Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Then if that is excluded, there is no way. The criminals are shrewd and daring. They asked me to check about probable steps that would be taken in pursuit, but they asked for no advice as to how to get away, because that would have been a waste of time. They will ask that once I am in their possession.’

  ‘Then,’ said Siebling heavily, ‘there’s nothing I can do to keep you. How about saving the men who work under me?’

  ‘You can save both them and yourself by boarding the emergency ship and leaving immediately by the sunward route. In that way you will escape contact with the criminals. But you cannot take me with you, or they will pursue.’

  The shouts of a guard drew Siebling’s attention. ‘Radio report of a criminal attack, Mr Siebling! All the alarms are out!’

  ‘Yes, I know. Prepare to depart.’ He turned back to the Sack again. ‘We may escape for the moment, but they’ll have you. And through you they will control the entire System.’

  ‘That is not a question,’ said the Sack.

  ‘They’ll have you. Isn’t there something we can do?’

  ‘Destroy me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Siebling, almost in agony. His men were running toward him impatiently, and he knew that there was no more time. He uttered the simple and absurd phrase, ‘Good-by,’ as if the Sack were human, and could experience human emotions. Then he raced for the ship, and they blasted off.

  ==========

  They were just in time. Half a dozen ships were racing in from other directions, and Siebling’s vessel escaped just before they dispersed to spread a protective network about the asteroid that held the Sack.

  Siebling’s ship continued to speed toward safety, and the matter should now have been one solely for the Armed Forces to handle. But Siebling imagined them pitted against the Sack’s perfectly calculating brain, and his heart sank. Then something happened that he had never expected. And for the first time he realized fully that if the Sack had let itself be used merely as a machine, a slave to answer questions, it was not because its powers were limited to that single ability. The visor screen in his ship lit up.

  The communications operator came running to him, and said, ‘Something’s wrong, Mr Siebling! The screen isn’t even turned on!’

  It wasn’t. Nevertheless, they could see on it the chamber in which the Sack had rested for what must have been a brief moment of its existence. Two men had entered the chamber, one of them the unknown who had asked his questions in Prdl, the other Senator Horrigan.

  To the apparent amazement of the two men, it was the Sack which spoke first. It said, ‘ “Good-by” is neither a question nor the answer to one. It is relatively uninformative.’

  Senator Horrigan was obviously in awe of the Sack, but he was never a man to be stopped by something he did not understand. He orated respectfully, ‘No, sir, it is not. The word is nothing but an expression—’

  The other man said, in perfectly comprehensible Earth English, ‘Shut up, you fool, we have no time to waste. Let’s get it to our ship and head for safety. We’ll talk to it there.’

  Siebling had time to think a few bitter thoughts about Senator Horrigan and the people the politician had punished by betrayal for their crime in not electing him. Then the’ scene on the visor shifted to the interior of the spaceship making its getaway. There was no indication of pursuit. Evidently, the plans of the human beings, plus the Sack’s last minute advice, had been an effective combination.

  The only human beings with the Sack at first were Senator Horrigan and the speaker of Prdl, but this situation was soon changed. Half a dozen other men came rushing up, their faces grim with suspicion. One of them announced, ‘You don’t talk to that thing unless we’re all of us around. We’re in this together.’

  ‘Don’t get nervous, Merrill. What do you think I’m going to do, double-cross you?’

  Merrill said, ‘Yes, I do. What do you say, Sack, do I have reason to distrust him?’

  The Sack replied simply, ‘Yes.’

  The speaker of Prdl turned white. Merrill laughed coldly. ‘You’d better be careful what questions you ask around this thing.’

  Senator Horrigan cleared his throat. ‘I have no intentions of, as you put it, double-crossing anyone. It is not in my nature to do so. Therefore, I shall address it.’ He faced the Sack, ‘Sir are we in danger?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From which direction?’

  ‘From no direction. From within the ship.’

