The Winds of Altair (16 page)

CHAPTER 20

Jeff's exile ended after five days. Amanda simply phoned him that evening, after dinner.

"Are you ready to stop loafing and get back to work?" she asked, a bright smile on her face.

"Yes!" he said eagerly.

"Good. Report to the contact lab at 0600 hours. All is forgiven."

"Okay, Amanda. Thanks."

Her smile shrank. "We need you, Jeff. We need all the help we can get."

It felt strange at first.

Crown was . . . different. Hungry, as always. But more than that. He was tense, weary, tight-strung.

The camp was bigger than ever, dominated by the large angular shapes of the oxygen conversion factory which hummed and rumbled and poured out noxious fumes. Other buildings and bubble-shaped tents dotted the beach. Out in the sloshing surf, four re-entry capsules sat half-imbedded in the sand; the stench from the rotting synthetics inside them almost overpowered the evil scent of the human machines.

The apes were clearly on the verge of insanity. Every instinct in their makeup was telling them to flee, to head south, get away from this land of cold and strange, killing machines. But they were under the control of the orbiting Village, and under the snarling guardianship of the wolfcats who, like them, were forced to stay at the camp on the beach. Stay and work. Stay and work and freeze and die.

The wolfcats bedded down each night as far from the camp as their human controllers would allow them, far down the beach. They only went close to the alien buildings when there was absolutely no way to avoid it.

That morning Crown trotted away from the other wolfcats—all of them noticeably leaner and edgier than Jeff remembered them—and headed southward.

The food capsule landed okay. All he has to do is find it.

It took less than half an hour. The capsule was resting in shallow high-tide surf, half under water. Fortunately the hatch, which had popped open automatically upon landing, was above the waterline. But the waves were splashing up dangerously close to it, their breaking foam spraying into the hatch and dripping inside.

Crown sloshed through the surf, growling at the cold and wet. The midleg that the snake had bitten was still stiff, but he could use it now, put weight on it. He stretched up on his hindlegs and stuck his massive muzzle into the open hatch. With one forepaw he scooped out a quivering blob of synthetic meat. Crown sniffed at it, licked at it. Hardly any taste, strange odor, no blood or warmth to it.

Awkwardly he carried the oblong chunk of artificial meat in his forepaws and splashed through the surf to the dry sand above the high-water mark. He dropped it on the sand, sniffed at it again, then bit into it. It felt like meat, despite its faint taste. Crown ate it, all of it. It helped to fill his stomach, but that's all it did.

He went back to the capsule, took out another chunk of the stuff, and carried it back in his jaws to the other wolfcats.

They were prowling around the beach on the southward side of the camp like a band of sullen policemen waiting for trouble to start. Crown dropped the artificial food on the sand, then trotted away and stretched out on a rock that was warmed somewhat by the feeble sun. He watched as, one by one, the other wolfcats edged up to the synthetic meat and sniffed at it. The last to approach it was the biggest male, Sharpclaw, who had been the leader of a large family before the humans had drugged him and implanted him with a neuro probe. He growled at the synthetic, pawed it, slashed it once with his claws. Then he settled down to eating it. The other wolfcats stayed a respectful distance away while Sharpclaw devoured the entire chunk of meat.

Then, one by one, the wolfcats approached Crown, grunting and snuffling, as if to ask where he had the food. Without getting up from his comfortable bed, Crown turned his head toward the south and made a long, low rumble deep in his chest. Down there, he was saying. The food came from down the beach.

The wolfcats started down the beach. All but Sharpclaw.

By the time the day had ended, all the wolfcats had eaten and had brought back enough food to allow the apes to eat, as well. The animals seemed to feel much better and more peaceful with their bellies full.

Just like people.

Frank Carbo absently drummed his fingers on the tabletop as Dr. Peterson presented his figures on the rate at which Altair VI's atmosphere was being converted to a breathable oxygen/nitrogen mixture.

Each Monday morning the heads of each scientific department met together to report on progress, identify problems, discuss solutions. The meetings invariably depressed Carbo. No matter how much progress they made, there was always so much more to do.

"The first oxygen conversion plant is now working well," Peterson said, "at long last. The four others have been built here in orbit and tested. Now the crews are disassembling them so that they can be carried to the planet's surface in sections, and then re-assembled on the ground."

Bishop Foy never attended these meetings, although he reviewed the tapes of them. Still, Carbo felt the Bishop's gloomy presence hovering over them.

Peterson pointed to the slide that was projected on the conference room wall.

