Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

“Well, that, too, but I guess you would’ve told me if you had them for me? Yes, that’s what I thought. No, what I wanted to tell you was Lieutenant Dern wants you at the firehouse today after siesta.”

Lieutenant Dern was the operations officer for the fire company, so Giyt was pretty sure he knew why. He asked the question anyway. “What for?”

“Training, and I think she’s going to pull a quiz on you, too. Have you been studying?”

“Well, not really.”

Hagbarth grinned at him. “So then it’s a good thing you’ve got a couple of hours, right? And listen, if I was you I’d just pitch that bamboo crap in the garbage. Mrs. B. will never find out.”

So that meant one more burden on Giyt’s suddenly insufficient time. There wasn’t any help for it. Resigned, he gave up the notion of doing a little more digging into some of the things he really wanted to know and got down to the business of studying.

The list of things a fireman was supposed to know was formidable. There were the schematics of the pumpers and the water cannon to learn, the theory of putting fires out to study (cool them with water, smother them with foam), the proper names of every air pack and peavey hook in the company’s arsenal to memorize. It wasn’t any more difficult than any of the college assignments Giyt had easily aced long ago. He had educated himself in far more complex subjects many times, for school or just for the pure pleasure of learning. This stuff was child’s play compared to, say, identifying Napoleon’s order of battle as he marched on Moscow, not to mention some of the more abstruse areas of network theory. If this one was a burden it was primarily because it was compulsory, had been most unjustly dumped on him without warning. And what did it matter whether he passed Lieutenant Dern’s quiz or not? What could they do to him?

So, having established that there was no good reason for him to cram for the test, Giyt did what he always did. He began to study, and he made good progress by the time he had to leave the house.

On the way to the firehouse Giyt stopped in at the house next door to tell Rina about Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s gift. He had to whisper, because one of the littlest kids was asleep in a bassinet by her feet, while Rina was trying to feed another in a high chair. Out in the yard, where Rina could keep a watchful eye on them through the open door, the rest of the de Mir get was playing raucously with a bunch of little pink Petty-Prime kits. “That was nice of the Brownbenttalons,” she said absently, aiming a spoonful of mush at the momentarily open mouth and expertly connecting. As he left she added, “Shammy? I’m glad to see you making some friends.”

On the way to the firehouse Giyt wondered if that was what he was doing. He hadn’t had much practice at making friends. For that matter, he hadn’t even had very many acquaintances back in Wichita, because every person who knew who Evesham Giyt was automatically became a potential threat to his carefully secured lifestyle. Well, and because he hadn’t much wanted any friends, either, he admitted to himself. The company he liked best was his own.

And of course Rina’s.

As he entered the firehouse, the first person he saw was Lieutenant Grazia Dern. She was definitely not a friend. She had already let Giyt know, pointedly, that she was very dose with the former mayor, Mariam Vardersehn, and thus not too friendly to her replacement. The only other fireman present at that moment wasn’t a good candidate for friendship, either, since he was the man who had been turned down for permanent family relocation to the polar factories, Maury Kettner.

Giyt’s training for the day turned out to involve a lot of hands-on practice, some enjoyable, some not much fun at all. After half an hour in the station Giyt thought he would never want to reel up a hose single-handedly again, but then Kettner took him out into the field. It got better then. Kettner let him drive the truck around the fringes of the lake to the foliage on the far side. That was interesting in itself, and then Kettner let him fire the water cannon at the brush along the roadway. That was pretty much pure pleasure: all that power under his hand! They had gone all the way down to the riverside below Slugtown before Giyt realized his “training” had served another purpose: under Kettner’s guidance his driving had widened a stretch of that horrible downhill road by a couple of meters on either side.

He didn’t mind. He didn’t even mind the stowing and draining after twenty minutes of blasting holes in the foliage along the banks of the foul-smelling stream, where one of the great cargo submarines from the Pole floated half submerged, waiting to be unloaded. But then, when they got back to the firehouse, the lieutenant was gone and Chief Tschopp was waiting to give him spot oral quizzes on what he had learned in his screen session.

That wasn’t what Giyt wanted at that moment. He was wet and sweaty and his arms were tired from holding back the kick of the water cannon. What he wanted most of all was to go home and take a shower. He didn’t do well on the quiz, and when Hoak Hagbarth strolled in in the middle of it, Giyt looked to him for a diversion.

It didn’t work that way. “For Christ’s sake, Giyt,” Tschopp exploded. “Pay attention!”

“He don’t catch on real fast, does he?” offered Maury Kettner, watching.

“He does not,” Tschopp agreed in disgust. “What’s the matter, Giyt? You too busy playing those little bedtime games with your lady to study?”

That was going farther than Giyt was prepared to accept, but as he was tensing to reply Hagbarth cut in. “Now, now,” he said mildly, “watch how you talk about somebody that’s about to become a mother, Wili. Come on. Tell Evesham here you’re sorry.” Tschopp looked rebellious, but muttered something that might have been an apology. “Now, that’s better. Are you through with the mayor? Because I need to talk to him about something.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just jerked his head toward the chief’s office. As the two of them entered, Giyt asked, “How did you know Rina was pregnant?”

“Oh, hell, Evesham.” Hagbarth smiled. “Everybody knows everything around here, didn’t you know that? Except about the freaks. They keep a lot of secrets from us.” He closed the door on the man who was the office’s rightful occupant. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring, set with a topaz—obviously fake—the size of a pigeon’s egg. “There’s a recorder in the stone, Evesham. What I’d like you to do, I’d like you to just wear it next time you see Mrs. B., and maybe get her to talk a little more about what armaments they’ve got—”

Giyt stared at him. “You want me to spy on her?”

“I wouldn’t call it spying, exactly,” Hagbarth protested. “Just for archival purposes, you know? And it’s not that we want to know anything they shouldn’t be willing to tell us anyway—”

“No.”

Hagbarth looked at him incredulously. “You don’t mean that,” he said.

“Actually I do. No. I won’t do it.”

“Christ, Giyt, where’s your patriotism? You could be doing yourself some good, too. You can bet the eeties know everything there is to know about Earth—who knows what kind of spy stuff they had in the drone they sent the portal in? I mean,” he added hastily, “if they did do that, like they say. And we’ve never gotten a ship near any of their planets. Hell, we don’t even know where the Kalks and the Petty-Primes come from! And the scout ships the Huntsville people sent to Alpha Centauri and Delta Pavonis never even reported back—I give you one guess why.”

Giyt frowned. Put like that, it sounded damning. But he. said firmly, “Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s a friend, and I don’t do that to my friends. I’m not going to rat her out for you.”