CHAPTER SIX: A Planet Called Heaven

Nothing could be seen of Heaven from the air. As the city descended cautiously, the spindizzy field became completely outlined as a bubble of boiling black clouds, glaring with blue-green sheets and slashes of lightning, and awash with streams of sleet and rain. At lower altitude the sleet disappeared, but the rain increased.

After so many months of starlit skies and passing suns, the grumbling, closed-in darkness was oppressive, even alarming. Sitting with Piggy on an old pier at the foot of Gansevoort Street, from which Herman Melville had sailed into the distant South Sea marvels of Typee, Omoo and Mardi, Chris stared at the globe of thunder around the city as nervously as though he had never seen weather before. Piggy, for once, was in no better shape, for he never had seen weather before; this was New York's first planetfall since he had been born.

How Amalfi could see where he was going was hard to imagine; but the city continued to go down anyhow; it had a contract with Heaven, and work was work. Besides, there would have been no point in waiting for the storms to clear away. It was always and everywhere like this on Heaven, except when it-was worse. The settlers said so.

"Wow!" Chris said, for the twelfth or thirteenth time. "What a blitzkrieg of a storm! Look at that! How far up are we still, Piggy?"

"How should I know?"

"D'you think Amalfi knows? I mean really knows?"

"Sure, he knows," Piggy said miserably. "He always does the tough landings. He never misses."

WHAM!

For a second the whole sphere of the spindizzy field seemed to be crawling with electric fire. The noise was enormous and bounded back again and again from the concrete sides of the towers behind them. It had never occurred to Chris that a field which could protect a whole city from the hard radiation, the hard stones and the hard vacuum of space might pass noise when there was air outside it as well as inside-but it surely did. The descent already seemed to have been going on forever.

After a while, Chris found that he was beginning to enjoy it. Between thunder rolls, he shouted maliciously:

"He must be flying sidewise this time. But he's lost."

"What do you know about it? Shut up."

"I've seen thunderstorms. You know what? We're going to be up here forever. Sailing under a curse, like IMT." The sky lit. WHAM! "Hey, what a beauty!"

"If you don't shut up," Piggy said with desperate grimness, "I'm going to poke you right in the snoot."

This was hardly a very grave threat, for although Piggy outweighed Chris by some twenty pounds, most of it was blubber. Amid the excitement of the storm Chris almost made the mistake of laughing at him; but at the same instant, he felt the boards of the ancient pier begin to shudder beneath them to the tramp of steel boots. Startled, he looked back over his shoulder, and then jumped up.

Twenty men in full space armor were behind them, faceless and bristling, like a phalanx of giant robots. One of them came forward, making the planks of the pier groan and squeal under the weight, and suddenly spoke to him.

The voice was blarey and metallic, as though the gain had been turned up in order to shout across acres of ground and through cannonades of thunder, but Chris had no difficulty in recognizing it. The man in the armor was his guardian.

"CHRIS!" The volume of sound suddenly went down a little. "Chris, what are you doing here? And Kingston Throop's kid! Piggy, you ought to know better than this. We're landing in twenty minutes-and this is a sally port. Beat it-both of you."

"We were only looking," Piggy said defiantly. "We can look if we want."

"I've got no time to argue. Are you going or not?"

Chris pulled at Piggy's elbow. "Come on, Piggy. What's the sense of being in the way?"

"Let go. I'm not in the way. They can walk right by me. I don't have to go just because he says so. He's not my guardian-he's only a cop."

A steel arm reached out, and steel pincers opened at the end of it. "Give me your card," Anderson's voice said harshly. "I'll let you know later what you're charged with. If you won't move now, I'll assign two men to move you-though I can't spare the men, and when that winds up on your card you may spend the rest of one lifetime wishing it hadn't."

"Oh, all right. Don't throw your weight around. I'm going."

The bulbous steel arm remained stiffly extended, the pincers menacingly open. "I want the card."

"I said I was going!"

"Then go." Piggy broke and ran. After a puzzled look at the armored figure of his guardian, Chris followed, dodging around and through the massive blue-steel statues standing impassively along almost the whole length of the pier.

