The Tenth Planet (14 page)

“Then the lakes are hydrogen lakes?”

“Yes. The surface temperature is about seventeen degrees K. You are familiar with the Kelvin scale?”

He laughed. “Kelvin was a man of Earth … So the surface of Minerva is only seventeen degrees above absolute zero. And this frozen planet is the lost citadel of mankind. Something will have to be done about that.”

“There is nothing to be done.”

“Oh, yes, there is.” He pointed. “What is that magnificent crystalline formation?”

Zylonia came to the plastiglass wall and followed his gaze. “Solid oxygen, probably. The nitrogen rocks are usually smaller and they do not reflect light quite so well. But, to be quite sure, we would have to consult a physicist.”

Idris was entranced. “This is truly the Ice Queen’s Palace.”

“Please. I do not understand. What is the Ice Queen’s Palace?”

“Part of an Earth legend, my dear. Created, I think, by a man called Hans Andersen … It was a story about a little boy who found the Ice Queen’s Palace and was held in thrall by having a needle of ice plunged into his heart. But his childhood sweetheart followed him and melted the ice with her love. Then they were able to return to their own country.”

Zylonia said: “I hope they lived happily ever after.”

“Naturally. It was a convention of all such tales.” Then he added irrelevantly: “There is no needle of ice in my heart. I shall return to my own country. I know it.”

She took his hand. “Poor Idris. Who can blame you for harbouring impossible dreams? But, to please me, do not speak of them to other Minervans. It could be disturbing.”

“Disturbing! That’s a nice word.” He laughed grimly. “Mankind now hibernates on the tenth planet and must not be disturbed.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. It is an axiom of
Talbot’s Creed
that Earth is finished for ever. But I do not believe that. Perhaps I did once, but not now.”

“Idris, you know the facts.”

“Five thousand years is a long time. Facts can change. Five thousand years ago I was dead. Now I am alive. So much for facts.”

Again she shivered. “I am cold. That dead world out there seems to project its coldness into my spirit. Let us go from this place. I promised to show you the surface of Minerva. You have seen it.”

“Give me five more minutes, Zylonia. I know the surface is a place of terror to you, but to me it is beautiful. I can see why those early colonists wanted to build domed cities. It is a tragedy they didn’t succeed. If they had, Minervan history would have been very different. Living on the surface, under the stars, you would all have been reminded that human destiny cannot be confined to a dead world. As it is you have all become afraid of open skies. You have developed the mole mentality.”

“What is a mole?”

“A small, furry, half-blind creature of Earth. It lives underground and spends its time constructing elaborate tunnel systems in the quest for food.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Who knows—perhaps Earth has now become a world fit for moles to live in.”

Idris peered intently through the plastiglass. He could understand Zylonia’s apprehension. The surface of Minerva was deadly; but it was also an exhilarating challenge. And, in a strange way, it was beautiful. In his mind’s eye, he could see it filled with light and life. Domed cities, space ports—a civilisation dynamically expanding until it was ready to reclaim the entire solar system. But, after three thousand years, all the Minervans had achieved was a subterranean culture, zero population growth, and a pathological fear of changing the
status quo
.

“All right, Zylonia. I know you have had as much as you can take. So let us go back to the community of moles. But, one day, I am going to drive you all out into the open—before that bloody creed has entirely brainwashed the sense of adventure out of the mind of man.”

T
HE RHYTHM OF
the M-day was maintained in the subterranean cities of Minerva simply by a dim-out of the lighting in streets and avenues and other public places in the Five Cities. Most Minervans observed the conventions of night and day for obvious and practical reasons. But, apart from the necessity of shift-work or the watch system for the atomic generators, the re-cycling plant, the hydroponics installations, the vast air-conditioning system and other life-support units that had to be operated continuously, there were some Minervans who preferred to reverse natural conditioning and live by night. They were mostly poets, artists, social discontents—as Idris discovered. On Earth, at one time, they would have been defined as drop-outs.

