John Brunner (10 page)

X

"Too
late
!"
Victor moaned. "The bastard's made us
too late!"

By
"bastard" he meant the miserable
Dickery
Evan, whose weight slumped across the stern of their clumsy "boat"
made it even more difficult than usual to force through the water. They had
been able to do nothing for him except feed him and re-tie the displaced splint
on his broken forearm—and at that, Horst suspected, they hadn't helped
noticeably. Unless he got back to civilization he would have a deformed arm
until he died.

Coberley
rounded on Victor. "Be quiet!" he
thundered. "Maybe you could have left the character to die out there, but
I couldn't have. And what do you mean, anyway—
he
made us too late? Who was supposed to be navigating us? Who sent us
straight into a
mudbank
, hey?"

Horst
winced, remembering the loathsome sucking sensation of that mud around his
legs up to the knee as he and
Coberley
had struggled
to get their craft afloat again. They had still been trying to find a line of
clear water more than a few inches deep and pointing in the direction they
wanted to go, when they'd heard the knelling sound of the starship taking off
again.

"It
wasn't my fault we ran aground!" Victor screamed.
"I
wasn't in the bow looking out for shoals, was
I?"

Horst
caught
Coberley's
eye and scowled at him.
"There's no point in arguing with him," he muttered. "He's in
one of his down-phases again. We're lucky he's stayed on the upswing this
long—at least if he goes completely crazy now we know we're close to where we
want to get."

It
was pretty slim comfort. Victor's cycles of clear thinking alternated with
periods of moody
noncommunication
, sometimes lasting
for days on end, out of which he would only emerge to voice complaints or angry
insults. He should never have come to
Zygra
. The
isolation had broken him completely.

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
taken 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."

"Damned near!"
Coberley
muttered. His eyes were switching fearfully from side to side, as though he
expected the automatics to pitch them into the sea at any moment.

"No!"
the girl insisted. "The mere fact that you're here proves my point,
doesn't it? Ah—I take it you are some of the nine of my predecessors who failed
to complete their tour of duty?"

"That's right," Horst agreed.
"Uh—I'm Horst
Lampeter
. This is Giuseppe
Coberley—Dickery
Evan, who's the latest arrived of us
four—and Victor
Sjoberg
is the one going around and
around the deck there."

"I'm
Kynance
Foy," the girl said. "I come from
Earth."

"And
you've given up your chance of being repatriated?" Horst demanded, as two
and two slotted together in his mind.

"What else could I do?
What could anyone have done?"

"But—what's
the use?" Horst countered. "I mean, here you've voided your contract,
so apart from being able to feel a solid floor instead of that disgusting mud
there's not much benefit in—"