John Brunner Read online

"What's the girl doing here, d'you know?" The words carried distinctly above the racket from the stemgates of the ship, where autohandlers were packing in empty pelt-crates that rang with hollow booms every time they were moved.

  Shuster half-turned, and recognized her. Was he still smarting from the smack on the face? She couldn't tell by his expression, nor by the tone he used to answer the inquiry.

  "Her? Oh, that's the new supervisor taking over from Evan."

  "What?" The second mate recoiled as though he'd been struck under the chin, and two or three of his companions exclaimed simultaneously. "Now look here, Executive! You can't do a thing like that to—"

  "Shut your mouth," Shuster told him coolly. "If you want to keep your berth aboard this ship . . . ?" The last word rose to a gently questioning note, and the second mate swallowed hard and held his tongue.

  Eyes searching for some clue to the reason for the outburst, all her misgivings returning in full force, Kynance stopped a pace distant from Shuster.

  "Congratulations," he said icily. "I'm informed you're the best trainee the company has ever had for the post you're taking on."

  "Thanks," Kynance muttered. It seemed safest to stifle her dislike of the man until he made some overt reference to the reason for it.

  Let him fust try and talk me out of it again!

  "Executive!" the second mate said. "Does that mean you won't—?"

  "If you poke your snout in one more time where it doesn't belong," Shuster snapped, "I'll cut it off. Is that clear?"

  Kynance shivered. The looks on all these faces, except Shuster's own, were such as she would only have expected to see at a funeral. There must be a catch in the deal after ail-that was the only explanation!

  But she'd persuaded herself there couldn't be, because the Zygra Company was too prosperous to bother with cheating its casual employees. Anyway, what sort of cheating was possible? By now she could have recited the contract word for word from memory, and there wasn't a loophole. The grounds for voiding it were set forth as clearly as anyone could wish, and provided she kept her head she'd last out the year.

  "Go to your cabin," Shuster was saying. "It's clearly arrowed from this lock here: number ninety. And remember that you are not to interfere with the running of this ship in any way. Delaying a crewman in the exercise of his duty constitutes interference, and when the ship is at space all crewmen are considered to be on duty twenty-four hours a day. In short, you will break your contract and lose your chance of repatriation if you talk to anybody except me. Is that understood?"

  He could have been reading her mind. Her plan had been formed a moment earlier: to corner one of these glum-looking men and pump him for explanations. He'd sensed it and forestalled her with orders given before witnesses. Pretty girl or no pretty girl, a spaceman in the lucrative zygra trade wasn't going to jeopardize his career for her sake.

  Was he?

  Hopefully she surveyed the men one last time, and read in their shrugs that they were resigned to her fate, whatever it was.

  Why not? It's not going to happen to them!

  Abruptly she discovered that she hated the Zygra Company and Shuster as its personification, because contact with him had made her so bitter that she seemed like a stranger to herself.

  With weary apathy she entered the ship and found her cabin. Surrounded by the noise of preparations for takeoff, she stowed her gear and sat down on the bunk.

  In five or ten minutes—she had lost track of the time— Shuster came calling.

  Shifty-eyed, he slipped through the door and pushed it closed quickly. He gave her a quick false smile and spoke in low tones.

  "I'm sorry I haven't been able to see you since our first meeting, my dear, but I've been tremendously busy—you'll understand that the company's business follows the same life-rhythm as the pelts themselves, ha-ha!, and as the time for harvesting approaches so we find ourselves more and more frantically busy—but I have kept a close eye on your progress and I must say that despite your lack of what we generally lay down as minimum qualifications for entering our employment, that is to say a scholar degree in some major field, you've done very well and it might easily be possible to arrange for you to join the company's permanent staff on completion of your tour at Zygra . . . . "

  All this time he had been closing the distance between them, and now he was sitting next to her, hands returning to the very same positions from which she had pushed them on the former occasion.