Piggy had already vanished. As Chris ran for home, his mind full of bewilderment, the city grounded in a fanfare of lightning bolts.

Unfortunately, so far as Chris was concerned the City Fathers took no notice of the landing: his schooling went on regardless, so that he got only the most confused picture of what was going on. Though the municipal pipeline, WNYC, had five-minute news bulletins on tap every hour for anyone who wanted to dial into them, decades of the uneventfulness of interstellar travel had reduced the WNYC news bureau to a state of vestigial ineptitude-the pipeline's only remaining real function was the broadcasting of the city's' inexhaustible library of music and drama; Chris suspected that most of the citizens found the newscasts almost as dim-witted and uninformative as he did. What little meaningful information he was able to garner, he got from Sgt. Anderson, and that was not very much, for the perimeter sergeant was hardly ever home now; he was too busy consolidating the beachhead on Heaven. Nevertheless, Chris picked up a few fragments, mostly from conversations between the sergeant and Carla:

"What they want us to do is to help them industrialize the planet. It sounds easy, but the kicker is that their social setup is feudal-the sixty-six thousand people they call the Elect are actually only free landholders or franklins, and below them there's a huge number of serfs-nobody's ever bothered to count them. The Archangels want it to stay that way even after they've got their heavy industries established."

"It sounds impossible," Carla said.

"It is impossible, as they'll find out when we've finished the job. But that's exactly the trouble. We're not allowed to change planets' social systems, but we can't complete this contract without starting a revolution-a long, slow one, sure, but a revolution all the same. And when the cops come here afterward and find that out, we'll have a Violation to answer for."

Carla laughed musically. "The cops! My dear, is that still a three-letter word for you? What else are you? How many more centuries is it going to take you to get used to it?"

"You know what I mean," Anderson said, frowning. "So all right, I'm a cop. But I'm not an Earth cop. I'm a city cop, and that makes all the difference. Well, we'll see. What's for lunch? I've got to go in half an hour."

The storm, as predicted, went on all the time. When he had the chance, Chris watched the machinery being uncrated and readied, and followed it to the docks at the working perimeter of the city, beyond which always bobbed and crawled a swarm of the glowing swamp vehicles of the colonists of Heaven. Though these came in all sizes, they were all essentially of the same design: a fat cylinder of some transparent cladding, ribbed with metal, provided on both sides with caterpillar treads bearing cleats so large that they could also serve as paddles where the going underfoot became especially sloppy. The shell was airtight, for buoyancy, but Chris was sure that the vessel could make little or no headway afloat, even if it were equipped somewhere with a screw propeller; under those circumstances it probably could do no more than try to maintain its position as best it could while it radioed for help. It was certainly well studded with antennae. Mainly, it seemed to be designed to shed water, rather than to swim in it.

How could any sort of industry be possible under these soggy conditions? He could not imagine how even an agricultural society could survive amidst these perpetual torrents, especially, since there was very little land area above water on the planet. But then he recalled a little of the history of the colonization of Venus, which had presented somewhat similar problems; There, farming eventually had been taken beneath the sea; but even that needed an abundance of energy, and besides, the people of Heaven hadn't even gotten that far-they seemed to be living mostly on fish and mudweed.

He listened as closely as possible to the conversations of' the colonists on the docks-not the conversations in English with the Okies, which were technical and unrevealing, but what the colonists said to each other in their own language. This was a gluey variant of Russian. the now dead Universal language of deep space, which the memory cells had been cramming into Chris's head at a cruel rate almost since the beginning of his city education. It was a brute of a language to master, especially on board a town where it was very seldom used, and perhaps' for this reason the colonists, 'though mostly they were circumspect even in their private conversations, did not' really seem to believe that the Okies spoke it; their very possession of it assured them that their history was safely pre-Okie. Quite certainly it never occurred to them that it might be understood, however imperfectly, by a teen-age boy standing about the quaysides gawping at their power-boats.

