by Jerry
“No. But if the prospect of such a danger convinced the Vanguard not to colonize this world, then I would not be unhappy!” Wing emphatically pushed a fat leafy branch out of the way to climb past it. Joe failed to catch the branch before Wing released it. The branch struck Joe in the face.
“Keep your martyr complex to yourself!” he snarled.
“So sorry!” Wing said.
“How far do we still have to go?”
“Less than half of the way, I think. We have come far. This world’s gravity is a bit less than that of Earth, and walking uphill is easier.”
Joe squinted into the ultramarine gloom filled with shapes and shades that had no names in human language, yet. The unearthly silence—no birds, no insects, no wind—pressed down like the stillness of the deep sea. Joe felt lightheaded, as if his head weighed nothing. Sweat coated his bare skin. Its chill made him think of being in seawater. Maybe instead of an allosaur jumping on them it would be a shark lowering from above. And maybe he was slightly delirious from the stasis fever.
Wing examined a branch. In the uncertain light, he puzzled over it. “Tetrapterous!” he declared.
Joe asked, “How the hell can you be a field botanist and not want to live here?”
“Oh, I do!” Wing said quickly. “But if we colonize this world, we will eventually wreck it. It is bad enough that we wrecked the world of our origin.”
“Our ancestors did,” said Joe. He added pointedly, “Particularly those nationalities who grossly overpopulated their land.”
“Come,” Wing said shortly. “Night is falling.”
The leafy trees thinned out slightly. But the gloom turned darker and less useful for seeing. The ground roughened. Joe stumbled on big rocks, making clumsy missteps that caused the sling to chafe the back of his neck. In what was left of the light, the way up the mountain looked steep and forbidding.
Jagged stone outcrops slivered the starry sky.
“This mountain is openly rocky only at its crown.” Wing sounded hopeful. “Our maps in Unity Base show many streambeds running down the mountain’s crown. They seem to be the courses where rain or melting snow runs off in some seasons. At this time of year, the streambeds are dry and full of low, annual vegetation, and may be the easiest way up.”
“What if the vegetation has thorns?”
“In the absence of animals here, that is unlikely.”
Because Wing hoped to strike a streambed, he angled up the mountainside. That was fine with Joe. The going was difficult enough without trying to go straight up. After the jolts of slipping and stumbling repeatedly. Joe’s shoulder began to ache again. And his good right hand got still more scrapes. Blood, plant juice, dirt, water, and sweat mingled madly on his skin. He gritted his teeth and followed Wing.
To make matters worse, the sea-delusion came back. This time he found himself obsessed with the idea of climbing up from the still blue deep into a killing surf. It became an act of will to put one foot in front of another. Even while cursing his brain for its gullability, he experienced the irrational sensation of wave action rocking his body. He was racked by the feeling that, if he climbed higher, the surf would fling him against murderous rocks. In desperation, he determined to master the delusion and all of its relatives: to figure out why they happened.
He went to work, attacked the facts with total intellectual concentration, made an all-or-nothing contest of it. And won—a more personal victory than usual: his mind made logical sense of the circumstances that had been toying with his brain. The sea-delusion faded away.
Joe grinned, an invisible expression. Night had fallen. In nearly total darkness, they had to inch along by feel.
The land dipped, turning loose and pebbly as it did. “This is our dry waterway, I hope,” Wing panted. “Let us ascend.”
“Fine with me!” Joe charged uphill. Stones slipped and turned underfoot. Then his heel struck something soft and slippery, causing him to come crashing down on one knee. Wing was by his side instantly, helping him up. His knee hurt. Joe cursed furiously.
“You have just stepped on the highest life form of Westpark,” said Wing. “It was a zucchini slug.”
“Too bad!” Joe grated. He limped to a large rock and sat down on it. Nursing his skinned knee, Joe brooded. “Park, hell! This world’s way too weird to call it a park!” Wing simply seated himself on a nearby rock. Joe said, “You know, you really cracked up back there. In the bog. Anything like that ever happen to you before?”
