Bedlam Planet Read online

  Somewhere in there was—

  The boat changed course abruptly, snatching him out of his brown study and back to awareness. Instantly he was alert to danger, one hand slapping down to the pocket where he kept his bolt-gun, the other poised to hit the emergency manual controls. There was no need. All that had happened was that the sonar had detected a large water-creature surfacing from the bottom—here, there was a channel nearly five hundred feet deep—and swerved to miss it.

  Excited, he saw it as it broke amid a vast bubble, a burp of stored air which it had used to go gathering its food on the lowermost slopes of the submarine mountains among which it roved. He had seen such a beast before, though only once, and swung his camera for Yoko to catch a few seconds of it before it had drawn a fresh breath and vanished.

  Now if only I were a xenobiologist … I can’t imagine Yoko losing her interest in this world before she’s very old.

  Why were there air-breathing herbivores in the oceans of this watery world? During what glacial period had their ancestors abandoned gills for lung-equivalents, and what upheaval had subsequently driven them back, like Earthly whales, to browse with their enormous comb-like lips on the deep-sea plants? Although the tumult on the water had lasted only moments, his memory retained the vivid picture of the beast: a thing like a carrot, to use a crude but exact comparison, frilled around its body with dozens of fins, bearing specialised sense-organs ranging from pressure-detectors to olfactory glands, its mouth where an Earthly creature’s tail would be, furnished with lips which served the double purpose of flukes and food-gatherers, upon which the comb-like serrations could open and shut as the feathers of a bird’s wing do.

  Fascinating!

  But his excitement was superficial. Sighing, settling back in his seat as the boat automatically resumed its course, he admitted to himself that what he felt on seeing that alien beast come charging up for air was exactly what a hunter might have felt on spotting his first elephant. Beyond the—well, literally, the fun of seeing it, what was there to gratify him? Merely the recounting of a fabulous tale to envious stay-at-homes. His temperament had never involved him in what he had imagined, a minute earlier, as furnishing Yoko with a lifetime interest: the patient dissection of a whole new biological system.

  Naturally, before being sent here for the first time, he like all his companions had been taught to use the instruments with which the Argo was equipped, and those included biological analysers. After their five months’ stay, at least half of what they now knew about Asgard’s animal and vegetable life had already been established, or at least could be guessed with reasonable certainty by comparing it with Earth’s. Gathering this huge mass of data, though, had been a matter of rote-following for him. It was the computers that took it in and understood it. All he did was feed them.

  He knew a little about a vast number of subjects. The first visitors to Asgard might have been confronted with any sort of emergency from man-eating monsters to plague. They might even have wrecked their ship and been compelled to colonise the planet involuntarily. Accordingly, they had to have a grasp of the outline of any given area of knowledge, so that they could ask the proper questions when they needed to extract more specific guidance from the computers—or guess.

  But knowing a little about many subjects was dilettantism. He had no all-absorbing passion to satisfy him. He was an observer, an explorer, a …

  “Hell, I’m a tourist!” he said to the uncaring air. And, as though that fit of gloomy cynicism had somehow relieved his intolerable mental burden, he turned to break out his noon meal from the rack of cartons behind his seat. By this evening he would have reached the first island which promised a chance of diamonds, according to the computers.

  It would be good to have work to do, real genuine valuable work which would contribute to the welfare and success of the colony. It would buy him a sort of personal stake.

  But finding diamonds wouldn’t be what he needed. He wouldn’t know a diamond in the uncut state if he kicked it on the path! The credit would belong to Ulla and the computers!

  Ripping the top from his meal-carton with a savage gesture, he muttered, “I never dreamed anybody—I or anybody else—could wind up in a state where everything was going perfectly and he was going out of his mind with frustration in spite of it!”

  IX

  IT FELT very strange to come back inside the ship after living for so long in the village below, Parvati noticed. No sooner had she become aware of the reaction than her mind was away in search of possible reasons.

