New America Page 6

  “You’re okay?” Dan croaked.

  “Y-yes. That is, the Lochabers are sick, but they ought to recover fast.”

  Dan crawled on hands and knees to Mary. “I came for you,” he said, and held her close. Dazed, she responded only with a mumble. He let her go, rose, and conferred with Bill.

  Taking in still more line, they secured bights around bodies at five-meter intervals. Bill would go first, he being in condition to help Eva; next came Ralph; then Mary (as he made her fast, Dan thought what an odd and deep intimacy this was); finally Dan himself, who could best endure the maximum oscillation.

  The remnant of the task proved simple. Eva raised the car, at the lowest possible rate, until one by one the four on the rope dangled free in the sky. She continued to rise till they were in calm air. Thereafter she left the vehicle again at hover and winched them in.

  Though reduction helmets were always on hand, she depressurized the cabin on the way back to Moondance. The Lochabers sat half asleep, half in a faint. Eva called the station medic. He said the highlanders should stay in the guesthouse till they had regained enough strength for a flight home; but on the basis of Bill’s account, he didn’t think that would take long, nor that treatment need consist of more than bed rest and nourishment.

  Dan spoke little. He was sunk in thought. Directly after landing, he prepared to take off again.

  When he had cycled through the lock, he found Eva on hand. The quarters were a dormitory with kitchenette and mini-bath—cramped, austere, and relieved only by windows that gave on a view of lake and forest, but they could never be opened to the breeze that sang outside. Eva had drawn a chair into the narrow aisle between rows of bunks. Ralph lay at her left, Mary at her right. The siblings were in pajamas, propped up on pillows. Nearby stood a vase of triskele that the visitor must have brought. The room had grown vivid with the goldenness of the blossoms, pungent with their summery odor.

  Dan halted. Eva had been crying! She’d washed her face afterward, but even though she seldom wept, he knew the traces of it upon her.

  “Why hello, stranger,” Ralph greeted. His tone was a little mechanical. Both the Lochabers already seemed well on their way back to health —and less than happy. “How did your expedition go?”

  “Successful, I think.” Dan’s gaze went to Mary and would not let itself be hauled away. Her hair was molten amber across the pillows and her eyes like the heavens about High America. She smiled at him; but the smile was uncertain, even timid.

  “How are you doing?” he said, 99 percent to her.

  “We’re coming along fine.” She spoke so low that he had to strain to hear her in this thin air. “Thanks to you.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t much.” Curiously, he didn’t blush. Rather, he felt the ghost of a chill.

  “It was plenty.” Ralph’s words came firm. He, too, was a leader. “Damn few men could have done what you did, or would have dared to risk their necks like that.”

  “I did try to talk him out of it,” Eva said in a dulled voice.

  “A heroic action,” Ralph went on. “You saved us several extra hours of suffering. Please don’t think we’re ungrateful. Still, we can’t help wondering. Why?”

  “Your lives,” Dan answered. “Or, maybe, worse, brain damage.”

  Mary shook her head. “That wasn’t at stake, dear, once you’d located us,” she said gently. “We could have waited awhile more.”

  “I couldn’t be sure of that,” he said, with a slight upstirring of anger that she should be thus withdrawn. “I didn’t know how long you’d been marooned, and you just might have been among those people whose pressure tolerance is abnormally low.” As low as mine is high.

  “We aren’t,” Ralph said. “But anyway, it was quite an exploit, and we owe you our sincerest thanks.” He paused. “And then you flew back at once, not even stopping to rest. I stand in awe.” He chuckled, though his heart wasn’t in it. “Or, I will stand in awe as soon as the doctor lets me out of bed.”

  Dan was glad to shift the subject. “My job, after all.” He drew up a chair to face Eva and them. It was good to sit. Hour upon hour had drained him. (The flight from here to the valley again, through air that in places had gotten heavily turbulent; the hovering above the rampage; the squinting and studying, while the agony of the herd tore in him almost as if it had been his own; the final thing he did; and not even his triumph able to lift the weariness off his bones, during the long flight back.) Maybe he should have caught some sleep after his return, before coming here.

