by Sam Smith
With all the panels removed I settled myself to examine the interior of the console.
The circuit block which controlled the propulsion had come adrift from its seating, had fallen onto and had fused to the life-support block. The clips, which were supposed to hold the blocks in place, had been designed only to stop them floating free in weightlessness. The shuttle had not been intended to withstand the shocks of a planet's gravity.
I had no tools with which to separate the two blocks, no knowledge with which to repair the damage suffered by both. Although, on closer inspection, I thought that it might be possible to bypass the two and to get the transmitter and the solar traps working, if nothing else.
However, in the practical lessons we had undertaken in school, I had learnt the value of first studying any problem and not rushing at it half-cocked. So I sat on the floor and stared at the damage, occasionally reaching forward to check various connections, building an image of the circuitry in my mind. At first and second glance it seemed hopeless, yet still I persevered, tried to stop myself thinking 'If only I had such and such a tool. If only I knew more about...' For I had to solve this problem with the only equipment that I had to hand — my existing knowledge.
At a nearby noise I turned. Malamud was smiling shamefacedly at me over the door ledge.
“I slipped and hurt my ankle,” he said, "Dag’s gone on without me."
I rose and helped him into the shuttle. His ankle was smeared with the planet's dirt, but I could detect no external signs of damage. He sat on the door ledge to await Dag's return. I resumed my contemplations of the console's innards.
For every solution that occurred to me almost instantly came the realisation why such an innovation would not work. After an hour of such fruitless conjecture I found my mind, as was its want, wandering off after other topics. I did not try to arrest these wanderings, knew from experience that by such circuitous routes, my subconscious rendering its intuitive insights, I had often solved seemingly insurmountable problems before.
So it was that I found myself wondering why I looked to Dag for leadership. Especially as, with regard to our flight here, he had demonstrated such a lamentable ignorance of space technology. Yet he had been the one who had made the decision to land on a planet; he had been the one who had decided to land on this planet; and I could still hear his shout, "Now!", which had ordered me to land. And I knew that if he had not shouted when he had we would have gone hurtling on to crash into the mountains’ rocks. It was also Dag who had decided that we drink the planet's water, and who had decided that we had to eat whatever food the planet had to offer. Left to myself I would probably, concerned about the dangers of disease, have died of thirst before daring to sample the water. Dag, though, had assessed the situation, had made a decision. And that, I decided, was why he was the Ieader — it was he who took it upon himself to make decisions.
As if summoned by my thoughts, Malamud said,
"Dag's here."
I rose and joined him in the doorway.
Dag stopped below us. He was smiling. One hand held his tunic up, exposing his legs. Within the fold of his tunic, his other hand lay on something which bulged.
“Gentlemen,” he addressed us, “I have been aware, for some time, of your barely concealed contempt for the study of philosophy. I now feel, however, that I have been presented with an opportunity, unparalleled in the annals of history, to vindicate my chosen profession. Please allow me to explain."
Dag’s good spirits were obvious. Malamud and I were thankful to have something, though we knew not what, to smile about.
"The study of philosophy," Dag continued, “leads one in many strange directions. To illustrate a point a philosopher may make a comparison with some natural object. To fully understand his point the student then has to acquaint himself with the aforementioned object. So one discovers what an onion is. Or a lake. Or,” he removed his hand from his tunic, “an apple."
Holding aloft a green and red sphere for our inspection, he then put it to his mouth, and bit into it.
"Delicious," he said.
Despite his injured ankle, which I suspected may have been a ruse to return to the known safety of the shuttle, Malamud leapt down and helped himself to one of the apples. He tossed one up to me. Hunger overcame my caution. Almost eagerly I bit into it. The outer flesh was sweet and crisp. The centre, however, had a hard unpalatable texture.
"How do these grow?" I asked Dag.
“On a tree. And not just one tree. I believe at one time an orchard was cultivated by the lake."
