The Winds of Altair (2 page)

The time was spent studying planetology, planetary engineering, and all the other special knowledge they would need to transform Altair VI into a fully Earthlike world, suitable for large-scale colonization. And praying. Prayer was as much a part of their lives as breathing. They prayed when they woke up in the morning. They prayed before each meal and after it. Every task began with a prayer for strength and success. Every night ended with a prayer that their efforts to tame Altair VI might prove fruitful.

But they might as well have saved their energy. Their first few weeks of struggling with the wildly inhospitable environment of Altair VI convinced even the most devout Believers that the planet was beyond redemption, no matter what the robot explorers had reported.

If they could have, they would have returned to Earth.

"It was weird," Jeff was saying to his friends. "It was like—blast, I can't tell you what it was like. There aren't any words for it."

They were sitting around one of the larger tables in the dome's autocafeteria, a dozen students, including Laura, the redhead that Jeff had lusted over so badly that he spent hours in the chapel trying to pray her out of his mind. It did little good.

Most of the students added decorations to their drab coveralls, to put a little color and individuality into their dress: a bright scarf, a medallion or a jewelled pin. Jeff himself clipped the gold symbol of his school's meteorology club to his breast pocket every morning. Laura did not need any decorations; her flame-red hair and jade-green eyes were all the color she needed.

Like all the student domes, theirs was built to remind them of a university campus. The rooms around the periphery of the dome were deliberately decorated in the genteel shabbiness of academia. The center of the dome was a grassy quadrangle edged with scrawny young trees that stretched their branches toward the artificial sun hanging at the dome's zenith.

Every student had an individual dormitory room. Jeff's had seemed spacious to him when the voyage began; now it was starting to feel cramped and tiny. The autocafeteria was a favorite meeting place, with its food dispensers, long straight rows of tables, and general openness. Even the surveillance cameras were tucked away where they wouldn't be too obvious.

Dom Petrocelli was the self-appointed student leader of Jeff's dome, not because he was bigger physically or faster intellectually than the others. Dom was a Convert, and always behaved as though he had to prove to the other Believers that his faith was true. Besides, he seemed to enjoy hurting people with his sarcastic tongue.

He leaned back in the plastic cafeteria chair, making it squeak under him, and eyed Jeff with an amused smile.

"So you got inside the wolfcat's brain, is that it?" he asked.

"Right," Jeff said eagerly. "It was like we shared our minds."

"Must have boosted your IQ a hundred points!" Petrocelli smirked.

The others laughed, and Jeff joined the laughter too, even though he was thinking what a wolfcat could do to Petrocelli's thick skull.

As the giggling died down, Laura—who was sitting next to Jeff—asked, "You really killed one of those deers?"

Jeff replied, "The wolfcat did. I didn't try to stop him."

Laura was very pretty, especially when she smiled. Red hair the color of autumn leaves, deep green eyes, skin like cream. "I don't understand how this mind-sharing business works. It sounds kind of . . . well, psychic, almost."

"No," Jeff said. "It's just electronics. You know the kind of electronic probes they put into criminals' brains, to control their violent behavior?"

Laura and several others nodded.

"Well, that's what we're using. Dr. Peterson and a team of scientists went down to the planet's surface a few weeks ago, stunned some of the animals, and put probes in their brains."

Petrocelli yawned ostentatiously. "We all know that. And they almost killed two men doing it."

Ignoring him, Jeff went on, "Then they hook somebody up to the equipment in Dr. Carbo's lab. It's kind of like a video show, except that you see what the wolfcat is seeing, you feel what he feels. Your mind is linked to the wolfcat's mind."

"I thought they weren't going to try that anymore," one of the other girls said. "Isn't it awfully dangerous? The first two people who tried it both died, didn't they?"

"And Dr. Mannheim is in the cryonics freezer, totally out of it."

"Well, I made contact," Jeff said, trying to keep his pride from showing. "We've made the first step toward taming this planet."