"Now that we have actual performance figures from the first plant," the craggy-faced anthropologist was saying, "we can get some idea of how quickly we can convert the planet's atmosphere into breathable air."

Jan Polchek, the zoologist, asked, "Is the abscissa of that graph numbered in months or years?"

"Or centuries?" somebody else joked.

Peterson grinned. "Months, thank God. With all five oxygen plants working at full capacity, we'll have a completely Earthlike atmosphere on Altair VI inside of thirty-six months."

"Three years," Lana Polchek murmured. As head of medical staff, she and her zoologist husband comprised the only married pair at these meetings.

"And the colony ship has already shown up at the edge of this system," said Higgins, of engineering. "They'll be here in another month."

"We're all going to have to live in orbit for at least three more years," Peterson said. "We might as well face that fact."

"Can we do it? Three years?"

"We have enough supplies, providing the recycling systems don't break down."

"I mean, psychologically? Can human beings live in spaceships for years at a time?"

Lana Polchek answered, "In a ship like this Village, yes, there's no reason why we couldn't live here indefinitely. I've seen no evidence of environmentally-induced stress among the students or the staff. Have you?"

"I wasn't thinking about us," Higgins said. "What about those colonists?"

Peterson nodded grimly. "I see. That's another matter, isn't it?" "Thirty-two thousand of them crammed into a ship no bigger than the Village."

"And millions more to come."

"They've all been fitted with neuro probes, though," Jan Polchek said. "They can be kept pacified for as long as necessary."

Carbo forced himself to stay silent. He wanted to bolt out of his chair and run from the conference room. But he held himself still as he gripped the arms of his chair with white-knuckled fury. Pacify them all, his mind raged silently. And one inevitable day they'll come to insert probes into our brains so that we won't cause them any more trouble, either.

The meeting finally ended and the department heads drifted out of the conference room, back to their tasks. Carbo lingered behind to catch Louisa Ferris by the sleeve of her coverall as she headed for the door.

"Dr. Ferris, a word with you, please."

She turned toward him, a pleasant smile on her cherubic face.

"Why, you didn't have a thing to say all through the meeting, Dr. Carbo," she said.

"Neither did you."

"Well, no ethical questions arose, did they?"

Carbo sat on the edge of the conference table. "I'm not so sure of that. We did spend most of the meeting discussing how long it would take to wipe out all the flora and fauna of an entire world."

Dr. Ferris' dimpled smile faded. "I know. It
is
distressing. But as long as there are no intelligent creatures down there, my hands are tied."

"I'm beginning to believe," Carbo said slowly, carefully, "that the wolfcats are intelligent."

Ferris' plump face looked suddenly distressed. "Oh, no! Not you too! First it was that student, and then that black woman who works in your department . . ."

"Amanda?" he blurted, surprised. "Amanda Kolwezi?"

Louisa Ferris pulled out a chair and sat in it heavily, as if her problems were too much to bear standing up. "Yes, Kolwezi. She sent me some tapes yesterday from your contact lab. With a note that says she thinks the wolfcats can communicate with each other."

"I saw those tapes," Carbo said. "I agree with her conclusion."

"But don't you understand?" Ferris asked, her voice rising slightly. "The definition of intelligence is
so
difficult, there are so many aspects to consider . . ."

"But that works both ways, doesn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if it's difficult to prove that a species is truly intelligent, isn't it equally difficult to say definitely that it isn't intelligent?"

Ferris blinked rapidly, her mouth slightly open, digesting Carbo's statement.

Without waiting for her to sort it all out, he went on, "Someone in your very difficult position can take either of two positions, it seems to me: Either you can say, 'The animals have got to show unmistakable signs of true intelligence,' or you can say, 'If there's any doubt about the matter, my responsibility is to protect those creatures until the question is resolved.' Isn't that right?"

She sat there looking confused.

"I mean," Carbo said, "it's the most difficult and significant task of anyone in the Village. All this responsibility rests on you!"

"Yes," she mumbled. "It does, doesn't it?"

"And I've admired the way you've been handling it for all these months," Carbo wheedled. "Never once have you cracked under the strain! How marvelously well you have handled this enormous responsibility. The world government chose well when it assigned you to this mission."

"Why . . . thank you, Dr. Carbo."

"I can understand the terrific pressures you must feel, now that the time has finally arrived to make your decision."

She nodded, gazing up into his eyes.

"It's going to be a very difficult decision to make, I know. Balancing the hopes of those colonists against the lives of all the creatures of a whole world . . ."

