by John Brunner
He did a fast count by eye. Ten minutes after the siren, and a good thirty people not yet present. He noticed Saul glancing at him, and turned his head inquiringly.
“Shall I call them to order?” Saul proposed.
“The hell! Where are the others?”
“You want to wait for them? Shall I sound the siren again?”
“No!” Dennis drew a deep breath. He scanned the audience in search of someone who seemed less overwhelmed by apathy than the average, and his gaze fell on Steven Highwood. “You, Steve! Know where to find some paint?”
“Well—yes, I guess so.”
“Right. We’re going to do something they did in ancient Greece. Get that paint and a rope’s end. Go and find every lazy son of a bitch you can’t shift off his ass to come and talk about the rescue of this community, and whip paint all over his stinking body. And nobody with paint comes into mess-hall until it’s worn off him. That clear? If I have to I’ll stand at the door myself and keep them out. Move!”
Steve cocked a surprised eyebrow. “Sounds like a system, man,” he acknowledged, and headed down the street.
Five minutes passed. There was a commotion, and they looked around to see the missing colonists coming at a stumbling run, followed by the grinning Steve flailing his paint-smeared rope. As they fell into their seats, he called out, “That’s the lot except for Silvana Borelli—she’s laid up with a bad ankle and can’t walk. I said I’d go tell her what happened afterwards. That okay?”
“That’s okay,” Dennis confirmed, and strode over to the table. For a long moment he hesitated. Then he picked up two of the three chairs, one in each hand, and held them out at arm’s length to Saul and Tibor.
I may be making deadly enemies, but we can’t let this go on!
“Here—take these and get out there with everyone else!” he ordered. “You seem to have been more or less running things lately, and what’s happened as a result is a downright disgrace.”
Stunned, the two men simply stared at him, making no move to take the chairs.
“Don’t you agree?” Dennis threw at the audience. “Look at yourselves! You’re filthy! You stink! You’ve behaved more like primitives out of the Dark Ages than civilised people—going and jeering at lunatics for a Sunday outing!”
“Right!” Steve Highwood shouted, and after a fearful pause there was a mutter of embarrassed agreement. White as paper, without taking the chairs, Saul and Tibor moved to places on the general benches.
“Okay, we’ll keep these chairs here as a sort of Siege Perilous,” Dennis shrugged, letting them drop to the ground again. “It’s open to anyone to come and take them over, but on one condition—they prove themselves capable of coping with the responsibility it involves. That’s the same condition I’m here on! Let’s get that straight right away, shall we? For example”—he drew up the chairman’s chair to the table and went on talking in a more conversational tone—”I just said you were filthy. You are. Why?”
“Well, when Dan broke the dam—” Tibor began defensively.
“Stuff that immediately,” Dennis cut in, taking malicious pleasure in throwing Tibor’s own phrase back at him. “How many dams did Dan build on other islands? I’ve been away from piped and purified water for almost four weeks. I didn’t even have buckets and tanks—I used the cushionfoil’s inflatable dinghy for a bathtub! First thing after this meeting, the whole gang of us is going to the stream with soap and disinfectant. Steve, keep that painted rope handy—and watch out particularly for the mess-hall staff! I never expected to see anyone handling food with black-edged fingernails in my lifetime!”
Several people shifted as though trying to sit on their hands and hide them. Dennis concealed a grin.
“Right! Now one more thing we’ve got to straighten out before we can get to real work. We’re short of power, but we aren’t without it—we’re short of scrap but we aren’t without it—we’re short of water but we aren’t without it—and so on and so on. Any or all of these things could have happened through a natural disaster. True or false? This is a tectonically active world; we seem to have hit it during a quiescent stage, but the process isn’t over. We could have had an earthquake which tipped the Santa Maria off that peak it’s sitting on and sent it rolling through the village like a ball down a bowling-alley. Did you ever think of that? I did! I came here before, remember, and there were exactly four of us, and if what happened to the Pinta had happened to the Argo there wouldn’t have been anyone left to pick up the pieces and make the sacrifice worth while. You’re standing bloody mockery of what those people up there on the moon gave their lives for—aren’t you?”
Dead silence followed. -
Suddenly Yoko leapt to her feet, clenching her small fists. “What’s the good?” she forced out. “What’s the good? We shan’t be able to live here—the best we can hope for is to die!”
“And weren’t your ancestors Samurai?” Dennis said cuttingly. “Or were they mud-grubbing peasants, and nothing more?”
The insult went through Yoko’s hysteria like a bullet through butter. She took possession of herself again like an invading army, letting her hands fall quietly to her sides.
“Yes,” she muttered. “Yes, I should have understood.” And she resumed her seat.
“Just in case that particular truth hasn’t penetrated yet,” Dennis said after a pause, “and just in case there’s anyone still pinning his hopes on returning to Earth in the Santa Maria, I guess I should point out that I’m the only person here who’s ever tried flying a qua-space ship manually. In fact I held the record when we left Earth—it’s not something I often boast about, but it’s a fact, for what it’s worth. And you know what that record was?”
He waited.
