“You have guessed wrong,” Rhes told him. “The settlements are now handled by a committee and going as smoothly as can be expected. I have no desire to remain—what is the word?—a backwoods rube for the rest of my life. This new planet sounds very interesting and I am looking forward to the experience.”
“That is the best news I have heard today. Now let’s get down to facts. The ship will be here in about two weeks, so if we organize things now we should be able to get the supplies and people aboard and lift soon after she arrives. I’ll write up an announcement that loads the dice as much as possible in favor of this operation, and we can spring it on the populace. Get volunteers. There are about twenty thousand people left in the city, but we can’t get more than about two thousand into the ship—it’s a demothballed, armored, troop carrier called the Pugnacious, left over from one of the Rim Wars—so we can pick and choose the best. Establish the settlement and come back for the others. We’re on our way.”
Jason was stunned, but no one else seemed surprised.
“Four hundred and eighty-five volunteers—including Grif, a nine-year-old boy—out of how many thousand? It just isn’t possible.”
“It is possible on Pyrrus,” Kerk said.
“Yes, it’s possible on Pyrrus, but only on Pyrrus.” Jason paced the room, with a frustrating, dragging step in the doubled gravity, smacking his fist into his open palm.
“When it comes to unthinking reflex and sheer bullheadedness this planet really wins the plutonium-plated prize. ‘Me born here. Me stay here. Me die here. Ugh.’ Ugh is right!” He spun about to stab his finger at Kerk—then grabbed at his calf to rub away the cramp brought on by overexertion in the heightened gravity.
“Well we’re not going to worry about them,” he said. “We’ll save them in spite of themselves. We’ll take the four hundred and eighty-five volunteers and we’ll go to Felicity, and we’ll lick the planet and open the mine—and come back for the others.”
He slumped in the chair, massaging his leg, as Kerk went out.
“I hope . . .” he mumbled under his breath.
III
Muffled clanking sounded in the air lock as the transfer station mechanics fastened the flexible tubeway to the spacer’s hull. The intercom buzzed as someone plugged into the hull jack outside.
“Transfer Station 70 Ophiuchi to Pugnacious. You are sealed to tubeway which is now pressurized to ship standard. You may open your outer port.”
“Stand by for opening,” Jason said, and turned the key in the override switch that permitted the outer port to be open at the same time as the inner one.
“Good to be back on dry land,” one of the ferry crewmen said as they came into the lock, and the others laughed uproariously, as though he had said something exceedingly funny. All of them, that is, except for the pilot, who scowled at the opening port, his broken arm sticking out stiffly before him in its cast. None of them mentioned the arm or looked in his direction, but he knew why they were laughing.
Jason did not feel sorry for the pilot. Meta always gave fair warning to the men who made passes at her. Perhaps, in the romantically dim light of the bridge, he had not believed her. So she had broken his arm. Tough. Jason kept his face impassive as the man passed by him and out into the tubeway. This was constructed of transparent plastic, an undulating umbilical cord that connected the spacer to the transfer station, the massive, light-sprinkled bulk that loomed above them. Two other tube ways were visible, like theirs, connecting ships to this way station in space, balanced in a null-G orbit between the suns that made up the two star systems. The smaller companion, 70 Ophiuchi B, was just rising behind the station, a tiny disk over a billion miles distant.
“We’ve got a parcel here for the Pugnacious,” a clerk said, floating out of the mouth of the tubeway. “A transshipment waiting your arrival.” He extended a receipt book. “Want to sign for it?”
Jason scrawled his name, then moved aside as two freight handlers maneuvered the bulky case down the tube and through the lock. He was trying to work a pinch bar under the metal sealing straps when Meta came up.
“What is that?” she asked, twisting the bar from his hands with an easy motion and jamming it deep under the strap. She heaved once and there was the sharp twang of fractured metal.
“You’ll make some man a fine husband,” Jason told her, dusting off his fingers. “I bet you can’t do the other two that easily.” She bent to the task. “This is a tool, something that we are going to need very much if we are going into the planet-busting business. I wish I had had one when I first came to Pyrrus, it might have saved a good number of lives.”
Meta threw back the cover and looked at the ovoid, wheeled form. “What is it—a bomb?” she asked.
“Not on your life, this is something much more important.” He tilted up the crate so that the object rolled out onto the floor.
It was an almost featureless, shiny metal egg that stood a good meter high with its small end up. Six rubber-tired wheels, three to a side, held it clear of the floor, and the top was crowned by a transparent-lidded control panel. Jason reached down and flipped up the lid, then punched a button marked On and the panel lights glowed. “What are you?” he said.
“This is a library,” a hollow, metallic voice answered.
“Of what possible use is that?” Meta said, turning to leave.
“I’ll tell you,” Jason said, putting out his hand to stop her, ready to move back quickly if she tried any arm-busting tricks. “This device is our intelligence, in the military sense not the IQ. Have you forgotten what we had to go through to find out anything at all about your planet’s history? We needed facts to work from and we had none at all. Well we have some now.” He patted the library’s sleek side.
“What could this little toy possibly know that could help us?”
