by John Brunner
"Ah, we're clearing the edge of the city at last," Ugant exclaimed. "Stop fretting, Chybee! The air will be a lot fresher from here on, space-budded poisons or not!"
And, still apparently convinced that chitchat was all the girl needed to help her relax, she continued pointing out sights of interest as the scudder hurtled onward, no longer having to make do with the random grip afforded by bravetree branches within Slah itself, where the wear and tear of traffic might lead to accidents if a single overloaded vehicle added too great a strain, but racing along a specially planted line of toughtrees that slanted around a range of gentle hills. Below, morning sun gleamed on a stream diverted and partly canalized to make a route for freight-pitchens, mindlessly plodding from loq to loq with their massive burdens. Now and then flashes showed how they were being overtaken by courier-pitchens, but of course most urgent messages were conveyed these days by nervograp or by air. Above, looming as vast and brilliant as the sparse white clouds, passenger-floaters were gathering for a landfall at Slah: some, Chybee knew, must have crossed three oceans since the beginning of their voyage. And how much air had been gulped into their ever-flexing bellowers to drive them over such colossal distances? If mere interference by the folk could bring about such incredible modifications, then...!
"Is something wrong?" Ugant said suddenly.
"No—But I mean yes!" she exclaimed. "If plants were changed, and ... Well, don't they also think that some kinds of animal were exterminated too?"
"It's generally accepted that that's what happened," Ugant confirmed gravely. "Many fossils have been found that scarcely resemble the species we're familiar with."
"So what about ourselves?"
The scudder, relieved at having reached open country, was swinging along with a pulsating rhythm; now and then it had to overtake another vehicle, so the rhythm quickened, and occasionally it had to slow because traffic grew too dense for speed. For a while Wam and Ugant seemed to be absorbed by it. If they were exuding pheromones, the wind of their rapid passage carried them away.
Finally, though, Ugant sighed loudly.
"To quote my colleague and rival: I wish I could disagree, but I can't. We were altered by the Greatest Meteorite. We had the most amazing luck, to be candid. Or, putting it another way, our ancestors planned better than they imagined. Would you believe that some of the records we've recovered suggest we were in a fair way to extinction before the meteorite?"
"Ugant!"—in a warning tone from Wam. "Galdu hasn't published her findings yet, and they may be adrift."
Chybee was feeling light-pithed by now. Never before had she imagined that her idols, the scientists, could argue as fiercely as any psychoplanetarist maintaining that her, or his, version of life on the moons of Stolidchurl must be more accurate than anybody else's.
She said, "Oh, spin your webs for me! You said I was coming along today to make up my own mind!"
But they both took the remark seriously. Ugant said, "If we can't convince her, who can we hope to convince?"
Wam shrank back, abashed. "You're right. And Galdu's primary evidence, at least, does seem convincing."
"She's a pastudier, remember, working in a field you and I know little about ... What it comes to, Chybee, is this." Adapting herself to the swaying of the scudder as it rose to pass over the lowest point along the line of hills that up to now they had been paralleling, Ugant drew closer. "None of our biologists can see how we could have escaped dying out ourselves unless some genius of the far past foresaw the need to protect us against just such an event as the fall of the Greatest Meteorite. Almost all the large animals on the planet disappeared because they were—like us—symbiotes. The regular adaptive resource of the 'female' sex among them was to become more male. In the end, naturally, this resulted in a zero bud-rate. But because we'd been somehow altered, the process came to a dead stop in the folk. In you and me, that means."
"Not a complete dead stop," Wam objected. "Another such calamity, and...!"
"Now you're arguing for Galdu's most extreme ideas!" crowed Ugant. "A moment ago—Still, that's of no significance right now. What is important is that once again young Chybee here has clawed hold of something most people overlook even when they have access to the evidence. I'm impressed by this girl, you know!"