“Earth-orbit to Mars-orbit with an error of less than eight per cent. At that point we quit. You can’t fly a qua-space ship on human reflexes. The instruments don’t exist which can convert qua-space information into forms we can handle. You need the nanosecond reflexes of automatics. And we don’t have the automatics any longer. Their data-banks have been cleaned out. In any case, though, since we didn’t have enough ascorbic acid to carry us through a winter here, we don’t have enough to keep us going through a trip back to Earth. We’re not Earthfolk any longer. We’re citizens of Asgard. And isn’t that what you wanted? Or were you fooling me?”
Once more he waited, wondering whether it was only the apathy which stemmed from scurvy that was restraining the audience from telling him to go to hell, or whether he was genuinely reaching their self-respect.
“I take it you agree with me,” he said finally. “So the next step is to find out just how badly off we are, instead of wringing our hands and moaning. Who’s taken over biological section in Tai Men’s place?”
There was a stir among the biologists, but no reply.
“Nobody there with enough guts to take charge and make plans?” Dennis clapped his hand to his forehead. “Then find someone, and do it fast! And the same goes for all the other sections who’ve lost their chiefs. By this time tomorrow I want a complete breakdown of our supplies, our most urgent tasks, our necessary repair jobs, our known natural resources and our secondary skills. Even if it’s only darning clothes, I want to know who can do what and teach others to do it!”
“Sure!” Saul said grumpily. “And we fix things, and what happens? Those damned lunatics you turned loose will come along and sabotage them all over again!”
Dennis looked him straight in the eye. “The way I heard it all my life,” he said, “delusions of persecution are the symptom of a worse kind of insanity than any those poor devils you locked up were suffering from. There are six of them and a hundred and seventy-five of us. If they’re on the winning side, then—hell’s name—I’m inclined to go join them! All right, meeting adjourned to the same time tomorrow. And let’s hear some sense talked then, shall we?”
SEVEN WHAT THE PANTHER DARE NOT
The Gypsy Snap and Pedro
Are n
one of Tom’s comrados.
The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn
And the roaring boys’ bravadoes.
The sober, white, and gentle,
Me trace or touch, and spare not,
But those that cross Tom’s rhinoceros
Do what the panther dare not
Although 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
XIX
“Now WE’LL have this out of the way for a start! The fire can’t have done it much harm—take it outside and sort it. Get a bucket of water to wash the grime off.”
“But all that grease—”
“We have soap left, don’t we? Or get a shovelful of beachsand! Do I have to tell you everything?”
“This is going to make a hell of a draught come winter! Cover it over. Doesn’t matter how it looks—just cover it.”
“But—”
“There are planks in stock at the sawmill, aren’t there?”
“But nails!”
“Hell, the planks which are burned through were fixed by nails in the first place, weren’t they? Ease ’em out and use ’em again!”
“But they’ll be bent!”
“Oh, for—! Look, moron, you get a flat piece of stone and bang the nails on it until they’re straight again. Do I have to show you everything?”
“It’s not going to be arctic here during the winter, but it’s going to be chilly come the turn of the year. These rooms of ours are badly insulated. Start gathering the branches of these shrubs. Take one of the cushion-foils and bring a cargo or two of them back from other islands. Lay ’em out to dry in the sun and wind.”
“But I don’t see—”
“Look, you fasten them together in a sort of mat, see? Then you lash it to the inside of the wall and all over the ceiling, and it traps the warm air like clothes. You get it now, or do I have to construct a working model?”
“Wire rope? What for? Oh—yes, I remember Kitty warning us about the fall gales. And Dan did say we’d need guys. And we don’t have any, hm? Let’s think about that for a bit, then … Got it! Weights. They’ll do for the time being. Plenty of good heavy rocks down by the sea. Lay ’em along the line of the walls so their weight is transmitted straight down and doesn’t bow the roof. We made those beams pretty thick, fortunately.”
“Yes, I know we were supposed to adapt the bearings from that gadget and it’s been distorted out of round! So what? Can’t you rig a treadle-operated lathe and true them back? At least well enough for them to turn in a bed of grease?”
“But you can’t grind hard steel on a wooden treadle lathe! What do you use for a tool?”
“Lord! Go cannibalise one of the rock-drill bits! A diamond ought to be hard enough, surely?”
“Now we can expect the peak winter tides to fill that little natural basin. If we take the drain from it past a water-wheel—”
“But there’s isn’t a channel for it to follow!”
“So make one! Look, run it over that lip there—see?
Then rig a bucket-wheel under the rim, so the flow turns it continually.”
“But that won’t deliver the voltage we—”
“Hell’s name, of course it won’t! This is for our backup power stocks. It’s not designed to feed the whole village, only to charge accumulators. Then with the power from the accumulators, if we don’t drain them for emergencies in any given day, we split water—electrolyse it—and refill the hydroxy fuel cells on things like the tractors and the cushionfoils, so they’ll always be available for use. And we certainly are not going to freeze in our rooms, either! Or eat cold food in the middle of winter! Blazes, we have the cream of Earth-side technical skills to make the best of the materials we have to hand!”
“Does it burn?”
“What?”