“Certainly not!” said Wing, a shadow with an indignant voice. “Smells often inspire nostalgia on my part, but not so overwhelmingly as that.”
“Did you see anything outside before we crashed that could have startled the pilot?”
“No,” said Wing. “Did you?”
Briefly Joe described the delusion of mangled and bleeding clouds. “A sight like that, plus his ‘touch of fever,’ might explain him making a bad mistake.”
“He was flying too close to the mountain for safety. People in Unity Base have tended to become careless, as if this were a park and we all came here on vacation.” Wing was silent for a moment. “What was it—the blood clouds?”
“Water, air, and light,” said Joe. “And animal brains.”
“We imagine violence when there is none?”
“No. Given hopelessly inconclusive data, our brains jump to conclusions.” He shifted to a less uncomfortable place on the stone. “What happens when you look at a visual paradox—an illogical drawing? Your brain shuttles between alternative interpretations, rather than dismiss the thing as impossible.”
“But such inventions are indeed impossible. Unnatural. This place is utterly natural.”
“That,” Joe stabbed at the talking shadow with his forefinger, “is a philosophical premise, not an experiential one! As you are wont to point out, my friend, we did not evolve here. For us this place is not natural!”
“Mmmm . . .”
“Now, if a smell drifts into your olfactory receptors, and it consists of complicated organic molecules unlike any on Earth—what does the brain make of it? Dismiss it as nonsense, or jump to a conclusion?”
“Possibly the latter,” Wing admitted. “But if so, I must admit that my brain has jumped to astonishing conclusions this evening. At one point, I smelled wet dog. And again gasoline.
Then there was the hot peanut oil.”
“Your wok bog produced a complicated smell, God only knows how many different organic volatiles, how many accidental similarities to terrestrial molecules that occur in totally different contexts. What we had there was the olfactory equivalent of ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ ! Sure, your brain was astonished. Jumped to a conclusion at random.”
The shadow bobbed, Wing nodding. “Perhaps so! But the blood clouds would seem to be a far simpler puzzle to the senses, and a less immediate one. How could that have so startled our pilot as to precipitate a crash?”
“Right then, he hadn’t left himself much room for error,” said Joe. “Now, think about that light, Catharin’s ‘seamoonlight.’ In the context of our evolutionary history that’s unnatural. Bright blue moonlight—mixed with red sunlight—alien! And the clouds here look different—the gravity’s different—hell, the bottom line is an alien gestalt. Everything is slightly different. Adds up to a global intuition of impossibility, eh?”
“Mmm! Mmm! But does that necessarily cause people to succumb to . . .?”
“Let’s say delusions. Compelling ones. People go about their business, the sense of impossibility reaches critical mass and then brains jump to conclusions. Illogical ones, maybe disastrous ones.”
The shadow moved. Wing was going to look at the crushed slug. A breeze lightly stirred the surrounding trees. And it was not more pleasant than the dead stillness which had preceded it: the breeze made a whispering sound in the trees. If he dwelled on the wind whispers, Joe’s brain would jump to the conclusion that it heard sibilant words.
“I thought I saw the
remains of the slug move and wondered if it were another illusion,” said Wing. “It was not. The undertakers have arrived.”
“Undertakers?”
“Insects—or insect analogues of some kind—the ground is alive with them. They are stirring and digging, and the slug is disappearing into the ground.” Wing’s voice sounded slightly strangled.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Joe. Neither of them mentioned the dead pilot, lying under a broken frond on deeper and darker soil than the dirt here. Together they fled uphill.
The ground underfoot was a mess of loose rocks and scree. The scree slid out from under Joe. He seized a bush. It doubled over like rubber, letting him fall flat and hard, which knocked the wind out of him. When he finished wheezing, Wing said, “Go by hand and foot. That way there is less far to fall.” The terrain got even worse. It turned into a jumble of rocks and plants. The stuff tended to slip, taking them down with it in a shower of dirt and leaves. Joe’s shoulder hurt savagely. His thin, strained grunts sounded almost like whimpering.