Petrocelli started to make a comment, but the sad-faced little engineer next to him said first, "Well, we'd better tame this planet. They won't let us back home until we do."

Nods of agreement went around the table. They all knew that they would either tame Altair VI or die there.

CHAPTER 3

Dr. Francesco Ignacio Carbo sat in his room, staring at the stars. He knew that Earth was an invisibly tiny speck in the universe gleaming before his eyes. He could not even identify the Sun out of the countless sparks of light that glowed against the infinite darkness.

Darkness and light, he said to himself. The eternal struggle.

Dr. Carbo's quarters were a spacious combination of office and apartment, handsomely furnished with his own possessions. Bishop Foy and the Elders frowned on such luxuries as a waterbed and genuine oil paintings, but Carbo insisted that he was not going to travel almost seventeen lightyears from Earth without some of his own comforts. Still, he missed the cool marble floors of his apartment in Rome, the noise from the streets, the warm night breeze and the splashing of the fountain in the Piazza di Navaronne.

He sighed heavily. Not for these austere Americans, the marble splendor and gaudy crowds of Rome. Here on this ship, this antiseptic womb of metal and plastic, there was no room for the splendors of the past, no patience for noise or dirt or people who splashed in fountains and sang late into the night.

You knew what you were getting into when you agreed to go with them, he told himself. But another part of his mind argued, How could you know what they would be like? How could you understand how it would be to live with these puritans day after day, month after month?

He leaned back in his recliner chair and stared at the stars through the plastiglass window set high up along the curving wall of his living room. The stars stared solemnly back, unwinking. They reminded him of Bishop Foy and the Elders. Even their smiles were without joy.

Carbo was the only bachelor among the scientists and social technicians of the Village. There were a dozen single women and unmarried daughters among the staff, and hundreds of nubile maidens among the students. But scientists did not fraternize with the students, who apparently took their vows of celibacy quite seriously, from what Carbo could see. Either that, or they were afraid of getting caught. Even with the staff women, half of them belonged to the Church and the other half seemed to be intent on getting married.

It was an uncomfortable situation for an unmarried Roman of thirty-two.

But face it, Francesco, he told himself, Rome was becoming unbearable.

The Eternal City had endured invasions by the Huns, the Goths, countless mercenary armies, the Nazis, and even swarms of American tourists. But year by year the streets became less and less safe. Starving children begged for pennies, and if you turned your back, they or their older brothers took with violence what they could not earn peacefully. As the ancient buildings and monuments crumbled under the attack of automobile pollution, the very fabric of society was falling apart under the weight of too many hungry, homeless people.

Carbo remembered his own childhood, running through the narrow twisting streets of the city, always in a pack with other boys his own age, always armed with at least a knife. It was a miracle that the Jesuits took him in, a ragged homeless waif, before he either was killed in the streets or killed someone else. The priests were stern and unyielding. They caught him in one of their periodic sweeps of the city, threw him into the terrifying machine that tested his mental abilities, and decided he was going to receive an education. Period. No recourse, no appeal. Little Francesco, who never knew his father and barely remembered the teenaged girl who was his mother, now became a ward of the Jesuit order.

The Jesuits had long boasted, give us the child for its first six years and he will be ours forever. Francesco was too old and too street-wise for such brainwashing. But under the inflexible discipline of the priests he learned to become a clean, polite, soft-spoken young student. And he fell in love—with learning. For the mind-testing machine had been quite accurate: beneath the filth from the streets, Francesco had a first-rate brain. By the time he was fifteen, he had discovered science and plunged into studies that even his Jesuit mentors could not fathom. On his twentieth birthday they reluctantly released him to the University of Pisa, reminding him sternly that he would be in the shadow of Galileo. To their credit, the Jesuits had led the Vatican to exonerate the contentious Renaissance genius some four centuries after he had been condemned by the Inquisition.

Francesco nodded at the priests' mention of Galileo, but in his heart he was more interested in the work of Fermi and the more contemporary Italian scientists.

