Tales of the Flying Mountains Read online

  Suddenly Avis thought: No matter if our private scheme doesn’t assay out. Something bigger than us was born today.

  Before long, the sounds and drafts faded. Rotation had caused the drive unit to point too far off the desired line. It shut down automatically. Another one, elsewhere on the equator, took up the work.

  The spectators began to disperse. Avis drew Donald Bell aside. They walked off, still hand in hand, feeling young again, until they stood in the grove. Cool shadowy greenness, smelling and whispering of life, hid them.

  “Why, you’re cryin’,” he said and drew her close to him. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No. Except, except—” She buried her face against his breast. A part of her noticed afresh, with sensuous delight, how thick and rubbery those muscles remained. “I’m so happy.”

  “Me, too.” He held her with one arm, ruffled her hair with the other hand. “Looks like we’re really goin’ to pull it off.”

  “M-maybe. I hope we will. For you, darling. But don’t you see—it came to me in a flash—today we launched the first starship.”

  “Hm?” He thought for a while. “Y-y-yes, reckon you’re right,” he said, largely to himself. “We know, now, Odysseus is bigger’n needful for a balanced ecology. And, of course, a giant ship wouldn’t have near this much mass; it’d mostly be hollow. If we can move a good-sized asteroid, livin’ on it meanwhile, traffic movin’ in and out as usual, we can do a lot better with a ship.…” The sun was sinking. More stars burned forth each minute. He glanced past the leaves, toward heaven. “Our grandchildren may get to go.”

  “And you first thought of it, Don.”

  “Me?” His laughter vibrated through her. “Sorry. You know damn well I’d no such exalted purpose in mind. My real project isn’t finished yet.”

  It was, when Odysseus had definitely left the Trojan territory. One prearranged day, a ship from the Asteroid Republic landed. Others took orbit, and they were warcraft. Meanwhile a representative on Earth filed claim.

  Diplomats were standing by in all countries. Notes had been prepared for them to deliver, speeches for them to make, logrolling bargains for them to propose. A stunned North America hesitated and was lost. Had it seriously threatened war, the asterites would have withdrawn. Instead, they trumpeted that they would defend themselves against “aggression” but were willing to have the case judged by the World Court.

  There they maintained, entirely truthfully, (a) that sovereignty over an asteroid was determined by first landing and claim; (b) that asteroids were legally defined by their orbital elements; (c) that members of a Trojan group were lumped together for purposes of this definition; (d) that Odysseus no longer had a Trojan orbit; (e) that no North American had staked a fresh claim. Lest this seem casuistry (though that word does not necessarily mean dishonest reasoning), the asterite spokesmen pointed to the result of a neutral-supervised plebiscite. It showed an overwhelming majority of Odysseans in favor of joining the Republic.

  The wrangling, and subsequent bargaining, lasted three years. Meanwhile the Republic was in possession. Social changes took place. They were not readily reversible. In off stage conversations, that were more amicable than public ones, asterite negotiators suggested that their American counterparts reflect on the history of regions “temporarily” occupied in the past—say, by Communists or Israelis in the twentieth century, or for that matter by British or Americans in the nineteenth. Would it not be better all around to accept a fait accompli and, perhaps, certain advantageous trade agreements?

  In the end, the asterites won their point. Naturally, their free-and-easy government was delighted to let Dingdong Enterprises continue its merry way.

  A stately banquet on Odysseus followed the signing of the treaty. After the food, the toasts, the interminable speeches, various participants repaired to the house on Mount Ida for a real celebration. At one point the President of the Republic drew Donald Bell aside. “Would you tell me something?” he requested.

  “Maybe.” Bell’s gaze above the rim of his champagne goblet was friendly but alert.

  “I’m newly elected, you know. Whole new government. How could you, planning over a decade, how could you be sure we’d follow through on your secret agreement with our predecessors?”

