Bedlam Planet Page 5

  THREE NOT SINCE THE CONQUEST

  With a thought I took for Maudlin

  And a cruse of cockle pottage,

  With a thing thus tall (sky bless you all)

  I fell into this dotage.

  I slept not since the conquest—

  Till then I never wakéd

  Till the roguish boy of love where I lay

  Me found and stripped me naked

  And made me sing, “Any food, any feeding,

  Money, drink or clothing?

  Come dame or maid, be not afraid—

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  —Tom o’ Bedlams Song

  VII

  ONLY SAUL CARPENDER, the rangy Australian who had been selected as their shipwright and harbourmaster because his long experience of wandering around the islands of the Pacific had prepared him for conditions on Asgard, was at the little natural wharf next morning to see Dennis off. But he was in the forefront of the minds of many, many other people.

  Paradoxically, they were jealous of him.

  The planners of the Asgard colony had always taken the worst assumptions for granted when deciding what equipment to stock the ships with. It was far faster to move around any planet through its atmosphere rather than in contact with its land and water surfaces, so they might have opted for two or three compact, powerful airplanes or helicopters to furnish the colony with long-range transport. Instead they provided cushionfoils. Between island and island they could speed along on their underwater wings, and if necessary they could cross land or sandbars by means of their hoverducts. But most important of all, if their engines failed they could be stripped of their foils and still serve for inter-island transport with oars or sails. It was not by any means certain that the colonists could pass on working engines to their descendants, but seamanship must be passed on because it could equally be applied to a dugout canoe.

  Spacemanship, on the other hand, could wait—as Dennis had often cynically reminded himself. Possibly the Santa Maria might lift to space again, to explore the nearer planets. But if a ship went from here to Earth again in his lifetime, it would be owing to an irremediable disaster.

  Is there any point to all this, really? So there are human beings under two suns instead of one: so what?

  But the impulses which led human beings off on crazy ventures like this were too far below the conscious level for even the finest modern psychologists to do more than hint at explanations.

  He finished checking the long manifest he had compiled for himself by adding Ulla’s and Tai’s new requirements to the one for his last trip and striking off what he had no need for this time. His boat, rocking gently on the outgoing tide, was mostly engine and cargo space anyway, and he had put in every possible additional item against emergencies that the spare passenger space could hold, as well. Successful explorers had vivid and pessimistic imaginations, or so he had always found. But he wasn’t taking anything which might be indispensable back here on the base island, apart from the jar of vitamin capsules Tai Men had insisted on slipping into his medikit. Since the alarming discovery that scurvy had already broken out, the biologist had become almost obsessed with deficiency diseases, and was ordering a complete check of their diet.

  “How long are you going to be away?” Saul demanded, after a long thoughtful study of the loaded boat.

  Dennis shrugged. “As long as seems to be useful. I’ll keep in radio contact, of course. I arranged with Abdul to do the same as before—call up every evening at meal-time. And there’ll be a monitor on my frequency as well, naturally.”

  “A week? Two weeks? A month?” Saul seemed to want a firm answer. Surprised, Dennis resorted to jocularity.

  “Going to miss me, or something? That’s nice! But let’s just say that if you go ahead with Dan’s boat-sheds along here, I’m not likely to recognise the harbour when I get back.”

  Saul didn’t respond to his light tone. He said with a sudden uncharacteristic burst of frankness, “Wish I could cut loose like that!”

  “Why—?” Dennis had been about to say: “Why on earth?” He cancelled it, and substituted: “Why in the world?”

  “Oh! I don’t know.” Saul shrugged helplessly. “I guess—yes, maybe this is why. If it was something I could do something about which had suddenly gone wrong with our plans, I wouldn’t be worried. I’d just buckle to and sort the problem out. Hell, we lost the Pinta, didn’t we? And you saw what happened: everyone sort of cursed the universe and put twice as much energy into everything to get their own back. But this scurvy bit is different. It’s something I only knew of as a word in a history book, before now.”

  Pounding fist into palm, he concluded, “It’s ridiculous! Everything is going better than we expected bar this one thing which hasn’t even done us serious harm yet, and very well may not do harm at all—and here I am with my skin practically crawling! Does it hit you that way?”

  “I guess it does,” Dennis admitted. “But I wish you hadn’t told me how you’re feeling. I hoped it was just me.”

  High up on the skeletal web of naked girders which had been the bones of the Niña—still were, though now grotesquely revolting because they were being systematically flayed of their hull-skin—Abdul Hassan saw the plume of steam that rose when Dennis fired the engines of his boat. He paused in the conversation he was having, which concerned the problem of which cannibalised parts should be held in reserve, which put straight to work, and repressed an unexpected shiver.

  Tibor Gyorgy, who was responsible for their electronics systems, said in alarm, “Something wrong, Abdul?”

  With some effort, the colony’s chairman recovered his self-possession. “No, nothing,” he lied, and went on talking in a perfectly normal tone. But behind the mask he was wishing there could be a way out for him, as there was for Dennis—wishing, in effect, that he was not indispensable.

