Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  The party entered cautiously, weapons ready but being very careful not to move too fast, not to speak too quickly, not to make a motion that might be construed as hostile.

  The natives sat in their doorways and watched them. They did not speak and they did not move. They simply watched the humans as they marched to the centre of the village.

  There the robots set up a table and placed a mentograph upon it. Decker sat down in a chair and put one of the headsets on his skull. The rest of the party drew up into a line and waited.

  Decker waited and the others waited and the natives sat in their doorways watching.

  They waited for an hour and not a native stirred. None came forward to put on the other headset.

  Decker waved his hand wearily, took off the headset.

  ‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘It won’t work. Go ahead and take your pictures. Do anything you wish. But don’t disturb the natives. Don’t touch a single thing.’

  He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his steaming face.

  Waldron came and leaned on the table. ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked.

  Decker shook his head. ‘It haunts me,’ he said. ‘There’s just one thing that I am thinking. It must be wrong. It can’t be right. But I thought of it and I can’t get rid of it.’

  ‘Sometimes that happens,’ Waldron said. ‘No matter how illogical a thing may be it sticks with a man, like a burr inside his brain.’

  ‘I thought,’ said Decker, ‘that they have told us all that they have to tell us. That they have nothing more they wish to say to us.’

  ‘That’s what you thought,’ said Waldron.

  Decker nodded. ‘A funny thing to think,’ he said. ‘Out of clear sky. And it can’t be right.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Waldron. ‘Nothing’s right here. Notice that they haven’t got a single iron tool. Not a single scrap of metal in evidence at all. Their cooking utensils are stone, a sort of funny stuff like soapstone. What few tools they have are stone.’

  ‘And yet,’ Decker told him, ‘they’re intelligent. Look at their eyes. Intelligence there if you ever saw it. And that fellow who came into the base. He knew what to do with the headset. He knew that we didn’t belong on the planet.’

  Waldron sucked thoughtfully at a back tooth. ‘We better be getting back to base,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late.’

  He held his wrist in front of him.

  ‘My watch has stopped,’ he said. ‘What time do you have Decker?’

  Decker’s arm came up and Waldron heard the sharp gasp of his breath. Slowly, Decker raised his head, looked at the other man.

  ‘My watch has stopped, too,’ he said, and his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

  For a moment they were graven images, eyes matching eyes, and then Waldron jerked his head away.

  ‘Assemble,’ he shouted. ‘Back to the base. Quick!’

  The men came running. The robots fell into place. The column marched away. The natives sat in their doorway and watched them leave.

  ==========

  Decker sat in his camp chair and listened to the canvas of the pavilion snapping softly in the wind, alive in the wind, talking and laughing to itself. The lantern, hung on the ring above his head, swayed gently and cast fleeting shadows that seemed at times to be the shadows of living, moving things. A robot stood quietly by one of the pavilion poles.

  Stolidly Decker reached out a finger and stirred the little pile of wheels and springs that lay upon the table.

  Sinister, he thought.

  Sinister and queer.

  The guts of watches, lying on the table.

  Not of two watches alone, not only his and Waldron’s watches, but many other watches from the wrists of other men.

  All of them silent, stilled in their task of marking time.

  Night had fallen hours before, but the base still was astir with activity that was at once feverish and furtive. Men moved about in the shadows and crossed the glaring patches of brilliance shed by the banks of lights set up by the robots many weeks before. Watching them, one would have sensed that they moved with a haunting sense of doom—and would have known as well that they knew, deep in their inmost hearts, that there was no doom to fear. No definite thing that one could put a finger on and say this is the thing to fear. No direction that one could point and say doom lies out there, waiting to leap upon us.

  Just one small thing.

  Watches had stopped running.

  And that was a simple thing for which there must be some simple explanation.

  Except, thought Decker, on an alien planet no occurrence, no accident or incident, can be regarded as a simple thing for which a simple explanation must necessarily be anticipated. For the matrix of cause and effect, the mathematics of chance, may not hold true on alien planets as they hold true on Earth.

  There was one rule, Decker thought grimly.

  One rule: Take no chances.

  That was the one safe rule to follow, the only rule to follow.

  Following it, he had ordered all field parties back to base, ordered the crew to prepare the ship for emergency take off, had alerted the robots to be ready at an instant to get the machines aboard—to even desert the machines and leave without them if circumstances should dictate that such was necessary.

  Having done that, there was no more to do but wait. Wait until the field parties came back from their advance camps. Wait until some reason could be assigned to the failure of the watches.

  It was not a thing, he told himself, that should be allowed to panic one. It was a thing to recognize, not to disregard. It was a thing which made necessary a certain number of precautions, but it was not a thing that should make one lose all sense of proportion.

  You could not go back to Earth and say: ‘Well, you see, our watches stopped and so…’

  A footstep sounded and he swung around in his chair. It was Jackson.

  ‘What is it, Jackson?’ Decker asked.

  ‘The camps aren’t answering, sir,’ said Jackson. ‘The operator has been trying to raise them and there is no answer… Hot a single peep.’

  Decker grunted. ‘Take it easy,’ he said, ‘They will answer. Give them time.’