"Lake?” Malamud asked through his second apple.
"A large area of water," Dag explained. "Like a small ocean.
"Cultivated?" I said.
"But long ago," Dag hastened to quieten my alarm. "It seems to have reverted to its natural state. The only reason I have for supposing that it may have been cultivated is that the fruit trees appear to grow in regular lines, and all within what appears to be a square area. Whereas all the other vegetation grows any-old-how."
We continued to discuss this in the shuttle over our lunch.
The nearest habitation Dag had seen had been from the shuttle, prior to our landing, was a town back across the other side of the mountains. Possibly there was another town beyond the mountains ahead of us. But, on this side of the mountains, Dag had found nothing, apart from the orchard, to give any indication that anyone had lived here.
He asked how the repairs were coming along. I explained how the life-support and propulsion blocks were damaged beyond my repair, how I was hoping to bypass the damage and so be able to transmit our mayday signal.
Dag nodded, proposed that he and Malamud take the stretcher, which had been left aboard after transporting the sick woman, and load it with as much fruit as they could carry.
"Onions?" Malamud said through yet another apple.
"They are vegetables,” Dag said "And I doubt that you would eat quite so many of them."
When they had left, I sat again before the console.
I soon found myself exploring the same ideas that I had that morning. So, by way of diversion, and to stretch my cramped legs, I decided to examine the exterior of the shuttle. Gingerly — I was still weak from my period of unconsciousness — I lowered myself over the door ledge and carefully picked my way over the tangle of vegetation our landing had caused. The radiation of the sun scorched my skin; so I kept, where I could, to the shade of the shuttle's tipped up hull.
As far as I could see the hull was undamaged. But then, I told myself, this metal had been manufactured in the deeps of space, had been smelted and spun and woven to withstand speeds or many millions of kilometres per second. A few bumps on some planetary sand would not have harmed it.
I reminded myself that the Yilan's hull, made of identical metal, had been damaged. That, though, had been by cosmic dust itself travelling at many hundreds of thousands of kilometres per second. On a planet, within its protective atmosphere, the speed of such an impact could not be experienced. Yet, ironically, it had been the planet, its gravity, that had jarred the propulsion block from its seating.
The front of the shuttle was caught about with the small trees and vines that we had dragged with us. Some of these lay across the wing roof. The only idea my inspection of the exterior gave me was that, if the shuttle was put onto an even keel, the movement, coupled with the force of the planet’s gravity, might dislodge the two blocks. And, should I succeed in bypassing the damage, the wing roof solar traps would in any case need to be cleared of debris.
From the rear of the shuttle I looked back to the path our landing had cleared through the sparse vegetation, a straight line narrowing to an imagined point in the desert's ochre expanse.
Giddy from the heat I returned within the shuttle, resumed my meditations in front of the console. I had been there only a few moments, however, when Dag and Malamud returned laden with the stretcher.
I was given a softer, juicier fruit to sample.
"Food and dr
ink all in one bite," Malamud recommended it. The juices from all the fruit seemed to contain a mild acid, which made my tongue and gums tingle. And this new fruit owned a hard pitted kemel, which I took to be its seed. What I was in effect eating was its seed case.
While eating I explained to Dag and Malamud what I wanted to try, and we set about clearing the trees and vines from the front of the shuttle. Once the wing roof and screen were free of all vegetation, I proposed that we attempt to right the shuttle.
By this time we were all sweating profusely. The shuttle, however, contained little intrinsic weight; and, while Dag and I lifted the lower wingtip, Malamud pressed bits of broken tree under the hull to steady it.
“At least now we won't have to jump out the door,” Malamud said when it was secured.
On entering the shuttle one glance served to show me that the two blocks had not separated. So, while Dag and Malamud stored the fruit, I returned to considering ways of circumventing the damage.