  “The probabilities favored it, sir. The character of asterites makes it likely that any bunch of them, regardless of their faction, will be quick and bold about seizin’ an advantage—which sovereignty over Odysseus definitely is.” Bell grinned. “There were risks, sure, but my friends and I were playin’ the odds. In the old country they discourage greed, so the bet was fairly good that they wouldn’t be as alert to the chance of a double play as people are out here. I wouldn’t have tried any such stunt on the Republic.”

  “I should hope not!” The other man frowned. “Still … I can’t say I really like that philosophy. I mean, well, surely man has more important drives than … than cupidity, damn it!”

  “I wouldn’t argue about that myself, sir, one way or the other. Now if you’ll excuse me …” Bell disengaged from the President and made his way through the guests. The orchestra was striking up a dance tune, and he wanted to find Avis.

  Interlude 4

  “Well well” says Lindgren. “I always suspected collusion between our government and the top Odysseans, but this is the first I’ve heard that anybody ever admitted it.”

  “Why shouldn’t they have?” I wonder. “At least, after they were safely citizens of the Republic.”

  “Might make it a touch difficult for them to visit North American territories, or even do business at long range,” McVeagh points out.

  “Besides,” Dworczyk adds, “regimes never admit to rascality. A revolutionary government might, perhaps, accuse the one it overthrew of terrible things. But one which has legitimately succeeded, as by election, can’t do the same. If it did, it’d either have to confess it was enjoying the fruits of misconduct, or else give up those fruits.”

  “Not that I know of any revolutionaries who voluntarily disgorged anything,” McVeagh responds. “In fact, they’re apt to grab fresh chunks of other people’s property.”

  “Would you say that of the Asteroid Republic?” Conchita disputes.

  “Why, certainly, at least in its young and bumptious days. As witness the case of Odysseus.”

  Conchita has no reply except a slightly indignant sniff. Echevaray speaks aside to Missy. “Will you permit me to inquire who has told you this story?”

  “Oh, Avis Bell,” she answers. At his look of surprise, she laughs. “We met again soon afterward, when the Sword expanded its operations to her world. It didn’t take our two families long to become the best of friends.” For a moment she goes away from us, elsewhere into time. Because I have keen ears, I hear her whisper: “She was a dear … like our men, Avis …” and wish I hadn’t.

  It is a relief when Amspaugh clears his throat and says, “We’d better get back once more to business. I don’t think we should put your account into our official histories, Missy.”

  She returns. “No, no.”

  “Why not?” McVeagh gibes. “Afraid it’d corrupt the morals of the young?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you’re imagining, Colin,” Lindgren tells him. “It’s hearsay. No documentation. We’ve got to uphold standards of scholarship, if only because it’s a foundation stone of science and technology.”

  I venture to interject, “A foundation stone with standards—banners—flying?” The chuckles tickle me.

  “We seem to be converging on some areas of agreement,” Orloff says. “No hypocrisy in our textbooks; only the plain truth, insofar as we can ascertain and describe it. We are still wondering how much of the whole truth should be included.”

  “Excuse me,” Conchita breaks in. “I don’t hold with pious frauds, of course. However, the truth is more than covetousness and bungling and the law of least effort. It’s also hopes, dreams, aspirations, adventures.” She waves her hand in an arc that en
compasses the constellations toward which we drive. Her eyes match the starshine. “It’s us, here, now, alive—eventually, it’s the human race—headed into the universe!”

  “If any of us denied that,” Orloff replies calmly, “he would not have signed on. But it isn’t what I am talking about. I am talking about the essential preliminaries to a new stage of evolution, and the requirement of recognizing what they were and how they continue to affect later events. Man is not less man because he is descended from simians, ultimately from some bit of pre-Cambrian slime. But he cannot understand himself unless he acknowledges that ancestry. Nor can he use the laws of nature until he has discovered them and admits that he too is bound by them.”

  “What has that to do with the subject?” asks Conchita.

