Tales of the Flying Mountains Page 11

  Interlude 3

  “Ahem.” Amspaugh clears his throat. “I suppose we should resume our business meeting. The majority opinion seems to be that it’s both harmless and desirable for our schools to represent our ancestors as—ah—ordinary fallible human beings.”

  “Including a hefty share of crooks, toughs, and bums,” McVeagh nods.

  “No,” Amspaugh says, “I do believe you lean too far backward, Colin. We can admit history has a seamy side without claiming it’s the only side, or that the good part doesn’t matter most. The Founding Fathers were honorable men, and statesmen; the Constitution of the Asteroid Republic is one of the noblest documents ever written.”

  “Why not?” McVeagh drawls. “It’s mainly plagiarized from the original United States Constitution.”

  “And what’s wrong with using the best model around?” Lindgren responds. “Besides, they adapted creatively. And the adaptation was to more than the physical, social, technological, or economic differences between Earth and the Belt. They drew lessons from history, and made sure the daughter Republic won’t get crusted over with the kind of unfreedom that the mother country did.”

  “Don’t worry,” McVeagh says, “future generations will find new ways to bollix things up.”

  “I would not claim, nor wish to teach, that the Constitution is perfect.” Orloff lifts a thin hand. “Please! Let me finish. Don’t forget, I was not born in the American asteroids, I was not caught up in their revolution, I came afterward, from the Soviet colonies. I chose my nationality. But that does not mean I cannot offer loving criticism. No work of man is flawless. It seems to me, the extreme libertarianism of the Republic has tended to produce individuals who are too selfish, too materialistic, too little concerned for their society as a whole. Can we not do better here on Astra?”

  “I don’t imagine we have room aboard for unregulated capitalism,” Lindgren says. “But I’d hate to see an outright socialism evolve. Not simply because it’s stifling. I think it’d discourage the creativity this ship will need for long-range survival. Only consider what advances, how fast and dazzling, the asterites made once they were free. Invention, exploration, construction.… And it’s got to be because they’d been liberated as individuals. The members of the Belt that remained under Earth governments didn’t do nearly as well.”

  “In part,” Missy answers dryly, “that was because we, the ungrateful and rebellious children, stopped sending very much of our wealth back to America. This in turn lured the ablest—and greediest—colonials elsewhere into joining us.”

  Conchita sounds impatient: “However that may be, you can’t deny that our forefathers were able, and had won ample scope for their abilities. Those that became wealthy deserved to, because they’d produced that wealth by their personal efforts.”

  “We-e-e-ell,” Missy murmurs, “I remember various real estate speculators, loan sharks, bucket shop operators, vice barons, and assorted con men who ended rich.” Soberly: “I also remember damn good men who died broke, or who never got the chance to get rich because they died young.”

  “I spoke statistically, of course.”

  “Yes, I realize that. But a statistic can mislead you pretty badly if you don’t know everything that’s behind it. On the whole, true, the Republic saw a brilliant era. Nevertheless, I doubt if everything—I wonder exactly how much of anything—was due to cool economic calculation, any more than it was due to the altruism we agree was in short supply. I’ve seen, myself, how many things just happened, as a result of blind stumbling. Nobody was more astounded at the outcomes than the people who’d been most directly concerned.”

  “Like the development of the geegee?” asks hitherto silent Echevaray.

  “I wanted more to emphasize that being a free entrepreneur does not automatically make you a prophetic genius or put you in control of events,” Missy says. “For instance, do you know about the Odysseus affair? I chanced to get a first-hand account not long after. Can you stand to have me tell another story? In a way, this was the cause of our being starbound today. And yet at the same time …” In her extreme age, she keeps the sweet laughter of a young woman.

