Life Force, page 3
"Oh, sorry," Reznor said. "I have been ground-bound for so long that I forget how one looks forward to some ground time after two years in space. I imagine you have made plans. I can take another ship."
"No." Teddy said quickly. "I mean, sir—"
"Wanta call me Andy?" Reznor asked, grinning at her, having anticipated just that reaction. He knew that the discovers of a planet had a proprietary interest.
"What?" Teddy asked, confused.
"Call me Andy. If we're going to spend time together on a small ship, we need to drop the formalities. I'd like for you two to take me there because I want to keep this hushed up as long as possible. As you indicated, the colonization boys like to get their grubby paws on any life-zone planet, and one like Beauty would drive them into a frenzy of possessiveness."
"You like the name then, sir?" Teddy asked.
"Andy. Call me Andy. Yes. It has a certain simplicity, a nice ring. That's your first choice, right?"
"Yes, sir—I mean, Andy," Teddy said.
Reznor snapped his finger and a girl put a portable keyboard beside his plate. He pushed his plate to one side, centered the keyboard and his fingers moved rapidly, the artificial ones on his left hand as dexterous as the flesh and blood fingers on his right. "Okay. Done. When the claim is filed with Pax Space Central, she'll be called Beauty."
"Thank you," Matt said.
"Thank you, for finding her," Reznor said. "Now you'd better eat."
The food was delicious. Teddy tackled a cold appetizer first, a meaty salad. "Delicious," she said. "Crayfish from Louisiana?"
"From Sheep Creek," Reznor said, "crawdads. I pay some of the kids to catch them for me. Any nice little clear creeks on Beauty?"
"We didn't have time to do a total small area scan," Matt said, "but we did see a few nice little creeks in low flyover."
"Good," Reznor said. "A world without crawdads would not be complete."
Matt looked at Teddy and winked. It was his way of saying, "Hey, how about this old man?" He found himself feeling totally at ease, his awareness of Reznor's wealth, fame, achievements, and power fading in the face of down-to-earth friendliness. It would be much later, when he was older, that Matt would recognize that Reznor was an artist in exercising that one absolutely vital element of success, people skills. As for Reznor, he was simply being himself, as he could be with few people, mainly those many called the space jock type, those usually young people who dared fling themselves into the far places for the kind of pay not often matched by Earth's industro-space complexes.
Matt found himself talking, sometimes, with his mouth full. Teddy, excited that Reznor had so easily accepted her name for their world, ate little, and alternated with Matt in singing the praises of Beauty. Serving girls cleared the table. One was Asian, the other Caucasian. Teddy wondered about the Asian, but there was no chance to talk with her, for Reznor was intent on drawing forth every morsel of information about Beauty.
"While we're waiting," Reznor said, "there's something I want you to see. You've probably seen such films before, but bear with me." He motioned and a slim, dark skinned young man entered, carrying a control box. The lights faded. An old-fashioned screen was revealed when panels of a wall opened.
"Ready, Dr. Reznor," the dark man said. He was relaxed, at ease. Teddy, subconsciously aware of his skin pigmentation, would not have thought of him as being black. If questioned, and such questioning would have been unlikely, she would have spoken in terms of race and the genetic diversity that made mankind such a driving force in the world and now in the near galaxy. Nor, questioned, would she have shown the slightest wonder or discomfort at having been served by females. The servers might well have been male in other places, and there was no hint of animus in her toward any person who was doing a job, nor was there subservience involved on the part of any worker. In a world of some sixteen billion people it had been a vital necessity to return to what some conservatives called "individual responsibility," and what any casual student of ancient literature knew as Paul's doctrine on industry as written in the second epistle to the Thessalonians.
The screen came to life. "These pictures were filmed in the late 1980s," Reznor said.
The scene was an African plain teeming with life. Vast herds of grass eaters grazed, flurried as a fat and sassy lioness walked, unhungry, among them. In quick succession the film showed the intriguing variety of African wildlife—hyenas and elephants, small, nervous antelope and bucolic buffalo, graceful cheetahs, a tree swarming with raucous monkeys.
