The Winds of Altair Read Online Free PDF

the merciless glare of Altair, a star ten times brighter than the Sun.
    What Carbo and his fellow scientists found when they reached Altair VI was a planet whose "Earthlike" air was laced with a lethal level of methane, a world covered by acid clouds that blanketed the land and seas in eternal inky blackness despite the fact that the ground was slightly fluorescent. And the abundant water was frothing with ammonia and other chemicals that made it useless for humans.
    Captain Gunnerson laughed bitterly when he realized what the ship's instruments were telling them. "Smog in the air and poison in the water. This planet is naturally polluted. It doesn't need us to foul it up!" Then he bid them good-bye, with a bitterly cheerful prediction: "You'll never tame this planet, no matter how hard you try."
    The staff directors and Church Elders met in Bishop Foy's conference room, a narrow, austere chamber bare of decorations.
    With all the enthusiasm of a mortician, Foy told them grimly, "We are here. The Church has spent an enormous sum of money to send us here. Even more money and effort is being spent to send shiploads of converts here to colonize this planet. It would be sinful to waste all that money by giving up on Altair VI without even trying to prepare it for colonization."
    They all gloomily, reluctantly agreed.
    "Very well, then," Bishop Foy said firmly. "Let us begin our task with a prayer."

    Martin Foy was the fourth son in a family of eight children, all but the last two being boys. He had grown up on a ranch in the dry scrubland of eastern New Mexico, where it took an acre of semidesert to support a single cow. Despite the laser-drilled deep wells and fusion-powered desalted water pumped all the way from the Gulf of California, Martin watched his father grow poorer and more desperate each year as the price of beef sank in the face of genetically-engineered meat substitutes. Finally, the same day that Martin received his First Communion, the corporation that owned the ranch sent his father written confirmation of his worst fears: the ranch was being converted into a housing development for lower-class city folks who were being resettled by the government.
    Martin had always been a good Church member; his parents insisted that all their children be Believers. When he found that he would not be allowed to attend college because his father could not afford it, he enrolled in the nearest Church seminary. While his brothers and two sisters accepted whatever jobs they could find, while his mother wasted away and finally died of cancer and his father withdrew into a private world within his own mind and had to be shipped off to a state hospital, Martin lived the austere but secure life of a novice, then curate, and finally the pastor of a small mission in Bangladesh.
    It was there in his sweaty, fetid cubbyhole of an office, behind a ramshackle building that passed for a mission church, that he read about the colonization of the stars. The star missions were enormously expensive, but his Church was going to fund one of the first ones, to a world called Altair VI, and the Church was looking for qualified ministers to lead the way.
    Wise in the ways of the world, the Church offered an inducement to volunteers: they would own the new world they helped to redeem. Right and title to the land would be given to those who volunteered to prepare the way for colonists.
    The temptation overpowered Foy. He left his pitiful mission in Bangladesh with unseemly haste, qualified for leadership of the expedition to Altair VI by sheer tenacity and force of will, and accepted a promotion to Bishop, effective the day the starship left Earth orbit.

    So he led the prayer that began the immense task of redeeming Altair VI. Bishop Foy knew well that if the planet was not ready for colonization in three years, he would be replaced. He would lose his share of the wealth that this colony would someday generate. His career would be finished.
    The other