The Winds of Altair (3 page)

Carbo stopped and peered at the words for several long minutes. That sounds pretty damned supercilious, he said to himself. On the other hand, it is perfectly true. With a barely detectable shrug of his shoulders, he resumed:

"The first two test subjects, one male and one female—computer, fill in their names and ages—were both failures. The reasons are still being studied by the psychologists. The third test subject . . ." he hesitated, then remembered, ". . . Jeffrey Holman, age 23, was an unqualified success."

Carbo paused again. He thought, Now we can start pushing the young man and see how much he can do for us. See the big genius scientist lean on the lowly graduate student.

The robot probes had reported that Altair VI was sufficiently Earthlike for colonization. It was slightly smaller than Earth, and had a slightly lower gravitational pull. Its chemical composition was very Earthlike and there was liquid water on its surface in copious amounts. It was covered with a global, perpetual deck of thick cloud, but that helped to shield the land below from the merciless glare of Altair, a star ten times brighter than the Sun.

What Carbo and his fellow scientists found when they reached Altair VI was a planet whose "Earthlike" air was laced with a lethal level of methane, a world covered by acid clouds that blanketed the land and seas in eternal inky blackness despite the fact that the ground was slightly fluorescent. And the abundant water was frothing with ammonia and other chemicals that made it useless for humans.

Captain Gunnerson laughed bitterly when he realized what the ship's instruments were telling them. "Smog in the air and poison in the water. This planet is naturally polluted. It doesn't need us to foul it up!" Then he bid them good-bye, with a bitterly cheerful prediction: "You'll never tame this planet, no matter how hard you try."

The staff directors and Church Elders met in Bishop Foy's conference room, a narrow, austere chamber bare of decorations.

With all the enthusiasm of a mortician, Foy told them grimly, "We are here. The Church has spent an enormous sum of money to send us here. Even more money and effort is being spent to send shiploads of converts here to colonize this planet. It would be sinful to waste all that money by giving up on Altair VI without even trying to prepare it for colonization."

They all gloomily, reluctantly agreed.

"Very well, then," Bishop Foy said firmly. "Let us begin our task with a prayer."

Martin Foy was the fourth son in a family of eight children, all but the last two being boys. He had grown up on a ranch in the dry scrubland of eastern New Mexico, where it took an acre of semidesert to support a single cow. Despite the laser-drilled deep wells and fusion-powered desalted water pumped all the way from the Gulf of California, Martin watched his father grow poorer and more desperate each year as the price of beef sank in the face of genetically-engineered meat substitutes. Finally, the same day that Martin received his First Communion, the corporation that owned the ranch sent his father written confirmation of his worst fears: the ranch was being converted into a housing development for lower-class city folks who were being resettled by the government.

Martin had always been a good Church member; his parents insisted that all their children be Believers. When he found that he would not be allowed to attend college because his father could not afford it, he enrolled in the nearest Church seminary. While his brothers and two sisters accepted whatever jobs they could find, while his mother wasted away and finally died of cancer and his father withdrew into a private world within his own mind and had to be shipped off to a state hospital, Martin lived the austere but secure life of a novice, then curate, and finally the pastor of a small mission in Bangladesh.

It was there in his sweaty, fetid cubbyhole of an office, behind a ramshackle building that passed for a mission church, that he read about the colonization of the stars. The star missions were enormously expensive, but his Church was going to fund one of the first ones, to a world called Altair VI, and the Church was looking for qualified ministers to lead the way.

Wise in the ways of the world, the Church offered an inducement to volunteers: they would
own
the new world they helped to redeem. Right and title to the land would be given to those who volunteered to prepare the way for colonists.

The temptation overpowered Foy. He left his pitiful mission in Bangladesh with unseemly haste, qualified for leadership of the expedition to Altair VI by sheer tenacity and force of will, and accepted a promotion to Bishop, effective the day the starship left Earth orbit.

So he led the prayer that began the immense task of redeeming Altair VI. Bishop Foy knew well that if the planet was not ready for colonization in three years, he would be replaced. He would lose his share of the wealth that this colony would someday generate. His career would be finished.

The other staff members had no desire to lose their share of the colony's eventual wealth. With the exception of Dr. Carbo, each scientist, social technician, and minister had little on Earth to return to. Yet, strangely, it was Carbo more than any of the others who led the work to tame Altair VI.

They had a huge task facing them, and they knew it. They had to alter an entire planet, almost the size of Earth, enough to make it livable for millions of colonists. If they succeeded, they would become rich. If they failed, they would return to Earth empty-handed, three years older, with nothing to show for their efforts except defeat.