That plain, both Matt and Teddy knew, without knowing its site, was probably under the plow, irrigated with desalinated sea water delivered by pumping systems powered by Reznor's G.D. power. At best, it had become grazing grounds for domestic cattle or one of the few species of originally wild grass eaters which were now bred for meat.
When the film ended, Reznor turned to face them as the lights came up. "Do you understand?"
"I think so," Matt said.
"We crowded them off this planet," Reznor said. "Yard by yard and square mile by square mile we usurped grazing grounds and habitats that had been theirs from, in many cases, before the time our first ancestor stood on his hind legs to look over the tall grass for the telltale movements of a predator. We've confined the poor remnants of an astoundingly rich diversity of life in tiny preserves. Thousands of species now exist only in zoos. Thousands are lost forever. I'm not going to preach to you, but can anyone imagine that man, or the lion, or the termite is the end product of evolution? We've short-circuited a vital process. We've been on this planet for what is only the blink of an eye in geological time. The cockroach was here over a billion years ago."
"Ugh," Teddy said.
Reznor laughed. "We won't be putting cockroaches on Beauty just now. But he's a good illustration of what I'm getting at. What was his purpose? Is he really as obnoxious as you feel, Teddy? Before man inserted himself into the cockroach's habitat he went about his business, whatever that was. He didn't evolve too much, except in smartness. He learned to adapt to man, to live in his buildings, to eat his leftovers. But what was his purpose? Has it been fulfilled?"
"If your plan is to recreate Earth's ecosystem in detail, bring your lunch," Matt said.
"Well, we won't be able to do that, will we?" Reznor said. "We'll have to start and work backward. There'll be as many decisions to make as there are species on Earth. I'm sure we'll make mistakes, and I'm equally sure that I won't live to see the end of the work. But, with God's help, we're going to give back to the animals what we have taken from them."
A chime sounded. Reznor motioned and his assistant went to the door. Two men rolled in a cart laden with Belle's carefully gathered horde of data on the new planet. Reznor had the visual tapes run first. He watched leaning forward in his seat, a look of musing pleasure on his face.
"You named it," he told Teddy. "It is Beauty." He rubbed his hands, and his face was animated. He motioned to his aide, said, "Call communications. Tell them to give the go signal." When the man was gone, he said, "In a matter of hours, ships will lift off from Earth and several other planets nearer to Beauty. As soon as we get the all clear on health hazards and all the necessary testing is complete, ships will land and begin to build facilities in places to be selected by my animal folks. We'll build in unobtrusive places, and the facilities will be designed to blend with the natural landscape. After they're built, we'll remove the workmen, and the human population of Beauty will be limited to no more than a few hundred people, just those necessary for the seeding programs: veterinarians, animal behavior specialists, ecologists, and the minimum number of support personnel."
"Sounds like it's going to be a lonely post," Matt said. His plans very definitely did not include a long stay on Beauty, nice as she was.
"It won't be all bad," Reznor said. "We'll go first class, the best of everything for everyone. Basic salary will be augmented by isolation post bonuses. The company will be good." He grinned. "Because, after a while, the company is going to include me. I'd like to have a few people out there that I can talk with other than scientists who get pretty involved in their work, Matt. I've taken a good look at your file folder in the last couple of days. You're an academy man, excellent service record, and you've shown me that you are persistent and consistent, loyal, not afraid of work or hardship. As a part of the support personnel of Beauty I'm going to need a security force. We'll not want unauthorized visitors for a while until we learn something about what it's going to take to recreate the complicated food chains of land and ocean from scratch. I'd thought to offer you the job of sort of planetary boss."
