Pallas Read online

  In between, she’d been to London as a guest of the last Marxist state on Earth, to Aspen (where she maintained legal residence) as a duly elected delegate to the Union Democratic Party’s first national convention, to the Hague to demand that Interpol spray the world’s tobacco fields with paraquat, and to Colombo to badger the General Assembly into funding the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project. And she’d soon be here at the Project itself to entertain the colonists and see for herself what they’d accomplished with what she’d helped them obtain.

  Unable to avoid another anxious glance out the window, Gwen found she was humming a song from the classic video The Music Man, the one about “The Wells Fargo Wagon.” The traveling dustcloud had grown closer all day, heralding the arrival of the star and her performing company—too many and with too much baggage to fly down from the North Pole in those ridiculous, tiny, ultralight aircraft the Outsiders used.

  Gibson had tried getting them a cargo helicopter from Colombo, but had failed. They’d settled on a huge-wheeled rollabout intended for a UN Lunar settlement that had never quite worked out—the Swiss-South African investors who had bought that colony out were building highways for private automobiles, of all things! The machine had been disassembled on Earth, shuttled bit by bit onto one of the big Curringer Liners, shipped to Pallas, and reassembled at the North Pole.

  Once it returned Miss Murdoch and her entourage to the spaceport, someone would drive it back to the Project, where it would double their present fleet of such vehicles, used for heavy farm chores and hauling produce to the market in Curringer. It represented a generous gift, especially since Miss Murdoch had insisted on buying it from the contractor herself and paying the freight. Too lightly built for work in the gravity of Earth, it had been sitting at a factory in Prague gathering dust and taking up space, about to be broken up for parts.

  None of that made Gwen feel nervous now as she personally straightened, cleaned, and dusted the Residence’s only guest room, hoping Miss Murdoch would be willing to spend a night in it, although at any other time in her life it would have been enough. Actually, it was her daughter’s bedroom, and as much as she dreaded putting little Vanessa in with Gibson Junior these days, if only for a few hours—even the servants and staff had learned to avoid him—it was necessary. Nor was it the fact that all of her own clothing was years out of date. Surely Miss Murdoch would understand and overlook something like that.

  What made her nervous was the personal reason she wanted Miss Murdoch in this room, especially during those first few precious minutes after she’d led the woman here, alone, without Gibson around, and was theoretically making sure that she was comfortable. What made her nervous was the favor she meant to ask of a person she didn’t know and had only admired anonymously for most of her life.

  Of the three overland journeys the Lunar rollabout would be making before its conversion to more mundane purposes, the trip down from the North Pole, the trip back, and the final trip to the Project, Gwen was concerned about the middle one.

  She wanted to go along.

  Her bag was packed only with what she and her three surviving children would require during the two-week voyage that would take her back to the home her parents had left her in Arlington.

  Making as little fuss about it as she could manage given the conditions she was operating under, because like it or not she would always be the perfect political spouse, she was ready—had been ready for a long time—to leave Pallas, the Project, and a husband who had neither needed nor wanted her for years.

  Emerson didn’t know how he’d gotten roped into this ceremony, but it was messing up his plans.

  Cleared through the security gate in the Rimfence, the rollabout from the North Pole had covered the seventy-eight-kilometer distance to the Residence and compound in forty minutes on what was said to be the only paved road on Pallas. After the rough, lumbering journey here cross-country, it must have seemed like flying.

  Anybody might have thought it was Santa Claus’s sleigh, the way it had been decorated and the way people were acting. All the servants and their families were on display in bright, fresh uniforms, democratically shoulder to shoulder with the Chief Administrator, his thin, pale, nervous wife, and their three children: evil-eyed Gibson Junior (who appeared to be keeping himself uncharacteristically close beside his father), gentle little Vanessa, and the two-year-old—Emerson could never remember its name or gender—squirming in its mother’s arms.

  Emerson felt like squirming, too. Standing on the verandah with his own mother and several brothers and sisters—his father assigned the humble task of helping make up the crowd scene below—he gave the machine a critical eye to take his mind off the embarrassment he felt for himself, his family, and his fellow peasants.

  It was almost identical to the hauler that already served the colony, a great plastic-lidded aluminum trough five meters wide and thirty long, hanging from—more than resting on—two dozen huge fin-treaded tires twice as tall as he was. Grossly overbuilt for conditions on Pallas, which exerted only about half of Luna’s pull, both had come cheaply to the Project through UN sources. The canopy of the Project’s vehicle had long since been removed to increase its cargo capacity, the curved, magnesium-strutted sheets of plastic having been set on a foundation of meteoric stone to function as a greenhouse which would probably be expanded now, once this machine was turned over to the Chief Administrator.

  Where life support machinery—oxygen, cooling, and heating equipment for the harsh Lunar environment—had once hung between the tires, the racks were now filled with boxes, bales, and trunks. Those same racks, on the machine the colony already used, were an important element in Emerson’s plans for tonight.