  He wished, even as he spoke, that he could feel some of the assurance that he tried to put into his voice. For a second a rising terror mounted in his throat and he choked it back.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘We’ll sit here and have a beer and then we’ll go down to the radio shack and see what’s stirring.’

  He rapped on the table. ‘Beer,’ he said. ‘Two beers.’

  The robot standing by the pavilion pole did not answer.

  He made his voice louder.

  The robot did not stir.

  Decker put his fists upon the table and tried to rise, but his legs suddenly were cold and had turned to water and he could not raise himself.

  ‘Jackson,’ he panted, ‘go and tap that robot on the shoulder. Tell him we want some beer.’

  He saw the fear that whitened Jackson’s face as he rose and moved slowly forward. Inside himself, starting in the pit of his belly and rising to worry at his throat, he left the same whiplash terror that Jackson must have felt.

  Jackson stood beside the robot and reached out a hesitant hand, tapped him gently on the shoulder, tapped him harder—and the robot fell flat upon his face!

  Feet hammered across the hard packed earth, heading toward the pavilion.

  Decker jerked himself around, sat four-square and solid in his chair, waiting.

  It was MacDonald, chief engineer.

  He stopped at the table’s edge and gripped its boards with two grimy hands. His face was twisted as if he were about to weep.

  ‘The ship, sir. The ship…’

  Decker nodded, almost idly. ‘I know, Mr MacDonald. The ship won’t run.’

  MacDonald gulped. ‘The big stuff’s all right, sir. But the, little gadgets… the injector mechanism, the…’

  He s
topped and stared at Decker. ‘You knew,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I knew,’ said Decker, ‘that it would come some day. Not like this, perhaps. But in any one of several ways. I knew that the days would come when our luck would run too thin, when we’d cover all the possibilities but the one that we could not suspect and that, of course, would be the one that would ruin us.’

  He was thinking: The natives had no metal. No sign of any metal in their camp, at all. Their dishes were soapstone and they wore no ornaments. Their implements were stone. (And yet they were intelligent enough, civilized enough, cultured enough, to have fabricated metal. For there was metal here … a great deposit of it in the western mountains. They tried, perhaps, many centuries ago. Had fashioned metal tools and metal ornaments and had them go to pieces underneath their fingers after a few short weeks.

  Waldron came into the pavilion on cat-like feet.

  ‘The radio’s dead,’ he said, ‘and the robots are dying like flies. The place is littered with them, just so much scrap steel.’

  Decker nodded. ‘The little stuff, the finely fabricated will go first,’ he said. ‘Like watches and radio innards and robot brains and injector mechanisms. After that it will be the big stuff. The ship will melt into a heap of slag.’

  ‘The native told us,’ Waldron said, ‘when you had him up here. You will never leave, he said.’

  ‘We didn’t understand,’ said Decker. ‘We thought he was threatening us and we knew that we were too big, too well guarded for any threat of his to harm us. He wasn’t threatening us at all, of course. He was just telling us. Warning us, maybe, although even then it might have been too late. He might even have felt sorry for us.’

  He made a hopeless gesture with his hand. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘No one knows,’ said Waldron, quietly. ‘Not yet at least. We may find out later, but it won’t help us any. A microbe, maybe. A virus. Something that eats iron after it has been subjected to heat or alloyed with other metals. Something that won’t tolerate alloyed metal on the planet. It doesn’t go for iron ore. If it did, that deposit we found would have been gone long ago. Possibly the radioactive ore as well.’

  ‘How does it survive?’ asked Decker. ‘Without stuff to eat, how does it live?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Waldron. ‘It might not be a metal-eating organism at all. It might be something else. Something in the atmosphere.’

  ‘We tested the atmosphere.’

  But, even as the words left his mouth, Decker saw how foolish they were. They had tested the atmosphere, but how could they have detected something they had never run across before? Man’s yardstick was limited—limited to the things he knew about, limited by the circle of his own experience.

  He guarded himself against the obvious and the imaginable. He could not guard himself against the unknowable or the unimaginable.

  Decker stood up and saw Jackson standing by the pavilion pole, with the robot stretched out at his feet, his metal hide gleaming in the shine of the swaying lantern.

  ‘You have your answer,’ he told the biochemist. ‘Remember that first day. You talked with me in the lounge.’

  Jackson nodded. ‘I remember, sir,’ he said. His voice was quiet.

  And suddenly, Decker realized, the entire base was quiet.

  A gust of wind came out of the jungle and rattled the canvas and set the lantern to swaying violently.

  Now, for the first time since they had landed, he caught in the wind the alien smell of an alien world.

  * * *

  Section 3—A Dash of Symbols—No Names to the Rivers

  ==========

  What an opening sentence: ‘The head was becoming too byzantine in the exaggerated torment of the face’!

  E. C. Tubb knows he is working with symbols. The key nouns in his story make a kind of pattern:

  CONTROL ROOM, CRUCIFIXION, SILENCE, CONQUEST, DREAM, TRUMPETS, MACHINE, PAINSTARS, CYANOSIS, DOMINATION, EQUATION PRESSURE, PARTICLES, TARGETS, ART TRUTH, HEAVEN

  Whether they wish it or not, science fiction writers are forced by the nature of their material to traffic in tokens: Man, the future. Earth, catastrophe, Utopia, the galaxy. As far as everyday life is concerned, these things are all abstractions in various degrees. Some readers can use the coinage, some can’t.

