Polymath (3 page)

“Turn the oar around,” Lex said, picking up his hatchet. With some difficulty Cheffy complied, and Lex knocked the beast flying. It had left puncture marks in the wood, deep as nailholes.

“Having second thoughts about diving alone?” Aldric inquired.

Lex shook his head. “Those teeth wouldn’t get through the suit fabric—though if there’s any strength in the jaws I could get a nasty pinch and a lasting bruise. But from the way it struck at the oar, I suspect that species preys on fishingbirds. Which reminds me!” He sat up straight, eyes searching the sky. “Where are they? This bay was full of them last fall!”

“Perhaps they’re migrants,” Aldric offered. “We’ll probably see them back now the weather’s turned.”

“Seen any landbirds?” Lex asked. “I saw a few yesterday.”

“Me, I wouldn’t have noticed. Been too busy since the thaw. We can ask Bendle about that when we get back.” Aldric turned the tiller a little and peered past Cheffy.

“Getting close now,” he reported. “Have the anchor ready, Lex.”

“Right.” He picked it up carefully, avoiding the scythelike blades. That would certainly shock any bottom-prowler which tried to hang onto it. An unsuspected trap. Like the one which had sunk their starship.

He hadn’t answered Aldric’s question—“Why did we pick the place?”—any more than Cheffy had. They’d chosen it because both sea and land teemed with life, offering a double range of potential foodstuffs; any ocean is a repository of salts, and if they couldn’t eat the native protoplasm or needed to supplement it, then simple processing of seawater would provide trace-elements for the diet-synthesizers; there was a rivermouth running back into a sheltered valley, and near fresh water was a logical site for a settlement; there were treelike growths, and wood was a material you could work with handtools…. Oh, the choice hadn’t been made lightly, and in almost every way it was a good one.

Mark you, the way in which it hadn’t been good might conceivably prove disastrous.

Now, in the clear water, he could see far down the curving side of the hull. At about the limit of vision there were soft darknesses and a motion not entirely due to the changing angle as the boat rocked. Lex shivered.

I’m not cast in the right mold for a hero.

Last summer, when they had improvised their underwater technique for the recovery of Bendle’s son, it had been easy. He hadn’t given a second thought to the obvious logic of the plan. Air, an impervious suit, boots that proved just right to keep the feet down, weights on a belt—and straight ahead with the job.

But he’d had a lot of time for second thoughts during the winter.

Still, this too was something that had to be done. “Stop rowing, Cheffy,” he said, pleased with the levelness of his voice. He cast the anchor overside; it sank, gleaming, as he paid out the cable. Mindful of the spring-release activating the knife-blades, he gave it only the gentlest of tugs to seat it, then knotted the cable to the bow-pin.

“Here’s your belt,” Cheffy said. “Put it on while I hitch up your air.”

“Right.”

Belt. Boots, hatchet, handlight, net bag. He weighed about ten pounds short of neutral buoyancy; he would
sink gently to the bottom. When he wanted to return, he would discard the belt and rise slowly, or open the valve on both air-tanks wide, filling the suit so full it would shoot to the surface like a bubble. Easy. Why was he sweating so much? Because of what he was now convinced he would find?

“Air’s coupled,” Cheffy said.

“Right—wish me tuck.” Lex set his helmet on his head and with a quick twist seated it against the sealing-ring. For better or worse, this was it.

Her eyes were red with lack of sleep, her voice was hoarse from addressing the dumb microphone, and her bead was swimming so that the words she spoke no longer teemed to mean anything.

All of a sudden Ornelle reached the end of her endurance, She thrust the microphone away from her, put her arms on the cool smooth surface of the table, leaned her head on them, and began to sob. Like the tip of a cracked whip she had been jerked through a cycle of emotions for which she-was simply not fitted.

She wished she was dead. Like the others.

Once there had been a planet called Zarathustra; people said comfortably, “Zara.” There were two hundred and ninety million people who said it. Figures of ash rose in Ornelle’s mind, marched across a blazing desert that had been fertile ground. A burning child screamed. She had not seen that. To stay so long would have meant she also burned.

