The Seedling Stars

by James Blish

  The Seedling Stars

  You didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man's shape and chemistry before he was born. And the pantropists didn't stop there. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe.

  This title includes the following contents:

  • Seeding Program aka A Time To Survive? (1956)

  • The Thing in the Attic (1954)

  • Surface Tension (1957)

  • Watershed (1955)

  First published in 1957

  The Seedling Stars

  Book One

  Seeding Program

  1

  T he spaceship resumed humming around Sweeney without his noticing the change. When Capt. Meiklejon's voice finally came again from the wall speaker, Sweeney was still lying buckled to his bunk in a curious state of tranquility he had never known before, and couldn't possibly have described, even to himself. Though he had a pulse, he might otherwise have concluded that he was dead. It took him several minutes to respond.

  "Sweeney, do you hear me? Are — you all right?"

  The brief hesitation in the pilot's breathing made Sweeney grin. From Meiklejon's point of view, and that of most of the rest of humanity, Sweeney was all wrong. He was, in fact, dead.

  The heavily insulated cabin, with its own airlock to the outside, and no access for Sweeney at all to the rest of the ship, was a testimonial to his wrongness. So was Meiklejon's tone: the voice of a man addressing, not another human being, but something that had to be kept in a vault.

  A vault designed to protect the universe outside it — not to protect its contents from the universe.

  "Sure, I'm all right," Sweeney said, snapping the buckle and sitting up. He checked the thermometer, which still registered its undeviating minus 194° F. — the mean surface temperature of Ganymede, moon number III of Jupiter. "I was dozing, sort of. What's up?"

  "I'm putting the ship into her orbit; we're about a thousand miles up from the satellite now. I thought you might want to take a look."

  "Sure enough. Thanks, Mickey."

  The wall speaker said, "Yeah. Talk to you later." Sweeney grappled for the guide rail and pulled himself over to the cabin's single bull's-eye port, maneuvering with considerable precision. For a man to whom 1/6 Earth gravity is normal, freefall — a situation of no gravity at all — is only an extreme case.

  Which was what Sweeney was, too. A human being — but an extreme case.

  He looked out. He knew exactly what he would see; he had studied it exhaustively from photos, from teletapes, from maps, and through telescopes both at home on the Moon and on Mars. When you approach Ganymede at inferior conjunction, as Meiklejon was doing, the first thing that hits you in the eye is the huge oval blot called Neptune's Trident — so named by the earliest Jovian explorers because it was marked with the Greek letter psi on the old Howe composite map. The name had turned out to have been well chosen: that blot is a deep, many-pronged sea, largest at the eastern end, which runs from about 120° to 165° in longitude, and from about 10° to 33° North latitude. A sea of what? Oh, water of course — water frozen rock-solid forever, and covered with a layer of rock-dust about three inches thick.

  East of the Trident, and running all the way north to the pole, is a great triangular marking called the Gouge, a torn-up, root-entwined, avalanche-shaken valley which continues right around the pole and back up into the other hemisphere, fanning out as it goes. (Up because north to space pilots, as to astronomers, is down.) There is nothing quite like the Gouge on any other planet, although at inferior conjunction, when your ship is coming down on Ganymede at the 180° meridian, it is likely to remind you of Syrtis Major on Mars.

  There is, however, no real resemblance. Syrtis Major is perhaps the pleasantest land on all of Mars. The Gouge, on the other hand, is — a gouge.

  On the eastern rim of this enormous scar, at long. 218, N. lat. 32, is an isolated mountain about 9,000 feet high, which had no name as far as Sweeney knew; it was marked with the letter pi on the Howe map. Because of its isolation, it can be seen easily from Earth's Moon in a good telescope when the sunrise terminator lies in that longitude, its peak shining detached in the darkness like a little star. A semicircular shelf juts westward out over the Gouge from the base of Howe's pi, it sides bafflingly sheer for a world which shows no other signs of folded strata.