Matt cleared his throat and started to speak. Teddy put her hand on his arm and Reznor spoke before Matt could. "Teddy, you're overqualified for a two-man exploration ship. I understand why you were willing to take on the job, to be with your husband. You've had a nice five-year honeymoon off to yourselves, transing around space. I think it's time you got to work on your specialty. I've looked over your file folder, too, and I'm impressed. Top two percent of your graduating class, honors in grad school, a thesis that got comment outside the academic world. It doesn't look as if Beauty will need much physical terraforming—" He paused, scratched his chin. "By the way, I suppose you know the origins of that word, terraforming."
"Yes," Teddy said.
"No," Matt said, shaking his head.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, Teddy," Reznor said.
"It's an Amenglish word, and it appeared for the first time in the fiction stories of the. mid-twentieth century futurists who described themselves as Science Fiction writers. It's based on the Latin word terra, meaning land. So to terraform means to alter a land to make it Earthlike. Teddy's thesis, Matt, in case you haven't read it—"
Matt looked at Teddy sheepishly. She'd never mentioned her thesis and he'd never asked.
"—concerned itself with the theoretical terraforming of a planet much like Earth during an ice age. She had some rather ingenious ideas about changing the climate to make it warmer, and thus more hospitable for settlers."
"By using G.D. power," Teddy said.
Matt was beginning to worry. Teddy was looking quite interested, and he was trying to envision how it would be, living on a planet where there were only a few other people, a planet teeming with a zoo of animals.
"As you said, Beauty doesn't need terraforming," he said.
"Well, not in some spectacular physical way, not the major alteration of the chemical contents of sea or air," Reznor said. "But won't we be terraforming her, using as a pattern the Earth of a few thousand years ago, before man bred himself into pesthood?" He smiled at Teddy. "We need you on Beauty."
Teddy looked at Matt. He could see she was damned interested. "Matt—" she said.
"Sir," Matt said, "we'll have to have some time to consider this. We appreciate the offer, and I'm flattered that you consider me capable of doing such an important and responsible job. But we'll have to—" Teddy dug her fingernails into his arm. He flinched. "—have some—" Teddy's pressure increased. "Ouch," he said. "—have some time to think—"
"Matt," she hissed.
"—it over. Teddy."
"Fine," Reznor said. "I'd like to leave for Beauty in a couple of days. We'll make the decision point the time when your ship is ready for space again. Okay?"
"Maaaaatt," Teddy whispered.
"That's quite fair, sir," Matt said, rising and half-dragging Teddy out of the room.
Chapter Five
Each time Davis Conroy had to leave either his quarters or his offices in the penthouse of the soaring Bureau of Colonization tower he questioned the wisdom of politicians. For all the technological advancement of the twenty-first century, there still was no method for preventing sweat. For Conroy, it began first in the tight and secret places of his body and then on his back, so that even five minutes in the equatorial heat of Africa required a bath and fresh clothing.
It was Pax Five policy to build new facilities in underdeveloped countries, and those countries of equatorial Africa certainly met the definition. If one adhered to the belief that one way of sharing the wealth with those who had never created their own was as good as another, it made sense to put a multi-billion dollar complex in the jungle, for the Bureau poured a lot of Pax dollars into the region. Ten thousand natives were employed. Imported executive and technical level personnel poured more money into the local economy. Yet ten miles away, people still lived in mud huts and practiced slash and burn agriculture. In many ways, Conroy felt, Africa had not changed in hundreds of thousands of years. The principal changes were readily evident to one flying over the continent, however. Each time Conroy traveled he felt that he could look down and see a sea of upturned, multihued faces, billions, for Africans of all hues practiced intently that most common of human pastimes—breeding.
Conroy, at fifty-five, was not old enough to remember the old Africa where vast areas were given over to animal life and there had been thousands of square miles of unpopulated, or, at best, thinly populated land.
