Chthon (11 page)

“Five days later (Earth-time, naturally—this garnet doesn’t cover comparative chronology) he was back, with a slip from the foreman: his efficiency was low and he was too cheerful about failures. What was the matter? The medic gestured again with the gauge, found no fever—on the contrary the man’s body temperature was several degrees on the safe side—and referred him to the disciplinary squad.

“Three more days passed. A friend brought the victim in this time. It was impossible to rouse him sufficiently for useful performance. The man was in an amiable stupor, and it was known that he had drunk no bootleg in two days. He no longer ate at all. And as long as he was here, the friend mentioned, he’d felt cold for a moment himself, a couple of days ago. As though a cold wash of air had descended on him, making him shiver, though no one else had felt it. It had passed in a minute and he felt fine now, better than ever, as a matter of fact, but… The medic automatically played the gauge over him, found no fever, dismissed him, made another entry in the record (for he was a good medic), and took the slack laborer in charge.

The man’s body temperature was 297°K and dropping. This was an unusual departure from the human norm of about 310°K, and the medic was intrigued. The man had no symptoms that could not be accounted for by the chill itself; what caused the chill was a mystery. In due course the patient died and the fact was properly noted. A report was sent routinely to Earth where it was lost in clerical tape and forgotten.

“Meanwhile three more men, including the friend, were down with it. They were not sick—that is, they had no fever—but the medic, catching a glimmer of a problem requiring a technique for which he was not competent—that is, serious thought—held two for observation and shipped the third directly to Earth for study. That one was intercepted by the efficient quarantine station and retained for proper dispensation. He was dead by the time the medic Officer of the Day had been notified, but Standard Operating Procedure had been upheld to the letter of the death certificate. Autopsy revealed the cause: malfunction of vital tissues owing to insufficient temperature. The body’s natural regulatory mechanism had lapsed. No cause for
that
had been determined.

“A month later over half of the colony’s 2,000 person complement was dead, and more were dying. The planet was quarantined. Earth shipped supply capsules, charging their cost against the colony’s Earthside performance bond, but refused to accept any person or anything from the settlement itself. Thirty-six days after the onset—officially fixed at the moment of the first victim’s initial shakes—ten additional men and women suffered the warning siege and set their affairs in order, each in the manner befitting himself and his religion. On the following day no new cases were reported; nor were any on the days thereafter. The ten recovered, and the epidemic (for so it was then regarded) was over, as mysteriously as it had commenced. The colony was held in quarantine for five years, during which time it accumulated a debt it would take a century to exonerate, but there was no recurrence, either there or anywhere else.

“Fifteen years later the chill broke out again, however, at a colony twenty-five light-years distant from the first. The pattern was identical, with the exception that the authorities alertly slapped on the quarantine within hours of the first death. Half the pioneers had been fatally infected within thirty-six days; the rest lived. Humanity breathed a collective sigh of relief when no contagion was detected.

“Now the debate of the first century § raged hotly over the chill. What was it? How did it spread? For the first question there was no satisfactory answer. For the second there were several. One vociferous group held that the chill propagated by etheric waves traveling at the speed of light, a kind of death ray engulfing entire planets and moving on after a suitable interval to others. This was quickly labeled the Wave theory. Another leading group claimed that the contamination spread by personal contact, transmitted by some short-lived virus that rapidly mutated into impotence: specifically in thirty-six days. This was known as the Particle theory.

“The Wavists were challenged to demonstrate just how a wave traveling at lightspeed could traverse twenty-five lightyears in just twenty years. But they rationalized that the inclining beam emanated from some third point, twenty years closer to the first afflicted colony than to the second. They waited eagerly for a third colony to be struck, so that triangulation could locate the origin. And in turn they challenged the Particlists to explain why no member of the moon-based quarantine party had contracted the illness, since many had been exposed before the full danger was understood. And why the chill showed no abatement whatever prior to its fixed termination, if it were really mutating its steady way into oblivion. The reply was that the quarantine experts had been exceedingly careful at all times, as proven by their ability to avoid contagion by the chill; and that the chill itself abated even though the symptoms displayed by man did not. When the causative virus weakened so that it dropped below the threshold of effectiveness, the body’s natural defenses were able to repel it.

