"Wilhelm, Kate - Planet Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

"I know. It's getting worse." The kindest among us have become withdrawn, short tempered; the indifferent ones have become quarrelsome; the ones tending toward meanness in the best of times have become vicious. Always before, the ubiquitous dangers of unknown worlds have drawn us closer, but here, in the total absence of any threat, we are struggling to free ourselves from the mutual dependency that is as necessary to our success as the individual skills each brings to the service. I shrug. "I look, too," I say. "There's nothing."
He glances at the search monitor and says, "When do you want your session?"
"When we get up, before sunrise." It is a good time, when defenses are down somewhat. Everyone will welcome a break in the record-keeping chores that occupy us all in the hours after we sleep and before sunrise. The nights are very long on this planet with its thirty-four-hour day.
I rise to leave him and pause before stepping over the portal. "I'm sorry about Jeanne, Wes." I know she was a favorite of his, also. He has few he can turn to. Something keeps him aloof from the rest of us, but he had Jeanne and now he won't have her. I am sorry.
* * * *
High above the atmosphere of this planet the orbiting ship is studying the sun. Closer, spy satellites weave an invisible web as they spin in their separate orbits, mapping the world, sensing mineral deposits, ocean depths, volcanic regions. On the surface, our group, split into halves, makes a minute examination of the soil, the air, the rivers and shores, the animal life. This planet can withhold no secrets from our assault: the nitrogen content of the soil, the bone composition of the animals, the oxygen dissolved in the streams, the parts per million of spores, bacteria, pollen in the air. Nothing will remain hidden. Our preliminary reports prepared in the first three days indicated there is nothing harmful to man on this planet.
The group that gathers for the open session knows all this. We meet in the main room of the ship, where each of us has his own seat-bed, with a screen to be closed at will. The seats are upright now, the screens open.
We are a good group, I know. We can trust one another. We know each has proven his bravery, his intelligence frequently enough not to have it questioned. We are close enough emotionally to be able to forego any preliminaries, intimate enough to recognize any signs of hesitation or evasion.
"I would like to try to get a profile of whatever it is causing our fears," I say. "Since there is nothing that anyone can see, or detect with instruments, we might approach with the possibility that it is a projection. This is not a conclusion, merely a place to start."
There are nods, and only Haarlem seems disapproving of this beginning. I call on him first. "Have you ever felt a comparable uneasiness that you couldn't rationalize?"
He shakes his head silently and I feel a flush of annoyance with him.
"Is there anyone who has felt a similar, baseless fear?"
"Once," Louenvelt says, "when I was a child, no more than four. I wakened with a feeling of great fear, afraid to move, unable to say why. Not the usual nightmare awakening, but similar to it. There had been an earthquake, quieted by the time I was thoroughly awake, but I didn't know that at the time." Louenvelt is our botanist, a quiet man who seldom participates in any group activity. I am grateful that he has started the session.
Sharkey is next to speak, and I know I will have to bear this, too. Sharkey is querulous: conversation with him is always one sided and endless.
"On my first Contract," he says, with an air of settling in, "we were faced with these bear-like beings. Big. Big as grizzlies, that's why we called them bears, even though they ..."
"But you knew what frightened you," I say firmly. "That isn't what we're after right now."
"Well, we knew those bears would tear us limb from limb, and they were smart, even if the computer did rate them non-intelligent. The dominant species: That always is a clue about ..."
I depress the button of my recorder to underline what he has just said. He has given me something to think about after all. There is no dominant species on this planet.
Olga has stood up and there is excitement on her face. "You said it might be a projection," she says. "But what if it isn't? What if there are things that we can't detect simply because we've never had to detect them before?" Sharkey gives way to her amiably. He is used to being interrupted.
"What do you mean?" I ask. Olga is a zoologist, specializing in holographic scanning of animals. She can make replications of animals with her equipment, down to the nerve endings. With her holograms and a blood sample, a nail, hoof, or hair clipping, she can tell you what the animal customarily eats, its rate of growth, its life span.
