Polymath

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Colonising a new planet requires much more than just settling on a newly discovered island of Old Earth. New planets were different in thousands of ways, different from Earth and from each other. Any of those differences could mean death and disaster to a human settlement. When a ship filled with refugees from a cosmic catastrophe crash-landed on such an unmapped world, their outlook was precarious. Their ship was lost, salvage had been minor, and everything came to depend on one bright young man accidentally among them. He was a trainee planet-builder. It would have been his job to foresee all the problems necessary to set up a safe home for humanity. But the problem was that he was a mere student - and he had been studying the wrong planet. (First published 1974)

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 152

Sample

“One thing about those damn winter gales,” Delvia said in a make-the-most-of-it tone. “They did give us a bit of stored power to play with.”

“But they took so much more away from us,” muttered Naline.

“I guess so. Still, not to despair. We may find things aren’t as bad as we expected.” Delvia cut the accumulator put of circuit and the whine and thump of the air-compressor died. With capable fingers she uncoupled the latest cylinder from the pipe, checked that its pressure-gauge was operative by bleeding a few pounds off—the air screeched thinly as it escaped the valve—then dropped it with a clank against the two already lying on the strange greenish sand. Taking an empty one, she began to connect it up.

“You can take those three, Lex,” she added.

“Right,” Lex acknowledged. “Finished, Naline?”

The darker girl, “baby” of the surviving refugees, nodded and turned to catch the eye of the lined-faced man standing a few paces distant along the beach. “Ready for you now, Captain!” she called, pushing back her long black hair behind her shoulders.

Captain Arbogast seemed to return from a long way away. He had been staring out across the blue calm sea of the bay to where a polished arc of metal showed above the water. He moved mechanically now and came to join Naline.

Lex, his lean tallness emphasized by the odd-looking garb he had on, gathered the three full air-cylinders into arms. He was wearing a spacesuit, the fluorescent orange fabric of which—designed for maximum visibility in space—was almost blinding under the blue-white glare of the morning sun. Naline had tied bands of black, glistening elasticon around his limbs and trunk to gather the slack of the material. It had been meant for someone much more heavily built.

He picked up his helmet, gave it a rapid wipe to dislodge some grains of blown sand which had adhered to the sealing-ring, and addressed Arbogast.

“I’ll go down and see if the boat’s ready, Captain.”

“Go ahead,” Arbogast answered. His voice sounded dead, and there was no expression on his face. He seemed unable to tear his gaze from that glistening thing in the sea.

“Left wrist, please,” Nadine said. She was performing the same service for him as she had just done for Lex. Arbogast’s suit was his own, but the past winter’s privations had cost him a good twenty pounds of his former weight. Obedient as a puppet, he lifted his arm away from his side.

The compressor started again, and Delvia straightened to her full height. Glancing at Lex, she said, “I do envy you. After the winter I feel dirty clear through. Nothing I’d like more than a long cool swim.”

Well, she was dressed for it—or rather undressed. She had on nothing except a ragged red tabard open down both sides. It was obvious that being half starved had merely fined down her former statuesque proportions; her flesh was firm and shapely, and good muscles moved under her sleek skin. It was reassuring to find that some at least of the refugees were capable of remaining healthy here. Although rubbing the noses of the less-fortunate in the fact might lead to problems later on…

“I shouldn’t try it,” Lex replied soberly. “Not after what happened to young Bendle.”

Delvia nodded and grimaced. Unconsciously she lifted one foot from the ground, supporting herself with a hand on the compressor, and used its sole to scratch at her other calf. Lex looked more closely. There was a reddened area.

“Del!” he said. “Are you itching a lot?”

Embarrassed, she dropped her foot to the ground. She said, “A bit. Sunburn, I guess.”

“Then what are you doing in that skimpy rag? What do you want, a case of lupus from the high ultraviolet? This isn’t—” He broke off, acutely aware that both Naline and Arbogast had turned their eyes on him. He had been going to say, “This isn’t Zarathustra, you know,” And that, of course, was a stupid comment.

He licked his lips. “You ought to be wearing a whole-body garment, Del,” he finished.

.For an instant he thought she was going to snap at him, tell him to mind his own business. Instead, she sighed.

“I know, I know. I’m blonde, so it’s foolish not to. But after the winter it’s unbearable! I’m not joking when I say I feel filthy inside. I never wore the same clothes for so long in my life. It’s as though the dirt’s worked its way down to my bones!” She gave a shudder. “But you’re right I’ll ask Doc Jerode if he can give me a screening ointment.”

“You’ll be lucky,” Lex murmured. With a nod to Arbogast, he turned away.

Behind him he heard Naline utter a grunt of exasperation. “Del! Do you have any scissors?”

“Not me, but I know who has. Why?”

“I’ll get you to chop this hair off for me. Keeps falling in my eyes. The job’s fiddling enough anyway—only one kind of knot will do, and if I don’t get the tension right the bands either slip off or constrict the circulation…” The words tailed off into a mutter, and Lex caught nothing more.

