John Brunner (4 page)

IV

H
obst
L
ampeter
parted the fronds of the
bladderwrack
and peered over the ribbon-like expanse of temporarily open water. It could
hardly be called a river, because it had no banks—it was just a channel between
two patches of mingled
bladderwrack
and
dinglybells
which had used up enough of the nearer
bondroots
to let a former
mudbank
dissolve into silt and wash away.

Damn
this mist, blurring his view! Or
was
it
the mist obscuring details? Were his eyes perhaps going bad on him? It was all
too likely—a local diet was deficient in so many necessities, and the mere
fact that you could choke something down without vomiting didn't imply proper
nutriment.

He
chopped the thought off short. Going blind on
Zygra
was too depressing an idea to be allowed to prey on his mind.
Concentrate,
he told himself.
Concentrate]

Instead
of straining to see, he listened.
Zygra
was a quiet
planet—maddeningly quiet, lacking as it did any form of animal life—but there
was always a susurrus of background noise, the plashing of open water, the suck
and shift of subsiding
mudbanks
, the occasional flop
of pelts returning to a floating phase from high on the edge of a weed-raft.
What could he hear that didn't belong in this normal murmuring?

Nothing.
Maybe Victor had calculated wrong after all.

He sighed, and remembered to shift before the
bladderwrack
accumulated enough cell-strain to
collapse the floats on which he was balancing. A man could easily get lost
among the trailing roots and fail to find his way back to air in the minute or
so he could hold his breath. Shadowed so that the light bathing him had a weird
greenish quality, he looked down at himself.

He was naked except for a belt of plaited
weed on which he had hung his crude wooden tools. His chest was so shrunken
that he could count his ribs by eye, and his skin was pallid even without the
greenish tinge of the shadows. His feet and ankles felt puffy and waterlogged.
His hair and beard, grown long for lack of any means of trimming them, were
braided together to keep them out of his way.

J
must look like a bogeyman out of a savage's nightmare.

Listening
anew, he still caught no sound distinct from the ordinary. How to know whether
or not Victor's calendar was accurate? Time in this horrible setting was so
fluid—as fluid as the marshy ground, which changed and drifted so that one
could never be sure where he was unless the night sky was clear for a change
and it was possible to sight on the stars with the notched crossed sticks he
called his "sextant."

And
even if by some miracle the calendar was correct, to within a few days at
least, and the time of harvest was really coming close, how to be sure that
some freak of circumstances wouldn't take the pelts by the northern route this
time? Four years back, they'd gone north instead of south in response either to
a fluctuation of the climate or tide, or else because some blind machine had
decided this course would be more profitable to the
Zygra
Company.

Horst
wished for solid ground on which to stamp his foot. Failing it, he pounded fist
into palm in a futile gesture of hatred. Why did people have to be this way—so
greedy to wring the last drop from a profitable venture, even if the last drop
was a man's lifeblood? It was as though the pattern of suspicion and jealously
imposed by the
Dictatrix's
régime
had rippled outward from Earth, and now, long after it had died at its
point of origin, it still ruled the minds of those in power on the
outworlds
, ferociously though they would have denied the
charge.

A sound?
A sort of flopping sound?
He jumped, just in time to save himself from being precipitated down among the
bladderwrack's
root system as it collapsed three square
feet of floats in response to the strain of his weight, and peered along the
channel as he had done earlier.

This time his heart gave a lurch. No doubt
about it: those were migrating
peltsl

The lay on the smooth surface of the water with hardly
a
hint of the quality which made them so prized
by humanity.
Their upper sides glistened, but only from wetness. It took an eye trained by
bitter experience to inform Hoist of the all-important truth: that smear of
red, that ripple of gold, overlying the pelts' basic greenish-brown,
foreshadowed the full glory of harvest-time.

Frantically
he reached behind him for the bundle of mat-weed fronds strung with a piece of
vine from an upper branch of the
bladderwrack
. The
fronds were twisted and bruised so that they would leak their juices into the
water. Without making a splash that could be detected at a distance, he set
the bundle adrift.

Moments
passed. The first taste of juice reached the searching pelts, and they began
to wriggle in their astonishing flexible manner towards the presumed source of
the lure.

Hoist
let some of the tension ooze away and whistled over his shoulder. The
bladderwrack
surged underfoot in response to movement
across its surface, and then the others were alongside, keeping their distance
carefully because to have four men's weight in one spot would trigger the
collapse of the floats instantly. The
bladderwrack
was one of many species of plant free-floating on the surface of
Zygra
, but no other seemed to have evolved the notion of
gas-filled cysts sensitive to weight on the upper side. The process went like
this: a seed or spore would settle on the float, feed there until it was heavier
than a certain critical load, at which point the collapse of the bladders
dropped it underwater and it became food for the larger plant, entwined among
root-tendrils and squeezed of its sap.

A
man's weight speeded the process so that it cycled to completion in three to
eight minutes. Nothing on
Zygra
was solid and stable.

"They're
pelts, all right," Victor muttered, adding in
a
tone of weak triumph, "Didn't I say
so?"

