The room filled rapidly with men, and Pelham's eyes hardened as he counted noses in one sweeping glance.
'We're all here. Men, we face a crisis!'
There was a vague stir. Olaf's eyes sought the ceiling and he relaxed. Crises hit the Dome once a revolution, on the average. Usually they turned out to be a sudden rise in the quota of oxite to be gathered, or the inferior quality of the last batch of karen leaves. He stiffened, however, at the next words.
'In connection with the crisis, I have one question to ask.' Pelham's voice was a deep baritone, and it rasped unpleasantly when he was angry. 'What dirty imbecilic troublemaker has been telling those blasted Ossies fairy tales?"
Olaf cleared his throat nervously and thus immediately became the center of attention. His Adam's apple wobbled in sudden alarm and his forehead wrinkled into a washboard. He shivered.
'I - I-' he stuttered, quickly fell silent. His long fingers made a bewildered gesture of appeal. 'I mean I was out there yesterday, after the last - uh - supplies of karen leaves, on account the Ossies were slow and -'
A deceptive sweetness entered Pelham's voice. He smiled.
'Did you tell those natives about Santa Claus, Olaf?'
The smile looked uncommonly like a wolfish leer and Olaf broke down. He nodded convulsively.
'Oh, you did? Well, well, you told them about Santa Claus! He comes down in a sleigh that flies through the air with eight reindeer pulling it, huh?'
'Well - er - doesn't he?' Olaf asked unhappily.
'And you drew pictures of the reindeer, just to make sure there was no mistake. Also, he has a long white beard and red clothes with white trimmings.'
'Yeah, that's right,' said Olaf, his face puzzled.
'And he has a big bag, chock full of presents for good little' boys and girls, and he brings it down the chimney and puts presents inside stockings.'
'Sure.'
'You also told them he's about due, didn't you? One more revolution and he's going to visit us.'
Olaf smiled weakly. 'Yeah, Commander, I meant to tell you. I'm fixing up the tree and -'
'Shut up!' The commander was breathing hard in a whistling sort of way. 'Do you know what those Ossies have thought of?'
'No, Commander.'
Pelham leaned across the table toward Olaf and shouted:
They want Santa Claus to visit them!'
Someone laughed and changed it quickly into a strangling cough at the commander's raging stare.
'And if Santa Claus doesn't visit them, the Ossies are going to quit work!' He repeated, 'Quit cold - strike!'
There was no laughter, strangled or otherwise, after that. If there were more than one thought among the entire group, it didn't show itself. Olaf expressed that thought:
'But what about the quota?'
'Well, what about it?' snarled Pelham. 'Do I have to draw pictures for you? Ganymedan Products has to get one hundred tons of wolframite, eighty tons of karen leaves and fifty tons of oxite every year, or it loses its franchise. I suppose there isn't anyone here who doesn't know that. It so happens that the current year ends in two Ganymedan revolutions, and we're five per cent behind schedule as it is.'
There was pure, horrified silence.
'And now the Ossies won't work unless they get Santa Claus. No work, no quota, no franchise - no jobs! Get that, you low-grade morons. When the company loses its franchise, we lose the best-paying jobs in the System. Kiss them good-bye, men, unless -'
He paused, glared steadily at Olaf, and added:
'Unless, by next revolution, we have a flying sleigh, eight reindeer and a Santa Claus. And by every cosmic speck in the rings of Saturn, we're going to have just that, especially a Santa!'
The faces turned ghastly pale.
'Got someone in mind, Commander?' asked someone in a voice that was three-quarters croak.
'Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.'
He sprawled back in his chair. Olaf Johnson broke into a sudden sweat as he found himself staring at the end of a pointing forefinger.
'Aw, Commander!' he quavered.
The pointing finger never moved.
Pelham tramped into the foreroom, removed-his oxygen nosepiece and the cold cylinders attached to it. One by one he cast off thick woolen outer garments and, with a final, weary sigh, jerked off a pair of heavy knee-high space boots.
Sim Pierce paused in his careful inspection of the latest batch of karen leaves and cast a hopeful glance over his spectacles.
'Well?' he asked.
Pelham shrugged. 'I promised them Santa. What else could I do? I also doubled sugar rations, so they're back on the job - for the moment.'
'You mean till the Santa we promised doesn't show up.' Pierce straightened and waved a long karen leaf at the commander's face for emphasis. 'This is the silliest thing I ever heard of. It can't be done. There ain't no Santa Claus!'
Try telling that to the Ossies.' Pelham slumped into a chair and his expression became stonily bleak. 'What's Benson doing?'
'You mean that flying sleigh he says he can rig up?' Pierce held a leaf up to the light and peered at it critically. 'He's a crackpot, if you ask me. The old buzzard went down to the sub-level this morning and he's been there ever since. All I know is that he's taken the spare lectro-dissociator apart. If anything happens to the regular, it just means that we're without oxygen.'
'Well,' Pelham rose heavily, 'for my part I hope we do choke. It would be an easy way out of this whole mess. I'm going down below.'
He stumped out and slammed the door behind him.
In the sub-level he gazed about in bewilderment, for the room was littered with gleaming chrome-steel machine parts. It took him some time to recognize the mess as the remains of what had been a compact, snugly built lectro-dissociator the day before. In the center, in anachronistic contrast, stood a dusty wooden sleigh atop rust-red runners. From beneath it came the sound of hammering.
'Hey, Benson!' called Pelham.
A grimy, sweat-streaked face pushed out from underneath the sleigh, and a stream of tobacco juice shot toward Benson's ever-present cuspidor.
'What are you shouting like that for?' he complained. 'This is delicate work.'
'What the devil is that weird contraption?' demanded Pel-ham.
'Flying sleigh. My own idea, too.' The light of enthusiasm shone in Benson's watery eyes, and the quid in his mouth shifted from cheek to cheek as he spoke. 'The sleigh was brought here in the old days, when they thought Ganymede was covered with snow like the other Jovian moons. All I have to do is fix a few gravo-repulsors from the dissociator to the bottom and that'll make it weightless when the current's on. Compressed air-jets will do the rest.'
The commander chewed his lower lip dubiously.
'Will it work?'
'Sure it will. Lots of people have thought of using repulsors in air travel, but they're inefficient, especially in heavy gravity fields. Here on Ganymede, with a field of one-third gravity and a thin atmosphere, a child could run it. Even Johnson could run it, though I wouldn't mourn if he fell off and broke his blasted neck.'
'All right, then, look here. We've got lots of this native purple-wood. Get Charlie Finn and tell him to put that sleigh on a platform of it. He's to have it extend about twenty feet or more frontward, with a railing around the part that projects.'
Benson spat and scowled through the stringy hair over his eyes.
'What's the idea, Commander?'
Pelham's laughter came in short, harsh barks.
'Those Ossies are expecting reindeer, and reindeer they're going to have. Those animals will have to stand on something, won't they?'
'Sure… But wait, hold on! There aren't any reindeer on Ganymede.'
Commander Pelham paused on his way out. His eyes narrowed unpleasantly as they always did when he thought of Olaf Johnson.
'Olaf is out rounding up eight spiny backs for us. They've got four feet, a head on one end and a tail on the other. That's close enough for the Ossies.'