Tales of the Flying Mountains (15 page)

“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 perturbations 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.

She squeezed his hand and thought how lucky she was.
Oh, yes
, she recognized for an instant,
I was on the rebound, hurt, embittered, come to Flora in search of a new job, and I don't know which of us seduced the other, but I know how we quarrelled the first few years. His flamboyance, his recklessness, his almost compulsive gambling, his repeated failures to hold down steady work, agaist my … well, my unconfessed memories of someone else, which made me prim, overcautious, often shrill with him, much too often concerned with the children at his expense.…
The admission was unremorseful. Avis Page had long since become a stranger, as had that early Avis Bell. After Don had gradually accepted some domestication, and she some liberation …

Thought faded to nothing before the reality of him. He was big, dark, trim, usually smiling, always gracious, with a lingering trace of New Orleans accent to evoke girlhood days within her. In the elegance of black tunic and trousers, white lace, discreet gold arabesques, diamond rings, silver shoecaps—none of which he imagined might look “prosperous”—he was too handsome to be true.

“Pardon the interruption, Dave,” he said, not breaking the light contact of his fingers with hers. “Please go on.”

“Well, I really have little to tell,” Mayor Pirelli answered. His tone was not glad. “My office has received nothing since that short-notice message.” Bitterness tinged his quoting: “‘The President has dispatched a commission, now en route, for the purpose of investigating conditions in the Trojan colony and making recommendations as to desirable changes—' Not so much as their names. It's a flat-out insult.”

“Suggests they've already made up their minds what to do about us,” growled Pete Xenopoulos, who owned a fruit ranch, “and they don't give a curse how we feel.”

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Bell said. “Let's not borrow trouble. The interest rate is so high. Let's begin, at least, with speakin' softly, and listenin' more than we speak, and instead of arguin', just pointin' out how matters look to us. Now what occurs to me along that orbit is, we'll put them up in the hotel as planned, but we'll invite them to our homes, individually, and give them the grand tour individually. Can't hurt none, and it might win our side some friends.”

“Hm-m … maybe,” said Roth, proprietor of the community's largest machine shop. “We can try. But in that case, Don, Avis, you two better take charge of the leader. You put on a fancier spread than anybody else can, and … uh——”

“And he's likely to be the most obnoxious of the lot, and we're the most used to handlin' difficult customers, eh?” Bell stroked his mustache. “Yes, reckon so.”

The speakers woke with announcement and the transport ship, which had crossed space in days but was awkward near soil, lumbered down out of the sky.

The Bell house stood atop Mount Ida, where the air was too thin to breathe. You took a liftshaft straight up through the rock and emerged in a sealed complex of rooms, pools, conservatories riotous with color. Most spectacular was surely the living room. Besides its spaciousness, its furnishings, its imported hardwood floor, its central hearth of copper where a genuine fire burned synthetic but realistic logs, it had a vitryl dome for the roof that began at waist height. Thus you could look from the peak in one direction to see the gaiety and frail beauty of Dingdong; in another direction for a glimpse of an ice mine, machines, buildings, unending energy; and elsewhere down a sheer cliff to a country still raw and dark and empty of life. When the sun happened to be away, as it was at the moment, every spot overhead was diademmed with stars, nebulae, Milky Way and sister galaxies.

The butler set coffee and liqueur on a table carved from a single great quartz crystal. The three diners took their places in armchairs around it, and he left them on cat feet. Music lilted forth, not loud, meant for a pleasing background to conversation—something by Haydn, Avis seemed to recall, though she lacked Donald Bell's ear and memory.

“Cigar?” The host offered a silver humidor.

“No, thank you,” James Harker said. His voice was not really stiff, nor was his seated posture, but they gave that impression. “Do smoke yourselves if you wish.”

“Thank you, I will. I hope you enjoyed your dinner?”

“Why … yes, of course. I'm sorry, Mrs. Bell. I should have expressed my pleasure earlier. Frankly, I never expected a gourmet meal in these regions. You're a superb cook.”

Avis overcame her dislike of her guest sufficiently well to smile. “Actually,” she said, “my cook is.”

“You seem to have quite a large personal staff,” Harker remarked.

Bell shrugged. “About a dozen. Place this size; and then we do a lot of entertainin'.” He lounged back and streamed a blue cloud out between appreciative lips.

“Live servants are scarcely to be had anywhere at home,” Harker said. “Scarcely anywhere on Earth, I believe.”

“In spite of mass unemployment?” Avis asked.

Harker frowned. He did not look like a stereotypical puritan. His garments, while modest in hue and cut, were of good material, and his middle-aged features were blobby and undistinguished till you noticed the big chin and the hard eyes. He had been polite, in a noncommittal fashion, when the Bells escorted him around. But it was not possible for the head of the Presidential Investigating Commission to hide altogether his disapproval of unabashed luxury.

“Americans traditionally consider that kind of work degrading,” he said.

“Well, we've developed a different tradition in space,” Bell drawled. “That was necessary, back in the days when people used their hands because they hadn't any machine to substitute, maybe no machine'd been designed for a particular job yet … except man himself, the all-purpose gadget. And then, well, look at it this way. The pioneers had to be self-reliant, or they died. But they also had to be mutually helpful, or they died. So they evolved, more or less unconsciously, the notion that anyone who did well was morally obliged to find jobs for the less fortunate; and that there was no disgrace in takin' those jobs, because every erg of work contributed to improvement. The disgrace would lie in freeloadin'.”

“You have
no
unemployables?” Harker sounded sarcastic.

“Oh, some, sure,” Bell said. “A few extremely handicapped—though in this day of prosthetics and regrowth, those're mostly mental cases. Otherwise our philosophy of public assistance is the same as our independent neighbors'. Give the deservin' person a leg up, no more. Like, say, a widow with young children to look after and no close relatives to help her. But cases like that are rare, most families bein' large and close-knit.” He took a sip of Drambuie. “I don't imply we're saints, Mr. Harker. We're everything but. In the usual blind, blunderin' human style, we've developed institutions that serve our needs. Nothin' fancier'n that.”