Bedlam Planet (8 page)

She frowned at that; it was new since she last came up here. It was an irrational deed, in the sense that it was superfluous—everyone knew that the flight-controls were there, but no longer for use.

Who did it? Who acted on the principle, “If you can’t see it, maybe it will go away?”

Over the past few days, since the progress meeting, it seemed that an infinite multitude of such trivial—but irrational—facts had been accumulating in the corner of her memory which stored them until they generated a suggestive pattern. Ordinarily, when she had gathered so many, she settled down to puzzle over them whenever she had the chance. At present, however, she was curiously reluctant to face them.

If she had found herself alone up here, she might nonetheless have attempted the job immediately: punched the computer-activation code which alerted those sections of the memory stocked with information about human aberrations, and tossed every petty irritation she could think of into a heap from which the computers might have drawn some conclusions.

But she was not alone. Seated before the section of the input board which dealt with his own speciality, Tai Men was studying a printout with such concentration he did not realise she had come in until she spoke to him.

Then he jerked and glanced over his shoulder. “Oh—morning, Parvati. How are things with you?”

“So-so. But better than with you, to judge by the expression you’re wearing.” She unlocked a chair with a touch on its back, slid it across the smooth metal floor to a spot where she could conveniently talk to him, and released the switch so that it stayed put.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” the biologist said unhappily.
“Ah—has it been showing very much, these past few days?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘very much.’ But it has been showing,” Parvati said candidly.

Tai Men sighed. “Yes, I thought so. And it isn’t good for morale, is it? But what I’ve run into is a pretty good excuse for paranoia, I guess … See here!” He turned the printout he was holding so that she could read it, and indicated one particular section of it with a stubby forefinger.

“It’s a bit too specialised for me to follow,” Parvati admitted after a few seconds. “Can you spell it out in lay terms?”

“Well, you know something about the basic techniques of fractionation, separating nearly but not quite identical biological compounds so that they can be individually analysed?”

“I know it can be done, and I’d recognise the equipment for doing it, but I wouldn’t care to attempt it myself.”

“Don’t blame you.” Tai sighed again, more heavily. “On the kind of scale which we realised would be necessary here, you need the most advanced mass fractionator ever designed, a Shlovsky-Har. It’s about nine feet by twelve—that’s because of the long distances the compounds need to be stretched out over—but … Well, say you poured in a bucketful of effluent from a dyeworks, containing a gram of chlorine phthalocyanine contaminated with a thousand molecules of copper phthalocyanine. Inside half an hour it would not only deliver the dye, and the water separately, but tell you what you’d got and how much of it. We had one. Because it was big we had
only
one. And I don’t have to say what became of it, do I?”

“Aboard the
Pinta?”

“Of course. Consequently we’re having to make do with time—wasting, repetitious, unreliable alternatives.”

“Looking for native sources of ascorbic acid?”

Tai hesitated. He said finally, “No. I appreciate what
Abdul was trying to do when he brought up that particular red herring at the progress meeting, but he knows, I’m sure, that what I said then about natural ascorbic acid here being as rare as copper-based globin on Earth was only half the truth. The way the chemistry of life is set up on Asgard, the bug we’ve acquired is a maverick, on a par with the bacteria on Earth who can live in boiling sulphur springs. In the ordinary course of events it wouldn’t use ascorbic acid. There wouldn’t
be
any for it to use.

“What we can do, of course, is the other thing I mentioned: ingest a certain amount of the substance this bug actually prefers, which our own bodies ignore, in the hope that it will then take the line of least resistance and leave our vitamin alone. But—!” He uttered an explosive compounded of frustration and rage. “We lost our big fractionator, which would enable us to purify the stuff. We lost: our Roberts synthesiser, which would enable us to go one better and tailor the native molecule so that it actually
became
ascorbic acid, the ideal solution. As things stand, we have precisely one means of converting the local raw materials in large quantities: our plants, which do the job cheerfully and what’s more retain in their leaves and fruits enough of the original substance to content the bug in our bowels—so far as we can estimate.”

