by John Brunner
“The computers will punch out a random series of six numbers between 1 and 180. We’ll toss a coin to decide whether we go through the alphabetical list of our names from the beginning or the end of the alphabet. The six names which correspond to the random numbers will be those of the test subjects. Is that a reasonable suggestion?”
She waited. She could almost see the sluggish minds of her listeners examining and discarding the alternatives: Volunteers better, so that I can hang back? But wouldn’t I feel ashamed? Then they’d have to choose among the volunteers anyway, and if I were one I’d know I could have opted to be left out, and the odds this way are thirty to one against it being me, the best I can hope for …
There were nods, and not a single voice raised in dissent. Hassan spread out the list of the survivors, produced a coin—a souvenir belonging to someone, presumably, for it would be a long time before money was useful on Asgard—and tossed it for Parvati to call.
“Heads at the beginning!” she said. It fell tails, and Hassan punched the computer remote. In less than a second the numbers rattled out, and in a dry voice he began to recite the names.
“Tai Men. Dan Sakky.”
She saw the big African’s face fall, unashamedly, but a moment later he gave a shrug and leaned back in his seat.
“Kitty Minakis. Abdul Hassan.”
Is that damned computer plotting against us? It’s naming key personnel, section chiefs, not aides! And Abdul himself! Preserve us, preserve us!
“Parvati Chandra. Ulla Berzelius. And that’s the six.” Hassan folded the list and resumed his seat.
“Me?” Parvati said to him faintly.
He nodded, maintaining his outward calm but failing to prevent a tremor in his voice when he answered, “Yes, you, Parvati. And me.”
XII
IT WAS as though he found his body again piecemeal: his left hand being thrust into the burrow of some sand-living creature, to be withdrawn with a moue and a grunt of disgust; the hollow drum of his belly as it gave back something turned to a foul slimy liquid; his eyes separately but both as hot prickling globes, jamming in their orbits on the friction of intangible sand; the dry tube that formerly had been a mouth and throat, inhabited by a fearful independent worm that he had to take between finger and thumb before he could recognise it as a tongue.
But there were gaps. Nothing from wrist to shoulder, nothing from hip to knee.
Until, completely without warning, like the implosion of a galaxy, he reassembled from all the scattered directions in which he had been hurled and was—here.
Surrounded by diamonds!
He gazed uncomprehending at the torrent of sparkling gems that passed before his eyes, and began to count his heart-beats to see how long they would go on flowing. The idea of diamonds gave way little by little, and he was able to conceive of them being something else.
Bits of sunlight broken up on water.
He was squatting cross-legged over his hips in a narrow stream, cool from the waist down, but his back and shoulders hot with the sun. He had a vague memory of thirst, but when he attended to the conditions of his mouth, to see if it was dry, he discovered it was fresh and moist, and there was a coolness inside him as well as outside.
I’ve been drinking unpurified water!
From wherever it had been driven, his power of judgment returned, and on the instant he wished it had not. Appalled, he leapt to his feet, almost losing his balance as a large round pebble turned under his weight, and stared down at his body. On his calf, where he had brushed against the water-creature while swimming, there was a fading reddish patch traversed by three parallel dotted lines of scabs. Reflexively he touched them with his fingertips as though to scratch an intolerable itch, and found exact correspondence.
That apart, however, to his amazement he felt well. Here and there he had grazed or cut himself; there was one cut in particular, under the arch of his right foot, which was tender and made him limp a trifle, but like all the other wounds it was perfectly clean and healing normally. His left shoulder ached very slightly, from a mending sprain, he concluded. It was past the stage of inconveniencing him. He swung the arm experimentally to prove it.
Damnation, though … Oughtn’t I to be dead?
Well—maybe I am!
The two ideas surfaced simultaneously in his mind: one rational, due to awareness of the fearful risks he must have run while deprived of reason, the other plainly absurd yet carrying an aura of truth because somewhere in the vague, dream-like memories he could recall a similar notion had appeared to make excellent sense.
Absently he reached up to his nape, and gave a start. His hair had grown noticeably. How long have I been … away?
He stared about him, looking for landmarks, and spotted one of the blazes he had cut on the track connecting the diamond deposit with the beach on which he had left his boat. With great concentration, trying to prevent himself from panicking, he picked his way in the indicated direction. A few minutes, and he was in sight of the beach where he had enjoyed his brief and calamitous bathe.
The boat was still there, unharmed, although a great many small creatures had invaded it: a glutinous mess of egg-cases adhered to the instrument board, which he had to scrape clean with a stick before he could read the dials.
Ten days!
What must they be thinking, back at the base island? Were they wasting precious time and energy on hunting him? But that didn’t make sense. They had a record of his search-pattern, and he had called in as usual the night before he found the diamonds, so they would have been able to locate him within a hundred miles or so—they should have found him and carried him back to the Santa Maria’s sick-bay within at most three days.
Why hadn’t they done so?
