Bedlam Planet Read online

“Blew out three of our generators!” Yoko said. “He’d shorted the current past the circuit-breakers. One of them exploded, and Tibor isn’t certain he can repair the others.”

  Tibor uttered a sound which might have been a Magyar curse.

  Dazed by the stream of disasters Yoko had been describing, Dennis fumbled for another question. Before he could put it, they had been spotted by people emerging from the mess-hall, who recognised him and came crowding around to demand what had happened to keep him away so long.

  He said curtly, “I had a run-in with a sort of fish. I think it poisoned me. I must have been delirious for a bit.” And, as they automatically shied away from him, suspicious of contagion, added: “But my medikit says I’m all right again now.”

  That provoked nods and shrugs, and almost as soon as they had assembled the people started to drift away again. It seemed that their apathy prevented them from being interested for very long. Dennis noted the marks of scurvy on them, and shuddered.

  Does this mean we’re going to have to evacuate? Can we evacuate? Or would everyone be so sick and undernourished before be reached Earth again that the attempt would be wasted?

  “Well—ah—we’ve still got the Santa Maria, haven’t we?” he said. “If the worst comes to the worst, we can always—”

  “The worst has come to the worst,” Yoko said gently. “I assume you were thinking of abandoning Asgard and trying to make it home? We can’t, though. That’s thanks to what Parvati did. She managed to get into the computer room and instructed the computers to blank their memories. All the navigational data, all the takeoff and landing data, all the life-support data … Because of what she did to us, that big shining ship up there is just about as useful as a lump of dirt. It would take more than a lifetime to re-stock the memory banks with what they were filled with when they left Earth.”

  She wrung her hands and her small mouth turned downwards at the corners. After a moment, tears trickled from the corners of her slanted eyes.

  “We’re going to die here!” she forced out. “We’re all going to die here! And I don’t—want—to—die!”

  XVII

  STEVE HAD been right: the food was slop. Sour-faced, their hands dirty, the dietitians ladled out portions of it so carelessly that some of it splashed on the counter from which the colonists lined up to collect it. It was some sort of warmed-through basic meal, or mush, salted. That was all. In answer to Dennis’s expression of dismay, one of the servers said curtly, “Don’t look at me like that! This is all we have left that’s fit to eat!”

  “It’s not fit to eat,” someone called from a nearby table.

  “Safe, then! Safe!” the server snapped. “You know damned well what I mean!”

  Behind the counter, with its big dishes steaming slightly, there was the smoke-grimed ruin of the food preparation plant. The wreckage had apparently been shoved to one side, and left. Had no one attempted to repair it, then?

  It was not strictly the food the servers were throwing at him which dismayed Dennis. It was the underlying attitude implied by their willingness to make do with it. A horrid suspicion took root in the corner of his mind, and grew. He sensed the irritability which he knew derived, like the bruising and Tibor’s swollen knee, from the scurvy. The lethargy which the disease also entailed was writ plain on every face he glanced at. With the colony in a desperate plight, many people—thirty or forty, perhaps—having long finished their breakfast, were still dawdling over the tables: not talking, just sitting and sometimes staring at Dennis.

  But they didn’t even bother to come over and inquire what had happened to him!

  To have bitten this deep into the colonists’ minds, the leeching effect of their deficiency must already have set in well before the last progress meeting. The cheering news of their success must have masked inertia, a state of coasting, in which people could keep going only so long as they were following a rote pattern. Faced with the urgent need to think for themselves, to diverge from the standard plan and make shift, they were helpless. All these people ought to have been out at work the moment they had choked down the last spoonful of their mush. Instead …

  But he had only just walked into the middle of this totally new situation. For the time being, Dennis decided he must move cautiously. The sudden baseless anger which had flared in the server’s face might emerge in Saul’s, or Tibor’s.

  At least these two, however, seemed to be willing to talk sensibly.

