Tales of the Flying Mountains Page 13

  Like hell we can! Avis wanted to shout. Not when one branch of the family insists on taking everything!

  A few days afterward, when the commission had proceeded elsewhere, another meeting took place in the house on Mount Ida. Being larger, it was held in a gold-paneled conference room; being composed of friends, it drank beer in huge quantities; being likewise made up of the magnates, those whose work and risk had made Odysseus come alive, it growled its business forth in angry words. Occasionally an oath broke loose—but a mild one, for a few women were present and asteroid colonists preserved the archaic concept “lady.”

  Also, Avis thought, seated by her husband, they keep the outmoded notion of democracy. Oh, they use that word back in the States, use it till the last meaning has been rubbed off; but in the end, collectivism, under whatever name, is elitist. Somebody makes a career of knowing what is good for you better than you’re supposed to know it yourself. In his heart, and ever oftener in his behavior, how can he respect you?

  Whereas Jack Herbert sat at the long table as proudly as Reuben Roth or David Pirelli. They might have more money than he did, Pirelli might be mayor as well as principal stockholder in the H2Odysseus Corporation, but they couldn’t do without the kind of skills he owned, and each man concerned knew that. Herbert was no more a spokesman for “labor” than engineer Richard Buytenstuyl for “the technologists” or farmer Pete Xenopoulos for “agriculture.” Bell had asked them to sound out their colleagues, but his basic reason for inviting them here was that he thought highly of their judgment.

  “This conference has no official standing, of course,” Pirelli declared. “In fact, I believe we’d be wise to keep our proceedings confidential and merely say we’ve had a party.”

  “A wake, rather,” Herbert retorted.

  “Perhaps not.” Pirelli turned to Bell. “Don, will you take over?” He sat down.

  Bell rose. “The idea,” he said, “is to compare notes on our various encounters with the Feds, and what we reckon the outcome of this thing is likely to be, and how people feel about it, and what we might do. I got kind of sociable with the chief, James Harker—don’t look shocked, Pete. He’s not an evil man, only a man doin’ his duty as he sees it, and maybe he’s right from the standpoint of the mother country. Problem is, obviously, our mother country is this asteroid, not a continent which some of us have never seen.

  “Anyhow, he warned me repeatedly that a shakeup here is unavoidable. The new government has to make a good showin’ fast, and it’ll help to exploit Odysseus to the limit. They need our water to expedite their projects elsewhere in space—minin’, mostly, no development, no conservation, just grub out and get out. What water they can’t use themselves they’ll sell for foreign exchange. Plain to see, our little world will revert to rock. Only the abundance of water has made it possible to create and keep the lushness we’ve got.

  “I’m not sayin’ this is necessarily bad. We’re North Americans too, with citizenship obligations. My pet business will have to go, and at a loss, but that won’t break me. The waterworks will boom for years. Most Odysseans can expect fat pay or profit.

  “Harker urged me, and through me all of us, to start plannin’ the changeover right away and carry it out voluntarily. It’ll take about a year to pass legislation and set up administrative machinery. If we fought the case clear to the Supreme Court, and dragged our feet after we lost, we might stall matters for another five years or so. But in the end we’d be forced to go along—by condemnation proceedin’s if need be—and we’d be called unpatriotic reactionaries who’d rate no sympathy or concessions, and many would have to sell out for a dime on the dollar. Contrariwise, if we cooperate, if we take the initiative, we can gain. For instance, if I don’t have to hurry, I might get a fair price in the Republic for the stock in trade of Dingdong. I could sell my land to the waterworks and buy shares. I’m sure each of you can see applications to his particular case.”

  Beside him, Avis cried, “No! You can’t! Or is a man really able to rape himself?”

  “Darlin’, please,” Bell whispered. Jack Herbert blushed.

  “Well, actually, I wouldn’t,” Bell informed them. “I’d sell, yes, but then I’d move over to the Republic. I may be kind of old to start fresh, but I’m not so old I have to sit and take whatever they choose to shovel onto me. However, that’s strictly personal. I’ve said my say. Let’s hear from somebody else.” He resumed his chair.

