Polymath (16 page)

“I’m afraid it doesn’t really matter whether we’re in favor or not,” Aldric said. “These few days without adequate water, the psychological effects of the thundery weather, all the rest of it—it’s brought it home to people that what lies ahead isn’t just a little hard work, but a damned hard life. A hell of a lot of tempers have come to the boil. Some of my best men are scarcely on speaking terms with each other. I think we’ll have to arrange an opportunity for them to blow off some pressure, Doc.”

There was a pause. Bendle said eventually, “What
can
have become of Lex’s party? Could they have been over-whelmed by the water? I mean, if the blockage broke of its own accord.”

“No,” Aldric grunted. “If they’d already been trapped by it at the time they failed to call us up, then the flood would have been on us an hour or two later instead of in the middle of the night. Much more likely is that the radio’s broken, or they accidentally shorted out their accumulator.”

“Isn’t it a shame we didn’t force Lex to take Delvia
with him?” Ornelle said. “That would have been a perfect solution.”

“I’d far rather you were lost!” Fritch snapped. “You’re getting on my nerves, know that?”

Ornelle rounded on the big architect, flushing. “Oh, I’m not surprised you’d rather have Del than me, Fritch! I guess you’re one of her customers, aren’t you? How’s she taking her pay? Are you building her a little brothel of her own?”

“Oh, shut up, Ornelle!” Cheffy flared. Jerode banged on the table as all of a sudden everyone started shouting at once. Ornelle leaped to her feet and planted her fists on the table, leaning forward with a glare.

“I will not be quiet!” she exclaimed. “I’m sick of all this get-you-nowhere chatter! All this garbage about ‘must let the people blow off pressure’ and ‘goodness what can possibly have happened to Lex?’—it’s turned my stomach. I know damned well what must have become of them!”

“Then tell us!” Fritch barked. She swung to face him.

“Where were you when the river started running again? In bed asleep, hm? I wasn’t. I was out for a walk. I couldn’t sleep for worrying about poor Naline.” She drew a deep breath, and an unpleasant sneer crossed her face. “It wasn’t cloudy any longer on the high ground. You could see a long way. There were flashes up where the river runs.”

“So?” Aldric snapped. “Must have been lightning!”

“It was not. The storm was all over. What I saw was guns being fired. Some of the vegetation burned for quite a long time, a couple of minutes.”

“What?” Hoarsely, from two or three throats.

“I…” Seeming to speak against his will, Cheffy licked his lips. “I came out when I heard the water. And—yes, I looked up the hill too, and I saw flashes. I did take them for lightning, but now I think back, I guess they could have been gun-beams. I’m not sure, of course. But they could have.”

“Thank
you.” Honey-sweet, sarcasm flavored Ornelle’s words. “I take it you were too concerned with your lost tools and pipes to give it any more thought? Well, I hadn’t been careless like that. So I worked it all out. Why was Lex so eager to go to the plateau? Because he wanted to get our river back? I don’t believe it!” Again she sucked in a deep, rib-straining breath. “What they were after was the other party’s ship. They didn’t contact us when they
should have because they found it could be repaired. When they realized we’d come searching for them if there wasn’t some reason why we shouldn’t, they staged this little drama with their guns to make us think they’d been eaten by animals or something. They knew we’d be awake and see them shooting because the noise of the water would have woken us up. Now they’ll take the other ship and get away!”

The paranoid quality of the fantasy she had erected had shocked her listeners so much that for a long moment open mouths and horrified expressions were her only response. Jerode was wondering at the back of his mind what provisions could be made here to confine and treat the insane, when he heard a shout from outside which made him more relieved than he would have imagined possible.

Ornelle was still standing, under the misapprehension that her revelation had provoked amazement and awe, when the cries became clearly audible.

“They’re back! Lex and Baffin and all of them! They’re all back!”

The air seemed to clear of something heavy and dark. They jumped to their feet in excitement. Ornelle alone seemed frozen, and Fritch broke the spell on her by saying as he pushed past her toward the door, “Now maybe you’ll learn to keep your silly mouth shut, Ornelle! Come on!”

As the others crowded onto the verandah, she dropped to her chair again, laid her head on her arms and began to weep.

