O Pioneer!

XIV

The good thing about the High Champion’s accident was that it happened so fast most of the fairgoers didn’t even know what was going on. Chief Tschopp did, though, and descended on Giyt like a thundercloud. “Damn fool,” he said. “You should’ve been watching what you were doing. Now we’re going to have the goddamn High Champion sick in bed with a major oxygen-deficiency headache, and I’ll be screwed if they don’t make some sort of formal complaint before dark, How could you do this to the fire company, Giyt?”

Giyt had no answer, though the accusation was unjust . . . but, well, not entirely unjust, Giyt thought. He should have had the magnets back on before the Delts got there. And he had trouble getting to sleep, weary as he was, when at last the Taste of Tupelo was over and the firemen were allowed to go home and to bed.

When he woke up his first action was to call the High Champion’s mates and ask the one who answered how he was doing. “The beloved person is resting,” she said without further comment, and cut the connection before Giyt had a chance to apologize.

He sat down at his workstation and stared into space awhile, sipping coffee and brooding over the accident. It wasn’t his fault, he told himself again. That raised the question of whose fault it was, but he figured that out quickly enough. The fault belonged to the fire company for secretly running crooked games at the fair. That wasn’t honest. More to the point, the fact that the games were fixed probably wasn’t a secret to at least some of the eeties. The Delt, for one, had been clearly aware he was being taken. And how did that look for Earth humans as a race? And all for the sake of making a few dishonest cues!

Did the fire company need money that badly? Just for curiosity’s sake, he accessed the stats for the Taste of Tupelo in previous years. When he saw what they were, he stared into space a while longer. All bills paid, all receipts recorded, the Taste of Tupelo had never made a net profit of as much as six thousand cues—or, Giyt calculated, just about enough to pay for a new set of tires on a few, but not all, of the company’s fire engines.

It wasn’t worth it. He was still puzzling over it when Rina called him to breakfast. Of course she picked up on his mood at once. The morning chorus of Kalkaboo firecrackers to announce the dawn—louder than usual, Giyt thought—made conversation difficult. But as soon as it was over, she asked, “Hon, are you worrying about that Kalkaboo?”

He blinked at her. He had almost forgotten the High Champion’s mishap. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Sort of. But mostly I was thinking about money.”

“Money? Really? Is there something real expensive you want to buy?”

“No, that’s not it. Not our money. The fire company’s.” But while he was trying to explain his carryphone rang with the fire company signal. It was an all-hands summons. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said, reluctantly getting ready to go over to the fairground to help break down the concessions.

This time the work was pure manual labor, not made easier by the way the other firemen joshed him about the Kalkaboo High Champion. Even Lupe gave him a couple of friendly jabs until she saw that he was really unhappy. Then she said, “Well, forget it, Evesham. Kalkaboos are always passing out for some reason or another; the atmosphere’s too dense for them here or something. He’ll be fine.”

It was hot work, but not particularly hard work. It went quickly enough. What eased the labor was Ex-Earth’s generosity with handling machines. Once the smaller pieces were crated and the booth walls were flat on the ground, three forklifts trundled up. They lifted the material onto a flatbed trailer, which carted them off for storage. Giyt went back to the firehouse with the last load, while others remained to tidy up the space the fair had occupied.

He had never been in the storage warehouse before. From the outside it looked like a low-roofed shed behind the fire-house. Inside it was dug deep into the ground, and a lot bigger than he had expected. All that space was needed, too, because it was crammed full of equipment: spare parts for the fire engines, extra hoses, even an entire additional pumper truck. One bin contained six additional water cannon, far bigger and more powerful than the ones mounted on the trucks. He gazed at them for a moment, puzzled, then turned to Lupe. “What are these things?”

She glanced at them and shrugged. “They’re just extras. We don’t use them. They’re too powerful for the kind of work we do—I think back on Earth they demolish burning buildings with them. Hoak probably knows, if you want to ask him.’’

Giyt did, but not as much as he wanted to ask him about finances. But Hagbarth didn’t show up at the firehouse, and when Giyt found a chance to call him the man announced he was really in a hurry. “Finances? Why are you worried about that kind of thing, Giyt? Well, tell you what I’ll do, why don’t I come over to your place after siesta, that okay?”

“That would be fine.”

“Fine. And, oh, by the way. The High Champion’s still in a coma.”

“Coma?” Giyt was startled. “Nobody said anything about a coma!” But Hagbarth had already cut off.

Giyt slept poorly during the siesta. Long before it was time he slipped out of the bed, leaving Rina gently breathing behind, and placed another call to the mates of the High Champion. “In present condition of beloved High Champion is no change,” the female Kalkaboo said, and cut off. The translation programs weren’t adequate to let Giyt tell anything useful from her tone.

