Darkness swallowed them as they cut through the cold air above the monotonous white wastes of the Edith Ronne Ice Shelf. When all around him had become featureless darkness, Broohnin finally admitted to himself that he was frightened. He doubted either of them could survive an hour down there in that cold and wind if the flitter went down.
“This was a stupid idea,” he muttered.
“What was?” LaNague, as usual, seemed unperturbed.
“Renting this flitter. We should have taken a commercial flight. What if we have a power failure?”
“A commercial flight wouldn't take us where we have to go. I told you before-I have to see this new protein source myself before I'll really believe it exists.”
“What protein are you going to find on an ice cap? Everything's frozen!” This trip was becoming more idiotic by the minute.
“Not everything, I'll bet,” LaNague said, craning his neck forward as he scanned the sky through the observation bubble. He pointed upward and fifteen degrees off the flitter's port bow. “Look. What do you think those are?”
Broohnin saw them almost immediately. Three long, narrow ellipses of intensely bright light hung in the black of the sky, motionless, eerie.
“How high you think they are?” LaNague asked.
Broohnin squinted. They looked very high, almost fixed in the sky. “I'd say they were in orbit.”
“You're right. They're in a tight polar orbit.”
“Orbiting lights?”
“That's sunlight.”
“By the Core!” Broohnin said in a breathy voice. He knew what they were now-mirrors. Orbiting solar reflectors were almost as old in practice as they were in concept. They had been used by wealthy snow belt cities in the pre-interstellar days to reduce the severity of their winter storms. But the advent of weather modification technology had made them obsolete and most of them had been junked or forgotten.
“I've got it!” he said. “Someone's melted enough ice to be able to plant crops at the South Pole!”
LaNague shook his head. “Close, but not quite. I doubt if there's enough arable soil under the ice to plant a crop. And if there were, I certainly wouldn't feel impelled to see it with my own eyes. What I've-”
The traffic control comm indicator on the console flashed red as a voice came through the speaker.
“Restricted zone! Restricted zone! Turn back unless you have authorized clearance! Restricted zone! Restricted-”
“We going to do it?” Broohnin asked.
“No.”
He fumbled with the knobs on the console. “Can't we turn it off then?” The repetitious monotone of the recorded warning was getting on his nerves. When the volume control on the vid panel did nothing to lessen the droning voice, Broohnin raised his hand to strike at the speaker. LaNague stopped him.
“We'll need that later. Don't break anything.”
Broohnin leaned back and bottled his growing irritation. Covering his ears with his hands, he watched the solar mirrors fatten in the middle, growing more circular, less ellipsoid. As the flitter continued southward, they became almost too bright to look at.
The cabin was suddenly filled with intolerably bright light, but not from the mirrors. A police cutter was directly above them, matching their air speed. The voice from the traffic control comm finally cut off and a new one spoke.
“You have violated restricted air space. Proceed 11.2 kilometers due south and dock in the lighted area next to the sentry post. Deviation from that course will force me to disable your craft.”
LaNague cleared the preprogrammed course and took manual control of the flitter. “Let's do what the man says.”
“You don't seem surprised.”
“I'm not. This is the only way to get to the South Polar Plateau without getting blasted out of the air.”
The cutter stayed above them all the way to the sentry station and remained hovering over their observation bubble even after they had docked.
“Debark and enter the sentry station,” the voice said from the speaker. Without protest, LaNague and Broohnin broke the seal on the bubble, stumbled to the ground, and made a mad dash through the icy wind to the door of the station. The sentry joined them a moment later. He was young, personable, and alone. Broohnin considered the odds to be in their favor, but LaNague no doubt had other ideas.
IT WAS MUCH ROOMIER in the cab of the sentry's cutter. Broohnin stretched out his legs and started to doze.
“Keep awake!” LaNague said, nudging him. “I want you to see this, too.”
Broohnin struggled to a more upright sitting position and glared at the Tolivian. He felt tired, more irritable than usual, and didn't like anyone nudging him for any reason. But his annoyance faded quickly as he remembered LaNague's masterful handling of the sentry.
“Are all Earthies that easy to bribe?” he asked.
There was no humor in LaNague's smile. “I wouldn't be surprised if they were. Those two coin tubes I gave him were full of Tolivian ags, and each ag contains one troy ounce of.999 fine silver. With silver coins, that sentry can operate outside the electronic currency system. The official exchange rate is about six solar credits per ag, but the coins are each worth ten times that in the black market. And believe me, Earth's black market is second to none in size and diversity.”
Broohnin remembered the way the sentry's eyes had widened at the sight of the silver coins. The man had looked as if he were about to lick his lips in anticipation. He had hardly seemed to hear LaNague as he explained what he wanted in return for the coins.
“Black market prices are higher,” Broohnin said. “Why bother with it?”
“Of course they're higher. That's because they've got something to sell. Look: all prices and wages are fixed on Earth, all goods are rationed. Whatever makes it to the market at the official price disappears in an instant, usually into the hands of friends and relatives of the people with political connections. These people sell it to black marketeers, who sell it to everyday people; the price goes up at each stop along the way.”
“That's my point-”
“No. You've missed the point. The price of a three-dimensional display module for a home computer is ‘X’ Solar credits in the government-controlled store; it's a fixed bargain price, but the store never has any. So what good is a fixed price? The black marketeer, however, has plenty of them, only he wants ‘doubleX’ Solar credits for each. It's an axiom of Kyfhon economics: the more rigidly controlled the economy, the bigger and better the black market. Earth's economy is run completely from the top, therefore there's hardly a thing you cannot buy in Earth's black market. It's the biggest and best there is!
“The black market here also means freedom from surveillance. You can buy anything you want without leaving a record of what, where, and when. Of course the sentry was easy to bribe. It costs him nothing to let us take this ride, and look what he got in return.”
The sentry had not come along. There was no need to. He had searched them for weapons and cameras; finding none, he had sealed them into the cutter and programmed a low-level reconnaissance flight into the craft's computer. The two out-worlders would get a slow fly-by of the area that interested them, with no stops. Anyone monitoring the flight would detect nothing out of the ordinary-a routine fence ride. The chance of the cutter's being stopped with the out-worlders aboard was virtually nil. The sentry was risking nothing and gaining a pocketful of silver.