“This little toy, as you so quaintly put it, costs over nine hundred eighty-two thousand credits, plus shipping charges.”
She was shocked. “Why—you could outfit an army for that much. Weapons, ammunition. . .”
“I thought that would impress you. And will you please get it through your exceedingly lovely blond head that armies aren’t the solution to every problem? We are going to bang up against a new culture soon, on a new planet, and we want to open a mine in the right place. Your army will tell us nothing about mineralogy, or anthropology, or ecology, or exobiology or . . .”
“You are making those words up.”
“Don’t you just wish I were. I don’t think you quite realize how much of a library is stuffed into this creature’s metal carcass. Library,” he said, pointing to it dramatically, “tell us about yourself.”
“This is a model 427-1587, Mark IX, improved, with photodigital laser-based recorder memory and integrated circuit technology . . .”
“Stop!” Jason ordered. “Library, you will have to do better than that. Can’t you describe yourself in simple, newsfax language?”
“Well, hello there,” the library chortled. “I’ll bet you never saw a Mark IX before, the ultimate in library luxury . . .”
“We’ve hit the sales talk button, but at least we can understand it.”
“. . . And the very newest example of what the guys who built this machine like to call ‘integrated circuit technology.’ Well, friends, you don’t need a galactic degree to understand that the Mark IX is something new in the universe. That ‘integrated so-and-so’ double-talk just means that this is a thinking machine that can’t be beat. But everyone needs something to think about as well as to think with, and just like the memory in your head, the Mark IX has a memory all its own. A memory that contains the entire library at the University of Haribay, holding more books than you could count in a lifetime. These books have been broken down into words and the words have been broken down into bits, and the bits have been recorded on little chips of silicon inside the Mark IX’s brain. That memory part of the brain is no bigger than a man’s clenched fist—a small man’s fist—becau
se there are over five hundred forty-five million bits to every ten square millimeters. You don’t even have to know what a bit is to know that that is impressive. All of history, science and philosophy are in this brain—linguistics, too. If you want to know the word for cheese in the basic galactic languages, in the order of the number of speakers, it is this. . .”
As the high-speed roar of syllables poured out Jason turned to Meta—and found she was gone.
“It can do other things besides translate cheese,” he said, pressing the off button. “Just wait and see.”
The Pyrrans were happy enough to vegetate, to doze and yawn, like tigers with full stomachs, during the trip to Felicity, and only Jason felt the urge to use the time efficiently. He searched all the cross-references in the library for information about the planet and the solar system it belonged to, and was only drawn from his studies by Meta’s passionate, yet implacable, grasp. She felt that there were far more interesting ways to pass the long hours and Jason, once he had been severed from his labors, enthusiastically agreed with her.
One ship-day before they were scheduled to drop from jump-space into the Felicity system, Jason called a general meeting in the dining room.
“This is where we are going,” he said, tapping a large diagram hung on the wall. There was absolute silence and one hundred percent attention since a military-style briefing was meat and drink to the Pyrrans.
“The planet is called Felicity, the fifth planet of a nameless class FI star. This is a white star with about twice the luminosity of Pyrrus’s own 2G sun and it puts out a lot more ultraviolet. You can look forward to getting nice suntans. The planet has nine-tenths of its surface covered by water, with a few chains of volcanic islands and only one land mass big enough to be called a continent. This one.
“As you can see it looks like a flattened out dagger, point downwards, divided roughly in the middle by the guard. The line here, represented by the guard, is an immense geological fault that cuts across the continent from one side to the other, an unbroken cliff that is three to ten kilometers high across the entire land mass. This cliff, and the range of mountains behind it, have had a drastic effect on the continental weather. The planet is far hotter than most other habitable ones, the temperature at the equator is close to the boiling point of water, and only this continent’s location right up near the northern pole makes life bearable.
“Moist, warm air sweeps north and hits the escarpment and the mountains, where it condenses as rain on the southern slopes. A number of large rivers run south from the mountains and signs of agriculture and settlements were seen here—but were of no interest to the John Company men. The magnetometers and gravitometers didn’t twitch a needle. But up here”—he tapped the northern half of the continent, the “handle” of the dagger—“the detectors went wild. The mountain building that pushed the northern half up so high, causing this continent-splitting range in the middle, stirred up the heavy metal deposits. Here is where the mines will have to be, in the middle of the most desolate piece of landscape I have ever heard about. There is little or no water, the mountain range stops most of it, and what does get past the mountains usually falls as snow on this giant, elevated plateau. It is frigid, high, dry, and deadly—and it never changes. Felicity has almost no axial tilt to speak of, so the seasonal changes are so slight they can scarcely be noticed. The weather in any spot remains the same all the time.
“To finish off this highly attractive picture of the ideal settlement site, there are men who live up here who are as deadly—or deadlier—than any life forms you ever faced on Pyrrus. Our job will be to sit right down in the middle of them, build a settlement and open a mine.
Do I hear any suggestions as to how this can be done?”