“Five years later both theories had their trials. A third colony was struck—but because its medic had been too busy publishing the learned tracts required for tenure and promotion to keep up with the medical literature, he failed to recognize the chill until several deaths had occurred. Infected colonists by this time had visited five other planets, including Earth itself. Moon station had been bypassed. Yet not a single case appeared outside the stricken colony, though the sick travelers cooled and died in public hospitals. The Particlists strained to explain the paradoxes, and could not. One of the victims had happened to be a popular call girl who continued her practice until her clientele complained of her literal frigidity. She died; the clients lived. The particle theory had been exploded.

“The Wavists pounced on the third coordinate with enthusiasm and triangulated for the fabled source. The third point was seventy-three light-years from the first; location was elementary. A ship of experts was dispatched. It found only empty space. If there had been a source, it had departed long since. And the disgruntled Particlists were quick to point out that a number of unaffected colonies lay between that so-called source point and the affected planets. How had those other colonies been missed? Was the wave discriminating? But in any event, the particular beam to strike the third colony could now be extrapolated. Volunteers planted themselves squarely in it—and were not affected. There was no beam, and the Wavists had been swamped.

“Time passed and the mystery deepened. Additional colonies were devastated, yet any victim removed within a day of the first symptom recovered promptly. If the chill were a contagious disease, why did time and location set such capricious limits? If it were a wave, why did so many escape?

“Gradually the unwilling answers appeared. Compromise gained the day. The chill
did
travel in lightspeed wave formation—but that wave was neither singular nor local. There were many waves, approximately a light-month in depth and ninety-eight light-years apart. The intersection of any wave with any colony meant pandemic until it passed. But within that wave there seemed to be random particles of infection that struck solely by the law of averages. Presumably there was a nutrient ether that guaranteed the progress of the illness unless the victim was promptly removed from its field. As with the ether of yore, none of this was detectable by instrument of man. He understood its presence by dying.

“The source was simply the center of the galaxy. There were other intelligent forms of life between man and that center, forms that also suffered variants of the illness, and it was rapidly understood that investigation was useless. The larger band of the chill impulse was twenty thousand light-years deep, and the source had been demolished long ago by a species now defunct. Yes, the chill was of artificial origin; no more was known.

“Meanwhile the waves were locally charted and schedules set up. The rich saved themselves by vacationing elsewhere during the critical month, while the majority simply waited and ferried the stricken out of range, if they found them in time. Great numbers were discovered too late.

“And Earth,” Hastings finished, “populous Earth, with far too many billions to transport, could do nothing but wait for the first of the waves to strike. This is the time: the year §400. I’m glad I’m not there.”

The crowd drifted off. Hastings had made light of the threat, but the chill was frightening, deep inside, to all of them. For no prisoner knew where Chthon was located.

The chill could strike tomorrow.

8

“Hey Fiver, pal—know what Garnet just done to me?” Framy was bursting with news.

“I can guess.” Aton halted his chipping and sat down.

Framy rushed right on. “She gimme a whole chow for free. I held out my garnet and she never took it. Just handed over my meal and went away, sort of dreamy. She ain’t never been so careless before.”

Aton reclined against the wall, rubbing grit off his forearms as Framy ate. “It wasn’t carelessness.”

Framy spoke around a mouthful. “But she never took the—you mean she done it on purpose?”

Aton nodded.

“She’d be crazy to do a thing Eke that. She hates me ‘most as much as she hates you.”

“Does she?” said Aton. Hate is such an interesting thing. I hate the minionette….

Garnet appeared, interrupting their discussion. “Got your stone?” she gruffly asked Aton. Wordlessly he held it out. She took it and dropped the package on the floor.

