New America

A FAIR EXCHANGE

Nowhere on Rustum was autumn like that season anywhere on Earth. But on the plateau of High America it did recall, a little, the falls and Indian summers of the land whence this one had its name—if only because many plants from another mother planet now grew there. Or so the oldest colonists said. They had become very few. Daniel Coffin knew Earth from books and pictures and a dim star near Bootes, which his foster father had pointed out as Sol.

Red leaves of maple, yellow leaves of birch, gold-streaked scarlet leaves of gim tree, scrit-tled on the wind, while overhead tossed the blue featheriness of plume oak that does not shed for winter. The founders of Anchor were forethoughtful men and women, who laid out broad streets lined with saplings when they were huddling in tents or sod huts. The timber grew with the town. In summer it gave shade, today it gave radiance to pavement, to walls of brick and tinted concrete and what frame buildings remained from earlier times, to groundcars and trucks—and an occasional horse-drawn wagon, likewise a souvenir of the pioneers—that bustled along the ways.

Children bound for school dodged in and out among elder pedestrians. Their shouts rang. Coffin remembered the toil and poverty he had lived with, like everyone else, and smiled a bit. Yes, there is such a thing as progress, he thought.

Air flowed and murmured, cool on his face, crisp in his nostrils. The sky arched altogether clear, pale blue, full of southbound wings. Eastward, the early morning sun stood ruddy-orange at the end of street and town, above the snowpeaks of the distant Hercules range. Though Anchor’s hinterland was an entire planet, it was itself not large: about ten thousand permanent residents, more than half of them children. To be sure, this was a fourth of the world’s humanity.

Glancing the opposite way, Coffin saw a tattered drift of smoke above the mostly low roofs. A flaw of wind brought a rotten-egg stench. He scowled. Progress can get overdone. Though he had never seen it in person, writings, films, and the tales of witnesses had driven into his bones what too much population and industry had done to Earth.

And as for children—the cheerfulness of the weather departed. Here was the hospital. His heart knocked and he mounted the steps more slowly than was his wont.

“Good morning, Mr. Coffin.” The nurse on desk duty was quite young. She addressed him with an awe which hitherto he had found wryly amusing. Him, plain Dan Coffin, lowland farmer?

Well, of course he’d made a name for himself as a young man, one of the few who could explore the immensities down yonder and gain the knowledge of Rustum that all men must have. And, yes, he’d had experiences that made sensational stories. But he’d always winced at those, recollecting the ancient saying that adventure happens only to the incompetent—then excusing himself with the fact that in so much unknownness, it was impossible to foresee every working of Murphy’s Law.

And anyhow, that was long behind him. He’d been settled down at Lake Moondance for—was it thirty-five years? (Which’d be about twenty Terrestrial, said an echo from his childhood, when people were still trying to keep up traditions like Christmas.) Oh yes, he did have by far the biggest plantation in those parts, or anywhere in the lowlands. He could be reckoned as well-off. His neighbors for three or four hundred kilometers around considered him a sort of leader, and had informally commissioned him to speak for them in High America. Nevertheless!

“Good morning, Miss Herskowitz,” he said, bowing as was expected in Anchor, where they went in more for mannerly gestures than folk did on the frontier. “Uh, I wonder, I know it’s early but I have an appointment soon and—”

The sudden compassion on her face struck him with terror. “Yes, by all means, Mr. Coffin. Your wife’s awake. Go right on in.”

That gaze followed him as he strode: a stocky, muscular man, roughly clad for his field trip later today, his features broad and weathered, his black hair streaked with gray. He felt it on his back, in his heart.

The door was open to Eva’s room. He closed it behind him. For a moment he stood mute. Against propped-up pillows, sunlight through a window gave her mane back the redness it had had when first they knew each other. She was nursing their baby. On a table stood a vase of roses. He hadn’t brought them, hadn’t even known the town now boasted a conservatory. The hospital staff must have given them. That meant—

She raised her eyes to him. Their green was faded by weariness and (he could tell) recent crying. For the same reason, the freckles stood forth sharply on her snub-nosed countenance. And yet she was making a recovery from childbirth that would have been fast and good in a much younger woman.

“Dan—” He had long had a little trouble hearing, in the High American air that was scarcely thicker than Earth’s. Now he must almost read her lips. “We can’t keep him.”

He clamped his fists. “Oh, no.”

She spoke a bit louder, word by word. “It’s final. They’ve made every clinical test and there is no doubt. If we bring Charlie to the lowlands, he’ll die.”

