native workers again, if any Downers had slipped in unvaccinated. It was no
paradise, Downbelow base. He had no reluctance to leave it and the new staff and
the Downers to each other. It was the manner of the recall which rankled.
“Sir.”
A last, parting nuisance came splashing after him on the trail. Bennett Jacint.
Jon half turned, kept walking, made the man work to overtake him in the mud and
the downpour,
“The mill dike,” Jacint gasped through the stops and hisses of the breather.
“Need some human crews over there with heavy equipment and sandbags.”
“Not my problem now,” Jon said. “Get to it yourself. What are you good for? Put
those coddled Downers to it. Take an extra crew of them. Or wait on the new
supervisors, why don’t you? You can explain it all to my nephew.”
“Where are they?” Jacint asked. A skilled obstructionist, Bennett Jacint, always
on the line with objections when it came to any measures for improvement. More
than once Jacint had gone over his head to file a protest. One construction
project he had outright gotten stopped, so that the road to the wells stayed a
mired track. Jon smiled and pointed across the grounds, far across, back toward
the warehouse domes.
“There’s not time.”
“That’s your problem.”
Bennett Jacint cursed him to his face and started to run it, then changed his
mind and raced back again toward the mill. Jon laughed. Soaked stock in the
mill. Good. Let the Konstantins solve it
He came over the hill, started down to the shuttle, which loomed alien and
silver in the trampled meadow, its cargo hatch lowered, Downers toiling to and
fro and a few yellow-suited humans among them. His trail joined that on which
the Downers moved, churned mud; he walked on the grassy margin, cursed when a
Downer with a load swayed too near him, and had the satisfaction at least that
they cleared his path. He walked into the landing circle, nodded curtly to a
human supervisor and climbed the cargo ramp into the shadowed steel interior. He
stripped the wet rainsuit there in the cold, keeping the mask on. He ordered a
Downer gang boss to clean up the muddied area, and walked on through the hold to
the lift, rode it topside, into a steel, clean corridor, and a small passenger
compartment with padded seats.
Downers were in it, two laborers making the shift to station. They looked
uncertain when they saw him, touched each other. He sealed the passenger area
and made the air-shift, so that he could discard his breather and they had to
put theirs on. He sat down opposite them, stared through them in the windowless
compartment. The air stank of wet Downer, a smell he had lived with for three
years, a smell with which all Pell lived, if one had a sensitive nose, but
Downbelow base worst of all: with dusty grain and distilleries and packing
plants and walls and mud and muck and the smoke of the mills, latrines that
flooded out, sump pools that grew scum, forest molds that could ruin a breather
and kill a man who was caught without a spare—all of this and managing
halfwitted Downer labor with their religious taboos and constant excuses. He was
proud of his record, increased output, efficiency where there had been
hands-folded complacency that Downers were Downers and could not comprehend
schedules. They could, and did, and set records in production.
No thanks of it. Crisis hit the station and the Downbelow expansion which had
limped along in and out of planning sessions for a decade was suddenly moving.
Plants would get the additional facilities he had made possible, manned by
workers whose supply and housing he had made possible, using Lukas Company funds
and Lukas Company equipment.
Only a pair of Konstantins was sent down to supervise during that stage, without
a thank you, Mr. Lukas, or a well done, Jon, thanks for leaving your own company
offices and your own affairs, thanks for doing the job for three years. Emilio
Konstantin and Miliko Dee appointed Downbelow supervisors; please arrange
affairs and shuttle up at the earliest. His nephew Emilio. Young Emilio was