Pallas (21 page)

He nodded dutifully, suspecting that the woman took some comfort from discussing this matter theoretically, abstractly. So did
he
, when it came to that. He didn’t enjoy having to think about yesterday, or worr
y
ing about where Gretchen might be now. He enjoyed thinking about t
o
morrow even less.

Mrs. Singh finished her cup of chocolate and immediately poured herself another from the pot on the coffee table. He’d seen people at the Nimrod go through the same motions with a bottle of liquor. There was an open pack of cigarettes lying on the table beside the pot. Although she wasn’t smoking now, the ashtray was full of burnt and crushed-out ends, many of them only partly consumed, apparently from the night before. Emerson had never had any idea that she smoked.

“Now you just imagine a bull elk, if you can, having survived an entire season of the kind of antler-bashing that serves his species as natural selection—”

For once Emerson knew exactly what Mrs. Singh was talking about. As a sort of student hunter, he’d recently watched the ritual from a blind in a deep-woods game preserve, only a few yards away from the an
i
mals—with Gretchen.

“—then catching one of the second-rate males he’s already bested, trying to beat his time with one of his cows.” She snorted, reached out to the pack of cigarettes, evidently thought better of it, and pulled her hand back. “Now can you imagine that elk saying to
himself
that jealousy’s just an immature emotional reaction resulting from his own insecurity and lack of self-confidence?”

Despite the way he felt, he laughed, spontaneously seeing, in his mind’s eye, the ridiculous image of a gigantic bull elk lying on a ps
y
chiatrist’s couch.

“Emerson.” Mrs. Singh put a hand over his own where it rested on his knee. It was the first time she’d ever touched him that way, and he didn’t know how to react, since neither his mother nor his father had been physically affectionate. He noticed that, exactly like Aloysius Brody, she tended to shed her folksy accent under stress. “Only humans are foolish enough to convince themselves they don’t go through a selection process just as brutal in its own way, or that their homes and families and gene pool don’t need protecting.”

He nodded, not knowing what to say.

Mrs. Singh lifted her hand and sighed. “Lookie here, Emerson, I’m real sorry that Gretchen didn’t see fit to tell you she had another suitor. We’ve had quite a number of set-tos about her privacy, me and that girl, which she won fair and square because she was dead right and made me see it. I sure as hell didn’t figure it was my place to let you know which way the wind was blowing.”

This time he patted her hand. So they’d finally come to it. “I don’t blame you for anything, Mrs. Singh. You took me in when I didn’t have anything, and trusted me when you hadn’t any reason to. But why didn’t she tell me? How long—”

She took the empty cup from his hand and poured from the pot, carefully not looking at him. “I expect young Altman’s been making
visits into town to see her, on an increasingly frequent basis, for about the last year. That’s only a few weeks longer than you’ve been with us, isn’t it? Since his old man kept referring to you as a child—unless that was all lawyer’s horsehockey, intended for the politics of the moment—he was probably sneaking rides with the rollabout drivers under Daddy’s nose. That could account for some of the hostility on Gibson Senior’s part. I never knew what she saw in the boy—maybe he was the only face around here she hadn’t grown up with—nor how far the whole thing went.”

“But why—” Emerson stopped, realizing he didn’t know what it was he’d meant to ask.

She shrugged. “And then you came along. But from Gretchen’s viewpoint you were a tough nut to crack. I watched her try. I honestly believe, from something she said to me early on, that she thought you were gay. Pallatians are a pretty direct, outspoken folk, and she’d never seen anybody as bashful and reserved as you are. But it kept her inte
r
ested, and once she figured it out, well...”

He kept his eyes on the carpet. “It wasn’t that long ago.
Only day before yesterday.”

“I know,” she nodded. “I thought she was never gonna get through to you, and I was glad to see it happen. But it did mean that, without either of you knowing it, you and young Gibson Ant-farm Junior were courting the same girl. I saw that coming and hoped you’d turn out to be the best man. My bet’s that she made a decision in your favor quite a while before day before yesterday and told him—that’s her idea of fair play—and that’s why he ratted you out to his father.”