"Save the compliments," Wam grunted. "Stick to the point she originally set out to make. Yes, Chybee, there was a change in us too, and the only reason we can conceive for it is that some of our ancestors must have arranged it. Compared with that gigantic achievement, what use are our petty undertakings unless they result in the exportation to space of our entire culture?"
"I thought we were going to sink our differences for the time being!" Ugant began.
But Chybee had already burst out, "How? How was it done?"
"We think most of the food-plants we rely on had been modified," came Ugant's sober answer. "We think they had been so far modified that merely by eating them we arrested part of what until then had been our normal evolutionary adaptation. We think—some people think, in deference to Wam's reservations, but I'm an admirer of Galdu—that had it not been for this most important of all inventions, we would have long ago become extinct. If you and I met one of our male ancestors right now, for instance, we couldn't bud together. We'd been used for generations to believing that evolution took place over countless score-score years. Suddenly it turns out that someone, long ago, must have ensured a change in us such that next tune a crisis of habitability occurred on this planet—"
"Stop! Stop!" Chybee cried, and a moment later added in an apologetic tone, "You did tell me that if you started to use too many technical terms…"
Ugant relaxed with a mantle-wide grin.
"Point well taken," she murmured. "Well, a crisis of habitability is what follows, for instance, a meteorite fall or an ice-age. What, with deference and respect to our forepadders, we are trying to avoid by creating such research projects as the one you can now see yonder."
She gestured with one claw, and Chybee turned her eye as the scudder relaxed into a crotch at journey's end. What met it dismayed and baffled her. Across a broad and level plain flanked by low hills, not familiar plants but objects unlike anything she had encountered before extended nearly to the skyline.
"All this has been created," Ugant said, "because what saved us last time may all too easily not save us twice."
V
"How much do you know about the dual principles of flight?" Ugant inquired of Chybee as they padded between countless huge and glistening globes, each larger than any unmodified bladder she had ever seen. Because pumplekins were forcing them full of pure wetgas, and there was inevitable leakage—though it was not poisonous—their surroundings were making the girl's weather-sense queasy. Sensing her distress, the professor went on to spell out information most of which in fact she knew.
"The first clues must have come from cloudcrawlers so long ago we have no record of it. Archeological records indicate that we also owe to the study of natural floaters the discovery that air is a mixture of several elements. Of course, it was a long time before the lightest could be separated out by more efficient means than occur in nature. And floaters drift at the mercy of the wind, so it again took a considerable while before we invented bellowers like those over there"—with a jab of one claw towards a bank of tubular creatures slumped in resting posture on a wooden rack. "How did you travel from Hulgrapuk to Slah?"
"I flew," Chybee told her, wide-eyed with wonder.
"So you've seen them in operation, gulping air and tightening so as to compress it to the highest temperature they can endure, and then expelling it rearward. We got to that principle by studying the seeds emitted by certain rock-plants. But of course it's also how we swim, isn't it? And there's even a possibility that our remotest ancestors may have exploited the same technique by squirting air from under their hind mantles. You know we evolved from carnivores that haunted the overgrowth of the primeval forest?"
"My parents don'
t believe in evolution," Chybee said.
"Ridiculous!" Wam exclaimed. "How can anybody not?"
"According to them, intelligence came into existence everywhere at the same tune as the whole universe. On every world but ours, mind-power controls matter directly. That's how Swiftyouth and Sunbride hurled the Greatest Meteorite at us. Our world alone is imperfect. They even try to make out that other planets' satellites don't sparkle or show phases, but are always at the full."
Wam threw up her claws in despair. "Then they are insane! Surely even making a model, with a clump of luminants in the middle to represent the sun, would suffice to—"
"Oh, I tried it once!" Chybee interrupted bitterly. "I was punished by being forbidden to set pad outside our home for a whole moonlong!"
"What were you supposed to learn from that?"
"I suppose: not to contradict my budder..." Chybee gathered her forces with an effort. "Please go on, Professor Ugant. I'm most interested."
