Polymath

by John Brunner

  “I see,” Delvia said after a pause. “Very well, you know best.”

  With perfectly good grace—or so it appeared—she went back to where she had been sitting. A buzz of comment rose and at Jerode’s bidding stilled again. After that the meeting proceeded smoothly to its end.

  But for some reason Delvia kept smiling, and it disturbed Lex considerably that he couldn’t figure out why.

  X

  “Keeping radio watch!” Elbing said ruefully. “Well, it’s about all I’m fit for now, I guess.” He lifted his pegleg from the ground to relieve the pressure on his stump. He was the last surviving member of Arbogast’s crew; like many spacemen, he suffered from circulatory disorders, and the frost of last winter had cost him his right leg below the knee.

  Lex clapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll be good to haye someone listening out that we know is accustomed to the job. Come on in the hut. Aykin is figuring out a backpack for our set.”

  Gesturing for Elbing to precede him, he glanced around. The air was muggy and oppressive, and dark clouds fringed the seaward horizon. There was tension in the air. It tantalized his mind. He felt as though there were some necessary provision he ought to have made for the town, yet he could not determine what.

  He shrugged. Necessary, in any case, didn’t mean possible. He followed Elbing into the hut.

  Their only radios were from the starship, of course: big and heavy, not intended to be carried from place to place nor to be run from portable accumulators. Aykin had devised a rough wooden case attached to a shoulder-harness; just as Lex and Elbing entered, he was slipping out of it, easing it gently onto a table.

  “How are you getting on?” Lex demanded. “How many extra accumulators will we have to carry?”

  “None,” Aykin said with satisfaction. “Look. This is an idea Minty hit on.” He picked up a short length of metal tube with wire wrapped around it. “The answer is to increase the length of the antenna. Minty suggested throwing this up over a tree-branch. I’ve just been trying it out, and it looks as though we’ll be able to transmit and receive quite clearly on the low-power setting. So we won’t need the extra accumulator.”

  “Ingenious.” Elbing nodded, lowering himself stiffly to a chair. Lex frowned, not because the idea wasn’t a good one, but because he felt he ought now to grasp the point he had been fumbling after.

  He said slowly, “Did you follow up my suggestion—take one of the solar collector sheets, spread that out, and use it to drive the radio?” There was one drawback to that: it would mean transmitting during the day, when solar interference was at its worst, instead of at leisure when they made camp after nightfall, and in any case the problem had been solved. But association of ideas might lead him to the one that was eluding him.

  In the far corner Minty and Lodette both looked up. They had been poring over a list on a shelf nailed to the wall.

  “Lodette says if we follow the river we may hardly see the sun at all,” Minty declared.

  “That’s right.” The plump-faced biologist nodded. “I don’t know if you’ve been far inland this summer, but the vegetation upstream is thick”

  “Besides”—Aykin laid the wire antenna back on the table—“it’s clouding over. It may even be going to storm.”

  Lex snapped his fingers. That was it: going to storm—wires in trees—lightning conductors! He said, “Back in a moment.” And hurried off to find Jerode.

  The hut which Fritch was intending to turn into a proper infirmary by adding a new wing stood a little apart from the other buildings. It was the logical place to look for the doctor. Casting anxious glances at the clouds on the horizon and wondering whether the expedition might have to be postponed, Lex strode toward the curtained doorway. When he was a few paces away the curtain swung back and Ornelle emerged, her face pale.

  On seeing Lex she froze for a moment, then let the curtain fall and continued forward.

  “Is Jerode in there?” Lex demanded.

  “Yes, but you can’t see him. He’s busy.” There was a bitter ring to Ornelle’s voice which dismayed him.

  “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “Yes. Something you could have prevented. Only you said it was a question of principle not to. Naline has tried to follow Arbogast’s example. Jerode says she’ll live, but it looks as though she’s blinded herself. Are you pleased at what you’ve done?”

  “Why? Over Delvia?” Lex demanded, forcing himself to disregard the gibe.

