John Brunner Read online

  Horst twisted his mouth in a parody of a smile. Should any of them have come here?

  And now: this last absurd desperate gamble ahead of them. What a plot to be hatched by four naked men, one almost insane, one driven only by hate, and one crippled with a broken arm!

  As for the fourth . . .

  He shook his head violently. He dared not wonder if he himself was still mentally normal.

  Mechanically pumping the paddle with hands that had forgotten how to report the pain of exhaustion, he stared at the prospect ahead. At least there was no further immediate risk of running aground—the tide had deepened the water to maximum and in places it was now sixty feet deep. Curiously abbreviated, the stems and fronds of the longest bottom-plants swayed against their own reflections: mud-sequoias, aquatic arbutus, mock-magnolia—the latter heavy with blossoms of an unhealthy greenish-white unconnected with their own life-cycle, being aerophytes more akin to orchids than anything else familiar to humans.

  At this moment, his impulse was to be thankful for the parasite flowers. There was no animal life at all on Zygra, so flowers to attract insects were irrelevant and all pollination took place via water or wind; the oxygen-cycle was closed by putrefying bacteria, not animal lungs.

  But thinking about the flowers reminded him of their isolation, their ensnarement, their reduction to miserable skulking half-starved beasts. Worse than beasts. They too had become parasites on the lush but drab vegetation of Zygra. And not very successful parasites, at that, he added as he glanced down at his wasted body.

  He forced himself off that line of thought too. Better to go over their plan and try to convince himself it was feasible.

  We should have worked up the courage for it when Solomon was still alive ....

  At that, so clearly and mockingly that he swung around to see if the words had actually been spoken, his memory shouted in Victor's voice of a few minutes back: "Too late!"

  Right back at the beginning, years ago, somebody he had heard of in garbled fashion from Victor and Coberley had been foolish enough to think the Zygra Company would simply take pity on an employee—ex-employee—stranded here. He'd hung around the main station, eking out a diet of whatever edible stems and seeds he could lay hands on, until the starship had landed, and then had shown himself.

  The crew, under orders from some company official, had shot him down, affecting to mistake him for a pirate or some other rival illegally on this private planet, or perhaps a wild beast—on a world without animalsl

  The frightening moral of that, for the others who followed, was to keep clear of the annual human visitors. Accordingly, devious ways were tried of getting messages out. The pelts were not normally inspected by the humans who came to pick them up, but crated and loaded by machinery. Horst had been told that one year there had been an attempt to get a message into a pelt-crate. What had seemed like a foolproof method had been worked out.

  The station, with majestic disregard for life other than the pelts', had smashed the man's legs with an automatic packing-press—and that had been the end of a year's cunning and scheming.

  Another year, hiding messages in young pelts had been tried, in the hope that inspection on arrival would reveal they had been tampered with. Nothing had come of that, though no lives had been lost.

  Another year—

  Oh, it wasn't important. Men had died: had been killed, or had just withered away from deficiency diseases. Time had passed. The company had ignored the stranded men on Zygra, and would go on doing so until they became a nuisance. Perhaps it was a source of surprise that they survived so long on their own. It was certainly nothing more. Sabotaging the pelt-crop was nearly impossible, with a monitor accompanying every herd; it was taken for granted that approaching the main station was tantamount to suicide; getting a message off-planet was out of the question except once a year and then—likewise ....

  This, though, was only the second time they had been so numerous. When Horst had joined Coberley, his immediate predecessor, and Victor, who had been around for perhaps two, perhaps three previous years, he had raised the total to its all-time high. Then Solomon had joined them, and they'd begun to recall the taste of hope, especially when they had devised the notion of seizing and smashing a monitor so that its parent station would have to ship it back to the main station for large-scale overhaul, carrying a man hidden in its pelt-compartment.

  But now Solomon was dead, and their newest recruit was both crippled by his arm and partly dazed with pain.

