The Winds of Altair (15 page)

"As for you, Jeffrey Holman," Amanda scolded, "for a man who says he cares so much about the moral rights and wrongs, you're awfully damned quick to put your friend in danger."

"I didn't realize . . ."

"You didn't
think
," Amanda said. "Never mind what could happen to her if Foy found out about this escapade. Suppose you had died while she was sitting there in the control room? How do you think that might have hit her?"

Jeff hung his head.

"All you could think about was that big cat down there, wasn't it?"

"I . . . Crown needed me."

"No he didn't," she answered, more softly. "
You
needed
him.
Don't you realize that when you worry about Crown, you're really worrying about yourself?"

He stared at her. "But . . ."

Amanda arched an eyebrow at him. "Think about it. And you're going to get plenty of time to think it over. I'm going to put this lab off-limits to you, until further notice."

"What? You can't do that!"

"Watch me," she said. "The medical staff agrees that you need a rest. So you're going to get a rest, even if I have to put an armed guard at the door to this lab."

"Amanda, please don't."

"You're too close to the problem, Jeff. You're tearing yourself apart. Crown's all right . . ."

"Until he dies of oxygen poisoning."

That stopped her, for a moment. "Yes, you're right. Until they all die . . . until we kill them all."

"Don't lock me out of the lab, Amanda. Please don't."

"I've got to, Jeff. Lana Polchek and the psychologists have put it into the official record. You are not allowed to resume contact work until further notice."

For a long moment neither of them said anything. Then Jeff slid off the couch and headed for the door.

Amanda wanted to call out to him, but knew that she shouldn't, she mustn't.

Jeff stopped at the door and turned back toward her. "What makes you think that Laura's in love with me?"

Amanda almost laughed, she was so relieved that his mind was moving in that direction.

"Only a blind man would ask such a silly question," she replied.

Jeff's brow knitted in puzzled frustration. Amanda saw clearly that he did not understand. But that didn't matter. At least he had something to look forward to, something vital and important, something that just might keep him from being crushed as they killed off all the native life on Altair VI.

CHAPTER 19

Jeff awoke the next morning, dressed as usual, and was heading down the dormitory corridor toward the autocafeteria when he remembered that he was no longer on duty. He would not be allowed into the contact lab. He had nowhere to go.

For the first time in months, he allowed himself a leisurely breakfast, and surprised himself by downing a large stack of pancakes, a trio of eggs with simulated bacon, and several glasses of synthetic milk. The long rows of tables filled up, gradually at first, but then almost the entire student body arrived within a few minutes, jamming the serving lines, filling up the tables, making the cafeteria echo with their talk and laughter. Jeff had not seen so many lively men and women since his first day at the contact lab.

He knew that he should feel angry with them, or at least deeply disappointed that they could appear so happy and free of worry in spite of all the problems the Village faced. Yet their laughter and youthful high spirits were infectious. Jeff grinned at the students who sat with him at the cafeteria table.

And they clearly respected Jeff with an admiration that came little short of adulation.

"What're you doing here so late, Jeff?"

"Yeah. You giving the wolfcats a rest today?"

He gave them a slight shrug. "I'm on vacation. They've ordered me to take a rest."

"Holy Nirvan! A rest! How did you finagle that?"

"It wasn't my idea."

"Hey, Jeff, will you be able to go to chapel this morning with us?"

"Sure," he said.

"Laura!" one of the women called across the noisy cafeteria. "Over here! Jeff's with us!"

She came to their table and the other students made a place for her beside Jeff. He wondered, Does everybody know about "us" except me?

They talked and joked and laughed until the overhead loudspeakers droned, "SUNRISE WORSHIP. ALL FAITHFUL TO THE TABERNACLE. SUNRISE WORSHIP."

The students cleared their tables and brought their breakfast trays to the disposal slots set into the cafeteria walls. Then they streamed toward the Tabernacle, off in its own dome.

Jeff offered his arm to Laura, who took it with obvious pleasure, and they walked along the greenpath toward the Tabernacle with happy grins on their faces.

"I really appreciate what you did for me last night," he told her.

"It was nothing."

"No it wasn't. It was very important—to me. If I didn't know that Crown was alive and able to take care of himself, I'd go crazy."

"I'll look after him for you," Laura said. "Amanda and I will make sure he's all right."

"You're the one who's all right," he replied. "You're pretty wonderful, Laura."

Her smile widened and she lowered her eyes for a moment. Then, "I'm sorry they took you off the contact work. I'll ask Amanda to let you back as quickly as she can."

Nodding, he said, "I'm going to talk to Dr. Carbo about it. They can't keep me away for long."

