Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  On the ninety-first day of his Met. duty Carlyle stepped out of the hut and gazed desperately at the cloudless sky. There were no quogs to meet him on the platform; the oily purple sea sucked gently at the wooden piles; his instruments had assured him there was a light westerly breeze. His delusion persisted and he had nothing to support it… not even the tangible evidence of an aching bunion. He did not dare call the station. How would he begin?

  ‘Something tells me…’

  He decided to walk round the island but he found an ancient quog, the one he called the Chief, squatting at the foot of the ladder. He beckoned him on to the platform. The quogs were cryptorchids so for all he knew perhaps this was a Chieftainess: it was difficult to tell.

  When he had first taken up his duty, before the boat brought him to the island, he had seen Mary Long, a young anthropologist who had tagged along with the landing party to the plateau, sexing a herd of quogs. She walked among them, picking the creatures up and solemnly examining their genital pouches. She was engrossed in her work: twenty or thirty quogs surrounded her and gently stripped off every stitch of her clothing before Carlyle or the other men could intervene. They sat round her and stared, their luminous eyes full of innocent curiosity.

  Not a great deal of work had been done on quogs; they had been described as small land mammals, semi-erect bipeds, modified baboons. They were docile, certainly, and capable of performing many tasks; but they were also ugly, elusive and rank-smelling. Their odour had already ceased to bother Carlyle but he noticed that the quogs still kept upwind of him. He found himself describing them differently: they were like trolls, like squatting goblins, like little old men. At night he listened for one of their rare sounds, the qwok-qwok-qwok, hardly vocalized, that had given them their name.

  The Chief, who was a big fellow, fully three feet tall, scrambled nimbly on to the platform.

  ‘Where are the others?’ asked Carlyle.

  Every other day the platform had been lined with quogs who gave him berries, limpets, burrowing shrimps, in exchange for bacon cubes. He had tried them with everything he had: orange juice, vegetables, vitamins, but they liked the bacon best. Now the Chief tried to explain their absence. He could be heard only by cupping his long bluish hands before his tiny slit of a mouth to amplify the sound, the way Carlyle made owl-hoots as a boy.

  ‘Mee-haw,’ boomed the Chief faintly.

  At first Carlyle did not understand. The mee-haw was a tree; in fact it was the only tree. The vegetation on AC 14 was low, luxuriant and undistinguished except for the mee-haw trees, which reared up, with straight trunk and spreading crown of leafy branches, one hundred metres and more above the bushy islands in the still, purple sea. The timber, resembling balsa, was particularly easy to work. The platform on which Carlyle had his Met. hut was made entirely of the single—mee-haw tree that had grown on the tiny island. The quogs had wept to see it fall down. Carlyle had had the uneasy notion that the mee-haw tree might be sacred to them.

  Now the Chief pointed to the island; Carlyle was shaken again by his crazy premonition.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  He climbed down from the platform and followed the Chief up the brush-covered slope. All the quogs on the island, about thirty of them forming one family group, were huddled together on the broad stump of the mee-haw tree.

  ‘Why?’ asked Carlyle. ‘Why?’

  The Chief cupped his hands and answered with a third quogword.

  Carlyle strained to catch it.

  ‘Aw-kee?’

  “The quogs on the stump waved their fingers; this was a way of laughing. To Carlyle’s surprise they all began to vocalize, even the babies, pale blue and completely hairless, cupping their tiny hands. ‘Aw-kee’ was the nearest he could get to it.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Carlyle.

  He already knew. He went into a mad pantomime, begging the quogs for confirmation,’ then he ran back to the Met. hut. He called the satellite without a glance at his instruments. He announced firmly:

  ‘There’s going to be a flood.’

  The receiver crackled. What were his readings?

  ‘The quogs told me,’ said Carlyle.

  The crackle became indignant. Readings please. Carlyle turned hopelessly towards his instrument panel and his heart pounded. The barometer had dropped thirty degrees and was still falling. The wind had swung round to the south. The room became dark as he completed his report and huge drops of rain began a tattoo on the roof of the Met. hut.

