Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  “So here we go, people. Don’t all hate me at once.” He put up his hands in mock-guard.

  “Curiosity killed a cat,” Onderdonck snorted, jowls quivering. “Your mystery is childish nonsense. This will finish you in the Corps, and Vane too.”

  “How did curiosity kill the cat?” Hank Chalmers asked. “I don’t like this either, Webb, but I can’t put my finger on a reason.”

  “A planet’s a planet, all in the day’s work,” Minelli soothed. “Let’s do a job on this Proteus and there’ll be no more mystery.”

  Joe Svirsky, the biologist, stood up. He was a stocky, graying man with cheekbones prominent in a broad face under slanting gray eyes.

  “This is no ordinary mission, my brothers,” he said gravely. “We must be careful.”

  “Amen to that,” Gard grinned. “Afterward let the Corps bounce me as far as it likes. I’ve been pointing for this all my life.”

  * * * *

  Proteus circled the smaller star close in. Its day was fourteen standard hours, no axial tilt and so no seasons, gravity point seven, air breathable but hot and humid, the instruments told them. Gard called a pre-landing conference in the main workroom on their second day in orbit.

  “Mean relief under ninety feet. Eighty-five percent sea, most of it epeiric. Never saw an Earth-type so leveled off,” Minelli said.

  “Mean annual temperature estimate twenty degrees above optimum,” Onderdonck said, looking at Gard across the table. “That alone rules out settlement. No landing necessary now or ever and pop goes your mystery. Let’s go home.”

  “We must sample the biota for a complete report,” Gard disagreed. “We serve man’s land hunger and his curiosity.”

  “Speak for yourself!” Onderdonck snapped, rising and propping himself on pudgy fingers. “I invoke article ten of regulations and call for a vote of supersession.”

  “Hold on, Webb, that makes bad feeling,” Pete Minelli said. “Besides, I want a closer look at that textbook peneplain down below.”

  Onderdonck insisted. Only Chalmers, glancing apologetically at Gard, voted with him.

  “Take her down, Ike, the place Minelli picked,” Gard told the shipman.

  McPherson set her down on a continental dome, a comparatively well-drained area of grassy swales and broad-leaf tree clumps.

  “Looks ordinary as hell,” McPherson said, standing at the foot of the ramp.

  “Hot as hell too,” Minelli said. “Steam bath. Me for swimming trunks.” He started back aboard.

  “Just a minute, Pete,” Gard called after him. “I was about to propose we stay on ship-time on account of the short local day. Okay with you?”

  “Hell yes, what’s time to a geologist?”

  They agreed to stay on ship-time. Svirsky was already taking soil and water specimens from a sluggish stream nearby. Chalmers gathered grass seeds and berries.

  “Help with the biota, Webb, and we’ll do a minimal job, get out fast,” Gard offered.

  “No,” Onderdonck growled, “and don’t figure on that account I’ll take galley duty, either.”

  Gard shrugged his broad shoulders.

  * * * *

  Chalmers started on protein analysis and Svirsky on the microbiota. Gard, McPherson and Minelli set up observation units in the few varying habitats the gray-green flatness afforded on a five-mile radius from the ship. Each unit transmitted to a scope on the monitor panel in the main workroom and could be switched at will to the large stereo-screen. The three men took turns on monitor watch, making selective recordings of animal behavior for later analysis.

  Native protein was unusually similar to that of Earth. The native vertebrates were Earth-homologous too, including birds and reptiles, but small. The largest land animal seemed to be a goat-sized herbivore. Svirsky turned to a comparative anatomy series and Gard and the ship-man trapped specimens for him when off watch. Minelli ranged afield in the atmospheric flyer for geology specimens. Outside the ship the men wore swimming trunks and cursed the heat. After two standard weeks Gard tentatively decided to lift out on the following day.

  That afternoon Pete Minelli burst into the main workroom shouting, “Ed, hey Ed, there’s men on this planet!”

  Svirsky turned sharply from his dissecting table. Chalmers came in from his lab across the passageway, pale and staring. McPherson, at the monitor panel, tugged at his red mustache and Onderdonck flushed. Gard spoke for them all.

  “Pete, you’re crazy with the heat! What do you mean?”

  “At least one man, by God!” Minelli insisted. “Big as you and red-headed as Ike over there. Naked and bearded and wild.”

  “Tell us about it. Did you speak to him?”

  “I was taking a core not far from here and this fellow was all of a sudden there, walking sideways around me with a stupid look on what I could see of his face. It shook me up, Ed. All I could think to do was keep turning to face him. After about three laps he went into the brush and I got out so fast I left my drill rig there.”

  “Somebody marooned? Maybe a lost Earth colony?” McPherson wondered, rubbing his long chin.

  “Could be native,” Gard murmured.

  “I’ll be damned,” McPherson said. “Everybody knows men are unique to Earth. We haven’t found humans on ten thousand planets now.”

