O Pioneer!

XXV

The opening session of the six-planet meeting wasn’t scheduled to begin for nearly three hours, but a lot of the delegates and their staffs were roaming the town. In the cart to the lakefront Giyt saw clumps of them wandering around like any tourists anywhere, taking pictures, getting souvenirs. Giyt wasn’t paying much attention to them. He was preoccupied with the prospect of making a polar flight under the conditions the Petty-Primes’ generosity made possible, while Rina wasn’t looking at the visitors at all. She was withdrawn and worried. It wasn’t until they were getting into the boat for the ride across to the launchpad on the far side of the lake that she glanced at the other passengers and said in consternation, “They’ve all got heavy coats, Shammy! You don’t even have boots. It’s winter up there!”

Giyt had noticed the same thing, but tried to reassure her. He wouldn’t be out-of-doors at all, he promised. It didn’t satisfy Rina. “No, Shammy,” she announced, “you need somebody to take care of you. I’m going to come along.”

She very nearly did board the ship at the last minute, as a matter of fact. Very likely would have done it, too, in spite of everything, if there had happened to be an available unoccupied seat in the Pole rocket.

But there wasn’t. “No more seats, certainly none at all, definitely not any, no,” the Delt at the door announced morosely. “Two seats remain open now for Earth-human persons, yes, but taken. Persons are late, too! Persons better damn come soon so captain get this vehicle back in time for watching of opening ceremonials, otherwise captain be damn mad!”

“I’ll be taking the Petty-Prime space,” Giyt informed him.

The Delt gave him the benefit of a concentrated stare from both eyes; “You say what?”

“It’s all right. The Responsible One gave his permission for the switch.”

“Ho!” the Delt snarled. “Responsible One? Gave permission? That very sweet, but, tell me, is Responsible One perhaps person who must now have task of to remove Petty-Prime seating structures from vehicle, so as to make physically feasible space for person your volume and mass to occupy? Still more not to be forgiven injustice!” As he turned to enter to do the job he flung over his shoulder, “For female Earth-human person, still no. Not possible at all.”

Giyt turned to Rina. “So you see there’s no room. But I’ll be all right.”

“Maybe so,” she granted dubiously, “but also maybe not. What if these other people don’t show? Then there’ll be room, won’t there?”

But that was a faint hope, quickly dispelled; the sound of a motor from across the lake was what dispelled it. A boat was speeding toward them, and as it was slowing down to touch shore Giyt saw who was in it. There was a driver, and two men huddled in parkas behind him. “Damn!” Giyt muttered. The men were Wili Tschopp and Hoak Hagbarth.

When the driver got out it turned out to be Olse Hagbarth, unctuously friendly. “Came along to see your hubby off?” she asked, chummy enough to make a cow puke. “Me too. Isn’t that always the way for us wives? We stay home with the housework while our men go off—what? You go along with him? Oh, no, hon, you mustn’t think about going along. Even if there was space for you. The acceleration in that rocket is fierce! Not so bad for a healthy man, maybe, but do you have any idea what it might do to that precious little baby inside you?”

Giyt’s big fear was that his wife would punch Olse Hagbarth in the face, but she didn’t. Rina allowed herself to be led morosely away across the charred surface around the pad, and Giyt hoisted himself into the entry door as the Delt mechanic brushed past him. He paused to speak to Giyt, half apologetic, half aggrieved. “Is now as good as can make it, which not in fact specially good, you know? You having nasty ride. Do not later speak didn’t tell you so.”

When Giyt tried to strap himself in he had to agree. The space intended for eight Petty-Primes was, in fact, large enough to hold an adult human male, but only if the human squeezed himself into the fetal position, knees almost touching his chin. As the Slug pilot came by, checking everyone’s fastenings, he made a sound of reproach at Giyt. “Not proper stowage!” he slurped. “Can cause most grave discomfort in delta-vee conditions. Urgently you lie quite still in both ac- and deceleration modes, otherwise potential for snapping of structural members. Not ship’s, yours.”