Zarathustra had ended in such nightmare that—had it been a dream—those who dreamed it would have clawed themselves, threshed wildly about, tried to throw their bodies to the floor rather than slip back into sleep and see more horror. It had been incredible—the sun was yellow-white each day as always, round, usual. You didn’t
see the change. But in the observatories someone said a word: nova. Someone else said: how long? The machines gave the answer.

Soon.

Then into the calm pleasant settled life chaos and terror reached like a scythe into grass. Go now, they said. No, not stopping to take anything. No, not to look for children or parents, not to find a lover or a friend.
Now
.

And if you didn’t, they had no time to drag you.
Go
.

White-faced officials. Spacemen moving like machines. Machines moving like men in panic, emptying the holds of cargo vessels on a spaceport in darkness. Useless goods being hurled aside, trucks and helicopters moving in with canned and dehydrated foods, medicines, bales of clothing. Diet-synthesizers being charged with trace-elements. All the time, everywhere, screaming, wailing, and sometimes a shout of savage anger begging a moment’s peace and silence. People shoveled like broken toys into the bellies of the shining ships.

And then the light breaking under the horizon and the knowledge that on the dayside of Zarathustra heat like a torch was shriveling life away.

Then those who had not acted for themselves or been passive like Ornelle, bewildered into letting action be performed for ‘them,
felt
the truth and came weeping and howling, naked from bed, clamoring like wolves for survival. But the ships were full; the ships were lifting into space.

In the crowded holds there had been time to think of those who were left at home. There was a terrible oppressive darkness, not physical but in the mind. Later she heard of other ships with which contact had been made, overfilled, where the oxygen was inadequate and the refugees stifled, where the lance of sickness ran through hunger-weakened bodies. But in the ship where she was, there was just enough.

Not much was learned of other ships, though. For some reason Ornelle didn’t understand, to get clear of the continuum distortions caused by the nova shifting fantastic masses of matter over giant distances at appalling speed, it was necessary to run ahead, under maximum hyper-photonic drive, in whatever direction they chanced to select.

In fact: into unknown darkness.

At the season when its sun exploded, Zarathustra had
been on the side of its orbit farthest from Earth and most of the other human-inhabited worlds. It was a recently-opened planet—indeed, Ornelle’s own parents had been born on Earth and had emigrated when they were young. The idea of trying to beat back around the nova and approach a settled system had been considered, but it was impossible; their ship was a freighter, not one of the passenger expresses disposing of as much power as a small star.

Then, pincered between the narrowing jaws of shrinking fuel reserves and the limits of the ship’s internal ecology, the only hope was to find a planet—any planet—with supportable gravity and adequate oxygen. One system in sixty had a planet where human beings could survive; about one in two hundred had a planet where they could live.

At the end of their resources, they had touched down here to find summer ending. They had no time to determine whether this was a one-in-sixty or a one-in-two-hundred world. At first only the lashing scorn of the few who intended to survive at all costs had driven the majority to behave as though there were hope. They felt themselves not only isolated, but abandoned, even condemned.

The arrival of a second ship from Zarathustra, that landed on a high plateau inland, was like a new dawn. Abruptly life, not just temporary survival, seemed credible. While with sudden demonic energy the refugees worked to build a crude town of wood, sundried clay and scraps from the ship, a team made its way inland to the site of the other landing to ask news of friends or relations.

There were none; the other ship was from a different continent on Zarathustra. Still, its mere presence was comforting; a radio link was organized on an agreed frequency and for the rest of the summer and the brief autumn they kept in touch.

The vicious speed with which winter had slammed down had prevented a second expedition being dispatched to the plateau; moreover, weakened by carrying a huge burden of ice, their main antenna had collapsed in a gale months ago. But directly it had become possible to re-rig it, they had powered the radio again. Ornelle—to whom the presence of other human beings on this world signified something; she couldn’t have described it—had waited feverishly to learn how they had fared.