  Talk rumbled and spat for more than an hour. The indignation was unanimous. Pirelli, who stood to profit most, stated: “If I want to become filthy rich, and I do, I’ll diversify. There’re plenty of airless rocks to find metals on. Odysseus is my home. Be damned if I’ll turn it first into an industrial slum, last into a dry-sucked corpse.”

  Herbert: “You should’ve heard us, a hundred of us, yellin’ ourselves hoarse at that Earthlubber who spoke to us in Agate Hall. He blatted about jobs, paychecks … and when we asked what we’d spend the paychecks on, he blatted about consumer goods. Judas on a jet, doesn’t he know what it’s like in space? This is a pretty little world, we tried to tell him; but has he been anywhere else in the group where they haven’t yet got the money to terraform? Can he imagine never being anywhere but in a ship, a suit, a dome, always, death just a centimeter outside, darkness, naked stone—? Well, he quacked about gambling and other vices, and somebody asked him what a fellow come in from months in the black is supposed to do, and when he said, ‘Healthful sports and clean entertainment’ we booed him off the platform.” Swallowing: “Sorry. I got carried away. But you can’t leave, Mr. Bell, you and your fun and greenery and, and—if you go, I’m going too, and I know a lot of boys who’ll come along.”

  “I may be prejudiced,” Bell said, “but I agree, this action could kill the aurovarian goose. It’s not as if we were in the Belt proper, with plenty of good places in easy reach. Without Dingdong or somethin’ like it, maybe no labor can be gotten in the American Trojans except at prohibitive wages.” He sighed. “What can we do, though?”

  “Tell them,” Xenopoulos urged. “Send men to Washington. Organize a lobby.”

  “Not that simple, I’m afraid.” Bell started a cigarette and signaled his butler for more beer. “People don’t believe facts, they believe what they want to believe, till the facts finally lose patience and club them with some catastrophe. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the States, but I’ve been back there from time to time, I have friends there, we correspond, I read a lot. The tide of puritanical collectivism is runnin’ stronger each year. If we don’t go along, we’ll be unpatriotic wastrels who ought to be punished.”

  “Unpatriotic, hell!” Buytenstuyl exploded. “I did my hitch in the war, but a country that won’t give me any rights isn’t my country any longer.”

  “Essentially,” said Roth in his scholarly manner, “deterritorialized technicians and politicians, managing a society of mobile, interchangeable, practically indistinguishable human units, cannot comprehend that when a man has a real home, that’s where his real loyalty lies.”

  “What hope have we got?” Xenopoulos pleaded.

  “I’ll tell you what.” Buytenstuyl leaned across the table edge. “They talk about democracy till I’m sick of the word. Okay, let’s give them democracy. Let’s hold a plebiscite. I’ll lay you ten to one, at least three-quarters of the Odysseans will want to join the Republic, once they learn what’s planned for them in Washington.”

  Pirelli took the negative. “No use, Dick. I’d guess the percentage higher, but a hundred percent would be too little.” He raised a hand. “Don’t say it. Secession would mean useless bloodshed. A single naval unit could end it. The Republic would not help. Odysseus is valuable, yes, but the treaty makes it American and it isn’t valuable enough for anyone to go to war about.”

  Avis said, half in tears: “Haven’t you ever wished we, the ordinary people, who only want to cultivate our gardens in peace … haven’t you ever w-w-wished we could steal away, with our gar
dens, all of us, one night, and hide where the politicians and generals and officials and crowds and mobs couldn’t find us? Then what would they do, with nobody else’s lives to run?”

  “You’d never escape the need for government, defense, civil service, everything you hoped to leave behind,” Pirelli said gently. “That’s how humans are.”