  It was as though she were being screened from exterior reality, perhaps, as a metal box will screen a receiver from a broadcast. And, of course, there were metal boxes around her—from the hull of the ship itself successively reducing to the scale of the automatic elevator which was carrying her up to the computer levels, with its padded walls of a soothing dark blue.

  The ship is of Earth, she reasoned. It seems marginally unreal, because Earth is out of reach for good and all.

  The elevator stopped. Waiting to enter it and go down was Yoko, clutching a thick wad of computer printouts. They exchanged greetings, and Parvati walked forward across the floor of the computer-room. It had been the bridge too, when the ship was in flight, and someone had draped cloths over the astrogation inputs.

  She frowned at that; it was new since she last came up here. It was an irrational deed, in the sense that it was superfluous—everyone knew that the flight-controls were there, but no longer for use.

  Who did it? Who acted on the principle, “If you can’t see it, maybe it will go away?”

  Over the past few days, since the progress meeting, it seemed that an infinite multitude of such trivial—but irrational—facts had been accumulating in the corner of her memory which stored them until they generated a suggestive pattern. Ordinarily, when she had gathered so many, she settled down to puzzle over them whenever she had the chance. At present, however, she was curiously reluctant to face them.

  If she had found herself alone up here, she might nonetheless have attempted the job immediately: punched the computer-activation code which alerted those sections of the memory stocked with information about human aberrations, and tossed every petty irritation she could think of into a heap from which the computers might have drawn some conclusions.

  But she was not alone. Seated before the section of the input board which dealt with his own speciality, Tai Men was studying a printout with such concentration he did not realise she had come in until she spoke to him.

  Then he jerked and glanced over his shoulder. “Oh—morning, Parvati. How are things with you?”

  “So-so. But better than with you, to judge by the expression you’re wearing.” She unlocked a chair with a touch on its back, slid it across the smooth metal floor to a spot where she could conveniently talk to him, and released the switch so that it stayed put.

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” the biologist said unhappily. “Ah—has it been showing very much, these past few days?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘very much.’ But it has been showing,” Parvati said candidly.

  Tai Men sighed. “Yes, I thought so. And it isn’t good for morale, is it? But what I’ve run into is a pretty good excuse for paranoia, I guess … See here!” He turned the printout he was holding so that she could read it, and indicated one particular section of it with a stubby forefinger.

  “It’s a bit too specialised for me to follow,” Parvati admitted after a few seconds. “Can you spell it out in lay terms?”

  “Well, you know something about the basic techniques of fractionation, separating nearly but not quite identical biological compounds so that they can be individually analysed?”

  “I know it can be done, and I’d recognise the equipment for doing it, but I wouldn’t care to attempt it myself.”

  “Don’t blame you.” Tai sighed again, more heavily. “On the kind of scale which we realised would be necessary here, you need the most advanced ma
ss fractionator ever designed, a Shlovsky-Har. It’s about nine feet by twelve—that’s because of the long distances the compounds need to be stretched out over—but … Well, say you poured in a bucketful of effluent from a dyeworks, containing a gram of chlorine phthalocyanine contaminated with a thousand molecules of copper phthalocyanine. Inside half an hour it would not only deliver the dye, and the water separately, but tell you what you’d got and how much of it. We had one. Because it was big we had only one. And I don’t have to say what became of it, do I?”

  “Aboard the Pinta?”

  “Of course. Consequently we’re having to make do with time—wasting, repetitious, unreliable alternatives.”

  “Looking for native sources of ascorbic acid?”

  Tai hesitated. He said finally, “No. I appreciate what Abdul was trying to do when he brought up that particular red herring at the progress meeting, but he knows, I’m sure, that what I said then about natural ascorbic acid here being as rare as copper-based globin on Earth was only half the truth. The way the chemistry of life is set up on Asgard, the bug we’ve acquired is a maverick, on a par with the bacteria on Earth who can live in boiling sulphur springs. In the ordinary course of events it wouldn’t use ascorbic acid. There wouldn’t be any for it to use.