When intermittent calls had been made for some days,
most people were resigned to giving the others up for lost. But Ornelle had insisted on being allowed to continue, and since she had no specially valuable skills they had let her go on. Now she had spent three long days and most of three nights calling, calling, calling—and hearing nothing. She might have thought that the radio was unserviceable, but she could hear her own voice from a monitoring receiver across the room.

This wasn’t life she had secured, then—so it appeared to her. It was mere illusion. The strange planet must already have killed half the intruders from space. It was only a matter of time before it ground the rest of them down.

She had tried to convince herself that if her parents had been able to emigrate from Earth, she could live on this alien ground. But her parents had come to a place prepared for them. There were already fifty million people settled on Zarathustra. First one island, then a chain, had been sterilized and terraformed by experts, assessing the risk from native life-forms, whether they were useful, neutral, or dangerous. A complete new ecology had been designed to include domestic creatures, plants, even bacteria brought from Earth, and only after half a century’s careful organization were immigrants invited, with one of the fabulous human computers called “polymaths” to supervise and protect them.

What chance did a few hundred refugees, with hardly any tools or weapons, a handful of scientists, and no experience of existence at such a primitive level, stand in face of a hostile and unpredictable world?

“Ornelle! Ornelle!”

With a guilty start she raised her head. Standing in the rough doorway, one hand holding aside the curtain and the other carrying his medikit, was Doc Jerode. His white shirt and overfoot breeches were yellowing and frayed, and since being out of reach of tricholene treatments his mass of shining gray hair had thinned to a crescent on the back of his head. But he was picking up a healthy-looking tan.

“I’m sorry, Doc. Didn’t hear you come in.” Ornelle licked her lips. Her throat was stiff after her fit of sobbing, and the words came painfully. “I’m all right. Just a bit tired.”

“Tired!” the doctor said. “Exhausted is more the word.”

He strode forward, his feet noisy on the crude planks of the floor, and set his medikit on the table. “Here, I’m going to make sure you haven’t picked up an infection, Get your clothes off.”

“Oh—oh, very well.” Ornelle rose to her feet and unfastened her shirt Like everyone else, she had been stifled throughout the winter by the sensation of having all possible clothing on against the cold, that daily grew greasier and fouler-smelling, and now was wearing only outer garments. She stood slackly as Jerode ran his diagnoser over her.

“Nothing on the culture slide except bugs I recognize,” he said at last. He surveyed her curiously. “So you’re right. You’re simply worn out. But… how long have you been at that radio?”

“Uh… most of the past three days,” she admitted.

“Have you slept properly? Don’t answer that—I can tell you haven’t. And I’ve watched you gulping your meals in your hurry to get back here. Take one of these.” Jerode selected a tube of small white pills from his kit, giving a rueful glance at how few of them remained. “Blast you, woman! Why do you have to let me down?”

“What?” Ornelle had a mug of water on the table; she checked in the act of reaching for it to wash down the pill.

“You heard me. Here I’ve been telling myself that you are one of the reliable people we have, able to think fairly straight in spite of being completely unprepared for this predicament, while so many who are supposed to be trained or talented have taken to running around in circles gibbering! But, like I say, you’re letting me down.”

“I don’t understand,” Ornelle muttered.

“To start with, what’s the panic about contacting the other party? They probably had a far tougher winter on high ground. Our antenna collapsed. So may theirs have, and it might still be buried in a snowdrift. Even if they have had time to worry about setting it up again, they may not have anyone to spare to sit by a radio and hope to hear from us. Give them a chance to clear up the mess of winter and get themselves organized.”

“If they were in bad trouble,” Ornelle said stonily, “the first thing they’d want to know would be if we’re OK If they weren’t in trouble, then they’d want to find out if we were and needed any help. No, I’m afraid there’s
not much hope for them.” She sighed and gulped down the pill.

“So that’s the weight you’ve got on your shoulders. An imaginary one. I thought so.”

“Weight on my shoulders? What do you mean?”

“You’re standing there like a—a badly stuffed doll! Here, look at yourself.” Jerode unfolded the lid of his medikit and snapped it to the mirror setting. “You ought to be ashamed of maltreating your body that way.”