Polymath

by John Brunner

  He let himself over the edge of the watchpost floor and swarmed back to the ground.

  Gomes and his companions came to the sedimentation plant and found it deserted. They spent a little while discussing it, giving nervous glances around them because for the past mile or more they had seen unaccountable movements in the undergrowth. They felt they were being watched. In fact they were. Cheffy’s workers had been told to hide nearby and keep an eye on them.

  Continuing, they came in sight of the town: solid-looking buildings of timber caulked with clay, their wooden-shuttered windows open to the hot summer air; smoke rising from the chimneys of the brick kilns; a clangor of nailing, sawing, and chopping. They saw where timber had been felled, ground cleared, and replanted with salad-trees in neat tidy lines. They saw people healthy, well-nourished, in clean serviceable clothing, and were reminded that they were ragged, filthy, lean as scarecrows.

  The people took notice of them—just a little. They did not interrupt what they were doing, which included the distribution of large bowls of savory-smelling food to workers on the job and the issuing of water rations from big barrels.

  They stood overlooking the town for some minutes, uncertain what to do. Then Cheffy’s men rose into sight from-the nearby scrub, and with an oath the intruders whirled, covering them with their guns.

  None of Cheffy’s men was armed. Lex had specifically enjoined them not to take the guns from the watchposts. Yet.

  Cheffy himself, approaching Gomes, said in a level voice, “We’ve been expecting you. Come along—I’ll take you to our polymath.”

  “What?” The word ripped from Gomes’s mouth as though it would tear his lips. “You have a polymath here? I don’t believe it! Nobody said—”

  “Captain,” Probian said under his breath, putting a hand on Gomes’s arm. He pointed at the thriving little town, and had no need to continue.

  Reading the confusion on Gomes’s rough-bearded face, Cheffy spoke again. “You may keep your guns, of course. I was told you’d feel insecure without them. But you won’t have any cause to use them. This way, please.”

  He didn’t pause to see their reaction, but turned and began to walk downslope. His gang moved behind him, encircling Gomes’s party in such a fashion as to suggest they were escorting a group of extraordinary animals, making a parade of it People working on the newly-erected houses here at the edge of town reinforced the impression as they improvised in accordance with Lex’s order: “Make them feel like the barbarians they are!”

  “Hi, Cheffy!” called Zanice, collecting bars of white soap from their setting-trays. “Pretty sorry lot they look, don’t they?”

  “Dirty!” Cheffy agreed. Gomes set his jaw and his grip on his gun tightened.

  “Are those they?” Minty inquired, wrinkling her nose as she sat on the step outside the single women’s house, ladling hot soup out for members of Fritch’s building team who were putting up new partitions inside. “Look as though they could use a good meal—and a bath!”

  One of Gomes’s companions swallowed so hard the noise was like a shout, and Probian rounded on him, his face thunderous.

  It went on like that all the way to the headquarters hut—personal remarks being passed, never addressed to the strangers but simply commenting on their dirt, their stink, their raggedness and scrawniness—while Cheffy’s gang watched like hawks for any sign that Gomes’s temper was going to break.

  It held. Just. As Lex had hoped, by the time the new arrivals were herded into a cluster in front of the head-quarters hut, they were not only angry. They were also overwhelmed.

  From here they could glimpse the installations down on the beach—stills, boilers, the solar furnace, and so on—and get the full measure of what had been accomplished here while they were crazily striving to repair their ship.

  Lex let them stand in the sun for a minute. Then he pushed aside the curtain covering the doorway and emerged on the verandah.

  “You?” Gomes said faintly. His voice shook. “You’re a polymath?”

  “In training,” Lex said, looking the captain over. The first glance showed him something he hadn’t spotted through the telescope. The twelfth gun was tucked in the top of Gomes’s backpack, improvised out of a spacesuit and roughly tied with cord. So either they had simply deserted their base, or they’d devised some other weapon to keep the slaves cowed during their absence. Interesting!

