Sten (3 page)

When his contract expired, a Tech could return home a rich man, to set up his own business—with the Company, of course, holding exclusive distribution rights to any new products he might have developed—or to retire.

For the Exec or Tech, Vulcan was very close to an industrial heaven.

For the Migs, it was hell.

It's significant that the winner of the Company's Name-Our-Planet contest, a bright Migrant-Unskilled worker, had used the prize money to buy out his contract and passage out as far from Vulcan as possible.

Fellahin
, oakie, wetback—there will always he wandering laborers to perform scutwork. But just as the Egyptian
fellah
would marvel at the mechanical ingenuity of the Joads, so the twentieth-century assembly-line grunt would be awed by the likes of Amos Sten.

For Amos, one world could never be enough. Doing whatever it took for a full belly, a liter of gutbuster, and a ticket offworld, he was the man to fix your omni, get your obsolete harvester to working, or hump your new bot up six flights of stairs.

And then move on.

His wife, Freed, was a backwater farm-world kid with the same lust to see what the next planetfall brought. Eventually, they guessed, they'd find a world to settle on. One where there weren't too many people, and a man and a woman wouldn't have to sweat for someone else's business. Until they found it, though, any place was better than what they'd already seen.

Until Vulcan.

The recruiter's pitch sounded ideal.

Twenty-five thousand credits a year for him. Plus endless bonuses for a man of his talents. Even a contract for ten thousand a year for Freed. And a chance to work on the galaxy's most advanced tools.

And the recruiter hadn't lied.

Amos' mill was far more sophisticated than any machine he'd ever seen. Three billets of three different metals were fed into the machine. They were simultaneously milled and electronically bonded. Allowable tolerances for that bearing—it took Amos ten years to find out what he was building—was to one millionth of a millimeter, plus or minus one thousand millionth.

And Amos' title was master machinist.

But he only had one job—to sweep up burrs the mill spun out of its waste orifices that the dump tubes missed. Everything else was automatic, regulated by a computer half a world away.

The salaries weren't a lie either. But the recruiter hadn't mentioned that a set of coveralls cost a hundred credits, soymeat ten a portion, or the rent on their three barracks rooms was one thousand credits a month.

The time-to-expiration date on their contracts got further away, while Amos and Freed tried to figure a way out. And there were the children. Unplanned, but welcome. Children were encouraged by the Company. The next generation's labor pool, without the expense of recruiting and transportation.

Amos and Freed fought the Company's conditioning

processes. But it was hard to explain what open skies and walking an unknown road meant to someone who grew up with curving gray domes and slideways.

Freed, after a long running battle with Amos, had extended her contract six months for a wall-size muraliv of a snowy landscape on a frontier world.

Almost eight months passed before the snow stopped drifting down on that lonely cluster of domes, and the door, with the warm, cheery fire behind it, stopped swinging open to greet the returning worker.

The mural meant more to Amos and Freed than it did to Sten.

Even though young Karl didn't have the slightest idea of what it was like to live without a wall in near-touching distance, he'd already learned that the only goal in his life, no matter what it took, was to get off Vulcan.

CHAPTER THREE

"YOU GOTTA REMEMBER, boy, a bear's how you look at him."

"Dad, what's a bear?"

"You know. Like the Imperial Guard uses to scout with. You saw one in that viddie."

"Oh, yeah. It looks like the Counselor."

"A little—only it's a mite hairier and not so dumb. Anyway, when you're in a scoutcar, looking down at that bear, he don't look so bad. But when that bear's standing over you…"

"I don't understand."

"That bear's like Vulcan. If you was up The Eye, it'd probably look pretty good. But when you're a Mig, down here…"

Amos Sten nodded and poured himself another half liter of narcobeer.

"All you got to remember in a bear fight, Karl, is you don't
ever
want to be second. Most of all, you don't want to get caught by that bear in the first place."

That was a lesson Sten had already learned. Through Elmore.

Elmore was an old Mig who had the solo apartment at the end of the corridor. But most of the off-shift time Elmore was in the children's play area telling stories.

They were the never true, always wonderful part of the oral tradition that industrial peasants from a thousand worlds had brought to Vulcan, making their own underground tradition.

The Drop Settling of Ardmore. The Ghost Ship of Capella.

The Farmer Who Became King.

And Vulcan's own legends.
The Delinqs Who Saved the
Company
. The eerie, whispered stories of the warehouses and factory domes that were generations-unused by humans…but still had something living and moving in them.

Sten's favorite was the one Elmore told least often—about how, one day, things would change. How someone would come from another world, and lead the Migs up, into The Eye. A day of reckoning when the air cycling system would spew the blood of the Execs. The best was the last, when Elmore said slowly that the man who would lead the Migs would be a Mig himself.

The corridor's parents never minded Elmore. He kept the kids out of their hair, and, very grateful, they all chipped in to card Elmore some kind of present every Founder's Day. If any of them knew most of Elmore's stories were anti-Company, they never said anything. Nor would they have cared.

The end was inevitable. Some kid talked around the wrong person. Like the Counselor.

One off-shift, Elmore didn't return. Everyone wondered what had happened. But the topic became boring, and everyone forgot.

Not Sten. He saw Elmore again, on The Row. The man was a shambling hulk, stumbling behind a streetcleaning machine. He paused beside Sten and looked down at the boy.

Elmore's mouth opened, and he tried to speak. But his tongue lolled helplessly, and his speech was guttural moans. The machine whistled, and Elmore obediently turned and stumbled away after it. The word crawled out of Sten's mind: brainburn.

He told his father about what he'd seen. Amos grimaced.

