Polymath (8 page)

“I cannot deny, however, that I had intended to go down and inspect my ship. I didn’t do so, for reasons I—” His voice cracked, and he ended on a lower tone—“I would rather not try to explain. I will only apologize. Excuse me.”

He lowered his head and walked away, out of sight as he turned the corner of the nearest building.

Nanseltine had the wit to realize that if he pushed his line of questioning any further now, he would turn his audience against him. Making the most of a bad job, he said loudly, “Since the captain is prepared to trust Lex’s judgment, that will suffice.” And he sat down and shut up.

Unfortunately not everyone else had that much grace. Rothers, the former computer chief, jumped up in his turn.

“You mean we’re not even going to try to refit the ship and get off this—this pestilential mudball?”

You could see the words hitting and hurting the useless ones.

“It’s a heap of scrap—weren’t you listening?” called Cheffy.

“Oh, be quiet!” chorused a dozen young voices. For a moment it looked as though the trouble were going to die down. But then—and Lex clenched his fists in impotent anger—Ornelle tossed fuel on the flames.

“The party up on the plateau had a ship too,” she said. “That one can’t be under water. And we haven’t heard anything from them, so it’s likely they have no further use for it. Why aren’t you mounting an expedition to go and see?”

That lunatic proposition snatched at the fancy of those who would rather delude than save themselves. At once a roar of excitement went up. People leaped to their feet—Nanseltine again, Rothers again, forty or fifty in all—demanding to be heard. In vain Jerode shouted for order.

Lex bit his lip and looked toward Ornelle. Her face was very white and she met his gaze defiantly.

He drew a deep breath and let out a sudden wordless bellow, so startling that everyone froze in surprise. Before they could recover he had lanced a question at Rothers.

“The ship repair yard at your port—did it handle ships that size?”

“Why—why, of course!” the man answered.

“How big was it?”

“Ah…” He licked his lips. “About a mile and a half square, I guess.”

“How much of the operation was done by hand?”

“Why—why, none, of course!”

There was a laugh. It came from, of all people, Delvia. Obviously she had her wits about her.

“Doc, a motion,” Lex said quickly. “I think this calls for a vote of confidence in the steering committee.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Jerode said with relief. “Those who—”

But he didn’t have to take a count. It was passed by acclamation, a majority of over two-thirds. Lex noticed, with interest, that it was Delvia who triggered off the clapping.

Frustrated for the moment, the useless ones made no more trouble. But Lex was profoundly glad that the question of Delvia’s pregnancy hadn’t come up after all; Jerode simply didn’t mention it, and was wise not to in the heated atmosphere of this meeting.

So they’d got away with it this time, at least.

It wasn’t until the assembly ended just before dusk that Arbogast’s body was found among the rocks fringing the beach, with a spent energy gun clasped in the right hand which was now his only recognizable feature. He had opened the beam to widest spread and turned the weapon against himself.

The shadow of Arbogast’s suicide lay chill across the hot bright days that followed. Towing a sled laden with scrap salvaged from the ship up the beach to where Aldric and his gang were working on the solar boilers and stills,

Lex wondered how long their precarious balance was going to last. Twenty days had elapsed, then thirty, without disaster. But he had a fearful feeling that time was gnawing at their psychological props like termites, and eventually…

Aldric raised a face half masked with dark glasses to acknowledge the delivery. Lex tipped the scrap to the ground with a clatter and stood back, wiping sweat from his forehead.

“How are things with you, Aldric?” he said, low-voiced. “Going smoothly, by the look of all this.”

Aldric hesitated. Then, pretending to examine the scrap piece by piece, he moved close enough to Lex to whisper.

“No, Lex—not so smooth. Matter of fact, I’d been wanting a word with you, and now might be as good a time as any. Here, let’s stroll along the beach a bit.”

“Sure.” Lex caught the handle of his sled in one hand and drew it behind as he fell in alongside. “These sleds are OK on the beach,” he muttered, “but we’ll need wheeled trucks some time soon…. Sorry. What were you going to say?”