Louisa Ferris said nothing. She seemed mesmerized.

"Only someone of your tremendous integrity and strength could stand up to Bishop Foy and represent the world government here, so many lightyears away from home. I admire you for that. We all do."

She shuddered, as if snapping herself out of a trance. "I had no idea that you cared about my work so deeply, Dr. Carbo."

"But I do, dear lady. I do. And I want you to know that if you must tell Bishop Foy that the colonization effort must be stopped because the wolfcats are intelligent, I and many of the other scientists will back you to the hilt."

"That . . . that's very flattering, Dr. Carbo. I appreciate the sincerity of your feelings."

Carbo made himself smile at her, while thinking, If purgatory exists, you've just bought a thousand-year visit, Francesco.

Louisa Ferris got to her feet and smiled sweetly back at him.

"When will you speak to Bishop Foy?" Carbo asked.

"Oh, there will be no need for that."

"No?"

"None whatever, Dr. Carbo. Those poor brutes down there are not intelligent, no more so than dogs or horses."

"
Signorina
, I simply cannot agree . . ."

She dimpled again. "
Signora
, Dr. Carbo. Martin Foy and I were secretly married a month ago. Isn't that romantic?"

With a girlish giggle, she went to the door, leaving Carbo sitting on the edge of the conference room table with a dumbfounded expression on his face.

CHAPTER 21

Crown could sense something different was in the air. Something terrifying.

It wasn't anything he could see, or smell, or hear. But it was there. In every gust of the icy wind that blew in from the gray sea, the terror was there. The dull pewter sky, the snow-covered beach, the trees up on the hills with their leaves rolled tight—everything around Crown reeked with dread and danger.

The apes sensed it, and so did the wolfcats. The apes worked clumsily, slowly, fidgeting, milling around whenever their human controllers slackened the electronic reins for a moment. They stared down the beach plaintively, as if silently begging the wolfcat guards to allow them to run away from this dreadful place. The wolfcats themselves prowled the snow-covered sand nervously, tails twitching, growling at nothing.

Whatever it was, it would be awful when it came.

Not that things were not already about as bad as the animals could stand. Winter storms had lashed the beach three times in the past seven days, wrecking some of the equipment with battering waves that smashed ashore far beyond the usual high-water mark. The snowfalls were heavy now, and apes and wolfcats alike had to sleep under shelter or be buried under the nightly snows.

Under their human controllers, the apes had erected special tentlike structures for themselves and others for the wolfcats. They had to put them up again every time a storm blew them down. The apes now spent every morning clearing the snow from the areas where they had to work. It left their handlike forepaws blistered and burned. The wolfcats' paws seemed to be tough enough to walk on the accumulated snowpack without blistering.

Now Crown stood partway up the slope of the hills, looking out across the beach at the slow-moving apes and the nervous wolfcats. The sea washed up on the beach, colder than ice. The apes moved numbly, reluctantly, at their work. The wolfcats growled.

Crown was on his way to locate the latest food capsule, which had landed crashing through the trees up in the hills the day before. But as he stood on the hillside for a moment, surveying the beach and the camp, waiting for the disaster that he knew was coming, he heard the now-familiar thunder of a sonic boom. Looking up, he saw the contrail of an approaching rocket shuttle. He rumbled and growled to himself.

Crown watched the sleek silvery winged craft swoop along the beach and land on the hard-packed snow. Wolfcats sprinted away in all directions as the shuttle skidded to a stop, spraying powdery gray snow from its landing skis.

The hatch opened and a dozen humans came out, small and frail-looking in their armored suits and bulbous helmets. Then the hoisting arm of a crane swung through the open hatch and the humans started lifting apes out of their ship and winching them down to the beach's surface.

The apes were dying faster than ever, especially those forced to work around the big, throbbing building that gave off the noxious fumes. For three straight days now, the humans had landed shuttles at the beach and brought out new apes, beasts they must have captured further south.

The apes were all unconscious, drugged, of course. But gradually they would awaken and begin to work like the rest, under neuro-electronic control.

Crown snarled at the idea. He realized that he was under control, too. Otherwise he would have long ago left this dismal beach and gone south to find his adopted family. But to Crown, it was more like a sharing, an experience that he had never known before, a force within his mind that led him to roam this world of Windsong and explore as no wolfcat had ever explored before.

I'm with you
, Crown,
a voice seemed to say within his mind. You and I ate one person, one creature.

