The Tenth Planet

by Cooper, Edmund

  “Please, Captain Hamilton! You are hurting us!” pleaded Zylonia. “You must exercise control, otherwise we shall have to introduce an automatic cut-out into your sound system.”

  He did not seem to have heard; but his voice became quieter.

  “To think of the billions who perished so that man might make a new start on Mars, avoid the old idiocies … To think of Suzy and Leo and Orlando blown to glory … And all for nothing … I can’t believe it. I can’t … You have to be lying, both of you. It has to be some kind of conspiracy … They can’t have died for nothing. The entire history of the human race can’t have ended like that!”

  “Idris Hamilton, look at me, please,” said Dr. de Skun softly. “Bring your eye close and look at my face. Tell me what you see.”

  “I see white hair, wrinkles, the face of an old man. I see tears on your cheeks.”

  “Look for deceit and conspiracy. Tell me if you find any.”

  “I see tears, unhappiness. Why do you cry, Dr. de Skun?”

  “May I not also weep for the human race, for the brave and gallant people, long dead, who tried to give it a second chance? The last refuge of mankind, Idris Hamilton, is the tenth solar planet, Minerva. Here we do not try to build empires, we have no dreams of conquest, we live in harmony. Harmony, you might say, is our fundamental law, our basic commandment. We are a stable colony of some ten thousand people.”

  “Ten thousand! All that is left of a race that once numbered ten thousand million!”

  “Biologically, it is sufficient,” said Manfrius de Skun. “If it is yet again our destiny to breed millions, we have sufficiently diverse genetic material.”

  “What is your destiny, Dr. de Skun? Here on Minerva, what do your ten thousand survivors propose to do?”

  The old man gave a faint smile. “To survive, Idris Hamilton, to endure. That is our main purpose. Simply to endure until we know enough about ourselves, about the nature of man, to avoid making the tragic mistakes of previous civilisations. But now, also, we have the Dag Hammarskjold project—the survivors from the age of disintegration. I will be frank. You and the others we have managed to resuscitate are to us living fragments of history. You are from the Twilight Period. Perhaps, by studying you, we shall learn what went wrong in human development. Perhaps the information we gain will enable us to define our own development programme.” He glanced at the girl. “Zylonia de Herrens is an officer in our Mental Health Department. She has volunteered to live with you, to orientate you in our ways, to give you companionship, to learn from you. I hope you will find her a pleasing companion. I believe you will.”

  “Live with me!” Idris laughed grimly. “How can she live with me? I am just a piece of debris in a tank.”

  “We made this facsimile of your cabin, Idris Hamilton, as a reality-anchor. Zylonia is also to be used as a reality-anchor. She will stay with you, talk to you, learn from you, sleep in the bunk you used to occupy. As a woman, she will do her best to please you. As a scientist, she will do her best to understand you. Later, when you understand our society better, there may be a less passive role for you to play. That is all I can say now. For the time being, I will leave you, Idris Hamilton. Be assured that we are doing our best for you.”

  Zylonia said: “Idris, I want to please you very much. Believe that I think of you not as a brain in nutrient solution, but as a man. I have my own dreams, just as you have yours.”

  Idris Hamilton uttered a great electronic sigh. “Then we must each take consolation from our dreams. Thank you for volunteering to keep me company. It is almost an act of love.”

  Zylonia tossed back her hair. “It is an act of love,” she said.

  10

  THERE WERE TWO clocks in the cabin. One was the actual clock taken from the bulkhead of the master’s cabin on the Dag, miraculously persuaded to work once more after an interval of five thousand years. The other was Zylonia’s—a much evolved replica of a Swiss cuckoo-clock. She had had it since she was a child. Evidently it was a kind of talisman.

  They were both twenty-four hour clocks; but they did not often tell the same time. The Martian day being longer than the terrestrial day, each Martian minute was almost one and a half seconds longer than each Earth minute. Idris amused himself briefly by calculating that once every forty-three days—Earth days—the clocks ought to tell the same time.