At the university he found that a special branch of physics intrigued him more than any other: electronics. And this led him into the fascinating world of neuro-electronics, where the transistors and microcircuitry of molecular electronics were being linked to the nerves and brains of human test subjects.

By the time he was twenty-eight, Dr. Francesco Carbo was an international celebrity, and widely touted as a certainty to be awarded the Nobel Prize. His work in neuro-electronics had produced the miniature probes that now could actually control human behavior. Criminal violence was becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, because every violent offender was fitted out with a neuro-electronic probe that controlled his antisocial behavior.

The streets of Rome were safer, thanks to Dr. Carbo. The streets of every city in the world were safer. And Dr. Carbo could not sleep because of the nightmares his guilt spawned in his own mind.

The world government seized on the neuro-electronic stimulator as the solution to violent crime. But in reality, the probes merely made such crimes impossible. They did nothing to solve the problems that caused the crimes. The police swept criminal offenders off the streets and into the hospitals for their quick, almost painless brain surgery. But poverty still existed. Hunger still existed. The vast gap between the rich and poor grew wider.

Pacified criminals no longer threatened society. Instead, they tended either to go insane or commit suicide. But crime still existed. The neuro-electronic stimulators themselves became a major source of crime; electronic stimulation of the brain's pleasure centers replaced narcotics and even sex as the world's premier vice. People died smiling with pleasure, starved to death or their brains destroyed by an overload of current.

By the time he passed his thirtieth birthday, Dr. Carbo had himself flirted with the idea of suicide. Even though the world government banned public report of the harmful effects of the neuro-electronic stimulator, he knew what was happening, and the knowledge filled him with remorse. Only his years under the Jesuits stayed his hand. He had never fully accepted their religious teachings, but their moral principles had sunk into the fiber of his being. If it is wrong to kill, then it is equally wrong to kill oneself. Logic was the Jesuits' most effective weapon, especially against a man in love with knowledge.

Still, he turned away the committee from Stockholm when they visited him. Politely, he told them that he could not accept a Nobel if it was offered, because the neuro-electronic probe was as much a curse as a blessing. They tried to argue him out of his remorse, but once they realized it was genuine, they withdrew, telling each other that Carbo is still very young, and the Prize can be granted him ten, twenty, even thirty years later.

It was only by chance that Carbo learned of the starflight missions. He had been seeking solace in the arms of beautiful women, and one night as he and his current
amour
lay side by side on his warm, enveloping waterbed, she said languidly:

"I will have to say farewell to you tomorrow, Francesco."

A pang of alarm tightened his chest. "Farewell? But why?"

"Tomorrow I leave . . ."

"Leave Rome? You?"

He turned to look at her and saw, in the shadows, that she was smiling sadly. "I am leaving Earth. I am going out to a distant star. I will be gone for three years, at the very least. Perhaps I will never return."

She expected him to be shocked, to try to argue her out of it, perhaps even to cry at their separation. Instead, he was silent. She had prepared herself for an angry scene or for the tenderest kind of parting. She was totally unprepared for silence. It infuriated her and she left the next day still seething with resentment.

Carbo flew that same day to the World Capital, in Messina, and ploughed through seven layers of bureaucrats and secretaries before he found the man in charge of the star missions. He was an American, of course, and his assistant was a Russian woman of middle years who sat in a corner of the American's office, stolid as a cow, suspicious as a policeman.

"So you're interested in helping to colonize the stars, are you?" the American asked jovially. He was a big man, with a loud voice and a wide smile.

Carbo said in English, "I would like to learn more about your plans, yes."

He knew that the American did not recognize his name, but the computer files had produced a complete background of Dr. Carbo, and the American kept glancing at his computer terminal's screen as he harangued his visitor.

Carbo sat patiently through the whole lecture. The American behaved like a low-class real estate salesman trying to palm off some worthless acreage on a gullible foreigner.

"But before we colonize the stars," he finished, "we must tame the planets for the colonists to come."

"I see," Carbo said.

"Now then," the American hunched forward and leaned both arms on his desk, "we have a very interesting videotape presentation that will show you the planets that are going to be targeted . . ."

