Polymath (13 page)

Like slaves, it seemed to Lex, was the right term. For as his party was being herded up the last few hundred yards to the plateau he had seen gangs of men and women, filthy and hunger-lean, sweating to reinforce the dam with a man screaming orders at them. On the plateau itself, at the edge of which the ship rested—like a squashed egg, Lex recalled dismally—one would have expected to see constructions of some kind, but not what were actually there: mere shacks of the same mud-plastered hurdles, set up like animal-stalls. There was a stink of sewage and smoke; there were open fires burning in mudbrick grates over which hung crude pots on tripods.

Dullfaced, men and women stared at the outsiders going past, and overseers howled them back to their tasks.

Around the ship a frame of timber had been erected; ropes dangled from it untidily. Lex had thought the work involved in dragging the uprights of the dam all the way from the nearest stand of tall trees remarkable; it was miles from here. But bringing so many big trunks! It beggared the imagination.

Under the hull, stones were being hammered in by weary, gaunt workers, and others were leaning on long wooden levers. A child about ten years old was beating on a metal pan to mark the rhythm of their grunting heaves. Clearly an attempt was being made to jack up the ship so that its crushed lower plates could be welded tight.

Lunacy! Lunacy! Lex clenched his fists. He had had a score of possibilities in mind when he wondered what they might find here. The reality was infinitely worse than any of them.

Face like thunder, Cardevant was striding ahead. Too horrified to contain himself any longer, Minty exclaimed to Lex as they were driven in his wake:

“Lex, they’ll never do it before the winter! And if they don’t make proper preparations, they’ll—”

Cardevant spun around, so rapidly that Minty didn’t even have time to flinch, and slapped her across the face.

“We’ll get through the winter like we got through the last one!” he declared. “And if the weaklings die it’ll be no loss, understand?”

“Hit my woman, would you?” Aykin said. He could move fast for all his brawn; even the weight of the radio and accumulator which he was still packing didn’t seem to slow him. His fist traveled quicker than even Lex could follow with his eyes, and suddenly Cardevant was reeling backward to lose his footing and sprawl on the stony ground.

He was no danger, but the others were. Lex judged instantly which of them was most likely to use the gun he had taken, and made for him. Just in time he struck up the man’s arm, and the bolt intended for Aykin went sizzling to the sky.

“Cardevant!” Lex rapped, catching the wrist of the man who had fired. “You’d better not let us come to any harm, understand? We have more than eight hundred well-fed and well-housed people, and you have half that number of starved cowed slave-laborers!”

“You dirty defeatist!” Cardevant blasted back, forcing himself to his feet. The word, Lex noticed, had apparently acquired what he classed to himself as political force. “Well-fed, well-housed, hm? What about thirsty?”

Lex just looked at him. After a few seconds his anger subsided, though his tone remained as harsh as before.

“OK, I guess I didn’t have to slap your loudmouthed
girlfriend. But if your people are fat and comfortable it’s because they’ve given up hope. We haven’t. We’re working to get off this ball of mud, working damned hard. And we’re not going to let anything stand in our way, least of all you!”

Under an awning improvised from bedding, Captain Gomes sat on a stool made from the buttend of a tree-trunk poring over notes made on scraps of paper. Clearly these people hadn’t chanced on the river-plant used in the town. There was another man with him whom Lex had met last year, his second officer, Probian.

“Good work, Cardevant,” Gomes said, leaning back as the seven captives were forced into a group before him. He was a gross man; he wore only shorts, and his hairy torso gleamed with greasy perspiration. He was an amazing contrast to the scrawniness of almost everyone else. “So these are the buggers who came to smash our dam, hm? Not willing to let anyone prove they have more guts, apparently!”

Lex and his companions stood in sullen silence.

“You haven’t searched their packs yet?” Gomes went on.

“No, sir”—from Cardevant. “Didn’t see why we should carry them up here.”

Gomes chuckled. “All right, do it now. Come on, you—drop that gear!” He folded his arms.

Lex shrugged and complied. The others followed his example, and Cardevant and Probian moved to inspect the contents of the packs.

“We took their guns, of course, Captain,” Cardevant said, reaching into Lex’s pack. “They had one apiece.”