  “We’ve found bipedal mammals on plenty of them. These could easily be human-homologs. Right, Joe?”

  Svirsky nodded gravely, his eyes wide.

  “If so, it’s contact,” Onderdonck said thickly. “Gard, you fool, you’ve found man’s first rival for the galaxy. Youwould persist!”

  “Hey, here’s one come into a scope!” McPherson shouted. “I’ll switch it over.”

  A scene of brown-flowered grass and gray-green shrubs took shape in the big stereo. A naked woman squatted, partially covered by long, coppery hair, and plucked grass racemes which she ate or fed to a scrabbling infant beside her.

  “Who’s crazy now?” Minelli asked, looking around the group. “Ike, there’s a carrot-top soulmate for you.”

  The woman suddenly looked directly out of the screen. Her heavy features were expressionless, her slaty eyes dull.

  “Opposites attract,” McPherson retorted. “Pete, she’s giving you the eye.”

  “Not a very bright eye,” Gard said. “They’re not exactly potent rivals, Webb.”

  The woman shambled off the screen, eating as she went, the child scrabbling after. McPherson worked his controls.

  “Here, I got ‘em on another one,” he said. “Hey! there’s a man!”

  The man was eating one of the goat-things. It twitched and jerked with residual life. The woman joined him in gnawing at it. From time to time she fed partially chewed flank muscle to the infant.

  “Hell, they must be native,” McPherson said disgustedly. “No human could slide back that far.”

  “Gard, let’s get out of here fast,” Hank Chalmers said abruptly.

  “Not till I try communication.”

  “Obviously useless. They’re pure animal, for all their shape.”

  “Hank, you know better than that. Extrapolate from that otter-homolog Joe has on his table. These Proteans must have a nervous system capable of forming a very rich symbol world. Right, Joe?”

  “Yes, but unlike the skeleton and musculature it is Earth-anomalous,” Svirsky said. “The pyramidal motor tracts in the cord do not cross. It might be a very strange symbol world.”

  “In what way?”

  “We don’t care!” Onderdonck burst out. “This is a waste of time on an unauthorized deviation from assigned mission. I vote to supersede Gard and go home. Who’s with me?”

  “I am,” Chalmers muttered, casting down his eyes.

  “Damn it, Ed, I want to back you, but set some limit,” Minelli pleaded.

  “Okay, Pete, a time limit. Give me one standard week.”

  “Okay, a week. I’ll ride along.”

  “Me too,” McPherson said. Svirsky nodded agreement.

&nbs
p; * * * *

  Over the next three days Proteans by the score came into the observation area, circling aimlessly to within a mile of the ship. They fled when Gard approached them in the field, doubling back to their dumb circling of him when he stood still. He developed headaches and overpowering fits of lethargy and suspected a virus, but Chalmers’ bio-analyzer found no foreign protein in him. Frequently McPherson and Minelli watched his maneuverings on the scopes and twitted him later.

  “You’re too hoity-toity, Ed,” McPherson said. “Squat down and eat snakes with ‘em and they’ll trust you.”

  “If you’d grow a beard, Ike, they’d make you a chief,” Gard grinned.

  On the morning of his fourth day in the field Gard woke in confusion on a grassy bank. McPherson and Minelli were bending over him and his left shoulder ached horribly.

  “She was eating me,” he said stupidly.

  “Yes,” Minelli agreed, white-faced. “You just folded up. Lucky we were watching. Lucky nobody had the flyer out.”

  “Get aboard, get aboard,” McPherson urged. “That shoulder needs fixing.”

  Chalmers, treating the wound a few minutes later, laughed shortly. “Communication by bite, eh, Gard? Where did you bite her?”

  Gard called a luncheon conference around the big table in the workroom. Outside the primary sun was setting.

  “They are animals,” he said ruefully to the men around the table. “We’ve never seen them communicate or cooperate. I doubt they even have voices. I propose we trap one and make him talk to us in action-language, the way we make rats tell us what they can see and remember.”

  “How can you make a rat talk?” McPherson asked.

  “You teach him triangle means food and square means shock, Ike. When he learns to run to one and away from the other then you and he have a common language of two symbols.”

  “Ed’ll be the food,” Minelli said. “They think he’s yummy.”

  “Go crawl under a rock, Pete. This is serious.”

  “Keep on meddling,” Onderdonck said under his breath.

  Gard firmed his lips. “What doyou think, Joe?”

  “They must have a nervous system adequate for language,” Svirsky said. “The symbol-world is in them, in neural impulse pattern and humoral gradient, far more intricately structured than in any rat. But they lack the Word. I suspect they’re like a supersaturated solution lacking a mote to crystallize a world around. But drop a primal symbol into them and they may develop language and verbal thought almost explosively.”

  “Define a primal symbol,” Chalmers demanded.

  “I can state one but not define it,” Svirsky said. “Space, time and the object. It’s triune, each member existing by virtue of the other two. It is the zygote of all language.”

  “Then it’s a verbal symbol?”

