Jem by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online

conditions as possible. She was sweating, filthy with both camouflage paint and Georgia clay, and she knew she smelled pretty high. Also, her company was just about to take a hill that she had personally spotted and attacked, so when she got to the phone she was in no good mood. "Captain Menninger," she snarled, "and this goddamn better be important!"
    Her father's voice laughed in her ear. "You tell me," he said cheerfully. "The President signed your bill ten minutes ago."
    Marge sank back onto the first sergeant's immaculate chair, heedless of his looks. "Jesus, poppa," she said, "that's great!" She stared out at the walls of the command trailer without seeing them, calculating whether it was more important to get back to taking that hill with the rest of the weekend soldiers or to get on the phone and start Danny Dalehouse in motion.
    "—what?" She had become aware that her father was still talking.
    "I said there was some other news too, not quite so good. Your Pak friend."
    "What about him, poppa?"
    "That, uh, vacation he was going to take? He took it last week."

FOUR

    THE PILOT was Vissarion Ilyich Kappelyushnikov. He was short and dark in the standard cosmonaut tradition, with a lot more Tatar in his family tree than his name would suggest. The expedition's eco-engineer was also a Soviet national, but Cossack-tall and fair-haired; his name was Pete Krivitin. The nominal commander of the expedition was an American, Alex Woodring. And they were all going at it at once. Alex was trying to arbitrate between the two Russians, helped by Harriet Santori, the translator. She wasn't really helping, but then the commander wasn't really succeeding at arbitrating. Kappelyushnikov wanted to land and get it over with. Krivitin wanted one more look at the probe reports before he would certify the landing site. Harriet wanted them all to act like adults, for heaven's sake. Woodring's difficulty was that until they landed, Kappelyushnikov was the captain of the ship and Alex's authority was only potential. And it had been going on for more than an hour.
    Danny Dalehouse swallowed the desire to intervene again.
    He loosened the straps of his deceleration couch and peered out the porthole. There was the planet, filling the window. From less than a hundred thousand kilometers, it no longer looked "away"; it was beginning to look "down." So let us the hell get there, he thought testily. These people didn't seem to realize they were screwing around with his personal expedition, which none of them would have been on if he hadn't persuaded that blond army female to authorize it.
    A voice in his ear said, "Think we'll ever get there?"
    Danny drew back. The woman beside him was Sparky Cerbo, as amiable a person as there was on the expedition; but after nineteen days of sharing less than twenty cubic meters of space, they were all getting edgy. The ongoing spat an arm's length away didn't make it any better.
    "It doesn't look like much, does it?" Sparky went on, determinedly making the effort.
    Dalehouse forced himself to respond. It wasn't her fault that he was sick of the sound, the sight, and the smell of her —and besides, she was right. Son of Kung didn't look like a proper planet at all. Danny knew what planets were supposed to look like. Some of them were red and bleak, like Mars. More often they were white or mottled white, like everything else from Venus through the gas giants. This one wasn't even trying to look right.
    It wasn't so much the planet's fault as Kung's itself; as a star, it was simply incompetent. If Son of Kung had been in orbit around Earth's Sol, it would have looked pretty fine. It had much the same makeup as Earth. What it didn't have was decent sunlight. Kung glowered, not much brighter than Earth's moon during a total lunar eclipse. The only light that fell on Son of Kung was bloody red, and what it looked like from orbit was an open wound.
    It would have helped some if it had had a real terminator, but Kung's