With a doubtful glance at her, as though suspecting sarcasm, Ugant complied.
"What, though, you might well say, does our ability to fly through the air have to do with flying into vacant space? After all, we know that even the largest and lightest floaters we can construct, with the most powerful bellowers we can breed to drive them, can never exceed a certain altitude. So we must resort to something totally new. And there it is."
Again following her gesture, Ugant saw a long straight row of unfamiliar trees, boughs carefully warped so as to create a continuous series of lings from which hung worn but shiny metal plates and scores of nervograp tendrils.
"Ah!" Wam said. "I've seen pictures of that. Isn't it where you test your drivers?"
"Correct. And the storage bladders beyond are the ones we had to devise specially to contain their fuel. What can you show to match them?"
Wam shrugged. "As yet, we've concentrated less on this aspect of the task than on what we regard as all-important: eventual survival of the folk in space."
"But what's the good of solving that problem," Ugant snapped, "if you don't possess a means to send them there?"
"With you working on one half of the job, and me on the other..." Wam countered disprongingly, and Ugant had to smile as they moved on towards the curiously distorted trees. Hereabouts there was a stench of burning, not like ordinary fire, but as though something Chybee had never encountered had given off heat worse than focused sunlight. Under the warped trees there was no mosh such as had cushioned their pads since leaving the scudder; indeed, the very texture of the soil changed, becoming hard—becoming crisp.
"You're in luck," Ugant said suddenly, gazing along the tree-line to its further end and pointing out a signal made by someone waving a cluster of leaves. "There's a test due very shortly. Come on, and I'll introduce you to Hyge, our technical director."
Excitedly Chybee hastened after her companions. They led her past a house laced about with nervograps, which challenged them in a far harsher tone than Ugant's home, but the professor calmed it with a single word. Some distance beyond, a score of young people were at work under the direction of a tall woman who proved to be Hyge herself, putting finishing touches to a gleaming cylinder in a branch-sprung cradle. It contained more mass of metal than Chybee had ever seen; she touched it timidly to convince herself that it was real.
In a few brief words Ugant summed up the purpose of their visit, and Hyge dipped respectfully to Wam.
"This is an honor, Professor! I've followed your research for years. Ugant and I don't always see eye to eye, but we do share a great admiration for your pioneering experiments in spatial life-support. How are you getting on with your attempt to create a vacuum?"
"Fine!" was Wam's prompt answer. "But unless and until we resolve our other differences, I don't foresee that we shall work together. Suppose you continue with your test? It may impress me so much that ... Well, you never know."
Smiling, Hyge called her assistants back to the house, while Ugant whispered explanations to Chybee.
"To drive a vehicle those last score padlonglaqs out of the atmosphere, there's only one available technique. If there isn't any air to gulp and squirt out, then you have to take along your own gas. We borrowed the idea from certain sea-creatures which come up to the surface, fill their bladders with air, and then rely on diving to compress it to the point where it's useful. When they let it go, it enables them to pounce on their prey almost as our forebudders must have done."
"I don't like to be reminded that our ancestors ate other animals," Chybee confessed.
"How interesting! I wonder whether that may account for some of the reaction people like your parents display when confronted by the brutal necessity of recycling during a spaceflight ... But we can discuss that later. Right now you need to understand that what Hyge has set up for testing is a driver full of two of the most reactive chemicals we've ever discovered. When they're mixed, they combust and force out a mass of hot gas. This propels the cylinder forward at enormous speed. Our idea is to lift such a cylinder—with a payload of adapted spores and seeds—to the greatest altitude a floater can achieve. Then, by using the special star-seekers we've developed, we can orient it along the desired flight-path, and from there it will easily reach orbital height and velocity."
"But scaling it up to carry what we'll need for actual survival out there is—" Wam began.
"Out of the question!" Ugant conceded in a triumphant tone. "Now will you agree that our best course is to—?"