  The standard Martian day, he learned, was still used to regulate the passage of time on Minerva, though the planetary period of rotation was almost exactly twenty terrestrial hours. It was used for sentimental, traditional and practical reasons. It was used because the first colonists brought Mars time with them, and lived by it. It was used because a twenty-four hour day—even allowing for the slight Martian variation—corresponded to the ancient cycle of human metabolism. It was used because night and day on Minerva were almost meaningless abstractions.

  The planet, nearly six billion miles from the sun, existed in perpetual night. It was a frozen world. The sun, the brightest star in its sky, was too far away to afford any life-giving warmth, any appreciable increase of light. The surface of Minerva was permanently frozen in permanent darkness. The first colonists had burrowed beneath its surface to establish underground refuges, which later expanded into small cities. They had returned to the surface as little as possible, though they maintained a few scientific and technological installations amid the wastes of rock and frozen gasses, and even a small space-port.

  The space-port serviced and maintained five small ferry rockets, used chiefly for short planetary shoots and for exploratory shoots to Minerva’s only satellite, an irregular lump of cosmic debris no more than five hundred kilometres in diameter which orbited the planet at a mean distance of seventy-three thousand kilometres. There was also one ancient deep-space vessel, carefully maintained but rarely used. It was three thousand Earth-years old and had been part of the original exodus fleet from Mars. It had been repaired and refurbished so often during its long existence that hardly any of the original components remained. The last time it had been used was when radio and visual telescopes had tracked the wreck of the Dag Hammarskjold. Then the Amazonia had lifted off from Talbot Field to effect the most dramatic space rescue in the whole of human history.

  According to legend and the known facts of Minervan history, the bulk of the fleet that had brought the Martian refugees to Minerva had been destroyed on the orders of Garfield Talbot, its commander. The exodus fleet, hastily assembled, badly equipped, was originally destined to shoot for the nearer stars—Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Altair, Procyon. But, to Garfield Talbot, an intensely religious man, the discovery of the tenth planet had seemed like a sign. The fact that it could be made to support human life, even if only subterraneously, seemed like an invitation. He argued that it was better for the refugees from devastated Mars to accept an austere but certain future on Minerva than to try to cross the light-years in the hope of discovering systems that might not exist.

  So the original plans were cancelled after the fleet had been in space for less than two thousand hours. The fleet would not disperse to its assigned stars—which there was little hope of reaching anyway—but would touch down on the outermost solar planet, which at least offered a sanctuary that should not be beyond the ingenuity of man to improve.

  One adventurous and rebellious captain refused to accept the change of plan. Garfield Talbot considered his refusal to be an affront to divine guidance, and promptly blasted his vessel out of space with an atomic torpedo. The remaining space-ships—twelve in all—obediently changed course for Minerva.

  After touch-down, after the colonists had established underground bases large enough to support them, Talbot ordered the destruction of the fleet, his argument being that God, in his infinite mercy, had offered mankind a third chance. If the race of man could not learn to live in peace in the solar system, it would not manage to do so elsewhere. Conditions on—-or under—the surface of Minerva were extremely hard. But that was simply God’s punishment and
his way of testing.

  Garfield Talbot was forty-three years old when he brought the remnants of Martian civilisation to Minerva. He lived to the ripe age of one hundred and twenty-one, working with almost fanatical dedication for nearly eighty years to establish a harmonious and stable community. For him, stability and harmony meant strict discipline, strict adherence to the law, swift and stern justice.

  He had set down his ideas on the purpose and nature of society and of human destiny in a book called simply Talbot’s Creed. Over the centuries it had attained the stature of a testament. It was the only authoritative bible on Minerva. The Judeo-Christian mythologies had lost their significance even before the Martian culture had disintegrated. But the mythological parallel was obvious. Garfield Talbot, the Moses of deep space, had brought his chosen people to the promised land of Minerva. It was an inhospitable wilderness frozen in everlasting night. Therefore it was the perfect place for mankind to atone for previous sins and to establish a new harmonic order of society.