  ‘Is the danger immediate?’ asked a voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was Merrill who turned out to have the quickest reflexes and acted first on the implications of the answer. He had blasted the man who had spoken in Prdl before the latter could even reach for his weapon, and as Senator Horrigan made a frightened dash for the door, he cut that politician down in cold blood.

  ‘That’s that,’ he said. ‘Is there further danger inside the ship?’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘Who is it this time?’ he demanded ominously.

  ‘There will continue to be danger so long as there is more than one man on board and I am with you. I am too valuable a treasure for such as you.’

  Siebling and his crew were staring at the visor screen in fascinated horror, as if expecting the slaughter to begin again. But Merrill controlled himself. He said, ‘Hold it, boys. I’ll admit that we’d each of us like to have this thing for ourselves, but it can’t be done. We’re in this together, and we’re going to have some Navy ships to fight off before long, or I miss my guess. You, Prader! What are you doing away from the scout visor?’

  ‘Listening,’ said the man he addressed. ‘If anybody’s talking to that thing, I’m going to be around to hear the answers. If there, are new ways of stabbing a guy in the back, I want to learn them, too.’

  Merrill swore. The next moment the ship swerved, and he yelled, ‘We’re off our course. Back to your stations, you fools!’

  They were running wildly back to their stations, but Siebling noted that Merrill wasn’t too much concerned about their common danger to keep from putting a blast through Trader’s back before the unfortunate man could run out.

  Siebling said to his own men, ‘There can be only one end. They’ll kill each other off, and then the last one or two will die, because one or two men cannot handle a ship that size for long and get away with it. The Sack must have foreseen that, too. I wonder why it didn’t tell me.’

  The Sack spoke, although there was no one in the ship’s cabin with it. It said, ‘No one asked.’

  Siebling exclaimed excitedly, ‘You can hear me! But what about you? Will you be destroyed too?’

  ‘Not yet. I have willed to live longer.’ It paused, and then, in a voice just a shade lower than before, said, ‘I do not like relatively non-informative conversations of this sort, but I must say it. Good-by’

  There was the sound of renewed yelling and shooting, and then the visor went suddenly dark and blank.

  The miraculous form of life that was the Sack, the creature that had once seemed so alien to human emotions, had passed beyond the range of his knowledge. And with it had gone, as the Sack itself had pointed out, a tremendous potential for harming the entire human race. It was strange, thought Siebling, that he felt so unhappy about so happy an ending.

  * * *

  Section 2—Inhabited Planets—Whatever Answers the Door

  ==========

  The original planets, the Wanderers, the worlds that can be seen by the naked eye, have had names ever since man first took to himself priests and ploughs, and probably before that. Their movements among the fixed stars were speedy and erratic and each had a different personality. They were gods, and named after gods. They remain named after gods and our thinking about them, even nasa’s hard astronomical thinking, is influenced by the remarkable difference between Venus, goddess of love, and Mars, god of war. ‘

  The gods got conscripted into many disciplines, astrology and alchemy among them. They were va
lued for their life-giving principles. And just as soon as Galileo turned his telescope on Saturn and Huygens resolved Saturn’s rings, and the real nature of the planets was perceived, so speculation grew about the possibilities of life there. It has never ceased. Christian Huygens was a remarkable man; among his other activities, he wrote a treatise entitled The Theory of the Universe, or Conjectures Concerning the Celestial Bodies and their Inhabitants.

  Also in the seventeenth century, de Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. It remained fashionable to picture life everywhere. Such imaginings are, the pleasure of homo ludens, not homo faber— the man of play, not the man of work. The latter side of man’s nature has gradually been eroding the realm of the unknown, forcing the fancy of homo ludens to move ever farther from home. In the eighteenth century, it was still feasible to set an imaginary community in an unknown land on Earth. In the early nineteenth century, imaginary islands in the South Seas might still serve; but, as more of the world was surveyed, refuges for the wilder strains of the imagination became scarce. So it was natural to press Mars or the Moon into service—communities could flourish there, given a willing suspension of disbelief.