  She detested men who were so egotistical that their preliminaries to love-making followed a pattern like a computer program, fixed and unalterable, so that a girl could never tell if they were thinking of her, or the last partner, or the next. She gritted her teeth, forcing herself to stay calm in the hope of picking up some clue to the pitfall she had overlooked.

  There must be one. She was convinced she had deluded herself.

  "I think perhaps that during the voyage we could become quite good friends, don't you? And a word from me in praise of your ability could carry a lot of weight with the firm, you know . . . . "

  Fumble, maul, squeeze—no, it was more than she could stand. She didn't slap him this time, but made her voice sound as though she wanted to when she said stonily, "I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in a career with the company. I want to get home, and if it takes a year on Zygra to do it I'll spend a year on Zygra."

  He withdrew, flushing, and stood up. For a second she thought he was going to hurl some taunt at her, reveal how he believed he had tricked her, but he bit down hard on his shiny-wet lower lip and went out.

  VI

  DICKERY EVAN stretched and yawned under the shower, let it progress by itself from steaming-hot through lukewarm to icy and at last to hot dry air. He was a stocky, well-built young man mostly of New Zealand extraction, the Maori side predominating.

  He didn't dress as he left the shower—why bother, when there was no one else to see him? He padded to the autochef and dialed breakfast, then carried it on a tray to his favorite vantagepoint, the dome overlooking the main station's landing-deck.

  He'd thought at first that, but for the presence of that deck, that smooth sheet of immensely tough metal constituting the largest solid surface on Zygra, he'd have gone crazy. Now, right at the end of his tour, he wasn't so sure. He'd seriously considered putting in for an extension, because it was the only way he could see himself ever drawing down a salary this size, and the complete isolation was growing easier to bear all the time, but for one thing—the lack of women.

  Still, it was too late to do anything about an extension now. He'd put off and put off a decision, until the day had come when the calendar had advised him it was less than one month before his time expired. Best that way, perhaps—he didn't want to get so used to loneliness that he couldn't readjust to human company.

  He thought of half a dozen girls he planned to look up when he got home, and the time he could give them with his accumulated pay . . . oh, not all of it, of course, because he planned to keep himself and a long succession of girls in great comfort with it for the rest of his active life. If he bought a share in some promising enterprise with say ten thousand of it, and started a small business of his own with another twenty, and acquired some land and had a house put on it, which would cost about sixteen to eighteen depending on the size . . .

  His mind ran on happily along these lines as he watched the monitors drifting in towards the main station. Drifting was the word; they were simply riding the same currents, the same sluggish solar tides, that the pelts followed to their rendezvous with harvest.

  Since his arrival—his forehead creased with the effort of picturing the concepts involved—those monitors had been all over the planet. The trail of the pelts was immensely long. Scarcely one of the beautiful things had less than twenty thousand miles of wandering to its credit. Four years old: ripe for the harvest ....

  When he had first been left here by himself, he had passed much of the time in figuring out ways of getting a pelt off the pla
net when he was picked up. There was one girl in particular he thought would look marvelous in a pelt, and nothing else. What it must be like to make love to a woman wearing a sort of living rainbow cum scent-organ.

  Then he'd found out various discouraging facts, such as how the pelts felt when they hadn't been treated and coated with the solid nourishment necessary to their survival off Zygra, and that every single one which was selected for export was watched by computers keener than hawks, and that there was no chance at'all of getting into the coating-station and stealing a batch of the prepared nutriments to be applied by hand.

  That had killed a subsidiary ambition, too. He'd thought of all the inside secrets about zygra pelts which he'd acquired, and considered the idea of setting up as a refur-bisher of the things. That would be a good line of business for an ex-supervisor of Zygra. Plenty of rich people whose pelts were finally wearing out would pay ten thousand for a fresh coating of nutriment even if it only lasted an extra couple of years. Someone in a position to buy two pelts in a lifetime was a real rarity—even rarer than the pelts were!

