Bedlam Planet Page 2

  But she had been used to a warm humid climate most of her life, at home on Earth. The weather didn’t distract her. She had paid it as much attention as she meant to today, while she was reading Kitty Minakis’s report on the probable pattern of the climate during the fall.

  Satisfied that the report contained nothing alarming, she had put it aside, taking up in its place that from Ulla Berzelius regarding materials and resources. Despite her almost inhuman power of detachment—compelled on her by the need to watch every movement and practically every thought of the colonists with more than paranoid suspicion—she felt a stir of excitement as she scanned the sheets. Last month Ulla had gloomily concentrated on the possibility of re-designing their planned equipment in terms of the aluminium and silica which could be got merely by shovelling up beach-sand. Now, here she was talking about gallium, indium, germanium; about a rock analogous to pitchblende with a high radioactive count; about a native form of fluorspar from which they could extract fluorine and, if required, employ the ancient process of gaseous diffusion to make fuel for a fission pile.

  Parvati made a check-mark on the margin of the copy of the schedule which lay before her, detailing the predicted stages of the conquest of Asgard. This island where the settlers had landed had been chosen by the original team of four explorers as ideal for a first colony. It was neither small nor large-extensive enough to offer plenty of data by which they could judge the true habitability of Asgard, yet not so big that its unexplored recesses might hide serious threats like carnivores or poisonous plants to kill over-confident and ignorant children when they started their families. It was steep enough to resist the tides. It was located in a temperate climatic zone where the fauna of the ocean were neither as fierce as in the equatorial waters nor as frenzied as at the poles, where the annual melting of the ice poured incredible volumes of nutriment into the sea and provoked a fantastic outburst of ravening greed.

  Nonetheless, in spite of all these advantages, the programme for the settlement had been laid out in gradual stages. By policy, to impress beyond doubt on the colonists that this was not tame, domesticated Earth, they had gone straight to grips with their new home. Instead of retreating nightly to the security of durasteel bulkheads, they cut native wood and fashioned huts like barracks, partitioned to afford privacy to those who had paired off, or who preferred to sleep alone. They made furniture. Currently they were baking pots of clay, since a suitable deposit had been found near the inland peak where the Santa Maria rested. It was no use relying on something manufactured lightyears away by the peak tools of terrestrial technology, when without warning they might be left naked and desperate.

  And yet …

  Parvati hesitated. At last she nodded and shrugged, and decided the gamble was justifiable. She was going to recommend to Hassan, at the progress meeting, that they omit some of the slow stages from their schedule. They could scarcely expect to leap ahead to programmed dwellings, polysensory entertainment channels and all the other trappings of the leisured culture they had left, not within the lifetimes of the first arrivals. But at the back of her mind she had always nursed the vague hope that here, with a chance to start over, mankind might avoid some of the worst mistakes he had committed at home: raping fertile lands until they became dustbowls, hunting animals like whales until it was too late to prevent their extinction, squandering irreplaceable coal and oil in furnaces and cars when they would eventually be needed as a source of food.

  It looked as though that was going to be possible. For instance, according to the report which Hassan himself had prepared-as well as being their chairman and senior administrator, he was their quartermaster and responsible fo the use they made of the stores they had brought from Earth, including the surviving ships—their solar collectors were already providing nearly all their power requirements, and if the tidal generators could be installed before winter they could cocoon their fusion generators for emergency use only. That was crucial; refining heavy hydrogen was not on the schedule for another year and a half.

  From this starting-point, optimistic conclusions radiated. They could scrap the idea of heating their new home in winter by means of a clay-pipe hot-water system connected to a common boiler, and concentrate the labour freed thereby on producing proper window-glass, a task which had posed unexpected difficulties. Small individual heaters containing unrefined molten salts and plugged into the common power-cable would be far more convenient. And so on.

  A shadow crossed the window, and she glanced around. Her brow clouded suddenly as she remembered what she, of all people, ought not to have forgotten for an instant: that it was on their human resources, not the material ones, that their success ultimately depended. She leaned back in her chair, bracing herself. Clearly Dennis Malone was going to come knocking at the door.

  In answer to his diffident tap, she called for him to enter, and he stood on the threshold with a look of faint surprise at seeing her rather than Hassan.

  “Ah—morning, Parvati,” he muttered. “Is Abdul around?”

  “He’s doing a tour of the island. We have a progress meeting today. Can I help you?”

  “Oh yes, of course. I’d forgotten.” Dennis seemed distracted, so that his eyes did not meet hers, and she surveyed him covertly while waiting for him to explain his business. She was alarmed at what she saw. His lids were puffy, most likely with lack of sleep, and there were deep lines seaming his forehead. His hands moved together nervously, as though possessed of independent life.

  Poor devil!

  Briskly, she said, “Well, I’m glad you’re here, anyway. I was just thinking yesterday I’d like to give you another checkup. Could you—?”

  “Oh, shut up, Parvati,” he said. There was no force behind the words. “What could another bunch of tests tell me that you don’t know already—that I don’t know still better because I’m on the inside? I’m a mess. I’m a wreck. About the only thing we can hope for is that I’ll sweat out my problem before it starts to bother anyone else.”