EventualIy I had to admit defeat; for, no matter which route I decided to take, part of it lay through the two damaged blocks. On anything bigger than a shuttle, I would probably have been able to isolate each block; but here all functions were shared, the circuitry interconnected. Loathe to admit to Dag and Malamud my failure, and its implications, I desperately imagined my tutor asking if I had tried this, considered that... All to no avail.
“I cannot repair it," I said to them.
Not wanting to look on them, I busied myself replacing the panels. When I had dropped the keys back into the tool kit, Dag said,
"Then we truly are marooned here.”
“But the rescue services will be searching for us?" Malamud looked with perturbation from Dag to me.
“Without a transmitter," I thought it best that we all face up to our situation, "they won't know where to search.”
"But they'll have some idea where we are?" Malamud refused to abandon all hope.
To give Malamud some idea of our predicament I told him the size of the galaxy we had come to — billions of billions of kilometres in diameter. The rescue services would have only the vaguest notion of where we were. Without our mayday signal they would have to scan every planet; that is if they realised that we had landed on a planet. For, with the lapse in transmissions, when Dag had worried about using up all our energy, they might well assume us lost as soon as the signals had stopped, ascribe our later continuation of the transmissions to a freak echo, which had itself now ceased. And, even should they not give up searching for us, we would be on the planet for many years.
"Is there nothing we can do?” Malamud asked.
“Yes,” Dag said. "We can, in the meantime, make this our home."
Night had come upon us. We closed the shuttle door. The day's exertions, the unaccustomed gravity taking its toll, too weary for further conversation, we lay silently upon our tipped back seats.
A sense of isolation is a common anxiety within civilisation: imagine the new loneliness that we three took that night to sleep with us.
Chapter Five
Reflections on the nature of luck, reconciliation to our situation, explorations of our local environs and experimentations with foodstuffs. Malamud has difficulty with the concept of territory.
The three of us awoke that second night with stomach ache. The shuttle's lavatory being no longer functional, Dag was the first to venture outside to discharge his diarrhoea. With the door being continually opened and closed, the shuttle soon lost the last of the heat that it had retained from the day. Our teeth chattering, clutching our stomachs, we awaited the dawn; our one consolation being that, this night at least, we didn't slide off our seats. On returning yet again from outside Malamud vowed that never again would he let a philosopher's apple pass his lips.
"It's only our digestions becoming used to their new diet," Dag reassured him.
I was not so confident. In fact I was certain that we had contracted a fatal planetary disease, of which our bodies were now manifesting the first symptoms.
I had noticed the previous evening several blemishes on Dag and Malamud’s skin, vaguely recalled mention of plagues, of the origin of the childhood game 'ring a ring of roses...' I believed that we were not long for this universe.
In that black night I also thought that I, despite the weakness from the blow on my head, would be the last to die; and I made myself miserable by imagining tending my friends in their death throes. For I had deduced that the water, not the food, contained the fatal organisms. Dag and Malamud had sweated copiously the previous day, had drunk their fill of water. I had drunk less. I did not have any blemishes, nor was my diarrhoea as bad as theirs. We could possibly find another source of food, but water?
Seeing nothing to be gained from disheartening my companions, I kept my fears to myself. Even when Dag, to stop Malamud grumbling, told him to count himself lucky that he was alive. Consequently, for the remaining hours of darkness, I found myself meditating on the nature of luck.
We were indeed lucky to have escaped the Yilan with our lives; but where was our luck when it had put us on such a ship in the first place? We were lucky to have found this planet, and we were lucky to have landed alive; but where was our luck when it had knocked out our transmitter? Where was our luck when we had eaten poisoned fruit? Where was our luck when we had quaffed contaminated water?
I retraced the thread of coincidence that had carried me to this planet. That my mother had happened to have a passion for musical instruments had led to me being accepted by a university because I could play the violin and they had happened to have an orchestra. That university had happened to be two galaxies distant, so I had taken passage on that doomed ship. Luck!