  Ramble with a Gamblin’ Man

  Avis’ youngest boy, Tommy, came headlong down the garden. Its paths wound between blossoming hedges. In his haste he sprang over them, aiming himself straight at Lake Circe. Those were substantial jumps, even though the geegee field made weight on the Odyssean surface equal to the mere three-quarter terrestrial that Earthside tourists enjoyed. But he was active at his age, which was less than one year. (That was a local year, of course. With orbital periods as variable as they were among the asteroids, colonists had no choice but to keep the old calendar. Not that Tommy’s parents would have denied him in any case the ten birthdays and Christmases he had known.) “Mom!” he shouted. “The ship’s coming!”

  She was about to remind him that she detested any such corruption of the good old word “Mother.” But he came so fast and happily among the flowers; his hair was flying in a light breeze; every day he looked more like his father. “What ship?” she asked when he panted to a halt before her. “We’re beginning to get quite a few, after all, now the war’s over.”

  “The, the, the Northa Merican ship. Gover’ment people. They jus’ masered in. Dad told me to go find you. He wants you to help meet them. I figured you’d be here.” Tommy straightened himself with such an air of masculine responsibility that she wanted to kneel and hug him.

  But he’d never forgive her that—when Jack Herbert, superintendent of the construction gang and its great machines, stood burly in his coveralls and watched. Therefore Avis said gravely, “Thank you. I’ll come right away.”

  “What’s this about, Mrs. Bell?” Herbert asked, with a bare touch of truculence. Like most of his men, he was a resident of the local group and thus still a North American national. But such folk were not unanimously pleased with a peace treaty that had left the mother country in possession of the leading Trojan asteroids.

  “A commission,” Avis explained. “That is, not just another set of inspectors from the vice governor’s office——”

  “Hector inspectors,” Tommy chortled.

  Avis shook her head at him. Hector was in fact the seat of regional colonial government, but she wished her son had not overheard the scurrilous limerick her husband had composed on that basis. “Not even from Vesta,” she went on, referring to the worldlet which was the capital of all remaining North American territories in the Belt. “Washington. A special mission, I understand.”

  Herbert scowled and tugged his blond beard. “What for?”

  Avis let her glance stray from his. The weather felt suddenly less warm and she noticed too clearly how dark the sky was.

  That duskiness always prevailed. Trapped by geegee fields, the artificial atmosphere of a terraformed asteroid could be as dense at the bottom as Earth’s; but it could not extend nearly as high, nor scatter light nearly as much. And then the sun was remote: in the case of a Trojan body, more than five times as distant, shrunken to a spark of brilliance which gave less than 4 percent the illumination Earth receives. The human eye is sufficiently adaptable that this did not seem murky. But heaven on Odysseus was a deep blue-black wherein the brighter stars were visible by day.

  The scene about her felt as if that endless surrounding night had touched it. I’ve been a coward, she reproached herself. I knew Don was worried, but he never lets on, so I told myself this will only be a standard official visit, and hid in the pleasure of landscaping.

  That joy was a high one, after the despair of the war years. Isolated, at their immense distance, from any but the rarest callers, the Trojan settlers had been concerned with little except survival. Donald Bell’s sympathies inclined toward the Republic, though basically he was apolitical. He might have tried to run supplies, if not actually to fight. But there were no spaceships to bring him to the scene: only a few patched-together scooters and flitboats, in which a few reckless men hau
led essentials from one to another of the half-dozen leading asteroids. Bell turned his parks and gardens into miniature farms, let his shops, theaters, restaurants, and half-built new facilities molder, and settled down to help keep as many folk fed as possible. (Well, he did maintain a distillery, which gave him brandy as a byproduct of his vineyards; but confound it, that had rescued the local sanity!)

  Now that traffic was resuming, the waterworks again in business and expanding fast, fresh immigration as well as returned veterans coming in to ransack the natural wealth of the group, Dingdong Enterprises had gone back to its original undertakings. Reconstruction and new growth went apace. Around Avis leaves rustled, flowerbeds stood bright against the green of lawns, fountains splashed, fragrance filled the air. Above a weeping willow she could see the hotel, a literal skyscraper, its rooftop dome high enough in this shallow atmosphere to provide a fantastic view for dancers. Across the small, glittering lake, where several canoes floated lazily past the zoo island Aeaea, sounded noises of building; the casino was nearing completion.