  “Why, this, my dear young lady. The laws of historical development are also natural laws. No one seriously considered space travel until the nineteenth century, when the possibility became evident. And nothing could actually be done before the essential technology and wealth existed. When they did, the will to use the technology and spend the wealth to reach the planets appeared. But the possibility had to come first. I think we should make it clear in the children’s minds that society creates, as well as realizes, its ambitions step by patient step.”

  “I can’t quite agree,” Amspaugh declares. “Granted, the Foundation—in effect, the Republic—couldn’t commence on a project as vast as this starship before it was able to. That’s a tautology. But what made it able to? What improved the technology and expanded the wealth? Where did the work, the research, the development come from? No visionaries did it, nor any vague, apotheosized society. It was the result of individual persons, usually quite unremarkable persons who faced the stark necessities of their daily lives and made those lives fit to live. In the process of that, they couldn’t help making the Republic great.”

  Lindgren stirs in his seat. “Uh, friends,” he says, “it seems to me you’re all unable to see the trees for the forest. Conchita thinks civilizations get from here to there because a few bold, inspired leaders have exalted goals. Ivan, I suppose due to his Russian background, Ivan thinks the goals will occur to us more or less automatically as we build up our capabilities. And our revered president”—he nods in jesting wise at Amspaugh—“no doubt because of his capitalistic background, thinks the capabilities and the goals alike are the result of letting individuals fearlessly work out their private destinies. You might call it the market theory of progress.”

  “Well, what’s your view, then?” McVeagh demands.

  Lindgren shakes his head. “I don’t have a theoretical turn of mind. I’m just an old rockjack who went into business. Maybe I’m only reading my limited life’s experience into what I’ve studied of history. But it seems to me that things simply happen. I can’t find any general rules. That goes for you too, Colin. Damn it, there’ve been important events, there’ve been whole periods, when ideals counted for more than greed or fear; and the idealists weren’t always misguided.”

  He gusts out a breath. “As for the great developmental era in space,” he continues, “I saw no romance in it at the time—excitement aplenty, sure, but no bright romance—and neither do I see anything automatic, looking back, nor any master plans. We were a wildly diverse lot of people, going in a lot of separate directions, mostly unforeseen ones. If we’d happened to be different people, the vector sum of all our goings would’ve been different from what it turned out to be. Very few, if any, even had as simple a goal as to get rich. They were only after their bread and butter and, they hoped, a swipe of jam on it. Whatever they acquired beyond that would be largely a matter of luck. Oh, and as for ‘facing the stark necessities of life’—surely, Joe, you don’t imagine they wanted to! They weren’t given any choice, that’s all.”

  Que Donn’rez Vous?

  K-B2.

  Q-K7. “Check,” said Roy Pearson.

  Captain Elias ben Judah did not swear, because it was against his principles. But his comment was violent enough. “Second blinking check in a row,” he added, moving the black kings to refuge at Kt3.

  “And the third,” said his operations manager with a parched chuckle. The white queen jumped in his artificial hand to Q8.

  “Do you mean that?” asked ben Judah, astonished. He was a medium-sized man, fifty Earth-years old, his hair gray, his eyes brown and gentle in a face that sagged a little with weariness. The blue uniform of the Jupiter Company sat neatly on him; insignia of rank and service, ribbons of past achievement, glowed beneath the fluorescent overhead of his cabin. It was more homelike than most, that cabin. Besides the usual pictures of wife and children, he had a shelf of books, not microspools but old-style volumes, for the pleasure of binding and typography. In a corner stood a little workbench where he had half completed a clipper ship model. Above was a flowerbox bright with poppies and violets.

  Pearson’s ruined features twisted into a grimace. “I do,” he snapped. “Want to resign?” He was small and hunched, five years younger than the captain, but looked ten years older—not entirely because a goodly fraction of him was prosthetic.

  “Certainly not.” R X Q.

  “I expected that, you know,” said Pearson. His bishop scuttled across the board and captured the black queen. “Check … and mate.”

  Ben Judah studied the board for a moment before he sighed. “Right. Good game.”