  He went on, “Well, what do you want? Apart, of course, from a bath with strong soap and a change of clothes.” He sniffed exaggeratedly.

  Gomes stifled an oath. He said angrily, “What the hell was the idea of digging those pits by the river?”

  “What? Oh, those! They’re to scare off animals that try to raid our orchards, of course. All the big herbivores are afraid of those underground traps. You too? Was that what happened to the man you lost on the way here?”

  Gomes scowled and was not going to answer. But one of his companions, a young man Lex remembered seeing with Cardevant when his party was ambushed at the dam, took a step forward and exclaimed incredulously, “How did you know?”

  “Shut your mouth, Dockle!” Gomes flared. “I’ll do the talking, hear me?”

  Lex, an enigmatic look on his face to suggest that for all they could tell he might have engineered or at least observed the death of their twelfth man, watched narrowly. This was a delicate situation; he needed to undermine the confidence of Gomes’s supporters in their leader—yet he dared not risk a gun being fired. Despite being low on Charge, as he guessed they must be, they could take precious lives or at least destroy buildings.

  “I won’t shut up!” Dockle said hysterically. “These people have a polymath to help them, and look at them! Are they hungry, sick, filthy the way we are? Are they—?”

  “I said shut up!” Gomes lifted his gun, his knuckles white around the butt.

  “Gomes, your personal quarrels are no concern of ours,” Lex said quietly. “If you want to say something, go ahead. But be quick—I’m busy.”

  “You bastard!” Gomes blurted. “If only I’d known when I had you up on the plateau!”

  “Known what I am, you mean? Why should I have told you? Would you expect me to help you with your futile project, aid and abet your brutal treatment of your slaves? No, I decided I’d simply wait until you got into the mess you’re in now. Up on the plateau, you’re no longer in control. People are demanding who’s going to be alive for the rescuers to find even if you do put a subradio aloft. They’re collapsing at work through fatigue, deficiency diseases, infections they have no resistance to. You’ve come here to beg for help—food, drugs, blankets, anything—because you’re afraid you may wake up tomorrow and find your throat cut.”

  Every word printed more clearly on Gomes’s face the accuracy of Lex’s analysis. As he had requested, people had come drifting in to surround Gomes’s party now, and they heard and saw for themselves. One more thing to cement his authority; he dared neglect no chance to reinforce it Gomes shouted, “I captained that ship! I know it can be repaired!”

  “I say it can’t,” Lex contradicted coolly.

  “You’re not a spaceman! You don’t know—”

  “In polymath training one learns a lot of things,” Lex said, his voice like a knife. “Now listen to me. Your proposition is unacceptable to us. It’s your turn to consider ours. We are extremely anxious to help our fellow castaways”—Arbogast, he recalled, had used that very phrase—“but our resources are limited and our survival is at stake. We will provide food, clothing, accommodation, whatever else is necessary, for everyone who survives on the plateau. To purchase it, you will lay down your guns now. And you, Gomes, you, Probian, and probably certain others—no doubt there will be a hundred witnesses to give the names—will be formally tried for crimes under the Unified Galactic Code; to wit murder, employment of slave labor, violence against the person, cruel and unusual punishment, and usurpation of unlawful authority. Well?”

  “You devil!” Gomes said,
almost in a whisper. “You—!” He raised his gun slowly until it was leveled at Lex’s chest, and a murmur of dismay went through the watching crowd.

  “These are my terms,” he said. “Either you give us what we want, or I’ll kill every last mother’s son of you and burn your pretty little town for a funeral pyre. We’ve got guns. Twelve of them. You have only two. Come on, move!”

  XXI

  For the rest of his life Lex was to look back on that moment and recognize it as the turning point when his knowledge about himself converted into knowledge of himself. They had pressed him from every side to act against Gomes, to liberate the other refugees, to head an avenging army or a party of kidnappers. In fact, only some twenty days had elapsed since his return from the plateau, yet they had felt like an eternity because people had come to him a hundred times with schemes for action. He turned them down, showing the flaws in them if he had time, merely uttering a curt negative if he was busy. He had felt obscurely guilty, knowing that every day’s delay might mean that another life or lives had been lost to Gomes’s cruelty—but to go against madmen with plenty of energy guns would be suicide for some, at least, of the attackers.