  Enough.More than enough. Now was the time to gamble and if necessary lose everything. Death would be better than this half-aware existence, this fetid damp vegtetable continuation of what had once been human lives.

  Furious at the very start of it, railing blindly against the company that had trapped him into breaking his contract, Horst had screamed at Coberley, telling him they ought to go straight back to the main station and tackle the new supervisor.

  To which Coberley had said only, "Suppose Victor and I had come asking you for help?"

  And Horst had shut his mouth on a vomit-like rising of self-disgust. He had no loyalty to the Zygra Company, to keep him within the terms of his contract, but he had needed to serve out his time and collect his pay.

  There had been a certain girl . . .

  Lost forever now. Probably thinks I'm dead. But wouldn't have made inquiries to find out.

  He was coming to feel that humanity was a horrible species, glamorous on the outside with a sort of star-spangled gaudiness, but inside stinking and foul with rot.

  So now: the double-or-nothing throw. Approach the main station, risking being spotted by the newly arrived—hence still alert—supervisor (it would have been safer to wait till he was lulled into apathy and the assumption that the whole of his stay would be a lonely vacation, but they couldn't stand further delay); either invoke his help, which he couldn't give without breaking his contract, or goad him into exposing himself where they could overpower him, then set about wrecking the automatics so thoroughly that the company would have to send an unscheduled ship. Which might excite interest at government level, and save them from simply being killed off.

  A thin chance indeed. But it was all they had. And Horst felt it might work. After all, unless something more blatant had been installed since he'd last seen the main station, all its weapons had had to be disguised as something else and excused as "devices to prevent willful sabotage." The Nefer-titian inspectors hadn't winked at computer-operated laser guns or anything of that kind.

  He wasn't looking at anything now—hadn't been, for how long he didn't know. His mind was far away and his motions were as unthinking as a machine's. He hadn't heard Coberley tell him to stop paddling; it took the man's savage backhanded slap to make him aware of his surroundings.

  Dazed, he stared over the water. There was the coating station, apparently just beginning to get up power to go hunt weeds; there were the substations and monitors in a sea of unripe pelts; there was the main station, its landing-deck glistening in the watery sunlight, and on the deck—

  "It's a woman," Horst said softly.

  Coberley, who had been snapping out some sort of orders from sheer habit, broke off. "What?"

  "It's a woman!" Horst repeated, trying to rise to his feet and re-learning what he had forgotten in the heat of the moment: this craft had no bottom except for the clumped bladderwrack cysts.

  "How do you know?"

  "My eyes aren't that bad." Horst closed and rubbed them, then looked again. "Yes, there's no question about it—a woman. Do you hear me, Coberley?"

  But Coberley wasn't listening. He was trying to stop Victor from waving at the new supervisor.

  "Get your head down! We want this damned boat to look like a raft of flotsam, not—"

  "He-elp!" Dickery Evan ignored him, flinging his good arm into the air and waving as frantically as Victor. "He-e-elp!"

  Why shouldn't a woman who'd taken on this job be as callous as a man? She'd have tak
en the post for the same reasons as they had, her predecessors, and she'd know as well as they that even to wave back was to forfeit her pay at the end of her year's tour: signaling to someone not employed by the Zygra Company voided the contract.

  Yet Horst was waving too, now, and shouting, and after a moment of silent fury even Coberley gave in and did the same.

  XI

  DOOMED OR NOT, Kynance realized sickly, nothing in the galaxy could prevent her from giving assistance to those men on their weird makeshift boat. So within a couple of days of starting her year-long tour, she could kiss goodbye to her chance of repatriation. For all her attempts to persuade herself that she was going to win out, it had been an illusion all along. Unless those were survivors from a starship which had crashed on Zygra—and the odds against that were enormous— their presence could be accounted for in only one way.

  They must be what Shuster had called "previous incumbents," deliberately disqualified from the company's employ and left to live or die as the planet let them.