He slumped on a chair at the bedside and groped for her hand. She didn’t give it to him. Holding the infant close in both arms, she stared at the wall before her and said, flat-voiced: “That was twelve or thirteen hours ago. They tried to get hold of you, but you weren’t to be found.”

“No, I—I had business, urgent business.”

“You’ve had a lot of that, the whole while I was here.”

“Oh, God, darling, don’t I know it!” He barely, lightly grasped her shoulder. His hand shook. “Don’t you know it, too?” he begged. “I’ve explained—”

“Yes. Of course.” She turned to him with the resolution he knew. She even tried to smile, though that failed. “I’ve just… been lonely. I’ve missed you….” Then she could hold out no longer, and she bent her head and wept.

He rose, stooped over her, gathered clumsily to his bosom her and the last child the doctors said she could ever have. “I know half a dozen fine homes that’d be happy to foster him,” he said. “That’s one thing that kept me busy, looking into this matter, in case. We can come see him whenever we want. It’s not like him being dead, is it? And, sure, we’ll adopt an exogene as soon as possible. Sweetheart, we both knew our luck couldn’t hold out forever. Three children of our own that we could keep may actually have bucked the odds. We’ve a lot to be glad of. Really we do.”

“Y-yes. It, it’s only that… little Charlie, here at my breast, m-m-milking me this minute—Could we move here, Dan?”

He stiffened before answering slowly: “No. Wouldn’t work. You’ve got to realize that. We’d lose everything we and—the rest of our kids—ever hoped and worked for. We’d be too homesick—” —for soaring mountains, rivers gleaming and belling down their cliffs; for boundless forests, turquoise, russet, and gold, spilling out to boundless prairies darkened by herds of beautiful beasts; for seas made wild by sun and outer moon, challenging men to sail around the curve of the world; for skies argent with cloud deck, or bright and changeable when that broke apart, or ablaze with lightning till the mighty rains came cataracting; for air so dense and rich with odors of soil and water and life, that the life in humans who could breathe it burned doubly bright, ran doubly strong; for the house that had grown under their hands from cabin to graciousness, the gardens and arbors and enormous fields that were theirs, the lake like a sea before them and wildwoods elsewhere around it; for friends with whom roots had intertwined over the years until they were more than friends and a daughter of theirs became the first love of a boy called Joshua Coffin— “You’re right,” Eva said. “It wouldn’t work. I, I, I’ll be okay… later on…. But hold me for a while, Dan, darling. Stay near me.”

He let her go and stood up. “I can’t, Eva. Not yet.”

She stared as if in horror.

“The whole community depends on, well, on me,” he said wretchedly. “The negotiations. We’ve discussed them often enough, you and I.”

“But—” She shifted the gurgling baby, in order to hold out one arm in beseeching. “Can’t that wait for a while? It’s waited plenty long already.”

“That’s part of the point. Everything I’ve been working for is coming to a head. I dare not hesitate. The time’s as good as it’ll ever be. I feel that. I can’t let… my man… cool off; he’ll back away from the commitment he’s close to making. I’ve gotten to know him, believe me. In politics, you either grab the chance when it comes, or—”

“Politics!”

He consoled her for the short span he was able. At least, she accepted his farewell kiss and his promise to come back soon, bearing his triumph and their people’s for a gift. He did not tell her that the triumph was not guaranteed. Doubtless she understood that. Her brain and will had been half of his throughout the years. In this hour she was worn down, she needed him, and he had never done anything harder than to leave her alone, crying, while he went to do his damned duty.

Or try to. Nothing is certain, on a world never meant for man.

Consider that world, its manifold strangeness, and the fact that no help could possibly come from an Earth which a handful of freedom-lovers had left behind them. Consider, especially, a gravity one-fourth again as great as that under which our species, and its ancestors back to the first half-alive mote, evolved.

Hardy folk adapted to the weight. Children who grew up under it became still better fitted. But the bearing of those children had not been easy. It would never be easy for most women, until natural selection had created an entire new race.

Worse, that gravity held down immensely more atmosphere than did Earth’s. Because this was more compressed, men could breathe comfortably near the tops of the loftiest mountains. As they descended, however, the gas concentration rose sharply, until it became too much for most of them. Carbon dioxide acidosis, nitrogen narcosis, the slower but equally deadly effects of excess oxygen: these made the average adult sick, and killed him if he was exposed overly long. Babies died sooner.