"That's the secret you gotta learn, boy. You got to zig when they zag."

"What'd I tell you about zigging, son?"

"I couldn't, pa. There were four of them, and they was all bigger than me."

"Too bad, boy. But there's gonna be a lot of things bigger than you come along. How you gonna handle this one?"

Sten thought for a minute.

"They won't look nigh as big from the back, would they, dad?"

"That's a terrible thought, Karl. Terrible. Especially since it's true."

Sten got up.

"Where you headed?"

"I'm…gonna go play."

"Naw. First you're gonna let that black eye go away. And let people forget."

Two weeks later, one of the four boys was shinnying up a rope in exercise period when it broke and dropped him twenty feet to the steel deck.

Three days after that, two more of the group were exploring an unfinished corridor. It was probably just their bad luck to be standing under a wallslab when the fasteners broke. After the boys were released from the hospital, the Counselor reprimanded their parents.

The leader of Sten's attackers was just as unfortunate. Out after curfew, he was jumped from behind and battered into unconsciousness. After an investigation, the Counselor said it had probably been a Delinq—a member of one of the wild gangs that roamed the abandoned sectors of Vulcan, one step ahead of brainburn.

Despite the explanations, Sten was left pretty much alone after that.

"Karl: Gotta have a word with you."

"Uh…yeah, dad?"

"Me and the other folks been to a meeting with the Counselor."

"Oh."

"You wonderin' what he wanted?"

"Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure I am."

"Don't have any idea, do you?"

"Nossir."

"Didn't think you did. Seems that some Mig's kid went and invented something. Some kinda spray. You don't know anything about that, do you, boy?"

"Nossir."

"Uh-huh. This spray smells just like…well, like when the sewage recycler blew up down on Corridor Eighteen-forty-flve.

Remember that?"

"Yessir."

"Kinda quiet tonight, aren't we? Anyway. So somebody went and sprayed this on the Counselor and four of those aides he's got. Sprayed on their pants where they sit down. Is that a laugh you're hidin'?"

"Nossir."

"Didn't think so. The Counselor wanted all of us parents to find out who's got themselves a antisocial kid and turn him in."

"What're you gonna do, dad?"

"Already done it. Dropped by the microfiles. Your ma talked to the librarian, while I sort of looked at who's been reading books on chemistry."

"Oh."

"Yeah. Oh. Unfortunately, I went and forgot to give them records back."

Sten didn't say anything.

"My pa told me once—before you go setting a man's foot on fire, you best make sure there's at least six other people with torches in their tool kits. You follow what I mean?"

"Yessir."

"Thought you might."

* * *

One of the best times was what Sten always thought of as the Off-shift Xypaca.

Xypacas were incredibly nasty little carnivores that had been discovered on some hellworld by the Company's probeships.

Nobody knew why the crew had brought back specimens of the psychopathic little reptiles. But they did.

Measuring barely twenty centimeters in height, the Xypaca had a willingness to use its claws and teeth on anything up to a hundred times its own height. One of Sten's teachers, originally from Prime World, said Xypacas looked like minityrannosaurs, whatever they were.

If the Xypaca hated almost everything equally, it had a special hard place in what passed for its heart for its own species.

Except during the brief breeding cycle, the Xypaca loved nothing more than tearing its fellow Xypaca apart. Which made them ideal pit-fighting animals.

Amos had just been rewarded by the Company for figuring out his mill would run an extra thousand hours between servicing if the clearing exhaust didn't exit just above the computer's cooling intake. With great ceremony, they knocked a full year off of Amos' contract.

Amos, always one for the grand parlay, used that year's credit to buy a Xypaca.

Sten hated the reptile from the first moment, when a lightninglike snap of its jaws almost took off his little finger.

So Amos explained it to him. "I ain't real fond of that critter either. I don't like the way it looks, the way it smells or the way it eats. But it's gonna be our ticket off of Vulcan."

His spiel was convincing. Amos planned to fight his Xypaca in small-time preliminary fights only, betting light. "We win small—a month off the contract here, a week there. But sooner or later it'll be our ticket out of here." Even Sten's mother was convinced there was something to this latest of Amos' dreams.

And Sten, by fifteen, wanted off Vulcan more than anything else he could imagine. So he fed the Xypaca cheerfully, lived with its rank smell, and tried not to yell too loudly when he was a little slow in getting his hand out of its cage after feeding.

And it seemed, for a while, as if Amos' big plan was going to work. Until the night the Counselor showed up at the fights, held in an unused corridor a few rows away.

Sten was carrying the Xypaca's cage into the arena, following Amos.

From across the ring, the Counselor spotted them and hurried around. "Well, Amos," he said heartily, "didn't know you were a Xy-man."

Amos nodded warily.

The Counselor inspected the hissing brute under Sten's arm.

"Looks like a fine animal you've got there, Amos. What say we pitch it against mine in the first match?"

Sten looked across the ring and saw the obese, oversized Xypaca one of the Counselor's toadies was handling. "Dad," he said. "We can't. It'll—"

The Counselor frowned at Sten.

"You letting your boy decide what you do now, Amos?"

Amos shook his head.

"Well then. We'll show them we're the best sportsmen of all.

Show the other corridors that we're so bored with the lizards they've got that we'd rather fight our own, right?"

He waited. Amos took several deep breaths. "I guess you haven't decided about the transfers over to the wire mill yet, have you, sir?" he finally asked.

The Counselor smiled. "Exactly."

Even Sten knew that handling the mile-long coils of white-hot metal was the deadliest job on Amos' shift.

"We—me and my boy—we'd be proud to fight your Xy, Mister Counselor."