Bedlam Planet

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Everything about the planet revolving about Sigma Draconis seemed to indicate that here was a world that could be made into a second Earth. It was fertile and lacked native inhabitants and dangerous beasts. Then what was troubling the pioneer colony that had landed and set up shop there? Was it really possible just to create a new Earth on any vacant world waiting a landing? Or was there a lot more to planetary ecologies than humanity realized?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 156

Sample

DREAMING …

Assailed by the presence of the gashed terrible reproving moon in the hysterical silence of the night Dennis Malone lay on his bed and writhed without waking, his spasms wasted because they could not break his shackles of exhaustion.

Set up on a monstrous peak towering infinite light-years above the bottomless abyss, he was the target in a cockshy where the balls came thick as hailstones, moon-huge, each gashed with that accusing mouth eloquent of disaster, and sometimes the mouth opened in the face of an avenging Jehovah, uttering curses upon him and all his seed.

Interstellar distances are God’s quarantine regulations.

At last anguish thrust down from the violent activity of his cortex and made his whole spine a long shaft of pain. He jerked into awareness like a frog spiked with a hot poker. His eyelids snapped up and stayed pressed by muscular spasm at the limits of his orbits. To exclude the light of the moon he had fastened the door tightly and the shutter over the unglazed window. Some light, though, crept through the ventilation slots under the eaves, and his mad-hungry gaze secured glimpses of form, the outline of familiar furniture. But they were distant from him across a pool of total dark, the floor, and he might as well have been drifting in space where men are robbed of perspective by vacancy. He stifled a moan. Relying on the contact of his skin and his mattress, he gained sufficient control to swing his legs to the floor and tried not to realise that the smooth planks on which he placed his soles had been peeled from the layered bulk of a thing more like a vegetable carbuncle than an honest upright tree. It was wood … of a sort.

The shudders of horror which he had carried with him from nightmare subsided, little by little. His breathing eased, and the pounding of his heart. It was no good trying to switch on a light—to conserve their irreplaceable generators, power was withdrawn at midnight. He would have to make the voyage across the room to undo the shutter catch. Whereupon he would see—

Stop it!

He trembled again, but this time, he noted with relief, it was a shiver and not a shudder. He had lain down naked as usual, but since he retired the night had called a cool breeze off the sea. By touch he located the suit he had worn the day before and wriggled into it, then walked his toes like insects into the shelter of the shoes he would rather have gone without but which against the risk of as yet undiscovered parasites or infection were enjoined on everyone. If there were a creature like a chigger, for example, which could bore up through even the toughest skin of a human heel …

Am I sick?

He knew the answer to the question was affirmative even as he put it to himself, but he made no move towards the self-diagnosing medikit with which he and everyone else in the village was equipped. He had a contagious disease, certainly, which was why he slept alone, and it consisted in aloneness, and it could not be cured by company. He must sweat it out like a fever for which there was no specific, and he might for all his struggles fail to conquer.

Deliberately, like a suicide, he took the four long steps to the window, fumbled with the shutter catch, and drew back the frame of boards that blocked out the night. Beyond, the sky was black and deep as cat’s fur, speckled with stars like drops of fine rain. He felt his head rise and turn, seemingly in response to a programme, not a decision, and saw the damaged moon sliding towards the horizon.

It was just a chunk of barren rock, like Earth’s moon, with a straight slash across the lower part of its oblate disc.

Vaguely surprised that his subconscious had not instantly re-created the nightmare image and made it come hurtling at him like a hunting missile, he waited until he was sure it was stable. Then, because even now he dared not return to sleep where fresh horrors might ambush him, he made for the door and went out into the wrongly scented night.

Everyone else seemed to be enjoying peaceful slumber. He felt a stab of resentment, but knew the reason: their exhaustion, though as great as his, could be tempered by satisfaction. And they had good cause for it. They had a village to live in, with a street-or at least a winding track, surfaced with compacted broken shells, heat-fused, then roughened to a texture right for walking on a rainy day. From the inland peak on which the Santa Maria rested like the egg of a roc, down to the natural harbour where small boats were secured among jutting boulders, it made two curves and formed an S. Along it were disposed buildings that provided evidence—slim, but precious—of humanity. Nothing else here, that they had discovered, had conceived the straight line or the level plane surface.

Under dogmatically right-angled eaves, enclosed by shingles and planks they had cut themselves, his companions slept in peace. They had what they wanted. Whereas he, Dennis Malone …

His feet were carrying him in the usual direction, towards the spot where he had experienced that mad fit of lust and risked the loss of his life, the destruction of a billion hopes, on the gratification of a passing impulse. He went back to it again and again, as though some eventual visit would furnish him with explanations for it. The deed had been so foreign to his normal self-control that it was impossible to categorise in memory except by stuffing it into a grab-bag of other unique associations whose only common link was “being on another planet.”

Would it help to have Sigrid here, who at first had been rational while he was frenzied, so that he came close to raping her, then finally gave way as though swept along with him in a torrent of psychic need that made the anticipation of death negligible?

But she could not be here. She was on Earth. And if she could miraculously be transported to stand before him, it would be a meaningless event.

What armour do I wear against reason? We calculate, we analyse, we deduce, and think we have planned for all eventualities. But what impulses lurk below the surface of the mind, which never could be allowed for in advance because it took the impact of an alien planet to trigger them?

He turned aside from the track which he had been automatically following, and clambered up a slope carpeted with the juicy, moss-like growths which filled the ecological niche occupied on Earth by grasses. At the top of the rise he sat down on a convenient woodplant. To grow beyond a certain minimum size, to sustain its respiration which helped to keep the air oxygen-high, this and all related species had adopted the same solution to the problem of surface versus volume as the human brain; it was convoluted like a walnut. By day it looked rather repulsive. But the outer, bark-like, layers were soft and made a good resting-place. Only the deeper tissues were hard and woody.