  Their arrival proved one thing, of course: the Zygra Company's insistence that this place was uninhabitable without millions of credits' worth of equipment was at least an exaggeration and probably a downright lie. She shuddered as she contemplated the idea of having to wrest a living from this boundless marshland.

  Among the—how many? She narrowed her eyes and counted: four men.—Among them, there must be at least one of remarkable talent and determination. You'd have expected resignation or even suicide by this time.

  Somebody like that shouldn't be abandoned to fate, even by a callous super-organism like the Zygra Company. She clenched her fists and turned towards the observation dome, through which access was gained to the interior of the main station. She was meticulously careful not to indicate that she had noticed them; if her contract was going to be voided, the moment must be delayed still another few minutes, until she had taken some necessary precautions.

  For instance, if the computer was under orders to refuse compliance with her commands the moment she waved—in the terms of the contract, signaled or attempted to signal to someone who wasn't an employee—all hell might break loose; there would be no more booming warnings when she touched a part of the automatic machinery, nor opportunities to justify her actions with legal precedents. She would simply be treated as a saboteur and the machines would defend themselves.

  Her mind raced. Those men would need food, showers, clothing, perhaps medical attention, so she had to isolate the autochef, the domestic services and the medicare unit from the central control. But in order to gain access they would have to be allowed aboard the main station, so she must find a reason to keep the computer from blocking their path ....

  Geoffrey Kotilal versus Astronaut Ambulance Company, 2094! Where the ambulance pilot, en route to a disaster already attended by three rival firms, had declined to rescue a lone spaceman who'd lacked a guarantee of payment, and had been held negligent on the grounds that "the duty of any person in space to save the life or attempt to save the life of any other person in space is paramount above considerations of remuneration."

  Stretching it a bit to apply it to rescue operations on a planetary surface, since it specified "in space" . . . But—

  She whistled. Hadn't it been ruled, in McGillicuddy and Kropotkin versus Callisto Methane Derivatives, 2106, that interplanetary space included any solid body not possessed of its own independent jurisdiction? As of this moment, therefore, the whole planet Zygra counted as an asteroid.

  She was driving her nails so deep into her palms that it hurt. A tremendous wave of excitement had gripped her. A sort of drunkenness was making her sway. There was no time to examine this crazy notion of hers in detail; she would just have to make the latest and wildest of all her gambles, and trust that her memory, or some later precedent superseding those she had studied, wouldn't blast a hole in hei plan.

  Feverishly she ran to get tools and attacked the various automatic devices she was most likely to need. She couldn't think of any better excuse to repair the medicare unit than the one she had already used—suspected malfunction—but the computer, though it generated an aura of puzzlement and distrust, didn't actually argue until the greater part of the job was finished.

  Then, firmly, it slammed the front panel of the master monitor control unit and reported its own ignorance of any fault in that system. Kynance bit her lip. She had hoped to add at least one of the really crucial control circuits to the list of those she had isolated from the computer before she rendered the job effectively permanent by disconnecting the circuit-restorers in the central maintenance block. But—well, at any minute now that ridiculous bladder-and-stick boat might come bobbing up to the station's hull, and she would have to concede a showdown.

  She ran to the circuit-restorer, uttered her little piece about suspected malfunction, and cut off its power. On a casuistic legal basis, she could justify this because anyone attempting manual repairs to circuits like these risked being fried with several hundred volts.

  The central computer was now half-paralyzed, but the services necessary to make fife tolerable, if not comfortable, were all removed from its jurisdiction and under manual control. Anything else?

  She forced herself to stand rock-still for half a minute, surveying everything in sight, then decided she dared spend no more time down here in case the computer accused her of sabotage and voided her contract on those grounds. That would be fatal.

  She dashed towards the observation dome and emerged into sight of the four naked men as they paddled their boat to within fifty yards of the main station. Then she waved, and hallooed, and invited them to come abroad.