  Now, all of a sudden, he realized he had been right to hold back not only for that, but for another—far subtler—reason.

  His decision could influence the whole future of humanity on this planet.

  He was not afraid for his own life, even with Gomes’s gun pointed at him. Polymath training had endowed him with reactions that no sick, half-starved old man could match. In the tenth of a second between Gomes closing his finger on the trigger and the lancing forth of the beam he could throw himself to one side, then spring at the captain, wrest the gun away, and have him at his mercy before any of his companions could respond.

  But the object of polymath training wasn’t to save his life.

  He had been able to give directions for scores of projects which would eventually turn this handful of castaways into a flourishing society. But that wasn’t the object of his training, either. He had assumed without question that it was.

  How, though, was a man fitted to take charge of a brand-new planet? What faculty entitled him to shoulder such responsibility? Not quick reactions or superior physique or encyclopedic knowledge. Anyone could have any of the three, and as for the last there were libraries, computer stores, recording banks which could hold infinitely more data than any human brain.

  No. The required talent was the ability to be right.

  Given the sum of two plus x, the ordinary man said the question was unanswerable. The polymath was the man who answered it. Correctly.

  Given a totally unexplored planet and a damaged space-ship, the polymath said, “Tame the planet.” The ordinary man said, “Mend the ship.” The planet was tameable; the ship was beyond repair.

  Given strong personalities in conflict, endangering the safety of the refugees, the polymath said, “This one is valuable; that one is a handicap.” The ordinary man said, “Well, there’s a lot to be said on both sides….” The valuable one worked like a fury; the other went insane and became a burden on the community.

  Lex had had a mere fraction of the full polymath training and only the first stages of the physical modifications. But those had sufficed. The demands of the situation itself had completed the training well enough to crystallize the indispensable talent—that, and confrontation with the evidence of what could happen if the man in charge decided wrongly.

  So also: given a lunatic dominating four hundred others at gunpoint, the ordinary man said, “We must liberate the persecuted, even if some of us are killed, even if many of them are killed.” The polymath said, “A man who can be that wrong will hang himself.”

  And here was the man who could be that wrong, driven by the consequences of his actions to put his neck in the noose.

  Very slowly, Lex smiled.

  At first the others thought he was crazy to tell Gomes he could have all he wanted. Then they thought he was stalling for time, so that tiredness and greed would eventually distract the intruders and they could be overpowered when their minds were not on their guns. Then, as they discovered that neither of these explanations fitted, they began to wonder if he was frightened.

  They obeyed his instructions—but they began to wonder.

  The fearfulness that Gomes and his companions displayed was pitiable. They could not refuse the luxury of a hot bath, with soap of which there had been none on the plateau for months. But they refused to enter the bath-huts; they said that they wanted the water brought outside and poured into tubs where they could guard each other, guns at the ready.

  Lex told his people to do as they were asked.

  They could not refuse the offer of a square meal, but they would not let the food be brought to them ready prepared; they went in a suspicious group to the kitchen, inspected the diet-synthesizers to make sure the settings had not been tampered with, and when one of Bendle’s students sprinkled antallergen on a salad of native green-stuff compelled her to sample it first and prove she hadn’t poisoned it.

  They could not refuse the offer of vitamin shots to help clear up the skin infections with which they all were afflicted; the sight of them stripped for the bath had been revolting, because they were patched with sores and scabs. Moreover, Gomes’s swollen legs had become far worse thanks to his journey through the dense summer undergrowth along the river. But there too suspicion led them to insist that Jerode give himself an injection first.

  Going with them from one place to another, Lex did not dare let a hint of his jubilation show on his face. He was worried that people might completely fail to understand his intentions, but it seemed that he had created enough trust in the community for no one to challenge him openly.