  “You’re exaggerating, Dennis.”

  “The hell I am.” He kicked around a chair, formed bentwood-fashion from slivers of the native woodplant, and slumped into it. “My trouble is that I’m a settler against my will, and not even the colony voting to give me the Niña to go home in would cure me, because I’d go crazy during the trip to Earth for fear sacrificing their spare ship meant the colonists were exterminated by something we haven’t come across and which they couldn’t run away from. Right? Don’t bother to answer. I just came in to tell Abdul that I need to go off by myself again.”

  “So soon? But you only came back from your last trip—”

  “It’s been two weeks, hasn’t it? If I’d picked up any diseases or anything, they’d have shown by now. And what other use can you make of me except send me off to scout the neighbourhood? After all, I’m the only expendable person here.”

  “A hundred and eighty people on a planet the size of Earth give or take a few per cent, and you think even one of them can be called expendable? Dennis, you’re not developing a martyr complex, are you?”

  “If I were, you’d have found it out from your tests,” Dennis muttered. “Quit fencing with me, Parvati. I know that in spite of everything—two hands, strong back, adequate intelligence, technical skills—I’m a liability. Everybody else wanted to be here, everybody else was prepared consciously and subconsciously for the idea of remaining here till their dying day. I’m the only one who’s trapped. And it follows from that that I’m the likeliest to go crazy. Something which even you couldn’t predict with your fantastic empathy might break me apart one day—a last-straw frustration, more than likely—and you might well lose someone you genuinely can’t afford to do without. Isn’t that true? Tell me honestly.”

  But before she had a chance to frame her answer, he rose and headed for the door. “I’ll wander round and see who wants some data harvested. Maybe I can come back this afternoon with enough requests to save Abdul from being as obstruc
tionist as you.”

  The door closed behind him. It was of unseasoned timber. It had been accurately cut with power-tools when it was installed, but it was warping a little now, and when it met its jamb a bulge in the wood rubbed, and caused a squeak. Parvati winced.

  Of course, he was perfectly right. Regardless of how well their plan to establish themselves was progressing, they had in the final analysis come naked to Asgard. They had to clothe themselves—indeed, to armour themselves—by power of reason alone. And human beings were not wholly rational creatures.

  That imponderable had been taken into account as much as possible, and even there luck had in most ways been on their side. Just as by policy they had set to immediately after arriving to work the native materials by hand, for the sake of the continuing psychological reinforcement which would stem from looking at the street, the houses, the boats and remembering that this was part of Asgard made over by the will of man, so too they had stocked their minds not only with the skills of Earth, but its varied culture and traditions: legend, folklore, literature, everything which could offer a pipeline to the past they had left lightyears behind them.

  In a sense which was so cynical that she had not dared discuss it with anyone else, she was even coming to think that the loss of the Pinta had been a blessing in disguise. When irrational regret at something not being available on Asgard, though commonplace on Earth, threatened to overwhelm someone, there was a rational ground for resentment to which it might be attached: the fact that instead of the three ships they had expected, there were only two. The crash had laid a long shadow of sorrow across their lives, naturally—every member of the expedition had counted all the others as friends. But, like a wound which healed to a scar without imposing a permanent handicap, that would fade.

  The sponsors of the venture had planned well. The lack of the Pinta had caused only difficulties, not failure, and perhaps the added incentive had driven people harder than they might have managed without the knowledge that catastrophe really could overtake them. That was just as well. She hated to think what another major setback would do to Hassan. As well as being the senior among them, at fifty, he was a sort of father-figure—deliberately chosen—and looked on the colonists as his family. The loss of the Pinta had put him in the predicament of an Abraham who had not escaped the charge to sacrifice his son, and, lacking visible compensation for his deed, he would have crumbled.

  Yet he, and she herself, and all the other key members of the colony, were enduring what had to be endured, and gaining strength.

  Except Dennis Malone.

  With an effort, because she knew he was correct to say his sickness could not be cured unless it were by time and his own self-mastery, she returned to her study of the progress reports. Now, however, the elation had gone from her, and indeed the light seemed to have gone from the bright summer day.

  III

  AT THE MOMENT the village street was empty, though there were several people in sight on the hillside and along the beach. Everyone had dispersed, after their communal breakfast in the mess-hall, to their daily work. During the first month or so after landing, superfluous Dennis had been in continual demand, called on by all the work-teams whenever a spare pair of hands was needed. Now, things were so well under control he had to go out and beg for assignments.

  He walked towards the harbour, more or less at random, his gun bumping his thigh as he went. To be seen without it, or without the medikit which occupied the corresponding pocket on the other side of his suit, would have been to invite the censure and rebuke of all the colonists. Not that he had to be compelled. Everything about his surroundings made him nervous. Even in the womb-like dark of his room at night, there was still the indefinably wrong smell of Asgard to remind him.