Now the human species is infinitely varied. One man’s meat can quite literally be another man’s poison. Such variability requires a gene pool big enough to contain it. The original colonists of Rustum were too few—had too few different chromosomes between them—to assure long-range survival in an alien environment. But they could take with them the sperm and ova of donors, preserved in the same fashion as were those of animals. These could be united and brought to full fetal development in exogenetic “tanks,” on whatever schedule circumstances might allow. Thus man on Rustum had a million future parents.

And: as far as practicable, the donors back on Earth had been chosen with a view to air-pressure tolerance.

Some of the original settlers could stand the conditions at intermediate altitudes; some could actually thrive. But exogenes like Daniel Coffin and Eva Spain could live well throughout the entire range, from ocean to alp. To them and their descendants, and whoever else happened to be born equally lucky, the whole planet stood open.

The human species is infinitely varied. A type on the far end of a distribution curve will not always breed true. There will be throwbacks to the median —perfectly normal, healthy children, perfectly well suited to live on Earth. Certain among them will be so vulnerable to unearthliness that they die already in the womb.

Because of that possibility, every woman who could manage it spent the latter halves of her pregnancies on High America. In earlier years, Coffin had often been able to visit Eva there. During this final wait she had seen little of him, in spite of all the time he spent on the plateau.

Thomas de Smet was a fairly young man; the accidental death of his father had early put him in charge of the Smithy. He ran it well, producing most of the heavy machinery on Rustum, and planned to diversify. Thus far, businesses were small, family affairs. They were, that is, with respect to number of employees. Since machines had started to beget machines, the volume of production—given the resources of an entire unravaged world—was becoming impressive. Manpower was the worst bottleneck, and the settlers were doing their lusty best to deal with that.

Coffin had known de Smet since their youth, albeit slightly. On Rustum, everybody of the least importance knew everybody else of the same. When the first glimmerings of his scheme carne to him, Coffin decided that this was the man to zero in on. He had spent as much of the past year as he could, cultivating his friendship.

The worst of it is, Coffin thought, I like the fellow. I like him a lot, and feel like a hound for what I hope to do.

“Hi, Tom,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Who cares?” de Smet replied. “This is my day off.”

“Not quite.”

“Dan, you don’t mean to propagandize me again, do you? I thought we were going fishing.”

“First I want to show you something. It’ll interest you.”

De Smet, a lanky towhead, studied Coffin for a second. Nothing in the lowlander’s squint-eyed smile, relaxed stance, and easy drawl suggested a serious intent. However, that was Coffin’s way at the poker table. “As you wish. Shall we flit?”

They entered the aircar. Since Coffin would be guide on the first stage of the outing, de Smet waved him to the pilot’s seat. The vehicle quivered and murmured up from the lot behind the Smithy. Anchor became a collection of dollhouses, where the Swift and Smoky rivers ran together to form the Emperor and all three gleamed like drawn swords. The countryside spread brown in plow-land and stubblefields, amber in late-ripening crops, fading green in Terrestrial grasses and clovers, blue-green in their native equivalents, multihued in timberlots and woods, one vast subtle chessboard. Dirt roads meandered between widely spaced farmsteads. Far to the north, where the tableland dropped off, a white sea of cloud deck shone above the low country. Eastward reared the Hercules; southward, the yet mightier Centaur Mountains came into sight above the horizon; westward, cultivation presently gave way to wilderness.

Coffin aimed in that last direction, set the autopilot, leaned back, drew forth a pipe and tobacco pouch. He hadn’t commanded a high speed of the machine. Equinox was barely past; daylight prevailed for better than thirty hours.

“How’s Eva?” de Smet asked.

“Herself healthy.” Coffin was silent for a heartbeat. “As we feared, we can’t take the kid home.”

De Smet winced. “That’s hard.” His fingers stole forth to touch his companion’s arm. “I’m awfully damn sorry.”

Coffin grew busy charging his pipe. “We’ve seen it happen to neighbors of ours. Eva feels bad, but she’s tough. We’ll get us another exogene baby who can live with us.” They had long since added to their brood the one that law required every family to adopt. “I reminded her of how she, and I for that matter, how we’re as fond of Betty as of those we made ourselves. Which is true.”

“Naturally. Uh, have you made any arrangements for… yours?”

“Not yet. We couldn’t, before we got the verdict.” Coffin hesitated. “Don’t be afraid to say no, I realize this is none of my business and we do have ample opportunities. But what might you and Jane think about taking our Charlie in?”