  "She's gone to get a gun!" Victor whimpered as the woman vanished.

  "Think so?" Coberley blasted. "Then why didn't you get your head down instead of waving at her and drawing her lttention?"

  "Maybe she didn't see us," Dickery Evan suggested weakly.

  "Of course she saw us!" Coberley growled. "Hoist, which way is the current carrying us?"

  "No current worth speaking of." Horst shrugged. "We'll have to paddle over there, and take the risk of being driven off by force. If we'd managed to catch the tidal surge as it passed this point—"

  "I wasn't in the front looking for shoals!" Victor shouted.

  I give up. Horst grasped his paddle and sank it into the silty water. On the second stroke, when Coberley joined in, he realized with a shock how completely he meant that. If I his woman was going to do what Coberley had accused him of doing in the same circumstances—ignoring them, refusing lo help because it would mean voiding her contract—he would be glad to die. He wouldn't want to rejoin the human race if a member of it could be so cynically cruel.

  After that, there was a long period of nothing but paddling, the ragged rhythm of splashes blotting out coherent thought. Around them the pelts scattered and the impassive automatics plotted the directions they were taking, fed power to engines and set monitors and substations on the first leg of their annual wanderings. If one of the monitors had headed straight lor them, Horst decided later, they would have lacked the energy to turn aside and avoid a collision.

  Fortunately, nothing barred their way until they were within fifty yards or so of the main station, at which point the woman reappeared. She was panting hard and had to regain hex breath before she called to them, but it was clear that she intended to recognize them and give help.

  "Come on! This way! Come on!" she cried, waving with both arms like a mad semaphorist.

  Behind Horst there was an unaccountable noise. He glanced around and saw that Dickery Evan had put his head down into the palm of his good hand and was sobbing with relief.

  Not case-hardened like the rest of us, Horst thought. He gathered his force for an answering shout at the woman ahead, and was just choosing words when another voice rang out: the dreadful mechanical doom-laden call which all of them knew far too well.

  "You have signaled to or in some other fashion communicated with
a person or persons not employed by the Zygra Company. Accordingly your contract is void."

  "Oh, God . . . ." Coberley breathed in a tiny despairing whisper. "What happens now?"

  "Keep paddling," Horst told him, white-lipped. "She's grinning so wide I can see it from here!"

  "Come on! It's all right!" The woman had advanced to the very edge of the station's deck, and was making gestures like an embrace to bring them closer.

  Simply letting things happen without trying to figure out reasons or explanations, Horst and his companions closed the last gap separating them from the station. The woman dropped on her belly and reached out her arm to help them off their boat. Victor insisted on pushing forward first, nearly sinking them, and went off on a crazy run around the entire deck, head bobbing on his thin neck like a chicken's, crowing with delight and disbelief.

  Horst understood the impulse, and wished he could do the same. But there was the injured Evan to be helped onto the deck, and so much weight in one place on the boat tilted it to a dangerous angle. Somehow they managed to lift him and drag him aboard; then Coberley followed, and last of all Horst.

  The sensation of solid steel underfoot seemed to magnify his weight enormously. He could barely stand and look at their savior, and try to recognize the instincts which informed him she was well worth looking at: petite, fine-featured, with strange iron-colored hair framing her face.

  All he could find to say was an inane question which made him feel so silly he wanted to bite his tongue, yet he had to force it out. "If you've broken your contract, what are you going to do?"

  The woman—correction: she was still a girl—gave a tiredlooking smile. She said, "Did you expect me to leave you out there to rot?"

  "They thought you might!" Victor put in, pausing at the end of his first circuit around the deck and shrieking the words like a parrot.

  "I'm not surprised," the girl sighed. "I guess you must have been trapped into breaking your contracts, and you probably feel the whole galaxy is against you after what you've suffered here .... But it isn't the end of the universe to have been tricked out of your pay and repatriation, you know."