Bright Segment (10 page)

And there was no heavy space-drive mechanism, nor tools to make one, nor fuel if they should make the tools.

Back in the instrument room, Carl grunted. “Somebody means for us to stick around.”

“The boat—”

Teague said, “I don’t think they’d have left us the boat if Earth was in range.”

“We’ll build a beacon,” Tod said suddenly. “We’ll get a rescue ship out to us.”

“Out where?” asked Teague dryly.

They followed his gaze. Bland and silent, merciless, the decay chronometer stared back at them. Built around a standard radioactive, it had two dials—one which measured the amount of energy radiated by the material, and one which measured the loss mass. When they checked, the reading was correct. They checked, and the reading was 64.

“Sixty-four years,” said Teague. “Assuming we averaged as much as one-half light speed, which isn’t likely, we must be thirty light-years away from Earth. Thirty years to get a light-beam there, sixty or more to get a ship back, plus time to make the beacon and time for Earth to understand the signal and prepare a ship …” He shook his head.

“Plus the fact,” Tod said in a strained voice, “that there is no habitable planet in a thirty-year radius from Sol. Except Prime.”

Shocked, they gaped silently at this well-known fact. A thousand years of scrupulous search with the best instruments could not have missed a planet like this at such a distance.

“Then the chronometer’s wrong!”

“I’m afraid not,” said Teague. “It’s sixty-four years since we left Earth, and that’s that.”

“And this planet doesn’t exist,” said Carl with a sour smile, “and I suppose that is also that.”

“Yes, Teague,” said Tod. “One of those two facts can’t exist with the other.”

“They can because they do,” said Teague. “There’s a missing factor. Can a man breathe underwater, Tod?”

“If he has a diving helmet.”

Teague spread his hands. “It took sixty-four years to get to this planet
if
. We have to find the figurative diving helmet.” He paused. “The evidence in favor of the planet’s existence is fairly impressive,” he said wryly. “Let’s check the other fact.”

“How?”

“The observatory.”

They ran to it. The sky glowed its shimmering green, but through it the stars had begun to twinkle. Carl got to the telescope first, put a big hand on the swing-controls, and said, “Where first?” He tugged at the instrument. “Hey!” He tugged again.

“Don’t!” said Teague sharply. Carl let go and backed away. Teague switched on the lights and examined the instrument. “It’s already connected to the compensators,” he said. “Hmp! Our hosts are most helpful.” He looked at the setting of the small motors which moved the instrument to cancel diurnal rotation effects. “Twenty-eight hours, thirteen minutes plus. Well, if that’s correct for this planet, it’s proof that this isn’t Earth or Prime—if we needed proof.” He touched the controls lightly. “Carl, what’s the matter here?”

Carl bent to look. There were dabs of dull silver on the threads of the adjusting screws. He touched them. “Parametal,” he said. “Unflashed, but it has adhered enough to jam the threads. Take a couple days to get it off without jarring it. Look here—they’ve done the same thing with the objective screws!”

“We look at what they want us to see, and like it,” said Tod.

“Maybe it’s something we want to see,” said April gently.

Only half-teasing, Tod said, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

Teague put his eye to the instrument. His hands, by habit, strayed to the focusing adjustment, but found it locked the same way as the others. “Is there a Galactic Atlas?”

“Not in the rack,” said Moira a moment later.

“Here,” said April from the chart table. Awed, she added, “Open.”

Tensely they waited while Teague took his observation and referred to the atlas and to the catalog they found lying under it. When at
last he lifted his face from the calculations, it bore the strangest expression Tod had ever seen there.

“Our diving helmet,” he said at last, very slowly, too evenly, “—that is, the factor which rationalizes our two mutually exclusive facts—is simply that our captors have a faster-than-light drive.”

“But according to theory—”

“According to our telescope,” Teague interrupted, “through which I have just seen Sol, and these references so thoughtfully laid out for us …” Shockingly, his voice broke. He took two deep breaths, and said, “Sol is two-hundred and seventeen light-years away. That sun which set a few minutes ago is Beta Librae.” He studied their shocked faces, one by one. “I don’t know what we shall eventually call this place,” he said with difficulty, “but we had better get used to calling it home.”

