Now the image changed abruptly to old stock footage of a younger Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, seated at his word processor, lecturing a university class, handling a fossil skull, cutting wood in some rustic setting, and finally, stalking game on the African plains with the same big .416 Rigby Emerson was so familiar with.
“Apparently, Mirelle Stein’s original vision of a hyperdemocratic society didn’t include basing an entire civilization on what others now quote her as calling ‘primitive blood sports.’”
At the precise instant that the word “blood” was spoken, Drake-Tealy’s enormous rifle recoiled on his shoulder, spouting smoke, and the view cut to a tiny, delicate antelope which fell over and slid as if it had been hit by an invisible truck.
“This was entirely Drake-Tealy’s ‘contribution,’” the newswoman declared, “to match the philosophical insights of Stein herself and the financial and engineering input of William Wilde Curringer...and it appears she’s always been sickened by it.”
The camera was on Miri once again, looking tired and unhappy.
“Kylie Kennedy at Port Peary, the North Pole of Pallas, for the East American Radio Service.”
A Beastly Pattern
A thousand years hence, perhaps in less, America may be what Europe is now...the noblest work of human wisdom, the grand scene of human glory, the fair cause of freedom that rose and fell.
—Thomas Paine
Emerson trudged the long, weary road back to Mrs. Singh’s.
Alone.
Ordinarily, it was a brief, pleasant stroll beside a freshly paved road quite unlike the dusty gravel track he’d first followed to freedom many years ago. He’d turned down the offer of a ride in Mrs. Singh’s three-wheeled contraption. Nobody had ever come up with a satisfactory generic name for the damned things, although they were in use all over the Curringer area and Nails was getting quite rich manufacturing them. Usually they just sat out on a sales lot or were displayed on a video screen, requiring no more label than a price tag.
Instead, Emerson had chosen to be by himself for a while. While he was in town—they’d all come in to see Cherry off—he was staying in his old room, which happened to be vacant. By tomorrow it wouldn’t be, since Miri was moving in, apparently as a long-term resident.
How odd, he thought, and how discouraging. Here I am, very nearly half a century old, two-thirds of my normal Earthside actuarial life span over with (although nobody could say for sure how long he might expect to live on Pallas), and I still can’t sort my feelings out a bit better than I could when I was fourteen, And everything still hurts just as much as it did when I was that age.
Maybe even more.
He lit a cigar, inhaled, and blew the smoke out in front of him.
He wouldn’t have admitted that he nearly worshipped Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy as a hero, and was almost as uncritically fond of the warm, kindly individual Mirelle Stein had turned out to be underneath that crusty layer of bitterness and anger which seemed to have crumbled away the very minute she’d discovered a reason to hope again. But it was true. It had broken his heart to learn that they were at odds with one another, had separated after all these years, and, if that bubble-head on TV had her way, would soon be arguing the whole thing out in public.
The one thing he had managed to learn in his forty-seven years was that you can’t live other people’s lives for them, that trying only makes you—and them—even more miserable. Not that this insight, for whatever wisdom it contained, offered much satisfaction. On the contrary, it was simply the sort of thing you resigned yourself to.
As always, when confronted with this kind of mentally immovable object, the subject seemed to change itself before he’d made any conscious decision in the matter. For some reason that defied analysis, he found he was thinking more and more often these days about Gretchen, and he was very confused about Cherry. Part of him wished her nothing but well, sincerely hoped that she’d succeed fabulously in her new career, as she deserved to. Yet another part hoped, not without a pang of guilt, that she would “fall flat on her face” and come right back to him.
But if he really loved her, he’d never have let her go back to Earth, at least not without him.
Right?
And if she really loved him, she’d never have gone.
Oh the other hand, maybe they loved each other enough to let each seek his or her own destiny.
And on the third hand, maybe that was bullshit.
With a rueful grin, he remembered an old poster he’d once seen: “If you love somebody, let them go—then, if they don’t come back, hunt them down and kill them.”
And with that grin, his mind refocused itself once again on something safer, although no less confusing: what were the Drake-Tealy Objects, anyway, and where the hell had they come from?
For that matter, the same question could be asked about the asteroids themselves. Emerson knew that the question of their origin had never been satisfactorily settled. Some scientists, mostly Earth-based astronomers and astrophysicists relying on mathematical models, had held for centuries that they were simple accretions of nebular matter—dust and gases—which, owing to the disturbing influence of massive Jupiter’s gravity, had never coalesced into the planet this region of the solar system should have given birth to.
Others, mostly chemists and geologists, argued back (perhaps a trifle romantically, although they had physical evidence, meteors in the beginning and now actual samples, to support them) that the asteroids were remnants of a planet which, for some unknown reason—possibly Jupiter’s gravity again—had shattered into millions of fragments. They also pointed out that the advocates of another romantic theory, continental drift, had been unjustly ridiculed as crackpots by established scientists for a century before not only being proven correct, but seeing their concept become the fundamental fact of Earthside geology.
Their opponents countered, quite logically, that just because Columbus had been made fun of and later proven right, that didn’t mean Velikovski was right, too.
For the most part, until recent years, those individuals actually living and working among the thousands of tumbling mountains hurtling through space between Mars and Jupiter had been far too busy simply surviving to worry very much about where the asteroids had come from, let alone some useless curiosity like the Drake-Tealy Objects which, in any case, had only recently come to light.