From here he had a clear view of the small natural harbour, the roofs of the village, the looming globe of the ship. To distract himself from that other globe, the moon, he began to employ the hard facts which one day would become the material of a historical record for the schoolchildren of the city which must succeed their new-built village.

If we survive …

But he blocked that out with verbalisations, treating the air as though it were a rather dull primary pupil in a distant generation.

“When they deciphered the reports of the first robot probe to return from Sigma Draconis—one of a fleet of hundreds which had been launched through the curious not-here-ness of qua-space towards nearby stars that astronomers held to be promising—the scientists of Earth were inclined to suspect malfunction in the recorders that had stored the information, even though Sigma Draconis was rather like Sol. After the disappointments of Tau Ceti, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani and other systems whose primaries had proved to mother mere barren balls of rock and gas, it was incredible to learn of a planet close in size to Earth, warmer so that its icecaps were seasonal and its oceans deeper, yet equally endowed with taller crustal deformities so that its surface was webbed with archipelagoes, the summits of submarine mountains, and possessing moreover a large, nearly Luna-sized, satellite whose tides had encouraged life to emerge from the sea and colonise the land.

“When they had been convinced by the agreement between the data gathered by the first probe, and those from the second and third, they converted one of the probes to carry four curious persons, poised at that improbable fulcrum of awareness where explorers live. Because they had to be enclosed together for nearly four years first in a fragile cockleshell of a starship, then on a world unseen by human eyes, and then in the ship again, they were all in a sense lovers. But what sustained them was the shared discovery of a greater hunger: the lust for knowledge.

“They called the ship the Argo. If that matters. And the world they called Asgard, the place in heaven reached across Bifrost, the rainbow bridge.

“In order of setting foot on the planet’s surface, the first visitors were Dennis Malone, Carmen Vlady, Pyotr Tang-Lin and Sigrid Kallela. They lived for five months on Asgard, deliberately—”

And once without intention. But one would not wish to burden a school-child with the problem which had caused Earth’s leading psychologists to peel down his personality like an onion, to the final weak green core, in search of the explanation for it, before conceding ultimately that it might have stemmed from a need to impose the most basic element of human experience on a totally new environment, and agreeing that by a miracle it had done no harm. So:

“Deliberately exposing themselves to the new planet to determine its habitability. When they brought home a favourable report, an expedition was mounted which consisted of three ships named the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa Maria (after the ocean-going vessels of the expedition led by Christopher Columbus, q.v. under ‘Terrestrial History’), crewed by volunteers who planned to colonise the newly discovered world.

“Unfortunately, in those pioneering days, the control which could be exercised over the resultant velocity at which a ship emerged from qua-space was rudimentary. When the Pinta returned to our normal universe, she was on a course which led to a grazing collision with Asgard’s satellite. Among those killed was Pyotr Tang-Lin, one of the two members of the original expedition who had agreed to act as guides for the colonists.”

He stared upward, across three hundred thousand miles, and wondered for a moment how the moon had looked before the Pinta had died there in thirty seconds of hell, like the passage of a match-head across sandpaper. Alarmed, he discovered that he could not remember. The first time, he had not been looking at the moon through the eyes of a child eager to make patterns of the dark maria.

But if only they hadn’t combined to suggest two eyes, a skull-pit nose, brows arching up across a hydrocephalic idiot’s forehead, to which the new formation added the last touch: a lop-sided mouth set in a permanent mocking leer.

He had been up there. He had touched, albeit through gauntlets, the rough-and-smooth surface of fused rock, seen the bright gobbets of spattered metal, steel-white, gold-yellow, cobalt-blue, embedded like shrapnel in the bones of the satellite. There was no one who could be held to blame for what had happened. It was blind chance.

And now here he was, on warm hospitable Asgard, where each breath he drew should remind him of the welcome the alien visitors had received: comfortable, well-nourished, healthy because there were so few native organisms which found human tissue congenial for infection. It was no use. In the silent cavern of his skull he cried the truth.

I didn’t want to be made welcome! I wanted to go home!

But he spoke aloud again, levelly, still picturing that unknown child a century hence, and said, “Although there could not be any more starships built in the immediate future, since producing them had strained even the incredible resources of modern Earth and no more were planned unless a still more promising planet should be discovered-which was unlikely-the loss of the Pinta was not an irremediable calamity except to one member of the expedition. Although with the wreck had gone many of the key experts, especially biologists, and many important supplies including computer-memories, the survival of the colony had not been made dependent on having all three ships available. It had been intended that one should be cannibalised, broken down into millions of valuable parts from the enormous fusion-generators which had supplied the power to blast her into qua-space clear through to the plainest sheet-metal bulkhead capable of being stamped into fence-nails; one should remain intact on the planet in case total evacuation should become necessary in emergency; and one should return to Earth after a year, piloted by Pyotr Tang-Lin and the other second-time visitor, Dennis Malone, taking along any of the colonists who had been overcome by uncontrollable nostalgia, or proved subject to an incurable allergy, or in some other way unsuitable to remain on Asgard.

“After half that time had passed, there were as yet no signs that any colonists would need to return. They had been screened and screened again, until those who were chosen were identified beyond doubt as settlers, capable of uprooting and re-planting themselves. There was only one person on the whole new world for whom the Pinta’s loss might truly be called disastrous, and it was so to him because he was not a settler. He was an explorer. And he wi. . .