  “Hell, we’re dirty and unshaven because that bastard Dan smashed the water-filters and breached the reservoir!” Saul grunted. “We’re getting just about enough clean water to cook with and drink, from the remaining purifiers. We don’t have it over for washing clothes or shaving.”

  But why shouldn’t you wash in the water from the stream? It’s good natural spring water, what you get on Earth!

  “We’re going down hill fast,” Tibor muttered. “That yellow devil Tai didn’t content himself with messing up the biolab. Looks as though he set out deliberately to make us fall sick. Just pouring vitamins and medicines down the sink—that’s what he must have been doing!”

  Yet I went without for ten days, and here I am, in better shape than these two!

  He glanced uneasily across the room towards Yoko, who had gone into a corner by herself after her outburst of misery, and remembered thinking that she had a lifetime interest in her speciality, which would maintain her enthusiasm for study far past any risk of boredom.

  Tibor said he was scared. So am I—so am I!

  “But what have you been doing since all this—this sabotage took place?” he demanded. “Why is there still that heap of muck behind the counter in here? Why hasn’t anyone patched the hole in the wall which the fire made?”

  Saul and Tibor exchanged glances.

  “Yes, I guess someone ought to have seen to that,” Saul admitted after a pause.

  “Someone!” Dennis thumped the table with his fist. The guns which the other two had laid down beside their plates jumped and rattled; his own was stowed in his pocket, as always. “Who’s the someone if it’s not going to be you?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that!” Tibor flared. “Haven’t I got enough trouble of my own since that bastard Abdul shorted out all those generators? One of them blew up, like Yoko told you—the bits are scattered all over creation and most of them won’t be any use again even if we find them.”

  “How much power does it take to fetch a stack of board from the sawmill and drive a couple of dozen nails?” Dennis rapped. And, struck by what Tibor had just said, he went on: “You don’t mean you’re actually spending your time hunting over the island for the bits of the generator that blew?”

  “Well-why not?”

  “Why not? You just told me why not! You said the parts won’t be any good for re-use! Abdul didn’t wreck the solar collectors, did he? There’s still power going down the lines!”

  “Won’t be when the summer ends,” Tibor said defensively.

  “Hell, we knew that, didn’t we? We knew that right along! What about the tidal generators you were supposed to be rigging?”

  “We were going to build them out of scrap from the Niña, and—”

  “And Abdul half-melted the whole shebang.” Dennis drew a deep breath. “So why aren’t you there building a—a water-wheel, for heaven’s sake? They had electricity back on Earth a hundred years before they managed fission, let alone fusion. Didn’t they?”

  “Dennis, stop riding him,” Saul said. “The kind of information you’d need for that went with the rest of the computer memories which Parvati blanked out. There’s not much point in grousing about it. It’s happened, and that’s that.”

  “The hell it is! I’m not an expert on this kind of problem, but I’ve seen pictures. I could build a water-wheel without a computer telling me what to do!”

  “Then get the hell out and build one, before I throw you out!” Tibor exploded, and leapt to his feet.

  For an instant the scene froze
. Even the apathetic faces surrounding them showed a spark of interest at the prospect of a fight. But Tibor’s rage evaporated, and he subsided into his chair again, shaking his head.

  “You only just got back here,” he said in a whining tone. “Can’t expect you to understand what’s really going on.”

  “That’s true enough,” Dennis grunted. “Far as I can see, just about six things have happened, and any of them could have arisen from natural causes instead of sabotage. Like water not coming out when you turn the faucet. Hell, we have buckets, don’t we? People don’t have to walk around stinking because they can’t fetch a pail of water from the stream. And the dam was built once—why can’t it be built again?”

  “We haven’t got Dan any longer,” Saul said, exaggeratedly patient.

  “But—!” Dennis said sharply. “The more you tell me, the sillier it all seems. When this happened, didn’t you call a progress meeting and review the situation, allot new priorities, second repair teams from non-urgent jobs?”

