Perilous Planets

by Brian W Aldiss

  They carried him back to the shelter of Torkul’s barricade, his bearded lips still grinning at the sky where Ulra—his Erth—swam bright and clear among the cold, far stars. They watched beside him through the night, as was the old custom, while the greater moon of Mur rose out of the dying sky-glow and raced in silent fear across the wan river of the galaxy.

  Above the black wall of the hills, a meteor burned and went out. Thorana snuggled close to Korul’s side.

  ‘That should have been he,’ she murmured. ‘Jim-Berk, going home to the Erth he loved. We must have been monsters to him, Korul as he was to us. How did he see us—dwarfed, hairless, saucer-eyed, hideous things out of a fevered dream. But he, the Star-Beast whom we mocked and imprisoned and tormented for more than half his life, saw us and understood. He could have gone back, but he stayed to help us. We must be like that, Korul, when the new race grows strong. We must be ready when the Titans come again in their starships.

  ‘They may have forgotten you on Erth. Jim-Berk, as you said they would. But Mur remembers you, and the people-the one People—of Mur will build truth into your dream. If they do not come to us, then some day we will go to Erth.

  ‘How did he say it, Korul? “Flocking down out of the skies to you—and you to us.” That is how it must be, for the Titan’s sake.’

  * * *

  Section 5—Becoming More Alien—A Universal Home Truth

  ==========

  There are times when you are at an impressionable age when science fiction can scare the living daylights out of you.

  On the last occasion that that happened to me, I was reading The Possessors, by an author for whom I have considerable respect. John Christopher. The Possessors, in case you have not had the pleasure of reading it, is a grand working out of the theme of aliens who can take over or exactly simulate human beings for their own malign ends. It is one of the most compelling of all sf themes, with a high terror quota.

  A Freudian interpretation of the theme, would be interesting; the idea implies, after all, a paranoid mistrust of one’s fellow men. But such interpretation would be beside the point unless it was remembered that the height of the theme’s popularity coincided with the depths of the Cold War—when, in fact, one half of mankind hated and sought to destroy the other half without actually resorting to outright war.

  Many themes which find popular expression in sf share the same mixture of inwardness and outwardness; neither one is particularly effective without the other.

  Sf writers and readers work on each other by stating and restating themes. There is now a clearer realization than ever before of man himself being no less strange than the guy on the next planet. The old Us and Them situation has softened into something much more ambivalent. It too has its rewards for a writer.

  Hence the inclusion here of Bob Silverberg’s most beautiful story, ‘Schwartz Between the Galaxies’. A sort of dissolving has gone on. The modernity of the story holds great appeal for us now; I have no doubt that time will work its transformations on the story, as on ‘Brightside Crossing’, for example; so that in another ten years we shall see it from another perspective—and undoubtedly still find it good.

  Schwartz—oh yes, Schwartz is cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan and alienated. The power of the story derives from Schwartz’s feelings on the subject. I must apologize for the planet on which Frederik Pohl’s cameo is set; I hope it is perilous enough to satisfy all tastes. Those dreadful people, Tandy and Howard are not at all cosmopolitan, not at all alienated. They un-complicatedly enjoy life. And that’s what makes ‘The Snowmen’ a powerful story.

  Some more awful people inhabit the narrow wastes of Spinrad’s tale. You could claim that it takes place on Earth, and consequently should find no place here. But think, as you laugh, that there is something terribly universal about its home-truths.

  Is that yet another definition of science fiction: a universal home truth? I leave the question with others, hastening to say of Damon Knight’s ‘Four in One’ that it contains a planet where the wild life is odd indeed. Yet the wild life functions much like society on Earth; it can digest you, make you, break you, or ultimately excrete you. The message is much more fun when set in Knight’s madly imaginative terms. Home truths are often more amusing when not at home.

  ‘Four in One’ comes from the same epoch as Simak’s ‘Beachhead’. The situation is roughly the same. Simak’s characters are dead ducks if they move outside the rugged military posture; Knight’s, on the other hand, find salvation simple by moving out. Or falling out, one should say.

  From this you may make your own deductions.

  Just don’t venture too far from the spaceship.

  George realized he was lucky. He fell into something scientists dream of—he was able to become completely absorbed in his work !

  FOUR IN ONE

  by Damon Knight

  ==========

  I

  George Meister had once seen the nervous system of a man—a display specimen, achieved by coating the smaller fibers until they were coarse enough to be seen, then dissolving all the unwanted tissue and replacing it by clear plastic. A marvelous job; that fellow on Torkas III had done it. What was his name?… At any rate, having seen the specimen, Meister knew what he himself must look like at the present moment.

  Of course, there were distortions. For example, he was almost certain that the distance between his visual center and his eyes was now at least thirty centimeters. Also, no doubt the system as a whole was curled up and spread out rather oddly, since the musculature it had originally controlled was gone; and he had noticed certain other changes which might or might not be reflected by gross structural differences. The fact remained that he—all that he could still call himself— was nothing more than a brain, a pair of eyes, a spinal cord, and a spray of neurons.

