Child of Space

by E. C. Tubb

  It was the size of a grapefruit, the skin with a metallic sheen, whorled like a thumbprint, the delicate engraving catching and diffusing the light so that it glowed like a rainbow.

  “What the hell is it?” The technician who had kicked it nursed his foot. “I’ve never seen anything like that on the Moon before. And it’s heavy. I damned near busted my foot on it.”

  Its Earth weight, Boardman calculated, would be about that of lead. A sixth as much here on the Moon, but still too much for him to manage with one hand even had the size allowed him to obtain a grip. He rose with it cradled in both palms.

  “Listen,” he said into the radio. “Attention, all of you.” He described the object he held. “There could be others and if so they are probably lying around and in front of the wreck. Please look for them. They may be almost buried in the dust or they could be lying in shadow. Shine light on the ground and you will see the reflection. It is unmistakable. Please concentrate your search as from now on the recovery of these objects.”

  The technician who had found the one Boardman held said, curiously, “What are they, Professor? Gems of some kind?”

  “I doubt it?”

  “Then what?” The man was no fool. “Minerals, then? Nodules like those of magnesium found on the ocean beds back home?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Of lead or platinum, maybe?” The man reached out and touched the sphere. His gloved fingers ran over the fine markings. “Perhaps the impact of that thing opened up a vein of some kind. We could have found a mine of sorts. Right, Prof?”

  “Perhaps,” said Boardman. “Now how about looking for more?”

  The next was found within two minutes, the third immediately afterwards, and within an hour they had a heap of them piled like ancient cannon balls to one side of the wreck.

  And it had to be a wreck, of that Boardman was now certain, but the wreck of what he had no idea.

  Sliding down the inside of one half of the shattered, pod-like thing, he made his way towards a technician busy with a cutting torch. The beam of the laser hit the material the man was working on, seeming to be absorbed into it, the fierce concentration of heat having no noticeable effect.

  “Useless.” The man cut the torch. “This stuff soaks up energy like a sponge. Yet it looks hard enough.” His gloved hand rapped against the smooth surface. “And it had to be worked to get this finish. See how it gleams?” He illustrated with his light. “That takes grinding with a fine abrasive—take my word for it.”

  “Can you cut it with a saw?”

  “Fred’s trying.” A hand lifted to where a man crouched on the edge of the hollowed shell working with something that glittered. “Hey, Fred! Any luck as yet?”

  “Not much,” said a disgruntled voice from the radio. “Saws were useless so now I’m trying a wheel.”

  “What are you using?” said Boardman. “Emery?”

  “I’ve tried emery, it was useless. Now I’m on a diamond wheel and if this can’t do it I’m giving up.”

  “Any progress?”

  “Some, but it’s mighty slow. I’ll be lucky to get a small wedge cut free before the wheel wears out. Well, it’s a way to pass the time.”

  Boardman moved on, the men could work as well without his supervision and his presence would only irritate them as theirs would him if he was engaged in an experiment. Dropping from the rear of the wreck, the part that had hit last and called the rear only because of that, he stepped back to gain a wider view.

  It was of little help. Behind him lay the crater of Schemiel, the dust that almost filled it marked by the scars of passage. The alien object had hit, bounced from the dust as a stone would bounce when skipped over water and smashed hard against the rim-wall. It had broken through and had slid partly down the far slope.

  Had it split open on first landing, on hitting the rim-wall or when finally coming to rest? The two halves, warped and twisted, lay close. The common join showed a clean break without any trace of sheared components or torn stanchions.

  A deliberately designed fracture plane?

  If so—why?

  Musing, Boardman stepped backwards and, too late, recognised his danger. His foot, instead of landing on solid ground, plunged into a bottomless lack of resistance. Desperately he threw himself forward, hands clawing at the rock, his fingers finding a hold and clamping hard to it as, slowly, he drew his foot out of the dust and heaved himself to safety.

