O Pioneer! (8 page)

Giyt said cautiously, "Well, you can't blame them for not taking any chances—"

"Sure, but, the way it works out, this 'safety' thing might actually
cause
an accident, don't you see? Something could go wrong. Hell, something did, once."

He stopped there, but Giyt's curiosity was piqued. He persisted. "What did?"

"It was a while ago," Hagbarth said moodily. "One of the keyholders turned off his key in the middle of a transmission. A bunch of Slugs were coming in and—well, they got lost. You know what happens to somebody like that? They were transmitted. They weren't received. So they're gone forever."

"You mean they're
dead
?"

"I mean they're
at least
dead. Maybe something a lot worse. like something I don't even want to think about. Now, we don't want that happening to the energy lady from Earth, do we? Not to mention there's a six-planet meeting coming along,"

"Six-planet meeting?"

"Oh, didn't you know? Twice a year all six of the races get together here on Tupelo to talk things over—it's like your commission, you know? Only these people represent their whole home planet. Now, we wouldn't want anything going wrong with them, would we? We're talking about some of the most important people there are. So if you could manage to dig out those codes for me—"

Giyt thought it over for a moment, then temporized. "I thought you'd have all that stuff. I mean, you must have access to the portal design."

"Must we? We don't," Hagbarth said bitterly. "The goddamn eeties won't tell us how the portal works, and if we try to take it apart to find out for ourselves it'll blow up. I mean, a
big
blowup. They've probably got the thing booby-trapped with nukes or something."

"I don't understand," Giyt said plaintively. "Wasn't it this man Sommermen who invented the portal, based on what they call this Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thing? Aren't all those guys human beings?"

Hagbarth shrugged. "I'm just telling you the way it is. So what do you say? Can you figure out those codes for me?"

"Maybe, but you've got me confused. I don't understand what you're telling me about the portal."

"Oh, hell," Hagbarth snarled, losing patience, "what're you asking me about all this stuff for? Maybe I misunderstood—and look, those Petty-Primes look like they're getting ready to go. Don't miss your ride."

Giyt got away without promising anything, but he didn't stop thinking about the portal codes—and most of all, about the portal itself. After dinner he sat down to stare at his terminal.

For starters, he was pretty sure he wasn't going to work out a system for bypassing the other controls for Hoak Hagbarth—not, anyway, until he convinced himself that Hagbarth was smart enough and responsible enough to be trusted with that kind of power. But what about the bigger question Hagbarth had planted in his mind? Was there something that no one was being told about the portal's provenance?

It occurred to him that a good place to look might be in some of the other species' data stores. Anyway, it might be worth a little time spent at the terminal to see if he could find them.

He started with the Petty-Primes, and an hour's hard work later he had to admit he had drawn a blank. However unreliable the damn translation programs were, Giyt was pretty sure he'd converted every possible name for the terminals into the dots and strokes of the Petty-Prime script and all he'd had for his pains was a lot of garbage about the numbers of immigrants and the volume of goods shipped back and forth.

It had seemed like a possible shortcut, but it wasn't working. Giyt sighed and went back to the human data files.

But even the Library of Congress store was less than illuminating. Yes, somehow or other, long ago, Huntsville Inc. had pried a grant from some foundation or other to finance the airy-fairy project of interstellar exploration. Yes, they'd launched a dozen or so miniature ion rockets, one to each of the most promising nearby stars. . . .

But then what? How did they get from the tiny, slow, unmanned probes to the instant transportation of the Sommermen portal?

That was where the story clouded over. Dr. Fitzhugh Sommermen worked for Huntsville, that was definite. He had been conducting researches on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen simultaneity effect—and doing it very expensively, in low Earth Orbit, paid for by another of Huntsville's free-flowing grants. The reason for his being in orbit the report said, was that it was necessary to avoid interference from Earth's surface gravity. Then somehow—this was when it all got misty and uncertain—he had come back from one session in orbit with the prototype of his portal device in his lander.