  We worked so hard for this, Avis thought. Now we could lose it.

  Realizing with a start that Herbert was waiting for an answer, she said, “Oh. Why should a special delegation come here? Well, we’re making a good profit once again. Tax assessment or something——”

  “Might be more than that, ma’m,” the superintendent said. “If your husband keeps on buying into the water-works at the rate I hear he is, he could end up owning this whole planetoid, pretty near. The government mightn’t like that. You know, Earthside they don’t think any man ought to become a lot bigger than any other.”

  “Maybe,” Avis said. If only it’s no worse! We don’t need more money than we’re earning. It’d be nice, certainly—and not just for Don and the kids and me; we could do so much, out here where so much needs doing. But that isn’t vital to us, I suppose. Let them forbid us to make further investments in industry. We can stand that. If, though, they take away this thing we built together—

  “I’d better go,” she went on with forced brightness. “We’ll talk further about the Hall of Alkinous idea when I can get free, Jack. Meanwhile——”

  “Sure, I’ll find plenty of jobs for the boys.” Herbert watched her stride off. She must be pushing fifty standard years, he thought, but antisenescence treatment had taken well on her; she remained petite, bounciness in her gait, hair flowing dark to her shoulders, maybe no stun-blast beauty in the face but sure okay to look at, especially when one of her frequent enthusiasms lit her up from within.…

  “Where you going, Mr. Herbert? Can I come too?”

  The superintendent looked down at his employer’s son. School was out for “summer.” He smiled. “Well, I guess we might go check on the ’dozer crew.”

  They walked along the shore. Wavelets chuckled and glittered on white sand.

  “Mr. Herbert?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why is water so, uh, important?”

  The man gave the boy a surprised glance. “You drink it. You wash in it. You get most of your oxygen from it when you’re terraforming. You couldn’t run any industry without it.”

  “I know,” Tommy said. “And I know ’bout the container effect. You can’t carry hydrogen gas by itself so well, under pressure. It either leaks out b’tween the atoms of the tank, or you need a lot of cry—cryogenic stuff to keep it liquid. But you got to have hydrogen for fusion power. So you bring the water where you want it, and crack the molecules, and use the oxygen for something else.”

  “Now that we’re through reciting elementary science at each other,” Herbert suggested, “suppose you tell me why water shouldn’t be important.”

  Tommy flushed. “’Course it is! I mean the water here. The ice they mine, that Daddy keeps buying shares of. We’re a far ways from anyplace else, and they can’t use sunjammers here. Why don’t they get the water from closer-in asteroids? Or maybe cook it right out of rocks?”

  “I see.” Herbert’s respect for his small companion went up. The question was actually shrewd, revealing an intuitive grasp of economics. “You mean, you wonder how it can pay to dig ice out of Odysseus and ship the water all over the Belt. We are at the end of a long haul, in an orbit that’s particularly hard for carriers to maneuver out of. Well, the answer is that it does pay. They haven’t found many bodies like this one, with an ice core and rich lodes of the stuff. It’s cheaper to work these deposits and meet extra shipping costs than it is to grub around on the average sunward asteroid or spend energy and use expensive equipment to extract water from minerals.”

  “Why not go to Jupiter? It’s no farther from the sun than we are. My planetology teacher says it’s got ice in its air and on the big moons.”

  “Uh-huh. However, the skydivers into Jupiter’s atmosphere are after still more valuable materials. And as for the moons, they’re in a deeper gravitational well than we are, and besides, they’re too big to terraform, which means you’d have to buy fancy life support gear and pay premium wages. No, we’re sitting pretty here.” Again Herbert tugged his beard. “Too pretty, perhaps. We’ve attracted Washington’s attention, and some men are greedy for other things than money.” He shrugged. “Well, I can always emigrate.”

