Monument. Lloyd Biggle jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ touched hands. Obrien turned and walked away quickly. Fornri and the young paddlers were waiting for him on the beach, and they pushed off at once and hoisted a sail, because the wind was at their back for the return voyage. They moved swiftly out of the bay, and Obrien, looking backward, saw the Elder still standing motionless on the knoll with arm uplifted.

      Chapter 2

      Cerne Obrien had been knocking about in space since he was twelve, and when he got sufficiently tired of being the top name on everyone’s duty list, he saved a little money and acquired a battered government surplus survey ship. The sale—at discounted salvage value—was contingent on his junking the ship, but he scraped together some supplies and paid a dispatcher to be looking the other way when he took off.

      He was only a dumb mechanic—though a good one—and he had no license to be touching anything at all on a spaceship forward of the retron cells; but he’d seen one piloted often enough to think he knew the fundamentals. The ship had a perverse streak that matched his own, but after he exercised his rich vocabulary of profanity and kicked the control panel a few times it would settle down and behave itself. Pointing it in the right direction was another matter. Probably any bright school kid knew more about celestial navigation than he did, and his only support came from an obsolete Simplified Astrogation for the Layman. He was lost ninety per cent of the time and only vaguely aware of his whereabouts for the other ten, but it didn’t matter.

      He wanted to see some places that were off the usual space lanes and maybe do a little illegal prospecting, but especially he wanted to be his own boss and make his own decisions. When supplies got low he looked for a small, privately owned port where there would be no authorities asking to see his non-existent license. Good mechanics were always in demand, and he could slip in for a night landing, work until he’d earned enough to replenish his fuel and supplies, and slip back into space without exciting anyone.

      He went through the motions of prospecting, too, nosing about on dozens of asteroids and moons and small planets that either were undiscovered or forgotten. He would have been reluctant to admit even to himself that the prospecting was in reality an excuse that enabled him to enjoy the contorted strangeness of a stark lunar landscape or experience the awesome thrill of riding a barren, spinning asteroid through an unending procession of glowing dawns and precipitant sunsets.

      No one could have been more amazed than Obrien when he actually struck it rich. An asteroid of solid platinum he would have overlooked, but a rich deposit of retron crystals made his ship’s instrumentation misbehave so radically that eventually he got the message. He started back to civilization with a wealth so enormous and so unexpected that he had no notion of what he would do with it.

      He had nothing with which to blanket the massive retron emissions from his cargo hold. He was lost when he started, and his erratically functioning instrumentation quickly lost him much more thoroughly while he fought a losing battle to conserve fuel and keep his worn engines operating. Finally he selected the world that seemed to offer his best chance for survival and pointed his ship at it. It was in fact his last chance, because his misbehaving fuel gauge had misled him. He ran out of fuel and crashed while attempting to land.

      The natives made him welcome. He became a hero by turning his las pistol on an obnoxious, leathery-skinned flying creature that dove into the sea to tear its food from the living koluf. The maf had become so numerous that the natives’ principal source of food was threatened. Obrien used up all of his magazines, shooting the creatures in flight and destroying chrysalides and young in the high, inaccessible lairs, and he rendered the maf virtually extinct.

      Obrien then explored the lone continent end to end and found nothing more significant than scant deposits of coal and a few metals. Any serious prospector would have scorned them, but they sufficed to lead the natives immediately into a bronze age and give them the metal points they so desperately needed for their hunting spears. He next turned his attention to the sea and added an outrigger to the hunting boats for stability in the furious battles waged with the koluf.

      He had lost interest in being rescued. He was the Langri; he had his family and his own growing village and a position of tremendous prestige. He could have been the Elder at a relatively young age, but the idea of him, an alien, ruling these people seemed repugnant to him. His refusal enhanced the natives’ respect for him. He was happy.

      He also was worried. The planet had such meager natural resources that no one would be attracted to it by prospective plunder. It was so inhospitable to humans that the natives could not have survived without the koluf and the many species of gourds. There were few material things that they needed that could not be made in whole or in part from gourds, but the koluf crop barely sufficed to feed them. Fortunately for the natives, there was no galactic market for gourds. Unfortunately, the world had another potential resource that rendered it priceless.

      It was a beautiful world. Its beaches were smooth and sandy, its waters warm, its climate admirable. It would make a magnificent vacation resort, a world-wide vacation resort, and those paradoxical features that made life so difficult for the natives would become assets where tourists were concerned.

      Man was the alien on this world, and these natives had to be descended from a space expedition or colonization party that had gone astray hundreds of years before. Except for the koluf—after a lavish purification process—and a few roots and berries, the world’s flora and fauna were virulently poisonous to man. Fortunately, man was equally poisonous to the native animals. He could swim in the sea with perfect safety as long as he avoided drowning, for not even the most voracious monster would dare to molest him. A drop of his blood, a scrap of his flesh, meant sickness or death, and in that violent arena the first was rapidly followed by the second.

      Man paid dearly for his safety, because there was so little that he could eat. The edible roots could be pounded into a barely palatable flour. A few specimens of bitter fruit and leaves were excellent for seasoning koluf meat, and there was a small, pulpy berry that was tasteless but contained juices that could be blended into an excellent fermented drink. That was all.

      But if man brought his own food, avoided poisonous thorns and nettles, and guarded against those forms of the world’s distressingly potent bacteria to which man was susceptible—and a well-ordered resort would take the necessary precautions—this world would become his playground. To the people of the myriads of harsh environments whose natural resources attracted large populations—dry worlds, barren worlds, airless worlds—it would be paradise. Those who could leave their bleak atmosphere domes, or underground caverns, or sand-blown villages for a few days in this sweet-smelling, oxygen-rich atmosphere could return to their rigorous environments with renewed courage.

      Luxury hotels would crowd the beaches. Lesser hotels, boardinghouses, rental cottages would press back into the hills where magnificent forests now flaunted their lavishly colored leaves. Millionaires would indulge in spirited bidding for choice stretches of beach on which to locate their mansions. The shores would be clotted with vacationers. Ships would offer relaxing sea cruises, undersea craft would introduce their passengers to the world’s fantastically rich and incredibly strange marine life, and crowded wharves would harbor fishing boats for hire—for though the sea creatures were inedible, catching such repulsive monsters would constitute rare sport. It would be a year-round business because the climate was delightful the year around: a multibillion credit business.

      The natives, of course, would be crowded out. Exterminated.

      There were laws to protect them, and an impressive Colonial Bureau to enforce the laws, but Obrien knew only too well how such governmental bureaucracies functioned. The little freebooters such as himself, who tried to pick up a few quick credits, received stiff fines and prison terms. The big-money operators incorporated, applied for charters, and if charters weren’t available they found the required legal loophole or paid the necessary bribe. Then they went after СКАЧАТЬ