Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

Giyt, who hadn’t touched the first one, repressed a sigh. “Thanks, no.” He looked around at the Petty-Prime Responsible One, still engaged in unfriendly conversation with the Delt who had stepped on his child; evidently he would have to wait for his ride back. To make conversation, he offered: “This is the first time I’ve been here. Do you always come down to meet the rocket?”

Hagbarth looked at him with a cautious expression. “Not always.”

“Just to pick up that package this time, I guess?” He meant nothing by it, but Hagbarth seemed to consider it a significant question. “Oh, that. Well, sure. Sometimes there’s a shipment corning down from the Pole that has to be met, that’s all. You know how it is. Most of the stuff comes by cargo sub, but there are some goods people are more in a hurry for than others.” He sighed and stretched, then looked over Giyt’s shoulder. “I promised to give .the damn Delt a ride, but I didn’t say I’d wait all day,” he complained, then began to grin. “Look at those silly little Petty-Prime buggers; they’re nuts, you know that?”

Giyt turned around to look. The Responsible One was still arguing with the Delt, but his kits were playing their childhood games. One’ pair had turned itself into an animated wheel—each kit holding the ankles of the other and rolling across the mossy ground. Another pair was standing back to back, trying to flail their arms around to strike each other. “I’ve seen grown-up Petty-Primes doing that one,” Giyt announced. “It seems to be a big sport on the home planet.”

Hagbarth gave him a questioning frown. “How do you know what they do on the home planet?” So, of course, Giyt had to tell him how, just for the fun of it, he’d gone to the trouble of figuring out the Petty-Prime protocols so he could listen in on their transmissions.

That seemed to impress Hagbarth. He said, “Huh.” Then he reached into the cooler and pulled out two more beers. He popped them both open and handed one to Giyt, without asking whether he wanted it or not.

“You know,” he said, “I forgot how good you were at that stuff.” Giyt shrugged modestly, but Hagbarth persisted. “I wonder if you could do something important for me.”

Giyt got cautious. “What’s that?”

“Well, you know how we handle transmissions at the portal? There’s six of us, and each one has a switch; if we turn it off, the transmission fails. Only that’s a pretty dangerous situation, you know? What I’d like, if you could do it, is to figure out how I can cut the other guys out of the circuit.”

Startled: “What the hell for?”

“So as to prevent accidents,” Hagbarth explained. “This whole six-switch business doesn’t make any sense. They just have it because they’re scared, but what could happen? Who would try to sneak anything really bad through the terminal, for God’s sake?”

Giyt said cautiously, “Well, you can’t blame them for not taking any chances—”

“Sure, but, the way it works out, this ‘safety’ thing might actually cause an accident, don’t you see? Something could go wrong. Hell, something did, once.”

He stopped there, but Giyt’s curiosity was piqued. He persisted. “What did?”

“It was a while ago,” Hagbarth said moodily. “One of the keyholders turned off his key in the middle of a transmission. A bunch of Slugs were coming in and—well, they got lost. You know what happens to somebody like that? They were transmitted. They weren’t received. So they’re gone forever.”

“You mean they’re dead ?”

“I mean they’re at least dead. Maybe something a lot worse. like something I don’t even want to think about. Now, we don’t want that happening to the energy lady from Earth, do we? Not to mention there’s a six-planet meeting coming along,”

“Six-planet meeting?”

“Oh, didn’t you know? Twice a year all six of the races get together here on Tupelo to talk things over—it’s like your commission, you know? Only these people represent their whole home planet. Now, we wouldn’t want anything going wrong with them, would we? We’re talking about some of the most important people there are. So if you could manage to dig out those codes for me—”

Giyt thought it over for a moment, then temporized. “I thought you’d have all that stuff. I mean, you must have access to the portal design.”

“Must we? We don’t,” Hagbarth said bitterly. “The goddamn eeties won’t tell us how the portal works, and if we try to take it apart to find out for ourselves it’ll blow up. I mean, a big blowup. They’ve probably got the thing booby-trapped with nukes or something.”

“I don’t understand,” Giyt said plaintively. “Wasn’t it this man Sommermen who invented the portal, based on what they call this Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thing? Aren’t all those guys human beings?”

Hagbarth shrugged. “I’m just telling you the way it is. So what do you say? Can you figure out those codes for me?”

“Maybe, but you’ve got me confused. I don’t understand what you’re telling me about the portal.”

“Oh, hell,” Hagbarth snarled, losing patience, “what’re you asking me about all this stuff for? Maybe I misunderstood—and look, those Petty-Primes look like they’re getting ready to go. Don’t miss your ride.”

Giyt got away without promising anything, but he didn’t stop thinking about the portal codes—and most of all, about the portal itself. After dinner he sat down to stare at his terminal.

For starters, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to work out a system for bypassing the other controls for Hoak Hagbarth—not, anyway, until he convinced himself that Hagbarth was smart enough and responsible enough to be trusted with that kind of power. But what about the bigger question Hagbarth had planted in his mind? Was there something that no one was being told about the portal’s provenance?

It occurred to him that a good place to look might be in some of the other species’ data stores. Anyway, it might be worth a little time spent at the terminal to see if he could find them.

He started with the Petty-Primes, and an hour’s hard work later he had to admit he had drawn a blank. However unreliable the damn translation programs were, Giyt was pretty sure he’d converted every possible name for the terminals into the dots and strokes of the Petty-Prime script and all he’d had for his pains was a lot of garbage about the numbers of immigrants and the volume of goods shipped back and forth.

It had seemed like a possible shortcut, but it wasn’t working. Giyt sighed and went back to the human data files.

But even the Library of Congress store was less than illuminating. Yes, somehow or other, long ago, Huntsville Inc. had pried a grant from some foundation or other to finance the airy-fairy project of interstellar exploration. Yes, they’d launched a dozen or so miniature ion rockets, one to each of the most promising nearby stars…

But then what? How did they get from the tiny, slow, unmanned probes to the instant transportation of the Sommermen portal?

That was where the story clouded over. Dr. Fitzhugh Sommermen worked for Huntsville, that was definite. He had been conducting researches on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen simultaneity effect—and doing it very expensively, in low Earth Orbit, paid for by another of Huntsville’s free-flowing grants. The reason for his being in orbit the report said, was that it was necessary to avoid interference from Earth’s surface gravity. Then somehow—this was when it all got misty and uncertain—he had come back from one session in orbit with the prototype of his portal device in his lander.

The rest of the story, for security reasons, was classified secret. But what “security reasons”? Military? But military security implied an enemy, and what enemy was involved here?