  A momentary danger quickly passed, but a moment of carelessness that could have been fatal. Once buried in the dust the chances of rescue were remote and, if the dust was deep, impossible.

  “Trevor?” Regan spoke from the radio. “How are you going? Trevor?”

  “Here, Mark.” Boardman drew in a deep breath and forced his voice to sound calm. “Fine.”

  “Have you solved the mystery yet? You’ve had long enough.”

  “Yes, Mark. I have.”

  “What?” Regan had been joking, now he was incredulous.

  “You know what that thing was and what it carried?”

  “Yes.” Boardman paused, enjoying his moment. “It was a pod, Mark, and it carried seeds.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Boardman’s quarters were adorned with the past; fragments of ancient civilisations, yellowed journals, old books, faded scraps of tapestry. On a wall hung his awards, among them the Nobel Prize, but there were no photographs of friends he had known or relations he would never see again. The past, to Boardman, was as much a tool as the microcomputer on his desk, the other delicately calibrated instruments in his laboratory. A thing to be used, to remind him of what had been, an illustration of what could be accomplished. Steps by which Mankind had lifted itself from the mud to the stars.

  Regan liked the room and was often to be found with his old friend. But now he had not come to play chess or to talk or to simply sit and relax away from the never-ending duties of his command.

  “Seeds,” he said. “Trevor, are you sure?”

  “No, Mark, I am not.” Boardman was carefully precise. “There are few things about which anyone can be totally certain, but the probability that I am correct is high. Everything leads towards it; the shape of the pod, the surround, the way it split, the strange spheres we found.”

  “An assumption.”

  “Of course, Mark, but without actual proof what else can we have?”

  “But, seeds?”

  “It’s possible, Mark.” Elna had been looking at a sketch of an old house, one that Boardman had hoped to build and never had. “Think of the seed pods we knew back home; the sycamore seeds with their propeller-like motion, the drifting puffs from thistles and dandelions, those plants which seem to literally fire their seeds into the air by the release of coiled springs.”

  “Yes, but the size?”

  “Size is relative. Think of a coconut that is a tremendously large seed when compared to an acorn and an acorn is huge when compared to a beech nut. And there are seeds so small they can hardly be seen with the naked eye. 1 think Trevor could be right, Mark. That object we found could have been a pod sent into space somehow and drifting until it found somewhere to rest.”

  “Such as?”

  “How can I be sure? Another world, perhaps, or even a region of space that would trigger it to life. I’m a physician, Mark, not a botanist, but I’ll bet there are vegetative life-cycles similar in pattern if not in size.”

  She looked, he thought, very lovely as she stood, the light gleaming from her hair, the firm yet soft contours of her body a continual reminder of the woman she was and the femininity she exuded. And it pleased him to play the Devil’s Advocate, to argue against something his intelligence had already told him was more than probable and certainly more than possible.

  “Let’s be rational about this, Elna. You too, Trevor. First the size, what manner of tree could produce a seed pod twice the size of a Pinnace plus a surrounding tracery? And why the tracery? We know that the mass of the thing was too great for it to have bee
n driven by light-pressure.”

  “Wind, perhaps?” Boardman frowned, thinking. “A sudden rush of air, assuming the planet of origin had a low gravity, would have caught the tracery and used it as a sail to lift the thing up and into space. Also the size tends to the conclusion that it came from some low-gravity world. The size of plants is limited by their ability to pump water up from the roots to the topmost branches. A moment.”

  A projector stood on a desk and Boardman activated it, light and colour flashing to illuminate a screen. Against the familiar backdrop of stars the enigmatic object rested like a rare and precious jewel.

  “Taken before the initial laser-blast,” said Boardman. “One of an entire series of photographs and as good as any to illustrate my meaning. Study the tracery; you see that the vanes are convoluted which gives the structure a tremendous surface area in relation to its actual size. A pity that it couldn’t have been preserved intact, our topologists would have had a field day in plotting the curves and vectors, but we can still gain some information. Now, assuming a steady force of wind, what pressures would be needed to move the entire mass against, say, zero gravity?”