“Among other things, I’m wondering how hot it’s going to be in midsummer.” Aldric paused, judging they were out of earshot of his crew. “I’m getting a lot of complaints about noontide work, and not frivolous ones, either. I had a case of heatstroke yesterday. Cheffy says some hot-climate countries back on Earth used to have a period for sleep in the middle of the day. I’m not so sure that would be the answer; it’s easier to stretch to a day longer than Earth-basic, harder to cut down to a shorter one. And that would mean, in effect, having two short days. Halves of days.”

“If Cheffy says people adjusted to it, he’s probably right,” Lex said. “Whether we’d be willing to is another matter. But surely if the heat does become unbearable…Well, what else could you do with the time you can’t work, except doze?”

“I know what you mean,” Aldric grunted. “On or off the job!”

Shading his eyes, Lex looked along the beach. In the near foreground was Aldric’s domain: in a weird spidery layout there were solar boilers that doubled as distillation equipment interspersed with crude turbine generators. The drive of the ship had been cannibalized for many of the
parts, once everybody was convinced there was no but absolutely
no
hope of repairing it. Ornelle had held out for nearly a week.

Beyond, fishing nets hung in the sun on racks, drying while girls checked the knots. Bendle had succeeded in preparing an antidote for the commonest allergens in the sea-life, and although they looked revolting even after they’d been cooked half a dozen species were now providing welcome and quite tasty variety in their diet. Back inland, ground was being cleared for planting—Bendle was up there with his team right now, studying the reproductive processes of their first standby, the salad-tree, in the hope of selecting for the strain with the best leaf-yield.

In the other direction the solar collector sheets were all spread out. Accumulators were being charged continuously. He saw Delvia, burned brown now, laughing and joking with a gang of Fritch’s men who were waiting for replacement accumulators for their power-tools.

Inland again there was a noise of sawing punctuated by crashes. Timber being felled. He could just discern a line of yellow trunks drying in the sun. The odd-shaped whitish forms of fishingbirds rested on them like wilting flowers. Their gummy black droppings were all over the beach—not to mention the roofs and, worse still, the pathways of the town. They were becoming a distinct nuisance, and some means would have to be found to frighten them away.

“I wonder where those birds go for the winter,” Lex murmured. “Maybe we should follow their example.”

Aldric gave a harsh laugh. “Won’t do us much good,” he said. “One of Bendle’s people told me about them. They aren’t migratory. They encapsulate—secrete a kind of gelatinous shell for themselves—and spend the winter stuck to the rocks. They thought they were eggs at first, but the eggs are being laid now.”

Lex nodded absently; the list of curious habits among the local fauna was too long already for him to be surprised. Besides, he had been carefully educated to expect the unexpected. He said, “Well, if heat’s our only problem, we can either develop the siesta habit as Cheffy suggests—which won’t be as hard as you make out, if you remember that the midsummer days are very long—or else plan a secondary program of jobs for everyone that
they can fill in with in the shade for an hour or two either side of noon.”

“I don’t think a change of work is the answer,” Aldric said. “It’s a question of—well, frayed tempers. Look I gave Rothers a job to keep him sweet, melting down scrap in a solar furnace, with half a dozen assistants under him. I thought a bit of petty authority would satisfy him.”

“It didn’t?”

“It did not. He had an argument with one of his helpers, lost his temper, hit the guy—knocked him against the back of the furnace-mirror and bent it clear out of shape. That’s why it isn’t out here working. I had to detail my two best handymen to restore the curvature. Meantime Rothers is snarling at everyone and slowing down my work.”

He made a gesture that embraced the entire field of view. “All this looks great. Signs of progress. But underneath it’s ready to explode.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” Lex sighed. “And I go right along with your point that a change of work won’t be enough. It’s about time we cheered ourselves up somehow—sort of congratulated ourselves on our marvelous achievements. I’ll talk to Jerode about it, make a report to the next assembly. Initiate some hobbies, perhaps, stimulate competition, provide a few luxuries…. I’ve been wondering about music. We could handcraft some instruments, I guess.”

“Just so long as somebody’s thinking about the problem,” Aldric said. “I have too much to do to waste time worrying. Just thought I’d tell you.”