  It was on that shelf that the other Adapted Men lived.

  Sweeney stared down at the nearly invisible mountain with its star-fire peak for a long time, wondering why he was not reacting. Any appropriate emotion would do: anticipation, alarm, eagerness, anything at all, even fear. For that matter, having been locked up in a safe for over two months should by now have driven him foaming to get out, even if only to join the Adapted Men. Instead, the tranquility persisted. He was unable to summon more than a momentary curiosity over Howe's pi before his eye was drawn away to Jupiter himself, looming monstrous and insanely-colored only 600,000 miles away, give or take a few thousand. And even that planet had attracted him only because it was brighter; otherwise, it had no meaning.

  "Mickey?" he said, forcing himself to look back down into the Gouge.

  "Right here, Sweeney. How does it look?'

  "Oh, like a relief map. That's how they all look. Where are you going to put me down? Don't the orders leave it up to us?"

  "Yeah. But I don't think there's any choice," Meiklejon's voice said, less hesitantly. "It'll have to be the big plateau Howe's H."

  Sweeney scanned the oval mare with a mild distaste. Standing on that, he would be as conspicuous as if he'd been planted in the middle of the Moon's Mare Crisium. He said so.

  "You've no choice," Meiklejon repeated calmly. He burped the rockets several times. Sweeney's weight returned briefly, tried to decide which way it wanted to throw itself, and then went away again. The ship was now in its orbit; but whether Meiklejon had set it up to remain put over its present coordinates, or instead it was to cruise criss-cross over the whole face of the satellite, Sweeney couldn't tell, and didn't ask. The less he knew about that, the better.

  "Well, it's a long drop," Sweeney said. "And that atmosphere isn't exactly the thickest in the system. I'll have to fall in the lee of the mountain. I don't want to have to trudge a couple of hundred miles over Howe's H."

  "On the other hand," Meiklejon said, "if you come down too close, our friends down there will spot your parachute. Maybe it'd be better if we dropped you into the Gouge, after all. There's so much tumbled junk down there that the radar echoes must be tremendous — not a chance of their spotting a little thing like a man on a parachute."

  "No, thank you. There's still optical spotting, and a foil parachute looks nothing like a rock spur, even to an Adapted Man. It'll have to be behind the mountain, where I'm in both optical and radar shadow at once. Besides, how could I climb out of the Gouge onto the shelf? They didn't plant themselves on the edge of a cliff for nothing."

  "That's right," Meiklejon said. "Well, I've got the catapult pointed. I'll suit up and join you on the hull."

  "All right. Tell me again just what you're going to do while I'm gone, so I won't find myself blowing the whistle when you're nowhere around." The sound of a suit locker being opened came tinnily over the intercom. Sweeney's chute harness was already strapped on, and getting the respirator and throat-mikes into place would only take a moment. Sweeney needed no other protection.

  "I'm to stay up here with all power off except maintenance for 300 days," Mei
klejon's voice, sounding more distant now, was repeating. "Supposedly by that time you'll have worked yourself in good with our friends down there and will know the setup. I stand ready to get a message from you on a fixed frequency. You're to send me only a set of code letters; I feed them into the computer, the comp tells me what to do and I act accordingly. If I don't hear from you after 300 days, I utter a brief but heartfelt prayer and go home. Beyond that, God help me, I don't know a thing."

  "That's plenty," Sweeney told him. "Let's go."

  Sweeney went out his personal airlock. Like all true interplanetary craft, Meiklejon's ship had no overall hull. She consisted of her essential components, including the personnel globe, held together by a visible framework of girders and I-beams. It was one of the longest of the latter, one which was already pointed toward Howe's H, which would serve as the 'catapult'.

  Sweeney looked up at the globe of the satellite. The old familiar feeling of falling came over him for a moment; he looked down, reorienting himself to the ship, until it went away. He'd be going in that direction soon enough.

