Pallas (27 page)

He felt like vomiting, sickened that she’d had to go through something like this—for his sake.

“Don’t look that way,” she told him gently, brushing his cheek with her fingertips. “It’s over now, and I got off easy. His father’s had to smooth over several messes with colonist girls. There’s a rumor that he killed one of them. Besides—” she glanced up at him from beneath her long eyelashes “—some of it—the handcuffs, not the whip—might have
been fun with the right person.”

For the next half hour, she showed him what she meant.

And then it was time to go.

When she was ready, he carried his yoke, along with a spare prototype, out to the parking lot, cross-connected their control panels the way he’d suddenly thought of earlier, and assured himself that they operated in the manner he’d anticipated. Duct-taping the yokes together, he switched their impellers on without taking his place within either machine. O
b
edient to the adjustments he’d made, they rose three feet into the air above the unpaved surface and stayed there.

Giving her a reassuring smile, he helped her step into one yoke,
then
stepped into the other himself. She weighed about the same as he did, and he had no plans more ambitious than ferrying her back to the Project at a modest altitude and speed, so they shouldn’t have any power problems like he’d experienced earlier, despite the added weight of the Grizzly on his thigh.

Keeping her hands off the panel of her machine, she donned the go
g
gles he handed her, checked the chamber of the pistol he’d found for her in his office—his first
Ngu
Departure—and nodded. He advanced a lever. Together they rose, side by side, into the night sky. At rooftop height, he oriented himself, turned carefully, and they began to move ahead at about thirty miles an hour.

“Wonderful!” she shouted. “I want to learn to do it myself!”

“That should take you about thirty seconds!” He grinned as the night-black prairie slipped beneath their dangling feet, proud that som
e
thing he’d built made her so happy.
“How about tomorrow night?”

“It’s a date!” She grinned back,
then
turned to peer through her go
g
gles at the country ahead. The breeze made conversation difficult. Before they realized it, they were more than halfway to a destination neither really wanted to reach. Abruptly, she spoke again. “What are those green lights down
there ?”

Just as abruptly, he felt something slap his face, as if he’d collided with a large, fast-flying insect. A cold, stinging sensation at his hairline above his right eye was followed by a warm liquid trickle—sweat, he
thought at first—running into his eye, momentarily blinding him. He brushed at it and his fingers came away blackened in the silvery moo
n
light, smelling of salt and iron.

A sharp crack followed, and another. He was aware she’d drawn the pistol he’d given her. One of their impellers began to disintegrate in its housing. He realized he was hearing—and feeling—the effect of supe
r
sonic bullets as they passed close by. He leaned on a joystick,
spiraling
them down out of the moonlit sky and leftward, away from whoever was shooting at them. He’d seen no flashes, heard no gunfire from the ground, only the noise of the passing projectiles.

They hit with a muffled crash in chest-high sagebrush. Gretchen stifled a scream. In a shallow bowl, in the moon-shadow of a low hill, they were less visible than before, but it was hard to see what they were doing. Beside him, she was already struggling to disentangle herself from the complaining flying yokes—which he shut off—and sit up. He was blind again in his right eye, and this time he didn’t think it was the blood from his scalp wound but the wound itself.

“Damn!” she whispered, “I’ve either sprained my knee or broken it!”

“I wouldn’t advise standing up, anyway,” he told her just as quietly. He slid from the yoke and drew the Grizzly. His head had begun to hurt. Worse than that, a broken string of bobbing green lights had come over the hilltop and was starting down in their direction.

“Goons!” they both hissed at the same time.

He added, “What are they doing here? We didn’t fly over the Ri
m
fence. We’re two miles from the gate.”

“Junior’s thugs,” she replied. “He’s sent them after me.” Moaning under her breath from the pain of her knee as she ground it against the turf, she leveled her pistol and fired. One of the lights fell into the sag
e
brush and went out.

Someone hollered, “There he is!” Someone else yelled, “Grease the sonofabitch!” A dozen other voices shouted in anger and confusion,
then
all the lights went out.

“Correction,” she whispered, “they’re after you!” Hearing muffled curses as the men stumbled over unfamiliar ground, they crawled quickly from
where they’d landed, their position given away by Gretchen’s shot, and waited.