Wing paused. “Is the painkiller wearing off?” he asked, lightly touching Joe’s shoulder. “I have the kit. There is another ampule, if I can see to administer it in the dark.”
“After we’re out of this!”
They crawled further. “This is debris!” Wing exclaimed. “We are near the top of the mountain. Material from the blast fell here.”
Minutes later, they emerged from the jumbled plants and ground. A sky full of stars hung above them and the mountain’s bare crown loomed ahead. With a groan, Joe lay flat.
“Now for the medicine,” Wing said, briskly unzipping the first aid kit. “Ah! I can see fairly well. There is so much starlight.” He carefully injected the painkiller.
“Looks pretty clear from here on up.”
“It is steep, with a few trees. Mmmm. There must be a chain of waterfalls in the season of melting snow: I see many steps or terraces. That will make it easier for us.”
“Is that your Third Planet?” Joe pointed to an untwinkling, ruddy point above the mountain.
Wing sighed. “Yes.”
“You’ve got a religious affinity for it.” Joe said suddenly. “Never mind the scientific camouflage, why are you convinced that we ought to start the colony there? Why shouldn’t we have a second chance to cooperate with nature—here?”
“Since you ask,” Wing said slowly, “Because God has not given this world to us.”
“How do you know?”
“God gave us the Earth and its living things to name, to enjoy, to use. I cannot believe that the same rights extend to the universe and everything in it!”
“Huh. So what are you doing here?”
“I am wondering about that myself!” Wing replied ruefully. “I do not feel that we must stay on Earth forever—as some believers insist. There is nothing wrong with the journey to the stars, to terraform a barren land—working with sweat and many sacrifices to build a good green home for our kind, and for the creatures which we brought with us in the ship. It is not,” he added, “a luxurious prospect! Yet it is what all of us expected when we left Earth.”
“So God gives us a better option,” said Joe. “Has the right to do that, eh?”
“True,” Wing admitted. “But I believe that what we are given is not a better option, but a hard choice. To choose hard labor or sloth, humility or arrogance, sacrifice or greed. A wilderness or a park.” He propped his head on one hand, looking up at the ruddy spark in the night sky, and continued sadly. “Almost no one seems to think that the choice is hard at all! Everyone blithely assumes that this Westpark is a gift from God or from the Universe.”
Mercifully, Joe’s shoulder was going numb again. He gazed up at the night sky. Three planets, he thought. The third was potentially habitable, at least for future generations, provided that the present generation was willing to rough it. A second planet, the raw oceanic world: uninhabitable, so much so that no one, except the planetary scientists, had expressed any interest in going there. And then the first, this green world, immediately habitable, mild, tractable.
Wing was misguided, Joe reflected, but he definitely had a point. There would have been something ennobling about the challenge of molding a lonely globe in the wilderness of stars. Too bad that was going to be unnecessary! Joe suspected that human nature would not be improved by the cosmic equivalent of a free lunch.
Three planets, two, and one. Then and still there was the zero planet. The one that had failed to be there. The zero planet stretched from Earth to here, eleven centuries long and thin, a string of cold nothingness: attenuated death.
“Joe. Joe Norden—or Toronto. Wake up.”
“Huh!?” He started, his heart pounding, surprised to be alive.
“Either the painkiller or my sermon put you to sleep. How do you feel?”
“Painkiller worked.” He carefully climbed to his feet and took deep breaths. “I’ll be damned, I can’t feel the stasis fever any more! Maybe all this exercise burned it out!”
“I hope so,” Wing answered.
The last climb turned out to be strenuous, but safe and fast. They ascended from one terrace of the waterway to the next. The pure white light of the stars made it easy to find hand- and footholds.
“Onward and upward!” said Joe, in a triumphant mood.
Trees of a new kind perched along the waterway: short, scrubby, and pungent. “Furry pines!” Wing said excitedly. “These are the dominant vegetation at the top of the mountain. I have studied samples of them. But I did not know that they smelled so—like celery?”
“I get seashells. You know, used ones. Or else antiseptic. Contradictory as hell, eh?”