  “What we can do, of course, is the other thing I mentioned: ingest a certain amount of the substance this bug actually prefers, which our own bodies ignore, in the hope that it will then take the line of least resistance and leave our vitamin alone. But—!” He uttered an explosive compounded of frustration and rage. “We lost our big fractionator, which would enable us to purify the stuff. We lost: our Roberts synthesiser, which would enable us to go one better and tailor the native molecule so that it actually became ascorbic acid, the ideal solution. As things stand, we have precisely one means of converting the local raw materials in large quantities: our plants, which do the job cheerfully and what’s more retain in their leaves and fruits enough of the original substance to content the bug in our bowels—so far as we can estimate.”

  “In that case, where’s the problem?” Parvati demanded. “None of your test animals have been significantly upset by the soil-grown diet they’ve been eating, have they?”

  “True enough. But that’s not proof that we can do the same, Parvati! A human being is not a rat or even a pig, which eats substantially the same kind of diet as a man. Primate metabolism differs from other animals’—for example, we can’t oxidise urea to allantoin before we excrete it. We lost our rhesus macaques with the Pinta, of course, so … Anyhow, if one compound direct from the soil manages to enter the edible portions of our crops in detectable quantities, others may be doing so in amounts too small to detect with our available equipment.”

  He fixed Parvati with his eyes, his expression almost belligerent.

  “How have you been lately? Well?”

  “I have a bruise on my leg which doesn’t seem to be healing properly,” she admitted. “That’s indicative of scurvy, isn’t it? And I found blood on my toothbrush this morning.”

  “Yes, I’m not surprised. But, you see, if I say go ahead and issue native-grown food at the mess, for all I know I may be poisoning the entire colony.”

  There was a dead pause. At length Parvati said, “You’ve got a choice of evils, in other words.”

  “Yes. To risk our energy being sapped by scurvy, or to risk something which could be considerably worse.” Tai shrugged. “And I haven’t got any more sensitive piece of equipment than one of our own bodies. When I mentioned the need for volunteers at the meeting, I saw you bridle—don’t deny it! You control yourself marvellously, but we’re old friends and you don’t have a monopoly of insight into other people. Yet I don’t see any alternative.”

  “Anything which tends to separate us into classes is potentially dangerous. Our stability is precarious in spite of our apparently good progress. We dare not let any kind of elite develop among us which isn’t based squarely on superior knowledge or experience. If we were to start splitting up into brave volunteer versus cowardly shirker, or expendable test subject versus indispensable expert, we could find ourselves factionalised in next to no time.” Parvati uttered the warning in a flat, emotionless tone.

  “So what else are we to do?” Tai snapped. “Look, could we not avoid the risk you’re worried about by drawing lots, or matching to a random number series generated by one of the computers?”

  “If you feel we’re that desperate … Well, I don’t like it, but it might be better than an appeal for volunteers, I suppose.” She still sounded doubtful.

  “We’re desperate,” Tai grunted. “Mark you, I don’t propose to quit yet. I have a few more ideas I can try. I have three of my best aides looking for a natural source of antibiotics which we could safely use as a food-additive, to depress the level of the bowel bacteria while we’re digesting our meals. That takes time, though, and a big test layout—I’ve had to turn over nearly the whole of the biolab here in the ship to that single project. But if we don’t have a major breakthrough inside—hmmm … Yes, inside two weeks, maximum—we’ll be beaten anyway unless we gamble.”

  “I suppose this is a ridiculous question,” Parvati said after a few moments’ thought. “But couldn’t you transfer some of our hydroponic plants to—?”