  Nineteenth-century findings in astronomy supported the hope that there might be life on Mars. The novels of H. G.

  Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, which depicted a plurality of creatures on the Red Planet, were much more plausible to their first audiences than they are to us. Time goes on; such tales may please us for many reasons but) like ‘Bright-side Crossing’, they no longer convey to us news from the frontiers of scientific possibility.

  When this tide in the affairs of imagination became apparent, science fiction writers resorted to creating their own planets. This is a satisfactory arrangement for all concerned. Hard science fiction writers like Hal Clement can invent worlds which satisfy the most rigorous scientific requirements; whilst the fantasists can invent worlds which satisfy their own particular requirements. Thus both classisist and romantic are pleased—and of course there are many gradations between the two positions.

  Simak’s planet in ‘Beachhead’ is unnamed. We can see why. It stands for any savage world you care to name. This was a popular story when it first appeared. Its realism was modeled on recent painful American experience in the Pacific theatre of war, while the Korean war was in progress as the story was published. Fear of the alien environment comes across clearly. Later in the book, we have a story which contrasts interestingly with ‘Beachhead’ in this respect.

  Reading ‘Beachhead’ now, our attention is caught by the way in which the machines break down, leaving the men in trouble. This theme was not fashionable in sf at the time Simak wrote—though in his hands machines were generally unreliable or prone to outright mutiny. If, on the other hand, they were reliable (as in his novel Ring Around the Sun), then there was always a Reason.

  I made the point in the first section that stories set on uninhabited planets are generally about man himself, rather than the actual world: his courage, his endurance, his bourgeois tendencies, or whatever. In stories of inhabited planets, the emphasis is more likely to be on the nature of the creature or creatures opposing the space-travelers. So it is, with interesting variations, in the first three stories of this section.

  Incidentally, ‘Grenville’s Planet’ all but fulfills the conditions for first-landing stories set out in the Introduction. Even the air is fresh and clean, almost better than Earth’s. Among my folk memories of first landings is an early story, very primitive compared with Michael Shaara’s, in which the air was not so good. The story was entitled, with commendable reserve, ‘Moon of Mad Atavism’. The crew jumps on to the surface of (I recall) the Moon, and sniffs the air. There is some nasty gas in it; it is very much worse than Earth’s. The villain (if memory serves, the crew consisted of hero, heroine, mad scientist, and villain) begins to turn into animal form, finally ending up as a tyrannosaurus rex—in which state it is killed by the hero just before it rapes and or eats the girl and or mad scientist. The ‘explanation’ (my recollection is hazy, but not all that hazy) was that the gas in the air caused human beings to revert along the evolutionary path to their primitive beginnings.

  Even at the time, this struck me as intolerable, i.e. too much to swallow. The gas was one thing. But man’s family tree, however distant, however debatable, does not include either order of dinosaur. I can see that the author, hard-pressed for a climax to his tale, could not visualize readers getting steamed up over the heroine’s being threatened by a lust-mad tarsier. On the other hand, for a story to work it must stick to its own premises. If, in the middle of DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe, our shipwrecked friend had come across a strain of intelligent eagles nesting on his island, and had trained them so that they carried him back to the city of York in an improvised laundry basket—why, our respect for the ingenuity of Crusoe (and indeed his author) might be increased, but our enjoyment of the tale would be ruined.

  This elementary lesson of logic was eventually learned by sf writers. The simple logic of ‘Grenville’s Planet’ is one of its pleasures: the moons, therefore the tides, therefore—but why anticipate?

  Robert Sheckley, of course, is renowned throughout nine or ten continents for his brilliant streak of illogic, which always boils down to a savoury piece of sanity in the end.

  ‘ “Damn!”, Cordovir said. “I have to go home and kill my wife.” ‘

  By the time the tale ends, we can comprehend exactly why the aliens (and men) behave in the funny way they do. To understand all is to cachinnate all.

