O Pioneer! (10 page)

"It's the sewage that brings them," Dr. Patroosh said, without pleasure. "You always see them here."

And the pilot called, "You bet! Mean bastards. Eat you up, one bite, quick-quick. Get bad bellyache after, sure, but what you care? By then you dead. Now everybody shut up, must catch wave,"

He had throttled back the skimmer's thrusters, though keeping the fans that raised them above the water level at full power. They idled for a moment in the shallows where the river broadened out to enter the sea. Then he poured on the power, the skimmer leaped ahead, and they slid over the froth deposited by one breaking wave and climbed the next before it crested. Finally they were in deep water.

Nonchalantly the pilot stood up, swaying easily in the motion of the sea. From a compartment in the wall he took out a thing that looked more like a pocket camera than anything else and held it to one eye as he began to study the sea. Something in the control board began to hum and stutter; Giyt hoped it was an autopilot of some kind. At least, though the pilot was paying no attention at all to what the skimmer did, they seemed to be moving steadily toward a smudge on the horizon. Giyt supposed it was Energy Island, As the skimmer rose and fell over the vast Ocean swells, Rina began to look uncomfortable. The pilot took the thing away from one eye long enough to stare at her. "You think you going to puke? Okay, over side. Ocean don't mind; only don't lean over too far, Christ's sake. Got no way to pull you out before, you know, gobble-gobble."

By the time they reached Energy Island—sliding right up into a dock as behind them a great steel-wire gate closed to keep the shore animals out—Dr. Patroosh had explained why she preferred the skimmer to the gyrocopter. Under its gold skin the skimmer was built of a sort of foam plastic, so light that if anything went wrong the vessel would simply float until rescue arrived. The chopper had its own flotation devices, but swells would overwhelm them quickly enough. Then it would sink like a rock, and, she said positively, nodding toward the hungry creatures on the far side of the gate, "You can see why you don't want to go swimming in Ocean."

Whoever built the power plant seemed to like gold as much as the builder of the skimmer did. The plant was a collection of hemispherical golden domes. There was a twenty-meter-tall giant hemisphere in the middle and there were smaller ones, which gave off a sound of big engines running, nested around it. Every one of them was bright with a golden skin. The difference was that what the power plant's skin covered wasn't foam plastic. It was something hard and solid. Cement, maybe. Steel, more likely, Giyt thought.

The Delt pilot was watching him. He tapped Giyt on the shoulder with a long-fingered hand and said with pride, "Good electric, true? You know who build plant? Us. Not stinky Slug, Centaurian, Kalkaboo; when we come they have zero but damn pitiful hydroelectric dam for power. Delts laugh and laugh. Too tiny. Us build good one here. Fuse atoms, fine Delt designings. Then plenty electric, you bet, except now so many immigrants coming in need more. Oh," he added quickly, not meaning to give offense, "not just you Earth-creature guys, you understand? Damn Petty-Primes even worse."

Dr. Patroosh scowled at him. "Wait for us here," she ordered; and to Giyt and Rina, "Come on." And a moment later, when they were out of earshot, "You know what they want? They want us to dig the damn
foundations
for the new plant, while they supply all the high-tech stuff that we don't even get to look at. Like we were some damn Third World country that doesn't know anything about technology." She shook her head gloomily. "Anyway," she said, "I've got to talk to the head controller—he'll be another damn Delt, of course. You two can look around. There ought to be a few Earth people on the shift; maybe you can get one of them to show you what's what."

Evesham Giyt had never been in a power plant before. He had never thought much about what one might be like, either. Electricity was what you got when you turned a switch. Here inside the belly of the plant it was something else, something that shook the walls with low-frequency rumbling and hurt the ears with high-pitched whines. And
,
those, he knew, were only the sounds of the turbines that turned steam into electricity. The source of the infernal heat that distilled Ocean's water and then flashed it into steam to spin the turbines was silent. But it was there. Somewhere no more than a few dozen meters away, Giyt knew, incalculable numbers of hydrogen nuclei were madly coupling with each other to make helium. It was the same nuclear fusion that made the old H-bombs so terminally lethal—no, it was scarier than any H-bomb, because what was happening inside the biggest dome wasn't a single explosion. It was a process rather than an event, and it went on and on.