The noise grew louder. The setting moon was no help. He couldn’t tell whether he was really blind in his right eye or it was just the darkness. He listened to his heartbeat—he could almost hear hers as they arranged themselves back to back, pistols leveled across their knees—and the amazing clamor of the advancing thugs.

Finally there came a footfall in front of him, no more than three yards away. Raising his gun, he pulled the trigger. The Grizzly bellowed and illuminated the night. The sights had been centered on the torso of a man wearing a pale blue uniform and carrying an awkward-looking rifle. The forms of three or four more, crowding up behind him, had been visible for an instant just before Emerson was truly blinded by his own muzzle flash. He fired at where he thought they were—knowing he was breaking a cardinal gunman’s rule—and fired again.

Gretchen, too, had begun shooting. Beyond knowing that, everything else was confusion. He heard and felt the hypersonic bullets zipping past his head, heard the screaming of the men he’d shot or of those who were trying to shoot him. For that matter, it might have been
his own
screa
m
ing.

He fired three more shots in quick succession,
then
became aware that she’d stood up behind him. As he rose and turned, the muzzle of his weapon hit something yielding which grunted. Pressing it further, he pulled the trigger and watched its muzzle-flash light up a man’s face—just before his head exploded. Something hot and cold hit him in the hip and he was down again, flailing, as three or four men yelled and started to kick him in the back, the ribs, and the head.

She screamed, but it was choked off. He was aware that somebody turned him over with a toe and stepped on his throat. A sickly green light flared briefly.

“Yeah, this is the guy!” growled a voice. “Nasty little slope with a Fu Manchu. This way we won’t have to slog it over to the factory. Junior may have been shitfaced, but he isn’t stupid. He said finish him quick, nothing fancy. We gotta get these hot-wired weapons back to the armory
and into legal config before they’re missed.”

Somebody mumbled. Emerson didn’t understand. It was followed by the laughter of several men.

“Yes, asswipe, I do know who the cunt is! Who gives a shit? She’s his girlfriend, an Outsider whore. Do whatever the fuck you want with her, the whole squad of you. Just do it fast and make goddamn sure you finish her off afterward.”

The last thing Emerson remembered was hearing Gretchen struggle. One man stumbled back from her, howling like a gutted animal, fell atop him, scrambled off, and collapsed.

Emerson hardly felt it. He never felt the muzzle jam against his temple and slide, just as it went off.

“I’m going to put the ship about, Mr. Cargill,” he said...He felt the tension, he felt the beating of his heart, and noticed with momentary astonishment that he was enjoying this moment of danger...The hands were at their stations; every eye was on him. The gale shrieked past his ears as he...watched the approaching seas...Despondency for the sake of despondency irritated Hornblower...he knew too much about it.

—C. S. Forester,
Hornblower and the Hotspur

“H
ello the house!”

The meadowlarks and pine buntings fell silent, but the squirrels began to chitter. The old man set down the stainless steel bucket he’d been about to carry to the spring and picked up the heavy rifle he’d just leaned against the high end of a short ramp leading up to the cabin’s porch.
The turnbolt of the weapon, its hollow knob polished by decades of use, worked smoothly under his practiced hand, sliding one of the huge brass cylinders from the magazine into the chamber.

“Hullo, yourself!”

He raised the rifle to his shoulder.

It wasn’t the friendliest of greetings he knew, but experience had
proven it necessary. Perhaps this was merely the pilot of the ultralight which had just dropped them their supplies for the month. Although he’d spoken to them many times, he’d yet to see one of them in the flesh. Perhaps the unfortunate chap had suffered some aviator’s mishap and required assistance. The old man knew all about those little aircraft and was astonished, now that he gave it thought, that accidents hadn’t ha
p
pened many times before over the last thirty years.

Then again, it might well be the vanguard of a marauding band of runaways from the never-to-be-sufficiently regretted Greeley Utopian Memorial Project settlement a thousand miles to the northwest. The a
s
teroid’s low gravity made travel relatively easy, and sometimes the m
i
serable wretches got this far. They usually didn’t last long, but they could be a lot of trouble before the wild country ate them up.

