Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

While he was hunting for it he heard peremptory gurgling from the Slug and looked up. The pilot, restored to three dimensions, had hoisted himself out of his cup and was growling at Hoak Hagbarth. Who had unstrapped himself and was floating free, coming toward Giyt, “I know, I know,” Hagbarth snapped at the pilot. I’ll get back when I have to.” And then to Giyt: “Damn that Tschopp! He always gets airsick, and he never gets to the bag in time. Look at me!”

He was dabbing at his knee, where there was a definite smear of something on his pants that smelled nasty. Giyt could hear the sounds of Wili Tschopp busily vomiting in the seat just above him.

Giyt didn’t answer him. He managed to stretch an arm to retrieve the translation button he had just spotted on the floor. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Hagbarth hesitated on his way to the toilet. “I guess you’re wondering why we’re here, with the six-planet meeting going on and all.”

“Actually,” Giyt said, “I’m not.” And replaced the button in his ear as he closed his eyes. And didn’t speak to Hagbarth again.

Corning back to the surface wasn’t worse than the takeoff, but it wasn’t appreciably better, either. If Giyt wasn’t having the breath squeezed out of him quite as much, there was instead a whole hell of a lot more shaking and bouncing about as they reentered the atmosphere. Then the ship danced around a bit on its rockets as the pilot finally did in fact do a little piloting, making sure it was centered on the polar factory pad before he let the craft drop onto its massive shock absorbers for the last half meter or two.

Then they were there. They had to wait, strapped in their seats—waiting, Giyt supposed, while people outside foamed the ground the landing rockets had broiled. Then everyone began getting into their cold-weather gear—those that had it, anyway, which is to say everybody but Evesham Giyt. A moment later, responding to some cue from outside, the Slug pilot slithered down past the passengers, bulky in his rubbery cocoon of electrically heated fabric. He wrenched the door open and, without saying a word, left the ship.

Giyt took that to be permission to do the same. So did everyone else, all at once. Even after Giyt got himself free of the restraining gear it took him a while to lever himself down through the tangle of other passengers and out into the shockingly frigid wind. The cold made him catch his breath, which actually hurt as it entered his lungs. It would have been even worse if it hadn’t been for the foamed, but still hot, ground underfoot—

No, he discovered. It wasn’t ground, and it wasn’t foamed, either. What was underfoot was mud, soaked by the melting snow and cooked to a slurry by the landing rockets. It was still steaming, and it was ruining his shoes. They were in a sort of well surrounded by snowbanks, and meltwater was still gurgling away through culverts.

Someone had gouged out a series of planked steps to get them to the top of the snow, where a duckboard path led them to the waiting hovers. Giyt ran toward them, but Hoak Hagbarth ran faster. He was there before Giyt, panting and irritable, no longer bothering to pretend to be friendly. “This one,” he ordered, pointing to one of the hovercraft. “Get in.”

Giyt did as told; this was not the time to try making a break. A Delt followed him; then Will Tschopp, morose and shaky from his airsickness. Giyt was shivering too, his teeth chattering, but at least the car was relatively warm. The bad part of the warmth was that both Tschopp and Hagbarth, though swaddled in their bulky parkas, definitely stank. The Delt took one look at them with both his wandering eyes, then conspicuously leaned away from them as the car began to move.

A few hundred meters away, the factory buildings were bathed in light. Giyt squinted at them, trying to reconcile the remembered schematics of the polar complex with what was before his eyes. Most of the buildings were the familiar golden domes of Delt architecture, linked by their mole-run connecting tunnels, but what the car was heading for was a chunky, square-edged block, ten meters high but dark and windowless. That, Giyt realized, would be the central facility, from which all the others branched off. The car didn’t stop outside, but went right through an air-curtain door without pausing.

Inside, they were in a bare room, corridors leading away from it in several directions. There was a sort of reception desk, untended except for a Delt technician, who roused himself from sleep to greet the Delt from the rocket. There was a distant thudding of heavy machinery in operation somewhere not too far away. At least in the building it was warm.

The two Delts disappeared in the direction of their dome while Tschopp and Hoak Hagbarth headed for toilet facilities—not the same ones, Giyt noticed—to clean up. “Wait here. Maury’ll come and show us around,” Hagbarth growled as he left.

That Giyt did not propose to do.

He looked swiftly around to orient himself. He knew that the Earth dome, as the latest built, was part of a necklace of three other domes, the Centaurians’ and the Petty-Primes’. Since the factory plenum belonged to everybody, the wall readouts were in a wild variety of notations and languages. Giyt recognized the dancing dots and slashes of Petty-Prime script on one door and ducked into it. He hurried down the broad hall on the other side until he was almost run over by a pair of forklifts, one with a human driver and the other slaved to the first one—on the way, no doubt, to offload cargo from the rocket. “Excuse me,” he called over the grinding whine of the forklifts. “I’m Evesham Giyt—the mayor, you know.”

The driver was muffled in cold-weather gear, but his face mask was hanging loose from his helmet. “Really?” he said in surprise. “Still?”

Giyt disregarded it. “Am I going right for the human factory dome?”

The driver took his time about answering. “Shouldn’t you be with somebody?” he asked.

“Of course not. I’m the mayor.”

The driver brooded over that for a moment. “Well,” he said, “most of the guys have taken some personal time. To watch the opening ceremonies of the conference, you know.” He thought for a moment longer, then added doubtfully that he didn’t personally get to the factory very often, but if Giyt wanted to keep going to the Centaurian control room there was a female there, stuck with the duty like himself, who might know the way. And who liked to gab. And since the whole operation was of course automated, didn’t have much else to do.

Giyt didn’t hesitate. It wouldn’t take Hagbarth and Tschopp much longer to make themselves presentable, and he didn’t want to waste his best chance to get rid of them.

He found the Centaurian control room easily enough, and at least part of what the forklift driver had said was true. The Centaurian shift manager was curled up on a pad in front of the controls, lying on her side with her paws relaxed and displayed: three of her paws were white, the other the dun color of her fur. A wall screen was displaying the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, but she wasn’t attending to it. She was murmuring softly to the husband who was nestled in the soft fur under her chin.

They did not look as though they wanted to be interrupted. But the male was peering at Giyt with bright eyes, and when he whispered something to his mate she turned her snout toward the door. “What person are you?” she demanded.

“I’m Evesham Giyt. I’m looking for the Earth-human factory dome.”

“You got visiting permission pass? No? You got no chance going that place alone, Large Male. You go away or I call—wait one.” Her husband was whispering to her. Then she looked at Giyt in a different way. “Oh,” she said. “You Mayor Large Male Evesham Giyt. You guy bitched up stinky Kalkaboo guy, right? Why had not spoken so right away?”