Steel Beach (67 page)

Simplicity eventually won out, and the
R.A.H.
, the trash pile adjacent to it, and certain caves and corridors that linked the whole complex to the more orderly world came to be called “Heinlein Town.”

Simplicity has its virtues, but to call it a town was stretching the definition.

There were forces other than the Heinleiners’ militant contrariness that worked against Heinlein Town ever fielding a softball team, electing a dogcatcher, or putting up signs at the city limits—wherever
those
might be—saying Watch Us Grow! Not all the “citizens” were engaged in the type of forbidden research done by Smith and his offspring. Some were there simply because they preferred to be isolated from a society they found too constricting. But because a lot of illegal things were going on, there had to be security, and the only kind the Heinleiners would put up with was that afforded by Smith’s null-field barriers: the elect could just walk right through it, while the unwashed found it impenetrable.

But the security also entailed some things even an anarchist would find inconvenient.

The constriction most of these people were fleeing could be summed up in two words: Central Computer. They didn’t trust it. They didn’t like it peering into their lives twenty-four hours a day. And the only way to keep it out was to keep it
completely
out. The only thing that could do that was the null-field and the related technologies it spun off, arcane arts to which the CC had no key.

But no matter what your opinion of the CC, it is damn useful. For instance, whatever line of work you are in, I’d be willing to bet it would be difficult to do it without a telephone. There were no telephones in Heinlein Town, or none that reached the outside world, anyway. There was no way to reach the planet-wide data net in any fashion, because all methods of interfacing with it were as useful coming in as going out. If Heinlein Town had one hard and fast rule it was this: The CC shall extend no tentacle into the Delambre Enclave (my own term for the loose community of trash-dwellers).

Hey, folks, people have to work. People who live completely away from the traditional municipal services have an even stronger work imperative. There was no oxygen dole in Heinlein Town. If you stayed, and couldn’t pay your air assessment, you could damn well learn to breathe vacuum.

One result was that eighty percent of “Heinlein Town” residents were no more resident than I was. I was a weekender because I didn’t want to give up my home and my place in Texas. Most weekenders lived in King City and spent all their free time in Delambre because they had to pay the bills and found it impossible to earn any money in Heinlein Town. There were not many full-time economic niches available, a fact that galled the Heinleiners no end.

Heinlein Town? Here’s what it was really like:

There were half a dozen places with enough people living close by to qualify as towns or villages. The largest of these was Virginia City, which had as many as five hundred residents. Strangeland was almost as big. Both towns had sprung up because of an accident of the process of waste disposal: a few score very large tin cans had been jumbled together at these locations, and they were useful for living and farming. By large, I mean up to a thousand meters in length, half that in diameter. I think they had been strap-on fuel tanks at one time. The Heinleiners had bored holes to connect them, pressurized them, and moved in like poor relations. Instant slum.

You couldn’t help being reminded of Bedrock, though these people were often quite prosperous. There were no zoning regulations that didn’t relate to health and safety. Sewage treatment was taken seriously, for instance, not only because they didn’t want the place to stink like Bedrock but because they didn’t have access to the bounty of King City municipal water. What they had had been trucked in, and it was endlessly re-used. But they didn’t understand the concept of a public eyesore. If you wanted to string a line across one of the tanks and hang your laundry on it, it’s a free country, ain’t it? If you thought manufacturing toxic gases in your kitchen was a good idea, go ahead, cobber, but don’t have an accident, because civil liability in Heinlein Town could include the death penalty.

Nobody really owned land in Delambre, in the sense of having a deed or title (hold on, Mr. H., don’t spin in your grave yet), but if you moved into a place nobody was using, it was yours. If you wanted to call an entire million-gallon tank home, that was fine. Just put up a sign saying KEEP OUT and it had the force of law. There was plenty of space to go around.

Everything was private enterprise, often a cooperative of some kind. I met three people who made a living by running the sewers in the three biggest enclaves, and selling water and fertilizer to farmers. You paid through the nose to hook up, and it was worth it, because who wants to handle
every
detail of daily life? Many of the largest roads were tollways. Oxygen was un-metered, but paid for by a monthly fee to the only real civic agency the Heinleiners tolerated: the Oxygen Board.