“I said does it burn? Combust? Oxidise under controllable conditions? You want to eat nothing but cold food all winter? Nor do I. So does it burn and give off a hot flame? The kitchen equipment won’t go back to power-operation until we find a suitable insulator for the cables, which all got scorched off in the fire. But that equipment was designed so it could be converted to burn wood if the need arose.”
“How did you know? Information like that—”
“No, I didn’t sift through the data-banks in the computers before Parvati wiped them! I just looked at the equipment, that’s all. The heater bars can double as a grate, with gaps for the ash to fall through into a pan underneath; rip out the useless metal bits of the cable, and you’ve got flame-channels running up the sides of the vats. All that remains is to couple them to a chimney. You know what a chimney is, or must I draw you a picture?”
More exhausted than he had ever dreamed of being in his life, yet somehow managing to keep going when his eyes were sunk deep into pits in his face, rimmed with red but alight with the fire of single-minded dedication, Dennis hurled answers to questions at everyone who came begging. Some of them were wrong—the ash from burning native plants didn’t react with grease in the proper way to make soap, for example, so he had to send people off in search of substitutes, like pumice, or fuller’s earth—but most were right, and as the days leaked away he grew more and more astonished at what he was managing to dredge up from his subconscious.
All the sections which had lost their leaders had done as he said, and found replacements: Steve Highwood had moved into Ulla Berzelius’s slot, for instance; a portly, cheerful woman called Ellen Shikalezi from Bechuanaland had managed to get the biomedical section operating again; the meteorological section was working on a routine basis anyhow, and Kitty’s former senior aide, Hugh Lauriston, was willing enough to handle the storm-warning side—the only really crucial part—on his own, turning loose his two colleagues for other duties; while the girl who had been Dan Sakky’s architectural programmer, Zante lonescu, quietly set about designing the makeshifts Dennis called for and found herself de facto in charge of construction after a week or so.
He himself, of course, had combined Abdul’s and Parvati’s jobs by accident, and there was no one to take over from him.
But what plagued him far worse than simple tiredness was the curious situation which recurred and recurred all the time he was shaking people and kicking them into activity.
Although, thanks to the training which had gone into the months prior to his original visit, with the four-man Argo team, he probably had a wider range of available survival data than any other single person on Asgard, he had never expected to be able to tell specialists things about their own disciplines which they knew themselves and had never thought of in the present context. Typically, he listened to an allegedly insoluble problem, thought for a few moments, and said, “What about… ?”
Whereupon the specialist hit his or her forehead with open palm and said, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Why indeed? Granted, there was scurvy rampant among the colonists, so their minds must inevitably be dulled, but after much heart-searching he had reached a compromise with Ellen: anyone whose joints began to swell should receive a ration of ascorbic acid to keep them going. By now, every other colonist had been allotted at least one rescue dose, and many were on what amounted to supportive therapy, requiring massive doses every other day if they were to function at all.
Yet it wasn’t merely that the minds of these brilliant specialists were sluggish. Dennis reached that conclusion after he had been able to show a dozen or more of them how to exploit their own knowledge to best advantage.
It’s more as though I look at Asgard from a different standpoint.
He wished achingly that Parvati were available to discuss this question with him. He was beginning to formulate an explanation, but he lacked the background to judge something as fundamental as a cultural shift. He could only hypothesise that whereas in the ultimate analysis the colonists h
ad a vague vision of building a replica of the Earth they had left behind, for which they could take unique credit, he with his explorer’s mentality looked on the predicament he was in more as a matter of survival, regardless of the purpose for which he was to survive. He seemed to be looking at the potential of Asgard, a whole new planet; they, at the ways in which Asgard fell short of the Earthly ideal.
But consideration of abstract matters like that would have to wait. There were plenty of more concrete problems to which he had even less of a solution.
For instance: there was one exception to the rule that the colonists were weak and lethargic, needing to be jarred into action, and kept going on heavy additional doses of ascorbic acid. That exception was himself.
Lying alone at night in his room, he pondered that mystery endlessly. Ever and again he was driven to the inescapable conclusion that the key to it must lie in the ten lost days by himself on that other distant island. Logic said that he had blindly eaten, or perhaps drunk, some naturally occurring substance which compensated for the effect of the debilitating bacterium that infected them all. He was eating the same diet as everyone else here, yet he alone had been able to decline the offer of synthetic vitamin supplements.
He tried to reassure himself with the recollection of his positive achievements. People acknowledged them, and sometimes shyly said they were grateful. The food was being properly cooked again, and one of the dietitians had discovered her talent as a chef, so that it was actually appetising. People were clean, and while he hadn’t yet been able to spare the time or manpower to rebuild the reservoir and supply running water again, he had been able to organise a delivery system by mounting a metal tank from the Niña on the back of a tractor, and the laundry could be done and the toilets could be flushed with disinfectant, albeit by hand.
Yet he was pursued into his dreams by guilty knowledge which often brought him awake sweating and trembling. He, and no one else in the village, had somehow found out how to escape the plague of scurvy. And unless he was able to share this secret with the others, he was going to watch them die, helplessly. He was going to be an Adam without an Eve.