“In that case, where’s the problem?” Parvati demanded. “None of your test animals have been significantly upset by the soil-grown diet they’ve been eating, have they?”

“True enough. But that’s not proof that we can do the same, Parvati! A human being is not a rat or even a pig, which eats substantially the same kind of diet as a man. Primate metabolism differs from other animals’—for example, we can’t oxidise urea to allantoin before we excrete it. We lost our rhesus macaques with the
Pinta,
of course, so … Anyhow, if one compound direct from the soil manages to enter the edible portions of our crops in detectable quantities, others may be doing so
in amounts too small to detect with our available equipment.”

He fixed Parvati with his eyes, his expression almost belligerent.

“How have you been lately? Well?”

“I have a bruise on my leg which doesn’t seem to be healing properly,” she admitted. “That’s indicative of scurvy, isn’t it? And I found blood on my toothbrush this morning.”

“Yes, I’m not surprised. But, you see, if I say go ahead and issue native-grown food at the mess, for all I know I may be poisoning the entire colony.”

There was a dead pause. At length Parvati said, “You’ve got a choice of evils, in other words.”

“Yes. To risk our energy being sapped by scurvy, or to risk something which could be considerably worse.” Tai shrugged. “And I haven’t got any more sensitive piece of equipment than one of our own bodies. When I mentioned the need for volunteers at the meeting, I saw you bridle—don’t deny it! You control yourself marvellously, but we’re old friends and you don’t have a monopoly of insight into other people. Yet I don’t see any alternative.”

“Anything which tends to separate us into classes is potentially dangerous. Our stability is precarious in spite of our apparently good progress. We dare not let any kind of elite develop among us which isn’t based squarely on superior knowledge or experience. If we were to start splitting up into brave volunteer versus cowardly shirker, or expendable test subject versus indispensable expert, we could find ourselves factionalised in next to no time.” Parvati uttered the warning in a flat, emotionless tone.

“So what else are we to do?” Tai snapped. “Look, could we not avoid the risk you’re worried about by drawing lots, or matching to a random number series generated by one of the computers?”

“If you feel we’re that desperate … Well, I don’t like
it, but it might be better than an appeal for volunteers, I suppose.” She still sounded doubtful.

“We’re desperate,” Tai grunted. “Mark you, I don’t propose to quit yet. I have a few more ideas I can try. I have three of my best aides looking for a natural source of antibiotics which we could safely use as a food-additive, to depress the level of the bowel bacteria while we’re digesting our meals. That takes time, though, and a big test layout—I’ve had to turn over nearly the whole of the biolab here in the ship to that single project. But if we don’t have a major breakthrough inside—hmmm … Yes, inside two weeks, maximum—we’ll be beaten anyway unless we gamble.”

“I suppose this is a ridiculous question,” Parvati said after a few moments’ thought. “But couldn’t you transfer some of our hydroponic plants to—?”

“It’s a ridiculous question,” Tai interrupted. “We evaluated that along with every other possibility. I take it you were going to suggest starting a batch of hydroponically-grown plants outside the ship? We’re going to do that anyhow. It’ll still leave a gap before the crops start to yield, and another thing we’re short of is gibberellins—growth-accelerators—so we can’t kick them along artificially. And the established plants, inside the ship, are already being harvested at the highest level we can risk. What we have to do is at least
treble
our intake of fruit juices, vegetable juices, citrus pulp, salad leaves and what have you, on top of our ordinary diet. Not instead of: on top of!”

Parvati shivered suddenly. She said involuntarily, “It makes my skin crawl!”

“What does?”

“I—well, I guess I’ve known since school that everyone carries a bunch of intestinal flora around. But I’ve never been consciously aware of it before. And there’s something almost nauseating about the idea that there are other creatures using your body, isn’t there?”