Giyt prepared himself for the worst, his thoughts on this new development. What was he to do about the presence of Hagbarth and Tschopp on the suborbiter? They could have only one reason for this last-minute decision to come along. That was to keep an eye on him, and that he could not allow. He would have to lose them somehow.

Then there was no more time to think. The Slug pilot extruded himself to the front of the vessel—actually, in its erected takeoff position, to its top. In the surveillance mirror over the pilot station, Giyt could see the Slug taking his place at the controls. He didn’t have a seat, exactly. All the other passengers, except Giyt, had custom-tailored sitting (or perching) places. All the pilot had was a sort of rubbery bowl.

As it turned out, that made good sense. The pilot didn’t bother to warn the passengers when he. started the engines. He didn’t have to. Giyt heard the rolling thunder of the rockets beneath him. The craft began to shake. The noise grew louder until it was all but unbearable, and then the ship slowly began to lift. Then it picked up speed…

That was when Giyt saw the wisdom of the form-fitting chairs. He knew perfectly well what G-forces were supposed to be like, because everybody did. At least he had thought he did, but he had not anticipated how hard the platform he was resting on would become, or that his chest would be compressed until it was hard to breathe, or that the keycard in his hip pocket and the clasp of suspenders at the small of his back would suddenly feel like knives thrusting into his flesh. He could not see how the other passengers were faring, but in the overhead surveillance mirror he could catch glimpses of the Slug, now compressed into a sort of thick pudding in the bowl, his eye stalks pulled back into his body, a few tendrils stretched toward, but not quite reaching, the toggle controls.

Then the noise stopped.

The pressure was gone. The rocket was in the ballistic portion of its flight now, with no thrust at all and no weight. Giyt took a deep breath, savoring the pleasure of breathing freely again. He glanced toward the passengers next to him, the pair of male Delts who were already twisting their heads to check the condition of their mates behind a pair of similarly packed Kalkaboos. Everyone was chattering away—incomprehensibly to Giyt, because somewhere along the acceleration the translation button had been pulled out of his ear by the G-forces.

While he was hunting for it he heard peremptory gurgling from the Slug and looked up. The pilot, restored to three dimensions, had hoisted himself out of his cup and was growling at Hoak Hagbarth. Who had unstrapped himself and was floating free, coming toward Giyt, “I know, I know,” Hagbarth snapped at the pilot. I’ll get back when I have to.” And then to Giyt: “Damn that Tschopp! He always gets airsick, and he never gets to the bag in time. Look at me!”

He was dabbing at his knee, where there was a definite smear of something on his pants that smelled nasty. Giyt could hear the sounds of Wili Tschopp busily vomiting in the seat just above him.

Giyt didn’t answer him. He managed to stretch an arm to retrieve the translation button he had just spotted on the floor. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Hagbarth hesitated on his way to the toilet. “I guess you’re wondering why we’re here, with the six-planet meeting going on and all.”

“Actually,” Giyt said, “I’m not.” And replaced the button in his ear as he closed his eyes. And didn’t speak to Hagbarth again.

Corning back to the surface wasn’t worse than the takeoff, but it wasn’t appreciably better, either. If Giyt wasn’t having the breath squeezed out of him quite as much, there was instead a whole hell of a lot more shaking and bouncing about as they reentered the atmosphere. Then the ship danced around a bit on its rockets as the pilot finally did in fact do a little piloting, making sure it was centered on the polar factory pad before he let the craft drop onto its massive shock absorbers for the last half meter or two.

Then they were there. They had to wait, strapped in their seats—waiting, Giyt supposed, while people outside foamed the ground the landing rockets had broiled. Then everyone began getting into their cold-weather gear—those that had it, anyway, which is to say everybody but Evesham Giyt. A moment later, responding to some cue from outside, the Slug pilot slithered down past the passengers, bulky in his rubbery cocoon of electrically heated fabric. He wrenched the door open and, without saying a word, left the ship.