Change the air. Purify the water. Alter the climate. Turn hell into Eden.

They tried.

But they soon found that humans could not work down on the planet's surface. Even in their sturdiest pressure suits, it was too dark and dangerous to remain there for more than a few hours at a time. Robot machinery, controlled from orbit, fared little better. The corrosive air and stubborn plant life knocked the machines out of commission too quickly for them to do any good.

Then Carbo got his chance for personal salvation. There were huge, powerful animals on the planet. Use them. Implant neuro-electronic probes in. their brains and control them from the ship. The staff agreed, and excitement ran high. Landing crews of pressure-suited men stunned several animals and implanted the probes in their skulls. Two of the men were seriously injured. All of the animals, with the exception of one wolfcat, died within a few days of the implantations.

Then it turned out that no one on the staff could establish contact with the implanted beast. Carbo's heart sank, and the entire staff turned funereal. Reluctantly, Carbo suggested testing the students. The staff argued against it, but in the end it was either the students or total failure.

Two months almost to the day after they first established orbit around Altair VI, Jeffrey Holman scored their first success by making solid contact with the wolfcat.

CHAPTER 4

The tubes that connected one globe of the Village with another were thickly green with foliage. It was like walking through a miniature forest. The floor was grass, soft underfoot and fragrant. The curving tube walls were lined with shrubs and stunted trees, many of them bearing edible fruit. In addition to providing a share of the Village's food and a large part of its oxygen, the greenpaths provided something even more important to the people who lived inside this artificial world: beauty.

The greenery also helped to camouflage one of the disconcerting things about the Village. The globes were clustered together tinker-toy fashion, with no particular respect to direction, either front-to-back or up-and-down. Since gravity inside the Village was artificially generated and controlled, it always
felt
as if you were walking along a straight and level path under normal Earth gravity. But the tubes actually made strange turns and bends, like the tracks of a roller coaster, plunging sickeningly downward at one point, arrowing up at an impossible angle somewhere else. Even though you could not feel it as you walked along, your visual sense would send up wild alarm signals when it saw your path suddenly veer sharply to the left and drop out of sight. The shrubs and greenery kept you from seeing ahead far enough to frighten your inner mind.

Jeff and Laura were strolling slowly through one of the greenpaths along a trail that wound past a lush garden of flowering shrubs and oriental trees. Neither of them realized that the sounds of an Earthly forest were missing: there were no birds singing, no insects, no water splashing. Only the faint pervasive background hum of the ship's electrical power systems which provided the heat and light necessary for life.

Taking her arm, Jeff led Laura off the trail, pushing through the shrubbery toward the all-but-hidden curving metal wall of the tube. Finally they found what they were seeking, a viewport that looked down on the planet below them.

"It looks so bright," Laura said.

Jeff nodded wordlessly. The planet hung outside, seemingly motionless, enormously massive and brilliant in the harsh light of Altair. Its surface was a featureless disk of white clouds, as smooth and unbroken as a seamless veil. It shone beautifully against the darkness of space.

"That's going to be our home," Laura said.

"When we get it tamed."

She looked up at him. "When
you
get it tamed."

"It's not . . ." He stopped, feeling flustered and flattered at the same time.

Laura smiled at him, as if she knew something that he didn't. Jeff wanted to hold her, to pull her close and lie down with her and forget about those who watched. But he could see, peeking at them from between the gnarled branches of a dwarf tree, the unblinking red eye of a security camera.

Trying to control the urges burning within him, Jeff said, "It's funny, you know. Like, it's not really
me
anymore. When I was with that wolfcat . . . it's . . . I can run as fast as a rocket . . . I'm
strong
. . ."

Laura stepped close and rested her head against his shoulder. He put his arm around her and stroked her flame-red hair.

"You've always been strong, Jeff."

"Not like that!"

"I don't mean muscles," she said, almost in a whisper. "Any gorilla like Petrocelli can have muscles. I mean you're strong where it's important—when you set out to do something, it gets done."

"Yeah . . . well, maybe."

"No maybes. You're the only one who's made this crazy thing work, aren't you? I knew that if anybody could make contact with those animals down there, you could. The scientists couldn't, could they? But you did."

"I'm just lucky."

"No you're not. You're not afraid of it. You like it. You enjoyed being in contact with that animal, didn't you?"