The rest of the story, for security reasons, was classified secret. But what "security reasons"? Military? But military security implied an enemy, and what enemy was involved here?

The questions were not getting answered, they were proliferating.

The obvious next place to look was in the Tupelo files of the Extended Earth Society, but when Giyt accessed them he was no farther along. Maybe there was something there, but every interesting file turned out to be secured. A password was needed.

That was neither a surprise nor a problem; not for Evesham Giyt, who had a hundred ways of getting past such obstacles. The first was to check every terminal on the island that might have access to the protected system to see if someone might have been stupid enough to leave his password in its default setting—its extension number, his name, something like that. He wasn't surprised when that didn't work; even Wili Tschopp wasn't quite that dumb. Another way of gaining entry was to select a terminal that was privy to the closed file and flood it with extraneous messages. That was how Giyt had financed his college education, going through the university president's terminal to enter the financial files; they would normally have questioned his status, but with the president's terminal bogged down it could not give the reply that would have denied Giyt access.

On Earth that no longer worked; net users had become a good deal more sophisticated since Giyt's college days. But here on Tupelo—

It took less than five minutes for Giyt to get into the closed files. But when he was there he was still nowhere.

The trouble was that even the secured files were still unreadable for him. He found plenty of entries that concerned the portal or the Sommermen terminal or any of the other variations he could think of on the term, but, just as with the Petty-Primes, they dealt only with what particular shipments had arrived or departed on particular days. And even those were enciphered.

What did it mean, for instance, when an entry read: "President
TARBABY
stocks: 1533
JUNIORS
, 114
GRABBAGS
,. 11
SUPERS
"? Or "Need 16 gross additional
HAIRNETS
"? Not to mention the wholly incomprehensible transmissions like "
GREEKS
53
FLYSWATTERS
,
COPTS
2600-plus
RUTABAGAS
all sizes, others not identified."

Giyt blanked the screen and sat back. He could, of course, ask Hagbarth what all this stuff meant, but that would mean telling Hagbarth he'd snooped into the files . . . and, anyway, the mere fact that it was all encoded meant that it probably was something Hagbarth wouldn't want to talk about.

Giyt hated to admit defeat, even when only curiosity was involved. He knew that if he were on Earth he could probably get into the master system there. But he wasn't. Here on Tupelo there was no continuous contact with Earth, only the burst transmissions that went to and from Earth when the EPR portal was open. He had no firsthand knowledge of that stuff, since neither he nor Rina, of course, had any reason to communicate with anyone back on Earth.

But as it turned out, about that he was wrong.

VIII

The climate of the planet Tupelo is uncomplicated, if sometimes drastic. There are relatively few major hurricanes, perhaps because of the lack of large landmasses, which means relatively few collisions between dry, continental, high-pressure air masses and humid maritime lows. However, disturbances from the planet's intertropical convergence zone may from time to time drift north or south and propagate some severe storms. Generally speaking, Tupelo's one inhabited island, which lies quite close to the planet's equator, avoids hurricanes because there is relatively little Coriolis force at those latitudes. There are, however, exceptions.

—
BRITANNICA ONLINE
, "
TUPELO
."

Giyt discovered that his wife had been communicating with Earth when she asked him for a favor. "Shammy, hon, I have to go to the store. I'd appreciate it if you'd come along."

That was a little surprising, because Rina knew that her husband wasn't fond of shopping, but then she went on, "It's a nice day for a walk," she wheedled. "Anyway I need you to help me pick out a birthday present for my sister's husband."

Then he was really astonished, since he hadn't known she had a sister. Rina was curiously defensive about it, too.

"Oh, yes," she said, "she's living in Des Moines. So I dropped her a line, just to let her know where I was and what I was doing."

"You sent a message to Des Moines?"

"Well, sure. Shammy. She's the only sister I've got. Wasn't that all right?"

Giyt wasn't quite sure of the answer to that. It had been his belief that they had cut their ties with Earth entirely—that is, not counting his private stashes of mad money, available any time he chose to draw on them. "Anyway," she went on, "there was an answer from her in the last transmission—wait a minute. I'll show you."

