Sentenced to Prism

by Alan Dean Foster

  "Where the hell did those come from?" They looked like tumbleweeds sculpted out of crystallized maple syrup. Their edges blurred even as he stared at them.

  "They have been there all along, sir. My programming identifies them as Fransus clumpings. It is not yet determined whether they are plant or animal."

  "Right now I'm not interested in their classification. Why didn't I see them before?"

  "Human eyes cannot see into fractal dimensions, sir. Fransus clumpings exist entirely within pure fractal space, between the second and third dimensions. Apparently not all local lifeforms can see into fractal space either. A wonderful camouflage."

  "By all means, let's go around them." If something could exist entirely in fractal space, it was conceivable it had defensive weaponry which could function in fractal space. Evan had no desire to test the effectiveness of something he couldn't see.

  It was clear that the station's defensive perimeter had collapsed. The grounds were alive with organosilicate forms. More than communications had failed there.

  As he strode between the buildings he saw that Prism was taking the installation apart. Huge vitreous vines were draped over one structure after another, while smaller growths followed in the wake of the larger, hunting for cracks or broken windows. The walls of plastic and metal were being methodically reduced to their basic chemical constituents and then consumed. The extent of the destruction hadn't been nearly as obvious from above. Now that he was in the midst of it he began to wonder if anyone had survived.

  Where was the station staff?

  "Try suit-to-suit frequencies," he commanded the MHW

  Again there was no response. He resorted to shouting through the helmet's voice membrane, his voice rising above the squeaks and whines that resounded around him, also to no avail.

  He called up a map of the station on his visor. A few more strides found him standing outside the communications center. It was thickly overgrown. Long thin ropes of green glass enveloped the curved roof and walls. Thin tendrils protruded from bunches of bright red spikes and penetrated the disintegrating walls.

  The door was shut, sealed from the inside. He could have forced it easily with the MHW, but since he'd resolved to disturb as little as possible, he sought another entrance instead. There were several which hadn't been installed by the station's builders.

  On the sunny side of the building, where the over­growth was thickest, he found that the red spikes had combined with a massive green cable to rip a hole in the wall large enough to admit him, suit and all. He crawled through.

  As he did so he noticed how the red spikes were pushing steadily deeper into the plastic while the flexible tendrils sought cracks to penetrate. They looked like vanadanite crystals gone berserk. One whole section of wall had been reduced by some kind of solvent to a mass of plastic foam. He put his sheathed hand right through it. When he pulled it back, the resultant hole was alive with frantic, squirming black shapes that were eating the plastic.

  Inside he commenced a detailed examination of what was left of the communications center of the station. Everything, from floor to furniture, was under attack by Prismatic lifeforms.

  "I thought HW buildings were designed to be completely animal— and insect— resistant," he murmured.

  "Normally they are," the suit replied. "However, this is not a normal world. The lifeforms have no precedents in the lexicon of Commonwealth discoveries. It is a unique environment that calls for unique countermeasures."

  "Which the staff here wasn't prepared to take. That's clear enough."

  He turned abruptly, went back for another look at the hole in the wall. "I wonder how it's done."

  From beneath his right arm a sampling hose reached into the plastic muck, inhaled briefly, and withdrew. Several minutes passed while the analytical laboratory built into the suit did its work. The answers appeared on his visor screen soon after, in the form of long complex molecules that were breaking apart even as he stared.

  "Polycyanoacrylates are tough, but very vulnerable to distortion. Most of the potassium is missing. When the small creatures remove that, the rest of the wall resin is reduced to garbage."

  "Why potassium?"

  "Who knows?" the suit said. "Perhaps they ingest it to increase their internal electrical conductivity."

  "Maybe." He looked back into the room. "I'd still like to know what happened to the staff."

  He found three of them a few minutes later in the next room, where the transmission and receiving instrumentation was located.

  Like the exterior door, the one leading to the inner chamber had also been sealed from inside. Unlike the other, it had been penetrated somehow, the seal broken. One figure was lying against the deepspace transmitter console. Perhaps he'd been trying to send a last, desperate message. Evan could only guess, because the man was as dead as his companions.

  The figure was barely identifiable as male. The flesh was intact, but all the bones had been eaten away from inside. A hunger for potassium again, and calcium too, Evan surmised. The fleshy envelope that remained was not in very good condition. He was glad of the suit which filtered the air he breathed. Silicate forms or no, obviously enough common bacteria were present to initiate the process of decomposition.

  The man's life beacon was intact. The light that pulsed from the tiny sensor embedded in his right wrist, however, was a pale, weak red, indicating that the beacon had been active for some time.

  The theory behind the beacons was simple and straight­forward. Any threat, danger, or trauma that sufficiently and adversely affected the beacon's owner would automatically activate the device, radiating strong signals to bring help. Everyone traveling to or working on a new world was required to have one installed. Despite the protection afforded by his MHW, Evan had one in his own wrist.

  But there'd been no one left on Prism to respond.

  The second occupant of the chamber also showed the flashing light. The third did not. His battery had given out prematurely.

  "I guess they never got their message off."