  He ran out on to the platform. The sky was a dome of blue-black cloud above a darkening sea; the waves flashed emerald and purple-black and broke in iridescent foam upon the shore. The word for it, Carlyle decided, was unearthly. Already drenched to the skin he cowered in the doorway of the hut. He was worried about the quogs; he guessed that their instinct to seek higher ground would keep them huddled on the mee-haw stump. The fragile shelters where they slept and did their weaving would be no protection against this rain. The picture of the quogs twisting their endless ropes from native flax lingered in his mind. He wished, idly, that the mee-haw tree had not been cut down.

  Carlyle gave a cry: ‘The tree!’

  He peered out into the downpour, staring up at the dark centre of the island where the mighty mee-haw tree had stood, ready to shelter the quogs in its dense foliage. They made ropes… probably sent up a young male to loop slings over the branches, then the whole tribe went up.

  There was a splashing and scrambling at the foot of the plat-form. Carlyle knelt down and saw the Chief, already swimming awkwardly; the water had risen three feet in twenty minutes. The rain was a blinding cataract; a man who lay on his back would drown, thought Carlyle. He dragged the old quog aboard and bundled him into the hut. They sat gasping, the water pouring from the quog’s grizzled hide, from Carlyle’s coveralls.

  ‘How far?’ gasped Carlyle. ‘How high does the water…?’ He gestured with a horizontal hand, staring into the Chief’s bulging dark eyes.

  Carlyle was suddenly aware of an earlier moment. When the mee-haw tree came down… the day the quogs wept… he and Ensign Weiss noticed marks on its great trunk. A series of wavy bands, between three and four metres from the lowest branches… more than eighty metres from the ground. Carlyle understood, with another thump of fear… water marks. The water would rise until only the mee-haw tops rose like islands out of the purple sea. The only high ground on the entire planetoid was the plateau where his expedition had touched down briefly, far to the north. It had a large quog population… and no mee-haw trees.

  The Chief touched Carlyle’s knee gently with the tip of his prehensile tail.

  ‘Sure,’ said Carlyle. ‘Sure. We have a real problem here, old buddy.’

  He was calculating… One life-raft, inflatable, fully provisioned and powered, capacity six humans. All he had to do was launch the thing. And figure out some way of transporting thirty quogs to the plateau. The receiver gave his call signal but Carlyle paid no attention. He rushed out on to the platform again, into the deluge, and saw with alarm that the water was up to the cross supports. The scrap of beach and the lowest rank of undergrowth were already submerged. Sea and sky were joined in a blue-black curtain of moisture. Suddenly Carlyle gave a triumphant cry that brought the old quog scuttling to his side; he had realized that they were standing upon a raft.

  He explained it to the Chief as he dug out the axe. The tribe must come aboard now, pronto, when the water rose he would knock out the supports of the platform and they would be launched. The wind and the current were driving towards the plateau… Maybe they could use the power pack of his own inflatable boat…

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘We have to get them aboard!’

  The Chief had been dancing and shivering at Carlyle’s side, stretching out his arms to the island. He pointed through the rain and Carlyle saw that the quogs were coming.

  It made sense of course; the platform was a little higher than the top of the island. They came swarming throug
h the bushes and flung themselves gamely into the water. Their awkward quog-paddle was very efficient; the first wave—pregnant females and mothers with babies on their backs—was already nosing towards the supports. The turbid water was alight with their bulbous eyes. Carlyle knelt down beside the Chief and began to heave the dripping creatures aboard. More than once Carlyle saw a big quog dive and ,drag up a half-drowned cub. The oldest animals took it pretty hard, they fought to stay on land; but the younger ones thrust them brutally into the water. All along the platform in the plunging rain the rest of the tribe were gently dancing and stamping, reaching out their arms in encouragement to those still in the water.

  As the last of them were dragged aboard Carlyle herded them into the Met. hut and went over the side with the axe. The Chief and four husky off-siders watched him wallowing in the water up to his neck and hammering with the back of the axe-head at one of the supports. The mee-haw piles had been embedded in heavy silt to a depth of two metres. Carlyle reckoned he could slide the tops of the piles out of the groove cut for them in the platform. But the first pile moved inward with a lurch the moment he hit it; he saw that the silt was swirling away in clouds as the water rose. He was treading water now, catching an occasional foothold on a rock. He moved under the platform, beat at the pile with the axehead, then heaved it outward with all his strength.