“Huh? Why, mmm—”

“You haven’t taken your exogene yet. Well, we’ll be adopting a second. The rules allow a family to do that on another’s behalf, you know. Eva and I would be mighty glad to have you raise Charlie. Then you’d be free to order an exogene later on, or not, whichever you chose.”

“This is rather sudden, Dan.” De Smet sat awhile in thought. “I’ll have to discuss it with Jane, of course. Frankly, though, to me it looks like a very attractive proposition. Instead of getting some doubtless nice kid, but one whose parentage is a total blank, we’d get one that we’re certain comes of high-grade stock.” After a moment: “And, hmm, it’d create a tie between two influential houses, in highlands and lowlands.”

Coffin chuckled. “In effect,” he said, “we’d swap babies. You’d have to adopt a tank-orphan— except that now Eva must take a second. So you gain freedom of choice, we gain a proper home for Charlie, both families gain, as you say, a kind of alliance… and, well, the babies gain, too. Mind you, this is my own notion. I’ll have to talk it over with Eva also. I’m sure she’ll agree if Jane does.”

He kindled his pipe. De Smet, though a non-smoker, didn’t object. Among numerous achievements on his plantation, Coffin had, with the help of a consulting agronomist, developed tobacco that could grow in Rustumite soil without becoming utterly vile.

He puffed for a bit before he added, “It’s what you’ve kept insisting, Tom, as we argued. A fair exchange is no robbery.”

De Smet had first quoted that proverb of economists to Coffin on the first occasion that the two men seriously discussed business. This was several lunations after they began to be well acquainted. They amused themselves by calculating precisely how many, since only a short while before, the lunation—the time it took for both moons to return to the same position in the sky— had been defined officially, if not quite truthfully, as five Rustumite days.

Coffin had returned from one of his frequent expeditions into the highland wilds, returned to Anchor and Eva. The de Smets invited him to dinner. Later the men sat far into the night, talking.

That meant less on Rustum than it did on Earth. Here, folk were regularly active through part of each long darkness. Nevertheless, most of the town was abed when Coffin asked: “Why won’t you? I tell you, and I’d expect you and your experts to check me out beforehand, I tell you, it’ll pay. The Smithy will turn a profit.”

De Smet was slow to respond. They sat side by side in companionable wise, whisky and soda to hand, pipe in the fist of the guest, out on a balcony. The air was warm; somewhere a fiddlebug stridu-lated, and rivers boomed and clucked; the windows of Anchor were lightless, and it had no street lamps, but it glowed coppery-silver beneath a sky full of stars, in which the moons were aloft, gibbous Raksh and tiny hurtling Shorab.

“I hate to sound like a Scrooge,” de Smet said at length. “You leave me no choice, though. The profit’s too small.”

“Really? The resources we’ve got—” De Smet drew breath. “Let me make a speech at you, Dan. I sympathize with you lowlanders, especially your own Moondance community, which is the largest. You want industries, too, besides agriculture and timber and suchlike nature-dependent enterprises. Currently, the machines that make machines are all here, because that’s where colonization started and High America is where the great majority of people still live. You want me to bring down a lot of expensive apparatus and technical personnel, and build you facilities that’ll belong to you, not me.”

“True. True. Except we’re not asking for any handouts. We have money from the sale of what we produce—”

De Smet raised a palm. “Please. Let me continue. I’m going to get a little abstract, if you don’t mind.

“Money is nothing but a symbol. It gives the owner a certain call on the labor and property of others. One can play many different games with money, until at last one loses sight of what the stuff is and ends by wrecking its value. Luckily, that’s no danger on Rustum, yet. First, we’re too few to maintain elaborate fiscal schemes. Second, we have a free-market economy with a strictly gold-standard currency.

“Why do we have that? First, because the founders of the colony wanted to be free, free as individuals; and the right to buy, sell, or trade as one chooses is an important part of this. Second, they’d read their history. They knew what funny money leads to, always, as inevitably as fire will burn if you stick your bare hand in it. Therefore the Covenant ties the currency to gold, whose supply grows too slowly to outrun the growth of real wealth. This causes most transactions to be in cash. One can borrow, of course, if one can find a willing lender; but the lender had better have that claim-on-wealth in his personal pocket.

“As a result, now that the hard early days are behind us, now that production is expanding faster than the money supply, the price of nearly everything is falling.”

“I know that,” Coffin protested. “What I got for my wheat last year barely paid the cost of raising it.”

