John Brunner Read online

  Gelatinized, fortified, sprayed on and allowed to dry.

  "I think," Kynance said very softly to herself, "that I won't go crazy, even if I am alone on the planet. I think it's going to be rather interesting."

  IV

  HOBST LAMPETER parted the fronds of the bladderwrack and peered over the ribbon-like expanse of temporarily open water. It could hardly be called a river, because it had no banks—it was just a channel between two patches of mingled bladderwrack and dinglybells which had used up enough of the nearer bondroots to let a former mudbank dissolve into silt and wash away.

  Damn this mist, blurring his view! Or was it the mist obscuring details? Were his eyes perhaps going bad on him? It was all too likely—a local diet was deficient in so many necessities, and the mere fact that you could choke something down without vomiting didn't imply proper nutriment.

  He chopped the thought off short. Going blind on Zygra was too depressing an idea to be allowed to prey on his mind. Concentrate, he told himself. Concentrate]

  Instead of straining to see, he listened. Zygra was a quiet planet—maddeningly quiet, lacking as it did any form of animal life—but there was always a susurrus of background noise, the plashing of open water, the suck and shift of subsiding mudbanks, the occasional flop of pelts returning to a floating phase from high on the edge of a weed-raft. What could he hear that didn't belong in this normal murmuring?

  Nothing. Maybe Victor had calculated wrong after all.

  He sighed, and remembered to shift before the bladderwrack accumulated enough cell-strain to collapse the floats on which he was balancing. A man could easily get lost among the trailing roots and fail to find his way back to air in the minute or so he could hold his breath. Shadowed so that the light bathing him had a weird greenish quality, he looked down at himself.

  He was naked except for a belt of plaited weed on which he had hung his crude wooden tools. His chest was so shrunken that he could count his ribs by eye, and his skin was pallid even without the greenish tinge of the shadows. His feet and ankles felt puffy and waterlogged. His hair and beard, grown long for lack of any means of trimming them, were braided together to keep them out of his way.

  J must look like a bogeyman out of a savage's nightmare.

  Listening anew, he still caught no sound distinct from the ordinary. How to know whether or not Victor's calendar was accurate? Time in this horrible setting was so fluid—as fluid as the marshy ground, which changed and drifted so that one could never be sure where he was unless the night sky was clear for a change and it was possible to sight on the stars with the notched crossed sticks he called his "sextant."

  And even if by some miracle the calendar was correct, to within a few days at least, and the time of harvest was really coming close, how to be sure that some freak of circumstances wouldn't take the pelts by the northern route this time? Four years back, they'd gone north instead of south in response either to a fluctuation of the climate or tide, or else because some blind machine had decided this course would be more profitable to the Zygra Company.

  Horst wished for solid ground on which to stamp his foot. Failing it, he pounded fist into palm in a futile gesture of hatred. Why did people have to be this way—so greedy to wring the last drop from a profitable venture, even if the last drop was a man's lifeblood? It was as though the pattern of suspicion and jealously imposed by the Dictatrix's régime had rippled outward from Earth, and now, long after it had died at its point of origin, it still ruled the minds of those in power on the outworlds, ferociously though they would have denied the charge.

  A sound?A sort of flopping sound? He jumped, just in time to save himself from being precipitated down among the bladderwrack's root system as it collapsed three square feet of floats in response to the strain of his weight, and peered along the channel as he had done earlier.

  This time his heart gave a lurch. No doubt about it: those were migrating peltsl

  The lay on the smooth surface of the water with hardly a hint of the quality which made them so prized by humanity. Their upper sides glistened, but only from wetness. It took an eye trained by bitter experience to inform Hoist of the all-important truth: that smear of red, that ripple of gold, overlying the pelts' basic greenish-brown, foreshadowed the full glory of harvest-time.

  Frantically he reached behind him for the bundle of mat-weed fronds strung with a piece of vine from an upper branch of the bladderwrack. The fronds were twisted and bruised so that they would leak their juices into the water. Without making a splash that could be detected at a distance, he set the bundle adrift.

  Moments passed. The first taste of juice reached the searching pelts, and they began to wriggle in their astonishing flexible manner towards the presumed source of the lure.

  Hoist let some of the tension ooze away and whistled over his shoulder. The bladderwrack surged underfoot in response to movement across its surface, and then the others were alongside, keeping their distance carefully because to have four men's weight in one spot would trigger the collapse of the floats instantly. The bladderwrack was one of many species of plant free-floating on the surface of Zygra, but no other seemed to have evolved the notion of gas-filled cysts sensitive to weight on the upper side. The process went like this: a seed or spore would settle on the float, feed there until it was heavier than a certain critical load, at which point the collapse of the bladders dropped it underwater and it became food for the larger plant, entwined among root-tendrils and squeezed of its sap.

  A man's weight speeded the process so that it cycled to completion in three to eight minutes. Nothing on Zygra was solid and stable.

  "They're pelts, all right," Victor muttered, adding in a tone of weak triumph, "Didn't I say so?"

  Scrawny, skin yellow and bagging, his large head wobbling on his thin neck, he chuckled his self-approbation.