"Wolfcat," Jeff corrected automatically. "Yeah, I think maybe you're right. It's kind of scary, though. I didn't simply make contact . . .
I was him!"

Laura looked up at him, her green eyes searching. If she was fearful about the future, she did not show it.

Jeff fell silent, his mind filled with the memory of being down in that forest, of having immense strength at his command.

"They're going to need more volunteers," Laura said.

It was an effort to bring himself back to reality. "I suppose they will. Do you want to try it?"

Her eyes went wide. "Me?"

"Sure. Why not?"

She shook her head. "Dr. Carbo won't take women volunteers. He's such a male chauvinist!"

"No," Jeff laughed. "He's just Italian."

"It's more than that," Laura said testily. "Several women have already volunteered, you know. He turned them all down. Said it was too dangerous."

"Well . . . it could be dangerous."

"You're doing it."

"Yes, but . . ." Suddenly Jeff felt confused. He didn't know which side of the argument he wanted to be on.

Less sharply, Laura said, "I'm going to volunteer anyway. And if he turns me down I'll take him before the Council and charge him with prejudice."

"And what'll you do if he accepts you?"

For a moment Laura said nothing. Then, eyes suddenly sparkling, she replied, "Why, then we can be down on the surface of the planet together, Jeff."

"Together," he murmured. Holding her closer, he gazed into her upturned face and kissed her. Laura twined her arms around him. He could feel her heart pounding against him; his own pulse thundered through him. Everything else vanished from his mind: the ship, the planet, the universe disappeared and there was only Laura and himself alone together in an infinite breathless moment.

"UNAUTHORIZED CONDUCT," the Village computer's flat impersonal voice blared through the loudspeakers set into the tube's ceiling. "UNAUTHORIZED CONDUCT. STOP AT ONCE OR BE REPORTED TO THE COUNCIL."

Jeff gazed bleakly up at the loudspeaker's grill as Laura pushed slightly away from him.

The computer was silent for only long enough to scan their faces. "JEFFREY HOLMAN AND LAURA MCGRATH, YOUR CONDUCT IS IN VIOLATION OF YOUR OATHS OF CELIBACY. BE WARNED."

They looked at each other, a mixture of guilt and relief on their faces.

"Maybe I can figure out how to turn off the cameras, someday," Jeff muttered.

Laura giggled. "If you do, the Village will vibrate itself out of orbit inside of ten minutes."

Hand in hand, they made their way back onto the greenpath and headed down the tube back toward their dome.

Halfway home, they saw Brunhilda hurrying toward them, her face florid with unaccustomed exertion as she lumbered along the greenpath.

"There you are!" She pointed a thick, blunt forefinger at them. "You should both know better. I'm ashamed of you! Curfew time is almost here and you're off in the bushes, making the computer sound warning alarms!"

Towering over them, Brunhilda separated Jeff from Laura and walked between the two would-be lovers.

They expected a lecture and grim threats of punishment, but instead Brunhilda was almost mild as she told them, "Just because he is such a hero right now, Ms. McGrath, is no reason to succumb to temptation. And you, Mr. Holman, don't think you're too important to be disciplined."

Jeff said nothing, and neither did Laura. They had learned that arguments and protests simply made things worse with Brunhilda.

As they neared the portal to their dome, the giantess said, "If you've got to smooch, at least do it in the privacy of your dorm rooms. If the computer warning had been picked up by one of the Council members instead of just me . . ." She shook her head.

As they entered their own dome, Bishop Foy himself passed by, heading toward the greenpath they had just come in from. He nodded at them unsmilingly, his thoughts obviously elsewhere as he walked past in his lean, loose-jointed amble.

Jeff looked up at Brunhilda as Bishop Foy passed. She caught his stare and slowly closed one eye in a solemn wink. Jeff was so startled that he nearly tripped and fell.

Jeffrey Holman had been born into the Church of Nirvan. His father, director of the leading bank in the Nevada town where they lived, had used the Church as a social and business tool. He Believed, of course; everyone in the town Believed or they moved elsewhere. But Jeff's father expected God to show some faith in Mr. Holman, too. When the town's copper and molybdenum mines closed down in the face of competition from the asteroid mines out in space, Mr. Holman (as everyone in town called him) brought the Church Elders together with the Los Angeles corporation executives who actually owned the bank and arranged a multi-million-dollar deal that turned the town into a "premier residential center" where executives from Los Angeles, Phoenix, and other crime-infested mega-cities could find a safe home for themselves and their families, far out in the desert.