De Smet nodded. “That was bound to happen. Fertile soil, new varieties of grain suited to local conditions—how easily we get surpluses that drive prices down! Meanwhile machinery and human labor are in shorter supply, with more call on them. Hence their price gets bid up; or, to be exact, it doesn’t fall in proportion to the price of natural products.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“You aren’t starving, are you? One advantage of tight money is that it discourages speculation, especially by an individual. He can’t have a mortgage foreclosed on his land because he was never able to get a mortgage on it in the first place, valuable though it is.” In haste: “I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, Dan. This is the same elementary economics you and I both learned in school. I’m simply recapitulating. I want to spell out that I have better reasons than greed for saying no to you.”

“Well, but look, Tom, I’m better off than most of my friends down there, and I often feel the pinch.”

“What you mean is, you’d like to do certain things, and can’t do them without High American help. You might wish for an up-to-date flour mill, for instance, instead of a waterwheel or windmill— or instead of selling your wheat here and buying back part of it, as bread, at a considerable markup. Yes, surely. The fact is, however, I regret it very much, but the fact is you will simply have to do without until there’s enough machinery available to bring its rental or purchase price down. Meanwhile, you can be self-sufficient. And nobody is pointing a gun at your head forcing you to overproduce.”

De Smet filled his lungs afresh before he continued: “You see, if we gave you a subsidy, the cost of that would have to be met either through taxation or inflation. No matter which way, it’d amount to taking earnings from the highlander for the benefit of the lowlander, who gives nothing in return. Price controls would have the same effect. In fact, any kind of official intervention would distort the economy. Instead of meeting our difficulties head-on and solving them once and for all, we’d hide them behind a screen of paper, where they’d grow worse and breed new troubles to boot.

“Machinery and labor are costly because there’s a demand for them—they’re wanted, in both senses of the word—and at the same time, for the nonce, they remain scarce. In a free market, the price of a commodity is nothing more nor less than an index of how much people are prepared to exchange for it.”

“You High Americans, though”—Coffin chopped the air with his hand—”you’ve got more than your share of machines. Even per capita you do. Which means, yours is the way the money flows, no matter what we lowlanders do. It isn’t right!”

De Smet took a sip of whisky before he shook his head and sighed, “Dan, Dan, you’re a frontiersman. You know better than I, from experience, no two people ever have identical luck.

“It isn’t as if your folk were in dire want. If they were, I’d be the first to bring them relief. The free market doesn’t forbid helping your fellow man. It only makes such acts voluntary—and so in the long run, I believe, encourages altruism, though I admit that’s just my opinion.

“Your folk aren’t suffering, except in their own minds. The poorest of them eats well, dresses decently, his adequate shelter. You yourself, to judge from the pictures you’ve shown me, you live in a bigger and better house than mine, live like a medieval baron. All you lowlanders enjoy many things we don’t, such as unlimited room to move around. And… whoever can’t stand it is welcome here. We have this chronic labor shortage; he can earn excellent wages.”

“We want to be our own men,” Coffin growled, albeit not hostilely.

“I admire you for that,” de Smet said in a mild tone. “Still, recall your origins. Individuals who could live in the low country went there first to study it, paid by High America because the knowledge they could get was essential. They fell in love with the land and settled. And this was right. Mankind ought to take over the whole planet.

“That’ll be slow, however. Meanwhile, most of us are confined to the uplands. We have the same right as you to improve our standards of living, don’t we? Since you lowlanders can come join us but would rather not, why should we sacrifice to support you in your own free choice—a much freer choice than we have?

“That’s where the social utility of the supply-demand law shows itself, Dan. High America is also still young, has plenty left to do. Plenty that must be done, because we’ll be crowded long before the typical lowlander can see his neighbor’s chimney smoke. The quicker return— the effectively higher profit—to be made here, simply reflects that urgency, as well as the fact that here, today, are far more persons needing to be served.

“Please don’t take this wrong; but honestly, it looks to me as if your community is the one asking for more than is fair, not ours.”

“I told you, we don’t want a handout,” Coffin answered with somewhat strained patience. “I can prove to you that the return on any investment you make among us will be good. Okay, granted, maybe not as good as equal investment made on High America. Still, you’ll gain, and gain well.”

“We already have considerable investments in the lowlands,” de Smet pointed out. _

Coffin nodded violently. “Yes! Mines, power stations, transport lines that you own, you High Americans. You employ lowlanders to work in them, but they’re your property, and the profits go to you.”