Beginning to be really frightened now, he turned to the radio and hit the call switch. Nothing happened. Yet he knew there was a monitor permanently on his frequency; he should at once have heard the high sweet hum of the emergency recorder. Briefly puzzled, he gazed blankly at the set. Abruptly he realised what might have happened, unclipped the front panel, and saw with a sinking heart that one of the native fauna had settled here, too. A creature five or six inches long, armed with erosive limbs hooked like a snail’s rasping tongue, had cleared itself a vacant spot in the heart of the mechanism.
He seized it and hurled it towards the sea in a burst of futile fury. Calming almost at once, he turned to look for his suit, discovered it partly hidden by wind-drifted sand, shook all the tunnelling creatures out of it and made sure his sealed gun and medikit were undamaged. From the latter he extracted a diagnostic chew and placed it in his mouth. He counted for the requisite thirty seconds, his jaw going mechanically, then withdrew it and placed it in the appropriate slot on the lid of the kit.
After a further half-minute, there was a click and the dial reported that he was apparently in good health, with one qualification. But the portable device wasn’t sensitive enough to tell him what that was.
Somewhat cheered, because the clean diagnosis implied that whatever else might have happened during his fit of insanity the principle that Earthly creatures didn’t pick up Asgard diseases still held good, he piled the kit, suit, and gun on the passenger seat of the boat and scrambled into the pilot seat himself. Gingerly, because if that animal had wrecked the radio one of its cousins might have ruined another and more essential piece of equipment, he checked the drive. The engine emitted a normal throbbing drone, and all the instruments read as they should.
He was on the point of feeding power to the drive and heading for base, when he halted his hand an inch from the main control lever.
Food?
He twisted around in the seat and stared over his shoulder at the rack of cartoned meals within arm’s reach. They looked as he remembered, and as they should have looked, after he had drawn thirteen days’ allowance. One carton had suffered the attentions of a local animal, and its corner was torn, but the thief had clearly found the contents inedible and left the
m alone after a few bites.
I ought to be hungry.
He switched off the power and sat shivering as a vivid, revolting memory came clear in his mind. He had vomited, and spewed a great gout of liquid all over himself. What had been in him, that his stomach rejected so violently? And more alarming still: what was in him now, that he did not feel hungry despite not touching his packaged stores for ten mortal days …?
He closed his eyes for a moment, for the world was tilting dizzily. He clutched the reassuring hardness of the control lever until his thinking calmed and he was able to face the important point that if he had managed to live by eating Asgard foodstuffs he must try and work out what they were. So far as he knew, Tai Men had not even begun a programme to determine whether native plants were nutritious. Possibly he had even chanced—blindly, crazily—across a key to the scurvy problem which had still been plaguing the colony the last time he spoke on the radio.
He wanted desperately to head for the base island to see another human face, hear a voice and lie under a roof again. But he steeled himself against the impulse to leave right away. He gathered a camera and a biological sampling kit, and got out of the boat.
For the best part of three hours he trudged back and forth around the island, trying to reconstruct his movements. He took a sample of water from the stream in which he had found himself when he recovered. Clearly, he had drunk from it without purifying it, and was none the worse. That was significant. So, too, were the gnaw-marks he spotted on the cabbagy stem of one of the shrubs, that at first he mistook for a blaze he had cut to show the trail. But those were the traces of teeth, not a machete.
He collected samples of his own excrement, which he had dropped like an animal wherever the need over took him, and sealed them in airtight bags. They were unattacked by the native scavengers—one of the reasons why sewage disposal was likely to become a major problem on Asgard, requiring all-chemical treatment without aid from bacteria—and he saw in them shreds of tough bark-like material, small round objects resembling tomato-pips, and other substances that had apparently gone through his bowel unaltered. Yet he had incontestably been nourished by his improbable diet. He was fit and strong, as though he had been under the supervision of an expert dietitian.
Shaking his head, he returned to the boat with his load of samples. Having stowed them, he turned on the power for the second time, eased his craft up on its hoverducts, and set the automatics to take him back to the base at maximum speed, regardless of wasted power.
During the terrible day and a half of suspense which he had to endure while the boat carried him along, he struggled to make sense out of the experience he had undergone. The ten missing days of his life were not wholly blank, though that would have been alarming enough. What frightened him was that most of the memories, elusive as dreams, which he could recapture didn’t match the objective traces of his activities that he had found when he went back to collect those samples.
He had walked and lain down, slept and eaten—that much was clear. But the few rational-seeming images he could recover to correspond with his deductions, such as the one of vomiting, were embedded in a matrix of confusion. He could tell that something had happened which must in its way be as pregnant with unspeakable meaning as the fit of madness that caused him to throw Sigrid down naked on an alien beach. But his conscious awareness seemed to have been disconnected. Fragments of legend came to him, isolated, in response to the mental clues which had always before conjured up sane memories, as though his experience had been so fearful he was compelled to interpret it to himself in parables drawn from the ancient lore in which he had been steeped at home on Earth: tales of the great heroes like Finn and Cú Chulainn.