Before Emerson could say anything, the phone began to chirp. Mrs. Singh answered it at the coffee table, where the flat plane of a two-dimensional image formed in the air above the surface. Even at his angle, which foreshortened the image, Emerson could see it was Gre
t
chen—apparently the phone she was calling from was more primitive than those in Curringer—and his heart, possibly encouraged by what her mother had just told him, gave a leap in his chest.

“Gretchen, baby!” the woman cried, delighted to see her daughter. “Honey, are you all—”

“This is a recording, Mother, because I don’t want to argue with you
—
or anybody else. I’m calling from the Residence at the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project.”

Mrs. Singh gave him an uninterpretable look and somehow turned the image so that he could see, too.

“Gibson Junior proposed to me day before yesterday when he was in town and I accepted. I came back with him yesterday and we
were married last night by his father.”

Even over his own feelings, which seemed to have deserted him for the moment, Emerson would remember the stricken look in Mrs. Singh’s eyes for as long as he lived.

Gretchen’s expression appealed for understanding. She appeared to have been doing a great deal of crying.
“Mama, I’m trying my best to do what’s right. Please tell Emerson
...
tell Emerson I hope he can forgive me. He’ll meet other girls. There’s a little blond at Galena’s who’s had her eye on him and really worried me for a while.

“Anyway, I’ll see you soon. Be well. I love you.”

The image above the tabletop dissolved.

Emerson sat where he was on the couch, too stunned at first to move or even think. The first thought that managed to filter into his mind was that even though she was likely be residing with the Chief Administrator’s family, it was a bizarre reversal.

Gretchen had taken his place at the Project.

And he would mourn the loss for the rest of his life.

All that is needed to give rise to a mighty nation, generate a wave of perpetual progress and prosperity within it, even revive a dying c
i
vilization
, is a simple, irrevocable guarantee that individual me
m
bers of the productive class be permitted to keep whatever they create. That is what America was supposed to have been about; its preeminence in the world is a direct result. Likewise, each of its failures ultimately stems from the gradual but unrelenting abrogation of that guarantee.

—
Mirelle Stein,
The
Productive Class

“W
hat’ve you got there, Emerson?”

“Nails” Osborn, Emerson’s employer and proprietor of Osborn’s Plumbing & Machine Shop, leaned over the boy’s shoulder to examine a number of oddly shaped metal plates laid out neatly on the bench. He was a big-shouldered, bearded man, closer to seven feet than six, with a clear tenor voice that usually took strangers by surprise. It was an hour after closing, and for the first time that month, Osborn had stayed at the shop after hours to catch up on the accounts.

Although it still smelled agreeably of heated cutting lubricant and other odors which are like a rare perfume to those who love machinery, the shop was darkened, the heavy equipment on the floor looming as ominous, bulky shadows against a back-lit latticework of skeletal supply shelves, except for a pilot glowing here and there, the glassed-in office cubicle where Osborn had been laboring, and the pool of light spilling onto Emerson’s bench from a floodlamp clamped to its edge.

“An idea I’ve been working on for a few weeks.” Emerson didn’t look up, but instead applied a fine-surfaced file to an edge of one of the plates until he was satisfied with the way it felt under his work-blackened thumb. Peering critically at a small hole which had been drilled in it—the polished steel threw reflections of the lamplight onto his face—he set it aside and began inspecting the next plate.

Stainless could be tricky sometimes, and any burred edges on these pieces would spoil everything.

As an afterthought, he added, “In my spare time.”

“I see.” Osborn tapped a bent, flattened cigarette from the pack he made a habit of carrying in the left hip pocket of his greasy overalls, a
p
plied a lighter he’d constructed at this same bench, and exhaled smoke. “Not during working hours, I trust.”