It did not seem to Giyt that this was a thing that should be left to run itself, however good the automatic controls. But there seemed to be nobody in sight. As he and Rina walked along the golden corridors they passed a sleeping Kalkaboo, curled against a wall. He woke up long enough to glare at them, then returned to sleep. It was only after a ten-minute search that they heard a whirring sound. It came from where a human shift worker was watching a porn film on his handset as he followed the cleaning machines around.

When Giyt asked the man for guidance he gave Giyt an injured look. "You don't recognize me, do you? Colly Detslider. I'm the relief driver on Pumper Three in the fire company."

But after Giyt apologized and shook his hand, the man was happy enough for an excuse to leave the machines to do their job on their own. Yes, he told them, there was a full shift on duty—thirty persons, five of them human like himself. No, he didn't know where the others were. Sure, he'd show them around, although it was only fair to warn them that his own job here was janitorial and he didn't know much about the machinery.

He knew enough, though, to keep them from going near the central chamber where the tokamak held its fusing plasma in an unbreakable magnetic grip. They saw the pumps that sucked cool water in from Ocean, to make steam and then to condense it when spent; they saw the gratings that kept the creatures of Ocean from being sucked in along with it; they saw the remarkably slim cables, wrapped in the chilling jackets that made them superconducting, that carried the power plant's output down under the strait to the community that used it. They even peeped into the control room, every wall a mosaic of screens and signals, where they saw Dr. Patroosh furiously arguing with a pair of uninterested Delt controllers. They would have seen more, probably, but Detslider was watching the time. He was due for his lunch break, he informed them, and they were welcome to come along if they wanted to.

Lunch was machine-served in a large room filled with tables, couches, and Kalkaboo tree-rests, sparsely occupied by beings who paid no attention to the human visitors. To Giyt's displeasure the human lunch menu turned out to be creamed chipped beef on toast. "It's always something the machines can dispense. Real crap," Detslider told him. "Come on. Take your plate and we'll go someplace that smells better to eat it." A Delt, sipping some thick yellow liquid from a shallow bowl by the door, turned one eye to glare at Detslider as they left, but the man ignored him. Five meters down the corridor there was a smaller room, with two human women and a man playing pinochle at one table and space for the visitors at another. While Giyt doggedly ate his lunch Rina made polite conversation with all of them. Detslider came from Pasadena, he said, but left it for Tupelo because there was too much crime in California. Like his job? Well, it was all right, but boring. The others, respectively from Tucson, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Boston, agreed, the woman from Pottsville adding, "The damn Delts push you around here, like they owned the place." But it wasn't just the Earth humans that suffered, she conceded; the Delts acted superior to everybody.

When they went back to the control room Dr. Patroosh spied them, snapped some final argument at the Delt controllers, and swept past them at the door. Over her shoulder she called, "Come on, we'll go home. I'm not doing any good here." And crossing the strait in the skimmer she was silent and morose. When Rina asked her sociably how her mission had gone. Dr. Patroosh snapped, "Lousy. They've got this whole fusion section locked up, nobody but Delts allowed in—because of radiation danger, they say, but for Christ's sake we know all about radiation danger." She glanced at the Delt pilot, who seemed to be paying them no attention, but lowered her voice. "I'm going home to report. We'll see what happens . . . but I'll bet we'll cave in again and dig their damn foundation for them." Then she was silent. So were Giyt and Rina until their pilot, sweeping the surface of Ocean with his glass, cried out joyfully and began pulling something heavy and harsh-looking out of a locker. With one hand he steered the skimmer toward dimples of disturbed water; with the other he was locking the object from the locker to a mount on the skimmer's rail.

"Now what?" Dr. Patroosh demanded irritably.

Giyt had no answer for her, but Rina piped up. "Do you know what that looks like. Shammy? That long gold thing with the barbs on the head?" And then of course he did. It was a harpoon, and the Delt proved it a moment later by firing it at the little whirlpools—no, at something under the whirlpools, something red and many-eyed that gasped and snorted as the shaft struck home and it rose briefly to the surface.