  “High,” said Regan. “We had to use the blast of an atomic missile to shift it, remember?”

  “We used it,” corrected Boardman.

  “But we didn’t have to. Given time we could have found an alternative. Also remember that, without a conducting medium, no blast can have a high shockwave. An explosion in water will create a more violent shockwave than one in the atmosphere—the denser the medium the greater the transmission. The pod need not have originated in space, in fact I tend to think the facts are against it. A large, but low-gravity world, perhaps one subjected to violent storms, one which could have an intensely active sun remitting tremendous amounts of radiation.”

  “A combination sufficient to send a pod into the void,” said Elna. “As the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883 created a hole a thousand feet in depth in the ocean and blasted debris into space. An accident, Trevor?”

  “The pod? Perhaps not, Elna.”

  Regan said, “Arrhenius?”

  “Why not, Mark?” Boardman met his eyes. “Why not?”

  Regan made no answer, thinking of the man they had mentioned, his very name encompassing a theory, which, at the time of its mention, shook minds with its calm acceptance of the fact that life in the universe need not be confined to one world. Professor Svante August Arrhenius who had proposed the possibility that life in the form of spores could be carried throughout the galaxy, even throughout the entire universe, by the pressure of light. Minute scraps of potential life, seeds, swept through the void until, attracted by the gravitational well of a possible home, they had fallen to their fate. To live or to die. To spread life or to wither in pools of acid, fires, seas of noxious liquids, corrosive gases or frigid wastes.

  “Spores,” said Regan. “But this—” He broke off, gesturing at the screen.

  “Size is relative, Mark,” reminded Elna. “To an ant we are mobile mountains and to a bacteria an ant is a world.”

  A fact he knew and he was tired of playing the Devil’s Advocate. To argue the opposing side was often necessary in order to bring into the open facts that could be too easily overlooked or deliberately ignored. And he had known what Boardman wanted from the first.

  “I want to plant them, Mark. The seeds, I mean, I want to see if they will grow.”

  “If they are seeds.”

  “I’m positive they are.” Boardman switched off the projector and led the way into his small laboratory. On a bench rested a seed, sliced open, the halves lying side by side. “I managed to cut one open using a sonic drill and vibratory wire,” he explained. “I wrapped the wire around the sphere, constricting it as I vibrated it with the drill. Tedious but it worked.” He handed a section to Elna, another to Regan. “Look at it and tell me what you see.”

  A mass of closely packed substance more familiar to Elna than to Regan.

  “Trevor.” Her voice was incredulous. “This looks like compacted tissue!”

  Regan said, “Animal or vegetable?”

  “Without microscopic examination there is no way to tell. Have you tested it, Trevor?”

  “Yes, but without definite result,” he admitted. “But one thing is certain, it is molecular, not crystalline. There is a regular, cell-like structure and nodes which could carry the genetic nucleus. The overall pattern is that of a seed. The pod in which it travelled places it in the vegetable kingdom. Mark, I want your permission to plant them. We can use the new Rural Area. It’s ideal for the purpose. No crops have been planted there yet and we have a perfect environment, artificial night which can be varied, water, air, a regulated temperature—Mark, you can’t refuse!”

  He could and should if there was the slightest risk of endangering the base, but always progress had to be attended by a calculated gamble. And, if they were to learn, chances had to be taken.

  “Think of what it could mean if we can cultivate them, Mark,” urged Boardman. “That pod out there, it’s the hardest thing we’ve found. Not even a diamond wheel can cut it easily. It’s proof against a laser. If we can learn how to utilise it we’ll have a new building material. And there could be more. Who knows what the seeds may give us if they can be persuaded to grow?”

  “All right, Trevor,” said Regan. “Go ahead.”