  As the silt let go its hold the pile swung upwards in the water and the platform sagged down at one corner. Instantly two quogs were in the water grasping the mee-haw pile and using it to restore balance. Carlyle swam to the diagonal under the far corner of the hut and knocked it out like a loose tooth; two more quogs hove up out of the rain and balanced the platform. Carlyle knocked out the remaining leeward pile and felt the whole structure buckle and shift. He yelled to the quogs and scrambled back on to the platform. The decking heaved about crazily. The last pile on the seaward side gave way. Carlyle watched his two pairs of assistants climb expertly inboard and tapped the loose piles free of their grooves as they rode up on the surface of the flood. Leaning down he caught hold of one long pile as it clung to the side of the platform and shoved off from the island. The quogs on deck gathered to help him, bracing their leathery underbodies against the pole; the platform shuddered, then settled gently. The wind was rising and a strong current ran to the north. The mee-haw raft floated free upon the waste of waters.

  ==========

  Carlyle and his deck-hands carefully drew in their oar; he felt an extraordinary sense of well-being as they clustered around his knees. The rain had slackened but they still pressed forward into a wall of water. A gleam of violet penetrating the low ceiling of black cloud showed that the Star was shining. Carlyle glanced down at the Chief, who blinked solemnly through the rain. He remembered that he must answer the call signal and led the way into the Met. hut.

  The quogs had packed themselves in snugly under the big plastic dome. Carlyle couldn’t think of any species who could carry off the situation better. Humans? Monkeys? Bedlam and filth. Okay, the quogs were a spooky lot, and the smell, en masse, was like camphorated garlic, but there were times when he appreciated their stillness, the way they organized themselves. He lifted aside a tiny blue paw, resting on the communicator, and called the satellite.

  The signal was faint.

  ‘Readings…”

  He gave the readings.

  ‘We observe dense cloud,’ pipped the signal. ‘Evaluate.’

  Carlyle switched over to voice, although he didn’t like talking to the computer. He made a report. The androgynous voice snapped. ‘Evacuate. Use liferaft.’

  Carlyle said: ‘The emergency is way past that point. I have evacuated the native population.’

  The quogs were vocalizing gently in the background… qwok-qwok-qwok… There was static, the voice signal was faint.

  ‘Follow emergency procedures. No record… population. Save…self…data.’

  Carlyle repeated stolidly: ‘Evacuating with quogs.’ ‘Follow… procedures. No deviation… losing contact.’ Carlyle said coarsely: ‘Screw yourself tin-brain. Give me emergency voice contact.’ He slammed the red button and Garrett answered.

  ‘Jim… Jim? What the hell is going on down there?’ Carlyle gave his report all over again; the reply was broken and distant.

  ‘We’re losing signal.’ Garrett was worried. ‘What in blazes are you doing with those quogs?’

  ‘Evacuating them. The island is submerged by now I guess.’ ‘But why? This is not time… Tough luck… the quogs. No ethnological value… plenty more…’ ‘Hell!’ said Carlyle. ‘We cut down their tree!’ ‘Jim!’ cried Garrett, with the static closing in. ‘Take care… crazy raft… Can’t allow… deviation emergency procedures.’ The receiver went dead.

  Carlyle felt a surge of panic as if his lifeline had snapped. His morale sagged at the thought of the satellite… warmth, filtered air, human company… He felt his conditioning slipping away. He was on the verge of apophobia, Weltraumangst, the fear that grew in interstellar space from contemplating vast distances. He remembered poor Ed Kravetts, a cadet in his year who tried to cover up a bad case of ‘Yonders’. He staggered through his classes on the station red-eyed and queasy; a glance at one of the monitors made him sweat; the checking of an air-lock or a simple space walk left him shocked and pale. To see Kravetts struggling with a quantum equation was to apprehend the void: all the black miles that separated them from the tiny spinning globe of earth, a pin-point of light seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

  Carlyle dragged himself back to his own world. ‘Identify with the place you’re in,’ wasn’t that Eva’s way of saying it Eva, E. M., Earth Mother, Commander Magnussen, come beautiful Eva, aid me now. He sent his prayer off into deep space and doled out bacon cubes to all hands before striding out on deck. The rain had really eased off and the cloud was lifting. The mee-haw raft rushed on faster than before. With the current and a rising wind they were making maybe five knots. The Star was down; the brief blue night had settled on AC 14.