  Saul drew back defensively. “Well—ah—it was pretty obvious what was wrong, and there was no need to depress everybody by calling ’em together and talking about it.”

  “And what the hell kind of a progress meeting would it have been, anyway, when we’d been set back practically to square one?” Tibor put in.

  Dennis shook his head dazedly. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered. “Judging by this, we don’t deserve to survive. What we’d have done in face of an earthquake, say—

  “Stuff that sort of talk!” Tibor ordered. “We’re not going to survive anyhow, so what’s the use?”

  “The way you’re letting things slide, you’re right,” Dennis agreed. “But I’m damned if I’m going to surrender without a fight! Who’s chairing the colony now? Who’s looking after admin?”

  “Well, without Abdul and Parvati—” Saul began. Dennis cut him short, raising his hand.

  “Thanks, that’s all you had to say. And that’s one thing that’s going to change, for a start.” He scooped up the last of his food, cold and tasteless, and thrust the plate away. “I’m going off to look over the island and see just how bad things really are. This kind of defeatism is nonsense!”

  He rose and turned to go, scowling. Struck by a sudden thought, he hesitated.

  “What have you done with them, by the way—the test subjects?”

  “I ordered ’em locked up,” Saul shrugged. “It was the best we could manage. Here, I’ll take you along and show you.” He too rose, and someone at an adjacent table stirred from apathy long enough to ask where he was going.

  “To look at them,” Saul said.

  With the first approach to animation Dennis had seen since his return, the others in the mess-hall got to their feet with a clatter. They all moved out together in a disorderly stream and set off up the winding village street in the direction of the Santa Maria. Walking with the rest, Dennis noted still more terrifying things: one of Tai’s aides crouched on a doorstep, asleep with his mouth open; a bucket of night-soil outside another door, unlidded, since presumably the lack of water to flush the drains …

  But it’s insane! It’s literally and completely insane!

  Also, as he was able to see when the street brought him higher, someone had been through a plot of Tai’s experimental plants and chopped them off, leaving only the stems to rot in the sun. That couldn’t have been sabotage. Yoko would have mentioned it. With the colony on the verge of starvation, what fool had spoiled potentially edible crops?

  He was so preoccupied that it took a nudge from Tibor to bring him back to awareness. He realised that the group of people in whose midst he had come to this spot had fanned out, and with unaccountable enthusiasm were shouting and jeering in a blur of noise from which he could sort out only the inflections: mockery and rage.

  What they were looking at was a cage, made of the steel reinforcement bars Dan used for building in concrete. In the cage, on its bare floor, were sitting the test subjects.

  They were all quite naked, and for lack of any facilities the floor was patched with their filth, but they were erect and alert, although thin with privation. Compared to those who mocked from beyond the bars, they were paragons of human dignity.

  “Ain’t been any change since we put them in there,” Saul was saying. “We hoped the effects would wear off—whatever they were—but I came up here only yesterday to try and get Tai to tell us what we ought to do to fix these swollen joints everyone’s getting now, and he was going on same as before about eating those damned poisonous plants of his, so I sent someone to chop ’em down, and …”

  The voice went on. Dennis stopped listening. He was staring at the figures within the cage: Dan Sakky nearest him, like an ebony Buddha; in the centre Abdul, upright as an ancient Pharaoh; next Parvati, graceful and delicate as an antelope, the look of resignation on her face slipping momentarily as she spotted and recognised him. She made a gesture to indicate the people gathered around, raised her hand to her temple and described a circle there, and unexpectedly winked at him, as to say: What do these silly little folk think they’re playing at?

  A sudden blast of white-hot fury engulfed Dennis. He strode forward, clawing at the pocket of his suit which held the gun he had never before removed except for testing. “Hey!” someone exclaimed. “What the—?”

  “Get out of the way or you’ll fry, and I shan’t weep,” Dennis said between his pale, stiff lips. He set the muzzle of the gun for a flat fan-shaped beam.

