And then?
He heard the lightest clack of shoes on stone and turned around. Luang emerged from the tunnel. She had yielded to this climate with a flame-red tunic and purple tights, but the effect was still remarkable, even before breakfast. “You should have called me, Dominic,” she said. “I rapped on Kemul’s door, but he is still snoring.” She yawned, curving her back and raising small fists into the fog. “This is no town for long naps. Here men work hard and wealth flows quickly. It has grown much since I visited it last, and that was only a few years ago. Let me get well established, and I can hope to earn—”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Somewhat to his own astonishment, Flandry discovered that he retained a few absurd prejudices. “Not while we’re partners.”
She laughed, deep in her throat, and took his arm. It was not a very gentle gesture, though. She was curt and fierce with him, and would never say much about herself. “As you wish. But what then shall we do?”
“Live quietly. We’ve more than enough funds.”
She let him go and snatched a cigarette out of a pocket. “Bah! Gunung Utara is rich, I tell you! Lead, silver, gems, I know not what else. Even a common miner may go prospecting and gain a fortune. It’s soon taken from him. I want to do some of the taking.”
“It is quite safe for me to show myself?” he asked cautiously.
She looked at him. With his beard still inhibited, he needed only to shave his upper lip each day. Dye had blackened his hair, whose shortness he explained to the curious as due to a bout of jungle fungus, and contact lenses made his eyes brown. The harsh sunlight had already done the same for his skin. There remained his height and the unPulaoic cast of his face, but enough caucasoid genes floated around in the population that such features, though rare, were not freakish.
“Yes,” she said, “if you remember that you are from across the ocean.”
“Well, the chance must be taken, I suppose, if you insist on improving the shining hour with racketeering.” Flandry sneezed. “But why did we have to come here, of all drizzly places?”
“I told you a dozen times, fool. This is a mining town. New men arrive each day from all over the planet. No one notices a stranger.” Luang drew smoke into her lungs, as if to force out the mist. “I like not the god-hated climate myself, but it can’t be helped.”
“Oh, right-o.” Flandry glanced up. A light spot showed in the east, where sun and wind were breaking the mists. A warm planet like Unan Besar could expect strong moist updrafts, which would condense into heavy clouds at some fairly constant altitude. Hereabouts, that was the altitude at which the mines happened to lie. The area was as foggy as a politician’s brain.
It seemed reckless to build a town right into a volcano. But Luang said Gunung Utara was nearly extinct. Smoldering moltenness deep underneath it provided a good energy source, and thus another reason for this settlement; but the crater rarely did more than growl and fume. It was unusually active at the present time. There was even a lava flow. But the same engineers whose geophysical studies proved there would never again be a serious eruption, had built channels for such outpourings.
As the fog lightened, Flandry could see the ledge below this one, and the head of a crazily steep trail which wound down past tunnel mouths. He caught a sulfurous whiff.
“We should find it interesting for a while,” he said. “But what do we do afterward?”
“Go back to Kompong Timur, I suppose. Or anywhere else in the world that you think there may be a profit. Between us we will always do well.”
“That’s just it.” He dropped his cigarette butt and ground it under his sandal. “Here I am, the man who can free your whole people from Biocontrol-I don’t believe in false modesty, or even in true modesty—”
“Biocontrol never troubled me very much.” Her tone grew sharp. “Under a new arrangement… oh, yes, I can easily foresee what an upheaval your cheap antitoxin would bring… would I survive?”
“You could prosper in any situation, my dear.” Flandry’s grin died away. “Until you get old.”
“I don’t expect to reach old age,” she snapped, “but if I do, I’ll have money hoarded to live on.” The clouds rifted, and one sunbeam dashed itself blindingly along the mountainside. Far down the slope, among ledges and crags and boulders, a rolling road was being installed to carry ore from a minehead to a refinery. Antlike at this distance, men crawled about moving rock by hand. Flandry had no binoculars, but he knew very well how gaunt those men were, how often they lost footing and went over a cliff, how their overseers walked among them with electric prods. But still the sunbeam raced downward, splitting the fog like a burning lance, until it touched the valley under the mountain. Impossibly green that valley was, green fire streaked with mist and streams, against the bare red and black rock which surrounded it. Down there, Flandry knew, lay rice paddies, where the wives and children of the construction gang stooped in the mud as wives and children had since the Stone Age. Yet once upon a time, for a few generations, it wasn’t done this way.
He said, “The hand labor of illiterates is so cheap, thanks to your precious social system, that you’re sliding back from the machine era. In another several centuries, left to yourselves, you’ll propel your rafts with sweeps and pull wagons with animals.”
“You and I will be soundly asleep in our graves then, Dominic,” said Luang. “Come, let’s find a tea house and get some food.”
“Given literacy,” he persisted, “machines can work still cheaper. Faster, too. If Unan Besar was exposed to the outside universe, labor such as those poor devils are doing would be driven off the market in one lifetime.”
She stamped her foot and flared: “I tell you, I don’t care about them!”
“Please don’t accuse me of altruism. I just want to get home. These aren’t my people or my way of life… good God, I’d never find out who won this year’s meteor ball pennant!” Flandry gave her a shrewd glance. “You know, you’d find a visit to some of the more advanced planets interesting. And profitable. D’ you realize what a novelty you’d be to a hundred jaded Terran nobles, any of whom could buy all Unan Besar for a yo-yo?”
Her eyes lit up momentarily. Then she laughed and shook her head. “Oh, no, Dominic! I see your bait and I won’t take your hook. Remember, there is no way off this planet.”
“Come, now. My own spaceship is probably still at the port, plus several left over from pioneering days, plus the occasional Betelgeusean visitor. A raid on the place-or, more elegantly, the theft of a ship—”
“And how long until you returned with a cargo of capsules?”
Flandry didn’t answer. They had been through this argument before. She continued, jetting smoke between phrases like a slender dragon: “You told me it would take several days to reach Spica. Then you must get the ear of someone important, who must come investigate and satisfy himself you are right, and go back, and report to his superiors, who will wrangle a long time before authorizing the project. And you admitted it will take time, perhaps many days, to discover exactly what the antitoxin is and how to duplicate it. Then it must be produced in quantity, and loaded aboard ships, and brought here, and-Oh, by every howling hell, you idiot, what do you think Biocontrol will do meanwhile? They will destroy the vats the moment they know you have escaped. There is no reserve supply worth mentioning. No one here could hope to live more than a hundred of our days, unless he barricaded himself in a dispensary. Your precious Spicans would find a planetful of bones!”