Pallas (7 page)

“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 a
s
sumed 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 consum
p
tion. 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 f
a
shionably 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 su
f
fering worker as he passed.

Everybody knows that nuclear fusion can only take place at tr
e
mendously high temperatures and pressures, in the presence of bi
l
lions of dollars.

—Mirelle Stein,
The
Productive Class

G
ibson 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 u
n
spoken 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 interplan
e
tary correspondent for the Global Information Gathering Organiz
a
tion—not to mention her equipment-laden technical assistant—had looked splendidly ridiculous, pedaling off on the pair of rattletrap b
i
cycles 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, da
n
gling 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.

“Any idea who it is or what it’s about?”

“No, sir,” Alice replied. “The operator would only tell me that it’s a triple-A priority call from Washington, using one of the United Nations keycodes.”

He arose reluctantly from his paper-cluttered desk where a hundred more important matters awaited his attention, briefly dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and threw it on the dinner tray, ran a hand through his hair even though he wouldn’t really be talking to anybody for a long while yet—if at all—and went to answer the call, feeling put upon and deeply annoyed. Earth seemed very far away these days, in much more than mere physical distance.

What people really needed, he thought as he settled into a comfortable chair before the wall-sized screen and waited for the unscrambling software to finish loading itself, was some kind of faster-than-light radio now, long before any hypothetical departure of humanity for the stars. He doubted that would ever happen anyway. Mankind had far too much u
n
finished business in its own backyard. But faster-than-light communic
a
tion was supposed to be impossible.

On the other hand, so had household fusion, and look at the way that had changed the world. Thinking back, it seemed obvious. An unexpected natural phenomenon had been discovered in what everyone else cons
i
dered an academic backwater—Utah, of all places. Large institutions, dependent on government grants invested in high-temperature, high-pressure technology, had been unable to replicate these “cold f
u
sion” experiments, while smaller institutions had done so with insulting ease.

It helped that these small institutions had followed the original design faithfully while those who “knew better” had modified it to suit outmoded prejudices. One intelligent change, consistent with the newfound pri
n
ciple, had been made by Israelis who’d eliminated an irrelevant electr
o
lytic process, lowered a rod of palladium into a can of deuterium gas, and gotten neutrons, heat, and helium.

Power lines had started coming down and gasoline pumps vanishing
from the world’s highways. No matter how authorities tried to laugh it off, how many conservative journals ridiculed it, how many frightened oil, coal, and natural gas companies hated it, or how many state-run uti
l
ities tried to suppress it, the Fusion Age of cheap, freely available energy had arrived.

Someday someone working in a basement somewhere, ignorant or contemptuous of the rules that men—rather than nature—imposed on science, would find a way to send a message that took less than fourteen minutes to travel from Earth to Pallas. The Senator wondered why that idea suddenly made him feel afraid.

“Gibbie!”

Altman realized that his mind had wandered. He hated being called “Gib” or “Gibbie.” His name was Gibson. It had a long, distinguished history in his family.

The call, however, was from Senator Elwood Dodd, one of the few friends he had left in public life, a longtime Union Democratic whee
l
horse who’d served two terms as governor in Hartford before taking up what now seemed permanent residence in the national legislature. Altman knew that Dodd was responsible for his having been given this post on Pallas rather than something unimaginably worse. The man had such close ties in the United Nations his opponents often charged that he represented Colombo rather than Connecticut.

Altman had to suppress a reflexive impulse to return his old co
l
league’s greeting. Communication across interplanetary distances co
n
sisted of a series of monologues. This message had been sent no less than fourteen minutes ago. It would take another fourteen for any answer to get back. Dodd’s genially alcoholic features projected from the screen almost as if he were here in the room, although he raised his voice as if it were a bad two-way long-distance connection.

“I thought I’d spend a little of the taxpayers’ money to let you know what’s going on down here before you see it garbled and distorted by Atlanta! I’m afraid we lost another one, my friend. Daniel Webster will be spinning in his grave! Young Lucero managed to force the bill out of committee because we thought we had enough support on the floor, but
the goddamned Conservatives and Libertarians joined forces at the last minute and wiped our asses for us on a roll-call vote!”

