Bedlam Planet Page 13

  Unless …

  XX

  FOR A WHILE, his sheer energy was enough to maintain his authority over the others. Even Saul, who had been publicly insulted far worse than Tibor—because everyone conceded that elaborations like electronics must take second place to essentials like food and shelter—grudgingly decided to cooperate, and forwent his speciality to lend a hand where he was needed, in the same way as Dennis had done following their arrival.

  But he began to sense a growing disquiet when his preoccupation with the mystery of his own good health led him to inquire what had become of the test subjects.

  Briefly, when he recovered his senses on the diamond island—as he now thought of it—he had been angered by the realisation that no one had come to search for him. Now, trapped in an endless maze of immediate problems, he was compelled to admit that he was capable of the same neglect. He had seen and heard nothing of them since he set them free from their cage. He had promised himself that he would make arrangements for their welfare; they must be found, fed, if humanly possible helped to return to their place in the community.

  Then everything fell on him, as though the moon had been pitched from the sky, and there was never the time to decide how to tackle the job, nor the spare person who could be assigned to carry it out.

  That reminds me: I used to be haunted by the moon, where my hope of return to Earth was smashed to bits. I haven’t given it a thought for days. I don’t even know what phase it’s reached right now!

  Perhaps that was a symbol of the way the change he had deliberately set out to force in the minds of the other colonists—by now he longer separated himself from them—was working in his own brain. He was trying to get rid of every association with the security of Earth, the ultimate refuge and escape route. It seemed logical to encourage the subconscious acceptance of the truth he had tried to drive home at the first progress meeting he called: that they were not now Earthfolk, but citizens of Asgard. He had abolished the nightly watch in the Santa Maria, though prudence had prevented him from suggesting that it be cannibalised in place of the Niña, much of which was now mere scrap-heap thanks to Abdul. Also he had made the meetings weekly instead of monthly. Asgard’s moon followed a thirty-six day cycle, not the twenty-nine day cycle of an Earthly month; the month as a unit of time was therefore irrelevant. It was, in a word, alien.

  However, that had not been in the forefront of his thoughts when he instituted the change. He felt rather that the colonists needed encouragement. To be reinforced in their decisions by news of successes from other sections: that was part of the fundamental attitude on which the colony’s administration had always been predicated. Yet as the time seeped away it became more and more plain to him that this meed of encouragement was like the supportive doses of ascorbic acid they were taking. It was a crutch, at best, enabling the crippled community to take another half-step forward, but next time it would be a half of a half-step, and then …

  Zeno, damn you! Come here and reassure us that Achilles did beat the tortoise in the end!

  And, finally, the day arrived which he had known in his heart of hearts must come—the day when Ellen Shikalezi entered the admin office, now his headquarters, without preamble, and told him that the supply of ascorbic acid had run out.

  He pushed back his chair and looked for a long time through the unglazed window of the office. Window-glass was one of the things they had classified as luxuries; when the worst cold of winter hit them, they would make do by boarding the windows over. There would be power for one fluorescent lamp per room, at least.

  If we live into the winter …

  Beyond the hole in the wall, clouds scudded across the sky. Over to the east, some of them had shredded into an amorphous mass. There was going to be their first rainstorm some time within the next sixty hours, according to the forecasts.

  I’ve almost forgotten what rain on a roof sounds like!

  And there too was a clue to what must be done, but like all the others it eluded him. Sighing, he turned his attention back to Ellen. She was a plump, very dark woman, with what must ordinarily have been a motherly air, but now it was rather grandmotherly. She had lost a tooth owing to the scurvy weakening her gums, and she had settled herself stiffly in her chair thanks to the pain of her swollen joints.

  “I guess we’ve been over all the alternatives,” he said at length.

  “There’s one alternative,” Ellen said. “That we use the native-grown crops. Since you tore that monumental strip off Saul for ordering some of the crops chopped down, we’ve kept them going—but more as a kind of ritual than for any practical purpose.”