  Since Garfield Talbot’s great passion was for order and balance, Minervan culture had not evolved greatly in the thirty Earth-centuries that the tenth planet had been colonised. Government, in the form of the Five Cities Council, had found it convenient and necessary to adhere strictly to the teachings of Talbot’s Creed.

  Although a fanatic and a dreamer, Talbot had been acutely aware of the limits of the technological skills brought by the original colonists. Therefore he had ordained that the maximum population should be ten thousand. That maximum had been religiously kept despite new scientific discoveries and new technological development. Minerva was now capable of supporting one hundred thousand people. But Talbot’s Creed was stronger than scientific and technological progress. Talbot’s Creed was the law.

  As time passed Idris learned much about Talbot and his influence on Minervan society. Also, he learned much about Zylonia, as a woman and as a Minervan.

  But, most of all, he learned about himself.

  11

  “WHEN CAN I meet the other survivors from the Dag?” It was a question he had asked many times, with increasing impatience.

  “Soon. Quite soon, now.” Zylonia gave him the standard reply.

  He began to suspect a conspiracy. He began to think that, for some reason, the Minervans had decided not to let him see the surviving children and their teacher.

  The trouble was he had to take everything they said and did on trust. He could not investigate personally. He was just a brain in a tank of nutrient. A biological curio wired electronically for sound and vision, capable of receiving only the data deliberately fed into it. He was a prisoner.

  Perhaps the survivors did not exist. Perhaps Manfrius de Skun did not exist. Perhaps Zylonia did not exist. Perhaps Orlando and Leo and Suzy were still alive, and the Dag Hammarskjold was shooting uneventfully to Mars, and the captain was confined to his cabin because he had quietly gone nuts.

  So, therefore, his deranged mind must have invented Minerva, the girl Zylonia, and the old man who claimed to be his psycho-surgeon. It figured. Paranoia was a distinct possibility for a man who had logged too many space-hours and who had had to lift a salvage cargo from his home planet before it died.

  It figured. Yes, paranoia was a good solution. The Dag Hammarskjold had never been sabotaged. All was well. Except that Captain Idris Hamilton was busy creating three-dimensional paper dolls.

  “How bloody long is soon?” he screamed.

  Zylonia cowered, putting her hands over her ears. “If you are going to use your voice as a weapon, I shall have to turn down the volume. You will find it exhausting, Idris. You will always have to shout to be heard.”

  He was contrite. “I’m sorry. Even if you are a paper doll, I have to accept some responsibility for your existence. I’m sorry.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know … Or I’m afraid to know … Let’s get back to the children and the surviving teacher.”

  “Idris, you must be patient. Please try to believe that our most highly skilled doctors are doing all they believe to be best for you and the others.” She smiled. “Medicine and psycho-surgery have made great advances since your time. Otherwise you would not be alive now. But, if we are not to end up with mentally deranged people, the process of integration and orientation must be carried out slowly. Are you prepared to risk their sanity, as well as yours, because you are impatient?”

  He was silent for a while. Then he said bitterly: “I have a choice of believing you or disbelieving you. I will try to believe you if only because it is less agonizing … But take good care of those Earth children—if they exist, and if you exist. I want to think that it didn’t all happen for nothing.”

  “We are taking good care of them,” she said softly. “I promise you.”

  “Well, then, Miss Zylonia de Herrens, take off your clothes.”

  “Take off my clothes?” She was amazed.

  He enjoyed her amazement. He could feel himself enjoying it. The sensation was good.

  “I want to find out what the sight of a naked woman does to me.” He laughed. “As a scientist you should be very interested in the response of a brain in a tank to sexual stimulus … Or are you too inhibited? Perhaps Minervan society has a stricter sexual code than I imagined.”

  “I am not too inhibited,” she said tartly, “and Minervan society is not riddled with primitive sexual tabu. I am reluctant only because there is your incidence of frustration to consider.”

