Pallas (37 page)

Altman gave his best, tolerant, statesmanly chuckle. He’d specifically requested that this question be asked so that the issues involved could be dealt with now, when they were controllable. He’d wondered when Downey was going to get around to it.

“In the first place, Hugh, no lawfully constituted national authority or accredited international organization has ever granted anything remotely like political sovereignty to Pallas. This asteroid was, effectively,
stolen
by the Curringer Trust from humanity as a whole, to whom it still rightfully belongs. Legally—although no one’s pressed the matter for decades—Pallas is still administered by the United Nations, and its i
n
habitants are still citizens of whatever nation they originally came from and therefore still subject to their laws.”

“Which is why,” Downey suggested on cue, “LiteLink and
Fifty/Fifty
were unable to find any duly elected leaders on Pallas to represent the other point of view?”

“Precisely.
Under the juvenile lunacy of the Stein Covenant, Pallatians enjoy styling themselves as genteel anarchists—which, under a long and very well-established body of international law, means that this is an ‘abandoned polity’ and that they’re subject to the first real government that comes along and claims them.”

There: the threat had been made.

Now to soften it a bit and give the enemy a way out.

“But, setting all that aside for a moment, the UN Emergency Anti
q
uities Protection Act is only one part of a larger overall plan for dealing with this unfortunate situation peaceably and ultimately, I believe, to everybody’s satisfaction.”

Downey raised his eyebrows in an expression he was famous for on
five continents.
“A plan?
Something new—
remember
, folks, you’re hearing about this first on
Fifty/ Fifty.
Tell us about your plan, Senator, and why we haven’t heard about it before this.”

Altman raised a hand in a self-deprecating gesture he had once been famous for himself. “Well, Hugh, the plan is simple, but it was necessary first to seek support for it among my old colleagues and other key figures
who
could help with it.”

Meaning that Altman and his partisans on Earth had to see whether the General Assembly still had the spine to lay claim to the Asteroid Belt and revive the long-discredited “common heritage” doctrine.
That had taken time and used up a lot of favors.
Then, of course, it had been necessary to enlist technophobes and neo-Luddites of every conceivable stripe, env
i
ronmentalists, and self-appointed consumerists to intrude themselves into the argument over the Drake-Tealy Objects.

At the same time, the ever-cooperative mass media had to be pe
r
suaded to help him promote the plan to Earth’s uninformed populace, decide to pass him off as a public benefactor all but martyred by the barbarians on Pallas and much sought after for interplanetary interviews. Above all, no opportunity must be offered to those on Pallas to defend themselves against the charges being leveled against them. That had been the hardest part—and the most expensive.

“What we wanted,” the Senator announced to a waiting world, “and what we got in the end, I think, was a plan that’s harmless to the trad
i
tional rights and customs of Pallatians or the so-called principle of hyperdemocracy which is almost sacred to them, whatever we may think of it ourselves. Under that plan, a special, newly constituted agency of the United Nations will assume nominal ownership and control of all items of scientific or antiquarian interest discovered in space. Civilian employees of that agency will oversee the handling of such objects, assuring that their eventual disposition is completely ethical.
Notice we’re not takings over Pallas or any other asteroid—as we could do under international law—nor
are we seizing anybody’s home or farm or factory. The fact is, once this law is in force, no one will even notice it’s operating.”

“Well, it certainly sounds reasonable and sensible to me, Senator, as
well as being in everybody’s best interests. I don’t see how any decent individual could oppose it.”

“Neither do
I
, Hugh, which is why I urge your viewers to write or call their United Nations representative, demanding that the Emergency A
n
tiquities Protection Act be put in place immediately, along with its var
i
ous enabling regulations.”

Downey
grinned
his famous grin. “I’m sure they all heard that, Se
n
ator, and will do as you ask. We here at LiteLink and
Fifty/Fifty
wish you the best of luck.”

“Thanks, Hugh.”

“Thank you, Senator, and good night.”

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newsp
a
per.

—Thomas Jefferson

E
merson slapped at his cheek.

A swarm of impossibly fat black houseflies buzzed and battered themselves against the sunlit windowpanes, and some kind of tiny brown weevil had gotten into the cupboard by the hundreds, spoiling both the freeze-dried coffee and the tins of hard biscuits.

It had been that kind of morning. He’d flown three-quarters of the way to the South Pole the day before, ostensibly to inspect a homestead that was up for sale, but actually as an excuse to get away from Curringer, the media, and the latest interplanetary crisis. He was sick of turning on the screen only to see Gibson Altman denouncing Pallatians and everything he accused them of standing for. Emerson was equally sick of being hounded by news vultures; avoiding them only seemed to make them more zealous to invade his privacy and interrupt his work. Of course if he’d actively sought publicity, they’d have ignored him.