In the Tabernacle, Jeff knelt beside Laura and tried to feel the religious warmth that he knew she did. But it was like his father's lack of feeling, compared to his mother's. Hundreds of heads were bowed in prayer, the Globe of Nirvan glowed brightly above them, yet Jeff felt no Presence, no awe, no deep stirring of his soul.

Then, from somewhere deep in his mind, came a memory of a Sunday School lesson: Faith is a gift, said Nirvan. God grants that gift to many, but withholds it from others, for inscrutable reasons of His own. Yet even a man who has not been granted the gift of Faith may show his devotion to God and Nirvan by his good works.

By my good works, Jeff thought. And all the burdens that had been lifted from his shoulders since he had seen that Crown was still alive, returned with a crushing new heaviness. The snake had not killed Crown, but we humans are killing him, and all the other creatures of Windsong. But if we don't kill them, the colonists coming from Earth will surely die.

By the time sunrise worship ended, Jeff's high spirits had evaporated. The tension, the pain had returned.

He did his best to keep it from Laura as she and the other students headed off for their day's work. They streamed out of the Tabernacle and into the greenpaths that led to the other parts of the Village. In the midst of that chattering, smiling, purposeful crowd, Laura stood up on tiptoes and gave Jeff a peck of a kiss, directly on his lips. Then she quickly turned and headed off, leaving him standing there with the other students swirling around him, grinning at him.

"See?" he heard Laura telling the young woman walking next to her. "He isn't a stuck-up snob at all. The people who've been saying that, are just plain jealous of him, that's all."

The Tabernacle emptied quickly and the students strode with determined vigor toward their morning jobs. Within a few minutes, Jeff was left standing all alone outside the Tabernacle's main doors. In the sudden heavy silence, he felt the cold hand of guilt pressing on him. They were all working while he stood idle.

But not for long. Jeff walked swiftly to his dorm room and phoned Dr. Carbo.

"We'll get this thing straightened out right now," he muttered to himself as the phone computer searched for the scientist. "I don't need a rest, I'm as ready for I was the first day here."

But the phone screen printed, DR. CARBO UNAVAILABLE AT PRESENT. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR MESSAGE AND HE WILL CALL BACK.

"Where is he?" Jeff asked aloud.

LOADING DOCK C.

He must be going down to the surface with today's landing team, Jeff realized. That means he won't be able to talk with me until this evening, at the earliest. Maybe he'll be down there for several days. Blast!

"Tell him it's Jeffrey Holman calling. And tell him it's urgent."

The phone screen printed JEFFREY HOLMAN. URGENT. It added the date and time. Jeff pressed the button that okayed the message. The letters faded from the screen, to be entered on Dr. Carbo's message list. There was nothing more that Jeff could do.

All that day, Jeff felt like a prisoner, an exile. He was free to roam anywhere in the Village he wanted to go, except for the contact lab—which was the only place he wanted to be. He hiked along the greenpaths, went up to the Village's observatory and gazed at the luminous blank face of cloud-wrapped Windsong, then pulled himself away and walked aimlessly for hours.

Finally he headed back to his own room, plopped himself on his bunk and started watching history tapes from the Village's library on his video screen. He examined the history of Earth, overcrowded, overpolluted, dangerous, dirty Earth. The teeming cities, the dying rivers and lakes, the oceans covered with algae farms and man-made islands and huge floating platforms that drank in the energy beamed from the Solar Power Satellites up in synchronous orbit.

He saw the human race, spread across the inner reaches of the solar system. and for the first time he realized how enormous was the difference between the rich and the poor, between those who lived in the vast luxurious colonies that floated serenely at the L-4 and L-5 points between the Earth and the Moon, and those squalid billions who lived in unending poverty down on the Earth's surface. He saw other space colonies drifting majestically out among the asteroids, beyond the orbit of Mars, where they mined the rocks and metals of the minor planets, turning those natural resources into enormous wealth.

For themselves. Very little of that wealth reached the hungry masses of Earth. The human race had split into two groups, early in the Twenty-First Century: those who lived in space, and grew richer every year; and those who remained on the home world, and grew constantly poorer.

Jeff remembered a twisted parody of the words of Jesus of Nazareth: The meek shall inherit the Earth; the rest of us are going to the stars.

To the stars.

He breathed out a long, weary sigh of frustration and despair. Here we are at the stars, working our hardest to create a clean new world for the Earth's poorest people. But at what cost?

Jeff spent hours staring at the history tapes. At the violence and hatred and fear and death that marked human existence. Even with the knowledge to end disease, to build artificial worlds in empty space, to tap the energies of the stars themselves, most of the human race still wallowed in murder and war, in poverty and ignorance. A few million lived in splendor in their space colonies. The seventeen billions on Earth lived in the mud.