  He was vastly amused at the thought. “My incidence of frustration! That’s a pleasing phrase. I like it … Maybe if you Minervans had given some thought to my incidence of frustration, you would have left my corpse—or the half of it you found—to drift through the galaxy in peace. Strip, Zylonia! Give a few billion resuscitated grey cells a treat.”

  “I—I—” She was confused, and he enjoyed her confusion.

  “Ho, ho! This is one of my good times. Maybe life is worth living—using the word somewhat loosely—after all … I presume we are monitored. It would account for your confusion.”

  “Yes—No. Idris, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “So, we are monitored. I thought as much. But it doesn’t matter. Let’s give the boys at the video screens a bit of fun. Strip, child. No doubt Manfrius de Skun will have much joy deciphering the variations in my brain rhythms. Strip!”

  He thought she would chicken, but she didn’t.

  Zylonia took off her tunic, her chemise, her bra, her panties. He was delighted to discover that such garments had changed very little in five thousand years. It was a great consolation.

  Having committed herself, Zylonia at least carried out the task bravely. She placed her hands on her hips and stood facing his ‘eye’ calmly. “Does this improve your state of mind, Idris? Do you like what you see?”

  He did not answer for a while. At last, he said: “I like what I see. It’s a real tonic. It feels as if I had forgotten about the human body—not the facts, but, somehow, the idea. I am glad to be reminded … The body is a very beautiful thing. Seeing you like this is a renewal of intimacy, a kind of contact. It makes me feel less lonely. Walk about, Zylonia. I want to see the muscles move.”

  She walked about the cabin, a little self-consciously. She stooped to pick up the clothes she had taken off, smoothed them out and placed them carefully on the bunk.

  Idris experienced real pleasure. He willed his ‘eye’ to follow her closely, lovingly, almost caressingly. The sensation of pleasure was intoxicating. It was the first time he had experienced it, since his resurrection.

  “May I put my clothes on now?” said Zylonia. “Surely you have seen enough?”

  “No to both,” he said emphatically. “I have news for you and for those bright lads at the monitor screens. I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying it immensely. Dr. de Skun will doubtless be interested to learn that, deprived of a body, a glandular system, any means of touch or fulfilment, this thing in a tank can still exper
ience sexual arousal, immense pleasure.” He laughed. “You Minervans are to be congratulated. You have created the most dedicated voyeur in the solar system … I’ll tell you something else, Zylonia. I want a lavatory, a head, a john or whatever you call it, installed in this stage set. I see you eat and relax and sleep. I want to see you do the everyday things that people do with their bodies…. Don’t you understand? You are my proxy. It is only through you that I can cherish the illusion of being alive.”

  Unaccountably, she began to cry. “You are alive. Oh, Idris, it won’t be long before you can be fully alive. They are growing a new body for you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “They are growing a new body for you … You weren’t supposed to learn about it so early in the programme. But it’s true.”

  12

  HE SHOT HIS mobile eye very close to her face so that, for an instant, she was afraid he was literally hurling the camera at her by will-power. Instinctively, she held up her hands to protect herself.

  “Sorry! It never occurred to me that I could use my eye as a weapon. An interesting thought …”

  She lowered her hands. He looked closely, searchingly, at her face.

  “Now, make it slow and clear, Zylonia, because I am only a stupid spaceman—or, at least, I used to be. How the hell can they grow me a new body?”

  “Do you understand anything of genetics?”

  “No. But I am willing to learn.”

  “You have heard of cloning?”

  “I seem to recall that it’s a technique of duplication. It was used on Earth, and on Mars, I think, for producing exact copies of prize cattle. Beyond that I know nothing.”

  “The principle is simple,” said Zylonia, “but the techniques involved are fantastically complicated. You see, the cells of the body each contain all the genetic coding, or design for an entirely new body. I know very little of the actual process of cellular surgery, and we have only recently succeeded in cloning from human cells; but given the right kind of environment—in this case a synthetic uterus—it is possible to electronically trigger the reproduction code in the cell nucleus so that the development cycle begins. Eventually, it yields a mature physical copy of the being from which the genetic material was taken.”