  “Was it the terasaur you were concerned about?” Mary asked. “Eva told us you were going back to them, but she didn’t know more than that herself.”

  He nodded. “Uh-huh. They’re an important part of the environment. I couldn’t pass up this chance to learn more about them, and try to save what was left.”

  Eva half rose. Something of the woe behind her eyes disappeared. “Did you?” she cried.

  “I think so.” A measure of joy woke likewise in him. “Frankly, I feel more like bragging about that than about a bit of athletics at a rope’s end.”

  “What happened? What’d you do?” Eva reached toward him.

  He grinned. The tide of his pleasure continued to flow. “Well, you see, terasaur do go rather wild in rutting season. The cause must be a change in body chemistry, whether hormonal or pheromonal we don’t know—but we do know how micro amounts of such substances will affect animal behavior, humans included. Now, this herd wasn’t mating and its antics were crazy even for that time of year. However, there were certain basic similarities. I wondered what new factor might have triggered the madness.”

  He stopped for breath. “Go on!’” Eva urged.

  Dan sought Ralph’s gaze. “Petroleum is complicated stuff,” he said. “Besides long-chain hydrocarbons, it contains all sorts of aromatics and the chemists alone know what else. In addition, your jet fuel probably has polymers or whatever, produced in the course of refining. My idea was that in among those molecules is one, or a set, that happens to resemble the terasaurian sex agent.” Mary drew a gasp. “Not your fault,” Dan added hastily. “Nobody could have known. But it does underline the necessity of learning everything we can about this planet, doesn’t it?”

  The blond young man scowled. “You mean… wait a minute,” he said. “A few bulls drifted near our car, probably just curious. They got a whiff of unburned fuel dissipating in the exhaust; we’d left the motor idling as a precaution—what we thought was a precaution. That whiff was enough to make them charge, cutting us off from the car. Then, when the first tank was ruptured and fuel spilled out by the hundreds of liters, it drove the entire herd into a frenzy. Is that what you mean?”

  Dan nodded again. “Correct. Though of course the total situation was wrong, unbalanced, for the poor beasts. The molecules involved must have similarities but no doubt aren’t identical with their natural gonad stimulator. Besides, it’s the wrong time of year and so forth. No wonder they ran amok. Suppose someone injected you with an overdose of any important hormone!”

  “It’s an interesting guess. Are you certain, though?”

  “The biochemists will have to check out the details. But, yes, I am certain in a general way. You see, I flitted back to the site, where they were still rampaging. I ignited the spilled fuel with a thermite bomb. It went up fast, in this atmosphere. Almost immediately, the herd started to calm down. By the time I left, the survivors had returned to their calves.”

  “M-m-m—”

  “I know why you’re glum, Ralph. Your family business is getting set to produce oil-fired motors. And now it’ll have to do a lofrmore research first. What’s at stake isn’t merely the terasaur, you realize. It’s every related species, maybe the entire lowland ecology.”

  “That’s why you were so anxious to save the herd,” Mary said low. “Eva’s told us how you insisted.”

  “Oh, I didn’t have any definite ideas at that time,” Dan replied. “Only a—general principle.”
His mood drooped. Trying to lift it, he said, “This doesn’t mean your father’s project has to be cancelled. Once the chemicals have been identified, I’m sure they can be taken out of the fuel.”

  “Indeed.” Ralph forced a smile. “You’ve done us a considerable favor, actually. Besides the rescue, you’ve saved us a number of further losses like this.”

  “But you didn’t know!” tore from Mary.

  Dan started half out of his seat. “What’s that?”

  “You didn’t know—then—and anyway, even if you had known, there are other herds—” She began to weep.

  Appalled, he went to her, knelt by her bunk, and gripped her hand. It lay cold and moveless in his. “Mary, what’s wrong?”

  “I was afraid of this… what Ralph and Eva were getting at… before you came… don’t you see? You, you care so greatly about this land… that to save a part of it… you’d risk—”

  “Not your life, ever!” he exclaimed.

  “No, I s-s-suppose not… but your own!”

  “Why shouldn’t I, if I want to?” he asked in his bewilderment.

