The World Between and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  Bernisty nodded. He looked sourly at the waiting men. “Need I tell you what to do?”

  “No.”

  Bernisty returned to his private office and presently sent for Berel. He asked, without preliminary, “How did you know a Kay ship was in the sky?”

  Berel stood staring defiantly down at him. “I did not know; I guessed.”

  Bernisty studied her for a moment. “Yes—you spoke of your intuitive abilities.”

  “This was not intuition,” said Berel scornfully. “This was plain common sense.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “It’s perfectly clear. A Kay woman-spy appears. The ecology went bad right away; red rust and black rust. You beat the rust, you celebrate; you’re keyed to a sense of relief. What better time to start a new plague?”

  Bernisty nodded slowly. “What better time, indeed…”

  “Incidentally—what kind of plague is it going to be?”

  “Plant-lice—mites. I think we can beat it before it gets started.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “It looks as if the Kay can’t scare us off; they mean to work us to death.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Can they do it?”

  “I don’t see how we can stop them from trying. It’s easy to breed pests; hard to kill them.”

  Banta, the head entomologist, came in with a glass tube. “Here’s some of them—hatched.”

  “Already?”

  “We hurried it up a little.”

  “Can they live in this atmosphere? There’s not much oxygen—lots of ammonia.”

  “They thrive on it; it’s what they’re breathing now.”

  Bernisty ruefully inspected the bottle. “And that’s our good vetch they’re eating, too.”

  Berel looked over his shoulder. “What can we do about them?”

  Banta looked properly dubious. “The natural enemies are certain parasites, viruses, dragonflies, and a kind of small armored gnat that breeds very quickly, and which I think we’d do best to concentrate on. In fact we’re already engaging in large-scale selective breeding, trying to find a strain to live in this atmosphere.”

  “Good work, Banta.” Bernisty rose to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” asked Berel.

  “Out to check on the vetch.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Out on the plain, Bernisty seemed intent not so much on the vetch as on the sky.

  “What are you looking for?” Berel asked.

  Bernisty pointed. “See that wisp up there?”

  “A cloud?”

  “Just a bit of frost—a few sprinkles of ice crystals…But it’s a start! Our first rainstorm—that’ll be an event!”

  “Provided the methane and oxygen don’t explode—and send us all to kingdom come!”

  “Yes, yes,” muttered Bernisty. “We’ll have to set out some new methanophiles.”

  “And how will you get rid of all this ammonia?”

  “There’s a marsh-plant from Salsiberry that under proper conditions performs the equation: 12NH3+9O2 = 18H2O+6N2.”

  “Rather a waste of time for it, I should say,” remarked Berel. “What does it gain?”

  “A freak, only a freak. What do we gain by laughing? Another freak.”

  “A pleasant uselessness.”

  Bernisty was examining the vetch. “There, here. Look. Under this leaf.” He displayed the mites; slow yellow aphid-creatures.

  “When will your gnats be ready?”

  “Banta is letting half his stock free; maybe they’ll feed faster on their own than in the laboratory.”

  “Does—does Kathryn know about the gnats?”

  “You’re still gunning for her, eh?”

  “I think she’s a spy.”

  Bernisty said mildly, “I can’t think of a way that either one of you could have communicated with that Kay ship.”

  “Either one of us!”

  “Someone warned him away. Kathryn is the logical suspect; but you knew he was there.”

  Berel swung on her heel, stalked back to the Beaudry.

  IV

  The gnats were countering the mites, apparently; the population of both first increased, then dwindled. After which the vetch grew taller and stronger. There was now oxygen in the air, and the botanists broadcast a dozen new species—broad-leaves, producers of oxygen; nitrogen-fixers, absorbing the ammonia; the methanophiles from the young methane-rich worlds, combining oxygen with methane, and growing in magnificent white towers like carved ivory.

  Bernisty’s feet were whole again, a size larger than his old ones, and he was forced to discard his worn and comfortable boots for a new pair cut from stiff blue leather.