Frank Carbo planted his boots on the firm crust of the packed snow and surveyed the camp on the beach, as best he could. Despite the lights they had strung along the camp and on every side of the big oxygen conversion building, the beach was still abysmally dark. Carbo knew that it was mid-morning, but to his Earth-born eyes it looked like blackest midnight.

He shook his head inside the cumbersome helmet of his armored suit. He knew what Peterson and the other scientists claimed; he had gone through the mathematics and physics of it himself: within three years this entire planet would be transformed into an Earthlike world, with clean breathable air and bright blue skies.

He knew it. But he found it hard to believe.

"Watch out below," he heard in his helmet earphones. It was the voice of one of the students, a burly youngster named Petrocelli.

Carbo looked up to see that Petrocelli had one of the drugged apes rigged into the sling and was ready to lower it to the ground. He stepped aside and Petrocelli let the hoist go, with a faint hum of electrical power. The ape, a gray-white mountain of sleeping muscle, came down slowly, its huge thick arms and legs hanging limply out of the reinforced steel mesh sling.

Carbo and three other scientists couldn't lift the inert ape, so Petrocelli and one of the other students rode the sling down to the snow-covered sand to help. Grunting and sweating inside their heavy suits, they dragged the giant animal a dozen meters or so from the ship. Then the medic bent over it and prepared to give it the injection that would neutralize the drug that kept it unconscious.

"Wait for my word," Carbo told the medic. He could not see who it was, inside the fishbowl helmet. The helmet's visor reflected the lights along the beach without allowing him to see through the plastiglass.

Carbo flicked the dial on his wrist to the communications channel that linked him with the contact lab, up in the Village.

"Contact lab," he heard a student's voice say.

"This is Dr. Carbo. Give me Dr. Kolwezi, please."

"I'm here, Frank," Amanda said.

It felt good to hear her voice. He grinned to himself as he said, "We're ready to activate the first of the new animals."

"We have the controllers ready to make link-up," Amanda confirmed.

"Good." Carbo peered through the murky air at the number they had stencilled on the ape's chest. "This is number 4-01."

"Four dash oh one," Amanda repeated.

"Right."

"Okay, just a minute . . ." He heard muffled voices in the background, then Amanda came back with, "We have 4-01 linked up. The controller is ready."

"All right. We will activate the animal." Carbo clicked his communicator dial back to its first channel and told the medic, "Give it the shot—and then stand back."

The medic rammed the hypodermic into the ape's massive shoulder, then stood up and walked rapidly away, toward Carbo. The beast lay there unmoving for several seconds, then shuddered, twitched, and rolled over onto all fours. It swung its head around toward the humans and growled menacingly.

Without realizing what they were doing, both Carbo and the medic took a step backward. Carbo bumped into Petrocelli, who held a power rifle tightly in both gloved hands.

The ape reared to its hind legs. Its lips pulled back in a snarl that revealed its fangs.

"Jesuto,"
Carbo mumbled.

"God, it's big," Petrocelli said. But he stepped in front of Carbo as he said it, protecting the two scientists with his rifle.

Carbo remembered someone telling him that Petrocelli was a convert to the Church of Nirvan, and still felt that he had to prove himself.

"Wait a second," he told the student. "Don't shoot unless . . ."

The ape jerked spasmodically and almost tottered off its feet. Then it seemed to take a deep breath. The snarl faded from its lips. It dropped back down to all fours and turned away, walking docilely toward the buildings, of the camp where the other controlled apes were already working.

Carbo heard Petrocelli blow out a long-held breath. The medic, who had said nothing through the episode, finally spoke up:

"Do we have to come that close to heart failure with every one of these critters?" It was a young woman's voice, but Carbo had no idea to whom it belonged.

"Well," he answered, "there are only eight more of them."
This trip
, he added silently.

Petrocelli broke his rifle into its two separate parts and clamped them to the magnetic grips on the belt of his suit.

"Okay," he said, "let's go get the next one out." There was real enthusiasm in his voice.

Carbo, already feeling weary, followed the youth back toward the ship. Three more years of this, he said to himself. Three more years.

Crown turned his back on the scene at the beach and headed inland, up the slope of the hills and into the gaunt woods, searching for the food capsule that had landed there. The underbrush was bare now, and the trees had curled up their leaves for the winter. The wind was cold and relentless. It was not a good place to stay. Crown wondered how long he and the other wolfcats could stand the winter cold and storms. He knew the apes would flee south as soon as the wolfcats left them alone.

And there was still that feeling, that foreboding, deep inside him. Some inner sense was warning him that something terrible would happen soon. But he did not know what it was.

