Pallas (22 page)

Like me?
he
asked himself.

Like me,
he decided. No matter how many of these little guns he made, he planned to go on carrying the Grizzly which hung heavily next to his right thigh where the braided tie-down bunched his trousers and put a wrinkle across the crease.
It’s a new low,
he thought,
when you’re getting revenge on a three-piece suit.

Cherry frowned. “Now you just hush your mouth up, Glea Thomas,” she insisted. “It’s my money we’re discussing here, and I think a little more respect is called for—for the money, if not for myself.” She smiled sweetly. “Otherwise, I’ll just take it all to another bank—or maybe start one of my own.”

The banker blanched—and hushed. In a community where fractional reserve banking—the lending of more money by a bank than it holds in the form of deposits—was considered an act of criminal fraud, banks often ran out of spare cash of their own and had to court their customers into making loans. His once mighty profession had been reduced to that of financial matchmaker.

Emerson could see Aloysius and Nails each stifling a grin. Both were
aware, as was Emerson himself and anyone else in town who frequented Galena’s or the Nimrod, that Thomas would like to have been one of
Cherry’s
best customers, but that she was too choosy and had declined the offer on several occasions.

Emerson couldn’t afford Cherry professionally, and he’d had too much self-respect over the past year to presume on her charitable hosp
i
tality again, although they often enjoyed each other’s chance comp
a
nionship at Brody’s establishment. She was the only Monopoly player there who beat him regularly.

“I believe I’ll second the lady’s motion,” Brody told them all, taking the gun from Cherry and admiring it all over again. “Cut me in for a third of the action.”

“Make it a quarter, Aloysius, if we’re going equal shares.” Mrs. Singh, being an expatriate American and a bit old-fashioned about such things, was inclined to disapprove of Cherry on principle, owing to her profe
s
sion, but always warmed to the little blond after a few minutes’ rea
c
quaintance.
“One for the young lady, one for you, one for me, and one for Emerson for having invented the damned thing.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, there’s enough here for everybody.”

“Then let’s make it a fifth, Mrs. Singh.” Nails leaned in to lay a huge, grimy hand on the banker’s otherwise pristine desk. After insisting that Emerson go home early and put on his suit, he’d come straight from the shop wearing his greasy work clothes. Emerson’s suspicion that it was a deliberate slight was immediately confirmed. “I managed to scrape a little bit of money together at the last minute. No thanks to you,” he added, glaring at the banker.

The banker sighed and rolled his eyes, obviously dissatisfied with the barbaric way these colonials conducted their affairs. Bankers didn’t usually last long on Pallas, Emerson knew. This one was the third in the last year, and probably wouldn’t last another quarter. They’d end up flying him back to one of the poles for transshipment to Earth in a straitjacket. The last one had gone native, quit his job, and was now a lone surveyor somewhere out in the weyers.

Come to think of it, it didn’t sound like a bad life at that.

“Then it’s all settled except for the paperwork,” the banker announced, gamely enough, Emerson conceded. It was the only way the man was going to make money on this deal.

“That’s right,” Nails agreed. “It’s all settled. And now we’re all going to get rich!”

“No,” corrected Cherry, generating a look of extreme pain on the banker’s face. “I’m going to get richer.”

Aloysius laughed and slapped his knees. “Medear, I was about to say exactly the same thing!”

When Emerson and Mrs. Singh arrived back at the boardinghouse that afternoon, ready to prepare a festive dinner for their old friends and new business partners, they found a small inset green light glowing from one of the few items of furniture set against the wall in her living room that was not a bookcase.

“Looks like we got us some mail,” his landlady observed. Like the boy, she was laden down with supplies they’d purchased on their way home. “Why don’t you take a peek, Emerson, while I get these here groceries into the
icebox.
”

More and more, since Gretchen had left them, Mrs. Singh had treated Emerson like a son. He was the only boarder she’d have asked to take a look at her mail. Emerson set down the bags he was carrying on the coffee table, gratefully removed his necktie and shoved it into a jacket pocket, and began unfastening the tie-down of his gunbelt. His three-piece suit had never been designed for such an accessory, and the weight of the weapon around his waist had grown increasingly uncomfortable throughout the long, unseasonably hot afternoon.

Or perhaps it was just having spent two hours of that afternoon with Cherry—and anticipating another couple of hours with her this eve
n
ing—whom he was beginning to consider approaching on a personal, rather than professional, basis. Thinking pleasant thoughts of a kind he hadn’t for many months, he went to the elaborately decorated cabinet, half again as tall as he was, and opened the double doors to inspect the output of the printer it contained. It was this device which the present
message had sought out and found.

The physical delivery of mail was something of a hit-or-miss prop
o
sition on Pallas, as it had become in many places on Earth most people would have regarded as civilized.

Partly this was a consequence of unreliable state monopolies on letter delivery, made worse in recent decades by the gradual collapse of go
v
ernment institutions in general. Partly, however, it was simply a result of technical progress. Three-quarters of the mail sent and received in the twentieth century needn’t have been sent at all, and most of the remaining quarter would have traveled faster and more cheaply—and with a greater guarantee of privacy—electronically.