He asked himself what he could do about it. As the past five decades of human achievement flickered by his eyes on the viewscreen, Jeff tried to figure out what he should do. He knew that behind the thirty-two thousand approaching colonists, millions more would soon be heading for Altair VI. And no matter how many of them were fitted out with neuro probes, they were all carrying a full cargo of anger and hatred within their minds. Inside of a few years, a few decades at best, they would turn Altair VI into another Earth—full of violence and conflict.

Is this what we're killing Crown for? Jeff asked himself. There must be a better way. But he could think of nothing better.

Nothing.

The matter was out of his hands. He had helped them to use Crown, to start the inevitable death of the world called Windsong. He had been tricked into betraying a whole world.

"No," he muttered to himself. "Don't blame the others. You tricked yourself."

It startled him to hear a knock at his door. Flicking off the history tapes, he got off the bunk and crossed his room in three strides.

It was Laura, smiling at him hopefully.

"I just wanted to let you know," she said, "that I was with Crown today."

"Is he okay?" Jeff asked eagerly.

"Yes. His leg's pretty stiff, but otherwise he's all right"

"What about food?"

Instead of answering, she said, "We're all going to sunset worship. Want to come along?"

"Sure." He stepped out into the busy corridor and closed the door behind him.

As they started toward the Tabernacle, Jeff asked again, "Are the animals getting any food?"

"Well, some of the apes have been going into the ocean surf and digging up shellfish, but the wolfcats won't touch those."

"There's nothing else in the woods to eat," Jeff said.

Laura replied, "Crown went up there this morning and dug up a couple of animals that were down inside burrows. Dr. Peterson thinks they were hibernating for the winter."

"They can't be very big."

"They're not, but they're better than nothing. We'll have all the wolfcats doing that until the first supplies of synthetics are landed on the beach."

Jeff shook his head. "I don't think the wolfcats will eat synthetics."

"We'll see," Laura said. "It will all work out, one way or the other."

"One way or the other," he repeated.

For the next few days Jeff's only source of news was the students. Dr. Carbo never returned his call, and he found that he couldn't even reach Amanda by phone.

"They're busy," Jeff told himself. "And they know that I just want to pester them into taking me back."

More and more of the students clustered around Jeff each day. He ate breakfast and dinner with them, listened to their problems, suggested solutions.

One evening he sat back in his chair, his stomach filled with the tasteless but nourishing food, and let the other students chatter around him. The cafeteria was bustling with noise. All the table were filled. Hundreds of conversations babbled through the big, echoing room; hundreds of aromas drifted through the air.

Crown would go crazy in here, Jeff thought. Then he grinned inwardly at the thought of the wolfcat suddenly appearing among all these students.

Even Petrocelli seemed to have acquired a newfound respect for Jeff. He sat next to Jeff that evening, his usually-smirking face utterly unsmiling, sober. There were hollows in his cheeks that hadn't been there a week earlier, Jeff saw. The contact work was taking its toll on him. On all of them.

"How's it going, Dom?" Jeff asked.

Petrocelli shook his head. "Slow, man. Very slow. The apes are getting sicker every day."

"And the wolfcats?" Jeff wanted to ask specifically about Crown, but he still felt wary of Petrocelli's sarcastic tongue.

"They're in trouble too. They're starving."

"I thought we were shipping synthetic food down to them," Jeff said.

"We are," replied another student, a lanky sandy-haired youth with a surprisingly deep basso voice. "But they aren't eating it."

Laura explained, "The biochemists have produced synthetics that look and taste just like real meat—at least, to me."

"You tasted it?"

She grinned and nodded.

"Raw?" Petrocelli asked, incredulous.

"It's like raw hamburger," Laura said. "What do they call that in restaurants?"

"Steak tartare," said one of the other students.

"But the animals won't eat it?" Jeff got them back on the subject.

Petrocelli made a sour face. "They land these reentry capsules full of food right down on the beach, okay? The things come in like a big bomb:
ca-boom!
The blasted apes jump out of their skins and run in the other direction. Even the wolfcats get scared. None of them will go near the capsules, and the stuff rots away."

Jeff leaned back in his chair. "Why don't they land the capsules farther down the beach, out of sight? Then they can send the wolfcats out to get the food and bring it back to the camp—just like they did with the antelope."

Laura's eyes lit up. "Why didn't we think of that?"

Because you're not a wolfcat, Jeff thought. No matter how many times you've been in contact with the beast, you haven't really
been
Crown.

"I'm gonna tell Dr. Peterson about that," Petrocelli said, an honest smile spreading across his face. "I think that'll work."