Polymath (18 page)

Lex didn’t say anything, but gave a half-nod, letting his eyelids drift down.

“And it seems to me,” Fritch insisted, “that there’s a much more urgent question. Are the bastards going to come after us? I figure that so long as they believed the wild tale Ornelle spun over the radio, all about how awful life was down here, they didn’t think we had anything they wanted. Now they’ve seen your team, Lex, and talked to you, and they know we only have two guns to defend
ourselves with, aren’t they likely to mount a raid, try to steal equipment and food?”

“Not tonight, at any rate,” Lex grunted. “They lost too many men when we led them into our trap. Hosper says there are only about a score that Gomes trusts, and two died and I think three others must have been pretty badly injured. But you’re right. We’ll have to mount some kind of guard.”

“And what are we going to do to help those poor devils?” Jerode muttered. “We can’t ignore them!”

“No more can we raise an army in a single night!” Lex said with a touch of impatience. “Yes, we’ll have to plan what we’re going to do about that, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to draft a formal constitution for ourselves, and figure out a way to prevent non-sane individuals from becoming a charge on the community, and make preparations for a flood of sick and starving fugitives, and—
and
!
”
He slapped his thigh and stood up. “But right now I’m going for a walk on the beach to relax before I lie down. I haven’t slept for two nights and anything I say at the moment is apt to be so much wasted air. Good night!”

On the edge of the beach he paused. In the starlight the skeletal forms of the solar stills and boilers were like the bones of ancient ships half buried in the sand. Someone With an inventive turn of mind had rigged a gadget, powered by a float bobbing in the water, which at irregular intervals jerked a clanging sheet of metal against the main boiler to discourage fishingbirds from perching there and smutching the reflectors with their droppings. Out near the hulk of the starship luminous bubbles were rising to the surface. A sea-beast was feeding, releasing gas from the carcass of one of the sessile animals on the oceanbed. They had grown to an alarming size in the past couple of weeks, and it was a major job to avoid their reaching arms when working on the ship.

The bones of ancient ships
…. The image took hold of his imagination and sent a shiver down his spine which had nothing to do with the cool wind now coming from deep water, flavored with salt and the smell of sea-life.

He had never admitted it to anybody, but he too—right up to the time when he realized what Gomes was doing—had been half hoping that it might be possible next year, or the year after, to lift if not a complete ship that at least a subradio beacon and a power source into
orbit, let whatever searchers there might be know how far they had had to flee for survival.

Now he was cured of that vain hope. It wouldn’t be done this year or next. It might not be done in his lifetime. For the first time he faced the knowledge squarely. Without clues to guide them, the searchers would almost certainly assume that nobody from Zarathustra had survived except those who left in ships that took off early enough to circle around the nova and head back toward the older systems.

Ultimately the tide of expansion would engulf this planet too—in five hundred years, in a thousand. What would the scouting parties find? A new branch of the family of man, its planet tamed, reaching once more to the stars? Or—

“Bones?” he said aloud. “Scraps of corroded metal? Bits of plastic buried in the sand?”

There was a sound of movement near him. Startled, he whirled, and a voice spoke from deep shadow behind the main boiler.

“Lex, is that you?”

“Delvia! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was anyone—”

“Oh, I’m alone, if that’s what’s worrying you.” She rose into sight. “I guess I’m becoming a reformed character. I spend a lot of time out here by myself, just thinking. Sometimes I sleep here.”

“Just to be alone! If so, I’ll move on.”

“No.” She kicked at the sand. Grains of it rattled on the nearest reflector, like dried corn spilling into a pan. “Mainly I come out here to look at Zara. It seems absurd that the star which I used to think of as the sun is still up there, shining quietly, when in fact it’s a raging cosmic explosion. How long before we see it happen, Lex? Is it sixty years?”

“More like seventy,” Lex said. Since the early days he hadn’t often looked up to see Zarathustra’s primary, soberly yellow like a thousand others, in the night sky. Now his gaze fastened on it automatically.

“So in fact
we
probably won’t see it,” Delvia said.

“No. I don’t know if that’s something to be grateful for or not.”