“Seven guns!” Gomes raised his eyebrows. “And you took them with one? Well, that’s a fair return on investment. And a radio too, by the look of it—right, Probian?”

“Yes, sir.” Probian was going through Aykin’s load. “With a GD accumulator in first-class condition. That’ll be useful.”

“Not as useful as the guns,” Gomes grunted. If that was his honest opinion, Lex thought, everything about this place was already explained.

“Medical supplies here, I guess,” Cardevant muttered, moving on to Zanice’s pack. He took them out: a few tubes of tablets, some surgical dressings and emergency instruments, a jar of tissue regenerant, what few other
items Jerode had been able to spare. “And—what’s this?”

He held up a jar containing Bendle’s synthetic antal-lergen, which rendered a valuable number of plants edible. It did look very strange. It was a coarse crystalline powder of a shade between lavender and purple—ground-up sea-salt tinted with a solution of the chemical.

The rest of the party looked to Lex for a lead. He said after a moment’s reflection, “It’s an antallergen. You can sprinkle it on a wet dressing and use it to treat inflammation caused by blisterweed.” Which was perfectly true; the poison in the leaves was chemically similar to the substance which made native vegetation indigestible. He went on, “I imagine you have a different name for that. It’s a trailing plant which stings when you brush against it. It looks very like—”

“Oh, I don’t want to hear about your damned plants!” Gomes broke in. “We’re not going to be here long enough to worry about them!”

Lex fell obediently silent.

“What’s that you’ve got?” Probian said suddenly to Cardevant as the latter drew out a transparent bag containing green-yellow leaves. “I found one of them, too.”

“Botanical samples!” Gomes roared, and burst into loud laughter at his own joke.

Reasoning, however, that if there was one of these packages in each person’s gear, they must be more interesting than that, Cardevant opened the one he had in his hand. Unconsciously he licked his lips.

“Say, it’s their rations!”

Gomes responded to that, hunching forward and laying his hands on the table. But it was Probian who sighed on seeing the synthesizer cake, and hastily started to un-wrap the identical package he was holding. The cake was folded inside salad-tree leaves, which he looked at suspiciously.

“What’s this for?” he demanded. “To keep the cake moist? Isn’t it dangerous? You don’t know what you might catch from it!”

“We never had that kind of trouble,” Lex murmured.

Probian gave him a distrustful glare, but after a moment he threw the leaves away and laid the cake on the table. A few crumbs adhered to his palm; he licked them off.

“Got something else,” Probian said. He was at Baffin’s pack now. “Explosives!”

He produced four precious blocks salvaged from the starship’s disaster box, designed to hurl an instrument monitor and a subradio bleeper well clear of a drive explosion or other catastrophe, which packed enough power to clear the river if a mountain had fallen into it. They were shaped; one could touch them off at arm’s length without harm.

That they were here on the planet at all was a source of endless self-reproach to Lex. He had been so fuddled with oxygen-lack, and his head aching so badly as they approached this world, he—along with everyone else-had overlooked the possibility of leaving at least this weak little beacon in orbit until it was too late for him to calculate a firing-trajectory for it.

Those also were laid like an offering on the captain’s table.

“That all?” Gomes said.

“Everything of interest.”

“Pity. Still, it’s a windfall. I wonder what else they have down there….” Gomes rubbed his bearded chin. On Zarathustra it had been customary to extirpate the facial follicles; however, there was no reason to expect Gomes, a spaceman, to follow Zarathustran fashion.

“Eight hundred well-fed and healthy people,” Lex said. What a fantastic mischance had overtaken the others, up here! He could see it all now. Lacking anyone capable of making rational plans to prepare for a permanent, or at any rate indefinite, stay here, they must have turned to Gomes pleading for not guidance but orders. But Gomes was a spaceman, and could conceive no other course than repairing his ship. Whether or not he realized it was impossible, he had staked everything on it, and he was long past the point at which he could have changed his mind. By this time, perhaps, it had taken on the force of an obsession, and a contagious obsession at that. Those who argued that repairing the ship was out of the question (and judging by Gomes’s estimate of the value of guns there must be many) were being driven to work regardless.

Consequently nothing of any practical value was being done!

“Yes!” Gomes was saying. “Eight hundred people—but without a ship of their own!”