Back on his couch in the contact lab, Jeff Holman twisted and writhed as if in pain. He mumbled to himself, eyes closed in deep electronically-induced sleep. The student who was monitoring him became alarmed and called Dr. Kolwezi, who was directing the work in another part of the greatly-expanded lab. Amanda hurried to the control room, scanned the monitoring instruments with a worried eye and watched Jeff struggle against himself on the couch. She shook her head and reluctantly told the student to continue without disconnecting Jeff unless his vital signs went into the danger zone.

Crown padded through the dead forest, under the cold gray sky, every sense alert for danger, every nerve on edge. He saw a pair of trees leaning crazily against their neighbors and headed in that direction. Sure enough, there was the food capsule. It had crashed into the forest, smashing dozens of trees and gouging a still-steaming tear in the ground.

The hatch was open; the food was inside. Crown fed himself, as usual, and then carried a fair-sized chunk of the tasteless stuff back toward the beach. When he got there he would show the other wolfcats where the capsule had landed, just as he did every day.

He stopped in mid-stride.

Something strange was happening. The air crackled, as if a summer storm were hurling lightning bolts through the sky. The chill wind sighed to a stop, yet the trees seemed to be swaying. The ground itself trembled, only slightly, but enough for Crown to feel it. Every instinct in him told Crown to drop the food he carried and run inland, away from the sea.

For a long moment he stood stock-still and did nothing. The ground's trembling ceased. The wind resumed. The electrical charge in the air seemed to subside.

Still, Crown knew that the beach was not a safe place to be. Yet that is precisely where he headed, dropping the load of synthetic meat he held in his jaws as he bounded through the silent forest toward the camp of the humans.

Carbo felt the tremor. They all did. The men and women on the beach, unrecognizable as individuals in their bulky suits and helmets, all stopped what they were doing and stood still for a moment.

"What was that?"

"It felt like a big truck had just rolled by me."

"You felt it too?"

"Could it have been an earthquake?"

"Pretty small one, if it was."

"It was a tremor," Carbo heard one of the scientists say, his voice sounding quite authoritative even over their suit-to-suit radio link.

"Is it a precursor to a bigger shock?" someone asked.

"No, this area is technically very stable. That's one of the reasons why we picked it for the base. I don't think we're in any danger."

Carbo heard his words, but wondered why the hairs on the back of his neck seemed to be standing on end. He peered into the darkness and saw, one by one, the rest of the landing team go back to its work.

Thank God this is the last one of the apes, Carbo told himself as they prepared to activate the giant beast. After this one we can pack up and get back to the Village. Until tomorrow.

Crown raced through the woods and halted only when he got to the top of the ridge line, where he could see the beach and the puny humans working alongside their flying craft.

The apes were working as usual. The wolfcats were prowling nervously down at the far end of the beach. Everything seemed normal. Yet Crown knew that it was not.

He roared out a warning.

The humans jerked to a stop and stared up at him. The apes dropped what they were doing and began to cluster together. The other wolfcats roared back at Crown, to tell him that they understood him, even though their human controllers did not and would not let them run to safety.

What is it, Crown?
He sensed within his mind the presence of his friend, the shared consciousness of his alien companion.
What's the danger, Crown? How can we warn them?

The wolfcat's sudden roar nearly froze Carbo's blood.

He turned around so abruptly inside his heavy suit that he wrenched his neck.

"Damn!" he yelped. "What now?"

The other wolfcats began roaring, somewhere out there in the darkness. The landing team came sprinting toward Carbo.

"What's the matter? Why are they roaring?"

"I don't know," Carbo said, irritatedly, as he tried to rub the back of his neck and was thwarted by the plastic helmet. "Something's bothering them."

"The most astute observation of the week."

Out of the murky gloom a huge gray figure took shape, a six-legged mountain of sleek muscle that padded slowly toward the humans.

"God Almighty, it's coming straight for us!"

"Stand back," Petrocelli said, clicking his rifle together.

"No, wait." Carbo put a restraining hand on the student's arm. "I think it's Jeff's wolfcat—Crown."

"How can you tell one from another?"

"I saw him before, the first time I came down here. Besides, the animal doesn't want to harm us."

The wolfcat's claws were sheathed as it walked up to the frightened knot of humans. It stood taller than any of them at the shoulder, frighteningly huge. The animal sniffed at them, seemed to peer at them one at a time, then turned toward the hills that overlooked the beach. It took a few steps toward the hills, then came back to the humans.