She poked at her terminal, and in a moment her sister's face appeared. The woman on the screen didn't look a lot like Rina, Giyt thought: older, sterner, sharper-featured. But she was smiling as she said, "Well, Rina, you could have knocked me dead. Imagine you settled down at last! And married to an important man, at that—a mayor, for heaven's sake!"

Rina stopped it there. "The rest is just personal stuff," she said, sounding embarrassed. "We had a lot to catch up on because, you know, she didn't much care for my, uh, lifestyle. So we sort of lost touch for a while. Anyway, her husband's birthday's coming up. I'd like to get him something. The trouble is, I don't know him well enough to know what he'd like, so if you wouldn't mind . . ."

Giyt didn't mind. He did have a pretty full afternoon ahead of him—the commission meeting first, and after that there was a scheduled transmission from Earth, but with live people coming in this time so that he would have to go to the terminal to greet them. No problem there, though. Giyt had become very relaxed about the commission meetings, now that he'd actually read up on the reports ahead of time. And even better, he had a tangible announcement for the Kalkaboos.

The store wasn't crowded. There was a knot of people in the food section, picking over the fresh vegetables and the wrapped cuts of meat, with another handful sorting through the video displays for things to order from Earth. None of that was what Rina was after. "I'd like to get him something from Tupelo if I can," she said, doubtfully fingering the sleeve of an anorak. "How cold do you suppose it gets in Des Moines?"

"Cold enough," Giyt told her, looking under the collar of the coat. He was a little surprised to see cold-weather gear in this balmy place, but no doubt it was for anyone unlucky enough to have to work in the polar factories. Then he found the label. "I think that one comes from Earth, though."

She sighed. "I know, but the ones they make here are all plastic." As they were. As were most of the locally produced garments, because there were these oil wells at the pole, and there was no need for the oil as fuel. The nuclear plant on Energy Island took care of all the town's energy needs, so most of the oil not burned at the pole itself got turned into plastic and fabricated in the polar factories into—well, face it, Giyt thought, mostly into junk.

The biggest export item on display was the doll collection. The dolls came in six varieties, one for each race on Tupelo, and they all squeaked out a friendly line of patter from their interior chiplets—"Hi! I'm a Slug! I like wet places and I can sing!" But Rina's brother-in-law, a forty-year-old insurance broker in Des Moines, Iowa, was not likely to want a doll of any kind. Nor did any of the locally made kitchen appliances seem like a good bet, however smart they were with chiplets of their own. Rina finally settled on a mantel clock. It was a fairly nice-looking thing, and it had two faces side by side, one displaying each hemisphere of the planet—not that there was much difference between them, unless you know what island groups to look for. One face told Tupeloyian time, the other displayed the twenty-four-hour Earth clock. "I guess it could be a kind of conversation piece," Rina said doubtfully, hefting the thing in her hand. "You bet," Giyt encouraged. "Anyway, he sure couldn't get one of those in Des Moines. Let's get them to ship it."

Giyt enjoyed walking around the town when he had the time for it. He liked seeing the new buildings going up—Delts installing the electrical connections. Slug crews running the machines that dug trenches for the sewer and water pipes. There was a human bakery cheek by jowl with a Kalkaboo brewery, offering two distinct smells, both interesting. He passed the human ecumenical church, reminding him that, since he was the mayor, after all, probably he and Rina ought to go there once in a while, and a Centaurian home with the little males bossing children around.

But the day was no longer fine. It had clouded over while he was in the store with Rina, and he wasn't halfway to the Hexagon when he heard thunder. The storm came on fast, and it was a big one, thunder crashes like artillery fire and startling displays of lightning flashing through the clouds. The rain had already begun and he was drenched by the . time he got a cart. He got drenched again when it let him out at the Hexagon. So as the meeting of the Joint Governance Commission started, he was soggy and no longer had the feeling of being entirely comfortable about it.