His visit with the homesteader had not gone well. The idiot had tried breeding African elephants from zygotes, but his holdings were too far
south and offered the wrong forage. What animals he’d raised had eaten him out of house and home, stripping the land to bare soil. They’d been sold to competent breeders further north, and the man was now attemp
t
ing to unload his overgrazed acreage in order to emigrate back to Earth, where, no doubt, he’d write a book about the inhospitable frontier which somehow would fail to mention his own ineptitude.

There was ice under that much-abused ground, but Emerson’s h
y
drologist, who’d met him at the site, had warned him that the salt and metal content were too high to make it economical for the pipeline’s electroceramic filters to process. A geologist, who’d also flown up from Port Amundsen, had informed him that the depth and distribution of the deposits were all wrong. Extraction would cause a massive subsidence which might not only generate local quakes—and on tiny Pallas, the word “local” took in a lot of territory—but could also get him sued by neig
h
bors whose surface water would drain into the resulting depression.

The final straw—and he hadn’t needed a hired hand to tell him this—was that extending his network to reach this far east over the rugged terrain of the Pocks would yield a dead loss for the next ten years. Co
n
vincing the landowner that he wasn’t trying to drive the price down, and that he really didn’t want the land, had proven impossible. All the time Emerson had been there, inspecting the ruined claim stake, the man had kept the video in his ATV tuned to another interview with Gibson Al
t
man. Clearly the homesteader agreed with the Senator on many points. They hadn’t parted company on amicable terms. Another unsatisfied “customer,” he thought wearily, more grist for Altman’s evil mill.

Although there were many demands on Emerson’s time and he could have used the last forty-eight hours to good advantage either in his new offices in Curringer or at his still-growing Ngu Departure plant, where he had really wanted to be this morning was Port Amundsen, at a symposium on state-of-the-art spacecraft design given by Fritz Marshall and comp
a
nies that maintained the atmospheric envelope and orbiting solar mirrors that kept the asteroid warmer than nature had intended.

Or he could have been at a similar affair in Port Peary concerning recent experiments in the field of antigravity, the so-called “fifth force”
locked inside the deepest recesses of the atomic nucleus. Mankind’s f
u
ture—and his own, he was convinced—lay in space, and he was dete
r
mined to involve himself in it somehow, if only the press of business left him enough time and energy.

He couldn’t even visit Digger while he was down here at this latitude. The anthropologist’s cabin was on the other side of the Pocks, half a world away, and the man was rumored to be visiting Earth. In any case, he wasn’t answering calls.

Instead, Emerson sat on the steps of a corrugated-steel line shack he’d stopped at for a rest—since he could hardly call on the hospitality of the landowner—and ate a snack from stored supplies. The shack marked the farthest reach of his pipeline in this area. Outside, the flies were mu
s
tard-colored and bit savagely if he wasn’t watchful. The rough, sparse ground cover was golden brown, punctuated by blue and yellow wildflowers, mostly mountain columbine. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a warm Coke—at least the weevils hadn’t managed to bore their implacable way into that—making virtue of necessity by enjoying the sunshine and the smell of sage and evergreen the breeze carried to him.

There was considerable satisfaction, gazing down the slope along the die-straight path of the pipeline. Where it crossed the holdings of others, it was often painted camouflage colors to match the local surroundings. Here, it gleamed like liquid silver in the sun, reflecting perfectly the cheerful yellow of a tiny caterpillar tractor sitting alongside. The pipeline was a testimony to human purpose, which could be just as implacable as that of any insect and vastly more constructive. He knew what Altman and his friends would say about that shining length of stainless steel, but to Emerson, it was beautiful.

In a few minutes he’d have to resume his journey to Curringer, where more unpleasantness awaited. An individual whose land had held ice of the proper quality was now convinced, mostly by Altman’s continuous barrage of innuendo, that Emerson had cheated him. He not only wanted his contract set aside, he wanted damages which he had publicly promised to donate to an Earthside animal rights foundation. Emerson’s la
w
yers—it still shocked him to realize that he had lawyers—had filed for dismissal and, under the Stein Covenant, were confident of getting it, but his own testimony was required, which meant the waste of at least another day.

This wasn’t the first instance of his business practices and personality being called into question, and it wasn’t any accident. The real perpetrator to be watched on Pallas, Altman had warned an entire galaxy, it seemed, over and over in the past five years, was that ruthless industrialist Emerson Ngu. If one believed Altman, his fast-growing, world-embracing water network—“to name a single, typically exploitive undertaking”—now threatened to destroy millions of priceless Drake-Tealy Objects.

Emerson snorted derisively. He had as much trouble thinking of himself as an industrialist as he did about employing lawyers. He was just a guy who made guns, flying yokes, a few other items, and happened to run a pipeline because his factory and the little town that seemed to be growing up around it of its own accord needed water. To listen to the Senator, one might think he was another William Wilde Curringer.