  All right, so it’s wonderful to be here on a strange new planet and find that outwardly it’s kindly, gentle, hospitable … But that’s only the way it looks. We know that it may injure us in some way we can’t suspect because we never lived on another planet before, at least not without canned air, spacegear, big obvious dangers like vacuum. So we must think, think, think and never ever stop!

  How long can a human being manage to burden his mind with the need to make a conscious decision about every action he undertakes, even about his next breath? And I of all people dare not make even a single error.

  I’m in a trap, and I don’t know what the trap is. I only know it’s there.

  They had chosen Parvati Chandra for the colony, and Max Ulfilas who was dead, because they were not simply psychologists. They both had a rare, perhaps unprecedented, gift for extracting the pattern of a trend from actions they could see still going on. Asgard was sure to evolve its own kind of society, different from any on Earth—although since the raw material was human, there would be resemblances. It was necessary to provide that society with a sociology that did not need the hindsight of history to know when it had gone astray.

  Crossing a ridge on her way to one of the experimental vegetable-plots, she glanced back and saw Dennis’s boat as it rose on its foils after leaving the harbour. For an instant she was overwhelmed by a vain desire: that she could have accepted his invitation of last night to go with him on his exploring trip.

  But I couldn’t desert the colony when it faces its first major crisis … Yet I want to. I want to desperately!

  Dispassionately, she considered for the first time whether she might not have to recommend the abandonment of Asgard, and whether she could cope with the hysterical resentment of the would-have-been settlers.

  Tai Men was again taking the morning sick call at the entrance to the Santa Maria’s main lock. There were no new cases of scurvy today, and naturally all those to whom he had administered massive doses of ascorbic acid were instantly on the mend. But there remained the risk that no way would be found to cope with the recurrence of this trouble, or the develo
pment of another like it. In which case the resentment of the colonists would devolve on him, because the cause of their failure would lie in his area of responsibility.

  I wish I could duck out like Dennis, Tai Men thought. And come back in a month’s time to find the problem solved…

  For Kitty Minakis, launching the usual batch of high-altitude radiosondes, the envy she felt on noticing Dennis’s, boat stemmed chiefly from boredom. Once, long ago, she had thoroughly enjoyed the speciality to which she had committed her mathematical talents; she was a brilliant mental calculator capable of handling even such complex independent variables as were involved in weather forecasting with minimum recourse to computers.

  But she had mastered that. Centuries of gathering information about Earth’s weather had reduced prediction to almost an exact discipline. She had offered herself for Asgard in the hope of finding new, tougher challenges.

  Instead, she had found Asgard’s weather ridiculously simple. It was closer to the ideal case of a water-covered globe than Earth, hence everything was less complex.

  Sighing, she wished she could escape, even for a few days, from what was becoming a dull, repetitious job.

  Dan Sakky had seized gladly on the chance of assigning two of his team to help Tai Men, and today, in place of one of them, he was driving a powerdozer and levelling foundations. Getting to grips with the basics of his job—that was what he needed. He wanted the resistance of rock, the dull stolidity of clay. He would almost have preferred to be using a pick and shovel.

  Pausing to watch Dennis’s boat as it skimmed towards the horizon, he wished that he too could find a brief respite. He had spent too long with abstracts, and abstracts were soft, easy, frustrating. Already in his spare time he had designed a gloriously functional city to occupy this island, capable of housing and servicing half a million people in enormous comfort. But all that was a game.

  And, although it was certainly good to wrestle with the obdurate material he used for his creations, at the back of his mind sniggered the suspicion that it might all go for nothing because the people to use what he built might be too sick to enjoy what he gave them. Over that, as a construction man, he had no control.

  Standing on the dam which held back their reservoir of fresh water, Ulla Berzelius glanced up from the dials of her portable analyser, and spotted Dennis’s boat as it vanished. She had just discovered that the indium she was looking for was present in adequate quantities.

  Hell! What’s the use of a world which gives you exactly what you think you want, then takes away, mocking, something you didn’t know you needed? I wish I could be going off like Dennis, not in search of these damned dull minerals that we already knew from the astronomers must exist, but looking for jewels—enormous, lovely, absolutely useless jewels!

  I wonder how many more of us are sick of things we need, and desperate for things we’d simply enjoy.

  VIII

  THE COMPUTERS had furnished Dennis with a shortest course taking in all the promising areas where the local geology hinted at diamond deposits. It had also indicated that by following the tide-run he could keep his time away from the island down to a maximum of nine days.

  Perversely, he elected to follow the charted course in precisely the opposite direction. He felt that if he could not stretch his absence to the point where before he turned for home he was hungry for company, he was never going to rid himself of his craving for Earth.

  Isn’t it curious that the explorer, not the settlers, should be homesick?