  Kathryn was playfully helping him cram his feet into the hard vacancies. Casually, Bernisty said, “It’s been bothering me, Kathryn: tell me, how did you call to the Kay?”

  She started, gave him an instant piteous wide-eyed stare, like a trapped rabbit, then she laughed. “The same way you do—with my mouth.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, every day about this time.”

  “I’d be glad to watch you.”

  “Very well.” She looked up at the window, spoke in the ringing Kay tongue.

  “What did you say?” asked Bernisty politely.

  “I said that the mites were a failure; that there was good morale here aboard the Beaudry; that you were a great leader, a wonderful man.”

  “But you recommended no further steps.”

  She smiled demurely. “I am no ecologist—neither constructive, nor destructive.”

  “Very well,” said Bernisty, standing into his boots. “We shall see.”

  Next day the radar-tapes showed the presence of two ships; they had made fleeting visits—“long enough to dump their villainous cargo,” so Bufco reported to Bernisty.

  The cargo proved to be eggs of a ferocious blue wasp, which preyed on the gnats. The gnats perished; the mites prospered; the vetch began to wilt under the countless sucking tubes. To counter the wasp, Bernisty released a swarm of feathery blue flying-ribbons. The wasps bred inside a peculiar, small brown puff-ball fungus (the spores for which had been released with the wasp larvae). The flying-ribbons ate these puff-balls. With no shelter for their larvae, the wasps died; the gnats revived in numbers, gorging on mites till their thoraxes split.

  The Kay assaulted on a grander scale. Three large ships passed by night, disgorging a witches-cauldron of reptiles, insects, arachnids, land-crabs, a dozen phyla without formal classification. The human resources of the Beaudry were inadequate to the challenge; they began to fail, from insect stings; another botanist took a pulsing white-blue gangrene from the prick of a poisonous thorn.

  New Earth was no longer a mild region of vetch, lichen, and dusty wind; New Earth was a fantastic jungle. Insects stalked each other through the leafy wildernesses; there were local specializations and improbable adaptations. There were spiders and lizards the size of cats; scorpions which rang like bells when they walked; long-legged lobsters; poisonous butterflies; a species of giant moth which, finding the environment congenial, grew ever more gigantic.

  Within the Beaudry there was everywhere a sense of defeat. Bernisty walked limping along the promenade, the limp more of an unconscious attitude than a physical necessity. The problem was too complex for a single brain, he thought—or for a single team of human brains. The various life-forms on the planet, each evolving, mutating, expanding into vacant niches, selecting the range of their eventual destinies—they made a pattern too haphazard for an electronic computer, for a team of computers.

  Blandwick, the meteorologist, came along the promenade with his daily atmospheric-report. Bernisty derived a certain melancholy pleasure to find that while there had been no great increase in oxygen and water-vapor, neither had there been any decrease. “In fact,” said Blandwick, “there’s a tremendous amount of water tied up in all those bugs and pa
rasites.”

  Bernisty shook his head. “Nothing appreciable…And they’re eating away the vetch faster than we can kill ’em off. New varieties appear faster than we can find them.”

  Blandwick frowned. “The Kay are following no clear pattern.”

  “No, they’re just dumping anything they hope might be destructive.”

  “Why don’t we use the same technique? Instead of selective counter-action, we turn loose our entire biological program. Shotgun tactics.”

  Bernisty limped on a few paces. “Well, why not? The total effect might be beneficial…Certainly less destructive than what’s going on out there now.” He paused. “We deal in unpredictables of course—and this is contrary to my essential logic.”

  Blandwick sniffed. “None of our gains to date have been the predictable ones.”

  Bernisty grinned, after a momentary irritation, since Blandwick’s remark was inaccurate; had Blandwick been driving home a truth, then there would have been cause for irritation.

  “Very well, Blandwick,” he said jovially. “We shoot the works. If it succeeds we’ll name the first settlement Blandwick.”

  “Humph,” said the pessimistic Blandwick, and Bernisty went to give the necessary orders.

