Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [114]
The sight of Matthew Luzon also in custody did nothing to relieve Torkel’s sense of impending doom. As if expecting his movements to be shortly confined in a space coffin, he began to pace the cell. Small as it was, he could still walk about it. Three paces up and three paces back and two back and forth . . . and if he went too fast, he cracked his shins on the hard plastic edge of the built-in bed or slammed his toes against the slab wall.
The Jenny, now registered as the Curly-corn, with new papers and no history before its recommissioning and complete overhaul, made her “maiden” landing at SpaceBase with a shipment of plumbing units, temporary housing units—though none as fancy as the Nakatira cubes—and other modern conveniences which most inhabitants of the galaxy took for granted but which sent the happy recipients on Petaybee into raptures. An accompanying note delivered by the captain, Petaybean-born Declan Doyle, newly commissioned and still stunned by his promotion and good fortune, indicated that the shipments had been purchased with the rewards for the return of many valuable and priceless items found on board the ship when she had been stopped and boarded and her crew placed in custody.
One arrival among the others particularly pleased Sister Igneous Rock. It was a collection of texts on the theories and principles behind the application and installation of geothermal and hydroelectric power, the English translation from the original Icelandic, dating from several centuries before. Sister Igneous Rock discussed the windfall with Brother Shale; then, on every subsequent day, she could be found at the communion cave reading bits aloud and afterward asking pertinent questions.
“What do you think? Would that work well here? Could you do a channel here and here, and still meet your other commitments? This wouldn’t hurt, would it?”
She kept a log of her research and inquiries, and the planet’s responses, and was compiling a list for Sean, Yana, and ultimately Madame Algemeine of equipment that would eventually be needed to assist the planet in its first venture into cooperative technology. Her intense contact with the planet considerably reduced her awe of it, but although it lost its godlike stature as a result, the planet, considering and collaborating with her for the welfare of its inhabitants, never stopped being “beneficent” in her mind.
The first outbound voyage was to deliver to the Intergal Station the sixty survivors of the Asian Esoteric and Exotic Company, whose unauthorized presence on Petaybee was adversely regarded by Intergal and CIS. Intergal tried to evade the responsibility, but Petaybean officials were perfectly within their rights to return the illegal aliens to their previous port of call. Their employers had been notified to collect the stranded men and women.
The inbound voyage was a joyous occasion, for spacegoing Petaybean citizens, specialists in many needed fields, had been invited to return home to provide the skills needed to develop its potential. They came willingly and with songs about how they would help Petaybee: how and where they would live, and how well their children would live, where the air was clear and clean, if cold, and a person could walk again with pride that she or he had been born on a world that knew exactly what it wanted.
The official CIS meeting was convened in the architecturally astonishing Arrivals Hall of Petaybee Space Facility—designed by Oscar O’Neill from the bits and pieces that Intergal had not thought salvageable, along with some remarkable local materials donated by the planet itself. O.O. had terminated his employment with Nakatira Cubes in order to devote the rest of his life to learning about the O’Neill clan and adapting many long-held construction notions to Petaybean needs and materials.
Farringer Ball, looking fit with a winter-tanned skin and now walking without aids, was the chairperson. Although he still tired easily, he had obviously recovered his zest for living and banged the opening gavel with