“I know,” Cion said, standing slowly. He was a hulking, burly man with a thick and protruding brow ridge. The weight of this bony ledge must have been balanced by even thicker bone in the skull behind, leaving room for only the most minuscule of brain cavities. His reflexes were excellent, undoubtedly short-circuited in his spinal column like some contemporary dinosaur, but any thoughts that had to penetrate his ossified cranium emerged only with the most immense difficulty. He was the last person Jason expected to answer.
“I know,” Cion repeated. “We kill them all, then they don’t bother us.”
“Thanks for the suggestion,” Jason said calmly. “Your chair’s right behind you, that’s it. Your suggestion is a sound Pyrran one, Pyrran also in the fact that you want to apply it to a second planet even though it failed on the first one. Attractive as it may look, we shall not indulge in genocide. We shall use our intelligence to solve this problem, not our teeth. We are trying to open this world up, not close it forever. What I propose is an open camp, the opposite of the armed lager the John Company men built. If we are careful, and watch the surrounding countryside carefully, we should not be taken by surprise. My hope is that we will be able to contact the locals and find out what they have against miners or off-worlders, and then try to change their minds. If anyone has a better suggestion for a plan of action, let me know now. Otherwise we land as close to the original site as we can and wait for contact. Our eyes are open, we know what happened to the first expedition, so we will be very careful that it doesn’t happen to us.”
Finding the original mine site was very easy. A year’s slow growth of the sparse vegetation had not been enough to obscure the burnt scar on the landscape. The abandoned heavy equipment showed clearly on the magnetometer, and the Pugnacious sank to the ground close by. From above the rolling steppe had appeared to be empty of life, and it looked even more so once they were down.
Jason stood in the open air lock and shivered as the first blast of dry, frigid air hit him, the grass rustling to its passing, while grains of sand hissed against the metal of the hull. He had planned to be first out, but Rhes happened to knock against him as Kerk came up so that the gray-haired Pyrran slipped by and leaped to the ground.
“A light-eight planet,” he said as he turned slowly, his eyes never still. “Can’t be over 1G. Like floating after Pyrrus.”
“It’s closer to 1.5G,” Jason said, following him out just as warily. “But anything is better than 2G.”
The first landing party, ten men in all, emerged from the ship and carefully surveyed the area. They stayed close enough to be able to call to one another, yet not so close that they blocked each other’s vision, or field of fire. Their guns stayed in their power holsters and they walked slowly, apparently indifferent to the frigid wind and blown sand that reddened Jason’s skin and made his eyes water. In their own, strictly Pyrran way, they were enjoying themselves after the forced relaxation of the voyage.
“Something moving two hundred meters to the southeast,” Meta’s voice spoke in their earphones. She was one of the observers at the viewports in the ship above.
They spun and crouched, ready for anything. The undulating plain still appeared to be empty, but there was a sudden hissing as an arrow arced towards Kerk’s chest. His gun sprang into his hand and he shot it from the air as calmly and efficiently as he would have dispatched an attacking stingwing. Another arrow flashed towards them and Rhes stepped aside so that it missed him. They all waited, alert, to see what would happen next.
An attack, Jason thought, or is it just a diversion? It can’t be possible—so soon after our arrival—that any kind of concerted attack could be launched. Yet, why not?
His gun jumped into his hand and he started to wheel about—just as hard pain slammed into his head.
He had no awareness of falling, just a sudden and complete blackness.
IV
Jason did not enjoy being unconscious. A red, cloying pain engulfed him and, barely rational, he had the feeling that if he could only wake up all the way he could take care of everything. For some reason he could not understand his head was rocking back and forth, adding immeasurably to the agony, and he kept wishing it would stop, but it did not.
After what mu
st have been a very long time he realized that when he was feeling the pain he must be conscious, or very close to it, and he should use these periods most advantageously. His arms were secured in some manner, he could feel that even if he could not see them, but they still had some degree of movement. The bulk of the power holster was there, pressed between his arm and his side, but the gun would not leap into his hand. His groping fingers eventually found out why, when they contacted the ragged end of the cable that connected the gun with the holster.
His shattered thoughts groped for understanding with the same disconnected numbness as had his fingers. Something had happened to him, someone not something, had hit him. Taken his gun away. What else? Why couldn’t he see anything? Anything other than a diffuse redness when he tried to open his eyes. What else was gone? His equipment belt, surely, his fingers fumbled back and forth at his waist but could not find it.
They touched something. In its separate holder the medikit still remained on the back of his hip. Careful not to hit the release button—if it slipped out of his hand it was gone-—he pressed the heel of his hand up against the device until his flesh contacted the actuating probe. The analyzer buzzed distantly and he never felt the stab of the hypodermic needles through the all-pervading agony in his head. Then the drug took effect and the pain began to seep away.
Without the overriding presence of the pain he could concentrate that small remaining part of his consciousness on the problem of his eyes. They could not be opened: something was sealing them shut. Something that might, or might not, be blood. Something that probably was blood considering the condition of his head, and he smiled at his success in completing this complicated line of thought.
Concentrate on one eye. Concentrate on right eye. Squeeze tight shut until it hurt, pull with lids to open. Squeeze shut again. It worked, the pulling, squeezing, tears-dissolving, and he felt the lids start to part stickily.
Deathworld: The Complete Saga Page 33