  Her look was desperate upon him. “I thought—I hoped—All the years we might have had! You risked those!”

  “But… but Mary, my duty—”

  In long, shuddering breaths, she mastered herself enough to say, with even the ghost of a smile: ” ‘I could not love thee (Dear) so much, Lov’d I not honour more.’ Dan, I never really sympathized with that attitude. Or, at least, I think two people have to share the same, well, the same honor, if they really want to, to share each other. We belong to different countries, you and I. Can you understand?”

  He shook his head as he spoke, harshly. “No. I’m afraid I don’t.” He rose to go. “But you’re still exhausted, Mary. I’d better not keep after you about this, or anything. Let’s talk later, shall we?”

  He stooped above her bed, and their lips touched, carefully, as if they were strangers.

  Though the air outside was hot and damp, a rising wind roared in treetops; and over the lake came striding the blue-black wall of a rainstorm that would cleanse and cool.

  Nobody else was in sight when Dan and Eva left the guesthouse. Nonetheless they did not continue on among the neighbor buildings, but went down to the shore. The water chopped at their feet. Afar, lightning flashes were reflected off its steeliness, and thunder rolled around heaven.

  “Well,” he said at last, into the wind, “I guess that’s that.”

  “You’ll get over it,” said Eva, no louder or livelier than he. “You both will, and be friends when you happen to meet.”

  “Except why couldn’t she see—?”

  “She could, Dan. That’s precisely the trouble, or the salvation. She sees far too clearly.”

  “You mean, because I care about the land, she doesn’t imagine I care about her? No! She’s not that petty.”

  “I didn’t say she is, Dan. In fact, she’s very large, > very wise and kind. Look, she can live here, never going outside of cages like a house and a helmet. But to make you stay all your days, or more than a bare fragment of them, where she can be—that’d cage you. You, who now have the whole world before you. Better to say goodbye at once, while you’re still fond of each other.”

  And you, Eva, inherit me, he thought in bitterness. He glanced down at her, but her head was averted from him and he saw only flying cinnabar locks.

  Wind skirled, thunder cannonaded. He barely heard, after a minute: “That’s what I had to tell Ralph before you arrived. When he asked me to marry him.”

  The breath went from Dan. The first stinging drops of rain smote him in the face.

  Then she turned back and took both his hands. In her eyes he saw—not a plea, not an invitation— the challenge to make a new beginning.

  A FAIR EXCHANGE

  Nowhere on Rustum was autumn like that season anywhere on Earth. But on the plateau of High America it did recall, a little, the falls and Indian summers of the land whence this one had its name—if only because many plants from another mother planet now grew there. Or so the oldest colonists said. They had become very few. Daniel Coffin knew Earth from books and pictures and a dim star near Bootes, which his foster father had pointed out as Sol.

  Red leaves of maple, yellow leaves of birch, gold-streaked scarlet leaves of gim tree, scrit-tled on the wind, while overhead tossed the blue featheriness of plume oak that does not shed for winter. The founders of Anchor were forethoughtful men and women, who laid out broad streets lined with saplings when they were huddling in tents or sod huts. The timber grew with the town. In summer it gave shade, today it gave radiance to pavement, to walls of brick and tinted concrete and what frame buildings remained from earlier times, to groundcars and trucks—and an occasional horse-drawn wagon, likewise a souvenir of the pioneers—that bustled along the ways.

  Children bound for school dodged in and out among elder pedestrians. Their shouts rang. Coffin remembered the toil and poverty he had lived with, like everyone else, and smiled a bit. Yes, there is such a thing as progress, he thought.

  Air flowed and murmured, cool on his face, crisp in his nostrils. The sky arched altogether clear, pale blue, full of southbound wings. Eastward, the early morning sun stood ruddy-orange at the end of street and town, above the snowpeaks of the distant Hercules range. Though Anchor’s hinterland was an entire planet, it was itself not large: about ten thousand permanent residents, more than half of them children. To be sure, this was a fourth of the world’s humanity.