  “Dennis!” Saul said, hurrying after him. “What are you going to do?”

  “You ordered these people caged?”

  “Well—what else could we do? We—”

  “You could have tried a little pity, a little decency, just as a start.”

  “After what they did to us? Hell, we couldn’t risk them breaking loose, doing more damage, busting up more of what we’ve built!” Saul was almost gibbering.

  Dennis levelled the gun. On every side, people drew back, shivering and whispering. When they were clear of his line of fire, he set the gun parallel to the nearest side of the cage. The occupants rose to their feet and stepped as far out of range as they could.

  He pressed the trigger, and metal ran down like quicksilver. The bars, under tension, snapped in succession, each with a baritone singing noise. A second cut, and there was a gap wide enough to climb through. Dennis turned the gun-muzzle towards the watchers. Behind him, one by one, the prisoners scrambled into freedom. The last to leave was Parvati. He felt the soft touch of her hand on his nape, but dared not turn his head from surveying the group who had locked the unfortunates up.

  “Thank you,” she breathed. “You too must have seen the truth—I don’t know how. We failed to show it to them. You try. We’ll be around to help as much as we can.”

  And she loped off after her companions, who had already taken the straightest possible line out of the village and towards the wild country on the higher slopes of the island’s central hill.

  “Right!” Dennis said, when he was sure they had had a chance to make their escape. “Saul, go to the admin office and sound the siren for a general meeting. I don’t know how much longer you planned to carry on down this roller-coaster slide to disaster, but I’m quitting right here and I’m going to take the ones who have the guts with me. The rest, for all I or the planet Asgard cares, can rot in their skins. Move!”

  XVIII

  SULLENLY, yet with a curious air of relief, as though they had been silently hoping for someone to take them in charge, the colonists assembled for the meeting. At first the early arrivals just stood about on the surface of the street. On all previous occasions, they had voluntarily gone into the mess-hall and fetched seating. This time, it took the lash of Dennis’s scorn to stir them to the effort.

  “Well? Want to stand up for the whole of this session? It’s going to be a long one, but it’s up to you!”

  Shamefaced, they moved to fetch the chairs and benches. With much irritable cursin
g they eventually got them into the normal arrangement. Meantime, as though wishing to propitiate this energetic demon who had materialised in their midst, Saul and Tibor had brought the chairman’s table from the admin office, and set three chairs behind it facing the crowd. Apparently, without coming into the open and staking a direct claim, Saul had been nursing secret ambitions to exercise authority—witness his claim to have ordered the imprisonment of the test subjects. But he merely hovered around, at the back of the table, as though afraid that if he took the middle chair, the seat of honor, Dennis would order him out of it.

  For his part, Dennis ignored him. He had liked Saul at least as well as all the other people whom chance had landed him among. To discover that he was capable of such an inhuman act as creating a kind of public Bedlam for a group of unfortunates temporarily out of their minds, so that his companions could come and mock them, had filled him temporarily with a sick distrust of any human being.

  And I’m not even sure I can trust myself, after the ten lost days …

  But fresh in his memory was the puzzling whisper he had heard from Parvati as she climbed out of the cage. What did she mean by “the truth”? Yet she had seemed hopeful of his ability to save the colony, and promised help, and whatever insanity had gripped the test subjects it had obviously passed.

  Any earnest of support, in a plight like this, was welcome. He decided to accept it for what it was worth, and plough his own furrow.

  The colonists took their places, hardly talking to one another: all without exception dirty, many ragged as well, having snagged their clothes and not bothered to attempt repairs. Scurvy had branded their skins. Yet somewhere in the distant past, men so weak with scurvy they could hardly stand had fought four-masted windjammers around Cape Horn in the teeth of a winter gale, and those were ignorant gutter-sweepings, not the cream of Earth’s best-trained minds. It might no longer be possible to maintain the Asgard colony, but if they had to go home, at least they needn’t go home like cringing puppies!