  “You could have had me a while back,” Pearson said, “when——”

  “Never mind.” Ben Judah got up and moved across the deck, heavily under the ship’s internal gyrogravitic field, to his dresser. He began to load an old pipe. “I’m afraid I can’t concentrate on chess. I keep thinking about the pilots.”

  Pearson observed him narrowly. “Don’t,” he said.

  “I must. I’m the captain.”

  “Not in their case. I am.”

  “Nu?” Ben Judah swung about, indignant. This was his first Jupiter-diving cruise, and he admitted there was much he didn’t yet know. But—

  “You are the captain of the mother ship,” Pearson said. “However, we’re in orbit now. Only the scoopships are under weigh. And I direct their operations. Under the laws of the Republic, they’re my responsibility. You’ll find working for the Jupiter Company is a lot different from an inner-planet merchant run.”

  Ben Judah relaxed. “You needn’t tell me,” he said with a rather wan laugh. “Everything in the Belt is different. I don’t envy you, trying to keep those wildcats of yours under control.” He sobered. “But what disturbs me—now that I’m here with the actuality, not a textbook abstraction; now that I feel what is involved—what makes me wonder if I should have come at all, is the business of sending men out time after time, ordering them to possible death, while we sit safely here.”

  “They aren’t ordered,” Pearson reminded him. “Any pilot may refuse any flit. Of course, if he does it repeatedly, he’ll be fired. We can’t afford to ship deadheads.”

  “I know, I know. And yet, well, you asterites are obsessed with economics.” The captain lifted a hand to forestall the manager’s retort. “I am quite aware of how closely you must figure costs. But there’s a … a callousness in your attitude. You often seem to think a machine is worth more than a human life.”

  “It is, if several other human lives depend on it.” Pearson gave him a quizzical look. Himself an introvert, he had not yet gotten to know the new skipper very well. “Why did you come to the Belt, anyhow?”

  Ben Judah shrugged. “I was approaching compulsory retirement age. Earth’s too crowded for my liking. Beside, spacing is my trade, the thing I want most to do. JupeCo offered me good pay for as long as I’m able to stay in harness. Also a downright luxurious homeship for my family. I’ve no personal complaints. But sometimes I can’t help wondering, meaning no offense, if I want my children to grow up as asterites.”

  He flipped a switch on his viewscreen. The panel darkened into a simulacrum of the outside, uncountably many frost-co
ld stars, the curdled ice of the galaxy, and Jupiter. The planet hung monstrous in its nearness, amber with multitudinous colored bands, blotted by storms that could have gulped all Earth, the Red Spot a glowing ember. One moon was coming into sight around that terrible horizon. Its face was tinted saffron by reflection.

  “Live men, diving into yonder kettle of hell,” ben Judah said low. The susurrus of the ventilators made an undercurrent to his words, as if the ship tried to tell him something. “And it isn’t necessary. You could automate the operation.”

  “Doubling the capital investment in every scoopship,” Pearson said. “Also increasing the rate of loss by an estimated twenty-five percent. Too many unforeseeable things can go wrong down there. An autopilot can act only within the limits of its programming. A man can do more. Sometimes, when he runs into trouble, he can bring his ship back.”

  “Sometimes.” Ben Judah’s hands returned blindly to his pipe. He finished stuffing it, touched an igniter to the tobacco, and blew nervous puffs.

  “We get more applications than we can find qualified men to accept,” Pearson said. “Pay, prestige. And most of the boys actually enjoy the work.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m scared,” ben Judah said. A corner of his mind observed that his English, hitherto Oxford with an Israeli accent, was slipping into the Belt dialect. The citizens of the young Asteroid Republic had every national origin, but North Americans predominated and put their stamp on language and folkways. “When my sons are grown, they might put in for those berths … and get them.”

  Master Pilot Thomas Hashimoto eased his craft away from the mother ship with a deftness born less of experience in this job—though he had plenty—than of several years of Earthside test piloting. His motions at the control board were nearly unconscious. Most of his attention was on the view before him.