The town quadrupled in size, the bank prospered, and Mr. Holman was elected mayor—proving that God had faith in him.

It was Jeff's mother who Believed in the Church of Nirvan with the simple abiding faith that demanded nothing in return. She bore eight children, fulfilling the Church's demand for fruitfulness. Jeff was her oldest son; her first three babies had been daughters.

Jeff seemed to slide through life as if God had intended him never to stub a toe. He was a happy, plump baby. He never had a sick day in his life. Once he started school, he charmed his teachers with his quiet, modest behavior and his quick, eager mind. He was always first in class, first in anything he chose to do. The only trouble with Jeff was that he chose to do so little. He liked to read, to sit alone and daydream, to think.

"Some days, Jeffrey, I worry that you're going to turn into a tree stump," his mother often chided him. Jeff would smile at her and offer to help her with the household chores.

"You've got to show more
drive
, son!" his father would admonish. "Get out of the house and meet people, make friends,
do
things."

Jeff would agree and take a walk down to the town library, to lose himself in books for hours on end.

In high school he steered away from sports. "Too much work," he said. "And for what? So you can get to date a cheerleader?"

Mr. Holman warned his wife, "If he doesn't show any interest in girls at this age, Martha, I seriously think we should . . ."

"Be patient, Mr. Holman," his wife said. "You just be patient with the boy."

Jeff easily won a full scholarship to the state university, but asked his father to pay tuition for a friend of his who had barely failed to qualify and couldn't afford college. Mr. Holman, like most bankers, did not like to spend money on people who actually needed it. But between Jeff and his wife—and their use of Church pressure—he became magnanimous. The local TV station was apprised of his open-hearted gesture and did a four-minute feature on the subject as a sidebar to its coverage of the high school graduation.

The weather fascinated Jeff, and after his first two years at the university, he decided to specialize in meteorology.

"We know so much about science," he explained eagerly to his father, one weekend when he had driven home for some solid cooking, "yet we still haven't been able to figure out how to make the weather behave the way we want it to."

"Perhaps God doesn't want us to tinker with the weather?" his mother suggested.

Jeff smiled at her. "If He doesn't, then He'd better let me know pretty soon. I'm going to study weather modification."

It was in his senior year that Jeff heard the call to colonize the stars. The campus was abuzz with the excitement: the Church had taken a contract with the world government to tame one of the outer worlds and make it ready for colonization. Students were being allowed to volunteer for the grandest adventure of all time.

When Jeff went home for Christmas vacation that year, he found his father adamantly opposed to sending students off to strange worlds beyond the solar system.

"I've let the Elders know how I feel about this," Mr. Holman said firmly. "Cannon fodder! That's what they're after. Those old men want to send kids your age out to the stars—they'll never come back. Mark my words. They'll all get themselves killed out there."

"But the Church would never deliberately send young Believers into mortal danger," Jeff's mother protested mildly.

"Oh wouldn't they? There's money involved, Martha. Billions of dollars. Trillions! And the chance to proselytize millions of poor people from all over the world. Do you think the Church is going to pass up such an opportunity just because a few thousand youngsters will get killed?"

Jeff listened intently, saying nothing.

"And those old men get an extra bonus out of it, too. They get rid of the next generation of natural leaders. They ensure their own hold on the Church by sending off all the idealistic youngsters to the stars."

"You're probably right, Dad," Jeff said at last. "But I'm going to volunteer anyway."

And nothing his parents could say or do would deter him. For easy-going, quiet, studious Jeffrey Holman had learned one basic lesson from his hard-driving father and his steadfast faithful mother: once you've made up your mind to do something,
do it.

By the fourth time Amanda strapped him down in the couch, Jeff was completely at ease. Dr. Carbo hovered over him, one eye on the monitor gauges, as Amanda fitted the helmet onto Jeff's head.

"Today is going to be different, Jeff," Dr. Carbo said, his round dark face totally serious, unsmiling. "You have made contact with this wolfcat three times now . . ."

"Crown," Jeff heard himself say. "His name is Crown."

Carbo glanced at Amanda, then looked back at Jeff, an odd expression on his face. "You've given the animal a name?"

"That
is
his name. I didn't give it to him."

Carbo fell silent.

"Crown," Amanda said, smiling. "That's a good name."

Jeff tried to nod but the helmet was too heavy and fitted so snugly he could barely move his head. He hadn't realized that the wolfcat had a name until the word popped out of his mouth. Did I make it up, he wondered, or did Crown really have that name before I linked up with him?