Free O Pioneer! by Frederik Pohl Page A

paid for by another of Huntsville's free-flowing grants. The reason for his being in orbit the report said, was that it was necessary to avoid interference from Earth's surface gravity. Then somehow—this was when it all got misty and uncertain—he had come back from one session in orbit with the prototype of his portal device in his lander.
    The rest of the story, for security reasons, was classified secret. But what "security reasons"? Military? But military security implied an enemy, and what enemy was involved here?
    The questions were not getting answered, they were proliferating.
    The obvious next place to look was in the Tupelo files of the Extended Earth Society, but when Giyt accessed them he was no farther along. Maybe there was something there, but every interesting file turned out to be secured. A password was needed.
    That was neither a surprise nor a problem; not for Evesham Giyt, who had a hundred ways of getting past such obstacles. The first was to check every terminal on the island that might have access to the protected system to see if someone might have been stupid enough to leave his password in its default setting—its extension number, his name, something like that. He wasn't surprised when that didn't work; even Wili Tschopp wasn't quite that dumb. Another way of gaining entry was to select a terminal that was privy to the closed file and flood it with extraneous messages. That was how Giyt had financed his college education, going through the university president's terminal to enter the financial files; they would normally have questioned his status, but with the president's terminal bogged down it could not give the reply that would have denied Giyt access.
    On Earth that no longer worked; net users had become a good deal more sophisticated since Giyt's college days. But here on Tupelo—
    It took less than five minutes for Giyt to get into the closed files. But when he was there he was still nowhere.
    The trouble was that even the secured files were still unreadable for him. He found plenty of entries that concerned the portal or the Sommermen terminal or any of the other variations he could think of on the term, but, just as with the Petty-Primes, they dealt only with what particular shipments had arrived or departed on particular days. And even those were enciphered.
    What did it mean, for instance, when an entry read: "President TARBABY stocks: 1533 JUNIORS , 114 GRABBAGS ,. 11 SUPERS "? Or "Need 16 gross additional HAIRNETS "? Not to mention the wholly incomprehensible transmissions like " GREEKS 53 FLYSWATTERS , COPTS 2600-plus RUTABAGAS all sizes, others not identified."
    Giyt blanked the screen and sat back. He could, of course, ask Hagbarth what all this stuff meant, but that would mean telling Hagbarth he'd snooped into the files . . . and, anyway, the mere fact that it was all encoded meant that it probably was something Hagbarth wouldn't want to talk about.
    Giyt hated to admit defeat, even when only curiosity was involved. He knew that if he were on Earth he could probably get into the master system there. But he wasn't. Here on Tupelo there was no continuous contact with Earth, only the burst transmissions that went to and from Earth when the EPR portal was open. He had no firsthand knowledge of that stuff, since neither he nor Rina, of course, had any reason to communicate with anyone back on Earth.
    But as it turned out, about that he was wrong.

VIII
     
     
    The climate of the planet Tupelo is uncomplicated, if sometimes drastic. There are relatively few major hurricanes, perhaps because of the lack of large landmasses, which means relatively few collisions between dry, continental, high-pressure air masses and humid maritime lows. However, disturbances from the planet's intertropical convergence zone may from time to time drift north or south and propagate some severe storms. Generally speaking, Tupelo's one inhabited island, which lies quite close to the planet's equator,