“I tell you one thing,” Tai said. “If that’s the way you
feel, there are probably a hundred more of us who feel much, much worse.”

He rose, gathered his sheaf of printouts, and headed for the elevator.

Left alone, Parvati sat immobile for a minute or more. At length she reached out to the board of the computer and punched a one-word question:
scurvy?

The printout began before she had taken her hand away. Words and phrases jumped at her, references to the skin discoloration caused by capillary leakage, easy bruising and slow healing, swollen and painful joints, bleeding gums and loosening teeth. When she did not halt the machine at that point, it progressed from the physical symptoms to the mental, citing at length Larrey’s classic observation regarding troops overcome by it who were so lethargic they paid no attention to the approach of the enemy.

At that, she violently countermanded the question, swept up the printout, and regardless of the waste it entailed—for it should have been wiped and re-used—tore it across, and again, and again, until the multiple thickness was too much for her strength and she let the pieces fall and scatter like snowflakes across the polished metal floor.

A
FTER A WEEK ALONE
, time for Dennis blended into the soft contours of a dream. He had to consult his instruments before he could tell how long he had spent on the trip. He touched at island after island, one barely distinguishable from another, and made camp beside his boat—which he could run up the beaches on its hoverducts—on the triturated shells of diatom-like sea-creatures. Small animals with tufts of greenish antennae at both ends of their bodies sometimes scattered from the crunching of his feet; they lived in tunnels an inch below the friable surface. At high tide the rocks of the shoreline dipped beneath the water; when they returned to the air, vegetable fronds dangling from their sides glowed with colours as brilliant as a parakeet’s feathers, which faded to drab as the water dripped away again and were once more renewed by the tide.

On the larger islands, carrying a back-pack of instruments and wielding a machete, he picked his way up the
edges of streams, sometimes squelching in mud, sometimes going on a spongy mat of dry plant-stalks, sometimes struggling through deep layers of pebbles. From the close, mossy carpet of the “Asgard grass”, the range of flora extended by way of low shrubs and bushes to the big convoluted woodplants, but there were no trees. Occasionally he saw specimens of a rare type of wood-plant whose massive oblate body was supported clear of the ground on multiple roots, suggestive of a banyan, and he made a note of the location, because wood from that species was exceptionally tough and pliable.

“Flowers” existed, but were neither colourful nor sweet-scented. There was a fertilisation process akin to pollination, which mixed the curious unfamiliar gene-equivalents and maintained variety—Yoko had shown him some examples under a microscope. Fluffy, sticky fruiting bodies dangled on flexible twigs and if they did not brush against another of their kind in the wind, they eventually dried out and wafted away like thistledown.

Among the bushes and shrubs skulked a limited number of animals, all rather small—seldom bigger than a mans palm—and all herbivorous. He had seen a few, on previous trips, gnawing at the partly decayed bodies of dead fish cast ashore on the beach, but Yoko had told him this was probably due to some local mineral deficiency, for all the species which had yet been studied also gulped up sand recently wetted with sea-water and appeared to derive diet-supplements from it.

The really vigorous life of Asgard was in the sea, not on land. On a world of islands lacking birds or flying insects, there was hardly any chance of an advanced life-form developing out of water. From the human point of view that was both good and bad. It meant that land-invaders would meet no competition to speak of, but equally it meant that sea-farming, which had become the staple source of food on Earth over the last hundred years, was impossible for at least a generation or two. They had brought no sea-creatures from Earth at all, although chemical tests by Dennis and his companions
on the first visit had indicated that there were scores of useful species which could live in Asgard water. If a land-animal got out of control and ran wild, perhaps through a disaster which killed its keepers, it would be more or less limited to the island where men had established it, and would not seriously disturb the local ecological balance. Turned loose in the sea, however, where there could be no pens or sheepfolds, creatures from Earth could cause incalculable harm.