the Dark Light Years (16 page)

He placed a hand over her finger-tips as carelessly as if they were molybdenum crystals. She withdrew them.

"I wish to change the topic of conversation, Bryant I have a suggestion that I think may be fruitful. Do you think you could get me a volunteer?”

"For what?”

"To be marooned on a strange planet.”

Back on the strange planet called Earth, the third Politan called Blug Lugug was in a terrible state of mental confusion. He was strapped to a bench with a series of strong canvas straps that passed across what was left of his body. A number of wires and cables ran from machines that stood silent or gargled to themselves on one side of the room and climbed on to his body or into his various orifices. One cable in particular ran from one instrument in particular worked by one man in particular; the man was dressed in a white sort of clothing, and when he moved a lever with his hand, something without meaning happened in the third Politan's brain. This meaningless thing was more awful than anything the third Politan had known existed.
He saw now how right the Sacred Cosmopolitan had been when he used to term bad to describe these thinlegs.
Here was bad bad bad: it reared up before him sturdy and strong and hygienic, and gnawed away his intelligence bit by bit.

The something without meaning came again. A gulf opened where there had been something growing, some-thing delightful, memories or promises, who knows?, but something never to be replaced.

One of the thinlegs spoke. Mainly, in gasps, the Politan imitated what had been said: "
noneural response there
/ either.
He
doesn
'
t have
a pain response in
his
whole body!”

He still clung to the notion that when they realized he could imitate their speech, they would be intelligent enough to stop the things they were doing. Whatever they were doing, whatever inside their mad little minds they imagined they were doing, they were spoiling his chances of entering the carrion stage; for already they had removed two of his limbs with a saw - from the corner of his misting eyes he watched the bin in which they had been deposited - and since there were no ammp trees here, the possibility of his continuing the cycles of being was remote. Nothingness confronted him.

He cried an imitation of their words but, forgetting their limitations, pushed it high into his upper voice range. The sounds came distorted; his ockpu orifices were clogged with tiny instruments like leeches.

He needed comfort from the Sacred Cosmopolitan, his worshipped father-mother. But the Cosmopolitan had gone, no doubt to the same gradual dismemberment.
The grorgs had gone; he caught their almost supersonic cries answering him in lament from a distant part of the room.
Then the something without meaning burst over
him
again, so that he could no longer hear - but what was it that he had been able to... been able to what? Something else had gone.

In his dizziness, he saw that a new figure had joined the figures in white. In his dizziness, he thought he recognized the new figure. It was - or it was very like - the figure that had performed the dung ritual a brief time ago.

Now the figure cried something, and through the growing dizziness the Politan tried to cry the same thing back, to show it had recognized him: "I can't bear to watch you're doing something that should never be done!”

But the thinlegs, if it was that specific one, gave no sign of recognition. He covered the front part of his upper head with his hands and went fast from the room, almost as if- The something without meaning came again, and the white figures all looked eagerly at their instruments.

Tipped far back until his toes were level with his head, the Director of the Exozoo lay in his therapad and sucked a glucose mixture through a teat. He was being calmed by a young men. now a member of the Exploration Corps with an Explorer's certificate, who had once trained under him at the zoo. Gussie Phipps, who had flown in from Macao, offered comfort.

"You're not so tough as you used to be, Sir Mihaly. You ought to change to synthetic foods; they're better for you. Fancy letting a vivisection upset
you!
How many vivisections have you performed yourself?”

"I know, I know, you needn't remind me. It was just the sight of that particular poor creature there on the stone, slowly being chopped into little bits and not registering anything detectable as pain or fear.”

"Which should make it better rather than worse.”

"Heavens, I know it should!
But it was so darned uneventful I had the feeling for a moment I was in at a preview of how man will treat any intelligent opposition it meets out there."
He gestured vaguely towards the patterned ceiling. "Or perhaps I mean that beneath the scientific etiquette of the vivisection bench I heard the savage drums of ancient man, still beating away like mad for a blood-letting session.

What is man up to, Gussie.?”

"Such an outburst of pessimism is unlike you. We're coming away from the mud, away from the primeval slime, away from the animal, towards the spiritual. We have a long way to go, but -”

"Yes, it's an answer I've often used myself. We may not be very nice now but we'll be nicer at some
unspecified
future time. But is it true? Oughtn't we to have stayed in the mud? Mightn't it be more healthy and sane down there? And are we just giving ourselves excuses to carry on as we always did?

Think how many primitive rites are still with us in a thin disguise: vivisection, giving in marriage, cosmetics, hunting, wars, circumcision - no, I don't want to think of any more. When we do make an advance, it's in a ghastly false direction - like the synth food fad, inspired by last century's dietary madnesses and thrombosis scares. It's time I retired, Gussie, got away while I'm not too aged, moved to some simpler clime where the sun shines. I've always believed that the amount of thought that goes on inside a man's head is in inverse proportion to the amount of sunshine that goes on out-side it.”

The door globe chimed.

"I'm expecting nobody," Pasztor said, with an
irritability
he rarely showed. "Go and see who it is for me, Gussie, and shoo them away. I want to hear all about Macao from you.”

Phipps disappeared, to return with Enid Ainson, weeping.

Nipping with momentary savagery on the end of his glucose teat, Pasztor jacked himself into a less relaxed position and stuck a leg out of the therapad.

"It's Bruce, Mihaly!" Enid cried.
"Bruce has disappeared.
I'm sure he's drowned himself. Oh Mihaly, he's been so difficult! What can I do?”

"When did you last see him?”