  On this small and highly irregular spheroid—maximum diameter 230 kilometers—no one bothered with private ground vehicles. A person might travel around it on a scooter, but normally he would use the autorail. There was a station near Lake Circe. Like the rest of the buildings in the Dingdong area, it was in vaguely classical style and surrounded by a garden. Like most architecture on most of the planetoids that had been made habitable, it was flimsy, with large doors and windows. Little protection was needed against the mild weather generated in thin gaseous cloaks far from the sun; no protection was needed against temperatures which, between greenhouse effect and waste heat from nuclear powerplants, were always balmy. In the unlikely event that a large meteroid struck or a spaceship crashed out of control, computer-linked radars would give ample warning to the endangered section.

  A car drew into sight one minute after Avis arrived. She waved it to a halt. A signal ran back and forth along the rails; other cars elsewhere adjusted their speeds. She boarded the ovoid and sat down, not bothering to close its canopy, and punched Space terminal on the board. The car started, with a smooth acceleration that soon had wind whistling by the forward screen.

  Avis leaned back and watched the recreational park give way to a residential district. Though neat, it was somewhat gaudy. The settlers in the leading Trojan cluster were quite as individualistic as those in the trailing group, which had gone to the Republic.

  A few kilometers beyond, the car plunged into night. Avis paid scant attention at first, because lamps made artificial day for the industrial quarter through which she was passing. Colonists usually ignored the rapid rotations of their tiny worlds and stuck by a twenty-four-hour clock. But then the car reached a switchpoint and headed north across an as yet undeveloped territory. The land humped aloft in barren, pitted hills and grotesque crags. Mostly they were hidden by darkness. But without man’s works in the way, each time she crossed a ridge Avis could see the horizon, black and topplingly near, and stars swinging out of it, up and over her. They blazed with a keenness she remembered from Earth’s northern winters—how very long ago!

  She made no attempt to pick out Hector, Achilles. Nestor, Agamemnon, or Ajax, the largest of Odysseus’ cluster mates. Their oscillations seldom brought them close enough to be naked-eye objects. She did seek Jupiter and found it, but only because she knew where to look. The king planet was not the brightest gleam in this heaven; it was twice as far away as it ever got from Earth.

  And yet, she recalled, with an awe that somehow never had faded in her … and yet that spark, together with the dwarfed sun, reached across to grip this orb on which she dwelt and lock it fast for eternity.

  Well, maybe not. That’d be a long time. Over millions or billions of years, the slow slight pertur
bations of Saturn might cause a Trojan asteroid or two to wander away. Or maybe that actually was impossible. Lagrange had proved in the eighteenth century that this was a stable situation: a giant body like Sol, a lesser giant like Jupiter circling it, and a midget in that same orbit but leading or lagging by sixty degrees. The tug of another planet, as it reached its still enormous minimum distance, was too variable, too soon dwindling, to change the configuration much. The midget might start to sneak off, but then the outside influence would diminish again and the vectors of Sol and Jupiter would haul the truant back.

  Six major asteroids leading, five trailing, together with assorted meteroids—cosmic debris drifting age by age into the Lagrangean trap—and, for a flicker in time, some bits of organic matter rooting about, re-creating the accidentally determined conditions of the remote globe that had brought them forth, dreaming about homes here and even, some of them, about those scornful stars.…

  Avis shook herself out of her reverie. I’m past the romantic phase of life. Am I not?

  Lights glowed ahead, Odysseus spaceport. A water tanker was in, looming huge on the ferrocrete, men and machines scurrying to pump her full. Avis hardly noticed. Her pulse beat in her ears.

  The car stopped at the terminal building. She got out and hastened inside. Several men and women stood waiting: the mayor, his council, executives of various Odyssean companies, their wives. Donald Bell waved at Avis. “You’re right on the mark, darlin’!” he boomed across the chamber. The screen above him declared that the official passenger transport Walter Schirra would make groundfall in three minutes.

  She noticed the semiformal clothes on everybody else and remembered her own blouse and slacks. “I should have changed,” she said.

  “No, that’s okay,” her husband answered. “We may not want to look too prosperous. Besides, you’re beautiful in anything.” He bent close. His lips tickled her hair. “Or nothin’,” he whispered.