“I said in my spare time, didn’t I?” The boy set down the plate he was examining and picked up the next. There were more than a dozen of them lying on the bench before him and he was only halfway finished with them. He’d almost run out of time because Mrs. Singh didn’t like him skipping dinner. Also, although he didn’t say so, he hated it when people watched what he was doing over his shoulder.

Surprised at the reaction, Osborn raised his eyebrows. “No need to get testy, Emerson. I’m the boss. I’m expected to say things like that. What the hell is it, anyway? It’s kind of large for a surrealist’s notion of a padlock.” The largest of the plates would have just spanned his ou
t
stretched fingertips.

Emerson
grinned,
turned on the metal stool he occupied, straightened his back to relieve the ache that came from hunching over the bench, and pushed the magnifying glasses he was wearing back onto his forehead. When he looked up at Osborn, there were dark circles below his eyes where the frames had gathered oily sweat and working grime. “Pretty good guess. I got the idea from one of those laminated padlocks, made up of several layers of steel, riveted together.”

Osborn nodded understanding. Locks were reasonably rare on the Outside, where people tended to trust one another—possibly because burglars seldom survived their initial foray into the field—but what locks there were had usually been sold, installed, or repaired by his shop. Emerson, of course, had seen plenty of locks in the Project, where, d
e
spite the goon patrols—or possibly because of them—almost every door and window required some sort of mechanical security.

For his curious employer’s benefit, Emerson stacked the finished plates together with the unfinished ones until they began to assume a recognizable form. It was still very difficult for him to think about that terrible Sunday morning, almost a year ago now, when Gretchen Singh
had disappeared forever from his life after changing it beyond recogn
i
tion, but there were some less emotionally painful aspects of it to which he’d given considerable thought. One of them was that Senator Altman and his thugs would have had no trouble dragging him back to the Project against his will if he and the women hadn’t had the means to deter them.

Sometimes he almost wished they had. He could always have escaped again. Junior wouldn’t have had the opportunity, right after the hearing at the Nimrod, he assumed, to propose to Gretchen. And Gretchen...he shook off the thought, telling himself for perhaps the millionth time that it was pointless.

By now, he almost believed it.

“I’ll be damned.” Osborn shook his head, patted Emerson on the shoulder, and grinned down admiringly at the inch-high stack of stainless steel plates. “It’s a pistol!”

“As far as I know it’s the first to be manufactured on Pallas,” Emerson told him, “or will be once it’s finished. It’s simple: straight blowback and double action only. Not counting springs, it’ll only have four moving parts: slide, trigger, trigger bar—this part here—and striker. I knew Pallas doesn’t have the industrial facilities to mass-produce guns or anything else by forging, machining, or
casting,
and I don’t like ordinary stam
p
ings, so I chose lamination. The whole thing can be bolted together with four Allen screws.”

Perhaps attracted by the warmth of the worklight, BCH, the “company cat,” chose that moment to hop up on the bench and begin sniffing at the parts Emerson had there. Osborn took the animal in his arms and stroked its head until it laid its ears back and began to purr. Both humans fell silent for a long moment.

“And by unskilled labor,” Osborn nodded at last, appreciating the boy’s genius all over again. “But straight blowback, Emerson—no breech-locking system, just the inertia of the slide and the power of the recoil spring—that’s an antique method only suited to obsolete poc
k
et-pistol cartridges. You don’t even have a hammer and mainspring to fall back on. You’ll never sell a little popgun like that to Pallatians, especially the deer and elk hunters.”

Emerson laughed and shook his head. “It’s designed to be a fully powered 10 millimeter, Nails—since that seems about the most popular cartridge on this asteroid—with dual recoil springs so powerful that even you couldn’t pull the slide back by hand. But you won’t ever need to. See how the barrel tips up, like a break-action shotgun, so that you can slip the first round into the chamber?”

“Like an old .25 caliber Beretta,” Osborn chuckled. “Well, any patents ever issued on that one ought to have expired by now. Who else did you steal ideas from?”

