Poul Anderson - New America

“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.”