  The Chief leaned on his knuckle-pads beside Carlyle; they stared together over the wine-dark sea. Low waves came at the raft from the south-west, as the wind swung round. They were long, uncrested hillocks of water, that surged under the mee-haw logs and disappeared into the dusk, rolling in line across the surface of the endless sea.

  ‘Those waves better keep low,’ said Carlyle. ‘Does the sea get rough?’

  In his ninety-one days of Met. duty he had never seen a choppy sea, never felt a drop of rain, never, observed a significant drop in barometric pressure. He made wave-motions with his hands and the Chief replied with ‘Aw-kee’ and some new words. He thought of the sea rising up into roaring crests, high over the raft, huge rollers, hills and valleys where the pink foam boiled. He had to shut his eyes to shake off the nightmare picture of those waves, superimposed upon the harmless scene he was watching.

  ‘I better get some sleep,’ Carlyle muttered. He was wet and shaky, his morale still down. The whole project, the solitary Met. duty, was a test of his survival qualities and his potential as a colonist. Perhaps he had blown it with Garrett by evacuating the quogs… He stumbled back into the hut, found a way to his bunk, put on a fresh warm coverall from the thermo-pack. He didn’t dare take any medication in case there was a sudden alert. Most of the quogs were sleeping; he caught the gleam of an eye here and there, the flicker of a blue hand. The Chief materialized at the foot of his bunk with two even more ancient creatures, so old that their skin was grey. They stared at Carlyle and clapped their long hands soundlessly. He felt an instant of revulsion… sleeping in a hut crammed with animals, for crissake. Then with a surge of weariness and a sense of strange well-being he fell asleep.

  … He was wide awake in a dark room with a low ceiling. A range of scents and sounds assailed him; fresh air, wood-smoke, perfume, the waffling roar of a jet refueling, insects, someone strumming idly on a moog. Earth. He was on Earth. Carlyle knew that he must be dreaming; he savoured his dream, taking
in the outlines of the room. It was night; he was standing beside a window that opened on to a balcony. He glanced down at the thick, unpatterned carpet. A memory stirred. Had he been in this room before? Or was it simply the colour, a rippling mist-green, an earth colour. There was someone at the desk; Carlyle felt himself drift closer.

  He peered at the dark figure… A caftan, a long fall of dark hair, he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Yet something in the attitude of the head made him tremble, in his dream. Slowly Eva Magnussen turned until she saw him. She blinked into the darkness of the room, switched off her cassette and removed the earpiece as he had seen her do a thousand times.

  ‘Jim?’ her voice was husky, hesitant. ‘Jim Carlyle?’

  ‘Eva?’ In the dream his own voice was muffled.

  ‘Where are you?’. she asked. ‘Is this some kind of experiment?’

  ‘It’s my dream,’ he said. ‘You know where I am.’

  ‘Jim… I can see you.’

  ‘I thought of you,’ he said. ‘I have a situation going here. My communications are gone. No word from upstairs. Seeing you helps a lot.’

  ‘You’re not alone,’ she said. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Quogs,’ he said. ‘They are great little guys. You might find a short report on them in the file on ACI4—Not enough work done on quogs.’

  ‘You say you are sleeping?’

  ‘Sure. Eva the sea is purple. Wine-dark sea…’

  ‘Oh, Jim…’

  ‘Don’t!’ he said. ‘Eva… Don’t cry. Think about what I said. I’m not one of your cadets any more. We could take a colonial posting.’

  Then as she rose in her chair the dream tilted; he was looking down on the room. He saw the figure of Eva Magnussen, his instructress, Commander Magnussen M.D., specialist in space psychology, rise up from her chair and run forward on the green carpet. He felt an instant of amazement and fear . . it was like watching something else… real life… not a dream. He heard Eva cry out across the abyss of space and time:

  ‘Jim… Jim Carlyle… I love you…’