Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

“Congratulations,” Giyt said, since that was what she seemed to be expecting; thinking that for a pair of same-sex females they were certainly remarkably fecund, courtesy of Ex-Earth’s sperm bank.

“Thanks, but what I wanted to say is that all of a sudden Matya is after me to quit being a volunteer fireman. Too much physical activity for a pregnant woman, she says. Which is nonsense. We don’t have that many real fires, and even if we did . . . Well, that’s between Matya and me, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m going to quit, just to please her, and what I was thinking is that that means there’ll be a vacancy in the fire company. So what I was wondering was whether you wanted to join.”

He blinked at her. “Be a fireman?”

“Only if you want to,” Lupe said quickly. “It doesn’t take much time—hell, how often does anything burn around here? Not counting brush fires, I mean, and you only get those in the dry. In a couple of weeks we’re having our annual firemen’s fair. We’re calling it ‘The Taste of Tupelo’ this year, and that’ll take everybody in the company to man all the booths. But—”

“But you really ought to, Shammy,” Rina coaxed. “As mayor. Set a good example. What do you say?”

Well what could he say? He said yes. And on their evening walk that night, did little talking, because he was wondering how it had happened that, without warning, the lifelong career computer thief and con man, Evesham Giyt, was suddenly turning into a model citizen.

Time was, back on Earth, when Giyt might hear someone refer to an elected official as a “servant of the people” and take it as a joke. It wasn’t a joke here, though. Here his constituents took it seriously. They called him on the net. They showed up on his doorstep. They buttonholed him in the street; and they all wanted something—sometimes a transfer to a different job, perhaps an increased line of credit at the hypermarket even some private tutoring for the child that wasn’t doing well in school. At first most of the requests struck Giyt as easy enough to handle—“Actually,” he would say, “that’s not my department; you’d better talk to Hoak Hagbarth”—but then it turned out that a lot of the petitioners had already talked to Hagbarth, and Hagbarth had said no.

Hagbarth even said no to Mayor Giyt when Mayor Giyt asked him about some of the petitions. “Take Kettner off the farm and transfer him to the Pole? Hell, no! Listen, don’t pay any attention to that bad back he keeps talking about; he just wants to sleep away his shift in a factory instead of running a cultivator. And how can we raise Gottman’s credit limit past what the computer says he can pay? We plug in his income; we plug in his present debt balance; we plug in his past payment record. The rest is just arithmetic. Gripes, Evesham, you ought to know that for yourself; you’re the guy who rewrote the programs.”

It all made sense once Hagbarth explained it. It was just a little surprising to Giyt to have Hagbarth say no to him, since he’d never said no before.

On the other hand, Giyt realized, he had never asked Hagbarth for anything before.

It wasn’t just the endless demands for favors he didn’t know how to give, either. The real time destroyers were the endless extracurricular duties of a model citizen mayor. For instance, he was expected to show the flag when the Slugs had their annual eisteddfodd. That meant two hours of squirming in damp, uncomfortable seats in Slugtown, pretending to enjoy the sounds of the Slug choir baying and moaning at the bright Tupelovian stars. Well, it was interesting to see how the Slugs lived, in their mud huts just below the old dam on the far side of the lake. It made him wonder why they chose to live by themselves instead of bunking in higgledy-piggledy with all the other races, the way everybody else did. (But then the Slugs liked the climate moister than anybody else.) Rina sat loyally beside him at the sing, showing no signs of concern that her brand-new boots were getting all muddied up. But she did mention to Giyt her interesting observation that, although half a dozen other Earth humans had gamely showed up for the event, neither of the Hagbarths were among them.

Then there was the business of the volunteer fire company. Lupe insisted on taking him to the station herself so he could meet the others. Unpleasingly, the fire chief turned out to be that general handyman and admirer of Rina Giyt, Wili Tschopp, Giyt knew that it was unreasonable to take offense at the way the man looked at Rina. Lots of men had looked at her that way back in Wichita, and it had never bothered him. Still, it made him uncomfortable in Tschopp’s presence. Then, as soon as he entered the firehouse, one of the other men buttonholed him to ask why he and his family couldn’t be transferred to the north polar mines on a permanent basis; it was cooler there, the man explained, and his wife really hated hot weather, and what was the use of having a damn mayor, and one, he pointed out, that he personally had voted for, if he couldn’t get a little help from the man now and then?

Giyt promised to think about it. He knew he would, too, because he was already thinking, a lot, about these endless requests.

The firehouse was interesting, though. Giyt was impressed, not to say amazed, by the mass of heavy-duty fire-fighting equipment the company possessed: three great tankers, four pumpers, and a chief’s car. “But what burns here?” he asked the chief. “I mean, everything I see is fireproof, isn’t it?”

“Brush,” Chief Tschopp said succinctly, opening a beer. “Want one?”

Giyt didn’t want any beer, exactly—he would have preferred a decent white wine—but he took the beer and listened to the chief’s stories about how when the droughts came, they turned the chaparral and the stubble in the farmlands on this side of the mountain into tinder. That made sense, though it had never occurred to Giyt that the island could ever suffer droughts. But the important thing was that Tschopp seemed to be doing his best to be friendly; and when the company voted Giyt in that night (Lupe told him later), it was Chief Tschopp himself who made the nominating speech. All the same . . .

All the same, although each of the little new drags on his time was reasonable enough, and maybe even kind of fun—Giyt was actually looking forward to the time when he himself might be driving one of those huge pumpers to a fire—there were a lot of drags on his time.

Giyt wasn’t used to that. He’d devoted his life to making sure nobody would ever be in a position to tell him that he had to do this or that at such and such a time. He’d made it happen that way, too, if you didn’t count the times when he rented himself out for a few weeks as a master debugger. Even then those times were short and he could quit when he liked.