John Brunner (6 page)

He withdrew, flushing, and stood up. For a
second she thought he was going to hurl some taunt at her, reveal how he
believed he had tricked her, but he bit down hard on his shiny-wet lower lip
and went out.

VI

Dickery
E
van
stretched and yawned under
the shower, let it progress by itself from steaming-hot through lukewarm to icy
and at last to hot dry air. He was a stocky, well-built young man mostly of New
Zealand extraction, the Maori side predominating.

He didn't dress as he left the shower—why
bother, when there was no one else to see him? He padded to the
autochef
and
dialed
breakfast, then carried it on a tray to his favorite
vantagepoint
,
the dome overlooking the main station's landing-deck.

He'd thought at first that, but for the
presence of that deck, that smooth sheet of immensely tough metal constituting
the largest solid surface on
Zygra
, he'd have gone
crazy. Now, right at the end of his tour, he wasn't so sure. He'd seriously
considered putting in for an extension, because it was the only way he could
see himself ever drawing down a salary this size, and the complete isolation
was growing easier to bear all the time, but for one thing—the lack of women.

Still, it was too late to do anything about
an extension now. He'd put off and put off a decision, until the day had come
when the calendar had advised him it was less than one month before his time
expired. Best that way, perhaps—he didn't want to get so used to loneliness
that he couldn't readjust to human company.

He thought of half a dozen girls he planned
to look up when he got home, and the time he could give them with his
accumulated pay . . . oh, not all of it, of course, because he planned to keep
himself and a long succession of girls in great comfort with it for the rest of
his active life. If he bought a share in some promising enterprise with say ten
thousand of it, and started a small business of his own with
another twenty, and acquired some land and
had a house put on it, which would cost about sixteen to eighteen depending on
the size . . .

His mind ran on happily along these lines as
he watched the monitors drifting in towards the main station. Drifting was the
word; they were simply riding the same currents, the same sluggish solar
tides, that
the pelts followed to their rendezvous with
harvest.

Since
his arrival—his forehead creased with the effort of picturing the concepts
involved—those monitors had been all over the planet. The trail of the pelts
was immensely long. Scarcely one of the beautiful things had less than twenty
thousand miles of wandering to its credit. Four years old: ripe for the
harvest
....

When
he had first been left here by himself, he had passed much of the time in
figuring out ways of getting a pelt off the planet when he was picked up. There
was one girl in particular he thought would look marvelous in a pelt, and
nothing else. What it must be like to make love to a woman wearing a sort of
living rainbow cum scent-organ.

Then
he'd found out various discouraging facts, such as how the pelts felt when they
hadn't been treated and coated with the solid nourishment necessary to their
survival off
Zygra
, and that every single one which
was selected for export was watched by computers keener than hawks, and that
there was no chance
at'all
of getting into the coating-station
and stealing a batch of the prepared nutriments to be applied by hand.

That
had killed a subsidiary ambition, too. He'd thought of all the inside secrets
about
zygra
pelts which he'd acquired, and
considered the idea of setting up as a
refur-bisher
of the things. That would be a good line of business for an ex-supervisor of
Zygra
. Plenty of rich people whose pelts were finally
wearing out would pay ten thousand for a fresh coating of nutriment even if it
only lasted an extra couple of years. Someone in a position to buy two pelts in
a lifetime was a real rarity—even rarer than the pelts were!

But he wasn't a good enough chemist to
duplicate the
resuit
of the complex natural
processes the coating-station merely accelerated, and ultimately he'd concluded
that if refurbishing the pelts had been an economic proposition the
Zygra
Company would have established the service themselves.

Anyhow,
he couldn't get his hands on a sample of the coating for someone else to copy,
short of stripping it from
a
finished
pelt. And he couldn't get a finished pelt, so . . .

Besides,
he told himself
comfortably,
somebody's
bound to have tried that already, just as they've tried to breed the things on
other planets and failed. Wasn't there some rich fool over Loki way
who
bought five of them and tried to raise them in an
artificial swamp?

Silly ass.
Better to be content with what he was going to get honestly: a hundred thousand
credits, free passage home, and a good, pleasant, undemanding existence for the
rest of his life, natural or otherwise. Good point in there somewhere—set
aside a small sum to cover geriatric treatment at age sixty or
so
...
.

He
dozed, while the watery morning sunlight sifted over the gathering hordes of
zygra
pelts, and the monitors closing in behind them, and
the bulk of the coating-station looming over the horizon from its regular site
among a particularly rich patch of
yardweed
and
blockweed
, bringing the huge vats of
gelantinized
fortified nutriment for the pelts.

He came awake with a jolt. Somewhere at the
edge of consciousness he'd detected a shrilling noise. What the—?

Oh
no!
He 'd
heard that noise before, at the very beginning
of his stay. They'd turned a switch somewhere in the bowels of the main
station, and an alarm siren had started to squall. The man who'd been showing
him around (what was the name?—oh yes: Executive Shuster) had let it sound for
half a minute and then turned it off.

