Mining the Oort by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online

long boards strapped to their feet, sliding down an immense snow-white slope; laughing nude men and women, all young, all beautiful—all distinctly Earthie in their proportions—diving and swimming at the edge of an immense blue lake. The startling thing was that they all looked somehow oddly almost familiar, though of course he had never seen anything like that in the flesh. "Is that Earth?" he asked.
    She was laughing at him. "Silly. That's Mars . The way it's going to be. Don't you recognize Olympus Mons, for heaven's sake? Those pictures are what they call renderings. They aren't meant to be real. Daddy's company uses them to encourage the investors when they underwrite a new issue."
    "Issue?" Dekker said, and then realized. "Oh. The Bonds."
    "Of course, the Bonds. Have you got everything you want? For starters, I mean? Then come on, I'd like you to meet some people."
    It was not exactly what Dekker would have liked, but he was determined to be a good guest. Annetta herself was not now the girl in the plain brown hotsuit he'd met out on the slope. Somehow she had grown up in a few hours. She was dressed in white, and what she was wearing was not shorts or even pants but a skirt , ankle length, filmy as her mother's. She wore a necklace of sparkling stones, with a large red one that lay close above her very nearly significant young breasts, and her pale hair was upswept with something like gold dust sprinkled on it.
    Dekker was dazzled—by the food, by the surroundings, by the girl, maybe most of all by the company. All these people were dressed like characters in a video play. All of them were Earthies, too—or almost all. He did recognize one elderly Martian couple as high-ups in the Sunpoint City administration. They seemed to be painfully on their best behavior, and Dekker saw that they were treated with elaborate courtesy, but no real concern, by the Earthies whose party it really was. Dekker also saw, with some scorn, that a large American "flag" was standing on a pole in one corner of the room, and then discovered that, even so, these people weren't all Americans. As he was introduced, catching none of the names, he learned that there was a German couple, and some Japanese and a handful of Brazilians. Some he couldn't identify at all. Altogether there were twenty or thirty people in the room, probably the whole Earthie population of Sunpoint City, Dekker thought.
    There were not very many children; Dekker was pretty sure he was the youngest person present.
    Annetta, he supposed, was not much older, and there was another Earthie girl and a boy a little older still; no one else under full adult age. Annetta introduced him all around. That was an ordeal in itself, because he had a plate of food and his mouth usually full, and hardly any of the names stayed with him long enough even to say hello. Still, he did get the names of the other kids: Evan, shorter than he but with a glass of wine in his hand, and Ina, with more makeup on her face than even Annetta. He remembered that Evan was the one he had met in the entry lock, and noticed that Evan and Ina were holding hands, and that when Annetta saw them doing it she bit her lip.
    "How old are you, Dekker?" the boy asked, looking him up and down with amusement.
    "Eight," Dekker said shortly, looking down at the Earthie boy. Evan was barrel-shaped; Dekker thought the boy looked as though he could break Dekker in half—what a strange notion, Dekker told himself reprovingly; just a few minutes with these mudsuckers and he was forgetting all about his nonviolence classes.
    "But that's almost fifteen, Earth years," Annetta put in quickly.
    "Oh, really?" Evan said, pursing his lips. "Then I suppose you're old enough to have a glass of wine with us?"
    Dekker knew what wine was, had even had a sip of his mother's now and then. "Of course I am," he declared. "We drink alcohol often." And then was stuck with this incredibly fragile-feeling crystal glass with this sour-tasting