Pallas Read Online Free PDF

chairs and sofas upholstered in dark colors, the yellow incandescent light of the fabric-shaded bulbs in end-table lamps—lent a welcome warmth to this room, and to others Gwen had decorated, which seemed lacking anywhere else on the little planet.
    He reached an intercom set into the wall beside the doors and touched a key. Its tiny liquid-crystal screen, until now merely displaying the time, date, and temperature, dissolved into a wide-angle view inside the g a tehouse, where an International Peace Corpsman waited to hear from him.
    “Altman here.”
    “Sir! Subject identifies himself as Brody, Aloysius, no middle initial, no real ID.”
    Before Altman could focus on the well-scrubbed face beneath a baseball cap of sky blue (Earth’s sky—Pallas’s was tinged with a reddish purple Gwen often complained of), a vast hand engulfed the picture, wrenching it about until it settled on a seamier face he recognized. A n noyance colored the young Corpsman’s voice, just as reddish purple c o lored the sky. It was a common reaction which the Senator understood perfectly but couldn’t train his people out of. Outsiders made a point of never carrying documents, and under the Stein Covenant—the agreement they’d all signed before immigrating to Pallas—they couldn’t be required to.
    Brody grinned into the camera. “A good evenin’ to ye, Senator darlin ’, an’ will y’kindly be lettin’ me in?” Altman was sure the accent was a phony. Not only did it seem to come and go with the weather and the time of day, but his intelligence sources had told him that Brody had been born in an industrial suburb of Boston.
    “Sorry for the wait, Mr. Brody. The corporal will have someone escort you to the Residence.”
    Altman rang off, savoring the room about him for a final minute. Thanks to Gwen, nothing but the gravity reminded him of the world he stood on. The drapes had been drawn before dark and—a welcome di f ference from Earth—a fire burned in the hearth. At home, with the dwindling resources and draconian pollution laws of eastern North America, it would have been a hologram. Here there was certainly no scarcity of agricultural waste, nor of hydraulic rams and labor to shape it into “logs,” and between the chimney precipitators and a selectively permeable atmospheric envelope, no pollution.
    Meanwhile, without a crackle or a grain of “snow,” the latest digit a lized disinformation from LiteLink in Atlanta, admittedly delayed by never less than fourteen minutes, splashed across a large high-definition room screen as it might have done in any home on Earth, without an a u dience at the moment to appreciate the technical—if not the journali s tic—accomplishment it represented.
    On the other walls, Gwen had hung framed prints, young girls in su n light-dappled gardens, quaint bridges arching over their own reflections in quiet, lily-patterned water. On the piano—small, but representing yet another conspicuous expense—stood a picture of her parents. Never mind that it was an old campaign photo taken just before the Big One murdered them and twenty million other Californians. The truth, which he’d never spoken in his wife’s company, was that dear old Dad Hathaway’s political posterior—or at least his reputation with posterity—had been rescued by the earthquake everybody had been expecting for decades.
    Shaking his head at the remembrance, he dismissed it and made his way to the formal entrance, where Alice was answering the door. “Good evening, sir, may I take your—”
    At first glance, there seemed nothing to take. From the way Brody leaned on his cane, he wasn’t about to part with that. A head shorter than Altman, he wasn’t large but somehow gave a contrary impression. Behind antique rimless glasses, his eyes glittered with good-natured m i schief—some cosmic joke he was willing to share with anyone who asked—the lines radiating from their corners making him look like a Coca-Cola