And
he'd said, "Remember that noise, Evan! It may go off at any time, day or
night. It indicates a malfunction of the automatics. One of the two reasons
you're here at all is that such a malfunction may occur. It never has yet, but
if it does, the problem is in your lap.
Which is why I'm
stressing the importance of recognizing the alarm.
"

Evan
had scuffled at the deck with his feet a bit and then said wonderingly,
"But—there's no other noise I'm likely to confuse it with, is there
there
?"

"No,
there isn't." Shuster had smiled blandly, rather
oilily
.
"But you heard how long I let it run for—thirty seconds?"

«
^YeS
"

"It
may sound at any time with
or without
a
malfunction. The point of this is to make sure you're on your toes. If it
sounds, you have exactly those thirty seconds to reach this switch and cut it
off—survey the operation from spawn to finished pelts—and report what you find.
It may be that everything is in order; in that case, you'll know it was only a
test. But I warn you quite bluntly that if you fail to reach it in thirty
seconds—"

Evan
leapt to his feet and headed for the switch at a dead run.

His
trembling hand missed on the first grab, got it on the second. The clamor died
instantly. But his skin was prickly with sweat. How long had it been sounding
before he'd caught on—more than thirty seconds?

No,
please! It's not possible for me to have lost everything after eleven months!

Frantically
he surveyed the telltale boards which relayed the information from all the
substations and monitors. As far as he could tell, everything was as it ought
to be. So this had been a dummy alarm, a test to make sure he was on his toes.

The bastards! The radiated pigs! To leave him
eleven months without a test at all, then catch him napping!

Heart sinking, he reported to the computers
that
eveiything
seemed to be in order despite the
siren. He hesitated, breathing deeply until he was in a fair approximation of
the state in which the alarm had caught him, made his way back to where he had
been dozing, and timed
himself
on the run to the
switch.

The run alone took him fifteen seconds. He
tried again, and registered seventeen.

He
exhaled gustily. Well, there was no choice then. Unless he was to be cheated
of his pay and passage home, he had to doctor the record of the time the alarm
had sounded. It was a terrible decision to make, since unwarranted tampering
with any of the automatics constituted sabotage and voided the contract of
employment, but he wasn't going to let one lapse cancel nearly a year of his
life.

He
slid up the front panel of the alarm unit and peered cautiously into its
bowels. Ah: straightforward enough. A band of white tape had reeled out like a
dry tongue from the base of the siren, and it was clearly calibrated in
one-second intervals. All he needed to do was ease it back so that about
twenty-five of the gradations showed, instead of—he counted —the damning total
of forty-nine at present visible.

He stretched out his arm
and grasped the tape.

Instantly
the front panel of the alarm unit slammed down, smashing the bones of his
forearm a few inches below the elbow. He screamed and tried to tear himself
free, straining to claw the panel up again with his other hand, feeling the raw
ends of bone rub and scrape agonizingly. Through a white fire of pain he heard
a majestic impersonal voice seal his doom.

"You
are reminded that unauthorized tampering with any of the automatic mechanisms
constitutes sabotage of the
Zygra
Company's
operations. Accordingly you are no longer a contracted employee of the
Zygra
Company."

"No!"
he screamed, wrenching
loose his shattered arm and cradling it in the other. He kicked the alarm unit
as if he could make it suffer as much as he did.

"You
are no longer a contracted employee of the
Zygra
Company."

He recovered a little of his self-control,
thought of having his arm mended, and went stumbling to the
medicare
unit, a coffin-sized block of automatics sited at the base of the observation
dome. He pushed its switches awkwardly with his good hand, trying to avoid
jarring the other arm.

"You are no longer a contracted employee
of the
Zygra
Company,"
said the unit.

"
Wha
-a-at?"
The voice was shrill; Evan barely knew it
for his own rather than another recorded signal. "But you can't do this to
me! You can't—it's inhuman!"

They could.

Two
hours later, having set his arm crudely in a sort of splint without benefit of
anesthetic, he settled to his own satisfaction that there was no longer any
automatic device on the station prepared to serve him. Even the
autochef
was included in the ban; it spat stinking burned
fat at him. The shower, too—that delivered a stream of boiling water. In the
smoke and steam his ambitions evaporated: goodbye house, goodbye girls, goodbye
geriatric treatment, goodbye
Dickery
Evan. For
without the
autochef
he would starve before the
harvesting ship was due.

"Then
we'll make sure those radiated swine don't enjoy what they've done to me,"
he promised between clenched teeth, and went to see what weapons he could find.

But
he had only killed one pelt, chopping it to messy shreds in the water, before
the nearest monitor came chugging up and seized him in its powerful mechanical
arms, to carry him off across the lonely swamps and abandon him to his fate on
a drifting mat of weed. The force with which he was dumped made the bones of
his arm grind together again, and the dazzling-bright pain blotted out his
consciousness.

Ignorant
even of identity, heedless of his fate,
Dickery
Evan
floated on the sluggish solar tides of
Zygra
.