That seemed to stir an idea, something about mankind’s future in space, but the thought eluded him.

As far as the Drake-Tealy Objects were concerned, Emerson was as romantic as anyone and honestly hoped Digger was right, that they were the product of an ancient alien civilization. It would be exciting, rea
s
suring, and somehow would make the universe seem less hostile and lonely. But there was no telling where the damned things were going to turn up; they seemed to be buried everywhere, and if you tried to avoid the almost indestructible items, nothing would ever get done on Pallas.
Which may have been the Senator’s point.

Nothing substantially new had been discovered on that topic in the past five years. One world-famous popular “scientist,” more of a TV personality, in fact, who hadn’t done any original scientific investigation of his own for decades, had “reconstructed” the hypothetical nonhumans of Pallas, along with their airy, futuristic cities. This effort made as much sense to Emerson as trying to recreate the human race and its civilization
from a handful of paper clips. The aliens stood about five feet tall, had enormous, lovable, moist brown eyes, and soft, glossy fur.

Naturally, these wise and noble beings were pacifists and veget
a
rians—although, when it served the purposes of the pop scientist and his fans, the benighted creatures had also blown themselves and their planet to pieces in a nuclear war which unfortunately had left no physical ev
i
dence, but which must stand nevertheless as a dire warning to a foolish and untrustworthy humanity concerning the iniquities of individualism, capitalism, runaway technology, or whatever else the pop scientist and his fans happened to dislike this week.

Those brown eyes had done the trick. While Altman appealed to what he termed the “collective conscience of humanity,” several countries, including East America and the People’s Republic of Britain, had ou
t
lawed the import of Drake-Tealy Objects, bypassing any need for co
n
science, making the choice for their subjects via the same deadly force so vehemently deplored by Altman and his allies on any other occasion. The UN was still pondering the Altman Plan. That it abrogated the concepts of national sovereignty, personal privacy, private property, and profit, on Pallas or anywhere else, was never conveyed to a public less hostile t
o
ward ideas like that than had been the case a century ago. By now they were growing bored with the subject anyway, and the media would find them as distractible by the next well-planned crisis as they always seemed to be.

Emerson didn’t really blame them. In fact he didn’t really believe in anything that might properly be called “the public.” There were just bi
l
lions of preoccupied individuals, coping with their own lives as he was attempting to cope with his. He knew the media lied about every issue he was familiar with, and as a consequence he assumed they lied about everything else, as well. But unless it bore directly on what he was doing, he lacked the time and energy to discover the detailed truth for
himself
. That was the advantage the media enjoyed, and the source of their power, but he didn’t know what to do about it any more than anybody else did.

Meanwhile, the prolonged and inefficient assembly of a UN spacefleet to enforce an Emergency Antiquities Protection Act they hadn’t as yet
ratified was proceeding in a bizarre kind of open secrecy, reminding Emerson of what he’d read of the decade of corruption and incompetence spent in the creation of the Spanish Armada.

Nobody seemed to know whether the idea was to blockade Pallas, preventing export of any further Drake-Tealy Objects, or to seize control of the entire asteroid. The latter seemed far likelier to Emerson, since the Objects’ main value seemed to lie in the excuse they provided Altman and his ilk to destroy everything Curringer had ever accomplished. Once a fleet stood in orbit about Pallas, it was only a step from blockade to i
n
vasion. The art of wringing a credible provocation from an enemy u
n
willing to fight hadn’t changed since the time of Begin or Bush. Pallatians observed what little the media told them of these events in a sort of helpless disbelief, and made what preparations they could for war.

Which was another reason Emerson had flown to the southern te
r
minus of his pipeline, on which all of Pallas had come to depend for its health and growth.
He wanted to estimate for himself how defensible it might be. The answer, he admitted gloomily, was that it wasn’t defensible at all. How could it be? It had been built in a time of peace for peaceful purposes. It had been meant to bring life to otherwise lifeless regions of the asteroid. Pallas was a growing concern, but it wasn’t growing fast enough to make the pipeline profitable if it had to be—what was the word?—
hardened
for war. Somehow, without giving up what Pallas really stood for, that war had to be prevented.

Idly, because he was still looking for an excuse to postpone his jou
r
ney back to Curringer, Emerson stubbed out his cigarette. He’d also run short of cigars this morning, which might at least have kept the damned flies away, and the thin, acrid smoke was getting in his own eye. He leaned inside to turn on the shack’s all-purpose communicator. He didn’t really expect it to be in any better condition than the coffee and biscuits had been, so he was actually surprised when a perfect polychrome three-dimensional picture of the familiar bartender-announcer from His Master’s Voice sprang into life across its screen.