  George closed his eyes for a second. It was a feat he had learned to do only recently and he was proud of it. That first long period, when he had had no control whatever, had been very bad. He had decided later that the paralysis had been due to the lingering effects of some anesthetic—the agent, whatever it was, that had kept him unconscious while his body was…

  Well.

  Either that or the neuron branches had simply not yet knitted firmly in their new positions. Perhaps he could verify one or the other supposition at some future time. But at first, when he had only been able to see and not to move, knowing nothing beyond the moment when he had fallen face-first into that mottled green and brown puddle of gelatin… that had been upsetting.

  ==========

  He wondered how the others were taking it. There were others, he knew, because occasionally he would feel a sudden acute pain down where his legs used to be, and at the same instant the motion of the landscape would stop with a jerk. That could only be some other brain, trapped like his, trying to move their common body in another direction.

  Usually the pain stopped immediately, and George could go on sending messages down to the nerve-endings which had formerly belonged to his fingers and toes, and the gelatinous body would go on creeping slowly forward. When the pains continued, there was nothing to do but stop moving until the other brain quit—in which case George would feel like an unwilling passenger in a very slow vehicle—or try to alter his own movements to coincide, or at least produce a vector with the other brain’s.

  He wondered who else had fallen in. Vivian Bellis! Major Gumbs? Miss McCarty? All three of them? There ought to be some way of finding out.

  He tried looking down once more and was rewarded with a blurry view of a long, narrow strip of mottled green and brown, moving sluggishly along the dry stream bed they had been crossing for the last hour or more. Twigs and shreds of dry vegetable matter were stuck to the dusty, translucent surface.

  He was improving; the last time, he had only been able to see the thinnest possible edge of his new body.

  When he looked up again, the far side of the stream bed was perceptibly closer. There was a cluster of st
iff-looking, dark-brown vegetable shoots just beyond, on the rocky shoulder George was aiming slightly to the left of it. It had been a plant very much like that one that he’d been reaching for when he lost his balance and got himself into this situation.

  He might as well have a good look at it, anyhow.

  The plant would probably turn out to be of little interest. It would be out of all reason to expect every new life-form to be a startling novelty; and George Meister was convinced that he had already stumbled into the most interesting organism on this planet. Something-or-other meisterii, he thought, named after him, of course. He had not settled on a generic term—he would have to learn more about it before he decided—but meisterii certainly. It was his discovery and nobody could take it away from him. Or, unhappily, him away from it. Ah, well!

  ==========

  It was a really lovely organism, though. Primitive—less structure of its own than a jellyfish, and only on a planet with light surface gravity like this one could it ever have hauled itself up out of the sea. No brain, no nervous system at all, apparently. But it had the perfect survival mechanism. It simply let its rivals develop highly organized nervous tissue, sat in one place (looking exactly like a deposit of leaves and other clutter) until one of them fell into it, and then took all the benefit.

  It wasn’t parasitism, either. It was a true symbiosis, on a higher level than any other planet, so far as George knew, had ever developed. The captive brain was nourished by the captor; wherefore it served the captive’s interest to move the captor toward food and away from danger. You steer me, I feed you. It was fair.

  They were close to the plant, almost touching it. George inspected it. As he had thought, it was a common grass type.

  Now his body was tilting itself up a ridge he knew to be low, although from his eye-level it looked tremendous. He climbed it laboriously and found himself looking down into still another gully. This could probably go on indefinitely. The question was—did he have any choice?

  He looked at the shadows cast by the low-hanging sun. He was heading approximately northwest, directly away from the encampment. He was only a few hundred meters away; even at a crawl, he could make the distance easily enough… if he turned back,

  He felt uneasy at the thought and didn’t know why. Then it struck him that his appearance was not obviously that of a human being in distress. The chances were that he looked like a monster which had eaten and partially digested one or more people.

  If he crawled into camp in his present condition, it was a certainty that he would be shot at before any questions were asked, and only a minor possibility that narcotic gas would be used instead of a machine rifle.

  No, he decided, he was on the right course. The idea was to get away from camp, so that he wouldn’t be found by the relief party which was probably searching for him now. Get away, bury himself in the forest, and study his new body: find out how it worked and what he could do with it, whether there actually were others in it with him, and if so, whether there was any way of communicating with them.

  It would take a long time, he realized, but he could do it.

  Limply, like a puddle of mush oozing over the edge of a tablecloth, George started down into the gully.

  ==========

  Briefly, the circumstances leading up to George’s fall into the Something-or-other meisterii were as follows:

  Until as late as the mid-twenty-first century, a game invented by the ancient Japanese was still played by millions in the eastern hemisphere of earth. The game was called go. Although its rules were almost childishly simple, its strategy included more permutations and was more difficult to master than chess.

  Go was played at the height of development—just before the geological catastrophe that wiped out most of its devotees—on a board with nine hundred shallow holes, using small gill shaped counters. At each turn, one of the two players placed a counter on the board, wherever he chose, the object being to capture as much territory as possible by surrounding it completely.