  “What do you think?”

  “Exactly how did it happen?”

  “She and Delvia were charging the energy guns for your expedition,” Ornelle said bitingly. “I imagine they had an argument. Maybe Delvia said straight out that she’d used Naline as a toy to pass the winter and that was all their relationship meant to her. Anyway, Naline took one of the guns and went off among the trees. Bendle found her when he heard her moaning. The gun wasn’t charged—it only flashed. But that was enough to put out her eyes.”

  “And Delvia?”

  “Her!” Ornelle stamped her foot. “Still charging your guns, I guess. Sooner or later she’ll notice that one is missing. Maybe she noticed already. But I haven’t seen her come looking for it.”

  Lex drew a deep breath. He said, “You’re determined to lay the blame for this on me, aren’t you?”

  Ornelle looked at him with smoldering eyes.

  “My expedition, my guns, my responsibility!” Lex rapped. “Now you listen to me, Ornelle! I’m tired of this and I’m not going to put up with any more. Have you done anything to help Naline? Well, have you? Have you even tackled Delvia about it?”

  Ornelle flinched. Defensively she countered, “I asked you to—”

  “Why me? You watched this from the beginning and you didn’t interfere—neither you nor any other of the supposedly responsible women in the house. All winter you let it stew; then the most you were willing to do was try to dump the chore of picking up the pieces on my shoulders. I am not going to carry your guilt for you; nor is anyone else. Do you understand?”

  Ornelle’s mouth worked. Suddenly her mask broke. She screamed a filthy name at him and slapped him on the cheek. He rode the blow impassively.

  “Bastard!” she shrieked. “All you men are bastards!

  You won’t hear a word against that bitch, that whore, that—!”

  He moved now, caught her arms and twisted them dexterously behind her, locking his steel-strong fingers around both her wrists. The curtain of the hut parted to reveal a startled Jerode.

  Lex shut off Ornelle’s obscene mouthings with the palm of his free hand. He said, “Tranquilizer shot, Doc. She’s in a bad state—hysterical jealousy. Shall I carry her inside?”

  “Uh—if you can!” said the astonished doctor.

  Lex could. A few moments later Ornelle lay in drugged slumber on one of the medical examination couches.

  “What the hell happened?” Jerode demanded.

  Lex explained. “I ought to have realized it before,” he finished. “She’s crazy-jealous of Delvia, who doesn’t let our predicament stop her getting what fun she can out of life. I was thrown off track by her saying she was concerned about Naline because she had two daughters back on Zara.” He noticed in passing that he had given up saying “back home.” So had virtually everybody else but a handful of what he regarded as the useless ones.

  “You think—” Jerode began. Lex cut him short.

  “I think you’d better find out what really happened in the single women’s house during the winter. In detail. Next year we might prevent a repetition. Ornelle faked her disinterest. I’d guess that she wanted to mother Naline, to provide a surrogate for her lost daughters, and Naline wouldn’t play, and took refuge with the least motherly of the other women. I’m afraid we may well have more nervous collapses of this type among women who have lost families and feel obscurely guilty, like Ornelle, about doing anything to replace them.”

  “It fits,” Jerode said heavily. “And I ought to have
figured it out myself, even though I’m a physical doctor and not a psychologist. I guess pressure of administration has taken my mind off my real job. And… Lex, I have to say this. You’re partly to blame for that, aren’t you?”

  There was a long pause. During it, Lex reviewed everything that had happened to him so far on this planet. The bitter disappointment of not continuing to fulfill his great ambition still lingered; it would linger, perhaps, all his life. And yet he was no longer faced with the daunting prospect of decades of study, training, analyzing, examination, guesstimating….

  Here, after all, was a world. Brand-new. More likely to be ultimately habitable than not. And wasn’t that the root of his ambition—to have a new world?

