Bedlam Planet (15 page)

“Get out of the way or you’ll fry, and I shan’t weep,” Dennis said between his pale, stiff lips. He set the muzzle of the gun for a flat fan-shaped beam.

“Dennis!” Saul said, hurrying after him. “What are you going to do?”

“You ordered these people caged?”

“Well—what else could we do? We—”

“You could have tried a little pity, a little decency, just as a start.”

“After what they did to us? Hell, we couldn’t risk them breaking loose, doing more damage, busting up more of what we’ve built!” Saul was almost gibbering.

Dennis levelled the gun. On every side, people drew back, shivering and whispering. When they were clear of his line of fire, he set the gun parallel to the nearest side of the cage. The occupants rose to their feet and stepped as far out of range as they could.

He pressed the trigger, and metal ran down like quicksilver. The bars, under tension, snapped in succession, each with a baritone singing noise. A second cut, and there was a gap wide enough to climb through. Dennis turned the gun-muzzle towards the watchers. Behind him, one by one, the prisoners scrambled into freedom. The last to leave was Parvati. He felt the soft touch of her hand on his nape, but dared not turn his head from surveying the group who had locked the unfortunates up.

“Thank you,” she breathed. “You too must have seen the truth—I don’t know how. We failed to show it to them. You try. We’ll be around to help as much as we can.”

And she loped off after her companions, who had already taken the straightest possible line out of the village and towards the wild country on the higher slopes of the island’s central hill.

“Right!” Dennis said, when he was sure they had had a chance to make their escape. “Saul, go to the admin office and sound the siren for a general meeting. I don’t know how much longer you planned to carry on down this roller-coaster slide to disaster, but I’m quitting right here and I’m going to take the ones who have the guts with me. The rest, for all I or the planet Asgard cares, can rot in their skins.
Move!”

S
ULLENLY
, yet with a curious air of relief, as though they had been silently hoping for someone to take them in charge, the colonists assembled for the meeting. At first the early arrivals just stood about on the surface of the street. On all previous occasions, they had voluntarily gone into the mess-hall and fetched seating. This time, it took the lash of Dennis’s scorn to stir them to the effort.

“Well? Want to stand up for the whole of this session? It’s going to be a long one, but it’s up to you!”

Shamefaced, they moved to fetch the chairs and benches. With much irritable cursing they eventually got them into the normal arrangement. Meantime, as though wishing to propitiate this energetic demon who had materialised in their midst, Saul and Tibor had brought the chairman’s table from the admin office, and set three chairs behind it facing the crowd. Apparently, without coming into the open and staking a direct claim, Saul had been nursing secret ambitions to exercise authority
—witness his claim to have ordered the imprisonment of the test subjects. But he merely hovered around, at the back of the table, as though afraid that if he took the middle chair, the seat of honor, Dennis would order him out of it.

For his part, Dennis ignored him. He had liked Saul at least as well as all the other people whom chance had landed him among. To discover that he was capable of such an inhuman act as creating a kind of public Bedlam for a group of unfortunates temporarily out of their minds, so that his companions could come and mock them, had filled him temporarily with a sick distrust of any human being.

And I’m not even sure I can trust myself, after the ten lost days …

But fresh in his memory was the puzzling whisper he had heard from Parvati as she climbed out of the cage. What did she mean by “the truth”? Yet she had seemed hopeful of his ability to save the colony, and promised help, and whatever insanity had gripped the test subjects it had obviously passed.

Any earnest of support, in a plight like this, was welcome. He decided to accept it for what it was worth, and plough his own furrow.

The colonists took their places, hardly talking to one another: all without exception dirty, many ragged as well, having snagged their clothes and not bothered to attempt repairs. Scurvy had branded their skins. Yet somewhere in the distant past, men so weak with scurvy they could hardly stand had fought four-masted windjammers around Cape Horn in the teeth of a winter gale, and those were ignorant gutter-sweepings, not the cream of Earth’s best-trained minds. It might no longer be possible to maintain the Asgard colony, but if they had to go home, at least they needn’t go home like cringing puppies!

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?”

“N
ow 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?”