  Bell clasped his wife’s hand. “She has got a point, however,” he declared. “I used to gamble every spare minute, and I’d still hate to swear off entirely. But when a game got too much for me—not a bad streak of luck, I hope I’ve more sportin’ instinct than that, but when the stakes got absurdly high or I suspected cheatin’—I’d get out and find me another game, takin’ my money with me. Our trouble today is we could leave individually, but we’ve got so big an investment in Odysseus, emotional more than financial, it’s hard to see how we could—”

  And the cigarette dropped from his fingers, and he stared into a vision for a minute that became very silent in the room, until he breathed, “Or could we?”

  Hundreds of persons cannot conspire together. Statistical variation guarantees that somebody out of such a number will be a fink or a blabbermouth. In the time that followed, Avis was haunted at first by the dread that one among the score or so whom Bell and his associates sounded out would betray them. It grew ever harder to continue in everyday life. After a while she was swallowing more tranquilizers than she dared count.

  Bell remained insouciant as befitted a gambling man. “We needn’t fret about bein’ discovered,” he assured her. “There’s hardly anything to discover. That’s the whole idea.”

  “Our group has had secret conversations, not only with Americans but with agents of the Republic—a foreign power,” she said.

  “Well, privacy’s not illegal yet.”

  She clenched her fists. “I’ve checked the law, Don. Conspiracy is a felony, even if it’s only conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. And you—no, we—let’s be honest, we’re planning treason.”

  “Are we? A nice point.” Bell chuckled. “I’ve discussed it with a high-powered lawyer in our cabal. He thinks we may not have anything whatsoever unlawful in mind. Treason? We’re not about to levy war on the United States of North America, and it bein’ at peace with the Republic, we won’t be givin’ aid and comfort to an enemy. Theft? No one’s property is to be taken away from him. Recollectin’ that the Convention of Vesta, as a treaty, is part of the supreme law of the land, you could make a pretty good case for each of our actions bein’ entirely legal.” He patted her shoulder. “Not that I expect the affair’ll go to criminal court. An international tribunal, sure—and won’t that be a hooraw’s nest!”

  “But if they find out our intentions——”

  Bell shrugged. “Be hard to prove we had any intentions other than what we’ve announced. If somebody does notice the possibilities in our project, and takes action, well, then we’ll’ve lost our bet.”

  Lost everything, Avis thought.

  She drew herself erect. My job, she told herself, is to be my man’s partner, not his burden. She smiled, reached up and stroked his cheek. “Sure, sweetheart,” she told him. “I’m simply a worrywart. What would you like for dinner?”

  Afterward she took another tranquilizer.

  But ordinariness wears down more than youth and daydreams; it also erodes fear. You can’t endlessly be on edge when you must see to your children, run your household, budget, entertain, prepare lists of off-planet needs, wrestle with accounts, stand watches on civic betterment committees and as hostess of your bridge club, fight a mutant weed that is playing Attila in the flowerbeds, worry about your older daughter’s slightly wild boy friend, integrate color schemes, watch shows, read, eat, drink, make love, sleep … and nothing else happens.

  The magnates of Odysseus agreed on the plan and signed the petition. The vice governor on Hector okayed it and sent it on to Earth with his positive recommendation. (He was among those who knew the real objective. He accepted it largely because he was worried about the fate of his other asteroids if their recreations were abolished.) After commissions had sat and assorted paperwork had been done, Washington approved the proposal. James Harker wrote an open letter to the Odysseans, saying how pleased he was by their constructive attitude.

  As a matter of fact, the average Odyssean complained furiously, and a certain amount of emigration took place. But you couldn’t let him into the secret.

  You could merely announce:

  “It is vital for us to develop our ice mines to their full potential. The government has plans that call for vast amounts of water. Our duty is to cooperate with whatever the government has decided is best. Now one major factor holding back exploitation of our mines has been our Trojan position. Because it is dynamically stable, spaceships require extra power to leave this region. The new sunjammer cargo vessels can’t do it; and they, fuelless, are the coming thing in transport of nonperishable goods. The imaginative answer to our dilemma is to move Odysseus itself.

  “True, a considerable amount of native hydrogen must be consumed in getting the fusion energy for this large a project. But cost analysis shows that, in the long run, the saving in freight charges will more than compensate; and meanwhile we will have an eager market for the oxygen and other byproducts.