The message was from Gretchen, the first they’d received since her recorded phone call of more than a year ago. Not knowing precisely what he was feeling—he supposed he should have known that this was i
n
evitable—he tore it from the printer and reluctantly took it to the kitchen. It was from this moment on, he realized many years later, that he first began thinking of Mrs. Singh—because from this moment she’d begun acting that way—as an old woman.

Mr. and Mrs. Gibson Altman, Jr.

are
pleased to announce

the
birth of their daughter

Gwendolyn Rosalie

...designed to be dropped into enemy-occupied Allied countries.
The idea...originated with the Joint Psychological Committee. The Ordnance Department made up...sketches of a [single-shot] we
a
pon...made of stampings with a...smoothbore barrel made of sea
m
less steel tubing...Guide Lamp Division of General Motors man
u
factured one million of these pistols by 21 August 1942 at a cost of slightly over $1.71 each.

—W.H.B. Smith,
Book of Pistols and Revolvers

T
he first hundred “
Ngu
Departure” semiautomatic pistols were man
u
factured in a flimsy annex, no more than a shed, hastily thrown up behind Osborn’s Plumbing & Machine Shop.

While Emerson cut stainless plates on a bandsaw and Nails drilled them for the connecting bolts—as well as the crosspins that would hold the parts inside the assembled frames—Aloysius wielded a chambering reamer on the barrel blanks which the two machinists had already cut and turned to the correct outside dimensions.

Cherry, doing the job Nails had interrupted the night Emerson first discussed the idea with him, made certain all components were properly finished.

Mrs. Singh took the completed parts and turned them into pistols.

They all took turns proof- and function-testing the finished product through the back door of the shed, which let out onto nothing but empty prairie behind the town.

Toward the end, when they’d already begun receiving prepaid orders, all the partners stayed up late into the night, laboring to make sure the orders were filled on time. Sometimes Emerson wondered if the profit would cover all the coffee they consumed. The whole process taught him and his friends a great deal that they’d thought they already knew about mass production. As one consequence, a brief interval followed during which the partners actually refused to take anybody else’s money until they all felt they were truly ready.

The second hundred pistols, along with every other weapon Emerson
and his little company ever made, were completed six months later in a modest factory building erected—neither by accident nor coinc
i
dence—on an unclaimed plot of land just five miles outside the gate of the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project. The consequences of that decision would reverberate for almost a century afterward.

Exactly as Emerson intended.

Although he kept his principal motive to himself at the time, Emerson had already learned something from his many jobs and everything that had happened to him since he’d run away from the Project. Arguing one strangely idle night in the Nimrod—shortly after the first run of pistols had been completed (and sold out within just a few hours of KCUF’s public announcement of their availability)—with those friends of his who’d been willing to take a risk with him against the possibility of a profit (and then added their sweat to his to raise that possibility to a probability), he emphasized the point that the manufacturing business they’d started together was completely dependent on hand assembly.

“Yes,” he replied impatiently to someone’s objection, “I know exactly how far away it is. Didn’t I ride the whole way in the cargo rack of a rollabout where I could count every last corrugation in a road consisting of nothing but washboard? Didn’t I measure every desolate mile—every yard—between there and here? But it’s also where the cheapest available labor on the asteroid happens to be—”

Aloysius laughed heartily. “Not to mention ten thousand potential new customers!”

One of their “old” customers chose that moment to pass by their table, drink in hand, patting Aloysius and Emerson on the back by turns and pointing happily to a worn and weather-stained pistol belt hanging on the elk rack at the back of the bar with a brand-new, shiny
Ngu
Departure pistol resting in its holster.

“There is that,” Emerson acknowledged, once these congratulations were over with. His attention had strayed momentarily to the fans hanging from the ceiling overhead. He’d always liked them for some reason he couldn’t quite get hold of. They’d been imported from Earth, originally. Aloysius had once told him that he’d been required to step down the
speed of their motors in order to keep them from blowing drinks off the tables—not to mention his clientele off their chairs—in the low Pallatian gravity.
Tonight, looking up at them made him think about his secret boyhood dream of flying over the Rimfence to freedom.

“Steady down now, boys,” advised Cherry. “We’ve got a lot more planning to do before we choose a manufacturing site. In the first place, the good Senator—”

“The good
former
Senator,” Nails corrected her.

“I’d say the only good Senator is a former Senator,” Mrs. Singh o
b
served smugly. She peered down into her coffee cup and frowned at the reflection she saw there.

Cherry ignored them. “—will never let his people go to work for us. In the second place, even if he did by some miracle, he’d never, ever let them have guns. Sometimes I think that was the whole point of the Project in the first place. And in the third place, how could any of them possibly afford to buy one?”

“I think you had two first places in there somewhere,” Nails told her quietly. Emerson had always privately suspected that he was a little bit afraid of her.

Mrs. Singh shook her head. “Lookie here: when automobiles were first produced, they cost a couple of thousand dollars apiece. That’s old American dollars, at about thirty-five to the ounce of gold. Which was way more than anybody but rich people could afford back then—not that I remember it personally, mind you.