  Ritual? The word seemed pregnant with unspoken meaning. Once more he failed to identify the concept he was groping after, and resumed talking.

  “They’d provide what we need?”

  “Tai said they would,” Ellen shrugged. “Me, I’ve been sort of busy. I didn’t re-check his findings. Couldn’t, after the mess he made of the biolab.”

  Dennis hesitated. Suddenly he said, “You know something curious? I never thought of it before. But I guess you could have predicted who was most likely to take over as a replacement section chief, like yourself. It’s turned out to be the people who didn’t instantly forget everything they ever learned from the six we lost, just because they went out of their heads owing to—well, whatever it was.”

  “But you don’t push it too hard,” Ellen said wisely. “I noticed the same thing. Most of us have this big mental block developing, don’t we? Saul’s a prime example, but you get it from everyone to some degree.”

  “How do you mean—you don’t push it?”

  Ellen shrugged. “I was thinking of what happened at the meeting when you tried to get people to take an interest. That didn’t work out so well, did it?”

  “Damned right it didn’t,” Dennis admitted and thought back to that climactic moment when he had come close to losing his hard-won grip on the colonists’ minds.

  Was it the second meeting, or the third, after his return? Or was it—? Never mind! He had been plagued, as usual, during the previous night, by the thought that simply turning loose the captives from Saul’s cage-Bedlam was not a service to them. By now they might have starved, drowned, died in any of fifty ways. And casting them out of the community altogether smacked too much of using them as scapegoats for his liking.

  It wasn’t fair—that was the basis of his attitude. All right, accept the likeliest assumption: that something in the native-grown vegetables and fruits they had sampled had driven them insane—even that their derangement was becoming permanent, as Saul believed—did that instantly afflict them with some sort of magical taboo, rendering them untouchable? They were still human, for pity’s sake!

  Saul maintained that, because when he tried to consult Tai about the deficiency they were suffering from the biologist insisted on the same solution as he had offered before, the five of them and hence presumably Kitty as well were hopelessly out of their senses.

  Yet I myself …

  That was something he had not dared mention to anyone, even Ellen. He could have spoken of it to Parvati; he could have come clean to her, and instead of hiding behind a fuzz of prevarications about his successful hunt for diamonds and a passing illness due to toxaemia, could have told her that he went mad for ten mortal days.

  But his grip on the irritable, weak, depressed colonists was too precarious for him to be honest about that. Someone might have said, next time he lost his temper, that they were in the charge of a crazy man and might just as well have stuck with Abdul. Indeed, when he raised the question of the test subjects at the meeting, that was very nearly what Saul did say. He heard the voices in memory, shrill with anger.

  “Who cares what’s become of them?”

  “But—”

  “Let ‘em rot! They ruined months of hard work that we sweated and slaved over! Are we to invite them back, say, ‘Pretty please, come and smash some more of the things we need to stay alive’? Good r
iddance, that’s what I think!”

  “That’s right! That’s right!”

  “Yes, but they were testing something which could have meant life or death to—”

  “So what? Death’s better than going out of your mind, isn’t it? And where do we find the spare resources to cope with crazy people who can’t work to support themselves?”

  Luckily, from that embryonic red herring, he had been able to steer the argument into a review of resources. But he knew it had been a close call. He had not again dared to raise the question in a general meeting, though he had discreetly inquired of everyone he encountered as he made his regular surveys of the island whether they had seen any sign of the missing six.

  Nobody had—or at any rate, nobody admitted to it. By now, therefore, it was reasonable to assume that Asgard had claimed its own first human lives, as though jealous of its smaller rival the moon, which had claimed so many and so soon.

