O Pioneer! by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

for it, either. As he called the meeting to order he realized he hadn't read over all the department reports so he could summarize them for the other commissioners. Besides, he was still a little worried about the Delts' copepod problem.
    But the Delt General Manager accepted without demur Giyt's promise that the matter was being looked into, and actually, it was the Kalkaboo High Champion who made the only fuss of the day.
    Even in this whole zoo of weirdly designed extraterrestrial beings, the Kalkaboos struck Giyt as being pretty much excessively weird. They were vaguely primate in shape. That is, they had two arms, two legs, and a head, though the head looked truly bizarre with those enormous ears napping around it. But they looked more like skeletons than people. They seemed to have no body fat at all; and their skin glittered with metallic scales.
    Which, Giyt learned, were actually some sort of photovoltaic cells, and what the Kalkaboo High Champion was pissed off about was that their perfectly reasonable requirement for a new and larger radiation house to soak up ultraviolet in was being deferred because of the need to conserve power. It wasn't anyone's fault that Tupelo's sun was deficient in the intense far-UV radiation they liked, the High Champion admitted. On the other hand, it was definitely everyone's fault that they were wastefully burning up so much electrical power for their own frivolous purposes that none could be spared for this urgent requirement of the Kalkaboo horde. The most wasteful people of all, he pointed out, were the new immigrants, of whom so many continued to flock in.
    As one of the new immigrants, Giyt knew who the creature was talking about. What he didn't know was what to do about it. It was the Principal Slug who came to his rescue with a proposal. Each race, he suggested slobberingly, should make a survey of its power consumption and at the next meeting come in with plans for reducing their demand. On a strictly temporary basis, of course. Until the added generating capacity was on line. He expressed confidence that there were plenty of reductions that could be made without seriously discommoding anybody, and then perhaps the Kalkaboos could have their new radiation chamber right away.
    Moved, seconded, and passed; and then, surprisingly, the meeting was over.
    Giyt hurried out of the Hexagon before anybody could raise any more problems, feeling he had dodged a bullet. He didn't like the feeling. He needed to get ahead of these problems, and the way to do that was to have a talk with Hoak Hagbarth.
     
    He found Hagbarth at the EPR terminal in Sommermen Square, but—Wili Tschopp explained—if Giyt wanted to talk to him about this power-conservation matter, he would have to wait, "It's Cargo Day, for Christ's sake," Tschopp told him. "Hoak has to be in the control loop."
    "Control loop?"
    Tschopp looked at him without patience. "The keys to the portal. Every race has a key. The portal can't operate unless all the keys are used, didn't you know that? So you'll have to wait. Just stay out of the way."
    Giyt had seen the great portal before, of course; in fact, he had come through it himself with Rina, because how else could you travel the vast distances from Earth? But he'd never seen it from outside with power on, when it was already wreathed in the golden glow of what he had learned to call the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen field and thus was ready to receive a transmission from Earth. Inside the chamber Giyt could see crates of merchandise ready to ship. He knew what they had to be. At the polar factories the Earth colony had a small production line that turned out various kinds of toys, trinkets, and knickknacks to export to the home planet—nothing very valuable, but, Giyt supposed, every little bit that helped offset the cost of the Tupelo colony was worth having.
    The thing that struck Giyt as curious was the number of nonhumans at the terminal. Five of them—and Hagbarth—were seated