"He couldn't stand the disgrace of being turned down for the Gansas. I know he's drowned himself.

He often threatened he would.”

"When did you last see him, Enid?”

"Whatever shall I do? I must let poor Aylmer know!”

Pasztor climbed out of the pad. He gripped Phipps' elbow as he moved towards the technivision.

"We'll have to hear about Macao some other time, Gussie," he said.

He began to
technical
the police, while Enid wept in a businesslike way behind him.

Bruce Ainson was already a fair distance beyond the reach of Earth police.

On the day after the Gansas was ejected into space, a much less publicized flight began. Blasting from a small operational spaceport on the east coast of England, a systemship started its long haul across the ecliptic. System-ships were an altogether different sort of spaceship from the starships. They carried no TP drive. They fuelled on ions, consuming most of their bulk as they travelled. They were built for duties within the solar system only, and most of them that left Britain nowadays were military craft.

The 7.5. Brunner was no exception. It was a trooper, packed to the hull with reinforcements for the Anglo-Brazilian war on Charon. Among those reinforcements was an ageing and troubled nonentity named B. Ainson, who had been mustered as a clerk.

That sullen outcast of the solar family, Charon, known generally to soldiers as the Deep Freeze Planet, had been discovered telescopically by the Wilkins-Pressman Lunar Observatory almost two decades before it was visited by man.
The First Charon Expedition (on which was a brilliant young Hungarian dramatist and biologist named Mihaly Pasztor) discovered it to be the father of all billiard balls, a globe some three hundred miles in diameter (307'558 miles, according to the latest edition of the Brazilian Military Manual, 309'567 miles according to its British equivalent).
This globe was without feature, its surface smooth in texture, white in
color
, slippery and almost without chemical properties. It was hard, but not extremely hard. It could be bored into with high-speed drills.

To say that Charon had no atmosphere was inaccurate. The smooth white surface was the atmosphere, frozen out over the long and unspeakably tedious eons during which Charon, a travelling morgue without benefit of bones, trundled its bulk about its orbit, connected by what hardly seemed more than coincidence with a first magnitude star called Sol. When the atmosphere was dug and
analyzed
, it was found to consist of a mixture of inert gasses packed together into a form unknown to, and un-reproducible in, Earth's laboratories. Somewhere below this surface, seismographic reports indicated, was the real Charon: a rocky and pulseless heart two hundred miles across.

The Deep Freeze Planet was an ideal place on which to hold wars.

Despite their excellent effect on trade, wars have a deleterious effect on the human body; so they became, during the second decade of the twenty-first century, codified, regulated, umpired, as much subject to skill as a baseball game or to law as a judge's table talk. Because Earth was very crowded, wars were banished to Charon. There, the globe had been marked out with tremendous lines of latitude and longitude, like a celestial draughts board.

Earth was by no means peacefully inclined. In con-sequence, there were frequently waiting lists for space on Charon, the lists consisting mainly of belligerent nations who wished to book regions about the equator, where the light for fighting was slightly better. The Anglo-Brazilian war occupied Sectors 159-260, adjacent to the current Javanese-Guinean conflict, and had been dragging on since the year 1999. A Contained Conflict it was called.

The rules of Contained Conflict were many and involved.
For instance, the weapons of destruction were rigidly defined. And certain highly qualified social ranks -who might bring their side unfair advantages - were for-bidden on Charon. Penalties for breaking such rules were very high. And, for all the precautions that were taken, casualties among combatants were also high.

In consequence, the flower of English youth, to say nothing of blooms of a blowsier age, were needed on Charon; Bruce Ainson had taken advantage of that fact to enlist as a man without social rank and to slip quietly out of the public eye. A century earlier, he would probably have joined the Foreign Legion.

As the little ion-driven trooper carried him now over the ten light hours that separated Earth and Charon, he might, had he known of it, have reflected with contempt on Sir Mihaly's glib remark that the amount of thought in a man's head is in inverse proportion to the amount of sun outside it. He might have so reflected, if only the Brunner permitted reflection among the men packed between its decks head to tail; but Ainson, together with all his companions, went out to the Deep Freeze Planet in deep freeze.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

One of the ways - if you were an intellectual - of proving you were not an intellectual was to stroll up and down the Scanning Deck with the sleeves of your tunic rolled un-tidily to the elbow. You put one of the big new corky mescahales between your lips, and you strolled up and down laughing heartily at your own jokes or at those of your companion. That way, the ratings who came up here for a gaze at the universe could see for themselves that you were human.

The faulty ingredient in this prescription, Lattimore thought, was his current companion, Marcel Gleet, the Second Navigation Officer. It would have constituted a major solecism, almost a solar solecism, to have laughed at what Gleet said. Gleet was wedded to seriousness, and the marriage was much like a funeral.

"
... would seem a substantial possibility," he was saying, "that the star cluster, the co-ordinates of which I have just mentioned, may be the home of our alien species.
There are six stars in the cluster having between them some fifteen orbiting planets. I was talking with Mellor of Geocred last watch, and he infers that as many as six of them are likely to prove Earth-type.”

One certainly couldn't laugh at that, Lattimore thought, though there were several crew about on the deck, not a few of them laughing - mainly at Mrs. Warhoon's notice, which was pinned conspicuously to the main notice board.

"
Since all of these six Earth-type bodies," Gleet continued, "are within two to three light years of Clementina, they would seem to constitute a reasonable area in which to pursue our search.
A further advantage is that the six bodies are all within light days of each other, an immense help with regard to flight promptitude.”