It was one of the Deputy Director's duties to bid official farewell to colonization ships lifting off from one of the several spacepads within the Bureau's one-hundred-square-mile compound, and it was that duty which had brought him out into steaming heat and moist, heavy air redolent with the aroma of the remnants of the jungle. His words of Bureau blessing had been broadcast throughout the great starship, but he wasn't sure how many of the passengers had understood, for this was a local load. Teeming Africa contributed, it seemed, more than its share of people who wanted out, who wanted to leave this crowded, tiresome world for an ideal, a heaven in space. And the almost completely African load aboard the ship illustrated one of Conroy's private concerns.
He had, just a few days past, voiced that concern to Angus Meade, Director of the Bureau, a political appointee, naturally. "Angus," he'd said, "we're polarizing space. We have Bureau embarkation facilities in the wrong places. When a ship lifts off from the main complex here, the people aboard are almost all black, or some shade of brown or tan. When one lifts off from the Columbia Complex in South America, the cargo is mainly Indio brown."
"Mr. Conroy," the director had said, "such things are not our concern."
What the hell, then, was their concern? And if the creation of black, brown, yellow, and white ghettos in space was not the Bureau's concern, whose concern was it? Not the concern of the politicians in the Pax Five capitals. Not the concern of the industrialists who profited from the expansion, whose plants on several planets built the ships, supplied the basic necessities for beginning a new life on a new planet, counted their profits in the billions. Whose, then?
Gonroy stayed in the open-air observation shelter until the latest in the growing fleet of colonization ships roared upward and puffed away into the bright blue of the African sky. Then he hurried to his closed, air-conditioned vehicle and gave the black driver orders to deliver him to the tower, quickly. He removed his supposedly lightweight formal jacket, loosened his tie, wiped sweat from his face with a white handkerchief and looked forward to a quick shower, lunch, and a quiet afternoon. He had not too much hope for the latter. Every one except the director knew who ran the Bureau, and it was no small job.
In an age where drugs could melt away fat and a man had to be mentally disturbed to eat enough to be five pounds overweight, Davis Conroy attracted stares from those who did not know him, for he was a solid chunk of a man, shorter than the general population, thick of chest, equally thick of belly—although not one ounce of fat had accumulated on his frame—treelike of thigh and leg. In spite of his solidity, he moved easily and with a certain grace. His hair was just beginning to gray, and he disdained any artificial method of preventing this natural occurrence. He refused to wear some contraption in his eyes, and so his nearsightedness was corrected by an anachronistic pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Glasses were so rare that he had to go to Geneva for fittings, but he didn't mind anything that got him away from Africa's heat.
The ground vehicle delivered him into Siberia, so called because the lower levels, parking areas, and service areas of the tower were something of a sump for the tower cooled air. He stepped out into the glacial temperature—or so it seemed after the outside—and felt his clothing grow quickly clammy and clingy. He almost ran to the lift and was stripping out of his shirt, his jacket thrown aside, even as he moved past the reception area into his private preserve, his office and his home, for he was a bachelor and conscientious about his job, and saw no reason why he should live outside the tower away from his work.
With his sodden shirt flying into a corner, his thick chest bare, he noticed that his office was not empty. He halted in mid-stride to glare somewhat angrily at the trim woman who sat in a chair in front of his vacant desk.
"The girl said you'd be back shortly," the woman said, "and that I could wait in here."
Conroy didn't like being caught bare-chested, and especially not by Genna Darden, pristine in white, blonde hair seemingly molded into place, makeup meticulous.
"Damnit, Genna, I'm soaked. Whatever it is, it'll have to wait until I shower." He plunged into his own living room and was a bit pissed to hear Genna's voice as she followed him. He slammed into the sanitary area, ripped off his pants, stepped into the shower, and was luxuriating in cool, clear water when he heard the door open.
"Genna, damnit, can't a man have privacy in his own shower?" he bellowed.
"I won't peep, Davis, I promise," Genna said. "I have a little something from Intelpax that I think will interest you."
"Wait in the office," Conroy yelled over the drumming of the shower.
"Reznor's found another life-zone planet," Genna yelled back.