He leaned over. His pipestem jabbed, stopping barely short of the other man’s chest. “Now let me explain some home truths,” he said. “Believe it or not, I understand your economics. I know that I’m asking, on behalf of my community, I’m asking you to use part of the stuff and staff you command, part of it to come build us—oh, that flour mill, or a factory producing machine tools, or whatever—come build that for us, instead of building something like it for High America.

“Well, I tell you, my friend, economics is not all there is to life. Rightly or wrongly, the lowlanders are starting to feel slighted. After a while they’ll come to feel neglected, and then go on to feeling exploited. I’m not saying that makes sense, but I am saying it’s true.”

“I know,” de Smet replied as if half-apologetic. “I’ve been down there myself, inside an air helmet, remember. You’re not the first lowlander I’ve talked to at length. Yes, you’re already beginning to think of yourselves as a separate breed, rough, tough, bluff frontiersmen opposed to us dandified, calculating uplanders. That notion hasn’t developed far yet-“

“It will. Unless you come help us. If you do, maybe this will stay a unified planet. Or don’t you care about your grandchildren?” Coffin waited before he added, gravely, “This is not a threat. But do bear in mind, Tom, several generations from tonight the highlanders will be an enclave. The population will nearly all be down yonder. And so will the power. Man, win their good will before it’s too late.”

“I’ve thought about that. I genuinely have. I’m aware that this isn’t a problem with any neat either-or solution. If some arrangement could be made, an economically sensible arrangement, so it’d endure…. But why should the lowlands be industrialized? In time, and not such a terribly long time, the prices of food and timber will soar, as High America fills up. Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait for that day? Meanwhile you’d keep your attractive surroundings.”

“They’re not that attractive, when we have to overwork our kids for lack of equipment we know could be built. Anyway, nobody wants to found an industrial slum. Of course not. We just want a few specific items. We’ve ample space to locate them properly, ample resources to treat the wastes so they don’t poison the land.”

“We haven’t. At least, we don’t have that kind of chance much longer, at the rate we’re going.” De Smet locked eyes with his guest and said in a voice tautened by intensity: “That’s my main reason for wanting to get rich fast. I mean to buy up as much virgin highland as possible and make a preserve of it.”

Coffin smiled in fellow feeling. De Smet’s outdoorsmanship was what had originally brought them together. It is hard not to like a man with whom you have been hiking, boating, camping for days on end.

“Maybe we can work something out,” de Smet finished. “However, it has got to involve a quid pro quo, or it’s no good. As the saying goes, a fair exchange is no robbery.”

/Lake Royal, where they planned to fish, gleamed remotely on the right. Still the car whined ahead. A ways further came a break in the forest, an ugly scar where the ground had been ripped open across several kilometers. No life save a few weeds had returned to heal it.

Coffin gestured with his pipestem. “How old is that thing, anyway?”

De Smet peered out the canopy. “Oh, the strip mine?” He grimaced. “Seventy, eighty years, I guess. From the early days.”

“Industrialization,” Coffin grunted.

De Smet stared at him. “What’re you talking about? Necessity. They had to have fuel. Their nuclear generator was broken down, couldn’t be fixed soon, and winter was coming on. Here was a surface seam of coal which they could easily quarry and airlift out.”

“Nevertheless, industry, huh? Earlier this morning, I caught a knock-you-over stink from the refinery.”

“That’ll have to be corrected. I’m leaning on the owners. So are others. Mainly, Dan, you know as well as I do, we’ve had to take temporary measures, but we’re almost back to a clean hydrogen-fueled technology.”

“Then why do you worry about industrialization? Why do you want to set aside parts of High America?”

De Smet seemed bewildered. “Isn’t it obvious? Because… I, Highlanders who feel like me, we can never really belong in your unspoiled lowland nature. Shouldn’t we too have a few places to be, well, alone with our souls?” He uttered a nervous laugh. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get pompous.”

“No matter.” Coffin blew a smoke ring. “As population grows, won’t there be more and more pressure to turn this whole plateau into a big loose city? Do you really think your wilderness areas won’t be bought out, or simply seized? Unless ample goods are coming from the lowlands. Then High Americans will be able to afford letting plenty of land lie fallow…. Well, that can’t happen without trade, which can’t happen unless the lowlanders have something—not only raw materials but finished products—to trade with.

“Don’t you think, even today, even at the cost of some profit, it makes better sense to spread the industry more thin?”