Had he now, again, collapsed under the pressure of a strange world? To use the comparison he had employed when talking to Parvati, had Asgard sprung another trap for him? Or was there some physical cause, perhaps some poison which the sea-beast had injected into his bloodstream?
It was useless to try and guess, he decided. He was going to have to wait until Tai and Parvati could take him apart for inspection.
It was in the cool pale light of dawn that he woke from uneasy slumber, dogged by random pictures from his weird experience, to find he was in sight of the base island and the automatics were buzzing to alert him. He knuckled his eyes and peered through the morning twilight.
Starting, he realised something was wrong. His boat was lying to off the south of the small harbour, and it was unchanged. But by now Dan Sakky’s boat-sheds should have been completed. The whole aspect of the harbour should have changed. But there was nothing new—correction: there was only a line of foundations, with nothing on them.
And beyond, up the hill towards the Santa Maria, things were subtly amiss. A solar collector had been knocked down and lay draped over a woodplant, randomly. Someone had decorated a power-line with knotted rags, like the paper shreds on the tail of a kite.
He rose in the boat as it bore him into the harbour, a great shadow of fear overcoming him, and called out loudly. From a hiding-place among rocks a figure rose, levelling a gun, and he recognised Saul Carpender.
“Saul! It’s me—Dennis!” he cried. “What’s wrong? Something is wrong, isn’t it?”
Unshaven, red-eyed, marked with scurvy bruises, Saul peered down at him as though struggling to convince himself that the new arrival was indeed a friend. Eventually he lowered the gun and rubbed his bristly chin with the back of his hand.
“Oh, it’s you,” he muttered. “More or less given you up for lost, I guess … Well, come ashore, and help us sort out the mess we’re in, hm? Abdul’s gone crazy, and Parvati, and Dan and Tai and Ulla and Kitty—mad as hatters, the lot of them!”
FIVE WAKING SOULS
The palsy plague these pounces
When I prig your pigs or pullen,
Your culvers take, or mateless make
Your Chanticleer, and sullen.
When I want provant with Humphrey
I sup, and when benighted
To repose in Paul’s with waking souls
I never am affrighted.
But still do I sing, “Any food, any feeding,
Money, drink or clothing?
Come dame or maid, be not afraid—
Poor Tom will injure nothing.”
—Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song
XIII
WAITING FOR the moment of truth to come upon her, Parvati was nervous: felt her palms moist, her belly taut with apprehension. Yet the anxiety was impersonal. It had little to do with the idea that she might be due to swallow a poisoned draught, though intellectually she was calculating with that possibility. What disturbed her far more deeply was that if the computers had been deliberately trying to sabotage the colony, they could hardly have picked a less expendable group of test subjects.
Kitty we could manage without; most of her work is done. And, without being slighting, Dan Sakky too. We could cobble makeshifts together without Dan’s capacity for visualising unbuilt structures, though it would take longer and lead to great wastes of effort. But how could we manage without Ulla to lead us to mineral deposits like a diviner sensing water, or Tai to watch our first babies from embryo to delivery, or Abdul to ride our fractious team, resentful of harness, or—or me?
Should the crucial event have been a solemn affair, watched over by the entire band of colonists? The possibility only occurred to her when the test group had assembled in the biolab of the Santa Maria, among racked experimental tanks and creeper-like festoons of translucent plastic piping along which bubbled noisy nutrient solutions. It was due to the remarkable ordinariness of the circumstances.
With astonishment she realised: I never consciously risked my life and health before! Even when I stepped out on the surface of Asgard for the first time, I knew that it had been proved superficially safe by the first visitors. How did Dennis feel, the first to take an unfiltered breath of Asgard air?
But she couldn’t ask him. He wasn’t here, a
nd no one knew what had become of him except that he must be at a place they could locate on a map, tomorrow at latest, and go to in search of him.
Meantime, she had this obscure annoying feeling that there should be a kind of ceremony to mark this commitment she was making. Life was a precious and irreplaceable possession. If she was going to gamble it, ought there not to be some special ritual to mark the moment forever?
She kept that to herself, however, for when she glanced at her companions she found they were all—at least outwardly—composed. They were tense, like her, but what betrayed the fact was no more than, for example, Kitty’s uncharacteristic silence, a frown on Dan’s broad ebony brow.
For better or worse, it was going to be a very unremarkable occurrence, this test on which the future of the Asgard colony might depend. They had all been here scores of times, in exactly similar surroundings, during the first month after landing. Then, Tai had conducted daily tests on members of the group, studying water and stool samples, blood and serum samples, nail parings, hair-clippings, reflexes, everything which might indicate danger to their health. During the outbreak of acute diarrhoea which had afflicted them all, without exception, for up to a week, she had been left with the impression that this biolab was the centre of the whole venture, but that scare had proved groundless and they had adjusted happily to their alien intestinal flora. Or so we all thought …
But everything was so familiar and ordinary! Under Tai’s directions, a couple of his aides were dropping round golden oranges into a conventional juice-extractor, leaves of spinach and spikes of red carrot into a big blender from the kitchens, adding sugar to one and salt to the other, for palatability! It seemed absurd!