  "No sir," said the suit quietly. A laser pointer came to life, drew Evan's attention to the back of the console.

  Two barely visible transparent filaments ran from a tiny pinecone-shaped growth that clung to the back of the console. They crawled up the console and vanished through a minuscule hole in the metal. Evan touched them and they quivered slightly.

  Disdaining tools, he used a hand to rip away the back panel, involuntarily jerked his hand back as a huge ball of downy tendrils spilled out onto the floor. They twisted slowly and deliberately, curling in and over themselves as each sought a new purchase.

  What he could see of the complex interior of the communications console had been reduced to mush. Chips and circuits ended in bubbles of moist fiber. "Sample."

  Out went the suction tube a second time. Tendrils were stolen for analysis and then spit out again.

  "Yttrium," the suit eventually announced. "A minor but important component in much communications equipment. This growth is after the yttrium in the components."

  "So it eats the whole inside out of the console just to get at a tiny amount of one rare earth. A real gourmet." Evan traced the path of the two invading tendrils to the pinecone growth. "Surely they ran regular checks on their equipment. I can't believe somebody missed seeing this."

  "Excuse me, sir, but you are operating under a misconception. The tendrils did not arise from this small growth on the floor and then penetrate the console. The tendrils are growing from the inside out."

  That explains it, Evan thought. A spore or something had slipped through the building's filters and lodged inside the console. Maybe it had come in on somebody's suit and somehow been shielded from the disinfecting unit mounted in the floor by the front door. Possible sources of infection were many. The staff had probably had no idea of the extent of the damage until it was too late.

  Leaving the console, he walked over to the second figure. The woman had been in her late fo
rties. She was lying comfortably on a couch. Perhaps she'd been asleep when the final blow had fallen. She was almost intact.

  Blue, olive green, and yellow tendrils emerged from the couch to penetrate every part of her body. Except for the presence of the tendrils she might have been resting comfortably.

  Evan reached out to run a hand along one leg. Through the suit's tactile sensors the limb felt normal. He used both hands to tear the tough duty suit from ankle to thigh. The skin was undamaged, though wrinkled and dried. He ran a hand along the bare leg.

  As he did so the skin peeled up like parchment. Beneath, where muscle and bone should have been, was a lump of solid green glass. Tiny shapes, like oversized corpuscles with legs, were moving about just beneath the transparent surface. They scattered, fleeing from the unexpected light.

  Evan drew back, feeling the gorge rise in his throat. For an instant he was tempted to burn the abomination. Logic held him back. The woman was already dead. More than dead. Cremation would entail a useless waste of energy.

  Nothing so obscenely deceptive marked the demise of the third occupant of the building. The young man had been neatly dismembered, like a child's doll awaiting repair. Arms and legs lay less than a dozen centimeters from their joints. The head had been removed to an equal distance from the shoulders. A man in six pieces, waiting for somebody to put him back together again. It was neat enough to be disturbing.

  Evan found he was glancing occasionally over his shoulder. Stupid, he told himself. The MHW would warn him of any approaching danger and deal with it before he was so much as aware of its presence. He forced his attention back to the corpse. Other than having been separated into six pieces, it appeared to be undamaged. Nothing was missing— no, that wasn't quite true.

  "There's no blood."

  "It would have evaporated by now," the suit suggested.

  "Maybe, but there aren't even any stains. There ought to be stains." He knelt to examine the floor. Standard universal matting; rubberized, flexible, and supportive. But it should show stains. Therefore the blood had been removed before it had a chance to reach the floor.

  "Iron, sir," the suit hypothesized. "Iron, and potassium again. Apparently different lifeforms here go after different minerals. It is clear that they make no distinction between the station itself and its inhabitants. Both are nothing more than sources of valuable minerals."

  Evan couldn't keep the edginess out of his voice. "Not me. I'm nobody's mine."

  He returned to the communications console and tried a number of the apparently undamaged controls. None of the telltales on the panel lit up. A weak glow from one readout indicated that the nullspace generator buried deep beneath the station was still intact, but that was understandable. It was sited in solid ferrocrete thirty meters below the surface. That was SOP. So the beam could be powered if it could be purged of hungry, invading life­forms. He clung to that thought gratefully. It was hard to maintain a positive attitude amid so much devastation.

  "I don't see any reason for optimism," he muttered aloud, "but we're obligated to check out the rest of the station."

  "Yes sir."

  It took the rest of the long local day to prowl through the remaining structures. Some were empty save for their complement of opportunistic colonizers. Others contained surprises more gruesome than anything he'd seen in the communications building.

  In the last warehouse he surprised three motile carnivores working a corpse. The fragments of the victim's suit identified him as a member of the life sciences support team, but that was about all Evan could tell about him.

  Each of the carnivores (a term more descriptive than accurate, Evan knew, since they couldn't properly be termed meat-eaters) was the size of a large dog. They were tripedal, with each foot ending in a supportive pad. Organic bodies were wrapped in protective silicate exo­skeletons boasting sharp black spines. They ignored Evan's entrance completely, so intent were they on ingesting the remainder of the unfortunate staff member. Droplets of solvent oozed from their mouths.