  And in a little while …

  He shied away from the premonitive vision of corpses on the thresholds of their homes, of the gradual rotting of the roofs and walls they had laboured to erect, of the ultimate ground-shiver in response to mountain-building elsewhere on the planet which would indeed shake the Santa Maria loose and scatter the relics of man like skittles. Then a tsunami would come, and wash the fragments into the depths of the sea, and there, in some unimaginable future, an as-yet unevolved Asgard scientist would puzzle over scraps of incorrodible metal and be laughed at by his respectable colleagues for hypothesising a visitation from outer space …

  ”I’ve got to go off by myself and think,” he said harshly, and thrust his chair back. Heedless of her attempts to stop him, he strode out of the room and walked blindly up the flank of the nearest ridge.

  From then on, for hours, he wandered about the island, avoiding more than the curtest of exchanges with the people he met. The noon siren sounded for mess, and he ignored it, welcoming the additional isolation it brought him because everyone else converged on the village.

  Maybe we could save the time it takes to walk to and from work if we packaged the food and delivered it on site …? What’s the point, though? Were all going to diel We’re not going to leave anything behind except bones!

  Weary to the marrow, he sat down on a woodplant overlooking almost all the traces of man’s temporary presence on Asgard. Was all this to be for nothing—was it all to be destroyed by the chance action of wind and weather?

  His mind, like the day, darkened with clouds of murky grey. Distracted, he picked with his fingers at the soft, almost spongy bark of the woodplant he was sitting on, tearing free fragments and toying with them. That a venture on which people had expended their best efforts and their most precious hopes should be doomed because of a tiny bacterium—

  His thoughts broke off in mid-flow. He drew his hand away from his mouth, to which it had strayed, and stared in dismay at what he saw. The bit of bark which he had been chewing was dark with his saliva, and there were little woody shreds of it between his teeth, which his tongue sought to dislodge.

  Am 1 crazy, doing a thing like that?

  Horrified, he was about to hurl the thing from him, when a voice spoke from nowhere, tinged with a chuckle of approval.

  “I thought so! I don t know how you found out, but it was clear that you’d learned the truth.”

  He snapped his head around to the right, and saw Parvati, half-hidden among the jumbled rocks that spined the ridge: eyes sparkling, face glowing with health, mouth turned upward in a smile. Jumping to his feet in amazement, he called to her, but all she did by way of reply was to blow him a kiss. Then she dodged away among the rocks, and by the time he reached the spot where he had seen her, she had disappeared.

  XXI

  FOR AN infinite age he stood staring stupidly from the bare ground, where he was sure he had seen her, to the fragment of bark in his hand, and back again. Had she really been here, or had his overloaded mind generated a delusion?

  Or …?

  The third possibility was so paradoxical it braked his thinking to a dead halt, as though he were plodding through quicksand and had grown totally exhausted. Logic insisted on telling him the concept was nonsensical, yet instinct declared that this was the only correct alternative of the three.

  Both.

  Baffled, he felt a lunatically disproportionate sense of frustration, as when everything else must stop because of a need to sneeze, yet the sneeze will not come. He tried to explain to himself how it might be possible for an event to be simultaneously real and unreal, because something below consciousness was telling him that this was tremendously important, but he came no closer to it than a hornet-swarm of apparently random associations: from his ancestral heritage, the sid; from his technical training, the weird mechanics of qua-space; from his elementary education, the arguments of relativity; from the recent past, a promise in Parvati’s voice about there being more traps on Asgard than anyone had yet fallen into …

  His hand was still reflexively clutching the scrap of bark he had been absently chewing. What could possibly account for such a stupid act as … ?

  Click!

  Once, a very long time ago, on a beach not far from where he was now standing, there had been a tall, rather graceful if not especially beautiful, and extremely sensible young woman named Sigrid Kallela, and a man a few years older, tough, equally sensible, named Dennis Malone. And something had come storming out of his subconscious like a hound of hell, chasing him away from all rationality and into a state of basic animality.

  Why were there high fences and strong cages to contain the experimental animals they kept here?

  Why were there only terrestrial test animals, when for a century the men of Earth had farmed and herded the creatures of the sea?