Giyt took that to be permission to do the same. So did everyone else, all at once. Even after Giyt got himself free of the restraining gear it took him a while to lever himself down through the tangle of other passengers and out into the shockingly frigid wind. The cold made him catch his breath, which actually hurt as it entered his lungs. It would have been even worse if it hadn’t been for the foamed, but still hot, ground underfoot—

No, he discovered. It wasn’t ground, and it wasn’t foamed, either. What was underfoot was mud, soaked by the melting snow and cooked to a slurry by the landing rockets. It was still steaming, and it was ruining his shoes. They were in a sort of well surrounded by snowbanks, and meltwater was still gurgling away through culverts.

Someone had gouged out a series of planked steps to get them to the top of the snow, where a duckboard path led them to the waiting hovers. Giyt ran toward them, but Hoak Hagbarth ran faster. He was there before Giyt, panting and irritable, no longer bothering to pretend to be friendly. “This one,” he ordered, pointing to one of the hovercraft. “Get in.”

Giyt did as told; this was not the time to try making a break. A Delt followed him; then Will Tschopp, morose and shaky from his airsickness. Giyt was shivering too, his teeth chattering, but at least the car was relatively warm. The bad part of the warmth was that both Tschopp and Hagbarth, though swaddled in their bulky parkas, definitely stank. The Delt took one look at them with both his wandering eyes, then conspicuously leaned away from them as the car began to move.

A few hundred meters away, the factory buildings were bathed in light. Giyt squinted at them, trying to reconcile the remembered schematics of the polar complex with what was before his eyes. Most of the buildings were the familiar golden domes of Delt architecture, linked by their mole-run connecting tunnels, but what the car was heading for was a chunky, square-edged block, ten meters high but dark and windowless. That, Giyt realized, would be the central facility, from which all the others branched off. The car didn’t stop outside, but went right through an air-curtain door without pausing.

Inside, they were in a bare room, corridors leading away from it in several directions. There was a sort of reception desk, untended except for a Delt technician, who roused himself from sleep to greet the Delt from the rocket. There was a distant thudding of heavy machinery in operation somewhere not too far away. At least in the building it was warm.

The two Delts disappeared in the direction of their dome while Tschopp and Hoak Hagbarth headed for toilet facilities—not the same ones, Giyt noticed—to clean up. “Wait here. Maury’ll come and show us around,” Hagbarth growled as he left.

That Giyt did not propose to do.

He looked swiftly around to orient himself. He knew that the Earth dome, as the latest built, was part of a necklace of three other domes, the Centaurians’ and the Petty-Primes’. Since the factory plenum belonged to everybody, the wall readouts were in a wild variety of notations and languages. Giyt recognized the dancing dots and slashes of Petty-Prime script on one door and ducked into it. He hurried down the broad hall on the other side until he was almost run over by a pair of forklifts, one with a human driver and the other slaved to the first one—on the way, no doubt, to offload cargo from the rocket. “Excuse me,” he called over the grinding whine of the forklifts. “I’m Evesham Giyt—the mayor, you know.”

The driver was muffled in cold-weather gear, but his face mask was hanging loose from his helmet. “Really?” he said in surprise. “Still?”

Giyt disregarded it. “Am I going right for the human factory dome?”

The driver took his time about answering. “Shouldn’t you be with somebody?” he asked.

“Of course not. I’m the mayor.”

The driver brooded over that for a moment. “Well,” he said, “most of the guys have taken some personal time. To watch the opening ceremonies of the conference, you know.” He thought for a moment longer, then added doubtfully that he didn’t personally get to the factory very often, but if Giyt wanted to keep going to the Centaurian control room there was a female there, stuck with the duty like himself, who might know the way. And who liked to gab. And since the whole operation was of course automated, didn’t have much else to do.