De Smet leaned back and regarded Coffin for a while before he said, “You promised me, no further arguments on our holiday.”

“Nor’ve I broken my promise, Tom. I just reminded you about what I’d said before, to help you appreciate the interesting thing I also promised to show you.”

The autopilot beeped. Coffin switched it off, took the controls, checked landmarks, and slanted the car downward. Below was a rough and lovely upthrust of hills. A lake gleamed among them like a star, and overhead circled uncountably many waterfowl. Sunlight made rainbow iridescences on their wings.

“You recall, several close friends and I have been around here quite a bit,” Coffin said. “We gave out that we were investigating botanical matters, to try to get a line on a problem we’re having in our home ecology. It wasn’t altogether false— we did even get the information we wanted—and nobody paid much attention anyhow.”

De Smet waited, braced.

“In addition,” Coffin said, “we prospected.”

Air whistled around the hull. Ground leaped dizzyingly upward.

“You see,” Coffin went on, “if we lowlanders don’t have the wherewithal to develop our country as we’d like, and if nobody’ll help us get it, why, we’d better go help ourselves. If we could stake out a claim in your country, then transportation to Anchor would be fast and cheap, giving us a competitive break. Or we might sell out to a highland combine, or maybe take a royalty. In any case, we’d have the money we need to bid for the equipment and personnel we need.”

“Nobody’s prospected these parts to speak of,” de Smet said slowly.

“That’s why we did. You think of this section as being far from home, but to us, it’s no further than Anchor.”

The car came to a halt, then descended straight into a meadow. Coffin opened the door on his side. A thousand songs and soughings flowed in, autumn crispness and the fragrance of that forest which stood everywhere around, ripe. Grasses rippled, trees tossed their myraid colors, not far off blinked the lake.

“Marvelous spot,” Coffin said. “You’re lucky to own it.”

“Not lucky.” De Smet smiled, however worried he perhaps was. “Smart. I decided this ought to be the heart of my preserve, and claimed the maximum which the Homestead Rule allows.”

“You don’t mind that my gang and I camped here for a bit?”

“Oh, no, certainly not. You’d leave the place clean.”

“You see, in searching for clues to minerals on unclaimed land, we needed an idea of the whole region. So we checked here too. We made quite a discovery. Congratulations, Tom.”

De Smet grew less eager than alarmed. “What’d you find?” he snapped.

“Gold. Lots and lots of gold.”

“Hoy?”

“Mighty useful industrial metal, like for electrical conductors and chemically durable plating. Making it available ought to be a real social service.” Coffin’s thumb gestured aft. “You’ll want to see for yourself, no doubt. I brought the equipment. I knew you know how to use it, otherwise I’d’ve invited along any technician you named. Go ahead. Inspect the quartz veins in the boulders. Put samples through the crusher and assayer. Pan that brook, sift the lakeshore sands. My friend, you’ll find every indication that you’re sitting on a mother lode.”

De Smet shook his head like a man stunned. “Industry can’t use a lot of gold. Not for decades to come. The currency—”

“Yeh. That should be exciting, what happens to this hard currency you’re so proud of. Not to mention what happens to the wilderness, the majority of it that you don’t own, when the rush starts. And it’ll be tough to get labor for producing things we can merely eat and wear. You, though, Tom, you’ll become the richest man on Rustum.”

Coffin knocked the dottle from his pipe, stretched, and rose. “Go ahead, look around,” he suggested. “I’ll make camp. I’ve brought a collapsible canoe, and the fishing’s even better here than at Lake Royal.”

De Smet’s look searched him. “Do you… plan… to join the gold rush?”

Coffin shrugged. “Under the circumstances, we lowlanders won’t have much choice, will we?”

“I—See here, Dan—”

“Go on, Tom. Do your checking around, and your thinking. I’ll have lunch ready when you come back. Afterward we can go out on the water, and maybe dicker while we fish.”

He strode into the hospital room, grabbed Eva from her bed to him, and bestowed upon her a mighty kiss.

“Dan!” she cried low. “I didn’t expect—”

“Nor I,” he said, and laughed. “I never dared hope things’d go this fast or this well.” The sun stood at noon. “But they did, and it’s done, and from this minute forward, sweetheart, I am yours altogether and forever.”

“What-what—Dan, let me go! I love you, too, but you’re strangling me.”

“Sorry.” He released her, except to lower her most gently, bent over her, and kissed her again with unending tenderness. Afterward he sat down and took her hand.