Whoever this fellow was, he appeared inhumanly steadfast—or simply too damned stupid to live. The average individual showed a trifle more reaction at having the gaping business-end of a .416 Rigby Magnum leveled on his solar plexus. By no
means the
most powerful of the classic African hunting rifle cartridges ever developed, it was merely the best. The softpointed 410-grain projectiles, traveling at something exceeding twice the speed of sound, gave up over two and a half tons of kinetic energy at close range—rather more than sufficient for any organism that had ever evolved on Earth—and could tear a big man in half.

This wasn’t any big man centered over the rifle’s express sights, but a young, wiry, rather sinister-looking Oriental with a thin, scruffy beard and a black fabric patch covering his right eye.
Off his left hip, low-slung and floor-plate forward, hung an enormous black semiautomatic pistol.
Over his shoulders he carried the limp, antlered carcass of a mule deer very nearly as big as he was.

In answer to the challenge, the stranger merely smiled. He’d appeared as if by magic out of the dense cover of evergreens surrounding the cabin on all sides, and stood now on the opposite bank of the rocky-bottomed creek whose nearby source was the cold, clear little spring the old man had been headed for with his bucket.

“I’m not hiding out,” the stranger declared quietly, “and I’m not ru
n
ning away from anybody—except maybe from myself a little. I haven’t come to hurt anybody.”

“Too bloody right you haven’t,” replied the old man. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Before he received an answer, there came the all-too-familiar clatter of worn wheel bearings from the cabin behind him. “Raymond, what the hell is going on out there?”

The old man didn’t need to look back over his shoulder to know that the old woman had appeared in the cabin door, erect and proper in her wheelchair, its chromium parts gleaming from the relative darkness of the interior. His ancient .455 Webley Mark VI—quite possibly the only r
e
volver on Pallas—would be lying in her lap. He could even hear its l
a
nyard ring tinkling as she moved. He wondered idly what the young stranger made of that. It must be a bit like having a flintlock pointed at
him,
no less deadly for all that it was ridiculous.

He answered without turning, never taking his eye from the front sight. “It seems that we have a visitor, Miri. We’re in the process of discovering what he’s here for.”

“I’m just a traveler,” the young stranger told them, apparently unable to take his good eye off the cabin. Likely he’d been born on Pallas and never seen anything like it. The end walls and chimney were constructed entirely of unshaped stones epoxied together, as were the front and back walls up to about shoulder height. In all likelihood it was the only building on the asteroid made even partially of wood—whole logs with the bark spokeshaven off, laid in the traditional West American manner under a shake-shingled peak—having been erected atop their original dugout as stones were gathered and the trees around it had grown large enough to harvest. “I’m only looking for a chance to spend the night under a real roof for the first time in six months. I brought this deer to make up for any trouble I might be, but if I’m imposing I’ll move on.

“My name is Emerson Ngu,” he added.

The old man frowned to himself. The name seemed familiar somehow, and for some reason that eluded him, he associated it with good things. Perhaps he’d heard it over the wireless which, aside from monthly gr
o
cery deliveries, was his only link with civilization out here in the Pocks. Half expecting to regret it, he decided to take a chance, thumbed the safety backward, and lowered his rifle.

“Come on over, son,” he answered. “My name, as you heard, is Raymond—Drake-Tealy. Most people call me Digger. The lady on the porch is my wife, Miri—Mirelle Stein.”

For a moment, the youthful stranger who’d faced the muzzle of an elephant gun so casually—Drake-Tealy could see now that he was no more than a boy—stood rooted where he was, as if in shock, eyebrows up, mouth open. It took them like that sometimes. Having become a l
e
gend—one that a majority of people were surprised to discover still li
v
ing—was, for the most part, a pain in the posterior. Then the young man seemed to accept what he’d been told and crossed the stream using ste
p
ping stones which had been placed there for the purpose.

Drake-Tealy set his rifle aside again and helped him hang the mule deer from a hook set under the eaves of the porch. It was a handsome buck, large enough to feed a sizable family for a month, indicating some patience and selectivity behind the sighting eye and trigger finger. Young Ngu began to field-dress the animal immediately using a big curved knife he carried on his trouser belt rather than his gunbelt—a survival-wise practice the old man heartily approved and which further raised the young fellow in his estimation. He started into the house before he remembered what he’d been about before the stranger put in his appearance.