  *

  It was a decision made as all decisions had to be made—a matter of compromise and a searching for the best for the least effort and the lowest risk. To deny the base the potential gain of the seeds was to go beyond his function; for a commander should lead and guide, not use his position to be dictatorial. And yet Regan wouldn’t have been human if he was absolved from all doubt.

  “You had no choice, Mark,” said Elna as, later, he accompanied her to Medical Centre. “We need what those seeds could give and how could you have denied Trevor his opportunity to probe into something so entrancing?”

  “He isn’t a child, Elna. He doesn’t need a toy.”

  “But he needs to keep his mind exercised, Mark. We all do.” Abruptly serious she halted and turned to face him, oblivious of the others present in the corridor. “Surely you know the edge we all are riding on? Strain can be absorbed only to a certain degree. Maintain an artificial way of life and trouble is inevitable. Couple the strain of unaccustomed living with the fear of personal extinction and we have a situation the same as was present in the trenches during the First World War. Later they called it combat fatigue and we know it as the General Adaptation Syndrome. People can only stand so much for so long—maintain the pressure and things begin to happen. Nasty things including murder, violence and sudden death.”

  And rape and quarrels and sudden, apparently illogical outbursts of verbal and physical violence. Regan had known it all back in the past when too many people had been crowded into too few rooms, tenements teeming with life on the verge of explosion. Emotions that had blazed out in riots and burnings, savage, wanton destruction and a sickly suicidal impulse to kill and kill until killed in turn. In the East they had known it as running amok.

  He never wanted to see it happen in Moonbase.

  Elna was one who would take care that it did not. With her tests and programmes devised to maintain harmony, with selective sedations and continual monitoring of all personnel, always ready to quench the fires before they could blaze, recognising the smoke for what it was.

  And yet, even so Liz Caffrey had gone insane.

  “I don’t know why, Mark,” Elna confessed when he asked. “As far as we can determine there is no trace of any organic cause. Her cortex is free of any sign of a tumour, there is no question of radiation sickness and her physical condition is excellent. The only real fact on which we can work is her encephalogram.”

  “The line which Rob said denoted hunger?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve checked?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “That is, we’ve tried. One of the attendan
ts volunteered to act as a guinea pig. He’s been starving himself but it’s too early to tell as yet whether a similar line will appear on his encephalogram. Personally I don’t think that it will.”

  “Which proves, what?”

  “Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps the machine was at fault. It could have been affected by some external source and gave a jumbled reading.”

  “In which case the girl isn’t really ill at all,” he said, dryly. “She only thinks that she is because the machine tells her so. Am I making sense, Elna?”

  “Yes, if she had seen the machine and knew just what the record signified. Stranger things have happened, Mark, especially to susceptible people. But she didn’t see the records so your theory can’t apply. In any case her symptoms aren’t appropriate to a self-induced state of hysterical mania. Do you want to see her?”

  She looked very small as she lay on the bed, her knees drawn up a little, her shoulders curved in a near-foetal position. On her cheeks her eyelashes rested like ebon moths and her hair, neatly arranged, framed the contours of her face as if it were a painting done by an artist of the pre-Raphaelite school. An angel, Regan thought, but, at times, all men thought women were angels. Most, later, changed their minds.

  “Liz?” Elna touched the smooth curve of the girl’s cheek. “Liz?” She looked up as Mandela came towards them. “Is she still under sedation?”

  “It should be passing now.” He glanced at his watch then at the clipped papers at the foot of the bed. “Yes, another dose about due.”

  Regan said, “Does she have to be under continual sedation?”

  “We’ve tried letting her come out of it and we had to use restraints,” explained Elna. “When she began to show signs of muscular hypertension we had to take action. She would have wound up breaking her own bones,” she explained.

  “Like a person poisoned with strychnine—the muscular convulsions override the mental safety factor. It’s kinder to keep her under sedation.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until we can find the cause of her trouble and eliminate it. Are you ready, Doctor?”