He felt almost cheerful as he approached the spot where Aldric and Cheffy were inspecting their makeshift boat for leaks, despite what he was afraid he and Arbogast were shortly going to discover on the bed of the bay. The gray chilly fogs and the appalling gales of winter had been like a prison for the spirit; now, almost literally oversight, they were released and a summer stretched ahead of them as long as an Earthly year. They had endured the worst their new home could throw at them, and most of them had survived. Even some of those who had thought they would never plan for the future again once their birthworld had been calcined were beginning to act like human beings instead of frightened animals.

Inland, in the cleft-valley where they had huddled for shelter along a riverbank, damaged houses were being mended and new ones planned. Here on the beach a dozen people under the leadership of gray-haired Bendle—recovered from the shock of losing his son last fall—were carrying out a methodical survey of the rocks and pools. Everything was changed, of course. The winter gales had done more than spin the windmills for weeks on end. The dunes, the shoals, even the huge rocks scattered like currants in a sand-pudding had been stirred into a new arrangement.

Nonetheless, the situation felt—well, promising.

Here and there on the beach were brownish, greenish, and reddish pieces of organic debris. Bendle’s team had looked at these first. Most were harmless fronds of a rooted sea-plant, torn up by the last storms. Those which were mobile and possibly dangerous, though dying out of water, had been marked with a warning splash of white paint, and one had been pegged to the ground with a sharp stake. A circle had been scraped around it in the sand.

Lex paused and examined this creature. Like many of the sea-beasts, it wasn’t easy to kill. Pinkish and greenish, quadrilaterally symmetrical, leaking a sour-smelling fluid, the staked body humped and pulsed; the paired flexible trunklike organs which were limbs, gullets, channels of excretion, and reactor-pipes combined writhed vainly toward him, extending almost but not quite as far as the circular groove.

A long cool swim… Lex shuddered and strode on briskly.

“Admiring our prize exhibit?” Aldric called, turning his dark glasses as Lex approached. He was a stocky redhead, and had been fat. But no longer. Nobody among the refugees was fat this spring.

“You could say so,” Lex agreed, setting down his aircylinders with his helmet on top. “Anyone invented a name for it yet?”

“I want to call it polystoma abominabilis,” Cheffy said. He didn’t raise his round head, capped with close-curling black hair. He was using a hot-spray to apply quickset plastic to a pair of pegs projecting from the rim of the boat’s peapod hull. His other hand held a spatula with which he was shaping the pliant material before exposure to air hardened it rock-solid. “That,” he added, “means the disgusting thing with a lot of mouths.”

“Apt,” Lex murmured. “Any leaks, by the way?”

“Not now. Two or three cracks we had to seal.” Cheffy shut off the hot-spray, gave a final dab with the spatula, and stood up.

“What are the pegs for?” Lex said. “Rowlocks?”

“Yes, of course.” Aldric kicked at a pair of long, wide-ended objects lying in the boat’s shadow. “The free paddles we ware trying last year weren’t very efficient, you’ll recall. Nor the punting-pole.”

Lex gave a dismal nod. It had been when his puntingpole stuck in bottom-mud that young Bendle had fallen overside and never come up.

“So I’ve been putting these together in my spare time,” Aldric went on. “Theoretically, they should drive a loaded boat better. We’ve hung a tiller on the stern, too—there. Not that I’m going to make any guarantee, you realize. I never expected to have to cobble together primitive makeshifts like these. If it hadn’t been for Cheffy’s interest in Earthside history, I don’t imagine I’d ever have dreamed of making oars.”

Lex nodded. It wasn’t the first time that Cheffy’s purely intellectual awareness of subtechnical devices had had to be translated—generally by Aldric, who was a deft craftsman—into hardware improvised from anything to hand.

Momentarily depressed again by the colossal scale of the task they’d taken on, he said, “What makes you so sure we’re going to have a loaded boat?”

Aldric looked out to sea. “She has settled, hasn’t she?” He sighed.

“Sunk is more the word,” said Cheffy. “Probably sifted half full of wet sand into the bargain. You’ll be working in at least a dozen feet of water, Lex.”

“Luck’s been with us so far,” Lex countered with forced casualness. “It may not be as bad as you think.”

Cheffy snorted. After a pause, he said, “How do you Imagine the others made out? I gather Ornelle’s been trying to raise them by radio, without success.”

True enough. Consequently no one was giving much for the chances of the only other refugees known to have reached the sanctuary of this planet. He was sorry Cheffy had mentioned the subject; he’d hoped that everyone would be too busy for at least another few days to worry about the party whose ship had landed—or crashed—on the inland plateau.

“Gales must have been terrible up there,” Aldric said, reaching for the stern of the little boat. “Well, let’s push her to the water. The captain ready yet, Lex?”

Shading his eyes, Lex stared back along the beach toward the air-compressor.

“Just about, I guess,” he replied.

The last band was tied. Critically Naline passed her hand over the slick surface of the suit, touching the knots in turn. As she felt the one on Arbogast’s chest, she gave a murmur of surprise.

“Are you all right, Captain?” she demanded.

“Of course,” Arbogast grunted. “Why?”

