Pallas (23 page)

That got Emerson’s attention off the ceiling.

Nails grinned admiringly. “Where in God’s name do you manage to hear these things, Aloysius?”

“A crystal ball he keeps behind the bar,” Cherry suggested.

“To go with his wooden leg?”
Nails asked sweetly.

Mrs. Singh shook her head. “No,
Cherry
, he’s got a Tarot deck up his sleeve, tucked in with the regular aces.” It was the first joke she’d ever made with the girl.

“Now in truth, were I a good journalist, I’d be after wantin’ t’protect me sources.” The innkeeper shrugged. “But since, unlike former senators an’ suchlike, the only good journalist is a dead
journalist,
in this instance I had it from a cargo handler at the North Pole to whom I send an occ
a
sional case of Irish cheer in exchange for tidbits exactly like this. The weapons in question are 2.8 millimeter hypersonics—.11 caliber, if y’can imagine it—individually safety-keyed t’special coded magnetic rings which the goons wear, and which must be destroyed before they can be removed from their cold, dead fingers.”

“Well,” observed Mrs. Singh, “so much for that idea.”

“Some tidbit.”
Nails shook his head. “What idea?”

Brody nodded. “There’s more. What’s worse—for them, not for us—is that a radio control link prevents their bein’ fired without the electronic consent of their regimental muckety-muck, safe in his co
m
mand post behind the lines.”

Emerson nodded understanding. The arrangement his friend was d
e
scribing was idiotic and suicidal—and thoroughly consistent with the way he’d been brought up.

Cherry sat back and sighed. “Gee, it must be a comfort to the men out in the field who need to shoot in a hurry and can’t get their little guns to work because their boss has gone to the powder room. What
do
these things shoot, anyway, death rays?”

“They use self-consuming caseless cartridges,” Brody explained, “designed not t’be picked up an’ reused by the subject population—an’ ultravelocity Lexan bullets. Both weapons and ammunition are shipped out to the Project in sealed containers, inventoried at both ends in an a
t
tempt t’keep ’em out of undesirable hands.”

Nails nodded. “Then that was a pretty good guess you made at Emerson’s hearing about Altman’s real reasons for having dared to venture out among us barbarians.”

“Either that,” suggested Mrs. Singh, “or Hizzoner, here, gave him the bright idea there and then.”
Occasional mention of the hearing was as close as any of them ever got to discussing what had become of Gretchen. Her name was never spoken among them, not because they were angry, but because her absence was too painful.

Cherry hadn’t known Gretchen, but respected her friends’ grief and obeyed the custom.

Aloysius gave Mrs. Singh a sour look.

“I don’t believe the poor man’s capable of having one all by
himself
,” she went on, “or they wouldn’t have stuck him out here in the back of beyond with all of us.”

Wrenching his attention back to the conversation and away from the ceiling fans, Emerson shook his head. “That wasn’t my hearing, Mrs.
Singh,
it was the Chief Administrator’s. And I think it’s extremely da
n
gerous to underestimate the man. They do say he could have been Pre
s
ident of the United States, after all.”

“I rest my case,” declared Mrs. Singh. Puzzled at Emerson’s behavior, she peered up at the ceiling, following his example, but she didn’t see what he’d begun to see.

“Emerson’s right on both counts,” Aloysius insisted. “It was no guess. The only human factor that never changes is the blind instinct of those who’ve obtained power t’maintain it. It was your own husband who said that—or was it Bertrand de Jouvenel? Anyway, it was the only thing that made sense under the circumstances.”

He leaned forward, across the table. “In many ways, Emerson, those guns are the exact opposite, philosophically speakin’, of the ones we’re makin’. There’s nothin’ like a quick-firin’ high-capacity assault rifle for defendin’ life, liberty, an’ the pursuit of property, but these things’re designed specifically to oppress the individual rather than allow him to liberate himself.”

There were murmurs of agreement from everyone around the table.