The Five Cities were called Talbot, Vorshinski, Brandt, Aragon, and Chiang, after the original leaders of the colonists. The cities formed a rough subterranean pentagon, each city being approximately five kilometres from its neighbours. Inter-city transit was by means of monorail cars. It was the custom of many of the discontents to ride the cars throughout the night, holding informal discussions, parties, protest meetings until the early hours. Eventually, Idris established contact with a group of young dreamers who were dissatisfied with the Minervan way of life. Eventually he took a desperate course of action that was to split Minervan society and destroy the centuries-old authoritarianism.

But, before that happened, he spent a great deal of time familiarising himself with all that had been accomplished on Minerva. Also he endured an exhausting programme of interviews and discussions with historians, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and others interested in the decline and fall of the civilisations of Earth. He bore their questions patiently and answered them to the best of his ability. As a piece of walking, talking history, he tried to be objective and honest in his analysis of the collapse of terrestrial man. Above all, he tried not to be provocative. For the time being, it was his intention to be accepted as normal, if possible, by Minervan standards.

For a while, Zylonia was his constant companion. It was she who took him on his first tour of the Five Cities. During the course of his tour he met many Minervans, all of whom had seen him already on tri-di. In fact, not only had they already seen him as he now was, they had also seen a documentary presentation of the entire immortality project, beginning with shots of the salvage operation on the
Dag Hammarskjold
(Idris learned that the wreckage of the
Dag
had been placed in a permanent orbit round Minerva so that it might eventually be brought down as a valuable museum piece) and proceeding to shots of the immensely difficult low-temperature surgery needed to remove the brain of the dead captain for resuscitation procedure. Different stages of the cloning technique had been shown, as had sequences in the simulated cabin, when Idris had been no more than a brain in a tank, able to use a synthetic eye, and when Zylonia was acting as the reality-anchor meant to preserve his sanity.

The immortality project, which might never have developed if Minervan radio telescopes had not tracked the stricken space-ship, was currently the issue that dominated Minervan conversation, philosophy and politics. For the first time in the history of mankind, it had been demonstrated that the failure of the entire organic life-support system—the body-—need not result in the permanent death of the personality, now incontrovertibly shown to be seated in the brain. Provide that brain with an identical life-support
system—and the psychosomatic potential and responses of a cloned body would be the same as the original—and the continuation of personality could be assured until the neural circuits of the brain became so supersaturated with data in the form of memories, desires and conditioned responses that it could no longer function as a rational entity. In other words, physical senility had been conquered. Because of the cloning technique which had worked so successfully for a body and its brain which had been dead for five thousand years, Minervans could now look forward to centuries of creative existence. All that there remained to conquer was mental senility—the ultimate breakdown of overloaded neural systems. The last enemy.

Dr. Manfrius de Skun, the psycho-surgeon responsible for the breakthrough, the man who had devoted so much of his life to bringing Idris Hamilton back from the dead, had suddenly become one of the most important, influential and controversial men on Minerva. The Triple-T party closed its ranks and tended to regard him as a kind of latter-day Satan come to tempt the pure with the promise of extended life. The more liberal-minded Minervans regarded him simply as a saviour—the man who had discovered how to delay the approach of everlasting night.

But the outcome of the struggle depended entirely on whether Dr. de Skun’s guinea pig—Captain Idris Hamilton—could be shown to be a completely sane individual. There were many who hoped that slight deviations from accepted standards of normal behaviour—normal Minervan behaviour—could be shown to be symptoms of an underlying instability.

As he talked to the various Minervans that he met, Idris soon learned to distinguish those who were in favour of the immortality project from those who were against it, though all of them seemed to be invariably and almost monotonously polite. The difference lay in their questions. Those in favour of the project—mostly younger people, scientists, technicians and the like—asked him chiefly about his memories of life on Earth. Those who were against the
project—administrators, some teachers and a number of older women of various skills—questioned him most on his reactions to Minervan society. Idris recognized most of the loaded questions and did his best to be diplomatic. On the whole, Zylonia was pleased with his performance.