  "Shut up," Coberly told him. Insofar as there could be a leader in this situation, Coberley was theirs. He was neither cleverer than Victor—whose IQ, in his normal phase, would have run close to genius level—nor more skillful than Horst, who was anyway fifteen years younger. But he fed on some invisible source of energy, probably hatred, and he was always the one who found the willpower to continue when the natural impulse was to weary surrender. He was a former fat man; now he was puffy, his skin loose without substance beneath to round it and firm it.

  "I don't see a monitor," Coberley went on. "What do we do if we've picked up a stray herd? There are some, you know. In a good year a few escape the monitors and wander about on their own."

  "Kill them!" Victor shrilled. "Rip them up and ruin them! Cost the company a million for every one we kill!"

  "Shut up!" Coberley repeated, this time with malice, and Victor complied. They waited. And at last, at last, the monitor came in sight: awash in the water, barely protruding above the herd of pelts, but hiding beneath its flush narrow deck a store of miracles.

  They sighed in unison. "Solomon!" Coberley snapped, and the fourth member of the party acknowledged with a cautious pace towards the edge of the channel.

  Solomon Weit was going to make their bid simply because, having been here a shorter time than any of his companions, he was stronger and quicker. Even so, he was a shadow of what he had once been. He was an immensely tall man, three-quarters of African extraction, and Horst had always found something oddly comforting in his very darkness. It brought to mind solid things: blocks of ebony, ingots of bronze. He seemed to resist the leeching soddenness of Zygra while all the others grew wan and feeble.

  Yet he had lately begun to cough on cool nights, and his eyes were rimmed with red. "Now?" he said.

  "Now," confirmed Coberley, and they threw themselves flat on their bellies, distributing their weight over a wide enough area of the bladderwrack to delay its collapse a few precious extra minutes.

  Plunging their hands into the water as the pelts surged by, they struggled to get a grip on their clammy edges.

  If the people who pay a million could
get them in the raw state, they wouldn't be so eager, Hoist thought for the hundredth time, or the hundred thousandth.

  "Got one!" Solomon exclaimed, and the others rolled closer, helping him to haul it from the water. Patches of white and navy-blue shimmered over its upper end; they didn't stop to admire the play of color, but laid it flat and held it down so that Solomon could slide onto it and get it wrapped securely around him. In response to the contact, it subsided and began to conform to him.

  "Damnation, it's too advanced!" Coberley muttered. "Look, it's clinging already, and we needed an unripe one which would take on a random shape—"

  "Too late to worry about that," Horst countered. "Just have to hope it fools the monitor anyway. Unless you feel it's not safe, Solomon?"

  The dark man looked at the monitor from the shadow of a kind of hood into which he had prodded and teased the pelt. "I don't think there's time to get it off and catch another," he grunted. "And we don't dare miss this chance! It may take weeks to get within reach of another monitor. . . . Give me the hammer, quickly!"

  Hoist detached the "hammer" from his belt. It was only a piece of wood, first gnawed into a club-shape and then dried, over heart-breaking weeks, in the intermittent sunlight until it was harder than most things on Zygra. Solomon closed his fist around it and wiggled to the very edge of the bladder-wrack.

  "A ripe one may not be a bad idea," Victor suggested. "The monitor is more likely to try and retrieve a ripe one, isn't it?" "Shut up," Coberley told him again.

  Tense, they held their breath as the monitor drew abreast of the pelt enshrouding Solomon. It sensed the presence of its responsibility, slowed down and bobbed towards the side of the channel. Victor whimpered faintly.

  Relays evaluated, circuits closed. The monitor decided that this pelt ought not to be stranded and left behind, but returned to the herd. Arms reached out from its nearer handling unit, closed tenderly on the pelt and Solomon too, lifted the load and began to swing it across the low deck so it could be replaced in mid-channel—exactly as we hoped, Horst reminded himself without excitement. His mouth was dry and his guts were churning.

  Go to it, Solomon. Make it come true all the way!

  How many long lonely hours of planning, how many dreams and arguments, had led to this momentl Now, now Solomon was making his bid for mastery of the little vessel: in mid-air stripping off the pelt with huge sucking noises, startling the monitor and throwing it over to the seldom-used interference circuits. He dropped awkwardly on the deck, almost losing his footing as the impact drove the monitor completely below the surface. His "hammer" rose and fell with a slam on the base of the handling unit, cracking the plastic across and letting water into unproofed circuits so that steam spurted out and something hissed as if in rage.

  The arms let go the pelt and it fell in the water. Solomon paid no attention. With all his might he was trying to extend that crack completely across the monitor's hull, to wreak havoc that would force the machine's return to the main station for servicing and carry him ignorantly with it.

  "Look out!"

  Who called? Horst realized with amazement that it had been his own voice, and he had spoken too late. The handling unit on the other side of the monitor was intact, and it sprang into action. Two huge arms snatched Solomon off the deck. The power surged and the stern-jets screamed, driving the hull into mid-channel again. The arms shot out to full stretch and let Solomon go. He plunged into the bladderwrack beyond the channel, screaming, and the scream ended abruptly as the glugging noise of collapsing floats greeted his fall.