Hyge cut in. "Scaling up is just a matter of resources. Save your disputes until after we find out whether our new budling works! Don't look at the jet! Slack down to tornado status! Keep your mandibles and vents wide open! The overpressure from this one will be fierce!"
And, after checking that the cylinder's course was clear of obstructions and that all the stations from which reports were to be made were functional, she slid back a plank of stiffbark in the control house's floor and imposed her full weight on something Chybee could not clearly see but which she guessed to be a modified form of mishle, one of the rare secondary growths known as flashplants which, after the passage of a thunderstorm, could kill animal prey by discharging a violent spark, and would then let down tendrils to digest the carcass.
Instantly there was a terrible roaring noise. The cylinder uttered a prong of dazzling flame—"Look that way!" Ugant shouted, and when Chybee proved too fascinated to respond, swung her bodily around and made her gaze along the tree-row—and sped forward on a course that carried it exactly through the center of the wooden rings, clearing the metal plates by less than a clawide.
Almost as soon as it had begun, the test was over bar the echoes it evoked from the hills, and a rousing cheer rang out. But it was barely loud enough to overcome the deafness they were all suffering. Chybee, who had not prepared herself for pressure as great as Hyge had warned of, felt as though she had been beaten from crest to pads.
"Oh, I'm glad we were here to witness that," said Ugant softly. "Wam, aren't you impressed?"
"She should be," Hyge put in caustically, checking the recordimals connected to the incoming nervograps. "That's the first time our guidimals have kept the cylinder level through every last one of the rings. And if we can repeat that, we'll have no problem aiming straight up!"
"Are you all right, Chybee?" Ugant demanded as she recovered from her fit of euphoria.
"I—uh..." But pretense was useless. "I wasn't ready for such a shock. I was still full of questions. Like: what are the metal plates for?"
"Oh, those," Hyge murmured. "Well, you see, not even the most sensitive of our detectors can respond to signals emitted by the cylinder as it rushes past faster than sound. If you were standing right near the arrival point, you'd be hit by a sonic blast, a wave of air compressed until it's practically solid. Even this far away it can be painful, can't it? So we had to find a method of translating the impact into something our normal instruments can read. What we do is compress metal plates against shielded nervograp i
nputs, compensating for the natural elasticity of the trees, which we developed from a species known to be highly gale-resistant—"
She broke off. Chybee had slumped against Ugant.
"Does she need help?" Hyge demanded. "I can send an aide to fetch—"
At the same tune making it clear by her exudates that this would be an unwarrantable interference with her immediate preoccupations.
"No need to worry," Ugant said softly, comforting the girl with touch after gentle touch of her claws. "She's a bit distraught, that's all. Wam and I are at fault; on the way here we should have explained more clearly what we were going to show her."
"Yes, I'm all right," Chybee whispered, forcing herself back to an upright posture, though lower than normal. "I just decided that all your efforts mustn't go to waste. So I'm willing and eager to do what Ugant wants."
"What's that?" Hyge inquired with a twist of curiosity as her assistants started to arrive with the first of the non-remote readings.
"You'll find out," Ugant promised. "And with luck it may make the future safe for sanity. If it does, of course—well, then, the name of Chybee will be famous!"
VI
Here, houses and food-plants alike were neglected and ill-doing, surviving as best they could on what garbage was thrown to rot at their roots. Many rain-channels were blocked and nobody had bothered to clear them, allowing precious growths to die off. Even a heavy storm might not suffice to wash away all the stoppages; several were sprouting weeds whose interlocking tendrils would hold against any but the most violent onslaught of water. There were scores of people in sight, most of them young, but with few exceptions they were thin and slack, and their mantles were patched with old or the scars of disease.
Chybee almost cried out in dismay. She had thought things bad enough at Hulgrapuk, but in that far smaller city there was no district which had been so completely taken over by the psychoplanetarists. How could anybody bear to live here, let alone come sight-seeing as that well-fed couple yonder were obviously doing?