She took him to Vorshinski Farm. Each of the Five Cities had its own organic farm, which was quite separate from the hydroponics plants and the protein factories. Synthetic steak, chicken breast, fish and cheese were standard components of Minervan diet. But organic food was also produced—largely for children, hospital patients and the very old.

Vorshinski Farm held a special place in Zylonia’s affection. She had taken her therapeutic work-holiday there. But there was also another reason—as Idris discovered to his ultimate disadvantage.

The farm was impressive. It was a vast natural cave that had been discovered by seismic survey centuries ago. It was nearly five hundred metres below Vorshinski City; and the only approach to it was by lift, down a broad service shaft.

It did not look at all like a cave. It was, as Idris had to admit, a magnificent illusion. Looking up, he did not see rock-face dripping with condensation. He saw what seemed to be a blue sky—as blue as it had been once on Earth before pollution brought the long twilight and the everlasting rain—a blue sky flecked with fleecy cloud, and a bright sun high overhead. At Vorshinski Farm it was high summer, with the cornfields turning a smoky golden colour. With cattle—Friesians, Red Poll, Herefordshire and even a few Texas Long Horns, browsing on succulent grass. With pigs running in the orchards to gobble up windfalls. With free range hens scratching for grubs and insects where the pigs had torn up the grass and exposed the top soil. With butterflies on the wing, even, and with bees tirelessly searching for nectar.

Idris was astounded. Here, far below the surface of a dead planet, was an almost perfect facsimile of a rural environment in the Golden Age of Earth. He looked in vain for
the plants and animals that had been genetically adapted to flourish under the harsh conditions of Mars, and was surprised when he could not find any. Then, after a moment or two, he understood the reason. Why bother with low-yield crops and livestock bred chiefly for their survival qualities in a poor environment when you can create an ideal environment for high-yield farm systems?

The controlled climate, as he learned from the farm manager, was designed on the theoretical optimum that might have been achieved for the best agricultural areas in the temperate zones of Earth at the peak of organic food production in the twentieth century, before men had really begun to poison the soil, air and water which supported life.

The mobile atomic lamp that was Vorshinski’s artificial sun delivered a variable, computer-controlled level of radiant energy, determined by the growth rate of the crops and the condition of the stock. Periodic showers were also computer controlled. The artificial rain that fell was channelled into two small streams feeding a central lake where ducks dabbled and freshwater fish swam, and from which the water was pumped once more to the rain reservoir. Although the cereals, vegetables and root crops grown on the farm were Earth varieties, they were, as Sirius Bourne, the farm manager, explained to Idris, accelerated strains. Most of them matured in less than half the time it used to take for similar crops to mature on Earth. It was the same with the live stock. At Vorshinski Farm, the four-season cycle had been transformed into a three-season cycle: a short spring, a long summer, and a very short autumn/winter period. The three-season cycle could be operated twice in little more than one E-year.

Sirius Bourne was a pleasant young man. By Earth reckoning, he looked to be about thirty years old. He and Zylonia obviously had much affection for each other—a fact which disconcerted Idris and had disastrous results.

However, all went reasonably well until the time came to leave. Sirius held Zylonia’s hands and kissed her on both cheeks.

Then he said: “When shall we put our slippers under the same bed again, Zylonia? It has been a long time. I was very happy with you.”

“Soon,” said Zylonia calmly. “I have been working very hard with Idris, as you know. But soon, definitely. I would like that.”

Idris stared at them in dismay. “You were lovers?”

Sirius laughed. “Forgive me. That is a romantic Earth concept. But, as you say, we were lovers. While you were still in the tank and your clone body was being cultured, Zylonia and I entered a short-term pairing. It was good for her, good for me. She is a delicious person to have sex with, don’t you think? Her body is so responsive. I can remember the time when we drank a little too much before, and—”

Idris hit him. Unthinkingly, he lashed out and with one blow destroyed all the goodwill he had been building up. There were witnesses—two farm technicians.