  Eventually he turned away. His back to Jerode, he said, “I know. I’m sorry. Ornelle tried to load me with a responsibility which wasn’t mine, and I lost my temper because I’m ashamed of not accepting a responsibility which really does belong to me. We can’t go on burdening you with all the administrative work. When we come back from this trip, I’ll turn the salvage team over to Minty and Aykin and get on with my proper job.”

  Jerode exhaled like a man coming up from an unendurable time under water. He said, “Lex, I can’t tell you how glad I am. How soon are you going to be back?”

  Smiling, composed again, Lex turned around. “Oh, about seven days altogether. That’s assuming we can break through the blockage in the river. If the vegetation on the way is as thick as Lodette predicts—although I imagine we can get to the other party’s site in about two days following the riverbed—we’ll spend much longer coming back because we’ll have to hack our way through dense undergrowth.”

  “Well, hurry!” Jerode said. His eyes were bright. Suddenly he laughed, and from the screened-off corner of the hut where Naline lay came an angry exclamation in Zanice’s voice, asking him to be a little quieter.

  When he had left Jerode, Lex was in a thoughtful mood. He had mentioned the lightning conductors, and Jerode had promised to refer the idea to Fritch. One tall metal post on high ground clear of the town should suffice.

  The breakdown of Ornelle, though, had given him new cause to worry. How much of it was due to her belief, throughout the winter, that the other party was going to join forces this year and make life easier for everyone? How many other people, not so close to the edge of sanity, might yield to despair when objective news was brought back about the death of the other human group? Despite his comment to Jerode and Cheffy about there being a dam-building animal here, he no longer seriously considered it possible that there were survivors on the plateau.

  He was not looking forward to what he expected to find up there.

  Without realizing, he had let his feet carry him toward the spot on the beach which Delvia had chosen as a site for her self-allotted task. Raising his eyes, he saw her ahead of him, surrounded by accumulators and solar collector sheets. On a rack of sticks tied with string were the seven energy guns the community possessed, fully charged.

  So someone had brought back the gun Naline had used, and told her the story. Yet she was going on with her work, humming to herself. She had wrapped her tabard casually around her hips as before.

  One of the accumulators was ready. She disconnected it, set it on another and those on another, and carried the three of them ten paces to a waiting handtruck. The ease with which she did it took Lex aback. The things were heavy; they doubled the depth of the prints her bare feet left in the sand.

  He said, “Delvia!”

  She straightened and turned, wiping sweating palms on her ragged kilt.

  “They told you about Naline?” he said in a rough voice.

  “Yes. One of Bendle’s team brought the gun back.” She waved at the rack. “They’re all ready for you, by the way.”

  Lex simply stood, gazing at her. After a moment she snapped, “Well? Well? Are you waiting for me to burst into tears?”

  “Not really,” Lex said. “More, I’m wondering why Naline took a gun which presumably she knew was uncharged.”

  Delvia gave him a look of amazement. After a moment it yielded to relief. “Thank you, Lex. Were you also told that she took care to be seen by four or five people with the gun, and no one bothered to ask what she was doing with it?”

  “No, but I’m not surprised.” Lex moved to the handtruck and sat down on the corner of it. “I think I should have asked for your side of the story earlier. Tell me now.”

  She hesitated. Then, with obvious bitterness, she said, “You were right when you said I shouldn’t come on your trip. I am impulsive, and never in my life have I had to restrain myself, so I don’t have the habit. I’m pretty much what you might call a natural animal, I guess. I have reflexes. It’s easier to give in to them than fight them, and it’s more fun.”

  Lex nodded. “But you must learn how, Delvia. For all our sakes including yours.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” she said wearily. She dropped to her knees on the hot sand. “If I’d known what I was getting mixed up with… Listen, I’m not the motherly kind. I don’t think I have an ounce of maternal instinct. And here was this gang of biddies squabbling over Naline, all wanting her as a kind of walking babydoll, with Ornelle slavering at the head of the rest. Naline hated the idea of letting them treat her as a kid. She wanted to think of herself as independent. Grown-up. Of course, she’s not. She’s a self-dramatizing, greedy, clinging adolescent. I wasn’t fussing over her like a hen with one chick, so she attached herself to me. That was all, at first.