“How do you know?” The words burst from Minty.

“Why, you told us!” Gomes retorted. “We were fully
intending to enlist your cooperation in getting our ships aloft again. Even if we couldn’t fly all the way back to civilization, we could at least put one or both of them into orbit and beam subradio signals for the searchers to home on. There are bound to be searches going on. Aren’t there?”

That was a question which had long been exhausted down at the town. None of the strangers answered. There was no way of knowing. When the ships evacuating Zarathustra fled they had beamed continuously—but they were racing at such velocity to escape the nova, it was probable that drivenoise would have drowned the signals out.

In any case, the nova itself emitted noise.

“And—?” Lex said.

“Well, we got our antenna back up when the thaw came, and what should we hear but some extraordinary woman moaning at the mike, announcing that your ship was in the
sea
of all places!” Gomes uttered a cynical laugh. “Oh, I’d have liked to see Arbogast’s face after what he said about my landing. It’s a shame you didn’t bring him with you.”

“We couldn’t,” Lex said stonily. “He killed himself.”

“Faced with a spineless defeatist lot like you, I might have done the same!” Gomes rapped. “Some of this lot up here were ready to give up and make themselves at home—like animals! But we put a stop to that soon enough. Hah! We made them listen to that woman sobbing. It turned our stomachs. That’s why we didn’t answer. We weren’t going to let idiots whose ship had rolled into the sea ride parasite on what we’d paid for with sweat and blood!”

“Have you been living just on synthesizer cake?” Lex said.

Gomes blinked. Then he snatched at a flattering reading of the question. “Of course! We’re half starved. And we’ve had sickness and frostbite and in spite of hell we’re getting on with the job!”

“How are you off for trace-elements?” Lex pursued, and from the corner of his eye saw Zanice give a vigorous nod. “You don’t have a doctor or biologist here, do you? A diet-synthesizer is for emergency use. A man can stay alive for about two years on the cakes, but after six months he’ll start suffering from deficiency diseases, and the moment the hoppers are empty the cakes are nutritionally
worthless—just bulk. Eating them, you starve to death.”

“Starve?” Gomes didn’t seem to have been listening. “Oh, we’re hungry all the time, but we’re not starving. Look at what we can do!” He rose, and for the first time Lex saw his legs. His calves were bloated and discolored, and there was a rag tied around his left ankle. He limped as he came forward, eyes blazing, to point at the ship.

“We’re going to lift that ship into orbit! We’re going to power her subradios and signal for help! It’s going to take a while, but well manage it! And then
you
, you defeatist devils—you’ll probably take the benefit and give no credit!”

“Where’s your grav-free cradle?” Lex said quietly. “Where are your fusion arcs? Where’s the chromalloy to patch her cracks? If you use mud, she’ll burst open, the same as your dam is about to.”

“It is not! It’s going to give us hydroelectric power! Hah—didn’t think of that one, did you?” Gomes was almost crowing. “We’re building the turbines and generators now.”

“We built windmills,” Lex said. “We had plenty of power all through last winter. And we didn’t steal someone else’s river to get it, either.”

For an instant he thought Gomes was going to strike him, not that he was worried—the captain was so slow from malnutrition and exhaustion, he could easily dodge the blow. Instead, he turned his back, furious.

“Oh, he’s lying! Shamed by what we’re doing while they give up hope and resign themselves to staying here forever! Cardevant, Probian! Get these revolting defeatists out of my sight. Tie ’em up and put a guard on ‘em. If I see ’em again today I’ll burst a blood vessel”

“What can have
happened
?” Jerode said for the twentieth time. Tiredly, Elbing raised his head.

“Doc, do you have to keep on and on asking that? It’s getting me down! Anything can happen on a strange planet! That’s one of the reasons I preferred just to visit them—get back into space as soon as I could.”

“I’m sorry.” Jerode wiped his face and dropped to a chair. He glared at the obstinately silent radio. “Is there no chance that—well, that their antenna failed, or something?”

“You asked that before, too,” Elbing muttered, and bent to rub his short leg. After a moment, he added, “Excuse me.” Unstrapping the peg, he laid it on the table.

“Is it chafed again?” Jerode demanded, suddenly remembering his medical responsibilities.