“Not.” She uttered the word positively, with conviction. “If we could see it, a great blazing sore on the sky, it would bring the truth home to us. It hasn’t reached me, you know. Sometimes I sit here and look up, and I try
to remember what it was like to live in a civilized, orderly, safe environment—and because Zara is still there I almost convince myself that that’s the reality and this is only a nightmare interlude.”

She glanced at him. “Do you agree with me, Lex, that that’s half our trouble? That it isn’t real to us yet? We’re still playing,
I
think. Sure, we work to make ourselves less uncomfortable, to get food and water and shelter. But inside we’re treating it as a glorified camping trip.”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” Lex said.

“But being right—does that count for anything?” She sounded dispirited. “I never dreamed this might happen to me, being cast away on a strange planet, with no hope of getting back all the things one used to take for granted. It makes me feel like—well, a prisoner. A condemned prisoner, not guilty of any crime. Do you ever find yourself feeling that the universe has punished you unjustly?”

Lex hesitated. Eventually, in a low tone: “Yes, often.”

“It must be particularly bad for you, I guess,” Delvia said. “But you hide it so well. That’s why I’ve always suspected there must be something special about you. Or am I wrong!? Are you better adjusted to what’s happened, because you’ve known for years that your life would be lived out under another sun?”

“Oh, no.” Lex gave a little dry chuckle. “I’ve just got over the first impact of what you’ve been talking about, and it’s been hard. I’ve been trying to make myself understand in my guts that what we do here won’t be for our own sakes. It’ll have to be for the children who are born in the fall, and their children—maybe. We’re living in the past and trying to build for the future, and we have no present for ourselves.”

“We’ve been hurled back to the deep past,” Delvia suggested. “Not our own, more the days when savage tribes were first spreading across the face of Earth.”

“No, there’s no comparison. They weren’t torn apart the way we are. They’d neither lost their own past, nor conceived the possibility of changing the future by an act of will. We’re unique, Del. That’s why our job is so hard.”

There was a pause. Delvia began to walk away from the boiler, and unconsciously he fell in beside her, staring at the sea.

“Do we have any hope, Lex?” she said when they had wandered some distance.

“Of what? Of achieving our goal here, of getting a signal home and being rescued?”

“Any kind of hope. It’s what we most desperately need. And we don’t really have any. We’re just pretending we have. If you can give it to us, we’ll be safe no matter what else becomes of us.”

He looked at her as though he had never seen her before. He said, “You’ve changed. Or—no, wait a moment. I wonder if it’s we who are changing, and you got there a jump ahead of the rest.”

“I don’t understand you.” She halted and faced him, one foot raised to rub the other calf. There were still traces of blisterweed rash on her legs.

“I remember thinking,” Lex said slowly, “some time ago, that what we could do with was a lot more Delvias and a lot fewer Ornelles and Nalines.”

“I’m flattered.” She inflected the words ironically, but they sounded lifeless. “I’m sure I don’t know why.”

“Nor did I until now, but I think I’ve found out. You have a present. You live in the here and now, and that’s why the rest of us are jealous of you. Being alive was enough reason, as far as you were concerned, to go on living when things got hard. I saw the way you picked a job for yourself, to do by yourself, while the rest of us were arguing till we were blue about our plans. And it turned out to be an essential job which hadn’t even occurred to us.”

“Is that supposed to make me a genuis, or something? Because I promise you I’m not.”

“And you went on being able to enjoy living,” he said as though she hadn’t spoken.

“Did I? No, I thought I did. But what I got was a load of misery. Living in the present, if that’s what I’ve been doing, isn’t any fun at all. Besides, the future is what counts now, and that depends on you…. Lex, what’s wrong?”

He was shaking suddenly, shaking from head to foot like a fiercely vibrating machine about to break loose from its mountings. He couldn’t say anything. His teeth had locked, his fingers folded into fists, in his struggle to control and end the dreadful trembling. It was as though Delvia’s words had made the whole immense burden of his duty solid and dropped it on his shoulders, so that he had to fight to remain standing. He closed his eyes and
thought he might scream. Anything, to switch off his awareness!