Between these eavesdroppings and the increasingly rare visits home of his guardian, Chris gradually built up a fuzzy picture of what the colonists seemed to want. As a citizen, he could have asked the City Fathers directly for the text of the contract, but access to .this was denied to passengers. In general, however, he gathered that the Archangels proposed to establish an economy like that of Venus, complete with undersea farming and herding, with the aid of broadcast power of the kind that kept the city's Tin Cabs in the air. The Okies were to do the excavating in the shifting, soaking terrain, and were to build the generator-transmitter station involved. They were also to use city facilities to refine the necessary power metals, chiefly thorium, of which Heaven had an abundance beyond its ability to process. After the economy , was revamped, the Archangels hoped to have their own refineries, and to sell the pure stuffs to other planets. Curiously, they also had enough germanium to be willing to pay for the job in this metal, although it too was notoriously difficult to refine; this was fortunate for them, since with-out any present interstellar trade, they were woefully short of Oc Dollars.

Once the whole operation had rumbled and sloshed out into the field and was swallowed up in the enveloping, eternal storm, Sgt. Anderson's absences became prolonged, and the number of colonists to be found on the docks also diminished sharply. Now there were only a few of the swamp vehicles-inexplicably called swan boats-to be seen at the end of each day, when Chris was released from school, and these were mostly small craft whose owners were engaged in dickering with individual Okies for off-planet curios to give to their ladies. This commerce also was bogging down rather rapidly, for the single citizen had no use for money, and the lords and franklins of Heaven had few goods to barter. Soon the flow of information available to Chris had almost stopped, frustrating him intensely.

In this extremity he had an inspiration. He still carried with him a small, cheap clasp knife with a tiny compass embedded in its handle, the last of the exceedingly few gifts his father had ever 'been able to give him; perhaps it would have status here as an off-planet curio. When the notion first occurred to him, he rejected it with distress at even having thought of it-but when first Sgt. Dulany, and then his own guardian, were officially posted on the "Missing" list, he hesitated no longer. His only remaining doubt was whether or not the compass would work here, amid so much electrical activity (but then it had never worked very well on Earth, either).

He waited until he saw the lord of a six-man swan boat stalking disappointedly away from a deal he had been unable to close, and then approached him with the knife outstretched on his palm.

"Gospodin—"

The man, a huge burly fellow with a face like one of the eternal thunderclouds of his planet, stopped in his tracks and looked down. "Boy? Did you speak?"

"Yes sir. With your permission, I have here useful tool, earthly in origin. Would my lord care to examine?"

"But you speak our language," the man said, still frowning. He took the knife abstractedly; it was plain that he was interested, but Chris's stumbling Russian seemed to interest him more. "How is that?"

"By listening, lord. It is very hard, but I am trying. Please see object, it is from Earth, from kolkhoz of Pennsylvania. Genuine antique, touched once by human hands in factory."

"Well, well. How does it work?"

Chris showed him how to pry out the two blades, but his attempts to explain the compass were dismissed with a brusque gesture. Either his command of the language was insufficient to make the matter clear, or the lord already had recognized that such a thing would be useless in the lightning-stitched ether of Heaven.

"Hmm. Sleazy, to be sure, but perhaps my lady would like it for her charm-necklace. What do you ask for it?"

"Lord, I would like to drive your swan boat one time, one distance. I ask no more."

The colonist stared at him for a long moment, and then burst into deep guffaws of laughter. "Come along, come along," he said when he had recovered a little. "Sharp traders, you tramps, but this is the best story yet-I'll be telling it for years! Come along-you have a bargain."

Still chortling, he led the way to the dock, where they were both stopped by a perimeter cop who recognized' Chris. Between them, the boy and the lord explained the bargain, and the Okie guard dubiously allowed Chris to board the swan boat.

In the forward cabin of the bobbing cylinder, two other colonists confronted them at once, wearing expressions at once nervous and angry, but the owner shushed them with a swift slash of one hand. He still seemed to be highly amused.

"It's only an infant. He traded me a bangle to learn how to mush the boat about. There's nothing to that. Go on aft; I'll join you in a minute."