  There was a period of worse than silence, during which the monitor evaluated its own damage, decided it was still serviceable, and resumed the pursuit of its pelts. When it was out of sight, Horst stirred.

  "Now, we have no choice," he said. "If we're going to get off Zygra alive we'll have to tackle the main station."

  "You're crazy!" Victor shrilled. "If we can't even take a monitor, what chance have we of—?"

  "I'd rather be crazy than dead," Horst whispered. "At least ... I think I would."

  V

  WHEN THE announcement reached Kynance, it was bald and to the point:

  The previous incumbent of the post of supervisor of Zygra has failed to exercise his option of a further year's employment. Kindly ready yourself for departure aboard the starship Zygra One at fourteen hundred tomorrow.

  She looked at it a second time and gave a sigh. She reminded herself about the repatriation clause and wondered if the attraction of a guaranteed trip home was going to lose its glamour in the same way as zygra pelts already had.

  Suppose the "previous incumbent" had exercised his option: what would they have done with her, having stuffed her mind full of so much information? Washed it all out again? Kept her on the staff in some minor capacity for a year and then sent her to Zygra after all?

  No, more likely just turned her loose. In the history of the company someone at some stage must have decided to stay on a second year at the last moment, but the trainee replacement would have learned the same crucial fact that Kynance had grown to accept: just as the Zygra Company had given up misleading its rivals by making them think the pelts were animal skins, so it had given up worrying about how much an outsider knew of the technicalities involved. There was no place in the universe where the data were of value except on Zygra itself. Launching an attack on the planet with a view to taking it over was still a possibility—there were other operators in this sector of the galaxy capable of mounting one or even two assaults fierce enough to defeat the Zygra Company's best efforts. But the main station and substations were all boobytrapped; if they ceased to receive a signal being broadcast by the orbital guardposts, they released a flood of poison into the water, and for at least the next fifty years, until the pelts reestablished themselves, there would be no crop worth harvesting. And without destroying all the guardposts there was no chance of making a landing.

  Moreover, there was nowhere to land in the literal sense, so that a ship designed to put down on the marshes instead of aboard the deck of the main station was bound to be a somewhat peculiar vessel, bulging with flotation chambers and equipped with some sort of seagoing propulsion. As part of her training Kynance had been shown the record of one ill-starred venture along these lines: the Zygra Company's spies had discovered the preparations being made to adapt a ship belonging to a company on Loki, had waited till the work had been almost done—involving the expenditure of half the rival company's capital—and then had blandly notified the Nefertitian government, which had a considerable stake itself in the Zygra operation, through the tax bills it imposed on the company's headquarters.

  There had followed a protest to the Lokian authorities, a swoop by a team of inspectors from the Bureau of Interstellar Trade, and a huge claim for damages which had bankrupted the would-be pirates.

  It was with something of a shock that, towards the end of the didactic recital, Kynance had recognized a case which had been dinned into her many times in college. "Manufacture of a device or devices uniquely fitted to conditions pertaining on a world not legally accessible to the manufacturer is prima facie evidence of piratical intent"—the Zygra Company and the Government of Nefertiti versus Wade, Wang and Hoerbiger, 2113, otherwise irreverently known as the smile on the face of the zygra.

  At first she had wondered why the company didn't simply assign members of its own staff to hold down the chair for a year at a time, perhaps on a rota basis. Later she had realized this was contrary to outworld psychology; anyone making a career with the company was trained for work far more important than sitting on Zygra and watching a lot of machines tending a lot of moss. Any casual applicant, reasonably greedy and moderately intelligent, would suffice, and would cost no more than salary for a year and ship-room to and from the Zygra system plus a course of training that occupied a mere fraction of the computers' attention, and would be dismissable on his return without the company having to worry any more about him.

  If
someone with inside information about harvesting the pelts wanted to sell out to another company, he'd have to have experience at the headquarters end as well as on Zygra, and if he worked well enough to rise in the firm to a level where his knowledge was likely to be useful to a third party, he'd have to be either a fool or a maniac to risk the gamble.

  Kynance was coming to admire the Zygra Company in an upside-down fashion. There was no denying the efficient cynicism with which they conducted their operations.

  As the reluctant admiration grew, so her original doubts subsided. This was no chiseling two-bit undertaking which could add to its profit margin by a fat percentage if it weaseled on its employment contracts. This was a firm big enough and inarguably profitable enough to tolerate such minor budget items as repatriation of an Earthsider. An extra five percent on the freight charges for a single consignment of Earthbound pelts would more than absorb her passage home.

  And she was not going to give them the slightest hint, the slightest suggestion of a hint, that she had infringed the contract.

  Since the interview at which she'd been engaged, she hadn't seen Shuster again. But he was the first person she spotted when she presented herself at the spaceport an hour ahead of the scheduled time, and she recalled with sick anticipation that he had claimed to be directly in charge of the Zygra supervisors, so there was no chance of eluding him.

  She mentally squared her shoulders, and marched boldly towards him. The group of spacemen with whom he was talking noticed her before he did, and one or two of them stared in a flattering manner. Then the senior among them, a lean type with second-mate braids on his tunic, tapped Shuster's arm and pointed towards her.