Frederik Pohl: O Pioneer!

Rina said she wouldn’t be nervous about being shot from one star to another in this newfangled Sommermen transportation thing, but Giyt thought she really was. He was. He got in and closed his eyes—and then, wonderfully, it was over as soon as it had begun. You stepped in the chamber on one world and stepped out of it on another, and that was all there was to it.

And Tupelo was just as promised. It was an Earth-sized planet, with perfectly breathable Earth-style air—which was what it more or less had to have, because none of the ET-DIXIE probes had ever found a life-bearing planet that didn’t. And it had a lot of water. Just as described, it was mostly ocean, with the colony on a Sri Lanka-sized island that was part of an archipelago in its temperate zone.

Giyt wondered about living on an island. He’d never done that, and it sounded—well, sort of confined. He had to admit that it was a nice island, though. It had everything the recruiter had promised. The island was built like a sombrero, with huge central peaks, the remnants of ancient volcanoes (but now, they swore, thoroughly dead), and the town they were to live in was on one of the series of broad plateaus that descended to the sea. Streams with pretty waterfalls raced down the mountainside to make Crystal Lake. The climate was ideal, sort of like a coastal Oregon spring. Their new home was within easy walking distance of the pretty freshwater lake that had, as promised, already been stocked with Earthly game fish. There was a fully functioning net, with a prime database that had been copied from the North American nexus itself; one subset was the complete Library of Congress base, so Giyt would not have to be without his favorite entertainment. There was a hypermarket, well stocked and promising to special-order from Earth anything they wanted that wasn’t already on the shelves; there were beauty shops and an office depot with everything the Earth superstores had and five or six small but nice-looking restaurants and bars . . . and all those things just in the services Ex-Earth had provided, with all the wonders of an alien planet to explore as well.

And then there was their home itself.

It had been a long time since Evesham Giyt had lived in anything that didn’t pull out of the wall, like a file drawer. He was a little uneasy as they prowled their six rooms with one of the Ex-Earth resident agents. She was a woman named Olse Hagbarth, and it was her job (and, she said, her pleasure—and that of her husband-slash-colleague, too) to make all the new colonists welcome. “Of course,” she said, looking around at the furniture with some disdain, “this stuff belonged to the previous occupant. Pity about her. She went back to Earth—homesick, I guess. You don’t have to keep her furniture. If you want to replace it we can get you just about anything you want from Earth. And listen, don’t worry about spending your resettlement grant. There’s more where that came from; Ex-Earth is loaded .”

But Rina was happy with the furniture supplied, was happier than Giyt would have believed with the house itself, and with the queer, un-Earthly plants that grew in its modest garden, and with the kitchen and the bathroom that was all their own, and she couldn’t wait until the agent left and they could try out their huge and comfortable new bed. “Shammy, Shammy,” she murmured into his ear, “don’t you think this is wonderful ?”

It probably was, he agreed. Tupelo was everything they’d been promised.

The only thing was, in one or two unexpected ways it was somewhat more than they’d been promised, because the recruiter in Wichita hadn’t said anything about the fact that five rather odd-looking races from other star systems were also doing their best to colonize it.

The funniest thing that happened to Evesham Giyt on Tupelo was when he got elected mayor of the human portion of the community.

It was, Rina told him fondly, quite an honor for somebody who’d been on the planet for only five weeks. Giyt didn’t think it was actually a great honor. There were only about eighteen hundred Earth humans there to be mayor of. Nobody else seemed to want the job, and the previous mayor, Mariam Vardersehn, flatly refused to run again, because she wanted to stay home and take care of her newborn twins.

Still, it was an odd turn of events for the man who for all of his thirty-four years had resolutely paid very little attention to the problems of anyone but himself.

Getting elected mayor was pretty much Giyt’s own fault. When Hoak Hagbarth, the male half of Ex-Earth’s team of on-site facilitators, happened to complain that the tax, license, and record-keeping functions of the government were in a terrible mess, Giyt incautiously volunteered to fix the programs. After that Hagbarth pointed out that it only made sense for the man who understood the system to be in charge of running it. “But I don’t know anything about politics,” Giyt protested. “Back in Wichita I didn’t even vote.”

“Well, who did? Who could vote for those snot-nosed, bleeding-heart politicians—’cept the president, of course,” Hagbarth added loyally. “I’m not talking about him. Walter P. Garsh is a real kick-ass go-getter that wants to make America strong again.”

“I guess so,’ Giyt said, not mentioning certain reservations. President Garsh was the one who had called the prime minister of Canada a pitiful pip-squeak and threatened to punch the Chinese party secretary in the nose if he didn’t repeal the import tax on American rice. Garsh’s status as a kick-ass-America-the-Greater was, in fact, the principal reason Giyt would have voted for almost anybody else, if he had ever voted at all. But Hagbarth was punching his shoulder in a friendly way.

“When Mariam got elected she didn’t know anything about politics either,” he said soothingly, “and she did all right. You’ll be fine. Anyway, you look like a candidate. Got that friendly dumb face—not too handsome, not really ugly, either. You look—I don’t know, I guess I’d have to say you look honest .”

“Yeah, thanks,” Giyt said, rubbing his shoulder. Hoak Hagbarth was a big man, even by Giyt’s own standards, and he was as strong as he looked. Giyt knew that he looked honest; it had been one of his most useful traits in the pursuit of his career as a crook, but Hagbarth didn’t sound as though he meant it as a compliment.

“Tell you what,” Hagbarth said, winding up the conversation, “why don’t we just let the voters decide? Now I’ve got work to do.”

As it turned out, the voters loved the idea. There was one vote for Albert Einstein, one for George Washington, and five for, succinctly, “Me.” All the remaining nine hundred and seventy-six adult members of the Earth-human electorate cast their ballots for Evesham Giyt. It was a wonderful display of democratic consensus at work.

Mayoring didn’t seem to be a very difficult job at first. Since Giyt had straightened out the fiscal programs, they pretty much ran themselves. For the first bit of time his only real duties were more or less honorary. He was expected to speak to the graduating class at the human school; that worried him a little, as he had had no previous experience in public speaking. However, there were only eleven students graduating, so Giyt’s public-speaking debut wasn’t really all that public. Then, come Christmas, Giyt was the one who put on the Santa Claus suit and descended from a gyro-copter onto the soccer field, where the giant community tree was winking its eighteen hundred (by then eighteen hundred and eighty-five) instrument lights, one for every human being on Tupelo. It happened to be a very sultry and rainy day, not Christmasy at all, but the human part of the colony was still resolutely sticking to the Earthside calendar, Giyt kept his ho-ho-hos short and got a big hand when he was finished, since everyone was grateful to be allowed to get out of the rain.