O Pioneer! by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online

tinder. That made sense, though it had never occurred to Giyt that the island could ever suffer droughts. But the important thing was that Tschopp seemed to be doing his best to be friendly; and when the company voted Giyt in that night (Lupe told him later), it was Chief Tschopp himself who made the nominating speech. All the same . . .
    All the same, although each of the little new drags on his time was reasonable enough, and maybe even kind of fun—Giyt was actually looking forward to the time when he himself might be driving one of those huge pumpers to a fire—there were a lot of drags on his time.
    Giyt wasn't used to that. He'd devoted his life to making sure nobody would ever be in a position to tell him that he had to do this or that at such and such a time. He'd made it happen that way, too, if you didn't count the times when he rented himself out for a few weeks as a master debugger. Even then those times were short and he could quit when he liked.
    Here it was different. Here there was always some duty he was supposed to perform, and some of those duties took actual work.
     
    The fact that it all took time meant there wasn't much time left over for his former hobbies. Rina noticed that was true when, digging through the datastores for her schoolwork, she stumbled on an old TV series that she knew he would like. It was so old that it was just flat pictures, and black-and-white at that, but it was a documentary of Oliver Cromwell subduing the rebels in Ireland. But then, a day or two after she'd given him the locator data, she asked him how he'd liked it. "Haven't had a chance to look at it," he confessed.
    "But I thought I saw you . . . Never mind," she said sunnily. "What would you like for dinner?"
    She really had seen him sitting before the screen, watching something or other; but it wasn't his usual fare. For the first time in his life Evesham Giyt had become a news addict; it was the only way he could hope to understand what his constituents were going to ask of him. Tupelo news came over the net and it was delivered by a sharp-faced, homely-featured woman Giyt recognized; her name was Silva Cristl, and she was a lieutenant in the volunteer fire company. Tupelo news wasn't much like the stuff he'd avoided in Wichita. There were weather reports, introductions of new arrivals, personal messages (the Dunbay teenagers offering babysitting services, the Carlyles wanting to know if anyone else was interested in Zen chanting), once in a great while an obituary, details of who was in the hospital, new births, standings in the bowling league—well, there was all sorts of stuff there, delivered in Silva Cristl's hokey jes'-folks dialect It didn't matter if you 'got interrupted in the middle of it. Giyt hated having someone bother him when he was in the middle of a good story of some exciting conquest but with this stuff there was no problem.
    When he found out all five of the other races had their own equivalent news programs he tried to access them as well. It didn't work. He got only garbage. Each eetie race had its own transmission codes, and none of them were in the least like Earth's.
    That was a tough technical problem to solve, or would have been for anyone else. For Evesham Giyt, however, it was just a matter of decryption, and that was the thing he was really good at. It took him a while to solve the basic protocols that went into Petty-Prime electronic communication, but he did it . . . and was rewarded with what appeared to be an installment of an interminable Petty-Prime soap opera. And then, while he was trying to puzzle out just why the two young males were refusing to mate with the older female—who already seemed to have several husbands, all of whom were urging the males to take her on—he heard Rina call his name. "Shammy? Aren't you supposed to chair the commission meeting today? You don't want to be late for it, do you?"
     
    He wasn't late in arriving at the Hexagon, But he wasn't really ready