  Logic be damned, Evan thought angrily. "Burn 'em!"

  "Perhaps one should be preserved for future study." As the suit made its suggestion the three scavengers turned and attacked. Their powerful jaws had no effect whatsoever on the MHW's exterior, nor did the solvent they secreted.

  "I said burn them," Evan snapped loudly. This time the suit didn't respond verbally. Instead, it extended a laser and methodically melted each of the attackers into a puddle of slag and carbonized flesh.

  They died silently, fighting to the last, their persistence as horrible as their appearance.

  "Let's get out of here." Evan turned. "We still haven't checked the dormitories." He pushed impatiently through the pink tendrils that had already begun to seal off the entryway. A brief electronic squeal accompanied each destructive swing of his metal-encased arm.

  The first dorm building was empty, but the second contained a surprise— two bodies untouched by dissolving parasites. They lay in their beds on the second floor. Each man had a neat hole in his head just above each ear. The second man held a needler tightly in his right hand. The other lay sprawled across his bed at an unnatural angle.

  "This one shot that one, then lay down and committed suicide."

  "Why?" the suit asked. Intelligent as it was, deductive reasoning wasn't one of its strengths.

  "Impossible to know for certain, since neither of them can tell us. Despair, perhaps. I imagine everything went to hell pretty quickly near the end."

  What particularly interested him, though, were not the two additional bodies but the neat row of survival suits, twenty in all, hanging on their holders on the back wall of the room. None looked damaged. He pulled one off the rack and inspected it carefully. Intact and ready to receive its owner. Each suit would have been fashioned for a specific staff member; it was important that they fit perfectly. None was as massive as the MHW encasing him, but they seemed tough enough to resist the assaults of black-seined scavengers and predatory plant-life.

  Yet none of them had been donned by their owners. The staff of the station had been slain, every one of them, before they could get into their suits.

  Again he looked at the pair of dead men, lying unprotected on their beds only seconds away from the potential protection of their suits. What kind of attack could strike that quickly? Or was everyone at the station the victim of something more subtle, like overconfidence? Once more he found himself looking over his shoulder, nervously eying dark corners. These were highly trained people, the best, the most resourceful. Nothing, not even a world as alien as Prism, should have been able to surprise them so quickly. And they were, every one of them, dead, slain before they could don their suits.

  Suddenly he didn't care. Suddenly all he wanted was to repair the deepspace communicator and get the hell out of there. For the first time in his life, Evan Orgell was frightened. It was a brand-new sensation and not a pleasant one.

  "Easy, sir. Relax. There is no danger. I am not a standard-issue survival suit. I am the MHW, and everything is under control."

  Evan slowed his breathing, took a sip of iced fruit juice from the helmet dispenser. "Sorry. I'm not easily unsettled." He swallowed more juice, took a last look around the room. "Let's get over to Administration and Records. We've got a job to do."

  He spent the rest of the day and most of the next running through those records which had survived the attentions of the local life without coming any closer to an explanation of how two dozen highly trained people had been overwhelmed and killed without so much as having a chance to don the survival suits that might have saved them. They hadn't been torn to shreds by some unimaginably huge carnivore, nor had they all been destroyed internally by the same kind of parasite or disease. Except for the pair who'd been needle-shot, cause of death remained a matter of some uncertainty.

  He did not work in silence. The forest surrounding the station, and, for that matter, the station itself, was filled with the cries and hums and squeaks of
creatures largely unseen. Occasionally a deeper roar reverberated through the silicates, but nothing materialized to attack him. Still, he took no chances and slept within the security of the MHW.

  The records contained information that would be invaluable to the company. All of it fit comfortably in the MHW's copious storage chips, where it would await transfer to company facilities. The irony was that the information couldn't be utilized until he also produced an explanation for the disaster which had devastated the station.

  Nowhere within the lengthy discourses and dissertations that had been fled by the station's staff was there anything to hint at the catastrophe that was going to befall them. Yet something capable of such rapid and utter destruction must exist. He was surrounded by proof of its existence.

  There was one final mystery.

  The dormitory where he'd found the two dead men held twenty-four racks but only twenty survival suits. Personnel records indicated twenty-four expedition members. He had buried the remains of twenty scientists and technicians. The time had come to locate the other four. Of course, he could have gone to work on the beam first, but even as anxious to be away as he was, he would rather die than leave a job incomplete.

  "They have to be around here somewhere," he told the MHW. "Trouble is, we've found several bodies with dead beacons."

  "I will run a sensitive." Evan waited while the suit performed the high-intensity scan. Within a modest range it would pick up even the slightest emanation from beyond the station perimeter.

  "Observation tower."

  It was the one place Evan hadn't personally inspected because it seemed an unlikely place to find survivors. The tower elevator was broken, the controls having been chewed up by tiny plant and animal forms, but the four metal struts that supported the three-story structure were still in place, though one had white bubbles forming on its flanks. A precursor to consumption, Evan knew.

  He chose the next strut to the left and started climbing, the suit negotiating the almost vertical ascent without straining. As soon as he'd gained the top he punched in a window and climbed through.