To judge by their expressions, the other two still disapproved, but they took orders. The big man sat Chris down in a bucket seat before the broad front window and showed him how to grasp the two handles, one on each side of the half-circle of the control wheel, which were the throttles of the vehicle.

"It's not enough simply to turn the wheel, because you must also deliver power to one tread or the other. To do that, you push the handle forward or back, to speed the treads or slow them down. Past the red mark here, the tread will reverse. If you're not getting any traction, tilt the whole 'wheel forward on its column; that blows the tanks and allows the boat to settle in the mud. When the ground gets harder, the boat will of course climb up by itself and that will start the pumps; as the pressure in the tanks rises, the steering column tilts back to its original position automatically. Understand me so far?"

"But can I try?"

"Well, I suppose so. Yes. I have some talking to do abaft. Let me back the craft away from the pier, and then you can try crawling in a circle just outside the perimeter. Make sure you can always see your city beacon there."

"Let me back it up, lord?" Chris said urgently.

"All right," the big man said with amused indulgence. "But don't be rough with it. Gently back of the red line on both throttles. That's it. Not so fast. Gently! Now into neutral on the left. That's it; see how it turns around?"

There was a shout 'from somewhere in the rear of the vessel, to which the big man responded with a tremendously rapid burst of speech, only a few words of which were intelligible to Chris. "t have to leave for a few minutes," he added. "Remember, don't try anything tricky, and don't lose sight of the beacon."

"No, lord."

As the boat's owner left the cabin, Chris caught a few more words, amusedly beginning to relate the story of the dock boy who had picked up a few stammering words of the language and immediately had decided that he was a pilot; then the voices dwindled to a blurred murmur. Chris spent the next few minutes testing the controls of the boat in small jerks and spurts, being as inexpert about it as he could manage, although the machine was really not difficult to master. Then, as directed, he set it to crawling in a fixed circle, counter-clockwise, left the bucket seat, and edged his way back to 'the door leading to the next chamber.

He had no idea what it was that he expected to overhear-he was simply avid for more information, to relieve the recent famine. He was certainly unprepared for what he got.

The men were talking in a rapid patois which differed sharply from the form of the Universal Language which the memory cells 'had been teaching him, but many phrases were clear and distinct:

"... can't be done without keeping the city, that's all there is to it."

"... Disable it? ... Don't even have a blueprint of the machinery, let alone a map."

"That can come later, after we've occupied ... We've got thousands of commoners to throw away, but the defenses-It's essential first to immobilize their Huacu, or whatever they call it here. We can't afford to fight on their terms."

"Then what's the problem? We've got their two chief generals for hostage. We can hold them forever if necessary ... Don't even know the name of Castle Wolfwhip, let alone where it—"

There the conversation ended abruptly. With a grinding thump, the swan boat hit something and began clumsily to try to climb it. Chris was thrown to the deck, and on the other side of the doorway there was the sound of scrambling and of angry shouting. Then 'that too was cut off as the bulkhead swung to, of its own inertia.

Fighting to regain his balance against the blind lurching of the boat, Chris scrambled up, and dogged the bulkhead tightly closed all the way around. Was there any way to, lock it, too? Yes, there was a big bolt that could be thrown which would hold the whole series of dogs in place, provided that it could not be unbolted from the other side. Well, he'd have to take his chances on that, though a fat padlock to complete the job would have made him feel more comfortable. Then, he clambered up the tilted, pitching deck to the control seat.

The boat had been' doing its best to travel in a circle, but Chris had failed to realize that mud is a shifting, inexact sort of medium in which to turn a machine loose. The circle had been precessing, and the boat had run head-on into a dock. Okie cops were running toward it.

Chris reversed both engines, backing away from the city as rapidly as the boat would go, but that was not half as fast as he would have liked. Then he switched the vehicle around, end for end, and set it to whining and sliding squarely into the teeth of the storm, aiming it for the pip on the cross hairs which showed on the control board as its homing signal.

Where that might wind him up, he had no idea. He could only hope that it might be Castle Wolfwhip, and that he would find Anderson and Dulany there-and that the six furious colonists in back of the locked bulkhead would not be able to burn their way out before he got there.