Space fiction is no longer fiction in the same way that it used to be. There was an element of distance and strangeness about it a few years back. Now, fact has caught up and threatens to overtake. Science fiction today has become science prediction.
An atom is a miniature solar system in some respects. The clustering molecules resemble galaxies, colloids are, perhaps, tiny models of the whole creation. Man stands midway between the unbelievably small and the unbelievably huge. This is one of the allies of science fiction. We look down into the mysteries of the infinitesimal; we look up into the majesty of the macrocosm.
In all this vastness of stars and planets there must be other life. One day we shall make contact with that life. What will the aliens be like? How will human culture compete with non-human culture? Which will survive?
Release date:
August 28, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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LIFE on Kolar was not by any means easy. Kolar was the second planet in sequence revolving around vast Sirius for a sun. ‘Colonist’ was hardly the term for those who scratched out a rather meagre existence on Kolar. They were proto-colonists. The time would come when the Kolar Settlement Organization had completed the necessary ramifications to civilization which would make the planet moderately habitable. Those ramifications were not completed. However, in the meantime the experimental group of proto-colonists were proving, and proving fairly satisfactorily that Kolar could support life.
No doubt, if you were anything other than humanoid, Kolar would probably be a very satisfactory planet indeed. There were vestigial evidences of valuable mineral deposits—valuable, that is, from the point of view of an industrial society. And there were other even more vestigial remains of what might, by a heavy stretch of the imagination, have been termed ‘ruins’. There were strange things that looked like earth covered mounds that could, by virtue of their spacing, and by virtue of a rather blackish grey ash, that seemed to hang over them, like an umbrella of dark soil put up to dry against the terrain—perhaps by some great stretch of the imagination they could have once been called ‘cities’. Were they the wreckage of cities?
The colonists had no real time to investigate, it took them most of their time to get any kind of living out of the Kolar soil.
As yet no archaeological expeditions had come out from the main home worlds of the solar system. It was a long, difficult journey through the warp—not so long as to be impossible, but it was a matter of months, and months in space are not everybody’s idea of a pleasant holiday afloat!
So the Kolar proto-colonists struggled on as best they might. They struggled on it hope, for as soon as their efforts had proved that Kolar was worth investment on a planetary scale, then they would get the pioneers’ reward; for what it was worth, of course. By that time many of them might possibly have succumbed to any of the strange perils which a pioneer must expect to face on a practically unknown world. But, by and large, those who took up pioneering were activated by a spirit which was spaceless and timeless. In other words, a pioneer was very much the same kind of man whether you met him in a covered wagon or in a rocket. There was a courage, a determination, a drive, a certain almost mule-headed stubbornness about the pioneering spirit, which would brook no denial whatever, and the Kolar colonists were certainly no exception.
Big Dan Jeffreys was ploughing, and as he ploughed he was reciting a line of Burns’ subconsciously. It was keeping him going, the same line over and over again.
“I’m an honest man, I guide my plough,
I eat my bread in the sweat of my brow.”
It seemed, somehow, a reason for going on. Gradually it came up out of the subconscious into the consciousness itself. Big Dan Jeffreys found himself saying it out loud:—
“I’m an honest man, I guide my plough,
I eat my bread in the sweat o’ my brow….”
The great mechanical cultivator continued to turn up the virgin soil of Kolar…. But was it virgin soil? wondered Big Dan. For when a man is sitting on a plough he does at least get time to think, even if he doesn’t get time for anything in the nature of practical exploration or archaeology. What if there was something after all in those strange rumours …? What if there was something, after all, in those dark, grey, ash-covered mounds? Could they be the remains of a civilization?
The administrator, Fletcher Starbuck, had seemed inclined to think they were. It troubled him a little. He wondered what had become of the civilization that had built, and presumably destroyed, those strange mounds, the graves of cities…. Had they been cities? Or were they just the result of natural volcanic phenomena? There was one on his right now: Dan Jeffreys paused and looked. Gears and wheels, levers and plough shares; they cracked and clanked behind him and took his mind away from the grey-black mound. It was as though some strange underground troll of enormous size was pushing its umbrella up from under the earth and was itself going to emerge from under it, huge, grinning, horrible—the product of radio-genetic mutation. He could almost imagine a gigantic ogre standing there with three eyes and possibly two heads—that was an interesting thought! Those old fairy tales back on earth, things about ogres with two heads … what if they were the remains of another civilization, his thought went out in circles and then went back to his plough like a boomerang, a mental boomerang.
Everything was queer, thought Dan Jeffreys, there were more mysteries in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in our philosophy. There were certainly more mysteries on the planet Kolar than were dreamed of in ordinary mortal philosophy! But it wasn’t the mystery he was concerned with. The big problem facing all the colonists was that somehow they had to remain on Kolar long enough to convince the earth federation that it was worth an investment. Once they had convinced them of that, then their own stakes would pay them very handsome dividends indeed.
In fact there would be practically no limit to the dividend. That was the gamble that a professional pioneer took. He went to planet after planet, as Dan Jeffreys had done, he went to planet after planet until he was sick of the sight of a space ship; until his ears became nauseated—if an ear can become nauseated—by the roar of a rocket. He got to hate the ships, to hate the planets, to hate his way of life. But still something inside him made him go on doing it. Once a man has committed himself to that kind of thing he doesn’t go back. There is an unwritten law among the pioneers that you don’t go back. You get a taste for it after a time. Dan Jeffreys had had the taste for pioneering a long time ago, and lost it; now only a kind of dull apathy kept him doing what he was doing. How many planets had he tried? How many had been failures?
Dismal, abject failures. How many times had he stuck it out winter and summer to prove to a seemingly heartless earth Federation, that this world, after all, was going to be worth planetary scale investment … only to find that the world was not suitable, and that the summer and winter of toil that he had put into the place—the sweat, and the blood and the tears—had all been wasted, and that the colonists were being withdrawn and the project being abandoned as impracticable…. How many times? Fifty?
A hundred? Not so many as that, he knew, deep down within himself, but it seemed more—it seemed a helluva lot more!
Big Dan Jeffreys was fed up; he was fed up with the way that the earth Federation was administered. He was fed up with the way that it seemed to him, as a disillusioned colonist, that the Federation began to pull out the stakes before there was a chance to see whether it would have been worth while. But what was the reward? What kept a man doing that?
Dan Jeffreys on the plough kept clanking on. The reward, he told himself, was a vast tract of land. Enough land to make a man a multi-millionaire, if only he’d got in on the one planet that paid off. That was the thing—getting in on the one that paid off….
Pioneers are rather like fishermen:—‘You should have seen the one that got away!’ ‘You should have seen the planet I went to—magnificent! The only thing, of course, was that the natural radiation background was about five times higher than even the most daring safety level—otherwise it was a wonderful place.’ ‘You should have seen the one we went to! Only thing wrong with that was that the water was poisoned—everywhere. Poisoned with some strange organic poison for which there was no antidote and no remedy. We had to get out of there in a hurry—otherwise there wouldn’t have been enough crew left to get us off!’
Poisoned atmosphere, poisoned water, glaring suns that drove a man mad; soil that nothing would grow in; soil that was so tough you couldn’t plough it; soil that was so dry and dusty that not even all the modern irrigation techniques would have any effect on it. Dust, and heat, and strange, stinging insects that could kill a man. On every world there was something wrong! Something wrong as far as homo sapiens was concerned—something that homo sapiens co. . .
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