The double news—not only that Lex and his party had returned, but that there were after all people alive on the plateau and two of them had arrived with Lex—spread like an explosion. Cheffy’s gang, picking up the equipment scattered when the rushing water hit the upstream site of their sedimentation plant, had been the first to see them—limping, filthy, scratched, Aggereth hobbling with his arm on Aykin’s shoulder. They had come back to town, their work forgotten, and as the word traveled around the rest of the community likewise abandoned their day’s jobs. Even Lex’s salvage team, who were out at the hulk of the ship marking it up for eventual cutting—the tools weren’t available yet but Aldric had hit on a promising new idea—came hastening back.

But it wasn’t simply the general excitement which compelled
the committee to call an assembly. It was what came to Elbing’s ears, what he relayed at once to Jerode at the infirmary where he was attending to Aggereth’s ankle and supervising dressings for the minor injuries of the others.

“Doc!” the spaceman said breathlessly, clutching the doorpost to relieve the weight on his stump. “Is it true that the others are trying to repair their ship and put it into orbit?”

Lex, his face showing appalling weariness, looked up from the chair where he was eating a hasty meal while one of Jerode’s nurses cleaned the cuts on his legs. “That’s right,” he confirmed. “Ask Hosper. He was Gomes’s super-cargo, by the way.”

“Then they’re crazy,” Elbing said with conviction. “Captain Arbogast told me what a state it was in when he came back from his visit. It couldn’t be put back in space without a month in a grav-free cradle. No matter how long you slaved on it with handtools, it’d never lift more than a mile.”

Hosper, who sat holding Jesset’s hand in a corner of the room, was gazing about him with hungry eyes at what had been accomplished here. It wasn’t surprising that they were both overwhelmed, Lex thought, after their weary months of sweating away at useless tasks.

Yet no one knew better than he how much remained to be done.

Now Hosper spoke up. “Are you a spaceman?” he demanded. And, at Elbing’s nod, he went on, “Well, then, listen. The underplates of our ship are all strained. There’s a crack that runs about three-quarters of the way around the hull. The whole drive gear has been shifted on its mounts. The—”

“Don’t go on,” Elbing said. “I’m right. They
are
crazy.”

The assembly came together in the hot air of early evening. It was immediately clear to Lex that the situation had worsened during his absence. People were grouped differently. The two factions were almost perfectly defined. On one side were the useful ones, clustered about members of the steering committee—lean, tired-looking, heavily tanned, with a kind of serious intentness in their quiet speech together. On the other side there was a totally new focus. Nanseltine and Rothers were together, and Nanseltine’s wife, looking very bad-tempered. She had been assigned to work on a project making soap from ash and
grease, and resented it although there was virtually no other light unskilled work to offer her.

That much was to be expected. What was new was that next to the Nanseltines sat Naline, half her face masked with a thick layer of yellow salve and a pad of dressing over her blind eye. Incredibly, there was discernible self-satisfaction in her manner, as though having attendance danced on her by the Nanseltines, Rothers, Ornelle—who sat on her other side—and many more people was a complete consolation for the loss of her eye. Lex had read in the history of psychology about self-mutilation to gain sympathy and attention, but centuries of advancement in education had almost abolished such pathological behavior. If he hadn’t seen what Gomes was doing, he would have found it hard to believe that regression could be so swift and far-reaching.

Yet, after all, the basic individual was much the same. Only circumstances had changed significantly.

The group centered on Nanseltine added up to a larger total than he had expected, and when he thought back on what Jerode had told him—summarily, in the infirmary—his heart sank. If only he and his companions had had a chance to sleep themselves out after their nightmare journey… But wild rumors were circulating, and it was imperative to scotch them.

He found himself frowning over the absence of someone he had been subconsciously looking for. Delvia, of course. And there she was, coming shyly to the fringe of the crowd as far away from Naline as possible. A few people gave her nods of greeting. Silent, arms folded, she sat down apart.

There was a sudden buzz of talk centered on Nanseltine, and the former continental manager climbed to his feet, his face red, his voice when he spoke charged with hostility.