  Standing at attention, their shock batons swinging from their belts, five hundred United Nations Education and Morale counselors—one for every twenty of the Project’s unarmed and compliant laborers—formed a kind of human corridor along both edges of the brand-new semicircular driveway in front of the Residence. Their pale blue one-piece uniforms couldn’t compete with the blazing splendor of the visiting machine or the circuslike spectacle of its arrival.

  To begin with, all thirty meters of its hull had been enameled in the pink equivalent of international safety orange. That much of any color was painful enough to look at, but the words sarah murdoch’s interplanetary tour of stars were emblazoned over it in a similar fluorescent blue that made the letters shift and dance in one’s tear-filled field of vision. Over that were many layers of transparent finish embedded with both metallic and pearlescent spangles, and strings of hundreds of tiny colored lights winking on and off at random.

  The plastic dome comprising the upper half of the hull was brightly lit from within, providing a view of dozens of outlandishly costumed dancers and musicians waving and smiling to the loudly cheering crowd. At first there was no sign of their employer—until the lights dimmed, allowing people to shift their attention, and their clapping and whistling, to a small railed platform high atop the dome in which, lit by a spot hanging from a slender upright behind her, the famous actress stood in a minimal black outfit cut almost to the waist front and back, and upward at the sides, its edges finished in some sparkly material.

  Her hair was short, straight, and as red as it had ever been. Emerson, who recognized her now that she was here, could see her famous freckles even where he stood, fifty meters away, on the Residence verandah. Sarah Murdoch grinned and seemed to wave a crookless cane and exaggerated top hat directly at him and him alone.

  All at once it was difficult for Emerson to remember what he’d heard of this woman, that she was responsible for his family becoming the property of the Chief Administrator and that she was far worse in terms of what she believed and advocated than even the former Senator. Emerson took a deep breath and straightened his back, determined tonight to keep the promise he’d made to himself. It would be relatively easy, he believed, since nobody except him seemed to think of the Project as a place to escape from,
or the Outside as a place to escape to.

  His moment came at last, when the brightly colored rollabout came to a halt directly before the Residence and everyone’s attention was distracted by Sarah Murdoch mounting a long metal ladder someone had placed for her and sliding down on the sides of her slippered feet to the verandah steps. People all around him crowded forward. The Chief Administrator’s wife extended both hands to her guest.

  He had time for one brief moment of disappointment. The woman who had seemed so glamorous and beautiful on her platform above the rollabout looked much older this close up, her thickly layered makeup cracked and chalky, her hair almost a helmet of hard plastic. Even her freckles had been painted on. Her perfume reminded him of the pungent insecticides his father and the others sometimes sprayed on the fields. Emerson quietly stepped back, slipped around a corner of the house, and, squeezing between the porch rails, let himself down easily into the flower bed below.

  Except for the front of the Residence, the entire compound appeared to be deserted, although how ten thousand individuals could pack themselves into the space enclosed by the circular driveway—or why they would want to try—he didn’t know. Without taking any particular trouble to remain out of sight, he hurried to the shed where the other rollabout was kept, slipped inside, and closed the doors behind him.

  The rack beneath this machine had also been stripped of equipment there was no use for on Pallas. It held half a dozen spare tires, lying on their sides, and other odds and ends experience had taught them might be necessary on the long, rough road around the lake. Climbing onto the rack, he pushed himself through the narrow space between one tire and the underside of the hull, concealing himself within the tire, where there was even more room than he’d anticipated. The air he breathed was very rubbery and also smelled of lubricants.

  After a great deal of thought, he’d decided against taking anything with him. It would have been too risky, and there was little to take in any case. He’d miss his homemade radio receiver, but doubted he’d have to build another. Someday, perhaps, having fulfilled certain other promises to himself, he’d be in a position to come back and retrieve it, provided that no one had found his little cave first.

  Inches above his head, the cargo compartment had already been loaded with produce, mostly potatoes, before it had been put away. He had wondered how he’d manage the many hours before dawn when the rollabout headed for Curringer on its regular delivery route, especially with everyone else having such a terrific, noisy time only a few hundred yards away. But he promptly fell asleep and didn’t wake again until the machine hit the coarse gravel roadbed outside the Project gates.

  He woke when the many-wheeled rollabout began to bounce on the half-finished road and he alternately struck the top of his head on the hull and the point of his chin on the sidewall of the tire. Shaking his head as briskly as he could to recover consciousness he peeped over the rim at the uncultivated grasslands all around him.

  He was free.

  Freedom’s Just Another Word

  Like the hunter in the absolute outside of the countryside, the philosopher is the alert man in the absolute inside of ideas, which are also an unconquerable and dangerous jungle.

  —José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting

  Not a stylish way to travel, she thought, or the most comfortable. She and her children might as well have crawled in among the trunks on the rack beneath the rollabout’s hull.

  By now, her furtive conference with Sarah Murdoch had begun to seem unreal. The woman had been cordial as long as she’d continued to see Gwen as the wife of the Chief Administrator of her pet social experiment. Eye contact had been minimal and conversation superficial until Gwen had changed the tone—and her identity as far as the movie star was concerned. In an instant Gwen had transformed herself into the object of a conflict between the public relations value of the Project and Sarah Murdoch’s long-standing policy of generous support for Wives who Wanted Out.