  To understand all that van Vogt is saying is to forgo something of his particular magic. There is no one like van Vogt, even within the eccentric ranks of sf writers. His is the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling, the poet who bodies forth The forms of things unknown.

  Much of what he wrote decades ago—and ‘The Monster’ dates from the forties—still seems far-fetched, hardly credible; some is feasible in a way scarcely envisioned by anyone then. The reconstructor in the present story is a case in point. We now know a great deal about the dna molecule and genetic coding; nothing was known in 1948, van Vogt guessed. As Katherine MacLean has remarked, van Vogt, in a similar story to the present one, ‘Black Destroyer’, invented the whole science of ecology when the word was unknown to intellectuals.

  When mankind does finally go knocking on the door of an inhabited planet those spacemen had belter carry a microfiche of the Complete Works of van Vogt in their hip pockets. Chances are it could be useful.

  * * *

  Raising the Monster from the dust of a dead planet proved a dangerously one-way affair. They could raise him, but laying that ghost wasn’t so simple—

  THE MONSTER

  by A. E. van Vogt

  ==========

  The great ship was poised a quarter of a mile above one of the cities. Below was a cosmic desolation. As he floated down in his energy bubble, Enash saw that the buildings were crumbling with age.

  ‘No sign of war damage!’ The bodiless voice touched his ears momentarily. Enash tuned it out.

  On the ground he collapsed his bubble. He found himself in a walled enclosure overgrown with weeds. Several skeletons lay in the tall grass beside the rakish building. They were of long, two-legged, two-armed beings with the skulls in each case mounted at the end of a thin spine. The skeletons, all of adults, seemed in excellent preservation, but when he bent down and touched one, a whole section of it crumpled into a fine powder. As he straightened, he saw that Yoal was floating down nearby. Enash waited till the historian had stepped out of his bubble, then he said:

  ‘Do you think we ought to use our method of reviving the long dead?’

  Yoal was thoughtful. ‘I have been asking questions of the various people who have landed, and there is something wrong here. This planet has no surviving life, not even insect life. We’ll have to find out what happened before we risk any colonization.’

  Enash said nothing. A soft win
d was blowing. It rustled through a clump of trees nearby. He motioned towards the trees. Yoal nodded and said:

  ‘Yes, the plant life has not been harmed, but plants after all are not affected in the same way as the active life forms.’

  There was an interruption. A voice spoke from Yoal’s receiver: ‘A museum has been found at approximately the center of the city. A red light has been fixed to the roof.’

  Enash said: ‘I’ll go with you; Yoal. There might be skeletons of animals and of the intelligent being in various stages of his evolution. You didn’t answer my question: Are you going to revive these beings?’

  Yoal said slowly: ‘I intend to discuss the matter with the council, but I think there is no doubt. We must know the cause of this disaster.’ He waved one sucker vaguely to take in half the compass. He added as an afterthought, ‘We shall proceed cautiously, of course, beginning with an obviously early development. The absence of the skeletons of children indicates that the race had developed personal immortality.’

  The council came to look at the exhibits. It was, Enash knew, a formal preliminary only. The decision was made. There would be revivals. It was more than that. They were curious. Space was vast, the journeys through it long and lonely, landing always a stimulating experience, with its prospect of new life forms to be seen and studied.

  The museum looked ordinary. High-domed ceilings, vast rooms. Plastic models of strange beasts, many artifacts—too many to see and comprehend in so short a time. The life span of a race was imprisoned here in a progressive array of relics. Enash looked with the others, and was glad when they came to the line of skeletons and preserved bodies. He seated himself behind the energy screen, and watched the biological experts take a preserved body out of a stone sarcophagus. It was wrapped in windings of cloth, many of them. The experts did not bother to unravel the rotted material. Their forceps reached through, pinched a piece of the skull—that was the accepted procedure. Any part of the skeleton could be used, but the most perfect revivals, the most complete reconstructions resulted when a certain section of the skull was used.