  But he wasn't a good enough chemist to duplicate the resuit of the complex natural processes the coating-station merely accelerated, and ultimately he'd concluded that if refurbishing the pelts had been an economic proposition the Zygra Company would have established the service themselves.

  Anyhow, he couldn't get his hands on a sample of the coating for someone else to copy, short of stripping it from a finished pelt. And he couldn't get a finished pelt, so . . .

  Besides, he told himself comfortably, somebody's bound to have tried that already, just as they've tried to breed the things on other planets and failed. Wasn't there some rich fool over Loki way who bought five of them and tried to raise them in an artificial swamp?

  Silly ass. Better to be content with what he was going to get honestly: a hundred thousand credits, free passage home, and a good, pleasant, undemanding existence for the rest of his life, natural or otherwise. Good point in there somewhere—set aside a small sum to cover geriatric treatment at age sixty or so ... .

  He dozed, while the watery morning sunlight sifted over the gathering hordes of zygra pelts, and the monitors closing in behind them, and the bulk of the coating-station looming over the horizon from its regular site among a particularly rich patch of yardweed and blockweed, bringing the huge vats of gelantinized fortified nutriment for the pelts.

  He came awake with a jolt. Somewhere at the edge of consciousness he'd detected a shrilling noise. What the—?

  Oh no! He 'd heard that noise before, at the very beginning of his stay. They'd turned a switch somewhere in the bowels of the main station, and an alarm siren had started to squall. The man who'd been showing him around (what was the name?—oh yes: Executive Shuster) had let it sound for half a minute and then turned it off.

  And he'd said, "Remember that noise, Evan! It may go off at any time, day or night. It indicates a malfunction of the automatics. One of the two reasons you're here at all is that such a malfunction may occur. It never has yet, but if it does, the problem is in your lap. Which is why I'm stressing the importance of recognizing the alarm."

  Evan had scuffled at the deck with his feet a bit and then said wonderingly, "But—there's no other noise I'm likely to confuse it with, is there there?"

  "No, there isn't." Shuster had smiled blandly, rather oilily. "But you heard how long I let it run for—thirty seconds?"

  «YeS"

  "It may sound at any time with or without a malfunction. The point of this is to make sure you're on your toes. If it sounds, you have exactly those thirty seconds to reach this switch and cut it off—survey the operation from spawn to finished pelts—and report what you find. It may be that everything is in order; in that case, you'll know it was only a test. But I warn you quite bluntly that if you fail to reach it in thirty seconds—"

  Evan leapt to his feet and headed for the switch at a dead run.

  His trembling hand missed on the first grab, got it on the second. The clamor died instantly. But his skin was prickly with sweat. How long had it been sounding before he'd caught on—more than thirty seconds?

  No, please! It's not possible for me to have lost everything after eleven months!

  Frantically he surveyed the telltale boards which relayed the information from all the substations and monitors. As far as he could tell, everything was as it ought to be. So this had been a dummy alarm, a test to make sure he was on his toes.

  The bastards! The radiated pigs! To leave him eleven months without a test at all, then catch him napping!

  Heart sinking, he reported to the computers that eveiything seemed to be in order despite the siren. He hesitated, breathing deeply until he was in a fair approximation of the state in which the alarm had caught him, made his way back to where he had been dozing, and timed himself on the run to the switch.

  The run alone took him fifteen seconds. He tried again, and registered seventeen.

  He exhaled gustily. Well, there was no choice then. Unless he was to be cheated of his pay and passage home, he had to doctor the record of the time the alarm had sounded. It was a terrible decision to make, since unwarranted tampering with any of the automatics constituted sabotage and voided the contract of employment, but he wasn't going to let one lapse cancel nearly a year of his life.

  He slid up the front panel of the alarm unit and peered cautiously into its bowels. Ah: straightforward enough. A band of white tape had reeled out like a dry tongue from the base of the siren, and it was clearly calibrated in one-second intervals. All he needed to do was ease it back so that about twenty-five of the gradations showed, instead of—he counted —the damning total of forty-nine at present visible.