  “It’s a ridiculous question,” Tai interrupted. “We evaluated that along with every other possibility. I take it you were going to suggest starting a batch of hydroponically-grown plants outside the ship? We’re going to do that anyhow. It’ll still leave a gap before the crops start to yield, and another thing we’re short of is gibberellins—growth-accelerators—so we can’t kick them along artificially. And the established plants, inside the ship, are already being harvested at the highest level we can risk. What we have to do is at least treble our intake of fruit juices, vegetable juices, citrus pulp, salad leaves and what have you, on top of our ordinary diet. Not instead of: on top of!”

  Parvati shivered suddenly. She said involuntarily, “It makes my skin crawl!”

  “What does?”

  “I—well, I guess I’ve known since school that everyone carries a bunch of intestinal flora around. But I’ve never been consciously aware of it before. And there’s something almost nauseating about the idea that there are other creatures using your body, isn’t there?”

  “I tell you one thing,” Tai said. “If that’s the way you feel, there are probably a hundred more of us who feel much, much worse.”

  He rose, gathered his sheaf of printouts, and headed for the elevator.

  Left alone, Parvati sat immobile for a minute or more. At length she reached out to the board of the computer and punched a one-word question: scurvy?

  The printout began before she had taken her hand away. Words and phrases jumped at her, references to the skin discoloration caused by capillary leakage, easy bruising and slow healing, swollen and painful joints, bleeding gums and loosening teeth. When she did not halt the machine at that point, it progressed from the physical symptoms to the mental, citing at length Larrey’s classic observation regarding troops overcome by it who were so lethargic they paid no attention to the approach of the enemy.

  At that, she violently countermanded the question, swept up the printout, and regardless of the waste it entailed—for it should have been wiped and re-used—tore it across, and again, and again, until the multiple thickness was too much for her strength and she let the pieces fall and scatter like snowflakes across the polished metal floor.

  FOUR THE MOON’S MY MISTRESS

  When short I have shorn my sowce face

  And swigged my horned barrél

  In an oaken inn do I pawn my skin

  As a suit of gilt apparel.

  The moon’s my constant mistress

  And the lonely owl my marrow.

  The flaming drake and the night-crow make

  Me music to my sorrow.

  While there I sing, “Any food, any feeding,

  Money, drin
k or clothing?

  Come dame or maid, be not afraid—

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  —Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song

  X

  AFTER A WEEK ALONE, time for Dennis blended into the soft contours of a dream. He had to consult his instruments before he could tell how long he had spent on the trip. He touched at island after island, one barely distinguishable from another, and made camp beside his boat—which he could run up the beaches on its hoverducts—on the triturated shells of diatom-like sea-creatures. Small animals with tufts of greenish antennae at both ends of their bodies sometimes scattered from the crunching of his feet; they lived in tunnels an inch below the friable surface. At high tide the rocks of the shoreline dipped beneath the water; when they returned to the air, vegetable fronds dangling from their sides glowed with colours as brilliant as a parakeet’s feathers, which faded to drab as the water dripped away again and were once more renewed by the tide.

  On the larger islands, carrying a back-pack of instruments and wielding a machete, he picked his way up the edges of streams, sometimes squelching in mud, sometimes going on a spongy mat of dry plant-stalks, sometimes struggling through deep layers of pebbles. From the close, mossy carpet of the “Asgard grass”, the range of flora extended by way of low shrubs and bushes to the big convoluted woodplants, but there were no trees. Occasionally he saw specimens of a rare type of wood-plant whose massive oblate body was supported clear of the ground on multiple roots, suggestive of a banyan, and he made a note of the location, because wood from that species was exceptionally tough and pliable.

  “Flowers” existed, but were neither colourful nor sweet-scented. There was a fertilisation process akin to pollination, which mixed the curious unfamiliar gene-equivalents and maintained variety—Yoko had shown him some examples under a microscope. Fluffy, sticky fruiting bodies dangled on flexible twigs and if they did not brush against another of their kind in the wind, they eventually dried out and wafted away like thistledown.