  Meiklejon came around the bulge of the personnel globe, sliding his shoes along the metal. In his bulky, misshapen spacesuit, it was he who looked like the unhuman member of the duo.

  "Ready?" he said.

  Sweeney nodded and lay face down on the I-beam, snapping the guide-clips on his harness into place around it. He could feel Meiklejon's mitts at his back, fastening the JATO unit; he could see nothing now, however, but the wooden sled that would protect his body from the beam.

  "Okay," the pilot said. "Good luck, Sweeney."

  "Thanks. Count me off, Mickey."

  "Coming up on five seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Hack."

  The JATO unit shuddered and dealt Sweeney a nearly paralyzing blow between his shoulder-blades. For an instant the acceleration drove him down into his harness, and the sled spraddled against the metal of the I-beam.

  Then, suddenly, the vibration stopped. He was flying free. A little belatedly, he jerked the release ring.

  The sled went-curving away from under him, dwindling rapidly among the stars. The pressure at his back cut out as the JATO unit, still under power, flamed ahead of him. The instantly-dissipated flick of heat from its exhaust made him ill for a moment; then it bad vanished. It would hit too hard to leave anything where it landed but a hole.

  Nothing was left but Sweeney, falling toward Ganymede, head first.

  From almost the beginning, from that day unrememberably early in his childhood when he had first realized that the underground dome on the Moon was all there was to the universe for nobody but himself, Sweeney had wanted to be human; wanted it with a vague, impersonal ache which set quickly into a chill bitterness of manner and outlook in his unique everyday life, and in dreams with flares of searing loneliness which became more infrequent but also more intense as he matured, until such a night would leave him as shaken and mute, sometimes for several days at a stretch, as an escape from a major accident.

  The cadre of psychologists, psychiatrists and analysts assigned to him did what they could, but that was not very much. Sweeney's history contained almost nothing that was manipulable by any system of psychotherapy developed to help human beings. Nor were the members of the cadre ever able to agree among themselves what the prime goal of such therapy should be: whether to help Sweeney to live with the facts of his essential inhumanity, or to fan instead that single spark of hope which the non-medical people on the Moon were constantly holding out toward Sweeney as the sole reason for his existence.

  The facts were simple and implacable. Sweeney was an Adapted Man — adapted, in this instance, to the bitter cold, the light gravity, and the thin stink of atmosphere which prevailed on Ganymede. The blood that ran in his veins, and the sol substrate of his every cell, was nine-tenths liquid ammonia; his bones were Ice IV; his respiration was a complex hydrogen-to-methane cycle based not upon catalysis by an iron-bearing pigment, but upon the locking and unlocking of a double sulfur bond; and he could survive for weeks, if he had to, upon a diet of rock dust.

  He had always been this way. What had made him so had happened to him literally before he had been conceived: the application, to the germ cells which had later united to form him, of an elaborate constellation of techniques — selective mitotic poisoning, pinpoint X-irradiation, tectogenetic microsurgery, competitive metabolic inhibition, and perhaps fifty more whose names he had never even heard — which collectively had been christened 'pantropy'. The word, freely retranslated, meant 'changing everything' — and it fitted.

  As the pantropists had changed in advance the human pattern in Sweeney's shape and chemistry, so they had changed his education, his world, his thoughts, even his ancestors. You didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand, Dr. Alfven had once explained proudly to Sweeney over the intercom. Even the ultimate germ cells were the emergents of a hundred previous generations, bred one from another before they had passed the zygote stage like one-celled animals, each one biassed a little farther toward the cyanide and ice and everything nice that little boys like Sweeney were made of. The psych cadre picked off Dr. Alfven at the end of that same week, at the regular review of the tapes of what had been said to Sweeney and what he had found to say back, but they need hardly have taken the trouble. Sweeney had never heard a nursery rhyme, any more than he had ever experienced the birth trauma or been exposed to the Oedipus complex. He was a law unto himself, with most of the whereases blank.