  “Yes. It is the cultural aspect or correlate of an immensely older neural symbol. The ontogeny of human language recapitulates the phylogeny of the vertebrate nervous system. Both make a model of the world, but language can bind time. If your enemy has no primal symbol, then your own becomes your most precious secret. I speak in riddles, my brothers.”

  “You speak in metaphor and analogy. That’s more poetry than science,” Onderdonck sneered.

  “And perhaps more truth than poetry,” Chalmers said thinly. “I’ll be honest, Gard. I fear your curiosity. Much as I dislike admitting it, I feel that some things are dangerous to know too soon. We need to keep firm hold of our world and wait the proper time.”

  “Ed, you don’t mean to feed ‘em that primal symbol?” McPherson asked anxiously.

  “No, Ike. I wouldn’t know how, anyway.”

  “You might trigger something, not meaning to or knowing, if you fumble around.”

  “Precisely, Ike!” Chalmers said. “Vote with Webb and me to stop all this.”

  “You promised me a week, people,” Gard pleaded. “Let me have the rest of it.”

  He won a shaky victory. Onderdonck and Chalmers undertook to bring in the observation units and to dismantle and stow the flyer. Gard, McPherson and Minelli set to work on the cage.

  * * * *

  The cage was the standard ten-foot cube of reenforced steel mesh. At one end problem boxes flanked a door with an observation unit above it. Sweating in the dim light of the further sun, the men baited the cage and charged one of the boxes with the small ground melons the Proteans ate avidly.

  “I’ll set this box for a two-lever problem,” Gard said. “See, Ike, he’ll have to press them in the right sequence to make a melon roll out. He’ll do it by random action first, then get the idea. Then we’ll make it tougher, record times and trials and so on. I expect he’ll learn fast.”

  They returned to the ship at Protean sunrise. McPherson fixed a late dinner and they ate it in the workroom watching the cage on the stereo screen. Minelli cleaned up the dishes and turned in, leaving Gard and McPherson alone. An hour later a male Protean entered the cage, showing no alarm when the door closed behind him.

  “That son of a gun looks just like me,” McPherson complained. “I wish he was green or purple.”

  “Watch him turn purple once he knows he’s trapped.”

  The Protean ate three melons, fumbled at the sticks Gard had left in the cage, and shambled through its side. The steel mesh was intact.

  “Let’s us turn purple,” McPherson said. “That ain’t possible.”

  Then it hit them. They stared at each other, speechless, then back at the screen. A female Protean came in view. She approached obliquely and seemed to slide through the mesh. She ate two melons and left, as stupidly unaware as when she came. Gard cursed softly.

  “Call Joe, Ike. Only Joe. I’ll brew some coffee.”

  The three men sipped coffee and watched a Protean eat the last melon in the cage center. McPherson broke the silence.

  “This is more’n I can take, Ed. Let’s dump it in their laps back on Earth. This calls for a full expedition.”

  “No, Ike. They’d never get several hundred people away against the jinx, not even six men another time. We’re here on a fluke and it’s up to us or never.”

  “You are the fluke, Ed,” Svirsky said. “Here’s a suggestion. Wind cable around that cage and send high frequency alternating current through it.”

  “How could that—”

  “A hunch, Ed. I’ve been wondering whether Proteans might not mix space and time into a world-structure different from our own in their neural model of reality. But so does AC mix them in a way strange to our neural model. Try it, Ed.”

  “Let’s do it, Ike.”

  Gard carried the heavy power pack, McPherson the cable and oscillator. They wound four turns around the cage, looping it over the door. Gard baited the cage with melons from the puzzle box and reset the door. Proteans shambled aimlessly near the cage when the Earthmen walked back sweating under the bright sun. When they entered the workroom the stereo showed a large male already trapped.

  He ate the two bait melons leisurely, then walked to the side of the cage and recoiled. The three men watched as he tried again and again in what seemed a mounting excitement. He began howling and other Proteans answered and drifted toward the cage, only to recoil from its outside. They milled in a ragged circle, howling too.

  “Well, they do have voices,” Gard commented.

  “Your hunch paid off, Joe,” McPherson said. “We’ve got ‘em by the tail now.”

  Svirsky grunted. “So we have, Ike.”

  It was just midnight, ship-time. By Protean sunset two hours later the captive became quiet in the cage center and those outside went away. McPherson and Svirsky turned in. Gard watched and thought.

  Minelli came in just after six. Gard asked him to take the watch until Protean sunrise at nine. He said nothing about the earlier escapes.

  “I expect Lord Proteus will stay quiet until sunrise. Then he’ll stir and be hungry and tell us how smart he is through that problem box,” he told Minelli.

  Gard
’s sleep was troubled with dreams. He woke to Minelli’s shaking and thought it was still a dream when the geologist said curtly, “Your man talked, Ed. He said ‘Open sesame.’“

  “You don’t mean he got away?”

  “You better come.” Minelli left.