They called the planet Viridis (“the greenest name I can think of,” Moira said) because none among them had ever seen such a green. It was more than the green of growing, for the sunlight was green-tinged and at night the whole sky glowed green, a green as bright as the brightest silver of Earth’s moon, as water molecules, cracked by the star’s intense ultraviolet, celebrated their nocturnal reunion.

They called the moons Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, and the sun they called—the sun.

They worked like slaves, and then like scientists, which is a change of occupation but not a change of pace. They built a palisade of a cypress-like, straight-grained wood, each piece needle-pointed, double-laced with parametal wire. It had a barred gate and peepholes with periscopes and permanent swivel-mounts for the needle-guns they were able to fabricate from tube-stock and spare solenoids. They roofed the enclosure with parametal mesh, which, at one point, could be rolled back to launch the lifeboat.

They buried Alma.

They tested and analyzed, classified, processed, researched everything in the compound and within easy reach of it—soil, vegetation, fauna. They developed an insect-repellent solution to coat the palisade and an insecticide with an automatic spray to keep the
compound clear of the creatures, for they were numerous, large, and occasionally downright dangerous, like the “flying caterpillar” which kept its pseudopods in its winged form and enthusiastically broke them off in the flesh of whatever attacked it, leaving an angry rash and suppurating sores. They discovered three kinds of edible seed and another which yielded a fine hydrocarbonic oil much like soy, and a flower whose calyces, when dried and then soaked and broiled, tasted precisely like crabmeat.

For a time they were two separate teams, virtually isolated from each other. Moira and Teague collected minerals and put them through the mass spectroscope and the radioanalyzers, and it fell to April to classify the life-forms, with Carl and Tod competing mightily to bring in new ones. Or at least photographs of new ones. Two-ton
Parametrodon
, familiarly known as Dopey—a massive herbivore with just enough intelligence to move its jaws—was hardly the kind of thing to be carried home under one’s arm, and
Felodon
, the scaly carnivore with catlike tusks, though barely as long as a man, was about as friendly as a half-starved wolverine.

Tetrapodys
(Tod called it ‘Umbrellabird’) turned out to be a rewarding catch. They stumbled across a vine which bore foul-smelling pods; these the clumsy amphibious bats found irresistible. Carl synthesized the evil stuff and improved upon it, and they smeared it on tree-boles by the river.
Tetrapodys
came there by the hundreds and laid eggs apparently in sheer frustration. These eggs were camouflaged by a frilly green membrane, for all the world like the ground-buds of the giant water-fern. The green shoots tasted like shallots and were fine for salad when raw and excellent as onion soup when stewed. The half-hatched
Tetrapodys
yielded ligaments which when dried made excellent self-baited fishhooks. The wing muscles of the adult tasted like veal cutlet with fish sauce, and the inner or main shell of the eggs afforded them an amazing shoe sole—light, tough, and flexible, which, for some unknown reason,
Felodon
would not track.

Pteronauchis
, or “flapping frog,” was the gliding newt they had seen on that first day. Largely nocturnal, it was phototropic; a man with strong light could fill a bushel with the things in minutes. Each
specimen yielded twice as many, twice as large, and twice as good frog-legs as a Terran frog.

There were no mammals.

There were flowers in profusion—white (a sticky green in that light), purple, brown, blue, and, of course, the ubiquitous green. No red—as a matter of fact, there was virtually no red anywhere on the planet. April’s eyes became a feast for them all. It is impossible to describe the yearning one can feel for an absent color. And so it was that a legend began with them. Twice Tod had seen a bright red growth. The first time he thought it was a mushroom, the second it seemed more of a lichen. The first time it was surrounded by a sea of crusher ants on the move—a fearsome carpet which even
Parametrodon
respected. The second time he had seen it from twenty meters away and had just turned toward it when not one but three
Felodons
came hurtling through the undergrowth at him.

He came back later, both times, and found nothing. And once Carl swore he saw a brilliant red plant move slowly into a rock crevice as he approached. The thing became their
edelweiss
—very nearly their Grail.