Emerson believed that Aloysius was correct. In startling contrast to what he’d just heard described, he’d revived an older, simpler technology made economical once again by the metal-rich Pallatian geology. His large-caliber semiautomatic pistols employed reloadable brass cases, molded lead bullets, and the same smokeless propellant powder now manufactured and widely used on the asteroid for construction and d
e
molition. His weapons may have been old-fashioned—although they were of an improved, compact design featuring more sophisticated alloys and many fewer moving parts—but they were cheap and reliable.

In short, he explained, they were precisely what
was
needed by c
o
lonists with such a long, expensive supply line back to their mother pl
a
net. What’s more, he informed Cherry, from the standpoint of their a
f
fordability by the impoverished Project peasants, he planned to allow easy credit. And hadn’t Henry Ford also nearly doubled the going wage for automobile workers, he asked Mrs. Singh, for exactly the same reason that he’d cut the going price for automobiles?

“Oh, pshaw, as people of my age are supposed to say now and again—though I was never quite sure how to pronounce it—I hate it when you’re right, boy.” Her
expression, almost that
of a proud mother, gave the opposite impression.

Arms
and
cycles.
Henry Ford putting “the whole damn country on wheels.”
The ceiling fans and the Rimfence.
Why did it all seem like it should mean something?

One thing Emerson didn’t tell his friends that evening was that he was also counting secretly on at least some of his cottage hand-assemblers to create “lunchbox specials” from pilfered parts—and take no serious steps to prevent it. In fact, his production scheme was designed specifically to encourage it.

The whole thing reminded him of an old drawn-out Russian joke he’d once heard about smuggling wheelbarrows, but ultimately it would mean that peasant families like his own would no longer be bullied by United Nations goons, however impressively armed. People, he had learned since coming to Curringer and living among free individuals, defend
themselves
with character, not with technology.

The latter was only one means among many; the former was indi
s
pensable.

It was a lesson many leaders of technically advanced nations back on Earth had either never learned or had forgotten as soon as it was forcibly impressed upon them. Emerson intended to remind at least one of them all over again.

But first, he had to get back to the shop.

He’d just had an idea he wanted to try out.

I’ve always believed it says something significant about humanity that in the seven or eight millennia we’ve been fighting wars, we haven’t made a tiny fraction of the technical progress we’ve made in the mere century, from Kitty Hawk to the
asteroids, that
we’ve been flying. People fly much better than they fight. Nice thought, isn’t it?

—William Wilde Curringer,
Unfinished Memoirs

I
t was a crude-looking lash-up.

As soon as he was able to make excuses, Emerson had left his friends at the Nimrod and hurried back to the machine shop. Seyfried Road, the main—and basically only—street of the town, was all but deserted, and the stars twinkled fiercely through the atmospheric envelope.

Nails was accustomed to taking on almost any sort of job, especially since he’d hired Emerson to assist him, which people thought they couldn’t do for themselves. In the tavern, the boy had suddenly reme
m
bered the pair of big electric office fans that some customer had left si
t
ting on their front counter near the door. Their heavy cast-iron bases, it seemed, weren’t quite heavy enough, in Pallas’s minimal gravity, to keep them wherever they were put. Propelled partly by their own blades, partly by the vibration of their motors, they tended to drift along a surface until they found an edge and fell off onto the floor.

Nails had purposed fixing them in two ways. First, their bases would be replaced with screw-adjustable spring clamps like those he used to mount flood lamps on the edges of working surfaces throughout his own shop. Since the fans also tended to blow everything downwind of their blades into the air—and apparently their customer’s cat was getting tired of being thrown against the nearest wall in the middle of a nap—Nails would step the motors down electrically, exactly as he’d done a few years ago with the overhead fans at Brody’s place.

The job still wasn’t done.

With all of the hurry, recently, to complete the first run of pi
s
tols—”
crawl
” might have been a more appropriate word—Nails hadn’t gotten around to modifying the office fans yet, and neither had Emerson.
Their customer hadn’t complained, not very energetically, anyway, b
e
cause he was on the
Ngu
Departure waiting list.