  He stretched out his arm and grasped the tape.

  Instantly the front panel of the alarm unit slammed down, smashing the bones of his forearm a few inches below the elbow. He screamed and tried to tear himself free, straining to claw the panel up again with his other hand, feeling the raw ends of bone rub and scrape agonizingly. Through a white fire of pain he heard a majestic impersonal voice seal his doom.

  "You are reminded that unauthorized tampering with any of the automatic mechanisms constitutes sabotage of the Zygra Company's operations. Accordingly you are no longer a contracted employee of the Zygra Company."

  "No!" he screamed, wrenching loose his shattered arm and cradling it in the other. He kicked the alarm unit as if he could make it suffer as much as he did.

  "You are no longer a contracted employee of the Zygra Company."

  He recovered a little of his self-control, thought of having his arm mended, and went stumbling to the medicare unit, a coffin-sized block of automatics sited at the base of the observation dome. He pushed its switches awkwardly with his good hand, trying to avoid jarring the other arm.

  "You are no longer a contracted employee of the Zygra Company," said the unit.

  "Wha-a-at?" The voice was shrill; Evan barely knew it for his own rather than another recorded signal. "But you can't do this to me! You can't—it's inhuman!"

  They could.

  Two hours later, having set his arm crudely in a sort of splint without benefit of anesthetic, he settled to his own satisfaction that there was no longer any automatic device on the station prepared to serve him. Even the autochef was included in the ban; it spat stinking burned fat at him. The shower, too—that delivered a stream of boiling water. In the smoke and steam his ambitions evaporated: goodbye house, goodbye girls, goodbye geriatric treatment, goodbye Dickery Evan. For without the autochef he would starve before the harvesting ship was due.

  "Then we'll make sure those radiated swine don't enjoy what they've done to me," he promised between clenched teeth, and went to see what weapons he could find.

  But he had only killed one pelt, chopping it to messy shreds in the water, before the nearest monitor came chugging up and seized him in its powerful mechanical arms, to carry him off across the lonely swamps and abandon him to his f
ate on a drifting mat of weed. The force with which he was dumped made the bones of his arm grind together again, and the dazzling-bright pain blotted out his consciousness.

  Ignorant even of identity, heedless of his fate, Dickery Evan floated on the sluggish solar tides of Zygra.

  VII

  ARMS ACHING, hands sore from gripping the crude paddle, Horst Lampeter kept thinking of Solomon and how real, how physical, this work made his loss seem. Their boat was difficult enough to drive along anyway, consisting as it did of only a rough frame supporting them on half a hundred pieces of bladderwrack, the cysts inflated by lungpower and resealed with a gummy exudation from the stems of dinglybells. Every other day it was necessary to check the whole caboodle and replace a dozen or so of the cysts which were starting to rot.

  But while Solomon had been with them paddling had been disproportionately easier. He'd driven his blade harder than Horst and Coberley put together—Victor could be ignored, since he was the weakest of any of them and often fainted after a couple of hours in full sun. Also, Solomon had been able to crack an occasional joke, tell a story, true or invented, or sing bawdy songs in his resonant bass voice.

  Now he rots among the roots .... He'd have made a joke of that too—or a new verse for one of his songs.

  "Take the right-hand side of that weed ahead!" Victor called in his thin, piping imitation of a shout.

  "Does it matter?" Coberley snarled. "We don't even know if we're on the same half of the damned planet as the main station!"

  "But we are," Victor insisted, sounding close to tears. Horst suspected that both he and Coberley had been equally affected by the death of Solomon, though none of them—including himself—had said how much he was missed. They gave their feelings away all the time, nonetheless: Coberley had been more than ever irascible since the disaster, while Victor had taken to whimpering aloud.

  "Haven't we seen the monitors nearby?" Victor went on.