“Dr. Jerode! Since you’re delaying the start of this meeting I guess it’s up to someone responsible to initiate discussion. What we want is straight information.”

White-faced, Jerode looked up from his notes. But Nanseltine plunged on before he could be interrupted.

“We’ve been told that the other party, instead of tackling these hopeless and unwelcome schemes for a permanent stay which have been imposed on us, have made a bold and brave attempt, in spite of crippling disadvantages,
to get their ship repaired and return to the comforts and sanity of civilization.”

A ragged cheer went up. He waited for it to end.

“We have it on the authority of someone invited by you yourself to join your self-appointed committee—who can hardly be charged with bad faith!—that you propose to play down, to disparage this important news. What impels you to this cowardly course, I don’t know: whether it’s your lack of enterprise, I might say of guts, or your reckless willingness to jeopardize our irreplaceable possessions—let me cite only the fact that the team you sent out under the young and inexperienced Lex departed with seven precious energy guns and returned with a mere two, plus a pair of deserters from the other party who represent extra mouths to feed, and moreover they lost a radio, medical supplies, and goodness knows what else, and of course let us not forget the hard work wasted when equipment for the drinking-water plant was washed out to sea….”

He was going on and on, and a frightening number of people were approving his hysterical onslaught. Jerode looked dumbly at Lex, seeking guidance.

What was to be done? Hosper and Jesset were pale with anger at what Nanseltine was saying; should Lex call on them? Elbing was muttering to himself; would the opinion of a spaceman carry any weight with people in this frame of mind? Of the members of his own team, both Baffin and Minty sat with their faces in their hands, pictures of hopeless misery, and the others wore expressions of uniform despair.

No, it was no use trying to reach these people on a rational level. They wouldn’t believe even a firsthand account of life as Gomes decreed it must be. They would probably shout Hosper and Jesset down; they’d argue that Elbing hadn’t seen the other starship for himself, so he must be talking nonsense…. One couldn’t any longer regard Ornelle as sane, and in a very real sense people like Rothers and Nanseltine weren’t either. They still craved the adulation and status which they had enjoyed back on Zarathustra, which even there they had not truly deserved.

Against an immense burden of fatigue, Lex forced himself to his feet. He drew a deep breath and shaped words which rang across the assembly like thunderclaps.

“Go to the plateau, then, all of you who want to! And damned good riddance!”

The passion of his words startled the crowd into silence. Even Nanseltine, the flow of his vituperation broken, stood bewildered for a moment.

More astonished still was Jerode. He said faintly, “Lex, you’re not putting that as a serious proposal, are you?”

“Why not?” Lex blazed at him. “Let’s stop fooling ourselves! People who turn their backs on their one chance of survival simply aren’t fit to live!”

“Jerode!” Nanseltine had recovered and was demanding the attention he had enjoyed before. “Jerode, tell this young fool that we have no time to waste on tantrums! We—”

And at that moment the thing happened which broke the fiddlestring tautness of the atmosphere. As always, a dozen or so of the ubiquitous fishingbirds were perched on nearby roof-poles. Now one of them, tired of thinking whatever thoughts occupied its roosting-time, spread its dingy white pinions and made a clumsy leap into the air. As it passed over Nanseltine it let go one of the gummy black cakes of excrement which were scattered indiscriminately on beach, rocks, trees, and houses.

The black sticky blob landed plump in Nanseltine’s hair, and a gust of laughter like a rising wind swept through the audience as he spluttered and clawed at it to wipe it away. It smeared his hands, ran onto his forehead, clung to his fingers when he attempted to shake it off. In moments he had become the clown for the assembly, and all their tension was hooting away in one vast peal of hilarity.

Probably, Lex thought, he was the only person who knew that that laughter had been triggered by the single forced giggle he had uttered, reflex-quick after the event No. Maybe the only person bar one. He saw that Delvia
wasn’t laughing. She was staring at him. When she noticed his eyes on her, she raised one eyebrow.

The anger drained from him now, and cool determination took its place. Now or never he would have to establish his ascendancy over Nanseltine, Rothers, Ornelle, and the rest—to make sure that so many of the others saw the literal stupidity of their ideas they would never again be treated except with the contempt they merited.