  Resting easily in the open cockpit of the boat, its foils holding it level four feet above the peaks of the gentle summer waves, he considered that paradox, and decided that it wasn’t a paradox at all. Asgard was a very beautiful world—more so than Earth, indeed, for man’s callousness and stupidity had not raped its plains into deserts nor smeared its rich valleys with ugly, monotonous townscapes. He yearned symbolically for Earth simply because that was the place from which he had set out, the place where he had been given the chance to gratify his explorer’s urge. Exploration for its own sake was a luxury Asgard would not be able to afford for generations.

  And yet…

  He thought about the people among whom he was seemingly stranded for the rest of his life, when he had meant at most to spend a year with them and then return taking whichever of them had proved unable to endure the stress of the new world. Was he not fortunate to have escaped that duty? By the time they caved in and abandoned their self-respect to the point of creeping home, whipped-dog-fashion, the failed colonists would have been abominable travelling companions, most likely needing to be kept tranked to their eyeballs for the entire duration of the voyage.

  And were these people not as stimulating, as intelligent, as talented, as might have been found in any city on Earth to which he could have retired? Maybe more so, for in a city they would be diluted among a vast horde of nonentities, needing to be sought out and put in touch with one another, whereas here they were concentrated and united.

  Yes, all that is true. But somehow it doesn’t reach me where it counts.

  He felt he was groping towards the recognition of an important truth, which perhaps no one else among the colonists except Parvati would have reached. The day was bright and warm again, with a breeze just vigorous enough to cream the occasional wavetop into foam, so that the deep emerald sea was touched with a veining of white, as though it were all one flowing gemstone; the sun gleamed on the polished nodules of the wood-plants which decorated the crowns of the nearby islands, a warm red-brown between the colours of mahogany and sequoia-bark, and lay like warm syrup among the close-set shrubs and bushes which filled the intervening valleys. To many human beings, could they have been snatched forward from barbarous ages in the past, the mere sight would have suggested paradise.

  And still ought to. Only …

  The formulation of the concept he sensed, but could not pin down, was like trying to mould wisps of smoke into a statue. Sighing, he made the usual automatic check of his instruments and found nothing was wrong—that also being usual—before starting a fresh attempt to sort out his ideas.

  He spread out one of his charts across his knees and studied it, because of a point which looking at the nearby islands had brought to mind.

  I wonder if our skills are too great? It took men a hundred thousand years to go from grunts and fire-hardened sticks to adequate maps of their home planet. This map took about a hundred hours: photographs from space, collated to eliminate the fuzziness which cloud-cover imposed on the image, converted automatically into contoured equivalents, and printed by the score.

  And yet that wasn’t what he was after, either. The skills of any given moment were the product of human thinking, whether they were on the Neolithic level or the Nuclear. His voyage in the Argo was about as remarkable, in perspective, as the travels of its legendary namesake, although, given modern longevity treatments, he had devoted less of his lifespan to his travels than those ancient Greeks.

  On the other hand, of course, one might argue that the scale of the challenges men faced had not kept pace with their ingenuity. He glanced up from the map to identify an island which, by his chart, should just be passing on his starboard side, and noticed how very closely it resembled the one where men had settled. This he had been struck by on his first visit, though. When they moved about the planet’s surface, staying briefly in each of the climatic zones from polar to tropical in order to assess the habitability of each, they had chosen their landing-sites more or less randomly within each zone.

  There was much less variety here than on Earth, one had to concede that, even though the total effect was un-Earthly. For instance, their base island was hexagonal and spined with ridges radiating from a central peak; the contours on the chart he held made it look like an X-ray photograph of an Earthly sea-star.

  But so was that island yonder, whose appearance he had just glanced up to verify. The lines suggested by the ridges of one could be traced across the seabed to
the termini of others like them on another island. There was a web of wrinkles all over the planet, and wherever you went you found much the same physical features shading gradually from one area to another. Under the sea, of course, one inevitably found a geology more like Earth’s. But men were surface-living creatures. They could learn from their submarine survey remotes that the equivalent of continents existed on Asgard; with their own eyes and the touch of their bare hands, however, they could detect only a sort of vast Pacific. There was not even an Australia to provide contrast; the largest island on the whole planet was smaller than Britain.

  Now, he realised, he was getting somewhere with his meditations. It was a wonderful thing to conquer a whole new world under an alien sun by the pure power of reason—analysing, testing, drawing conclusions, and acting on them—but for him at least the mere solving of problems was not enough justification to stay alive. When all the factors were known before you committed yourself, no external influence could surprise you. He remembered Kitty Minakis rising at their first monthly progress meeting, the only one they had held inside the ship, to answer some questions about the weather the colony would have to contend with. She had said something to the effect that the temperature of Asgard was not actually higher than Earth’s, in the sense that its distance from the sun gave it a comparable quantity of solar radiation. But owing to the seasonal nature of the icecaps, less heat was reflected from snow and ice, and the annual melting produced little more than an aberration in the ocean temperature—it didn’t give rise to huge cold currents like the polar waters of Earth.

  What was the image she used? “The typical polar phenomenon here is not snow, as it is at home, but merely fog.”

  There was something definite about snow: water after a change of state, abruptly differentiated into white flakes. But fog was merely a clammy nuisance.