“Aside from Master Lock, you mean, and Astra, who made full-power straight blowbacks in the twentieth century? I think the trigger bar is my own idea. I think. See how it acts as its own trip-release and disconnector, camming on the frame?”

“And once you have a working model...” Osborn looked thoughtful. He’d acquired his nickname, and built what fortune he could lay claim to, by being the first individual to manufacture anything on Pallas—nails, badly needed by the early colonists, from heavy wire left by the terr
a
formation crews. He gently set BCH down on the floor and began laying the parts out on the bench again the way Emerson had originally arranged them. “...what do you plan on doing with it?”

Emerson grinned, but without the slightest trace of humor. “I’m going to recruit some of that unskilled labor you mentioned and make a lot more just like it.”

Her name, as it had turned out, was Cherry.

And she was much more than just one of the girls at Galena’s. Among other things, she was the second-largest depositor at the First Pallatian Bank of Curringer.

The largest depositor was Aloysius Brody.

The late afternoon sun blasted through the plate-glass window and beat directly on his wool-covered belly and thighs. Emerson felt as u
n
comfortable as ever in the suit he hadn’t worn since the first day he’d met Cherry, but Nails and Mrs. Singh had insisted it was important. They were with him now, in the office of the president of the bank, sitting
across a genuine dark mahogany desk from that esteemed institution’s first and second most important customers.

The banker himself was little more than a master of ceremonies.

“So that’s your business plan, is it?” Brody asked rhetorically. “Well, me boy, it has the virtue of simplicity, and seems to cover the conti
n
gencies.
Now for the fun part.”
He picked up the gleaming silvery object lying in the center of the banker’s desk blotter. “I’ve seen this already, medear, and even fired it several times. There isn’t any safety, and you can’t pull the slide back. I can’t, anyway. Remove the magazine and o
p
erate the barrel catch, like this.” The rear of the barrel popped up. “You see, the chamber’s empty.”

“Why, thank you kindly, Aloysius.” The little blond took the pistol, closed the chamber, and sighted it expertly at the shiny round seal of one of the bank president’s certificates of civic virtue on the wall. She then bent down to get her bag from where it lay on the floor beside her chair, extracted an elderly-looking .45 automatic, and, having likewise emptied it, held it beside Emerson’s invention, hefting each, then swapping them in her hands and hefting them again.

“It’s quite a bit lighter than mine,” she observed, “and a lot shorter. It feels better in my hand. 10 millimeter—won’t that kick pretty hard, Emerson?”

“No harder than that .45 you have there, Cherry.” He resisted the urge to shove a couple of fingers in his shirt collar and wrench it a few inches looser. Neckties, he was certain, must have been invented by the Spanish Inquisition. He wondered whom he had to confess his heresies to in order to get his neck out of this one. “There’s an integral muzzle brake at the end of the barrel, and the middle of the backstrap, in the grip, is spring-loaded to absorb recoil, as well.”

At least Cherry didn’t make him feel nervous, the way some girls did. She smiled her most radiant nonprofessional smile and nodded. “I always knew you were smart, Emerson. I always knew that you’d amount to something big, and here you are. I like this little gun, I like you, and I’m going to invest in both of you.”

Nails grinned broadly at Emerson and gave him a brotherly punch on
the shoulder. As he was recovering, Aloysius and Mrs. Singh beamed approvingly at him, as well.

“Now, little lady—” the banker made throat-clearing noises and raised a plump brown hand to advise her from behind his desk “—that’s no basis at all on which to make business decisions. I think it wisest not to be too hasty in this matter. After all, weapons are controversial in many quarters, and their manufacture somewhat questionable, ethically. At least we should begin with a series of market surveys.
”
             
,

He was a plump brown man all around, the boy thought to himself, in his plump brown suit, sitting here on his plump brown bottom behind his plump brown desk in his plump brown bank. At the moment, Emerson couldn’t remember the man’s name and didn’t know where he’d come from—wherever lawyers and bankers and ministers always come from, he guessed, just when everybody else has things arranged the way they like it.

He certainly wasn’t the Pallatian type.