Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

Here it was different. Here there was always some duty he was supposed to perform, and some of those duties took actual work.

The fact that it all took time meant there wasn’t much time left over for his former hobbies. Rina noticed that was true when, digging through the datastores for her schoolwork, she stumbled on an old TV series that she knew he would like. It was so old that it was just flat pictures, and black-and-white at that, but it was a documentary of Oliver Cromwell subduing the rebels in Ireland. But then, a day or two after she’d given him the locator data, she asked him how he’d liked it. “Haven’t had a chance to look at it,” he confessed.

“But I thought I saw you . . . Never mind,” she said sunnily. “What would you like for dinner?”

She really had seen him sitting before the screen, watching something or other; but it wasn’t his usual fare. For the first time in his life Evesham Giyt had become a news addict; it was the only way he could hope to understand what his constituents were going to ask of him. Tupelo news came over the net and it was delivered by a sharp-faced, homely-featured woman Giyt recognized; her name was Silva Cristl, and she was a lieutenant in the volunteer fire company. Tupelo news wasn’t much like the stuff he’d avoided in Wichita. There were weather reports, introductions of new arrivals, personal messages (the Dunbay teenagers offering babysitting services, the Carlyles wanting to know if anyone else was interested in Zen chanting), once in a great while an obituary, details of who was in the hospital, new births, standings in the bowling league—well, there was all sorts of stuff there, delivered in Silva Cristl’s hokey jes’-folks dialect. It didn’t matter if you got interrupted in the middle of it. Giyt hated having someone bother him when he was in the middle of a good story of some exciting conquest but with this stuff there was no problem.

When he found out all five of the other races had their own equivalent news programs he tried to access them as well. It didn’t work. He got only garbage. Each eetie race had its own transmission codes, and none of them were in the least like Earth’s.

That was a tough technical problem to solve, or would have been for anyone else. For Evesham Giyt, however, it was just a matter of decryption, and that was the thing he was really good at. It took him a while to solve the basic protocols that went into Petty-Prime electronic communication, but he did it . . . and was rewarded with what appeared to be an installment of an interminable Petty-Prime soap opera. And then, while he was trying to puzzle out just why the two young males were refusing to mate with the older female—who already seemed to have several husbands, all of whom were urging the males to take her on—he heard Rina call his name. “Shammy? Aren’t you supposed to chair the commission meeting today? You don’t want to be late for it, do you?”

He wasn’t late in arriving at the Hexagon, But he wasn’t really ready for it, either. As he called the meeting to order he realized he hadn’t read over all the department reports so he could summarize them for the other commissioners. Besides, he was still a little worried about the Delts’ copepod problem.

But the Delt General Manager accepted without demur Giyt’s promise that the matter was being looked into, and actually, it was the Kalkaboo High Champion who made the only fuss of the day.

Even in this whole zoo of weirdly designed extraterrestrial beings, the Kalkaboos struck Giyt as being pretty much excessively weird. They were vaguely primate in shape. That is, they had two arms, two legs, and a head, though the head looked truly bizarre with those enormous ears napping around it. But they looked more like skeletons than people. They seemed to have no body fat at all; and their skin glittered with metallic scales.

Which, Giyt learned, were actually some sort of photovoltaic cells, and what the Kalkaboo High Champion was pissed off about was that their perfectly reasonable requirement for a new and larger radiation house to soak up ultraviolet in was being deferred because of the need to conserve power. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that Tupelo’s sun was deficient in the intense far-UV radiation they liked, the High Champion admitted. On the other hand, it was definitely everyone’s fault that they were wastefully burning up so much electrical power for their own frivolous purposes that none could be spared for this urgent requirement of the Kalkaboo horde. The most wasteful people of all, he pointed out, were the new immigrants, of whom so many continued to flock in.

As one of the new immigrants, Giyt knew who the creature was talking about. What he didn’t know was what to do about it. It was the Principal Slug who came to his rescue with a proposal. Each race, he suggested slobberingly, should make a survey of its power consumption and at the next meeting come in with plans for reducing their demand. On a strictly temporary basis, of course. Until the added generating capacity was on line. He expressed confidence that there were plenty of reductions that could be made without seriously discommoding anybody, and then perhaps the Kalkaboos could have their new radiation chamber right away.

Moved, seconded, and passed; and then, surprisingly, the meeting was over.

Giyt hurried out of the Hexagon before anybody could raise any more problems, feeling he had dodged a bullet. He didn’t like the feeling. He needed to get ahead of these problems, and the way to do that was to have a talk with Hoak Hagbarth.

He found Hagbarth at the EPR terminal in Sommermen Square, but—Wili Tschopp explained—if Giyt wanted to talk to him about this power-conservation matter, he would have to wait, “It’s Cargo Day, for Christ’s sake,” Tschopp told him. “Hoak has to be in the control loop.”

“Control loop?”

Tschopp looked at him without patience. “The keys to the portal. Every race has a key. The portal can’t operate unless all the keys are used, didn’t you know that? So you’ll have to wait. Just stay out of the way.”

Giyt had seen the great portal before, of course; in fact, he had come through it himself with Rina, because how else could you travel the vast distances from Earth? But he’d never seen it from outside with power on, when it was already wreathed in the golden glow of what he had learned to call the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen field and thus was ready to receive a transmission from Earth. Inside the chamber Giyt could see crates of merchandise ready to ship. He knew what they had to be. At the polar factories the Earth colony had a small production line that turned out various kinds of toys, trinkets, and knickknacks to export to the home planet—nothing very valuable, but, Giyt supposed, every little bit that helped offset the cost of the Tupelo colony was worth having.

The thing that struck Giyt as curious was the number of nonhumans at the terminal. Five of them—and Hagbarth—were seated or slumped at workstations around the terminal. That made sense. As Wili Tschopp had explained, there was this rule requiring all six races to be present whenever the terminal was operational. But there were at least one or two others present of each race, and what could interest them about a purely Earth matter?

He got the answer in a moment. There was a blue-and-white warning flare; then a faint hand-clap of air as the stacked merchandise disappeared; a moment later a gentle puff as the export crates were replaced with others. At once the nonhumans descended on them, opening every crate and peering inside. It looked like a customs search to Giyt, and then recognition clicked in his mind. It was a customs search. The nonhumans were looking for contraband, and they were being damned thorough about it. Wili Tschopp was protesting vigorously, but the eetie representatives were insisting on opening every carton.