Rough diamonds lay in the streambeds and emeralds glinted in the night-glow, and for the Terran-oriented mind there was incalculable treasure to be scratched up just below the steaming humus: iridium, ruthenium, metallic neptunium 237. There was an unaccountable (at first) shift toward the heavier metals. The ruthenium-rhodium-palladium group was as plentiful on Viridis as the iron-nickel-cobalt series on Earth; cadmium was actually more plentiful here than its relative, zinc. Technetium was present, though rare, on the crust, while Earth’s had long since decayed.

Vulcanism was common on Viridis, as could be expected in the presence of so many radioactives. From the lifeboat they had seen bald-spots where there were particularly high concentrations of “hot” material. In some of these there was life.

At the price of a bout of radiation sickness, Carl went into one such area briefly for specimens. What he found was extraordinary—a tree which was warm to the touch, which used minerals and water at a profligate pace, and which, when transplanted outside an environment
which destroyed cells almost as fast as they developed, went cancerous, grew enormously, and killed itself with its own terrible viability. In the same lethal areas lived a primitive worm which constantly discarded segments to keep pace with its rapid growth, and which also grew visibly and died of living too fast when taken outside.

The inclination of the planet’s axis was less than 2°, so that there were virtually no seasons, and very little variation in temperature from one latitude to another. There were two continents and an equatorial sea, no mountains, no plains, and few large lakes. Most of the planet was gently rolling hill-country and meandering rivers, clothed in thick jungle or grass. The spot where they had awakened was as good as any other, so there they stayed, wandering less and less as they amassed information. Nowhere was there an artifact of any kind, nor any slightest trace of previous habitation. Unless, of course, one considered the existence itself of life on this planet. For Permian life can hardly be expected to develop in less than a billion years; yet the irreproachable calendar inherent in the radioactive bones of Viridis insisted that the planet was no more than thirty-five million years old.

V

When Moira’s time came, it went hard with her, and Carl forgot to swagger because he could not help. Teague and April took care of her, and Tod stayed with Carl, wishing for the right thing to say and not finding it, wanting to do something for this new strange man with Carl’s face, and the unsure hands which twisted each other, clawed the ground, wiped cruelly at the scalp, at the shins, restless, terrified. Through Carl, Tod learned a little more of what he never wanted to know—what it must have been like for Teague when he lost Alma.

Alma’s six children were toddlers by then, bright and happy in the only world they had ever known. They had been named for moons—Wynken, Blynken and Nod, Rhea, Callisto and Titan. Nod and Titan were the boys, and they and Rhea had Alma’s eyes and hair and sometimes Alma’s odd, brave stillness—a sort of suspension of the body while the mind went out to grapple and conquer instead of fearing.
If the turgid air and the radiant ground affected them, they did not show it, except perhaps in their rapid development.

They heard Moira cry out. It was like laughter, but it was pain. Carl sprang to his feet. Tod took his arm and Carl pulled it away. “Why can’t I do something? Do I have to just
sit
here?”

“Shh. She doesn’t feel it. That’s a tropism. She’ll be all right. Sit down, Carl. Tell you what you can do—you can name them. Think. Think of a nice set of names, all connected in some way. Teague used moons. What are you going to—”

“Time enough for that,” Carl grunted. “Tod … do you know what I’ll … I’d be if she—if something happened?”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“I’d just cancel out. I’m not Teague. I couldn’t carry it. How does Teague do it?…” Carl’s voice lapsed to a mumble.

“Names,” Tod reminded him. “Seven, eight of ’em. Come on, now.”

“Think she’ll have eight?”

“Why not? She’s normal.” He nudged Carl. “Think of names. I know! How many of the old signs of the zodiac would make good names?”

“Don’t remember ’em.”

“I do. Aries, that’s good. Taurus. Gem—no; you wouldn’t want to call a child ‘Twins.’ Leo—that’s
fine!
”

“Libra,” said Carl, “for a girl. Aquarius, Sagittarius—how many’s that?”

Tod counted on his fingers. “Six. Then, Virgo and Capricorn. And you’re all set!” But Carl wasn’t listening. In two long bounds he reached April, who was just stepping into the compound. She looked tired. She looked more than tired. In her beautiful eyes was a great pity, the color of a bleeding heart.

“Is she all right? Is she?” They were hardly words, those hoarse, rushed things.