  He noticed, of course, that Alfven failed to show up when his next round was due, but this was commonplace. Scientists came and went around the great sealed cavern, always accompanied by the polite and beautifully uniformed private police of the Greater Earth Port Authority, but they rarely lasted very long. Even among the psych cadre there was always a peculiar tension, a furious constraint which erupted periodi cally into pitched shouting battles. Sweeney never found out what the shouting was about because the sound to the outside was always cut as soon as the quarrels began, but he noticed that some of the participants never showed up again.

  "Where's Dr. Emory? Isn't this his day?"

  "He finished his tour of duty."

  "But I want to talk to him. He promised to bring me a book.

  Won't he be back for a visit?"

  "I don't think so, Sweeney. He's retired. Don't worry about him, he'll get along just fine, I'll bring you your book."

  It was after the third of these incidents that Sweeney was let out on the surface of the Moon for the first time — guarded, it was true, by five men in spacesuits, but Sweeney didn't care. The new freedom seemed enormous to him, and his own suit, only a token compared to what the Port cops had to wear, hardly seemed to exist. It was his first foretaste of the liberty he was to have, if the many hints could be trusted, after his job was done. He could even see the Earth, where people lived.

  About the job he knew everything there was to know, and knew it as second nature. It had been drummed into him from his cold and lonely infancy, always with the same command at the end:

  "We must have those men back."

  Those six words were the reason for Sweeney; they were also Sweeney's sole hope. The Adapted Men had to be recaptured and brought back to Earth — or more exactly, back to the dome on the Moon, the only place besides Ganymede where they could be kept alive. And if they could not all be recaptured — he was to entertain this only as a possibility — he must at least come back with Dr. Jacob Rullman. Only Rullman would be sure to know the ultimate secret: how to turn an Adapted Man back into a human being.

  Sweeney understood that Rullman and his associates were criminals, but how grievous their crime had been was a question he had never tried to answer for himself. His standards were too sketchy. It was clear from the beginning, however, that the colony on Ganymede had been set up without Earth's sanction, by methods of which Earth did not approve (except for special cases like Sweeney), and that Earth wanted it broken up. Not by force, for Earth w
anted to know first what Rullman knew, but by the elaborate artifice which was Sweeney himself.

  We must have those men back. After that, the hints said — never promising anything directly — Sweeney could be made human, and know a better freedom than walking the airless surface of the Moon with five guards.

  It was usually after one of these hints that one of those suddenly soundless quarrels would break out among the staff. Any man of normal intelligence would have come to suspect that the hints were less than well founded upon any. real expectation, and Sweeney's training helped to make him suspicious early; but in the long run he did not care. The hints offered his only hope and he accepted them with hope but without expectation. Besides, the few opening words of such quarrels which he had overheard before the intercom clicked off had suggested that there was more to the disagreement than simple doubt of the convertibility of an Adapted Man. It had been Emory, for instance, who had burst out unexpectedly and explosively:

  "But suppose Rullman was right?"

  Click.

  Right about what? Is a lawbreaker ever 'right'? Sweeney could not know. Then there had been the technie who had said "It's the cost that's the trouble with terra-forming" — what did that mean? — and had been hustled out of the monitoring chamber on some trumped-up errand hardly a minute later. There were many such instances, but inevitably Sweeney failed to put the fragments together into any pattern. He decided only that they did not bear directly upon his chances of becoming human, and promptly abandoned them in the vast desert of his general ignorance.

  In the long run, only the command was real — the command and the nightmares. We must have those men back. Those six words were the reason why Sweeney, like a man whose last effort to awaken has failed, was falling head first toward Ganymede.

  The Adapted Men found Sweeney halfway up the great col which provided the only access to their cliff-edge colony from the plateau of Howe's H. He did not recognize them; they conformed to none of the photographs he had memorized; but they accepted his story readily enough. And he had not needed to pretend exhaustion — Ganymede's gravity was normal to him, but it had been a long trek and a longer climb.