  Now every vat, tub, culture tank, incubator, tray and rack in the laboratory was full; as soon as the contents achieved even a measure of acclimatization to the still nitrogenous atmosphere, they were discharged: pods, plants, molds, bacteria, crawling things, insects, annelids, crustaceans, land ganoids, even a few elementary mammals—life-forms from well over three dozen different worlds. Where New Earth had previously been a battleground, now it was a madhouse.

  One variety of palms achieved instant success; inside of two months they towered everywhere over the landscape. Between them hung veils of a peculiar air-floating web, subsisting on flying things. Under the branches, the brambles, there was much killing; much breeding; much eating; growing; fighting; fluttering; dying. Aboard the Beaudry, Bernisty was well-pleased and once more jovial.

  He clapped Blandwick on the back. “Not only do we call the city after you, we prefix your name to an entire system of philosophy, the Blandwick method.”

  Blandwick was unmoved by the tribute. “Regardless of the success of ‘the Blandwick method’, as you call it, the Kay still have a word to say.”

  “What can they do?” argued Bernisty. “They can liberate creatures no more unique or ravenous than those we ourselves have loosed. Anything the Kay send to New Earth now, is in the nature of anti-climax.”

  Blandwick smiled sourly. “Do you think they’ll give up quite so easily?”

  Bernisty became uneasy, and went off in search of Berel. “Well, play-girl,” he demanded, “what does your intuition tell you now?”

  “It tells me,” she snapped, “that whenever you are the most optimistic, the Kay are on the verge of their most devastating attacks.”

  Bernisty put on a facetious front. “And when will these attacks take place?”

  “Ask the spy-woman; she communicates secrets freely to anyone.”

  “Very well,” said Bernisty. “Find her, if you please, and send her to me.”

  Kathryn appeared. “Yes, Bernisty?”

  “I am curious,” said Bernisty, “as to what you communicate to the Kay.”

  Kathryn said, “I tell them that Bernisty is defeating them, that he has countered their worst threats.”

  “And what do they tell you?”

  “They tell me nothing.”

  “And what do you recommend?”

  “I recommend that they either win at a massive single stroke, or give up.”

  “How do you tell them this?”

  Kathryn laughed, showing her pretty white teeth. “I talk to them just as now I talk to you.”

  “And when do you think they will strike?”

  “I don’t know…It seems that certainly they are long overdue. Would you not think so?”

  “Yes,” admitted Bernisty, and turned his head to find Bufco the radioman approaching.

  “Kay ships,” said Bufco. “A round dozen—mountainous barrels! They made one circuit—departed!”

  “Well,” said Bernisty, “this is it.” He turned upon Kathryn the level look of cold speculation, and she returned the expression of smiling demureness which both of them had come to find familiar.

  V

  In three days every living thing on New Earth was dead. Not merely dead, but dissolved into a viscous gray syrup which sank into the plain, trickled like sputum down the crags, evaporated into the wind. The effect was miraculous. Where the jungle had thronged the plain—now only plain existed, and already the wind was blowing up dust-devils.

  There was one exception to the universal dissolution—the monstrous moths, which by some unknown method, or chemical make-up, had managed to survive. Across the wind they soared; frail fluttering shapes, seeking their former sustenance and finding nothing now but desert.

  Aboard the Beaudry there was bewilderment; then dejection; then dull rage which could find no overt outlet, until at last Bernisty fell into a sleep.

  He awoke with a sense of vague uneasiness, of trouble: the collapse of the New Earth ecology? No. Something deeper, more immediate. He jumped into his clothes, hastened to the saloon. It was nearly full, and gave off a sense of grim malice.

  Kathryn sat pale, tense in a chair; behind her stood Banta with a garrote. He was clearly preparing to strangle her, with the rest of the crew as collaborators.

  Bernisty stepped across the saloon, broke Banta’s jaw and broke the fingers of his clenched fist. Kathryn sat looking up silently.

  “Well, you miserable renegades,” Bernisty began; but looking around the wardroom, he found no sheepishness, only growing anger, defiance. “What goes on here?” roared Bernisty.

