Poul Anderson - New America

“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.