Giyt didn’t hesitate. It wouldn’t take Hagbarth and Tschopp much longer to make themselves presentable, and he didn’t want to waste his best chance to get rid of them.

He found the Centaurian control room easily enough, and at least part of what the forklift driver had said was true. The Centaurian shift manager was curled up on a pad in front of the controls, lying on her side with her paws relaxed and displayed: three of her paws were white, the other the dun color of her fur. A wall screen was displaying the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, but she wasn’t attending to it. She was murmuring softly to the husband who was nestled in the soft fur under her chin.

They did not look as though they wanted to be interrupted. But the male was peering at Giyt with bright eyes, and when he whispered something to his mate she turned her snout toward the door. “What person are you?” she demanded.

“I’m Evesham Giyt. I’m looking for the Earth-human factory dome.”

“You got visiting permission pass? No? You got no chance going that place alone, Large Male. You go away or I call—wait one.” Her husband was whispering to her. Then she looked at Giyt in a different way. “Oh,” she said. “You Mayor Large Male Evesham Giyt. You guy bitched up stinky Kalkaboo guy, right? Why had not spoken so right away?”

“That was just an accident—” he began instinctively, but she was still talking.

“Mrs. Brownbenttalon litter-sister of my junior husband here,” she said with pride. “She say you pretty good guy. I also think it; damn Kalkaboos always getting damn feelings hurt. You want see Earth-human dome, sure, Mr. Threewhiteboots here take you, show you where everything located, no problem. But when you are got there, please, you tell him quickly hurry right back.”

The little male took Giyt in a Centaurian cart—no seats, just a sort of pad with grips to hold on to—and when he had delivered Giyt to the human autofactory dome, he didn’t wait to be told to hurry back. He was quickly gone, to whatever intimate moments the couple had been heading toward.

There was a screen and a door, but the door wasn’t open. The human autofactory, of course, was locked.

Giyt could hear rumblings from inside. That meant nothing about whether anyone was there; the nature of an autofactory was that it was automatic. Likely enough anybody who was supposed to be on shift had taken off to watch the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, like everybody else.

He flexed his fingers and sat down at the screen. There were not many combinations or passwords that could keep Evesham Giyt out, and it took only five minutes to establish that this wasn’t one of them.

When he entered the chamber the rumbling sounds were louder. They came from where a cascade of the talking dolls were dropping out of the assembly machine onto a moving belt, to be picked up by the packing members and stowed in shipping cartons. Several dozen filled cartons were already stacked against a wall, waiting for shipment.

And none of that was of any interest to Giyt.

He looked around and found locked storerooms. These looked more promising. Their locks, too, were only a small inconvenience. But while he was working out the combination, his screen buzzed and half a dozen legends appeared on it. The one in English read: Earth human Evesham Giyt has wandered away from his party. If you see him please inform Central Command of his whereabouts so he can be returned.

He scowled and picked up his pace; the communications would not remain so polite. One after another the locked doors opened. Behind the nearest one, surprisingly in this warehouse where no one but humans ever went, was a store of Kalkaboo dawn-bangers—big, bomb-shaped firecrackers, of the size that required detonators. Behind the other doors—

Behind the other doors was worse.

There was no reason for any Earth human to possess Kalkaboo firecrackers, even little ones, to say nothing of these monsters. But the other things in the locked storerooms simply had no business existing on Tupelo at all. They were Earthside weapons, and there were hundreds of them. Handguns. Minicarbines. Assault rifles. Grenades. Mortars. Even shoulder-launched missiles, the kind that rocketed to an enemy’s position and then exploded with a shower of high-velocity shrapnel. And when he looked more closely at the missiles he saw the answer to two puzzles.

The missiles bore sniffer vents. They would follow the airborne odor of a target and explode over the target’s head, and that explained why there had been that almost forgotten data file on the scents of the eetie races on Tupelo.

And to make them work required high-tech computation . . . and that explained something, too. That had to be where the missing chiplets had gone.