  “She is a traitor,” said Berel; “we execute her.”

  “How can she be a traitor? She never promised us faith!”

  “She is certainly a spy!”

  Bernisty laughed. “She has never dissembled the fact that she communicates with the Kay. How can she then be a spy?”

  No one made reply, there was uneasy shifting of eyes.

  Bernisty kicked Banta, who was rising to his feet. “Get away, you cur…I’ll have no murderers, no lynchers in my crew!”

  Berel cried, “She betrayed us!”

  “How could she betray us? She never asked us to give her trust. Quite the reverse; she came to us frankly as a Kay; frankly she tells me she reports to the Kay.”

  “But how?” sneered Berel. “She claims to talk to them—to make you believe she jokes!”

  Bernisty regarded Kathryn with a speculative glance. “If I read her character right, Kathryn tells no untruths. It is her single defense. If she says she talks to the Kay, so she does…” He turned to the medic, “Bring an infrascope.”

  The infrascope revealed strange black shadows inside Kathryn’s body. A small button beside her larynx; two slim boxes flat against her diaphragm; wires running down under the skin of each leg.

  “What is this?” gasped the medic.

  “Internal radio,” said Bufco. “The button takes her voice, the leg-wires are the antenna. What better equipment for a spy?”

  “She is no spy, I tell you!” Bernisty bellowed. “The fault lies not with her—it lies with me! She told me! If I had asked her how her voice got to the Kay, she would have told me—candidly, frankly. I never asked her; I chose to regard the entire affair as a game! If you must garrote someone—garrote me! I am the betrayer—not she!”

  Berel turned, walked from the wardroom, others followed. Bernisty turned to Kathryn. “Now—now what will you do? Your venture is a success.”

  “Yes,” said Kathryn, “a success.” She likewise left the wardroom. Bernisty followed curiously. She went to the outdoor locker, put on her head-dome, opened the double-lock, stepped out upon the dead plain.

  Bernisty watched her from a window. Where would she walk to? Nowhere…
She walked to death, like one walking into the surf and swimming straight out to sea. Overhead the giant moths fluttered, flickered down on the wind. Kathryn looked up; Bernisty saw her cringe. A moth flapped close; strove to seize her. She ducked; the wind caught the frail wings, and the moth wheeled away.

  Bernisty chewed his lip; then laughed. “Devil take all; devil take the Kay; devil take all…” He jammed on his own head-dome.

  Bufco caught his arm. “Bernisty, where do you go?”

  “She is brave, she is steadfast; why should she die?”

  “She is our enemy!”

  “I prefer a brave enemy to cowardly friends.” He ran from the ship, across the soft loess now crusted with dried slime.

  The moths fluttered, plunged. One clung to Kathryn’s shoulders with barbed legs; she struggled, beat with futile hands at the great soft shape.

  Shadows fell over Bernisty; he saw the purple-red glinting of big eyes, the impersonal visage. He swung a fist, felt the chitin crunch. Sick pangs of pain reminded him that the hand had already been broken on Banta’s jaw. With the moth flapping on the ground he ran off down the wind. Kathryn lay supine, a moth probing her with a tube ill-adapted to cutting plastics and cloth.

  Bernisty called out encouragement; a shape swooped on his back, bore him to the ground. He rolled over, kicked; arose, jumped to his feet, tackled the moth on Kathryn, tore off the wings, snapped the head up.

  He turned to fight the other swooping shapes but now from the ship came Bufco, with a needle-beam puncturing moths from the sky, and others behind him.

  Bernisty carried Kathryn back to the ship. He took her to the surgery, laid her on the pallet. “Cut that radio out of her,” he told the medic. “Make her normal, and then if she gets information to the Kay, they’ll deserve it.”

  He found Berel in his quarters, lounging in garments of seductive diaphane. He swept her with an indifferent glance.

  Conquering her perturbation she asked, “Well, what now, Bernisty?”

  “We start again!”

  “Again? When the Kay can sweep the world of life so easy?”