He took the bucket to the spring and filled it.

By the time he’d carried the water and his rifle through the screen door, his wife had vanished toward the back of the cabin, where he could hear her stirring up a fire, never allowed to die out altogether, in the old-fashioned stove he’d constructed out of boyhood memories and sa
l
vaged materials from the terraforming operation. She rolled over to him, ball bearings clicking, took the bucket from his hand, set it on the stone-flagged kitchen counter, filled the big copper kettle they’d expe
n
sively imported from Harrod’s many years ago as one of the few genuine extravagances they’d allowed themselves, and placed it on the stove.

“Thank you.” Her face was set in an expression of grim determination.
Company of any sort, under any circumstances, was a tremendous ordeal for her. No one could possibly loathe being crippled, and in her view helpless, more than the popular novelist who’d created a worldwide p
o
litical movement out of her own personal philosophy of self-sufficiency. Theirs was not, perhaps, the happiest of marriages—they were not the happiest of individuals—but they had seldom been deliberately cruel to one another and she knew what occasional contact with the outside world meant to her husband. “Ask whether he prefers coffee or tea.”

Drake-Tealy nodded wordlessly and went back out onto the porch. The afternoon sun sparkled along the broken surface of the creek, and iridescent hummingbirds hovered and flitted about the feeder hanging at the opposite end of the porch. He was always glad he’d insisted on i
n
troducing hummingbirds to Pallas. He leaned against a rough-hewn pillar, shoved his hands into the upper pockets of his bush pants, and watched the newcomer expertly wielding his knife, taking much the same pleasure from it as he did from watching his hummingbirds.

“You’re quite welcome to spend the night with us, Mr. Ngu,” he d
e
clared, “provided that you don’t mind dossing down in what we laug
h
ingly refer to as the parlor—which is to say our combination kitchen and front room. We were about to have tea when you arrived, and supper will be perhaps another hour. The lady of the house wishes to know whether you’ll actually have tea or would rather have coffee.”

The sentence had come out awkwardly. It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed that sort of thing, which he attributed to insufficient practice at relating to his fellow human beings. It didn’t help that he and Miri didn’t talk much any more. For the space of a few heartbeats, he and his guest listened to the hammering of a woodpecker, hollow in the distance, looking for its own supper.

“Whatever’s easy,” the young man began,
then
he turned and grinned. “To tell the truth, sir, it’s Emerson—and I’d give just about anything for a real cup of coffee.” He wiped a bloodstained hand off on a rag he’d brought with him, then fished carefully in his shirt pocket and extracted a pair of long, thin cigars.

“I don’t mind if I do, Emerson,” responded Drake-Tealy, accepting
one of the cigars. He was a pipe smoker by habit, but any change was welcome, and no one was more sensitive than the anthropologist to the necessities of human ceremony. He fished about in a pocket of his jacket, extracted his lighter, and lit both cigars. For another few heartbeats they stood savoring the tobacco smoke and the moment; then Emerson turned back to his grisly task, filling a plastic bag with the deer’s viscera. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“I left all my gear in the trees over there,” Emerson replied without looking away from the gleaming edge of his knife. He’d finished the field dressing and begun the skinning process. “There isn’t much of it, if you wouldn’t mind—Digger.”

“Not at all.”
Drake-Tealy was secretly grateful to be asked. People he met these days, and they were few enough, were all considerably younger than he was. They took one look at his thick shock of snow-white hair and walrus moustache, the latter stained like antique ivory from the pipe smoke streaming past it, and tried to do things for him, whether he wanted them done or not. It was one reason—not the major one, by any means—that he and his wife lived in seclusion here in the center of an area set aside by the Curringer Trust for future growth.

Leaving Emerson to finish with his work, he stepped across the creek and followed a trail of freshly trod grass into the trees. Beside one of them, within easy sight of the cabin, lay a peculiar object consisting of two hoops, each almost a yard in diameter, hinged together at one edge and presently folded, lying parallel to one another. At the edges opposite the hinge, two pairs of louvered football-sized pods appeared to contain electric motors with short-bladed propellers. One of the hoops held a harness in which the pilot—that much was a guess—presumably sat. The other was rigged to carry a large rucksack.