“What’s happened?” she demanded. “Speak up, Daniel Coffin, or before heaven, I’ll personally wring the truth out of you.” She was half weeping, half aglow.

He glanced at the door, to make doubly sure he had closed it, and dropped his voice. “We’ve got our contract, Eva. Tom de Smet called in his counselor as soon as we returned, a couple hours ago, and we wrote a contract for the Smithy to come do work at Moondance, and you know Tom never goes back on his word. That’s one reason I was after him particularly.”

“You finally persuaded him? Oh, wonderful!”

“I s’pose you could call it persuasion. I—Okay, I’ve told you before, strictly confidentially, how my gang and I weren’t just doing research in the High American backwoods, we were trying for a mineral strike.”

“Yes. I couldn’t understand why the hurry.” Her tone did not accuse. Nor did it forgive. It said that now she saw nothing which needed forgiving, and merely asked for reasons. “I kept telling you, the minerals would wait, and the ecological trouble wasn’t that urgent.”

“But getting the contract I was after was.” He stared downward, and his free hand knotted into a fist. “I had to leave you mostly alone, and I knew it hurt you, and yet I didn’t dare explain even to you.”

She leaned over to kiss him afresh. When he could talk again, he said: “You see, machinery and engineers are scarce. The Smithy itself has none too big a supply. Any day, someone else might’ve instigated a project which’d tie everything up for years to come. And in fact, if word should leak out that we lowlanders might seriously bid, why, then chances were that somebody else would tie the Smithy up, and invent a project afterward. Not to suppress us or anything, but because it’s true that profits are higher here than amongst us.

“It wouldn’t’ve mattered if you, under anesthesia or whatever, if you let slip that I was quietly prospecting. I knew there’d be suspicion of that in Anchor; and what the hell, plenty of people go on such ventures, even if not quite that far afield. This other thing, though, this real aim of mine—”

“I see, I see. And you did succeed? You’re a marvel.”

“According to Tom de Smet, I’m a bastard.” He grinned. “Then after we’d talked awhile, he said I was a damn fine bastard who he was proud to call a friend, and we shook on it and have a date later today to go out and get roaring drunk.”

Puzzlement darkened her eyes. “What do you mean, Dan? First you talk about prospecting, but evidently you didn’t find your mine. Then you talk about getting this contract that you were actually after all the while. Didn’t you simply, finally, persuade Tom to give it to you?”

He shook his head. “No. I tried and tried, for lunations, and he wouldn’t agree. I grew sure he wanted to, down inside. But his silly social economic conscience insisted he stick by the dictates of economic theory. In the end, I told him I knew I’d gotten to be a bore on the subject, and I’d dog my hatch, and why not go fishing?”

“And—” she said like a word of love.

“This is a secret you and I take to our graves with us. Promise? Fine, your nod is worth more than most people’s oaths.

“I took him to a mother lode of gold I’d found on land of his. I explained that I hated, the same as him, how a gold rush would destroy the wilderness, let alone the currency, and draw effort away from things more useful. But I had a duty to my own community, I said, to my friends who’d asked me to speak for them. I offered my silence, and my fellow prospectors’—I’d picked them very carefully—I offered him that in return for his contract with us. We could write that in, as a provision not made public unless our blabbing gave him cause to cancel the deal. Take it or leave it, I said. A fair exchange is no robbery.

“He took it, and I really am convinced he was personally glad to have that excuse for helping us. Say, how about letting him and Jane foster Charlie? They’re more than willing.”

“Dan, Dan, Dan! Come here—”

He knelt by the bed and they held each other for a long while.

Eventually, calmed a little, he took his chair and she lowered herself back onto her pillows. Eyes remained with eyes.

One of hers closed in a wink. “You don’t fool me, Dan Coffin,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“That act of yours. The simple, hearty rural squire. Nobody gets to lead as many people as you do without being bloody damn shrewd.”

“Well….” He looked a trifle smug.

“My love,” she said, barely audible, “this may be the first time in history that anyone salted a mine which the victim already owned.”

“I have my contract, which Tom de Smet will honor in word and spirit both. Further than that, deponent saith not.”

Eva cocked her head. “Have you considered, Dan, that the possibility may have occurred to Tom, and he decided not to check the facts too closely?”

“Huh?” Seldom before had she seen or enjoyed seeing her husband rocked back hard.

But when at last he left her—for a while, only a while—he walked again like a young buccaneer. The wind outside had strengthened, a trumpet voice beneath heaven, and every autumn leaf was a banner flying in challenge.