Outland
Authors: Alan Dean Foster
In orbit out from Jupiter
in view of its malignant red eye is
Here on Io—moon of Jupiter,
hell in space—men mine ore to
satisfy the needs of Earth.
They are hard men, loners for
whom the Company provides the
necessities: beds, food, drink
and women for hire. Now, in
apparent suicide or in frenzied
madness, the men are dying . . .
To OUTLAND comes the new U.S.
Marshal O'Niel, a man with a
sense of duty so strong it
drives him to ferret out evil, greed
and murder regardless of the cost.
If he must, he will forfeit love,
livelihood—even life itself
Books by
A
LAN
D
EAN
F
OSTER
Alien
Clash of the Titans
Outland
Krull
Spellsinger
Published by
WARNER BOOKS
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1981 by Peter Hyams Productions, Inc., and
The Ladd Company.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.,
75 Rockerfeller Plaza,
New York, N.Y. 10019
A Warner Communications Company
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing; March, 1981
ISBN 0-446-96829-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Emery Morris of Shackleford County, Texas,
My favorite ex-sheriff,
Who would understand O'Niel . . .
INearly everything had to be imported to Io, including love.
It wasn't a duty station that inspired fond memories among those who served there. The men and women imported to exploit its surface felt no affection for their temporary home. Merely to tolerate Io required real effort because human emotions and attitudes underwent drastic changes so far from the warm Earth, and rarely for the better.
Surely it hasn't changed me that much, O'Niel thought. Sure the past several years have been tough. He was used to places like Io, though. As used to them as any man could get.
He was lying in the bed in the darkened room, hands behind his head as he gazed upward. Nearby a digital clock glowed a soft, mocking green. The ceiling was a sooty black parodying the space that lay beyond, a dark veil mirroring the smaller domesticated shadows that populated the bedroom.
Usually O'Niel was able to concentrate fully on his job, but tonight the shadows had seeped into his head, to muddle and worry him. They buzzed his thoughts, little worries obscuring purpose, indecision and uncertainty mottling the color of the future.
It was a future tied tightly to the supple, silhouetted form that slept next to him. He rolled over and rested on an elbow as he stared at the familiar curves masked by the loose folds of the thin blanket.
Why can't I ever tell you all that I feel, he wondered? Do you know, Carol, how much I depend on you? How much I love you and Paulie? I know I'm not eloquent and I'm sure as hell no poet. But I'd be lost without you. I wish I was confident enough to wake you to tell you that.
It was cold outside, colder than most men could imagine, let alone would ever experience. Inside: here, now, in this quiet bed it was warm and comfortable and reassuring. How nice it would be to have that feeling all the time instead of just for a few hours each day and during the unconsciousness of night!
That wasn't possible, he reminded himself. His was a cold job, one that matched the nature of Io's environment. Some day soon, perhaps. He promised himself, as he promised the woman sleeping alongside him. Just one more tour, Carol. Just one more.
He reached out and ran a hand along the curve of her hip, down the gentle swell of her side, up to her shoulder, the tips of his fingers touching lightly her cascading hair and then on to her cheek. At the touch she stirred lightly in her sleep.
So beautiful, he thought. Even when she's turned away from me, even when she's asleep, so beautiful. I can't lose her, can't risk it.
Definitely the last assignment. The Company and the rest of them could all go to Hell. Some things were more important than a lousy job.
A part of him was dimly aware that he'd said that before, only for resolution to slip stealthily away, for committment to vanish. But this time I'll mean it, he told himself, this time will be the last.
He touched her again, his hand moving lower, the heat of her bare back communicating like a mild shock through his fingers. She stirred again, pulled the blanket higher around her neck.
O'Niel turned away, closing his eyes. Slowly the shadows haunting his thoughts broke up and went away, to merge with the shadows that filled the bedroom, and he dropped into the light, infrequent sleep that was both trademark and necessity in his work . . .
Mankind had pushed and kicked his frontiers beyond the confines of a single world, beyond his primordial bubble of air. He sent probes searching the moons of Neptune and burrowed deep beneath the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. He mined the floating wealth that drifted between the red planet and giant Jupiter.
All were harsh and bleak and dangerous. But of them all, none was worse than Io.
There was very little sky and what there was of it was black as the dark side of Pluto. Instead of sky, there was a Presence. Tourists might have found the Presence inspiring and beautiful and even awesome but tourists did not come to Io. Io was a place to work, and to do your best to survive.
The Presence took the form of a monstrous, bloated globe of banded yellow and orange hell. Long ago man had named it Jupiter, after the then king of his gods. Man's gods were transitory. Jupiter was not.
The men and women who toiled on Io made up other names for the giant planet, names equally colorful, often scabrous, sometimes scatalogical. To them it was nothing to admire. It constituted an inescapable reminder of the precariousness of their position and of the enormous distance between them and warm homes on Luna or Mars or Earth.
Its initial impact on new arrivals was always noted with interest by the experienced Ioites. There was an unwritten, informal test known as "degree of flinch" to which the shuttle station operators, the first to greet newcomers, always subjected them.
It is one thing to view Jupiter from the inside of a spacecraft, secure in the knowledge that powerful engines stand ready to push you safely clear of that tremendous gravity. It's quite another to step out of a shuttle into Io Station, glance upward through the transparent access corridor, and see billions of tons of mass floating just overhead, seemingly poised to obliterate you the way a man would an ant.
So the station crew would watch with interest to see how sharply and how often a new arrival would flinch away when first confronted with that psychologically devastating sight. The quicker and more extreme the flinch, the more often it occurred, then the less time that individual was likely to spend on Io.
Of course, if you'd signed a time contract, as most of the transient workers did, then you were stuck. You didn't break a contract with the Company.
There was one other test, usually applied later. The Jump Test. The Station crew assured newly arrived visitors that you could actually feel the pull of Jupiter's immense gravity out on Io's surface. Given Io's light gravity, they assured you, would enable a strong and careless jumper to leap so far off the surface that Jupiter's gravity would take over and suck you helplessly out into space.
And that would be the end, because as the workers of Io well knew, Hell wasn't red. Dante had it all wrong. Hell was yellow-orange, striped like the eyes of a dozen angry tigers, with one big, ugly red eye always glaring unwinkingly down on you.
A meteor, an ambling chunk of long-ago, had made the crater. More recently, mankind had made the mine that rested inside it. The mine was the reason for his continued presence in a place which actively discouraged it.
The explorers had come and touched down, raised their flags and made their speeches and gobbled their ounce of glory and moved on. Others had followed. They were not speech- makers. Most found nothing, but one tired group of bored searchers had made a discovery inside this particular crater—a discovery of more than passing interest.
What they found was a huge body of ore, a hard black mineral called Ilmenite, a product of Io's volcanic upheavals. Ilmenite happens to be the principal ore of a certain metal, titanium, which is used for, among other things, the skin of spaceships. The presence of Ilmenite in vast quantities on Io paid for a great deal of trouble, a number of deaths, and the eventual establishment of the mine.