"That won't be necessary, thank you," Dr. Carbo said. "I think I understand the situation now. You have been most helpful. Thank you."

The American shrugged. "Let me send the tape to your home anyway. Just in case you think of some questions after you leave."

Carbo nodded.

"Are you interested in joining one of the missions?" the Russian woman asked, in a midwestern American accent that exactly mimicked her boss.

"Yes, I am," Carbo heard himself say.

"Which one?"

"The next one to leave."

"No matter where it is going?"

He shook his head. "It doesn't matter."

The American's grin became dazzling. He touched a button on his computer keyboard, and a single sheet of paper slid noiselessly from its printer slot.

"Sign here," he said, pushing the contract across his desk toward this slightly crazy visitor.

On the plane back to Rome, Carbo told himself that it really did not matter where they sent him. The important thing was that colonizing the stars would help to solve the
real
problems of Earth, the problems that his neuro-electronic stimulator had only swept under the rug. The poor would at last get their chance for a new life, on a new world. And he would help them to succeed.

He could not believe the medieval Catholicism of his Jesuit mentors. Or so he thought. But the moral imperatives were ingrained in him nevertheless. He finally felt as if there was something to live for, as the plane carried him back to dirty, teeming Rome.

Now he leaned deep into his relaxer chair and it tilted far back for him, becoming almost a couch. He stared up through the window at the stars that hung like brilliant diamonds in the darkness beyond the ship. The room was softly lit, like the early twilight of a springtime evening back in Rome, An odor of fresh blossoms wafted on gentle currents of air. If he liked, Carbo could change the room's scent to jungle perfume or the tangy snap of the sea, merely by touching a button. Another of the luxuries that Foy and his Elders frowned upon.

With another reluctant sigh he slid his right hand to the control keyboard set into the recliner's armrest. But not to change the room's scent or lighting.

On the far side of the curving wall his desktop view-screen glowed to life and a green light winked on to signify that his computer terminal was waiting for his input.

"Data for the record," he murmured, knowing that even a whisper would be picked up by the microphone built into his chair. "Put in the correct date and time, eh?"

A glance at the screen showed him that the time and date had been entered, in glowing yellow letters.

He hesitated before starting, then said, "Let me see all the physiological data on today's test subject."

He sat up, and the chair moved with him so that its soft fabric never left his back. The computer screen showed a complex graph with intricate curves of various colors to indicate Jeff Holman's heart rate, brain rhythms, breathing, and other vital functions.

"
Bene.
Next."

The screen's picture flicked to show another graph, more curves.

Dr. Carbo studied the information for a long while, going through graph after graph. Then he watched a replay of the tapes that showed what the wolfcat saw when Jeff was in contact with it.

He cleared his throat as the tape ended and the screen went blank.

"Okay, for the record." His voice became louder, firmer, as if he were talking to an auditorium full of students. He had spoken nothing but English for nearly six months now, and even though the computer could automatically translate from Italian, it was English he spoke now.

"Since all our tests with members of the staff resulted in failure, we decided to investigate the use of one or more of the students to make contact with the animals on the surface.

"This decision was not made lightly. Deep hypnotic interrogation of the staff members who failed to establish neuro-electronic contact with the animals revealed that their minds withdrew instinctively from the 'mind-sharing' effect that such contact entails. Psychological analysis indicates that a fully-formed adult personality is too rigid to accept the mindsharing. Adults will not—and probably cannot—allow their
personas
to mingle with that of an alien animal."

Carbo examined his words as they were printed on the computer viewscreen. He made a couple of minor editorial changes, then continued:

"The psychology committee, after lengthy discussion . . ." he grinned, remembering the furious arguments among them, " . . . accepted my suggestion of testing one or more of the students as a contactor. My reasoning was that if an adult personality fails to establish neuro-electronic contact, then perhaps a younger, more malleable personality would be better suited to the task. We have more than four hundred such personalities aboard this ship: the students."