"I mean that no matter how much information we have, we always have to add more with new facts. The computer can't be more intelligent than its programmers. We all know that. And if we are faced with something that no one has ever seen before, of course we haven't got that information in the computer. The sensors can't report what they haven't been programmed to sense, any more than a metal detector will indicate plastic." She sits down again with a smug air.
Haarlem says, "And the evidence of our eyes? And our ears? Are we to believe that we cannot hear or see because we have never experienced this before?" Haarlem is very dark, he keeps his head shaved, almost as if he wants to conceal nothing on the outside because he realizes that there are so many hidden places within. Olga has never repressed anything in her life. She is fair, open, quick to be wounded, quicker to heal. Haarlem bleeds internally for a long time.
"Yes, our eyes can deceive us," Olga says with some heat. "If a ghost walked in here, we would every one of us deny our eyes!"
Haarlem laughs and settles back to become a spectator once more. I study him briefly, wondering at his withdrawal, his almost sullen attitude that has kept me at a distance. I yearn for him, but in his present mood we only fight when we are together, and it is well that he rebuffs me, I decide. He is wiser in some matters than I am.
Julie tells of a time that she was overcome by fear in a deep wood in the Canadian Rockies, and someone else relates a similar feeling while at sea, standing alone in the stern of the ship. It goes on. Nearly everyone can remember such an incident, and when it is over, I wonder what we have accomplished, if we have accomplished anything. Perhaps we will all speak of it now when it occurs. Mel Souder, our meteorologist, will chart the times and check them against weather changes, wind shifts. I expect little to come of it.
* * * *
My suit is lightweight and impermeable, my oxypack heavy on my back, an accustomed heaviness accepted as one accepts a gain in weight, or a swollen foot or hand. Awkward, but necessary. We do not breathe the air of the planets we discover. It is for the seedling colonists to take such risks, to adapt to the local conditions if necessary. We adapt to nothing but change.
This is how Jeanne walked away, I think, her footsteps clear in the sand, her tracing clear on the recorder, until suddenly there was no longer any tracing, although the footprints continued up the beach another twenty or thirty meters, and then turned inland and were lost in the undergrowth of the tangled marsh trees and bushes.
There is a pale coloring in the sky now: first comes the lightening with no particular color, and then the clouds glow as if a fire is raging somewhere, obscured by smoke and fog that lets a crimson band appear, then a golden flare, then pale pink rolling clouds, and finally the yellow spot that is too bright to look at directly, but is not defined as a sun.
I walk along the edge of the flowers that divide the plain from the forest. The vegetation is grass-like, but not grass. It is broader leaved, pliable. It springs up behind me and shows no evidence of my passing. A swarm of jade insects rises and forms a column of life that hovers a moment, disperses, and settles once more, hidden again by the plants. There are birds here, songbirds, birds of prey, shore birds. Every niche is filled from bacteria to mammals, but intelligence did not arise. Nor is there a dominant species.
I could go into the forest, walk for hours and never become lost. My belt has homing instruments that would guide me back to the ship. My oxypack has a signal to warn me when half of my supply of air is gone. And aboard ship, telltale tracings would reveal my position at a glance to rescuers, should I faint and be unable to continue.
I suppose I am mourning Jeanne, but more than that, I am inviting the fear to come to me now. Always before I have been where I could busy myself instantly, or return to the ship, or seek out another and start a conversation designed to mask the fear. It always comes to one who is alone, in a contemplative mood possibly. Can the fear be courted? I don't know, but I will know before I return to the ship.
The resilient blades under my feet make a faint sighing sound as they straighten up. It is almost musical, a counterpoint to the rhythm of my steps, so faint that only if I concentrate on it does it become audible. I am becoming aware of other sounds. Something in the woods is padding along in the same direction that I walk. I stop and search for it, but see nothing. When I move again I listen for it and presently it is there. A small animal, curious about me probably, not frightening. If a carnivore should become confused and attack me, I would stop it long before it could reach me. We are armed, and on many planets the arms have been necessary, but not here. I wish to see the small animal because, like it, I am curious.