  “Yes, the planned orbit will cause Odysseus to leave the cluster. But that won’t happen soon. This much mass cannot be accelerated fast. Calculation shows that more than a year, terrestrial, will be required simply to maneuver out of the Trojan area. After that, further maneuvers will gradually ease the asteroid back into the same orbit as Jupiter, but leading by about seventy instead of sixty degrees. This will not be too far from its ancient companions for easy visiting in powered spacecraft. Nor will the new orbit be grossly unstable. Thousands of years will be required for perturbation to deform it significantly.

  “We will have gained the capability of using free solar energy to move our water to our markets. Society will have gained the part of that water which would otherwise have gone to fuel tankers.

  “In view of this far-sighted cooperation with the government, and of the fact that we shall have to engage many outside workers, the authorities have agreed that the recreational complex may continue operations for the years it will take to complete the project.”

  That reconciled a number of Trojanites, at least temporarily.

  And the ordinariness went on. Nothing happened in a hurry. Besides the usual human reasons for this, there was the size of the undertaking. It was common practice to put a geegee engine on a meteoroid and ride it off to where facilities existed for getting at its ores. But Odysseus was bigger by several orders of magnitude, so big that man’s puny terraforming would never even circulate enough heat through that mass to thaw the interior ice. The drive system must be designed and tested virtually from a cold start. That alone took a year. The time would have been longer except for modern computers and scale-up methods. But in the course of it Avis decided that anyone who could put a finger on the real objective would have done so by then.

  Slowly she stopped being frightened. A growing influx of tourists, eager to see the spectacular construction going on, helped by keeping her busy in Dingdong. She herself was fascinated by watching the drive units rise, and thought them beautiful when finished.

  By coincidence, their activation took place on the exact fourth anniversary (terrestrial) of that furious meeting in her home. The persons who had been there were, on this day, among the dignitaries who crowded a flag-draped grandstand. They looked as excited and happy as anyone. Avis felt the same upsurge, squeezed her husband’s hand and waited impatiently for the speeches and ceremonies to end. She wanted the governor to pull the master switch.

  Finally he did.

  Staring across the parade ground, Avis saw its grassland drop sharply away till it met the plum-dark sky. On her left rose a grove of trees—she had helped plant them once—whose leaves rustled in a slight cool breeze and caught the tiny sun in
shivers of light and shadow. On her right a jagged jaw of primeval rock thrust over the horizon. She gazed straight ahead. The buildings, the control tower, the pumping stations and storage tanks, were not hideous like those ramshackle works which were all that the mines required; these had the clean lines of an aircraft or scoopship, where every contour was necessary. By themselves, they might have looked smug in their sleekness. But they culminated in what they surrounded, the breathtaking upward leap of a giant Emett, whose drive cone was invisible to her because its supporting tower soared above the air.

  A rumble awoke, soft but bone-deep. Outpouring forces, which could not be altogether shielded from atmosphere, laid hold upon it and started a gentle cyclonic motion. Humans perceived this only as a ripple and whisper through leaves, an occasional swirl of dust devils, a wind in their hair and on their faces which seemed to chant, Outward bound!

  The cheer they raised, though lusty, was dwarfed by that quiet, resistless music of power. Well it might be. Deep-buried fusion generators were turning almost a kilogram of matter into energy every second. This did not require the breakdown of a ton of water in the same time—proton-metal reactions were used, less efficient but more sparing of the asteroid’s prime resource—but the fuelling machinery alone was among the most ambitious enterprises men had carried out thus far in history. And nevertheless Odysseus, little Odysseus, was so massive that no instrument would have registered any change in its path across the stars.

  Not yet. But the thrust of gyrogravitic force would go on, and on, and on. Cunningly blended with the tug of sun and planets, in an Earth year it would have pushed the asteroid free of the Trojan well. Thereafter maneuvering would be easier. It would still take some years to reach the target orbit—but the job would be done, and men would have done it.