“You’re shivering,” Naline said. In the act of laying down the latest charged cylinder, Delvia glanced around.

“Nonsense,” Arbogast said. He stepped back, avoiding the eyes of the girls. “Is my air ready, Delvia?”

“Yes, three cylinders.”

Arbogast bent stiffly to pick them up, paused while Naline—still looking worried—placed his helmet on them, uttered a word of thanks, and headed for the waiting boat.

Looking after him, Naline said under her breath, “I hope he doesn’t have a fever. You can’t see it, but his whole body is—well, sort of vibrating.”

“That’s nothing to do with fever,” Delvia said. She turned quickly to the compressor and disconnected the accumulator leads from its motor, then picked up and began to unfold the solar collector sheets. “Give me a hand to spread these flat, will you?” she added over her shoulder.

Moving to obey, as she always obeyed Delvia, Naline said in a puzzled voice, “But he is shivering, I tell you. And in full sunlight.”

“Not shivering. Trembling.” Delvia pegged down the corners of the first sheet and coupled the accumulator leads to its output terminals.

“What? Why?”

“The ship—what else? All winter long he’s talked about nothing except patching her up and getting her aloft. Now he’s come out and seen what’s happened to it. He’s grounded.”

“Aren’t we all?” Naline countered bitterly.

“He’s a spaceman. I guess that makes it tougher. And he isn’t so young anymore.” Delvia brushed sand from herself.

“Besides,” she went on, “don’t you remember when things began to get bad at the start of the winter he kept trying to persuade everybody to take shelter in the ship?” She gestured in the direction of the thin shining arc which was all of the vessel now showing above water. “How’d you like to be in there? Come on—I’ll trim that hair for you now.”

“Air,” Aldric said, checking the items of gear over the stern of the boat. “One, two, three cylinders. Weighted belts. Boots—”

“Last time,” Lex realized suddenly, “we were just walking on the bottom. But these are ordinary magnet-soled spaceboots. I don’t want to be dragged feet first against the hull every time I go close.”

“Thought of that,” Cheffy said briefly. “I told Aldric to change the magnets for chunks of lead. But we couldn’t find any. He had to make do with plain steel. Go on, Aldric.”

“Net bags. Lex, don’t pick up anything which well have to haul up on a cable, will you? I’m not sure how stable this boat is, and I’d hate to be tipped into the water. One waterproofed handlight. At least it says it’s waterproof. Two hatchets, the best we could think of in the way of weapons. There is absolutely no means of making an energy gun fire under water. Cheffy tells me they used to use compressed air for underwater guns, so I’ll get to work on one as soon as I can think of something expendable enough to use as ammunition.”

“Don’t expend it,” Lex suggested. “Use something long enough to tie a cord to. We have plenty of that.”

“There are things down there,” Aldric countered sourly with a jerk of his thumb at the sea, “which I would not care to be tied to if they took off for deep water. Of course, if you want the thrill of a submarine joyride in the wake of a hurt and angry monster…?”

“Point taken,” Lex said, and grinned.

“I’m glad. We don’t want to lose more people than we have to. And what do you think of our new anchor?” Aldric held up a shiny metal object consisting of a shaft and four spiked, curved tines. On the shaft was a coarse spiral thread, and fitted loosely on this was a rotating collar bearing four sharp blades.

“If this gets caught in bottom-weeds, or some beastie tries to cling to it, you haul on the cable sharply, that releases this spring catch—see?—and the blades spiral up the shaft.” He gave it an approving pat and placed it in the boat.

“Cheffy, are you going with them, or shall I?”

“I’ll go. You can make the next trip.” Cheffy swung his legs over the side of the boat. “Push us out a few yards, will you? And mind where you put your feet.”

Lex scrambled lightly aboard and took the bow thwart “OK, Captain,” he called to Arbogast.

But Arbogast was staring toward the sunken spaceship again, his hands hooked together in front of him, his knuckles bright white. He didn’t seem to have heard.

“All set, Captain!” Aldric said sharply.

Arbogast let his hands fall to his sides. He swallowed hard before speaking. “I… I changed my mind. I’m not going.”

“What?” Aldric took a pace toward him. Cheffy, startled, paused in the act of setting the oars in the rowlocks. Only Lex, slewed around on his thwart so he could see the captain, gave a slow nod. He hadn’t been altogether unprepared for this.

Arbogast bowed his head and walked off up the beach, his dragging feet leaving smeared marks. The dying horror pegged to the ground sensed his passage and hunched once more to try to strike at him.

“Now just a moment!” Aldric said hotly, starting after him. “You can’t leave Lex to—”

“Aldric!” Lex launched the name on the air like a dart. “Aldric, let him alone.”

“The hell!” Aldric snapped. “Look—it was his idea he should go, wasn’t it? Are we to waste another hour finding a suit to fit me or Cheffy, have it tied up, go hunting for different boots? It took most of yesterday to find enough wearable kit!”

“Keep your temper,” Lex said. “Think of it his way. How would you like to go see your old home wrecked and smashed, with alien creatures crawling in e. . .