The pilot shrieked in exultation, something that the translator did not even try to put into English. The creature sounded, pulling a hundred meters of supple, braided cable out of the harpoon's reel. The pilot made an adjustment on the reel, darted to the controls, and started the skimmer at high speed toward the coast. Then he turned to his passengers, grinning. "Good eating, you bet! But maybe too far out for any good."

"Too far out for what good?" Rina asked, but the Delt had already turned away. He was talking rapidly on the communicator to someone ashore, keeping one eye on the skimmer's wake, where the cable was stretched out almost horizontally. At the end of it Giyt could see the quarry flailing about for a moment, then it disappeared below the surface. Ominous whirls appeared all around it, and then something else was in the water. Blood?

It was blood, all right.

By the time the skimmer reached the river's mouth a Delt vehicle built like an armored car was waiting for them, but it was too late. When the pilot hauled his catch in to retrieve his harpoon most of the creature was gone, slashed away by the horde of predators.

The pilot laughed and spoke into the communicator; the tanklike thing lumbered away as he turned the skimmer upstream toward the town. He said philosophically, "Too far out, you understand? Too bad. Wonderful to eat, only not just for Delts." Then he pursed his everted lips, as though trying to remember something, then brightened. "Hey, I know Earth thing! You know Earth-human liar Kepigay?"

"Who?" Giyt asked, and the Delt tried the name several times more before Rina said, "Oh, do you mean Ernest Hemingway?"

"Yes. Excellent liar, Kepigay. Greatly enjoy Earth-human lies; Earth humans such excelling liars. You know Kepigay old Earth romance lie,
Man Approaching Death in Relationship to Ocean
?"

"I think he means
The Old Man and the Sea
," Rina offered. "We had it in American lit in Wichita."

The pilot nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, I had volume also in aboriginal folk lie study. Damn good lie, that one. You see? Same thing here; catch fish too far, sharks eat. Aboriginals have much native lore which persons can learn from, I say always—though not," he added, with one eye wandering over to fix on Dr. Patroosh, "on subject nuclear fusion."

And all the way back to the town their pilot entertained them with stories of his fishing exploits while Dr. Patroosh glowered silently into space. When the pilot let them out on the shore of Crystal Lake, he said cheerfully, "Survive well until dark."

Rina giggled. "I think he means have a nice day."

"Yes, exactly. Do not shoot brain fragments all over house like famous Earth-human liar Kepigay."

They dropped Dr. Patroosh off at the Hagbarth home. Then, in the cart going to their own house, Rina said thoughtfully, "You know what's funny, hon?"

"What?"

"Well, Colly's from California, right? We're from Kansas. Matya comes from a little town on the Jersey shore, Lupe from just outside of Albuquerque, those other guys—"

"What's funny about that? Everybody has to come from someplace."

"Well, sure, Shammy, but they're all from
America.
Wouldn't you think there'd be some people from South America or Asia or somewhere?"

He thought for a moment, then brightened. "What about Dr. Patroosh? She said she was from some island in the Indian Ocean."

"No, not exactly. She said her grandparents were. She's an American, all right. So I just think it's funny that there isn't anybody from the rest of the world, that's all."

X

The celebrated inventor of the faster-than-light transmission portal, Dr. Fitzhugh Sommermen, remains in a coma after suffering a major stroke. The attack occurred while the scientist was being interviewed on European network television. His physicians have declined to offer any prognosis for his recovery, saying only that he is resting comfortably and that all possible measures are being taken. In a related story, U.S. President Walter P. Garsh interrupted a news conference this morning to deliver a typically outspoken attack on the European reporters who were questioning Dr. Sommermen at the time. "When will they stop badgering this, poor man?" the president demanded. "No one can pretend that it is only scientific curiosity that continues to impel them. They want secrets, and they want them for their own use. Well, they won't get them. These secrets belong to America, and we aren't giving them away."

—
EARTH NEWS TRANSMISSION TO TUPELO

Once his wife had called it to his attention, Giyt began to ponder the question himself. It seemed to be true. There weren't any Tupeloyian humans from anywhere on Earth but the U.S.A., and why was that?