Taking what might be his last appreciative look at the starry sky and the darkened storefronts of Curringer for quite a time—there was no telling in advance how long he’d labor over this crazy idea he’d had (or that had him) before he even ate or slept again—the boy let himself into the machine shop. Reflexively, he reached up to silence the bell tinkling above the doorframe and greeted BCH, the cat, who’d come to investigate this uncustomary intrusion.

Switching on a light, he saw that the
fans,
complete with work order and claim tags, were still gathering dust on the front counter where they’d been left weeks ago.

For a moment, as BCH stropped happily at his shins, he allowed himself to stop and admire the fans. They were perfect for his experiment, with 16 inch blades mounted in lightweight wire cages, driven by big 45 watt motors. Then, in an instant, he had a screwdriver in his hand and the heavy bases off. In another, he’d duct-taped the two machines to either end of a four-foot piece of scrap electrical conduit, their cords running to the head of a switching extension cord he’d attached to the center of the conduit at a point convenient to his thumb.

With mounting excitement, as he gathered up the free end of the e
x
tension cord and maneuvered this unlikely collection of parts into the assembly shed, which had more overhead, he considered the one and only time he’d ever given swimming a try—at Gretchen’s insistence—in a perfectly circular swimming pool with natural glass sides and bottom, the remnant of a primordial meteor strike between what, millions of years later, would become the town site and the lake.

Fed by a tiny sun-warmed trickle of a stream momentarily delayed on its journey downhill to Lake Selous, the water had been surprisingly clear, fresh—from time to time the local volunteer fire company washed the algae out with their high-pressure hoses—and not too cold. Nor had it turned out quite as deep as he’d expected. Among a number of other silly things, he’d attempted standing up, with his feet planted none too firmly either side of a discarded inner tube, and very nearly gotten away with it
in the low Pallatian gravity, but wound up, instead, standing on his head for an instant at the bottom of the pool.

Which was how he’d learned about mouth-to-mouth resuscit
a
tion—also at Gretchen’s insistence—and eventually decided, reluctantly, not to count it as a kiss.

Such a memory—of his tawny, emerald-eyed Gretchen at her ha
p
piest, her beautiful, long-legged swimsuit-clad body wet and sparkling in the sunlight—should have been painful, but in this instance it was i
n
structive, which for Emerson, at least, made all the difference. The fans would have to be above him, where his weight would hang below and balance naturally. Accordingly, he moved the extension head, with its neon-lit rocker switch, to a shorter piece of conduit which he hung a foot beneath the longer piece like the rung of a rope ladder, using a pair of multilayered straps of duct tape. He plugged the cord in across the room, near the back door of the shop, at what had once been an all-weather outlet.

Only mildly curious—because he hadn’t been ordered to stay away—BCH sniffed at the cord where it was plugged in, then hurried back across the room after Emerson, anxious to reassume his feline r
e
sponsibility to be underfoot whenever possible.

Emerson, meanwhile, laid the longer piece of conduit across the na
r
row gap between two of the firearms-assembly tables, so that each of the fans rested facedown on a separate surface. He made sure that the osci
l
lator clutches built into the fan housings were disengaged and that the rotary switches on the motors were turned all the way up. Unable to think of any more preliminaries, he sat down on the floor between the tables, removed the cat from his lap several times, took a deep breath, and grasped the hanging rung with both hands.

“Well,” he informed BCH, unconsciously imitating Mrs. Singh, “here goes nothin’!”

“Brrow?”
replied the cat.

Emerson thumbed the rocker switch.

Before he knew what was happening, both his arms were yanked a
l
most out of their sockets. His feet were wrenched from his shoes. He and
his electric contrivance smashed violently against the ceiling. Without thinking, he let go of the bar and fell—more gently than he might have on Earth—to the concrete floor again, hitting a worktable apiece with his hips and shoulders on the way down. Ignoring his impact-damaged posterior, he huddled on the floor between the tables, arms over his head, waiting for the fans to fall and crush his skull.

