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Authors: John Brunner

Bedlam Planet (16 page)

BOOK: Bedlam Planet
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“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 had 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.

Unless …

XX

F
OR A WHILE
, his sheer energy was enough to maintain his authority over the others. Even Saul, who had been publicly insulted far worse than Tibor—because everyone conceded that elaborations like electronics must take second place to essentials like food and shelter—
grudgingly decided to cooperate, and forwent his speciality to lend a hand where he was needed, in the same way as Dennis had done following their arrival.

But he began to sense a growing disquiet when his preoccupation with the mystery of his own good health led him to inquire what had become of the test subjects.

Briefly, when he recovered his senses on the diamond island—as he now thought of it—he had been angered by the realisation that no one had come to search for him. Now, trapped in an endless maze of immediate problems, he was compelled to admit that he was capable of the same neglect. He had seen and heard nothing of them since he set them free from their cage. He had promised himself that he would make arrangements for their welfare; they must be found, fed, if humanly possible helped to return to their place in the community.

Then everything fell on him, as though the moon had been pitched from the sky, and there was never the time to decide how to tackle the job, nor the spare person who could be assigned to carry it out.

That reminds me: I used to be haunted by the moon, where my hope of return to Earth was smashed to bits. I haven’t given it a thought for days. I don’t even know what phase it’s reached right now!

Perhaps that was a symbol of the way the change he had deliberately set out to force in the minds of the other colonists—by now he longer separated himself from them—was working in his own brain. He was trying to get rid of every association with the security of Earth, the ultimate refuge and escape route. It seemed logical to encourage the subconscious acceptance of the truth he had tried to drive home at the first progress meeting he called: that they were not now Earthfolk, but citizens of Asgard. He had abolished the nightly watch in the
Santa Maria,
though prudence had prevented him from suggesting that it be cannibalised in place of the
Niña,
much of which was now mere scrap-heap thanks to Abdul. Also he had made the meetings
weekly instead of monthly. Asgard’s moon followed a thirty-six day cycle, not the twenty-nine day cycle of an Earthly month; the month as a unit of time was therefore irrelevant. It was, in a word,
alien.

However, that had not been in the forefront of his thoughts when he instituted the change. He felt rather that the colonists needed encouragement. To be reinforced in their decisions by news of successes from other sections: that was part of the fundamental attitude on which the colony’s administration had always been predicated. Yet as the time seeped away it became more and more plain to him that this meed of encouragement was like the supportive doses of ascorbic acid they were taking. It was a crutch, at best, enabling the crippled community to take another half-step forward, but next time it would be a half of a half-step, and then …

Zeno, damn you! Come here and reassure us that Achilles did beat the tortoise in the end!

And, finally, the day arrived which he had known in his heart of hearts must come—the day when Ellen Shikalezi entered the admin office, now his headquarters, without preamble, and told him that the supply of ascorbic acid had run out.

He pushed back his chair and looked for a long time through the unglazed window of the office. Window-glass was one of the things they had classified as luxuries; when the worst cold of winter hit them, they would make do by boarding the windows over. There would be power for one fluorescent lamp per room, at least.

If we live into the winter …

Beyond the hole in the wall, clouds scudded across the sky. Over to the east, some of them had shredded into an amorphous mass. There was going to be their first rainstorm some time within the next sixty hours, according to the forecasts.

I’ve almost forgotten what rain on a roof sounds like!

And there too was a clue to what must be done, but
like all the others it eluded him. Sighing, he turned his attention back to Ellen. She was a plump, very dark woman, with what must ordinarily have been a motherly air, but now it was rather grandmotherly. She had lost a tooth owing to the scurvy weakening her gums, and she had settled herself stiffly in her chair thanks to the pain of her swollen joints.

“I guess we’ve been over all the alternatives,” he said at length.

“There’s one alternative,” Ellen said. “That we use the native-grown crops. Since you tore that monumental strip off Saul for ordering some of the crops chopped down, we’ve kept them going—but more as a kind of ritual than for any practical purpose.”

Ritual?
The word seemed pregnant with unspoken meaning. Once more he failed to identify the concept he was groping after, and resumed talking.

“They’d provide what we need?”

“Tai said they would,” Ellen shrugged. “Me, I’ve been sort of busy. I didn’t re-check his findings. Couldn’t, after the mess he made of the biolab.”

Dennis hesitated. Suddenly he said, “You know something curious? I never thought of it before. But I guess you could have predicted who was most likely to take over as a replacement section chief, like yourself. It’s turned out to be the people who didn’t instantly forget everything they ever learned from the six we lost, just because they went out of their heads owing to—well, whatever it was.”

BOOK: Bedlam Planet
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