  Why, when there was nothing on the whole of Asgard as far as had been determined more advanced than a squid or a codfish—nothing at all to compare with a dolphin or an elephant—was there precisely one group among the colonists dignified with the status of an independent section under its own section chief and yet not directly concerned with the establishment of survival of the colony: that one being the xenobiological section?

  Why are toe afraid of animals?

  Very deliberately, he raised the scrap of bark to his mouth again and started to chew, considering the flavour. It was in no way strange, despite the fact that he could call to mind no earthly comparison. It was pungent like nutmeg, but it was not nutmeg; it was bitter, like oil of almonds, but it was not oil of almonds; it was fragrant, like orange-peel, but it was not orange-peel …

  Never mind. It was familiar. It assuaged a hunger far too deep for words.

  Gradually, as he masticated the woody bark and swallowed the juice from it, his thinking clarified. Instead of the wild grab-bag of associations which had welled up a few minutes before, he found himself drawing perfectly sensible analogies to his experience, from soberly learned historical facts. He spat out a few stringy remnants and looked around for a fresh piece, not realising until after he had selected one that he had had some standard of judgment by which to make his choice: bark of a particular colour and sheen, something told him, was better than the rest.

  Was this why he had been able to go on reasoning, improvising, making shift, when everyone else was lost in a fog of impotence? Could be—why not? After all, there were precedents, and he could now call them to mind with as much precision as an instructor briefing a class.

  For example, during the preparation for the Argo flight, he and his companions had been crammed with information about survival problems. The data came from every period of history and every kind of civilisation, and in some cases from beyond civilisation. He had been told about the Australian aborigines and their use of pithuri; he had been told about the Bedouin tricks of steeping liquorice stalks in their drinking-water because it cut down water-loss by restricting urination; he had been told about the first lunar settlers, and long-voyage explorations which carried men to Pluto
, and many, many more.

  Somewhere in with the rest he had been told about one of the pioneer round-the-world trips by a nuclear submarine, following which the crew came ashore with an inexplicable need to eat cottage cheese. A check showed that they were short of calcium, and their bodies knew what they consciously did not: that this was the quickest way to replenish their supply.

  Meditatively chewing on the bark of an alien plant, Dennis contemplated the ways in which the animal was wiser than the man.

  At length he started to walk towards the shore. He chose his direction in the same reflexive fashion as he had chosen the right piece of bark to put in his mouth. That way lay the nearest of the other uncountable islands on the face of Asgard. He passed a few of his companions, tiredly going through the motions of tending the crops which they had brought here to plant, yet refused to eat, and accorded them no more than a curt nod. They for their part were too debilitated to spend time wondering why.

  Eventually he came to the sea, peeling off his suit as he went, and threw it aside as he crossed the tide-line. He strode out into the shallows. Someone behind him seemed to have noticed what he was doing, because he heard a voice raised, shrill with complaint, which said something about trying to stop him. But although the cry was succeeded by the noise of running feet, before the pursuit reached the water’s edge he was a hundred yards out and swimming strongly, and when he glanced back he saw a group of five or six men and women clustered there on the beach, not daring to come after him.

  And yet, sooner or later, they must, or the fiction of mans conquest of Asgard would remain—a fiction.

  Keeping a wary eye out for the species of water-creature with red fronds dangling beneath it which had stung him when he went swimming from the diamond island, although he doubted whether a second dose of the poison would have the spectacular consequences of the first one, he forged steadily through the clear water towards his goal. He met several of the native species, but most sheered away from him, as though whatever element of alienness their organs enabled them to sense from him alarmed them. A pretty greenish beast with a sort of sail, vaguely akin to a Portuguese man-o’-war, was too busy shedding its autumnal crop of egg-purses to worry about tacking out of his way, so he paid it the courtesy of making a short detour. The sun was still well above the horizon, however, when he reached the beach of the island he was aiming for and was able to stand up.