  Glancing the opposite way, Coffin saw a tattered drift of smoke above the mostly low roofs. A flaw of wind brought a rotten-egg stench. He scowled. Progress can get overdone. Though he had never seen it in person, writings, films, and the tales of witnesses had driven into his bones what too much population and industry had done to Earth.

  And as for children—the cheerfulness of the weather departed. Here was the hospital. His heart knocked and he mounted the steps more slowly than was his wont.

  “Good morning, Mr. Coffin.” The nurse on desk duty was quite young. She addressed him with an awe which hitherto he had found wryly amusing. Him, plain Dan Coffin, lowland farmer?

  Well, of course he’d made a name for himself as a young man, one of the few who could explore the immensities down yonder and gain the knowledge of Rustum that all men must have. And, yes, he’d had experiences that made sensational stories. But he’d always winced at those, recollecting the ancient saying that adventure happens only to the incompetent—then excusing himself with the fact that in so much unknownness, it was impossible to foresee every working of Murphy’s Law.

  And anyhow, that was long behind him. He’d been settled down at Lake Moondance for—was it thirty-five years? (Which’d be about twenty Terrestrial, said an echo from his childhood, when people were still trying to keep up traditions like Christmas.) Oh yes, he did have by far the biggest plantation in those parts, or anywhere in the lowlands. He could be reckoned as well-off. His neighbors for three or four hundred kilometers around considered him a sort of leader, and had informally commissioned him to speak for them in High America. Nevertheless!

  “Good morning, Miss Herskowitz,” he said, bowing as was expected in Anchor, where they went in more for mannerly gestures than folk did on the frontier. “Uh, I wonder, I know it’s early but I have an appointment soon and—”

  The sudden compassion on her face struck him with terror. “Yes, by all means, Mr. Coffin. Your wife’s awake. Go right on in.”

  That gaze followed him as he strode: a stocky, muscular man, roughly clad for his field trip later today, his features broad and weathered, his black hair streaked with gray. He felt it on his back, in his heart.

  The door was open to Eva’s room. He closed it behind him. For a moment he stood mute. Against propped-up pillows, sunlight through a window gave her mane back the redness it had had when first they knew each other. She was nursing their baby. On a table stood a vase of roses. He hadn’t brought them, hadn’t even k
nown the town now boasted a conservatory. The hospital staff must have given them. That meant—

  She raised her eyes to him. Their green was faded by weariness and (he could tell) recent crying. For the same reason, the freckles stood forth sharply on her snub-nosed countenance. And yet she was making a recovery from childbirth that would have been fast and good in a much younger woman.

  “Dan—” He had long had a little trouble hearing, in the High American air that was scarcely thicker than Earth’s. Now he must almost read her lips. “We can’t keep him.”

  He clamped his fists. “Oh, no.”

  She spoke a bit louder, word by word. “It’s final. They’ve made every clinical test and there is no doubt. If we bring Charlie to the lowlands, he’ll die.”

  He slumped on a chair at the bedside and groped for her hand. She didn’t give it to him. Holding the infant close in both arms, she stared at the wall before her and said, flat-voiced: “That was twelve or thirteen hours ago. They tried to get hold of you, but you weren’t to be found.”

  “No, I—I had business, urgent business.”

  “You’ve had a lot of that, the whole while I was here.”

  “Oh, God, darling, don’t I know it!” He barely, lightly grasped her shoulder. His hand shook. “Don’t you know it, too?” he begged. “I’ve explained—”

  “Yes. Of course.” She turned to him with the resolution he knew. She even tried to smile, though that failed. “I’ve just… been lonely. I’ve missed you….” Then she could hold out no longer, and she bent her head and wept.

  He rose, stooped over her, gathered clumsily to his bosom her and the last child the doctors said she could ever have. “I know half a dozen fine homes that’d be happy to foster him,” he said. “That’s one thing that kept me busy, looking into this matter, in case. We can come see him whenever we want. It’s not like him being dead, is it? And, sure, we’ll adopt an exogene as soon as possible. Sweetheart, we both knew our luck couldn’t hold out forever. Three children of our own that we could keep may actually have bucked the odds. We’ve a lot to be glad of. Really we do.”