“Then along came Henry Ford, with a mind to put the whole damn country on wheels, and car pricing was never the same afterward. He charged a flat eight hundred dollars, and when his higher-priced co
m
petitors came around to whine about it, he explained that if the average individual who worked in his car factory couldn’t afford to buy one of his cars, there wasn’t any point to making them.”

“I stand corrected,” Cherry replied. “I guess. I’ve never been in a business before where anyone gained anything by economy of scale and volume pricing.”

Aloysius laughed again.

Emerson grinned, too. “For as long as anyone remembers, gunshops around here have been demanding three gold ounces—at about a tho
u
sand New American Dollars per—for anything that’ll shoot. And they’re the same old clunkers, recycled and recirculated, that have been here since they were first brought up from Earth by all of you people. Meanwhile, the gunshop owners complain constantly that business is flat.”

“We asked half an ounce for ours,” Aloysius agreed, “and sold a hundred on the same day.”

The partners were interrupted again when the Jacksons, Mrs. Singh’s other steady boarders, stopped by to ask Emerson a technical question about the pair of consecutively numbered pistols they’d just taken del
i
very on. In Lenda’s hand were two delicate glasses and a bottle of the Nimrod’s most expensive wine, which they’d bought to celebrate the occasion. Emerson noticed the gaze of her husband Charlie straying to the Grizzly hanging in its heavy belt on the back wall. Aloysius and the others had argued that it was bad business for the boy not to be carrying one of the guns he’d designed. Emerson had answered that the
Ngu
D
e
parture was for people who didn’t already have weapons they were s
a
tisfied with.

“We could have sold twice as many,” Nails added when the Jacksons had left, “at twice the price. I knew this guy, one time, who hand-made the best five-string banjos in the solar system. But he damn near starved to death because his prices were so low it looked suspicious, like he was selling junk or something. Nobody bought from him until he doubled what he’d been asking for them.”

Emerson nodded. “Except that we won’t. You once asked me, Nails, what else I’d stolen from the old Earth-side gun outfits when I showed you my first prototype, remember?”

Nails gave him a dubious look. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, Mrs. Singh’s house is full of history books,” he explained, “and I’ve read as many of them as I had time for. There’s a good deal more in the past that any halfway intelligent entrepreneur can use than just simple design features. Whether we ever state it publicly or not, Nails, I’ve
adopted the motto from the old Iver Johnson Arms & Cycle Works: ‘Honest Goods at Honest Prices.’”

“Honest goods at honest prices,” Cherry remarked brightly. “Now that’s something I
do
understand.”

Emerson turned to the little blond. “The Chief Administrator may not have any choice much longer about what he lets his workers do, Cherry. I think there’s something going terribly wrong out there. We’ve all noticed how the quality of the produce the rollabouts bring to Curringer seems to get worse every week.”

“Something odd must be going on,” she agreed, “because the drivers don’t spend any time at Galena’s any more while their machines are r
e
charging overnight.”

Emerson remembered that driving produce deliveries had been a pr
i
vilege individual workers competed for. The temporary freedom of the town must have been a major inducement in obtaining volunteers for the long trip from the Project and back.

“More to the point, perhaps,” suggested Aloysius,
“they’re not spending any money, not at Galena’s, not here at the Nimrod, nor any other place here about.”

Emerson went on. “I keep hearing rumors of all kinds. What they boil down to is that there’s a rampage of violence and petty crime going on out there, basically because orders are dropping off and Altman’s people have less and less to do.”

“And you plan to give them work.” Cherry nodded. “I saw that co
m
ing. It’s one reason I invested in the company. It’s something you can do to help your parents and your little brothers and sisters, even though they all still refuse to talk to you or see you. I knew there was a good reason I like you, Emerson.”

Inwardly, Emerson cringed at Cherry’s words. He was all too well aware that Cherry liked him, and that she was almost as beautiful as Gretchen had been. But with the best will in the world on both their parts, she wasn’t Gretchen, she could never be Gretchen, and they both knew that nothing would ever change that.

What bothered him now was that, given what she did for a living, she
was far too trusting, and he didn’t have the heart to disillusion her. What he’d been seeking to accomplish with this plan of his was something a good deal more like revenge than charity. At a healthy profit, of course—remembering his fantasy of flight had awakened another me
m
ory. He wouldn’t cheat his partners.

But why was it that whenever he looked up at those damned ceiling fans, he thought about the Rimfence?

Aloysius, who knew Emerson—in the present context, at least—far better than Cherry ever would, spoke up. “I hear me share of rumors, too, me boy.”

“Such as?” inquired Mrs. Singh. Something about Emerson was b
e
ginning to worry her.

“Such as the Project security stooges are now arming themselves not only with those so-called ‘shock batons’ they were issued at first and which once constituted their only armament, but with light automatic assault rifles—‘bullpups,’ they call ’em—recently sent from Earth in answer to the risin’ unrest inside the cooperative.”