Now times were better and people could afford to be curious.
Pallas was still the only body in the Asteroid Belt with a permanent population. However, ship-based mining, such as that pursued by Aloysius’s friend Fritz Marshall, was being carried out on an everyday basis elsewhere in the Belt, just as sixteenth century European fishermen had once harvested the Grand Banks off North America, returning home after each trip, never really setting foot in the New World. And, as Emerson had observed on many occasions before, there was always talk of new colonial enterprises being launched from Earth, or even from Pallas itself.
There was always talk...
“I’m Hugh Downey, Junior, and this is Fifty/Fifty, part of LiteLink’s never-ending struggle to get at the real truth no matter what the facts may be. With us this evening, via interplanetary video and a bit of careful editing to reduce the time it takes for signals to get back and forth from world to world, is the distinguished former United States Senator—and onetime Union Democratic Presidential hopeful—Gibson Altman, presently Chief Administrator of the United Nations’ Greeley Utopian Memorial Project on the asteroid Pallas.
“Good evening, Senator Altman. We feel we were very lucky to get this interview, and we’re grateful, with all the other networks anxious to consult you on the current crisis.
That wasn’t true, of course, but it would be after this—and worth every cent it had cost.
“Good evening, Hugh—although it’s morning where I happen to be at the moment.”
Even so, he had the drapes drawn here in his office—the one room he’d been able to maintain
by himself, now that he was all alone, living in the moldering remains of what had once been his official Residence—so that the brown, dying fields surrounding the building would not be visible to billions of viewers back on Earth. It would be late afternoon before the interview—consisting of questions and answers separated by half an hour’s wait each time—was over. It would be a long, arduous process which would leave him exhausted for the next couple of days, but it might well prove to have been worth the effort.
Downey briefly detailed Altman’s personal history—brushing only very lightly over the scandal which had taken him to Pallas in the first place—but bearing down on the “beastly pattern of treatment” the Senator and his Project had received at the hands of the brutish colonists, whom he compared to the Boers of South Africa.
“Senator, public curiosity here on Earth—as well as there on Pallas, I understand—has recently been piqued by the mysterious so-called Drake-Tealy Objects, which may or may not be remnants of a lost alien civilization. Even before the infamous and colorful anthropologist wrote his book about them, they were commanding higher prices among this planet’s fashionable elite than finds of precious metals. A number of very emotional controversies centering on those objects has begun raging. First and foremost, of course, there’s the question of what to do with them.”
“Yes, Hugh, that’s the crucial question. According to a long-standing position taken by the United Nations General Assembly and broadly shared by academic and government authorities on Earth, such objects are the common property of all humanity, and should be treated as such, rather than being permitted to fall into the hands of unscrupulous individuals, no different from archaeological pot-hunting criminals anywhere else, really, willing to exploit or even obliterate these fragile and mysterious relics, simply to make money for themselves.”
Downey nodded sympathetically for the benefit of his Earthside audience rather than for the Senator, who didn’t see the gesture until half an hour after he’d made the statement that inspired it. “However, I gather that this position, as you say, broadly shared among civilized people everywhere, has been discarded on Pallas, although it still finds local support in the person of a certain courageous, respectable, but tragically unappreciated elder statesman.”
That was laying it on pretty thick, even for this notoriously effusive telejournalist, Altman thought, but Downey knew his own constituency and perhaps he knew what he was doing. He’d been paid enough that he’d better know.
But before he could make a suitably modest disclaimer, the man was going on. “Some advocacy media figures and entertainer-activists here on Earth have gone so far as to portray Pallatian colonists as thick-witted, savage louts. I’ve heard comparisons being drawn between them and the whale hunters of ages past, as well as baby-seal harvesters, commercial loggers, and even industrial polluters.”
Stand-up comics, TV and radio talk-show hosts, each had played a part in an overall scheme the purpose of which was to make Altman appear moderate and reasonable.
“Hugh, I think the media may be making a mistake in that regard. I admit there are times when I’m tempted to compare my fellow Pallatians to the barbarians who burned the Alexandrian Library, but in general, I think it’s a waste of time to call names or point fingers. What we must all do, instead, is encourage the General Assembly to pass the Emergency Antiquities Protection Act I’ve proposed, no matter how much or how loudly it—or I, for that matter—may be repudiated by certain short-sighted individuals making a fortune here on Pallas.”
Downey grinned. Like Altman, he knew that, for all practical purposes, and with only one significant exception, the interview was over, that it had already achieved what it had been arranged for, and that the rest of the conversation would be a matter of consolidating that achievement or merely filling airtime.
“And what of the argument we’ve been hearing lately that what began as a matter of mere paleontological curiosity could now become a fundamental question of cultural conflict and political sovereignty? Does the Emergency Antiquities Protection Act you’ve proposed threaten to trample human rights wholesale, as its opponents claim, and even raise the terrible possibility of interplanetary war?”
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 inhabitants 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 Antiquities 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, environmentalists, 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 persuaded 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 traditional 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 sensibl
e 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 Antiquities Protection Act be put in place immediately, along with its various enabling regulations.”
Downey grinned his famous grin. “I’m sure they all heard that, Senator, 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.”
Rosalie Frazier
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
—Thomas Jefferson
Emerson 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 attempting 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.