better and better, he thought. “Fortunately, through an unintentional loophole written into Mirelle Stein’s infamous covenant—“

  She winked. “Which I understand was closed immediately afterward by its embarrassed author.”

  “Yes—it’s been possible for a more humane form of society to gain something of a foothold here.”

  “You’re referring to cooperative agrarianism, Senator?” At present, the idea was all the rage with a cocktail-party set on Earth who would never be called upon to try it.

  Nevertheless, he nodded. “As practiced within the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project—just a minute.”

  This time, Gibson Junior had taken the biggest armful he could manage of the weeds some of the colonists had pulled up and others had collected, and was lifting them into the air a little at a time, letting them scatter back across the field on the breeze. Concealing what he did with his body, the Senator snatched what was left of them from the boy, and threw them back at the hopper they’d come from.

  It was some time before peace and quiet were restored sufficiently to go on with the interview, and Altman vowed he’d never repeat this particular mistake again. From now on, Junior would be kept out of sight.

  “Er, can you explain the principles of cooperative agrarianism for our TV audience, Senator?”

  Knowing perfectly well that what he was about to say would be edited out or—far more likely—voiced over before it went on the air, he went ahead, hoping that the background he was providing would help her make an accurate summary.

  “Sure, Martie. It’s based on the concepts of universal brotherhood and appropriate technology, which its academic and political sponsors on Earth believe will inevitably triumph here. Their aim, and my own, is to supersede the exploitive techno-barbarism rampant just outside the Project’s benign influence.”

  He nodded toward the Rimfence. Eight times taller than a man (barely adequate in this gravity), the inward-slanting steel-mesh barrier around the crater rim enclosing the Project also served to absorb and deflect all but authorized communications, filtering out undesirable and confusing political and commercial propaganda.

  At that moment, as if in answer to a prayer, the sound of gunshots echoed across the fields, most likely from Outsiders hunting in the wild grassland beyond the Projects boundary.

  The reporter started. “Does that happen often?”

  “Many times a day, Martie, each day including Sundays.” He’d assumed a carefully disgusted expression which he now dropped for a look of dedicated confidence. “That’s just another reason I’m determined to pursue the United Nations’ benevolent long-range goals here, by voting our own colonists’ shares for them, as a bloc.”

  “And this is possible under the special Project articles all of them signed as a condition of free passage here?”

  It was time to smile warmly. “Well, I can see you’ve done your homework, Martie.”

  “All part of the job, Senator,” she smiled back, a bit regretfully. He braced himself for what he guessed was coming. “Unfortunately, so is asking about a less-than-cordial relationship, initially, with what you people call Outsiders—settlers brought here by the Curringer Trust who didn’t come as part of the United Nations program. And wasn’t there a rumor going around that the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project was originally meant as a pilot program for future penal colonies?”

  Altman and his family had been required—by a leadership anxious to get them under cover and the Curringer Line’s tight scheduling for its new cold fusion transport—to leave Earth before that rumor (which happened to be perfectly true at the time) could be squelched. Apparently it had been spread by the increasing number of dissenters and refuseniks who were its likeliest future beneficiaries. He couldn’t say that to Martie Mough, but fortunately he’d handled the question many times over the years and knew exactly what he could say.

  He grinned and lied. “Personally, Martie, I think it’s the Rimfence that started that story. Setting aside its admittedly daunting proportions, which, allowing for gravity, are easily equaled by anything the average Texas ranch offers, there’s nothing exotic about it. It’s plain old homely chain link, topped with concertina coils of ordinary military razor wire. Like many such fences, it’s electrified with fifty thousand volts at—well, I forget how many amperes—mainly to keep high-jumping wild animals out of the crops.”

  “And of course, Senator, it’s those very crops you’ve come out here to inspect this morning,” the reporter suggested, accomplishing an adroit change of subject following the obligatory question which few would notice he hadn’t really answered.

  “That’s right. I’m closing a deal—I hope—with a, er, restaurateur in the nearby town of Curringer, and I wanted to remind myself of what we have to offer.”

  “Even to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about farming, Senator, it’s impressive.”

  “Yes—I mean thank you, Martie. We’ve worked hard here. The land is contoured and cultivated according to the latest recommendations of United Nations agricultural specialists—“

  “I notice the plants are set closer together than they’d be on Earth, is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s owing to the unexploited richness of the soil and the amount of labor available. These are soybeans, for which my customer professes to have no use—“

  She grinned, shaking her head. “We visited his restaurant in Curringer last night. I heard comments about cattle feed unfit for human consumption. The arrogance of it, making fun of something billions of people back home eat every day!”

  Because they hadn’t any other choice. Unwilling to pursue the matter because he couldn’t stomach soya products himself no matter how fashionably plebeian they happened to be, he went on. “They do serve to give me an idea of how the crops are faring. It looks to me—with only nine years’ experience at these matters under my figurative belt—as if they’re exceeding our expectations.”

  “This is Martie Mough on the asteroid Pallas, for GIGO.” She smiled, waving to her assistant to turn his camera off. “If your little boy lets them, you mean?”

  “What?” Altman pivoted to see what she was talking about, then groaned with something akin to horror.

  Behind him, Gibson Junior was bouncing down a row of soybeans, taking exquisite care to land on the hand of each and every silently suffering
worker as he passed.

  Cold Fission

  Everybody knows that nuclear fusion can only take place at tremendously high temperatures and pressures, in the presence of billions of dollars.

  —Mirelle Stein, The Productive Class

  Gibson Altman believed he still had a few friends back on Earth, but the physical conditions governing communication with them—an endless and unconscionable fourteen-minute lag while radio signals crawled a quarter of a billion kilometers—were better suited for delivering diatribes than for conversation.

  He’d seen Martie Mough off within the past hour. In the end, she’d been more perplexed than anything else at his indifference to her unspoken advances and had probably come to the conclusion—although people back home would never believe it after all he’d been through—that he was gay. The Greeley Utopian Memorial Project had been her last stop on a general tour of Pallas for her network. Now she’d be heading for the South Pole to catch a Curringer Liner back to Earth.

  As a longtime political foe of the internal combustion engine and the private automobile, even he had to admit that the celebrated interplanetary correspondent for the Global Information Gathering Organization—not to mention her equipment-laden technical assistant—had looked splendidly ridiculous, pedaling off on the pair of rattletrap bicycles they’d rented in Curringer. That sight alone had made all the trouble they’d put him to seem worthwhile, although he wished he’d had a chance to see them on their way down here from the North Pole, dangling like puppets from the fragile wing of one of the ultralight aircraft which were presently the only long-range transport on the asteroid.

  Shaking his head with amusement, he’d watched them wobble off and vanish over a horizon much closer on Pallas than it would have been on Earth. Then he’d abandoned the verandah to go inside, where Alice had been waiting lunch for him. No sooner had he finished, blessedly alone in his private study after a thoroughly hellish morning in the fields with Gibson Junior, than she came to inform him that a personal call from Earth was coming in on the big screen in the family room.