Adele

Filename: ds02.html
© 1998 Darren Stewart

Genre: Science Fiction
Description: A young man on a faraway planet meets the man he believes is responsible for his father's death.


Adele

Christopher Hill, chief administrator of Newport, Adele hesitated in the narrow street before the door that read, "Henry Stilman." He glanced down and saw with surprise a rock wolf sleeping there. Kneeling, he tapped on its red-rock shell and it poked its dog-like head out and stared accusingly up at the man who had awakened him.
Rock-wolves only rarely came out of the thin Adeline atmosphere into the thick one enforced by the humans' enviro-field. The characteristics of the various creatures that inhabited this red planet were such that until man's actual landing and exploration of the planet, they hadn't even known they were there.
Hill smiled then, something he didn't often do. "Where's your pack, little one?" he asked softly.
The pack itself an0swered his question, as about two hundred red rocks suddenly poured down the street and the rock-wolf ran off, blending into a moving rock like the rest. With amazing accuracy, not one of the wolves actually touched Hill
Once they disappeared into nothing but trailing dust, Hill's smile faded away and he straightened up and pressed the doorbell. After a few seconds the screen beneath it lit up to show a face so hauntingly familiar that Hill almost cried.
"Yes?" the face said, in an English accent, vaguely North-Western to Hill's ears.
"Mr. Stilman, I don't believe we have met. I'm Christopher Hill."
Stilman's eyes suddenly hardened. "What do you want?"
"To talk. May I come in?"
Stilman nodded and his face disappeared. Seconds later, the door slid open to reveal the man himself.
With eyes trained to notice details, Hill immediately noted the boy's heavy and atypically British features, with broad shoulders and a narrow face. He was obviously over thirty, and silently Hill wondered where all the years had gone. It seemed like only yesterday…

"And the entire operation will be based from this area here, gentleman." The NASA official was boring, as usual. Hill was really more interested in getting onto the surface of this planet.
The miracles of modern technology allowed them to reach this distant sun, over eight light-years away from their home on Earth, in only nine years. Hill was therefore extraordinarily ready to get out of the ship that had carried them there.
Beside him, a man of about forty smiled at Hill. "Ready to get out there, huh?"
Hill nodded. "Colonizing a new planet hasn't happened since Mars, eighteen years ago."
"Not that long ago," the man told him.
"Long enough that it isn't routine." Hill waved at the top of the ship, which was resting on the Adeline surface. "In about eight or nine years time, the people back on Earth are going to see us establish this colony. In twenty years time, why, thousands of people will arrive here!"
"Chris, it probably won't be that popular."
"You never know, Matt, you never know."

Hill shook himself out of the reverie and followed Stilman through one of the apartments that Hill could walk through blindly. The same plans and specifications built every apartment on the planet. Every one had the same furniture, wallpaper and floor plan. It was actually sort of a dull place, considering how many people on Earth would give an arm to be there.
They shortly reached a living room, with standard Government Issue furniture and several boxes stacked up against the wall.
"How old are you, Mr. Hill?" Stilman asked, as he opened one of the boxes, his back facing Hill.
"I'm just fifty-one."
"Then you'll remember these?" He withdrew two calculators, both Sharp, and held them up above his shoulder, without turning, to let Hill see.
Hill gave out a short laugh, completely without humor. "How could I forget? Wherever you went, mathematics teachers always tortured you with them. In Canada they wouldn't let us use them, in Britain they wouldn't let us not use them."
Stilman nodded. "How did you get your job?"
Hill shrugged, "I was hired by NASA straight out of university."
"And why was that?"
Confused, Hill shrugged again, "I had the credentials, and they thought I had promise."
"So did my father," Stilman said bitterly. "He was a brilliant engineer. Do you know where he worked for the first eight years of my life?" Stilman was still facing away from Hill as he challenged him.
Hill shook his head.
"A calculator factory." Again, bitterness seeped into the young man's voice. "He inspected calculators, and slowly they became his life. He became obsessed with them. He collected them. Every single one, from the first model to the last, when computer pads became so popular calculators were obsolete. Then he heard of the chance to run a settlement on Adele. He wouldn't have gone, I don't think, had my mother survived." He said it grimly. "Stupid. Eleven years later they could cure cancer, but back then they couldn't even cure something as simple as AIDS." He snorted and began bitterly, "They thought they'd eliminated the threat from blood transfusions. I guess they were wrong." He moved away from the boxes and sat on the couch and stared blankly at the TV, hung on the wall. It currently displayed a picture of Earth from space, centered on Europe with the night line splitting the small continent in two.
"Why are you here?" Hill asked softly.
Stilman stood, turned and bored his eyes into Hill. "Answers," He told Hill. "I need to know why I own over four hundred calculators." He grabbed one of the boxes and vehemently dumped it out onto the floor and a pile of calculators fell out with a clatter.
Hill turned away uncomfortably, the reminder of Matthew Stilman's death bringing bad memories back.
"Do you know what it's like?" Stilman said, wiping his eyes of tears that weren't really there and lifting his face to the Adeline Administer's back. "To not see your father for nine years, and then get a message saying he died? A small piece of paper, all official and everything, saying 'We are ever so sorry…' And they didn't even tell me how!" Stilman almost shouted the last word accusingly at Hill, sinking his head into his hands.
"Do you know why he left you?" Hill asked, quietly steering the conversation down a different path, as he turned around.
Stilman, his hands over his face just shook his head.
"It was because he loved you. We knew almost nothing about Adele then, and there was all that fuss in the early years about virulent micro-organisms being found in Adeline meteorites. He didn't want to lose you like he lost his wife." He stopped and watched that sink in, again noting the painful similarities. "Matt and I were friends. Friends of maybe the best sort. I, least of all wanted to take over his responsibilities." His mind quickly went over as many consequences as he could before, slowly, he said, "And as for the cause of death, they wouldn't have told you."
"Why not?"
Hill snorted, "Because they think it will discourage colonists, which it would, good and proper. But as long as Dillan is the president, and it looks like that's going to be a long time, they never will let it out." He sighed, knowing that he was breaking his oaths of office.
"Adele has four main life forms, the dominate carnivore: the rock wolves, the blobs: which are both producers and consumers and the snails: which consume the bacteria. There are lots of other microbes in the air, but these particular bacteria are the most common. The bacteria make up a good portion of the air, but they're tiny. They're so small an electron microscope has difficulties finding them. And they are very dangerous.
"They react to oxygen by having feeding frenzy of anything edible. Normally, they're producers, plant-like, but if exposed to a high oxygen environment they feed. It's a survival trait.
"That's how you're father died. He tripped and fell through the enviro-field. One breath is all it takes, then these micro-organisms are inside you and when you start breathing in here, they kill you."
Stilman was now staring at Hill, wondering whether or not to believe the story. "I'm sorry," he said at last. "I misjudged you. I thought you were just another power hungry politician, and that the death of my father just helped you along."
Hill nodded in understanding. "That's okay, that's what politicians are here for. To be misjudged," and for the second time that hour, he smiled.