  In the end the woman agreed, a little grudgingly, to find a place for them aboard the rollabout when it left for the North Pole—in exchange for Gwen’s promise to accomplish her disengagement quietly. That suited Gwen. She hadn’t planned to tell Gibson she was leaving him until the Curringer Liner had lifted off for Earth.

  Now here she was, with Gibson Junior, little Vanessa, and fourteen-month-old Terence, over the first physical and emotional hurdle, and squeezing in among the duffels and other light luggage at the very back of the rollabout where she’d feel well hidden and secure during the hour or so before the wheels began to turn. Gibson Junior, the only one of her three born on Earth, seemed unusually quiet, even for him. She’d come to think of him as her dark child, given to disturbing episodes of cruelty toward small animals, younger siblings, and Project youngsters not in a position to defend themselves. The boy kept peeping over the edge of the window he’d insisted on sitting by, staring at who knew what.

  The rollabout began to fill with passengers, themselves rather subdued after a long evening of entertaining the Project’s inhabitants and hours afterward of entertaining themselves. Gwen heard an unmistakable hangover groan from several of them. The air in the rollabout began to reek of stale alcohol and too many cigarettes the night before. She hoped the children wouldn’t be carsick.

  At the same time she heard the whine of motors warming up, she peeked cautiously through the window herself and watched Gibson on the verandah, receiving a kiss on the cheek from Sarah Murdoch. Gibson had an expression of annoyed perplexity on his face. He cast about, probably wondering where his wife was. He bore the movie star’s small talk—her gestures were plain even at this distance—stoically, but his mind was elsewhere. Gwen began to have second thoughts.

  Then his expression and demeanor changed completely. At his shoulder Walter Ngu, a field foreman and the housekeeper’s husband, had a hand raised, pointing at the fields. Gibson looked in that direction, nodded, said something to Sarah Murdoch, and descended the verandah steps with Walter, suddenly purposeful and energetic. With the rest of her retinue safely aboard and the engines ready, Sarah Murdoch climbed on—looking tired, hung over, and a bit miffed at such an unceremonious sendoff—let the door shut behind her, and sat down. The rollabout began to move, and before too many minutes had passed, they were doing two hundred kilometers an hour—once outside the Project, their pace would slow appreciably—over the only paved road on the asteroid.

  They paused briefly while a guard opened the Rimfence gate. There was a small disturbance at the back of the rollabout. Gwen’s eldest son suddenly stood up in his seat, looked down at his mother, then climbed over her and out into the aisle.

  “Gibbie, sit down before the machine starts moving again!”

  He gave her an odd look. He’d always been closed to her, indifferent to anything outside the circle of his whims, and she couldn’t read him the way she could her other children.

  “When the machine starts moving again, Mother, I won’t be on it. I’m staying here, with Father.”

  “Your father...” Gwen, surprised and suspicious at the boy’s sudden, inexplicable loyalty, failed to observe that she was having a grown-up argument with a child. “The Chief Administrator is too preoccupied to notice that we’re leaving. You think he’ll notice that the son he’s never had time for is staying?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Here I can be—whatever. On Earth...” He made a face as if the rest of his sentence were self-evident. Without a word, he glided down the aisle, demanded to be let off the rollabout, descended the half-dozen steps in a single bound, and skimmed toward the guard post without looking back. The machine started again, rolled through the gate, and began crunching its way southwest toward the rim of Lake Selous, where it would head north past Curringer.

  Inside, Gwen Altman held her baby, put an arm around her daughter, and wept quietly.

  Emerson was free.

  Even at his age, he knew it would be a long while before he understood exactly what that me
ant.

  He’d never seen a map of the region in which the Project lay—or even one of Pallas in general—for the same reason his family’s quarters, unlike the Chief Administrator’s Residence, lacked windows. How could maps or windows be of use to an individual whose existence began and ended with the cultivation of the Project’s crops?

  Thus he was unaware that it occupied the middle and largest of three shallow, slightly overlapping impact features stretching east to west over a quarter of the northern hemisphere in what would have been the temperate zone on Earth. The easternmost was smallest, undeveloped, mostly unexplored. The westernmost was deepest. Having filled with water during terraformation, it was called Lake Selous.

  The country north of Lake Selous, which might have offered a direct route to the town of Curringer, sitting perched on a bluff overlooking the shore, was too rough for surface travel, pocked with many small, deep craters whose interlocking ridges formed a complex, mountainous terrain. Southward, at the junctions which the broad bowl of the Project made with similar neighbors, lay another pair of deep features, perhaps thirty miles in diameter, but between them lay an uninterrupted plateau stretching south and curving west with a relatively smooth topography that properly sprung and powered wheels could negotiate.

  The rollabout’s wheels were properly sprung and powered—for Earth’s moon. For so large a vehicle, it was almost silent, running on powerful electric motors in each wheel hub, fed by solar panels making up a section of the domed roof that hadn’t been replaced. Within an atmosphere, which reduced available light, they were supplemented by batteries it had taken all night to charge and which would be recharged overnight in Curringer before the return trip.