I went on to examine all the ifs — if I hadn't played the violin, if another university had accepted me... And I concluded, towards dawn, that luck was a word that should not belong in the vocabulary of a philosophy student.
Possibly because we knew now what to expect, and because we knew that the day would bring warmth, the dawn’s squeaks and screeches seemed not so loud this new day, nor so intimidating. And, no sooner had the sun claimed the sky, than Dag roused us from our seats, said that we ought to make a start while the day was still cool.
Dag did not look like a man about to die. A little pale, dishevelled and unshaven, like any man who has had too little sleep; but that was all. And with that I began to think that possibly my fears had been but morbid fancies, which the night had exaggerated. They seemed to own no place in the day's reality. For, no sooner were we beyond the shuttle, than I forgot them. Indeed, apart from one or two pauses to empty what remained in our bowels, our diarrhoea seemed to dissipate itself. Nor did our diarrhoea seem to have greatly weakened us. And, as we followed the path that Dag and Malamud had taken the previous day to the lake, I found myself thinking that possibly Dag was right — our stomach aches were due entirely to our new diet. So... with a future restored, I looked about me with interest.
How to relate my first impressions?
Although this may sound a contradiction coming from a Spaceman, my first impression was of unlimited space. The previous day, on my examination of the hull's exterior, I had giddily returned into the shuttle. That giddiness I had assumed to have been due to the heat and to my head wound. This day I knew that not to be so. That dizziness had been caused by the amount of space about me. Because, in living in space, although aware of the dark infinities beyond our dwellings, we are always contained by walls. Even the largest banqueting halls have a ceiling and walls. And the space outside is framed in windows; and that space is black.
But imagine, if you can, being in the centre of a brightly lit room with a blue ceiling ten kilometres high and with no visible walls. A dizzying prospect indeed. I immediately forgave Malamud his feigned twisted ankle.
The path, after winding around clumps of prickly bushes, soon rose towards the mountains' foothills. As we climbed I noticed that the foliage changed. On the desert edge the leaves of the plan
ts were hard; but, the higher we climbed, the softer and more profuse they became. Although I was unable to name the different species, many were familiar from films I had seen. So they, in themselves, did not awe me as much as the space. No film can portray the seeming vastness of day on a planet’s surface.
We were sweating when we reached the brow of the hill. In a hollow between us and the mountain lay the lake. Although I had seen pictures of seas, of oceans, although I knew there to be ponds in our cities, nowhere in apace had I then seen, at such close quarters, such an expanse of water.
Standing together a moment we looked over the land about us. The shuttle could not be seen. On the far side of the lake were the ragged lines of trees that I took to be the orchard. I mentioned the fact that as yet I had seen no living creatures to account for the dawn cacophony.
“Only these little beasts," Malamud smacked at his own arm.
"They seem to hang about the lake," Dag told me. A tiny black insect, with transparent wings, alighted among the fine hairs on my forearm. It bit me. I hastily brushed it from my arm. Within seconds a red spot appeared on my skin. That accounted for the blemishes on Dag and Malamud's skin. Something more to mock my fears of the night.
Two streams splashed into the far end of the lake. While, at this end, the lake overflowed into a marsh.
Dag and Malamud removed their slippers. Carrying them in one hand, and holding up their tunics with the other, they began wading through the wet grass and mud. Not wanting to seem squeamish, I gingerly followed them. The sensation was not at all unpleasant. Especially as my feet were hot from our climb. The cold water seemed to tighten the skin.
Beyond the marsh we encountered some spiky grass and put our slippers back on. The grass still pricked our ankles.
By some moss-covered rocks Dag knelt and, cupping water in his hand, he drank. I was thirsty. I too knelt and drank.
Dag then proceeded to guide me over the orchard, showing me where the different fruits were to be found. Although Malamud dubbed them laxative trees, Dag seemed determined to vindicate his faith in his learning, plucked and ate several of the fruit. Malamud must have been as hungry as I, but neither of us followed his example.