From the giraffe to the platypus, from the elephant to the shrew, the crocodile to the gibbon, such is the spread of life that we have accepted on Earth, and wherever we have gone since then, the range has been comparable. There are things that are like, but not the same, and others that are unlike anything any of us has seen before. The universal catalogue of animals would need an entire planet to house its volumes. Perhaps Olga is right, perhaps there are those things we cannot perceive because we are too inexperienced.
The small animal has become tired of its game, and walks out from the brush to nibble yellow flowers. It is a pale gray quadruped, short coarse hair, padded feet, tailless, and now it evinces no interest in me at all. It is cat-like, but no one would ever mistake it for a cat. An herbivorous cat.
The animals have struck a balance on this planet. Checks and balances work here. A steady population, enough food for all, no need for the genocidal competition of other worlds. This, I feel, is the key to the planet. I have stopped to observe the cat-like animal, and now I start to walk once more, and suddenly there it is.
There has been no change in anything as far as I can tell. No sound of parallel steps, no rustling in the grass. The wind hasn't changed. Nothing has changed, but I feel the first tendrils of fear raising the hairs of my arms, playing over my scalp. I study the woods while the fear grows. Then the plain. A small furry animal flies overhead, oblivious of me, intent on his own flight into the woods. Now I can feel my heart race and I begin to speak into my recorder, trying to put into words that which is only visceral and exists without symbols or signs that can truly define it. My physiological symptoms are not what my fear is. I describe them anyway. Now my hands are perspiring heavily and I begin to feel nausea rise and spread, weakening my legs, cramping my stomach. I am searching faster, looking for something, anything. Something to fight or run away from. And there is nothing. My heart is pounding hard and the urge to scream and run is very strong. The urge to run into the woods and hide myself among the trees is strong also, as is the urge to drop to the ground and draw myself up into as tight and hard a ball as possible and become invisible. Nothing in the overcast sky, nothing in the woods, nothing on the plain, nothing ... From the ground then. Something coming up from the ground. I am running and sobbing into my recorder, running from the spot where it has to be, and it runs with me.
I am in the woods and can't remember entering them, I remember telling myself I would not enter them. Now I can no longer see the ship in the distance and the fear is growing and pressing in on me, crushing me down into the ground. I think, if I vomit I might drown in it. The suits were not made for that contingency. I would have to take off the helmet, and expose myself to it even more.
If I turn off all my devices, then it won't be able to find me. I can hide in the woods then. Even as the thought occurs to me I start to scream. I fall to the ground and claw and scrabble at it, and I scream and scream.
* * * *
I begged them not to give me a sedative, but Wes countermanded me and administered it personally and I slept. Now it is late afternoon and much of the morning is dream-like, but I know this will pass as the sedative wears off. They think I am mad, like Ito, like Jeanne probably was at the end. I am very sore. I believe I fought them when they found me in the woods clawing a hole in the ground, screaming.
I am in a restraining sheet and there is nothing I can do but wait until someone comes to see about me. Not Sharkey, I hope. But Wes is too considerate and wise to permit Sharkey access to someone who cannot walk away.
It is Wes who looks in on me, and behind him I can see Haarlem. "I'm all right," I say. "Pulse normal, no fever, calm. You can release me, you know."
"How did you take your pulse?" Haarlem asks, not disbelieving, but interested.
"In the groin. I have to talk to you and this sheet makes it damned difficult."
Wes releases the restraint and I sit up. Before I can start, he says, "If you have found out anything at all, let's have it straight. Now. The clouds have lifted and for the first time we have the opportunity for aerial reconnaissance, and I want to go along."
The cloud cover of this planet is not thick, not like on Venus, but since our arrival there has been a haze, there have been no sharp features that were visible from the aircraft. Probably a spring feature, the meteorologist said, that would not be a factor throughout the rest of the year. With the lifting of the clouds there would be sharp shadows, and clearly defined trees and streams, and peaceful animals that would look with wonder on the things in the sky.
Inside the Chinese puzzle box are other boxes, each smaller than the last, and our innermost box is the one-man aircraft.
"You mustn't go," I say. "Don't let anyone go anywhere alone again."
The captain clears his throat and even opens his mouth but it is Haarlem who speaks first. "What happened to you?"