Electricity was so cheap it was free. Just hook a line into the main.

And here’s the real secret of Mr. Smith’s success, the reason a fairly unlikable man like him was held in such high esteem in the community. He didn’t charge for the null-field jig-saw network that hermetically sealed Heinlein Town off from the rest of Luna—that had made their way of life possible. If you wanted to homestead a new area of Delambre, you first rented a tunneling machine from the people who found, repaired, and maintained them. When you had your tunnel, you installed the tanks, solar panels, and heaters of the ALU’s every hundred meters, then you went to Mr. Smith for the null-field generators. He handed them out free.

He had every right to charge for them, of course, and nary a Heinleiner would have complained. But just so you don’t think he was a goddamncommunist, I should point out that while he gave away the units, he didn’t give away the science. The first thing he told you when he handed you a generator was, “You fuck with this, you go boom.” Years ago somebody hadn’t believed him, had tried to open one up and see what made the pretty music, and sort of fell inside the generator. There was a witness, who swore the fellow was quickly spit back out—and how he ever fell
into
a device no bigger than a football was a source of wonder in itself—but when he came out, he was inverted, sort of like a dirty sock. He actually lived for a little while, and they put him in the public square of Virginia City as a demonstration of the fruits of hubris.

So there you have the economic, technical, and behavioral forces that shaped the little hamlet of Virginia City, as surely as rivers, harbors, railroads and climate shaped cities of Old Earth. Since no pictures of the place have yet been allowed out by the residents, since I’ve gathered that, to most people, “Heinlein Town” conjures thoughts of either troglodyte caverns dripping slime and infested with bats or of some superslick, super-efficient techno-wonderland, I thought I should set the record straight.

To visualize the public square in Virginia City, think of a brighter, cleaner version of Robinson Park in Bedrock. On a smaller scale. There was the same curving roof, the same stingy acre of grass and trees in the center, and the same jumble of packing crates stacked higgledypiggledy around the green acre. Both of them just grew that way—Robinson Park in spite of the law, Virginia City because of the lack of it. In both places squatters appropriated discarded shipping containers, cut windows and doors, and hung their hats in them. There and in Bedrock the residents didn’t give a hoot for stacking the damn thing warehouse-fashion, in neat, squared-up rows. The result was sort of like a pueblo mud dwelling, but not nearly so orderly, with long crates spanning empty space or jutting out crazily, ladders leaning everywhere.

There the resemblance ended. Inside the Bedrock hovels you’d be lucky to find a burlap rug and spare pair of socks; the Heinleiner modules were gaily painted and furnished, with here a window box full of geraniums and there a rooftop pigeon pen. The lawn in Virginia City was golfgreen trim and trash free. Bedrockers tended to stack themselves twenty or thirty deep, until whole impromptu skyscrapers toppled. None of the Virginia City dwellings were more than six crates from the floor.

The square was the hub of commerce in Delambre, with more shops and cottage industry than anywhere else. I usually went there first on my weekend visits because it was a good place to meet people, and because my peripatetic guides and shameless mooches, Hansel, Gretel, and Libby, were sure to pass through on a Saturday morning and see if they could hit up good ol’ Hildy for a Double-fudge ’n’ Rum Raisin Banana Split at Aunt Hazel’s Ice Cream Emporium and While-U-Wait Surgery Shoppe.

On the day in question, the day of the Big Glitch, I had parked my by-now quite considerable
tuchis
in one of the canvas chairs set out on the public walk at that establishment. I nursed a cup of coffee. There would be plenty of ice cream to eat when the children arrived, and I had no particular taste for it. I’d made worse sacrifices in pursuit of a story.

Each of the four tables at Hazel’s had a canvas umbrella sprouting from the center, very useful for keeping off the rain and the sun. I scanned the skies, looking for signs of a cloudburst. Nope, looked like another day of curved metal roofs and suspended arc-lights. You can’t beat the weather inside an abandoned fuel tank.

