Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

“It’s the sewage that brings them,” Dr. Patroosh said, without pleasure. “You always see them here.”

And the pilot called, “You bet! Mean bastards. Eat you up, one bite, quick-quick. Get bad bellyache after, sure, but what you care? By then you dead. Now everybody shut up, must catch wave,”

He had throttled back the skimmer’s thrusters, though keeping the fans that raised them above the water level at full power. They idled for a moment in the shallows where the river broadened out to enter the sea. Then he poured on the power, the skimmer leaped ahead, and they slid over the froth deposited by one breaking wave and climbed the next before it crested. Finally they were in deep water.

Nonchalantly the pilot stood up, swaying easily in the motion of the sea. From a compartment in the wall he took out a thing that looked more like a pocket camera than anything else and held it to one eye as he began to study the sea. Something in the control board began to hum and stutter; Giyt hoped it was an autopilot of some kind. At least, though the pilot was paying no attention at all to what the skimmer did, they seemed to be moving steadily toward a smudge on the horizon. Giyt supposed it was Energy Island, As the skimmer rose and fell over the vast Ocean swells, Rina began to look uncomfortable. The pilot took the thing away from one eye long enough to stare at her. “You think you going to puke? Okay, over side. Ocean don’t mind; only don’t lean over too far, Christ’s sake. Got no way to pull you out before, you know, gobble-gobble.”

By the time they reached Energy Island—sliding right up into a dock as behind them a great steel-wire gate closed to keep the shore animals out—Dr. Patroosh had explained why she preferred the skimmer to the gyrocopter. Under its gold skin the skimmer was built of a sort of foam plastic, so light that if anything went wrong the vessel would simply float until rescue arrived. The chopper had its own flotation devices, but swells would overwhelm them quickly enough. Then it would sink like a rock, and, she said positively, nodding toward the hungry creatures on the far side of the gate, “You can see why you don’t want to go swimming in Ocean.”

Whoever built the power plant seemed to like gold as much as the builder of the skimmer did. The plant was a collection of hemispherical golden domes. There was a twenty-meter-tall giant hemisphere in the middle and there were smaller ones, which gave off a sound of big engines running, nested around it. Every one of them was bright with a golden skin. The difference was that what the power plant’s skin covered wasn’t foam plastic. It was something hard and solid. Cement, maybe. Steel, more likely, Giyt thought.

The Delt pilot was watching him. He tapped Giyt on the shoulder with a long-fingered hand and said with pride, “Good electric, true? You know who build plant? Us. Not stinky Slug, Centaurian, Kalkaboo; when we come they have zero but damn pitiful hydroelectric dam for power. Delts laugh and laugh. Too tiny. Us build good one here. Fuse atoms, fine Delt designings. Then plenty electric, you bet, except now so many immigrants coming in need more. Oh,” he added quickly, not meaning to give offense, “not just you Earth-creature guys, you understand? Damn Petty-Primes even worse.”

Dr. Patroosh scowled at him. “Wait for us here,” she ordered; and to Giyt and Rina, “Come on.” And a moment later, when they were out of earshot, “You know what they want? They want us to dig the damn foundations for the new plant, while they supply all the high-tech stuff that we don’t even get to look at. Like we were some damn Third World country that doesn’t know anything about technology.” She shook her head gloomily. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got to talk to the head controller—he’ll be another damn Delt, of course. You two can look around. There ought to be a few Earth people on the shift; maybe you can get one of them to show you what’s what.”

Evesham Giyt had never been in a power plant before. He had never thought much about what one might be like, either. Electricity was what you got when you turned a switch. Here inside the belly of the plant it was something else, something that shook the walls with low-frequency rumbling and hurt the ears with high-pitched whines. And , those, he knew, were only the sounds of the turbines that turned steam into electricity. The source of the infernal heat that distilled Ocean’s water and then flashed it into steam to spin the turbines was silent. But it was there. Somewhere no more than a few dozen meters away, Giyt knew, incalculable numbers of hydrogen nuclei were madly coupling with each other to make helium. It was the same nuclear fusion that made the old H-bombs so terminally lethal—no, it was scarier than any H-bomb, because what was happening inside the biggest dome wasn’t a single explosion. It was a process rather than an event, and it went on and on.

It did not seem to Giyt that this was a thing that should be left to run itself, however good the automatic controls. But there seemed to be nobody in sight. As he and Rina walked along the golden corridors they passed a sleeping Kalkaboo, curled against a wall. He woke up long enough to glare at them, then returned to sleep. It was only after a ten-minute search that they heard a whirring sound. It came from where a human shift worker was watching a porn film on his handset as he followed the cleaning machines around.

When Giyt asked the man for guidance he gave Giyt an injured look. “You don’t recognize me, do you? Colly Detslider. I’m the relief driver on Pumper Three in the fire company.”

But after Giyt apologized and shook his hand, the man was happy enough for an excuse to leave the machines to do their job on their own. Yes, he told them, there was a full shift on duty—thirty persons, five of them human like himself. No, he didn’t know where the others were. Sure, he’d show them around, although it was only fair to warn them that his own job here was janitorial and he didn’t know much about the machinery.

He knew enough, though, to keep them from going near the central chamber where the tokamak held its fusing plasma in an unbreakable magnetic grip. They saw the pumps that sucked cool water in from Ocean, to make steam and then to condense it when spent; they saw the gratings that kept the creatures of Ocean from being sucked in along with it; they saw the remarkably slim cables, wrapped in the chilling jackets that made them superconducting, that carried the power plant’s output down under the strait to the community that used it. They even peeped into the control room, every wall a mosaic of screens and signals, where they saw Dr. Patroosh furiously arguing with a pair of uninterested Delt controllers. They would have seen more, probably, but Detslider was watching the time. He was due for his lunch break, he informed them, and they were welcome to come along if they wanted to.

Lunch was machine-served in a large room filled with tables, couches, and Kalkaboo tree-rests, sparsely occupied by beings who paid no attention to the human visitors. To Giyt’s displeasure the human lunch menu turned out to be creamed chipped beef on toast. “It’s always something the machines can dispense. Real crap,” Detslider told him. “Come on. Take your plate and we’ll go someplace that smells better to eat it.” A Delt, sipping some thick yellow liquid from a shallow bowl by the door, turned one eye to glare at Detslider as they left, but the man ignored him. Five meters down the corridor there was a smaller room, with two human women and a man playing pinochle at one table and space for the visitors at another. While Giyt doggedly ate his lunch Rina made polite conversation with all of them. Detslider came from Pasadena, he said, but left it for Tupelo because there was too much crime in California. Like his job? Well, it was all right, but boring. The others, respectively from Tucson, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Boston, agreed, the woman from Pottsville adding, “The damn Delts push you around here, like they owned the place.” But it wasn’t just the Earth humans that suffered, she conceded; the Delts acted superior to everybody.