The waterway petered out; the terrain flattened. They pushed their way into a stand of “furry pines.” Some of the trees leaned outward at a 20-degree angle, with broken branches and roots half-pulled out of the ground. The damaged ones were resolutely thick with living needles.
“Tough little beggars!” Joe laughed.
Then they found burned and shattered pines. Hurriedly they scrambled through, and over, those. A heavy smell hung in the air: the stink of combustion, Joe guessed, though his brain came up with several odors, all wildly unrelated to burned cellulose.
Then they found the edge of the mountaintop crater. Shallow and wide, it curved away into the distance on both sides. In the crater’s center, a quarter of a mile away, stood the geodesic dome of Unity Base. No fence surrounded the dome. No floodlights stood guard over it. None were needed on this world. The dome simply sat there, an angular bubble lit from within by yellow light.
Wing slowly seated himself on a fallen pine’s trunk, near the edge of the crater. After a few moments, Joe sat down beside him. Exhilaration had vanished. Joe felt utterly drained.
“Haven’t heard the copter since the first time,” said Joe.
“I see it. It is parked on its pad, almost behind the dome from where we are.”
A few minutes later, Joe blurted, “They’re not dirty. They’re clean in there.”
“I know,” Wing whispered.
“We ought to go knock on the door,” said Joe, with no conviction at all.
“Yes,” Wing agreed. Neither of them moved. An idiotic thought popped into Joe’s head. If they knocked on the dome, maybe the bubble would burst and disintegrate. He picked up a handful of small rocks and pitched them, one by one, back to the ground. Ejecta from the crater, these rocks had fresh sharp edges. Finally Joe said angrily, “Why aren’t they looking? They ought to hope that we’re still alive, and they know we’re not necessarily sick!”
“They do?”
“Before I left the ship, I transmitted my recommendation to the Chief Expedition Scientist.”
“Manhattan.”
“Yeah. And an abstract of the findings that led to the recommendation, I transmitted that too. I’d have thought he’d send a search party out!”
“Perhaps he did not agree with your recommendation. Perhaps no one did and there
were no volunteers!” Wing said unhappily.
Joe swore.
“Then again, such pessimism may be unfounded,” said Wing. “Knowing these people, perhaps they decided to vote on whether to send a search party, what kind of search party, and with what degree of precaution. In which case they may democratically argue all night.”
“Wonderful!” Joe exploded. “What time is it? I lost my watch.”
“No, I removed it, fearing that your arm might swell.” Wing handed over Joe’s watch.
“Stopped! Reads two hours since we left the ship!” Joe hurled the watch into the ashes on the ground.
“Mmmm.” Wing went over and ferreted among the ashes. Finding the watch, he examined it. “No, it is running! In truth, I do not think that we had far to come. And if our other senses are disoriented, why not the sense of time as well?”
“Maybe, but we can’t wait all—”
A brighter pane of yellow light fell out of the dome: the door had opened. A small group of people emerged. Four of them, they hurried in the general direction of Joe and Wing. Joe saw that they wore landsuits, but no helmets. And they seemed to be loaded with gear, ropes, flashlights, pickaxes, bags.
Joe leaped to his feet and whistled. Wing shouted, “This way!”
The group hesitated and changed course, then came running toward Joe and Wing. The person in the lead looked familiar. Catharin. Instantly Joe was struck, as never before, by her beauty. Wing could talk all night about how Westpark was beautiful, but the planet was too weird. Beauty was this woman with the bright starlight around her, glazing her hair and clothes.
About two yards away, Catharin stopped so abruptly that the other three almost collided with her.
In an awkward silence, Joe put his free hand into his pocket. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Congratulations, we found you.”
“Thank goodness—” Her glance slid to Wing. “Carlton! I am so glad to see you! But what about—”
“The pilot’s dead,” said Joe.
Wing added quickly, “Killed in the crash.”
“Oh, dear God. We thought, we hoped, that it was just a forced landing, and all three of you were all right,” Catharin said unevenly.