Yes, Lex thought, the physical problems could be overcome. Given the rest of the summer, the town could be made moderately comfortable, twice as warm as last winter, with far more room for people to spread out. The food problem was almost licked. There was adequate water. Clothing was still a difficulty, but it was amazing how long fraying fabrics could be made to hold together. Besides, in this heat everyone preferred to wear the minimum.

A point struck him. He glanced toward Delvia again. Yes, Naline was there. While Fritch’s men were loading up with charged accumulators, she was keeping her back
turned so she wouldn’t have to watch Delvia laughing and chatting.

It hadn’t come to an explosion yet—but it would. Damn Delvia! Her old tabard was becoming a collection of rags linked by threads; instead of darning it like the other girls she had reduced it to a kind of kilt, thereby proving that she possessed the handsomest bust among the refugees.

And yet she was a tough and reliable worker herself. How could one reprimand one of the most useful people around? She hadn’t been assigned to her particular job. She had just seen that someone would have to make sure charged accumulators were in regular supply, so she had proceeded to coordinate the arrangements in an orderly and economical manner. And Naline, of course, had shadowed her.

Would it serve any purpose to bring her onto the steering committee? J erode kept asking him that question; every time Lex returned the same answer. She and Ornelle would waste hours wrangling over personal differences, and Ornelle was coping usefully enough with the human problems she had been allotted. The register of intended pregnancies, for instance—that had been her idea. It would be open for another month at most. No winter births if humanly possible.

But Delvia… In the end there had been no fuss over terminating her pregnancy. When she was told about it following the stocktaking assembly, she had meekly accepted Jerode’s rebuke and demanded a shot to get rid of it The idea wasn’t one to which he could bring many of the refugees around, but Lex was beginning to suspect that this involuntary colony could do with many more Delvias and far fewer Ornelles and Nalines.

Dragging his sled, he made his way back toward the point where his gang of amateur salvagemen were checking equipment after the morning’s diving. Spacesuits, tough as they were, might tear on a sharp projection; hatchets—essential now that the summer life of the sea was teeming—were blunted and had to be reground; one helmet was cracked and would have to be patched somehow; the boat was lying bottom-up on the sand while one of the girls, her pink tonguetip between her teeth, was chipping away masses of hard-shelled sessile animals which had clung to the hull.

He was lucky, Lex thought He had a keen team. The strong element of physical danger in this underwater work had sorted them out for him.

Not to mention their willingness to work under a young leader….

“Lex! Lex!”

He spun around. Running toward him from the direction of the river was Cheffy, waving and shouting. One glance told him this was urgent. He left the sled where it was and ran to meet him.

“What is it?” he called, thinking over a whole range of possible catastrophes. Cheffy was working on what they referred to, with a wry awareness of exaggeration, as the civil engineering projects of the town: water supply, sanitation, and heating for the inevitable winter.

“Just you come and look!” Cheffy snapped, whirling around and making back the way he had come. Better built for running than he had been when he landed here, he still was going too fast to have breath to spare for talk.

It was only a matter of moments before they came in sight of what had been yesterday a wide calm expanse of steadily flowing water, discolored by suspended silt and the larvae of some as-yet unidentified species of aquatic creature that metamorphosed to the adult stage when the river carried it into salt water.

Yesterday? This morning, even, when Lex came down to start work!

Now it was reduced to a trickle. Irregular curves of mud had been exposed; a few writhing creatures lay gasping in puddles, and water-weeds were already turning gray-yellow and deliquescing into a stinking mess from exposure to the full sun. The mouth of the estuary normally passed such a flow that the course of the fresh water could be traced a hundred feet from shore. Now the sea was trespassing into the riverbed.

Lex halted, appalled. They had staked everything on the river! Cheffy was planning to draw water for drinking and washing via a sedimentation system a mile upstream, to replace the crude bucket-hoists they still depended on. They had decided to install piped water for every house and flush-sanitation for every twenty-five people. At the moment, since the sea was barred to them for swimming anyway and there was no tide to return the effluent, they were content to let the offshore current disperse their
sewage, which was at least an advance on the crude latrines of the first month here; but pipes made of hollow tree-trunks sealed with plastic film were being readied—one and a half miles of them—to take their drains well away from the town.