  There were no other rules; and yet it had taken the Japanese almost a thousand years to work up to that thirty-by-thirty board, adding perhaps one rank and file per century. A hundred years was not too long to explore all the possibilities of that additional rank and file.

  At the time George Meister fell into the gelatinous green-and brown monster, toward the end of the twenty-third century ad, a kind of go was being played in a three-dimensional field which contained more than ten billion positions. The

  Galaxy was the board, the positions were star-systems, men were the counters. The loser’s penalty was annihilation.

  The Galaxy was in the process of being colonized by two opposing federations, both with the highest aims and principles. In the early stages of this conflict, planets had been raided, bombs dropped, and a few battles had even been fought by fleets of spaceships. Later, that haphazard sort of warfare became impossible. Robot fighters, carrying enough armament to blow each other into dust, were produced by the trillion. In the space around the outer stars of a cluster belonging to one side or the other, they swarmed like minnows.

  Within such a screen, planets ‘were safe from attack and from any interference with their commerce… unless the enemy succeeded in colonizing enough of the surrounding star-systems to set up and maintain a second screen outside the first. It was go, played for desperate stakes and under impossible conditions.

  Everyone was in a hurry; everyone’s ancestors for seven generations had been in a hurry. You got your education in a speeded-up capsulized form. You mated early and bred frantically. And if you were assigned to an advance ecological team, as George was, you had to work without proper preparation.

  The sensible, the obvious thing to do in opening up a new planet with unknown life-forms would have been to begin with at least ten years of immunological study conducted from the inside of a sealed station. After the worst bacteria and viruses had been conquered, you might proceed to a little cautious field work and exploration. Finally—total elapsed time fifty years, say—the colonists would be shipped in.

  There simply wasn’t that much time.

  ==========

  Five hours after the landing Meister’s team had unloaded fabricators and set up barracks enough to house its 2,628 members.

  An hour after that, Meister, Gumbs, Bellis and McCarty had started out across the level cinder and ash left by the transport’s tail jets to the nearest living vegetation, six hundred meters away. They were to trace a spiral path outward from the camp site to a distance of a thousand meters, and then re-turn with their specimens—providing nothing too large and hungry to be stopped by machine rifle had previously eaten them.

  Meister, the biologist, was so hung down with collecting boxes that his slender torso was totally invisible. Major Gumbs had a survival kit, binoculars and a machine rifle. Vivian Bellis, who knew exactly as much mineralogy as had been contained in the three-month course prescribed for her rating, and no more, carried a light rifle, a hammer and a specimen sack. Miss McCarty—no one knew her first name—had no scientific function. She was the group’s Loyalty Monitor. She wore two squat pistols and a bandolier bristling with cartridges. Her only job was to blow the cranium off any team member caught using an unauthorized communicator, or in any other way behaving oddly.

  All of them were heavily gloved and booted, and their heads were covered by globular helmets, sealed to their tunic collars. They breathed through filtered respirators, so finely meshed that—in theory—nothing larger than an oxygen molecule could get through.

  On their second circuit of the camp, they had struck a low ridge and a series of short, steep gullies, most of them cloaked with the dusty-brown stalks of dead vegetation. As they started down into one of these, George, who was third in line—Gumbs leading, then Bellis, and McCarty behind George—stepped out onto a protruding slab of stone to examine a cluster of plant stalks rooted on its far side.

  His weight was only a little more than twenty kilo
grams on this planet, and the slab looked as if it were firmly cemented into the wall of the gully. Just the same, he felt it shift under him as soon as his weight was fully on it. He found himself falling, shouted, and caught a flashing glimpse of Gumbs and Bellis, standing as if caught by a high-speed camera. He heard a rattling of stones as he went by. Then he saw what looked like a shabby blanket of leaves and dirt floating toward him, and he remembered thinking, It looks like a soft landing anyhow…

  That was all, until he woke up feeling as if he had been prematurely buried, with no part of him alive but his eyes.

  ==========

  Much later, his frantic efforts to move had resulted in the first fractional success. From then on, his field of vision had advanced fairly steadily, perhaps a meter every fifty minutes, not counting the times when someone else’s efforts had interfered with his own.

  His conviction that nothing remained of the old George Meister except a nervous system was not supported by observation, but the evidence was regrettably strong. To begin with, the anesthesia of the first hours had worn off, but his body was not reporting the position of the torso, head and four limbs he had formerly owned. He had, instead, a vague impression of being flattened and spread out over an enormous area. When he tried to move his fingers and toes, the response he got was so multiplied that he felt like a centipede.

  He had no sense of cramped muscles, such as would normally be expected after a long period of paralysis—and he was not breathing. Yet his brain was evidently being well supplied with food and oxygen; he felt clearheaded, at ease and healthy.

  He wasn’t hungry, either, although he had been using energy steadily for a long time. There were, he thought, two possible reasons for that, depending on how you looked at it. One, that he wasn’t hungry because he no longer had any stomach lining to contract; two, that he wasn’t hungry because the organism he was riding in had been well nourished by the superfluous tissues George had contributed.