Framy stared after her until she was gone. “God of the Pit! I never seen it before. She soft on you, Five.”

Aton opened his package.

But the little man was still puzzled. “That ain’t no cause for her to be doing
me
no favors. I ain’t no woman’s idol. Why don’t she give
you
no chow for free?”

Aton explained carefully so that the other would understand. Framy was incredulous. “You mean she don’t want to show how she’s soft on you, so she takes it out on me? ‘Cause I’m your pal and don’t know nothing anyway?”

“Close enough.”

“It just don’t make no sense. No sense at all.” 

•    •    •

They brought the half-eaten corpse in for everyone to see. A man had wandered too far out alone, downwind. He might have been searching for superior garnets, or perhaps for an exit from the lower caverns. The chimera had come. Help had come ten minutes after his agonized scream—but he had been dead ten minutes. Stomach and intestines had been ripped open and eaten; eyes and tongue were gone. Long dark streaks showed on the cavern floor, they said, where he had been found, where the blood had flowed and been licked up.

“Remind me never to go on the Hard Trek,” Hastings said sickly. “I’m too tender a morsel to be exposed to that.”

The black-haired beauty gave him a sidelong glance. “I hear there’s worse ‘n that downwind on the Hard Trek,” she said. “Ain’t no one ever made it out. You can hear the howls of the beast-men that once were people like us, before they got caught.”

“They live?” Hastings asked, obligingly setting up her punch line.

“Naw—but they howl.”

There was general laughter. It was an old joke, and not without a suspicion of accuracy.

This is my opportunity, Aton thought. Now—while it seems natural. Feign uncertainty, but get it out.

“I’m not sure, but it seems to me I heard about someone getting through,” he said.

Framy took him up immediately. “Somebody got out? Somebody made the Hard Trek?”

“There must be a way out,” Hastings said. “If we could only find it. The chimera had to get in
somewhere
.”

“Maybe them animals never did get in,” the black-haired woman said. Aton had never picked up her name. She had been subtly interested in him since that first discussion, but refused to make an overt play. Possibly she was afraid of Garnet or just smarter. She certainly interested him more; she was able to fling her hair about in a kind of dress that hinted at the sensuality of clothing. Nothing, he had discovered here, is quite so sexless as complete nudity. “Maybe there ain’t no animals,” she continued. “We never see none.”

“I seen a salamander—” Framy began, then cut himself off.

“Salamanders, yes,” Hastings said. “But that’s about the only one a man can see and survive. That’s why we speak of the ‘chimera’—that’s what the word means. Imaginary monster. But we sure as Chthon didn’t imagine
that
.” His eyes flicked toward the corpse.

“It was a doctor,” Aton said judiciously. “He was quite mad—but free.”

Heads turned in his direction. Conversation stopped.

“A
doctor
?” Hastings breathed.

Aton held out his hand for a garnet, and everyone laughed. “About five years ago, I think. They never found out how he managed to escape. They had to put him in a mental hospital.”

“Bedside!” someone cried.

“He swore he’d get out.”

“That means there is a trail.”

“You sure about that?” Hastings asked Aton. “You remember the name?”

Do I remember the name I pried so carefully from the prison librarian, knowing that this was the word that might free me? “It wasn’t Bedside,” he said. “Something like Charles Bedecker, M.D. Of course he lost his license when they sent him down.”

“Yeah,” Framy agreed. “They defrocked him.”

“I knew him,” Hastings said. “I had almost forgotten. We never called him by his real name, of course. He stayed about a month; then he set out with hardly more than his doctor’s bag. He said he’d make a trail for the rest of us, if we had guts enough to follow. But he was such a small, mild character. We knew he’d never get far.”

“How come you let him go?” the woman asked. “Him a doctor—”

“No sickness down here,” Hastings pointed out. “We’re sterilized—by the heat, perhaps. And death is usually too sudden. And he was a bad man to offend. Small, but what he could do—”

“That’s not surprising,” Aton said. “Didn’t you know what he got sent down for?”