  On a kind of natural wharf, formed by a slab of rock akin to slate, which ran beside the sandy bay, he found Daniel Sakky, their construction engineer in chief, discussing with shipwright Saul Carpender the siting of the boatsheds that would make their harbour storm-proof for the winter. Daniel was a big jovial African who personalised his standard suit with whatever touches he could find; today, he had given himself a brooch of little spiky egg-cases such as were found washed up on all the nearby beaches, glistening like opals, fastened into an eight-pointed star.

  He greeted Dennis cordially, but in response to his diffident request for something useful he could go looking for, merely shrugged.

  “This planet’s being too kind to us, Dennis!” he exclaimed. “What I needed was mainly cement and a supply of steel bar, or else a source of structural plastics which could be cured on site. Ulla has found me both, when I could have made do with either. But if I think of anything …”

  On a rocky promontory further around the island he encountered Kitty Minakis, the tiny fragile Greek meteorologist whom no one would have suspected of being on speaking terms with storms, being helped by an assistant to fill the day’s batch of upper-air radiosondes from a small automatic electrolyser that broke up water and supplied the necessary hydrogen. She gave him a flashing smile and contrived to draw down the zip of her suit—already low as though the heat of the day were oppressing her—another inch on her small but beautiful bosom. No one held her fondness for men against her; it was impossible to dislike such a sweet-natured person.

  But there was nothing she could suggest for him to do which would furnish the excuse for another scouting trip away from the island. They had left robot weather satellites in orbit as they came down, and all of them were functioning; they had sown surface observation units on equally spaced islands from pole to pole, and they too were signalling on schedule.

  He exchanged greetings with a couple of Daniel’s staff who were stringing additional power-cables from the solar collectors that had started to fledge the slopes of the island like weird technological shrubs, and came to the stream which they had dammed to provide their fresh water. Ulla Berzelius, her long blonde hair clipped back from her face with a metal comb, was sifting the mud of the exposed bed and picking out small pebbles to put in a box. Beside her, Yoko Namura was lifting, examining, recording with an automatic camera and throwing away the corpses of the little water-creatures which the artificial drought had killed.

  “You’ve done too good a job on your previous trips,” Ulla said in answer to his question. “We’ve, located all the minerals which are indispensable already. Right now I’m just looking for indium—our seawater analysers came up with a minute trace which was probably washed out by a stream, and I want to know if it was this stream. But if you like I’ll cheerfully tell Abdul a white lie. Even negative knowledge is useful, after all.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Just a second, though! One thing we don’t have, which it would be nice to find in a natural deposit instead of having to make them, and that’s diamonds. I’ll bet that Abdul would love to have a supply. He keeps asking me hopefully whether the stuff I’ve located is in hard or soft strata, because we’re not overloaded with rock-drill bits. Shall I see if I can work out a list of likely localities for you?”

  “Just tell me what to programme the computers for, and I’ll do it myself,” Dennis said, cheering up instantly. “Blue clay in a young volcanic region—isn’t that right?”

  Ulla chuckled. “Start concentrating on that, on a world with vigorous tectonics like this one, and you could spend half a lifetime on the job.”

  “That would be great,” Dennis muttered. Not catching his meaning, she gave him a blank look and continued.

  “You might as well have a shot at it, though. I think I should have put enough data into the store by now to produce a manageable printout. Just punch for bort—industrial-grade stones. We certainly haven’t mapped enough of the local geology to pin down gemstones with any precision.”

  “Thanks,” Dennis said. “Anything I can do for you, Yoko?” he added to the xenobiologist.

  “The usual,” Yoko shrugged. “Shots of any creature or plant you don’t recognise, and enough clues to lead us
back to where you spotted it.”

  “Will do,” Dennis said, and climbed back out of the streambed.

  The island was roughly hexagonal, with rocky ridges connecting the central peak where the Santa Maria rested to each of the promontories. The shallow valleys between the ridges were cluttered with vegetation, except where Tai Men’s team had cleared the ground to plant vegetables from Earth in the rich soil there exposed, but on the ridges themselves there were only the warty excrescences of the woodplants. He made his way to the spine of the nearest and started to follow it towards the ship. As he went higher, he was able to see over the island’s shoulder, towards the spot where the Niña was being systematically dismembered for the sake of its components. The star-brilliance of a cutting torch hurt his eyes as it moved across the gleaming plates of her upper hull, not because it could truly be so bright at this distance, but because at every pass it eroded another of the strands that tied him to Earth, as though he were hanging at the brink of a precipice feeling the stems of a grass-clump break one by one with his weight, and could not tell how few there must be before he fell.

  Also he could see the heavily wired pens where their handful of test animals were kept, the survivors which a cautious planner had assigned to Santa Maria instead of the Pinta. There were plenty of rats and mice thanks to their rapid breeding, but the more useful hamsters and pigs were alarmingly few when one considered how soon human beings must start to eat soil-grown instead of hydroponic food.

  However, he was no longer in the mood for gloomy thoughts. Ulla had given him the excuse for an excursion by himself, and that was all he cared about right now. He hastened his steps, remembering that when he first made an ascent like this, in company with Carmen Vlady, the exertion tired him owing to Asgard’s eight per cent greater gravity. Now he was used to it and didn’t notice. Perhaps, in time, the other strangenesses of the planet would cease to trouble him.