  Here lies the power of science fiction—not excluding some badly written science fiction—which we find difficult to explain even when it moves us strongly. Ordinary fiction has characters, science fiction has personages.

  Writing in the realistic tradition, an author seeks to populate the streets and houses of his fiction with characters who—while they may be never so odd—must persuade us that they are the prosaic inhabitants of those streets, those houses. And the streets and houses themselves—though they may prove to be slum property in Ulan Bator—must have about them certain traits common to all human experience which we recognize, so that we can see that those characters truly live in those houses. From the start, the realistic novel calls for ordinary components.

  Vexed at myself for generalizing so grandly, as well as for using a critical term, ‘realistic’, which has become defaced by “over-usage, I reach out and pull a couple of novels from my shelves. David Storey’s novel, Radcliffe, begins, ‘The Headmaster brought the new boy into the classroom several weeks after the term had begun.’ A good start, to be sure. We are immediately alerted to the way in which the child is to feature as the odd boy out. The rest is prosaic: headmaster, classroom a new term, these are ordinary, recognizable components of everyone’s experience. They act as a foil to the embarrassed child.

  Here’s Saul Bellow’s Herzog. It opens with these words, ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’ The reader has the whole ample novel to decide how mad or sane Moses Herzog is; but the second paragraph, as if to reassure us by this pressingly posed question of madness and the unreal, bestows upon us a litany of familiar place names: New York, Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, a village in Massachusetts.

  Local habitations, names. Such are the usages of the realistic novel or (to get away from that over-used critical term) of what is regarded as the main tradition of the novel, which seeks to lure us into belief by citing real facts. ‘I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, tho’ not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull,’ begins one of the great imaginative books of our language.

  There are science fiction stories which follow this tradition; Christopher Priest has good reason to commence his The Space Machine with these words: ‘In the April of 1893,I was staying in the course of my business at the Devonshire Arms in Skipton, Yorkshire.’ However, there is another kind of fiction which aims at disorientation. In this tradition, there are no streets and homes, merely exile. We’ll never get home. Recall the opening sentence of van Vogt’s story: ‘The great ship was poised a quarter of a mile above one of the cities.’ It is not absentmindedness which causes van Vogt to withhold from us the name of the ship, the name of the city, the name of the planet. He withholds them because withholding them makes for a more powerful sense of disorientation, a more powerful fiction. We are to be confronted—no, not with the familiar—but with the unknown, the particular unknown of science fiction. Van Vogt’s prosaic nouns, ‘ship’, ‘city’, take on new connotations, like the nouns in the Tubb piece.

  Unknown planets beckon us like unknown women. This not particularly subtle thought has occurred to many writers. In a Ray Bradbury story, ‘Here There be Tygers’, his unnamed planet has a female-disposition, and rather a highly-strung one at that. Robert F. Young’s ‘Goddess in Granite’ is a lovely story, and I know no other like it; although I do not entirely agree with its conclusion, it remains a striking example of a man coming to terms with himself through his encounter with a planet as beautiful, as baffling, (as female) as any in the canon.

  I make no apology for including two Robert Young stories in
the same section. His is one of the under-valued names. In ‘On the River’, that river has and needs no name. It does not require that sort of label for true recognition.

  In both the Young stories, water plays a part in the symbolism, as it does in ‘The Ark of James Carlyle’. Here, the water proves to be no sundering flood. It forms a common bond between man and alien.

  Superficially, ‘The Ark of James Carlyle’ appears to be a conventional planet story, and none the less satisfactory for that. What is unusual about it is the way in which it accepts the alien nature of the quogs and indicates—I believe with some subtlety—how man’s nature is enlarged by accepting that alien quality. An attractive story, the first science fiction from a woman who will clearly do us all a favour by writing more.

  When a writer creates an environment which does not exist in realistic terms—a new planet, an old Mars—he then has to set about populating it with his goddesses, his quogs. Useless to populate it with a new schoolboy being shown his classroom a few weeks after term has begun, or a middle-aged man in a village in western Massachussets worrying about his sanity. That sort of thing is what modern phraseology would term counter-productive.

  Depending on the individual bent of the author, he is most likely to people his imaginary territory with beings from his psyche (and this is what I take quogs and goddesses of granite to be). If this line of thought interests you, seek out the recently published volume from Bran’s Head Books entitled The Significance of Science Fiction, edited by Richard Kirby, and read the chapter on ‘The Beings in SF’, by Stan Gooch. It is the most thorough-going examination of the subject I know.

  Meanwhile, on Planet AC14, the barometer is dropping fast, the wind is changing, and those quogs are gathering silently about the stump of the single mee-haw tree…

  * * *

  The flood was treacherous, the ark was insubstantial. But something permanent came of them. A new author presents us with a new Noah…

  THE ARK OF JAMES CARLYLE

  by Cherry Wilder

  ==========