To take his mind off it, he went back to thinking about the community’s finances. The wealth of material in the fire company’s warehouse had been a total surprise to him, far more than a thousand Taste of Tupelos could ever hope to pay for.

He decided to dig a little deeper. It turned out that most of the data he wanted was in a secure file, though naturally not secure from Evesham Giyt. He accessed the community’s whole balance sheet without difficulty.

What he found made him very thoughtful. Tupelo was a gilt-edged proposition, but basically a charity operation. They were living on handouts from Ex-Earth. Very generous ones. Somebody was investing a great deal of money in a venture that was providing next to no cash returns at all.

But why? Tupelo was a whole planet, undoubtedly packed with riches. In the days of Earth’s conquerors they had gained more than military victories, they had gained sources of gold, spices, rare woods, treasures of many kinds. Why couldn’t Tupelo pay its own way in the same fashion? Charity was all very well, but what if the philanthropists ever got tired of giving?

When Hagbarth arrived, looking mildly resentful at Giyt’s imposition on his time, the first question Giyt had for him was: “What happens if Ex-Earth runs out of money?”

Hagbarth gave him a suspicious look, then relaxed. “Don’t worry yourself about that. Never happen, Giyt. Ex-Earth is loaded.”

“It looks that way, all right. But where does the money come from?”

Hagbarth shrugged. “Public-spirited citizens. People concerned about the future of the human race—hell, Giyt, all that should have been in your briefing materials. You didn’t get any?” He rolled his eyes. “What can I tell you? Ex-Earth pays the recruiters so much a head for volunteers, so once they’ve got you to sign up, what do they care? Anyway, the money’s there. We have pledges from some of the richest people in America, and some of the biggest corporations, too. And I’m not talking about just one-time donations. They’ve all made fifty-year pledges, and they’ll keep their words.”

Giyt nodded. “And what happens when the fifty years run out? There’s what left, thirty-five years or so?”

“Long enough not to worry,” Hagbarth said, smiling.

“For you and me, maybe. But I do worry. I’ve got a child coming.”

Hagbarth said sympathetically, “Yeah, I see what you mean. Olse and I haven’t been that lucky, so maybe I haven’t really thought much about that kind of thing. I guess we figured if Ex-Earth pulled the plug we could just go back to Earth and retire.”

“But what if we don’t want to do that?” Giyt persisted. “If we have a kid that grows up here, what’s he going to do back on Earth? Besides, my wife likes it here.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Hagbarth said shortly.

His tone made Giyt look at him in surprise, but Hagbarth’s face wasn’t giving anything away. “Well, what I’ve been thinking,” Giyt said, “it doesn’t have to be that way. Couldn’t we pay for ourselves?”

“Pay how?”

“Ship stuff back to Earth. Earn money.”

“Well, we do the best we can that way, Giyt. You know that. We send back all that souvenir stuff to Earth that we make here—”

“That’s not money, Hoak. The amounts involved are pitiful. We should try to earn real money. The other races do, don’t they? I mean, they’re always sending local stuff home through the terminal. I presume it earns money for them. We could do the same.”

Hagbarth was looking wary but no longer suspicious. “What kind of local stuff?”

“Organic materials, for a start. The Petty-Primes ship whole saplings and bushes back, roots and all; I think it’s so they can be checked for possible pharmaceuticals or new food crops, that sort of thing. Why don’t we? And the Delts do a lot of manufacturing. We could do much more of that, too. Not just gadgets—real goods. We’ve got metals and stuff from the polar mines. We could build things—some to ship home for credit, a lot for ourselves right here.”

Hagbarth pursed his lips. “You’ve never been to the polar mines yet, have you? Sure, they’ve got processing stuff up there, but most of it isn’t ours. We just have a little corner of the works. What you call boutique factories, you know? Anything big, they don’t do much more than forty or fifty copies in a run.”

“So we can build some new factories, can’t we? So there will be something the Tupelo humans can do to earn money instead of living on handouts?”

Hagbarth looked as though he was tiring of the subject. “Well,” he said, “maybe you’ve got something there and maybe you don’t, but I guess it could be looked into. Tell you what: When the Earth commissioners come for the six-race meeting I’ll see if I can get them to send some specialists along, check over what the possibilities are here. How would that be?”

“Fine,” said Giyt, making a mental note to remind Hagbarth of his promise.

“Then that’s settled. I’d better be getting along—and listen, you won’t forget about those programs for me, will you? Because—oh, wait a minute.”

He paused, listening to a message from his carryphone. Then he looked angrily at Hagbarth. “Shit,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s the goddamn Kalkaboo High Champion. He just died.”

“Died? But I thought . . . Oh, hell, that’s too bad.”

“Yeah, well, they’ll be boiling him all night—’’

“Boiling?”

“It’s what they do, Giyt. So the funeral will be at dawn tomorrow, and you’d better be there. See, basically they figure you killed him.”