So that was it.
Another failed attempt, this time in the Senate, to fill the “vacant” Western seats.
For more than ten years there had been constant pressure, mostly from
his own
party, to accomplish that highly necessary task. They even had historical precedent: exactly the same thing had been done to the South during the nineteenth century. It had been the major issue of his career, responsible for vaulting him to prominence—which was why Dodd was calling him about it—but Altman was surprised now at how little he cared. After nine years in exile, it was difficult reme
m
bering how the “Cold Civil War” had started in the first place.

Money, he supposed.

What else would it be?

The Second Great Depression had been brought about by Third World debts amounting to fourteen figures, the widespread and enthusiastic repudiation of which had devastated the American banking system. Of course the bankers had understood from the beginning that the gaggle of dictatorships and people’s republics they were showering with credit were bad risks. They’d counted on taxpayers to bail them out—with a little coercive assistance from Congress.
And why not?
Weren’t both parties doing essentially the same thing with their Russian aid program?

And hadn’t Congress helpfully destroyed the only competition American banks had ever had, the savings and loan institutions, toward the end of the twentieth century?

Then the economy of California had been destroyed by a long-predicted earthquake which, despite expensive (some said repre
s
sive) civil defense measures, had killed twenty million in the Greater Los Angeles area alone, inflicting trillions of Old Dollars’ worth of damage. Suddenly the money wasn’t there to bail out the banks, even if a new three-sided Congress—composed of Democratic Unionists, Conserv
a
tives, and Libertarians rather than Republicans and Democrats—had been willing.

“Something you won’t hear about at all—from Atlanta or from an
y
where else, with any luck—is that the goddamned Jackelopes apparently
took over another nuclear waste facility and they’ve been mailing that crap, an ounce at a time in foil-lined envelopes, to members of both houses! And still we lost the vote! Sometimes I think I ought to give up politics, Gibbie, and look for honest work like you!”

Altman gasped. This was more important than a lost vote in the
S
e
nate,
and far more dangerous than the ecoterrorism of the last century because it was part of an incredibly popular movement rooted in respect for individual rights and private property. It was the closest thing so far to a provocation that couldn’t be overlooked, and it couldn’t have been accomplished without the cooperation of Western postal officials. However, owing to the Great Depression II and countless other stresses (which, to give Aloysius Brody credit, much like the San Andreas Fault had been long overdue for relief), a dramatic—although not yet officially acknowledged—political, economic, social, and geographic reshuffling had followed in North America without respect to offices and titles.

Westerners had often complained bitterly of what they felt amounted to colonial treatment by the Northeast, of three-quarters of their land being perpetually tied up for the sake of a future which somehow never arrived, of their involuntary status as the Northeast’s dumping ground, its bottomless food, water, and mineral reserve, its hiding place for the Pentagon’s most dangerous toys.

Privately, Altman admitted that there was substance to their co
m
plaints. His own party had always taken pains to assure that the West was represented by transplanted easterners—“carpetbaggers,” some called them—or by westerners with eastern values. The eastern-based media followed the same policy: for sixty years, there hadn’t been a news anchor in Denver, to name one example, who truly spoke for western values, although that never stopped them from claiming otherwise.

Nothing lasts forever, of course. During the same sixty years, Ame
r
ican industry had become almost universally decentralized as a result of the fairly recent development of small, relatively inexpensive fusion plants, computer-driven machine tools of tremendous versatility which freed the entrepreneur from union labor, and a remarkable process of ion-impregnation which made it possible to fabricate anything from bo
t
tle-cap lifters to fusion-electric locomotives out of easily worked mat
e
rials which could be hardened afterward to any desired toughness.

With each startling innovation, the stranglehold of America’s trad
i
tional industrial region and the factions that controlled it was broken a bit more, the vital, energetic West, in effect, gradually seceding econom
i
cally from the moldering, overpopulated Rust Belt which had dominated its existence for two centuries.