Scrawny, skin yellow and bagging, his large
head wobbling on his thin neck, he chuckled his self-approbation.

"Shut up,"
Coberly
told him. Insofar as there could be a leader in this situation,
Coberley
was theirs. He was neither cleverer than
Victor—whose IQ, in his normal phase, would have run close to genius level—nor
more skillful than Horst, who was anyway fifteen years younger. But he fed on
some invisible source of energy, probably hatred, and he was always the one
who found the willpower to continue when the natural impulse was to weary
surrender. He was a former fat man; now he was puffy, his skin loose without
substance beneath to round it and firm it.

"I
don't see a monitor,"
Coberley
went on.
"What do we do if we've picked up a stray herd? There are some, you know.
In a good year a few escape the monitors and wander about on their own."

"Kill
them!" Victor shrilled. "Rip them up and ruin them! Cost the company
a million for every one we kill!"

"Shut
up!"
Coberley
repeated, this time with malice, and Victor
complied. They waited. And at last, at last, the monitor came in sight: awash
in the water, barely protruding above the herd of pelts, but hiding beneath its
flush narrow deck a store of miracles.

They
sighed in unison. "Solomon!"
Coberley
snapped, and the fourth member of the party acknowledged with a cautious pace
towards the edge of the channel.

Solomon
Weit
was going to make their bid simply because,
having been here a shorter time than any of his companions, he was stronger and
quicker. Even so, he was a shadow of what he had once been. He was an immensely
tall man, three-quarters of African extraction, and Horst had always found
something oddly comforting in his very darkness. It brought to mind solid
things: blocks of ebony, ingots of bronze. He seemed to resist the leeching
soddenness
of
Zygra
while all the
others grew wan and feeble.

Yet he had lately begun to cough on cool
nights, and his eyes were rimmed with red. "Now?" he said.

"Now," confirmed
Coberley
, and they threw themselves flat on their bellies,
distributing their weight over a wide enough area of the
bladderwrack
to delay its collapse a few precious extra minutes.

Plunging
their hands into the water as the pelts surged by, they struggled to get a grip
on their clammy edges.

If
the people who pay a million could get them in the raw state, they wouldn't be
so eager,
Hoist
thought for the hundredth time, or the hundred thousandth.

"Got one!"
Solomon exclaimed, and the others rolled closer, helping him to haul it
from the water. Patches of white and navy-blue shimmered over its upper end;
they didn't stop to admire the play of color, but laid it flat and held it down
so that Solomon could slide onto it and get it wrapped securely around him. In
response to the contact, it subsided and began to conform to him.

"Damnation,
it's too advanced!"
Coberley
muttered.
"Look, it's clinging already, and we needed an unripe one which would take
on a random shape—"

"Too
late to worry about that," Horst countered. "Just have to hope it
fools the monitor anyway. Unless you feel it's not safe, Solomon?"

The
dark man looked at the monitor from the shadow of
a
kind of hood into which he had prodded and teased the pelt. "I
don't think there's time to get it off and catch another," he grunted.
"And we don't dare miss this chance! It may take weeks to get within reach
of another monitor. . . . Give me the hammer, quickly!"

Hoist
detached the "hammer" from his belt. It was only a piece of wood,
first gnawed into a club-shape and then dried, over heart-breaking weeks, in
the intermittent sunlight until it was harder than most things on
Zygra
. Solomon closed his fist around it and wiggled to the
very edge of the bladder-wrack.

"A ripe one may not be a bad idea,"
Victor suggested. "The monitor is more likely to try and retrieve a ripe
one, isn't it?" "Shut up,"
Coberley
told him again.

Tense, they held their
breath as the monitor drew abreast of the pelt enshrouding Solomon. It sensed
the presence of its responsibility, slowed down and bobbed towards the side of
the channel. Victor whimpered faintly.

Relays
evaluated, circuits closed. The monitor decided that this pelt ought not to be
stranded and left behind, but returned to the herd. Arms reached out from its
nearer handling unit, closed tenderly on the pelt and Solomon too, lifted the
load and began to swing it across the low deck so it could be replaced in
mid-channel—
exactly
as we hoped,
Horst
reminded himself without excitement. His mouth was dry and his guts were
churning.

Go to it, Solomon. Make it come true all the
way!

How many long lonely hours of planning, how
many dreams and arguments, had led to this
momentl
Now, now Solomon was making his bid for mastery of the little vessel: in
mid-air stripping off the pelt with huge sucking noises, startling the monitor
and throwing it over to the seldom-used interference circuits. He dropped
awkwardly on the deck, almost losing his footing as the impact drove the
monitor completely below the surface. His "hammer" rose and fell with
a slam on the base of the handling unit, cracking the plastic across and letting
water into
unproofed
circuits so that steam spurted
out and something hissed as if in rage.

The
arms let go the pelt and it fell in the water. Solomon paid no attention. With
all his might he was trying to extend that crack completely across the
monitor's hull, to wreak havoc that would force the machine's return to the
main station for servicing and carry him ignorantly with it.