  “Then it got really cold. Remember what it was like in midwinter?” Her voice was low and fierce. “Well, one night there she was, climbing under my blanket with me, stiff with cold. I know what I should have done—oh, yes! I knew my reflexes were set to detonate. I ought to have given her my blanket and gone out in the snow to cool off. Well, I didn’t. Shivering in my sleep with a pitch-black storm outside, I wasn’t in a state to think about noble gestures. And when she got warmed up enough to move around, well, what in all of space was I expected to do with her hands all over me and her tongue in my ear?”

  She slapped her thigh with her open palm. “But I tell you this! If Ornelle or anybody says she could have done different, it’s a lie.”

  “Go on,” Lex said in a neutral tone.

  “Thanks, I’m going to! Since I’m setting the record straight, I might as well make a proper job of it. Look. I’m a long way from my adolescence and I never had one like Naline’s anyway, so it took me a shamefully long time to figure out what was attaching her to me. She’s never seen me, Delvia-as-is. She’s invented a Delvia that never was, sweet and generous and big-sisterly and so on in quantities enough to justify the way she throws herself at me. Why do you think I’ve been taking men like—like trophies even when it was still so cold it was damned uncomfortable and no fun at all? I’ve been trying to smash this nonexistent Delvia, get Naline to notice the real one!”

  “Did you tell her to come out here and work with you today?”

  “I did not. I don’t give her orders. I didn’t tell her to go away either, though. I’ve been hoping she’d recover from her hysteria. But she hadn’t. She tried to pick a quarrel, and I kept calm, and she accused me of hating her and snatched up a gun and ran off. I didn’t chase her. I didn’t think she could do any harm with it. It had been given to me as expended, for recharging. Lex, I swear I didn’t know there was enough power left in it even for a flash discharge!”

  Her face was pale; her lips were trembling. Lex looked at her for a long time. At last he said, “Go and talk to Jerode, Del. Ornelle’s had a breakdown, and she’s said a lot of things that’ll make him readier to listen to you. Between you, you may be able to figure out how to prevent you being lynched when the news about Naline gets around.”

  XI

  The little expedition moved off at first light the next day—partly to get as far as possible before having to camp for the night, partly to avoid making a ceremony of the departure. Lex had walked two or thr
ee miles up the riverbed to reconnoiter, to a hill which gave a good view of the next several miles still, and knew the going was fairly clear to start with. But for this, he might have postponed their leaving. A wind off the sea was piling up the clouds which had been on the horizon yesterday, the sun was hidden, and as the clouds approached the land they began to be carried upward.

  With luck they might not spill their rain until they were over the high ground inland, then move on before Lex and his companions caught up. But they spread a pall of gloom over the first stage of the trip. Once or twice they had to use handlights even though dawn was long past. At least, however, it wasn’t raining.

  The people they were leaving behind might have been more pleased if it had been. It would have meant fresh water for washing, as well as the scant ration for drinking provided by Aldric’s solar stills… which in any case could not last long unless the sun came back.

  The contrast with the going at the end of last summer was amazing. This time it was far tougher. Newly-sprouted plants of all kinds fringed the river and a network of roots meshed out from the banks. The disappearance of the water had left them dry and fibrous, and the rotting bodies of freshwater animals were piled in what had been the last puddles. At first there were stands of quite tall timber on either side—trees twenty to fifty feet high, draped with an incredible tangle of creepers, vines, and plants for which no names had yet been invented. The river narrowed and its course grew steeper; then the trees were replaced by sucker-rooting shrubs only half as high, but equally festooned with creepers.

  The mud had dried out and gave a good footing. They made fair progress throughout the morning. Around them were strange noises: oddly-shaped birds, yellow-gray and brown, shrilled and boomed, carapaced insects hissed and stridulated, and sometimes there were bubbling grunts which suggested that some large creature had been taken by what passed for its throat and was being strangled.