I looked out over the square. In the center was a statue, a bit larger than life-size, of a cat, sitting on a low stone plinth. I had no idea what that was all about. The only other item of civic works visible was a lot less obscure. It was a gallows, sitting off to one side of the square. I’d been told it had only been used once. I was glad to hear the event had not been well attended. Some aspects of Heinleinism were easier to like than others.

“What the hell are you doing here, Hildy?” I heard myself say. Someone at a neighboring table looked up, then back down at her sundae. So the pregnant lady was muttering to herself; so what? It’s a free planet. From beneath the table I heard a familiar wet smacking sound, looked down, saw Winston had lifted one bleary eye to see if food was coming. I nudged him with my toe and he sprawled sybaritically on his back, inviting more intimacy than I had any intention of giving. When no more attention came, he went to sleep in that position.

“Let’s look this situation over,” I said. This time neither Winston nor the lover of hot fudge looked up, but I decided to continue my monologue internally, and it went something like this:

What with umpty-ump suicide attempts, Hildy, it’s been what you might call a bad year.

You greeted the appearance of the Silver Girl with the loud hosannas of a Lost Soul who has Seen The Light.

You brought her to ground, using fine journalistic instincts honed by more years than you care to remember—helped by the fact that she wasn’t exactly trying to stay hidden.

And—yea verily!—she was what you’d hoped she’d be: the key to a place where people were not content to coast along, year to year, in the little puddle of light and heat known as the Solar System, evicted from our home planet, cozened by a grand Fairy Godfather of our own creation who made life easier for us than it had ever been in the history of the species, and who was capable of things few of us knew or cared about. Let me hear you say
amen
!

Amen!

So then…  so then…  

Once you’ve
got
the story a certain post-reportorial depression always sets in. You have a smoke, pull on your shoes, go home. You start looking for the next story. You don’t try to
live
in the story.

And why not? Because covering any story, whether it be the Flacks and Silvio or V. M. Smith and his merry band, just showed you more people, and I was beginning to fear that my problem was simply that I’d had it with people. I’d set out looking for a sign, and what I’d found was a story. The Angel Moroni materialized out of good old flash powder, and was held up with wires. The burning bush smelled of kerosene. Ezekiel’s wheel, flashing across the sky? Look closely. Is that bits of pie crust on it, or what?

How can you say that, Hildy? I protested. (And the lady with the sundae got up and moved to another table, so maybe the monologue wasn’t as interior as I had hoped. Maybe it was about to get positively Shakespearean and I would stand up on my chair and commit a soliloquy. To be or not to be!) After all (I went on, more calmly), he’s building a starship.

Well…  yeah. And his daughter is building pigs with wings, and maybe they’ll
both
fly, but my money was on needing protection from falling pigshit before I held an interstellar boarding pass in my hand.

Yeah, but…  well, they’re
resisting
in here. They don’t kow-tow to the CC. Not two weeks ago you were moved almost to tears to be accepted among them.
Now
we’ll
do
something about the CC, you thought.

Sure. One of these days.

Two things had come clear to me once the fuzzyheaded camaraderie had worn off and my cynicism reasserted itself. One was that the Heinleiners were as capable of lollygagging procrastination as anyone else. Aladdin had admitted to me that the resistance was mostly a passive thing, keeping the CC out rather than bearding him in his lair, mostly because no one had much of a clue as to how to go about the latter. So they all figured they’d take the fight to him…  when they felt like it. Meantime, they did what we all did about insurmountable problems: they didn’t think about it.

The second thing I realized was that, if the CC wanted to be in Heinlein Town, he would
be
in Heinlein Town.

I wasn’t privy to all their secrets. I didn’t know anything of the machinations that had brought the MacDonald-clone to Minamata, nor much of anything else about just how hard the CC was trying to penetrate the little Heinleiner enclave. But even such as me could tell it would be easy to get a spy in here. Hell, Liz had visited the previous weekend, with me, and had been admitted solely on the strength of her reputation as a person of known Heinleiner tendencies. Some sorts of checks were run, I’m sure, but I would bet anything the CC could get around them if he wanted to infiltrate a spy.