Then she was saying his name over and over, “Lex, Lex, Lex, Lex…. Her arms were around him. Dimly, through all the layers of his terror, he could feel her skin. She had slipped off her one garment; she was taking his hands and pressing them to her body and some archetypal reflex made them grip her flesh; she was bending his head to her breasts so that he breathed the warm scent of her.

When the shaking had stopped, she still said nothing but his name, and drew him down beside her on the sand.

During the days which followed the endless vistas of future problems more than once threatened to paralyze him with the same shivering fear. And if him, then how many others? For the first time he comprehended men overwhelmed by what had happened to them, shocked by calamity, strained to the limit of their endurance, nervous tension knotting their jaw muscles, drying their mouths, turning their stomachs sour, yet not daring to let themselves explode into aggression or rail at the circumstances which oppressed them. In Delvia’s phrase: feeling that the universe had unjustly punished them.

It was worse for the men than the women. Imperceptibly their quasi-primitive predicament had reawakened the ancient habit of looking to the male as organizer and leader.

During those fearful moments on the beach, Lex knew, he had been balanced on the brink of insanity. He had found in himself that weakness which had driven Arbogast to suicide, which had allowed the refugees on the plateau to let themselves be dominated like beasts, brutalized without offering resistance.

But Delvia had realized what she must do. Might one say “instinctively”? (She had said—so long before that he felt he was recalling the words from a previous existence
—she had always been “what you’d call a natural animal.”)

No, not instinctively. From experience. Lex wondered, though he would never have dreamed of asking, from whose shaking moaning body she had first learned to purge the evil of terror.

He could spare little time now, though, to worry about himself. It was as though the universe had shifted to a different track with his assumption of authority. There truly was no present for the refugees, merely the illusion of one. The past had spewed them out, and only in the future could they justify themselves.

Indeed, their plight was unique. Who else in all of history had been compelled to found their present not on what had gone before, but on what was yet to come?

So, in this oven-heat of summer when the air shimmered on the hills and the still sea gazed up at images of itself miraged on the horizon, everything said to him without ceasing, “Visualize! Predict!
Plan
!
”

Immediate plans, contingent plans, emergency plans. Practice routines, normal routines, emergency routines. He could frame one plan and perfect it, and something would happen to undermine his careful scheme. That job required this tool, and with it could be done in a few days. Unfortunately this tool had been left on the riverbed and swept away with Cheffy’s lost equipment. Was it quicker to evolve an alternative method, or replace the tool by getting Rothers to melt down steel in his solar furnace and have Aldric cast it, so that one of the women could file it sharp with a power-grinder borrowed from Fritch and driven off a solar collector sheet normally employed by Delvia to charge accumulators and then fit the blade with a wooden handle which someone else had turned from a branch, sanded smooth and bound with scarce wire against splitting, time invested one hour? The lack of the power-tool affected work on the new buildings, while the lack of the collector sheet might mean a shortage of charged accumulators and the need for more might crop up anywhere—in Bendle’s lab-hut, out at the sedimentation plant, in the infirmary,
anywhere
.

Proof was all about them that Jerode had set scores of crucial projects in motion during his tenure. What Lex found most terrifying was that despite Jerode’s work he never stopped thinking of new tasks, equally important.

And always, especially when he saw Hosper or Jesset
pass by but at any other time as well, his mind was clouded by the thought of the other refugees on the plateau, driven by madmen to waste their energy and possibly their lives.

But he was adamant that no attack should be made on the plateau before arrangements had been made for an influx of three to four hundred survivors, most of them side or injured, all weak. Moreover, if—as seemed likely—toward the end of summer their overused diet-synthe-sizers began to break down, there would have to be food in store, enough to last until spring. In addition it was self-defeating to use power for heating only to lose it through bad insulation, and though their improvised wind-mills had worked amazingly well they would be inadequate for the enlarged community…. And there was an increasing number of married couples for whom Fritch was providing separate accommodation, only that absorbed a lot of extra building material, and time, and also increased the demand for heat because more external walls were exposed to the wind…. And at about the same time as coping with hundreds of sick and helpless adults the first births would be occurring, and babies would need frighteningly thorough care because the four infants who had been brought here had all died….