BCH had teleported from the room.

To the boy’s surprise, the infernal machine was still overhead, bo
b
bing and clanging against the corrugated metal ceiling like a maddened bumblebee suicidally determined to break through a pane of glass. The resulting noise was dreadful—and absolutely wonderful. Only Emerson Ngu and perhaps a few other pioneering spirits would have said what he did as, making sure that all of his body parts were still in the right places, he clambered painfully to his feet.

“It works!”

“What works?”

He turned, too excited with his success—and numb from his brui
s
es—to be startled. “Oh. Hi, there, Cherry. When I ask, will you please unplug that extension cord from the wall over there? Wait a
minute,
let me get up on this table first.”

BCH was in the girl’s arms, trying frantically to bury his head between her breasts. She looked dubious, as people often did when asked to deal with Emerson’s ideas, but—also as they often did—obeyed him. Ove
r
head, the clanging noise abruptly stopped. The whirring of the fan blades descended in pitch rapidly until they, too, fell silent. The young inventor easily fielded his primitive flying machine as it dropped. Assuring
hi
m
self
that it was essentially undamaged, he carefully laid it on the table and hopped down to the floor.

“I was on my way home from the Nimrod,” Cherry told him, sounding apologetic. “I saw the lights as I walked past, so I came in. I hope it’s not—”

“It’s terrific.” He brushed grit from the shop floor out of his hair, wondering what a cast for both a broken hip and shoulder blade would look like. “I’m grateful you were here to help me, Cherry. Otherwise I’d
have had to unplug it myself and let the whole thing fall wherever it wanted—and they’re not my fans.”

Setting the cat down on its feet on one of the tables, she came close and helped him brush at his clothes.
“Maybe not, but I certainly am—here, you’ve cut yourself.”

The short sleeve of his shirt was torn. There was also a long shallow scratch along his upper arm, from one of the tabletops, but it had already stopped bleeding.

“Uh, Cherry...” For the first time this evening, he noticed how she was dressed, in pink velvet shorts with a matching top that left her midriff bare—unlike most Pallatians, she wasn’t wearing a pistol belt; these days she carried a Ngu Departure in a compartment between the halves of her handbag—and demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that she was a female mammal. She wore no makeup and there was the faintest sca
t
tering of freckles across her nose. For some time, he realized, she’d been using a great deal less perfume than when he’d met her.

Possibly none at all.

“Sorry.” She backed away. “You’ll never know how sorry.” She muttered under her breath and changed the subject. “What in the world are you doing here, anyway?” She glanced at the lashed-together fans lying on the table, BCH giving them a cautious going-over. “Is this another invention? What’s it supposed to do?”

Emerson grinned. “It’s supposed to fly. And take me with it. And—for a moment—it did.”

Cherry gave a delighted squeal and clapped her hands. “You weren’t yourself at all tonight back there at the Nimrod. I knew you had som
e
thing on your mind!”

“You bet I did,” he told her excitedly. “I still do. I think I know what I did wrong, and how to fix it. You want to come to the office with me for a minute?”

She looked puzzled. “Sure.
How come?”

“Because there’s something in there I need.”

With BCH trailing along in front of them, as cats will, Cherry followed Emerson to the glassed-in office cubicle, where, in a matter of moments,
he had a chair upside-down on the floor and was attacking it with a screwdriver. The upper part of the chair, consisting of the seat, arms, and railed back, was wooden, the lower part, with its swivel base and casters, mostly made of steel.

“Isn’t that the antique oak swivel chair that Nails brought with him personally from Earth?” Cherry asked. “I seem to recall his saying that it belonged to his great-grandfather. And please don’t try to tell me he’ll never miss it.”

“Don’t worry,” the boy replied, pulling the last screw out of the u
n
derside of the seat. He stood and seized the top of the chairback in one hand. “I’ll put it back exactly the way it was just as soon as I’m through with it. Besides, if he were here, Nails would be the first one to suggest using it.”