  Your clothing is past hope: see if this will fit…. It does? Take it!

  Your bedrolls are torn and filthy: we’ve made blankets now. Have some!

  Your journey back will be tough: we have food to spare. Here you are!

  Back at the headquarters hut, Gomes looked with satisfaction on everything they had been given. He still had his gun in his hand; now, glancing up at Lex, he gestured with it.

  “Guess I should have brought more men, so’s we could carry more stuff away!” he gibed. “Still, it looks like a gun talks about as loud as ten men on the average, and more with luck.”

  He spat in the dust. “So you’re a polymath,” he added. “But you can be just as dead as anybody else. So we’re level.”

  Lex was very conscious of the many, many eyes turned on him. Everyone had left work to come and witness the appalling spectacle of Gomes and his men being loaded with as much as they could carry of the community’s goods. To his regret and alarm, their thinking had apparently stopped there—even Jerode, Fritch, Aldric, Cheffy, did not seem to have asked themselves whether this single load of booty was a real prize for Gomes.

  But he was not at all surprised to see that Delvia, standing in shade alongside the hut, was smiling to herself when none of Gomes’s men were looking her way.

  “Two more things,” Gomes said. “Just a couple more. Lex, you still have a brace of energy guns. The way things are I believe they’d be more use to us than you. Get ‘em!”

  “No! No, you mustn’t!”

  Fran the front row of the audience Hosper ran out, to confront Gomes with his face pale, his hands clenched.

  “You!” Gomes said. “After what you did, I ought to use this gun on you!” His lip curled. “But why should I waste good charge?”

  And he reversed the gun and swung it butt-first against Hosper’s jaw.

  A cry, and Jesset was trying to rush after her man, fingers like claws; if she had reached Gomes, she would have torn out his eyes. But someone was there to catch her, hold her, soothe her back to calmness.

  Delvia.

  If anyone tried to grade the community on a basis of potential for survival, Lex thought, Delvia would come a very good second to himself.

  Gomes glared at
Hosper, sprawled on the ground before him, then at Jesset panting while Delvia clutched her arm. He said, “Give me those guns, or I’ll burn these two!”

  “Go ahead!” Jesset shouted. “It’s a cleaner death than what you’re doing to the people on the plateau!”

  “Who has the guns?” Lex said quietly. “Aldric, is it you? Let him have them.”

  “Thank you,” Gomes said with immense sarcasm, wiping sweat from his face. “You talked pretty big at first, Mr. Polymath! But these guns talk bigger, don’t they?”

  Silently, with one glance at Lex as though he thought the community had been betrayed, Aldric placed the guns on top of one of the packs made up for Gomes’s men.

  “Right, that’s almost all,” Gomes said. “Now I want to make one thing clear. Don’t follow us. Don’t try to get up to the plateau. We have all the guns now, and we can spare the time to watch for you creeping up on us. Now I’ve seen how much you have down here, I can see it’s going to be worthwhile coming back. So we will be back, guns and all, and we’ll collect what we want when we want. Next time maybe we’ll ask for more. And when we get our ship into orbit, we may be kind enough to mention that there are some other refugees here on this miserable mudball. Depends how well you behave, understand?”

  He chuckled. At that moment Hosper, recovered from his blow on the jaw, made to gather himself and dive for Gomes’s swollen legs. Probian moved quicker. His foot shot out, and Hosper went sprawling again, clutching his face and moaning.

  “Thanks, Probian,” Gomes acknowledged with a nod.

  “I see I beat a spark of guts into Hosper, at any rate, even if the rest of you are only worried about your comfort and the whole skins you’re so fond of.”

  He turned to his companions. “All right, load up. Let’s get away from here before dark.”

  They moved obediently to shrug into their packs—all of them except Dockle. He was barely more than a boy, his face tanned to a burned-wood color, his limbs stalk-thin, his body meager. He stood rock-still, his blazing eyes on Gomes.