This Star Shall Abide
Page 16
“Not really. You are looking at sides you haven’t seen before.”
“But . . . some of what you’ve said supports my side, sir! Why should you side with someone who opposes you, someone who’s got to be silenced?” Was it possible, thought Noren wonderingly, that there were secret opponents of the system among the Scholars themselves?
Smiling enigmatically, Stefred answered, “I’ve always been on your side. I couldn’t let you know until I was sure of where you stood; but from now on I have nothing to lose by it, and everything to gain.”
Chapter Nine
He was the First Scholar again. He was aboard the starship, but he no longer looked out through its viewports; instead, he sat at a large white table with a group of people, some men, some women. He knew them all, but their faces were dim and their names didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the topic under discussion, which lay so heavily upon him that everything else was blurred.
“The colony will not survive,” said someone.
“It must survive,” declared Noren. “It is all that is left of humankind.”
“Of course it must,” another agreed. “Haven’t we made every provision for its survival? Why else did we throw all our worlds’ energies into the preparation of this fleet as soon as we learned that the sun would nova?”
“To put it bluntly,” replied the first man, “we did so because there was nothing else to do. We had to keep busy at something. There were less than six weeks; we could not build new starships, we could merely recall and re-equip those we had. We’ve saved ourselves, only a few hundred of us. Our generation will live. The next will die.”
“You speak as if our goal were self-preservation!” protested Noren angrily. “You forget that we were chosen by lot from among the best-qualified scientists of the Six Worlds, and that we were sent not for our sake, but for the colony’s. The technicians at the existing research station don’t have enough scientific knowledge to establish a permanent settlement; ours is needed.”
“It may be needed, but it will prove useless. The research station is utterly dependent upon the arrival of a supply ship every five weeks. People can’t live there without supplies; the environment of the planet is just too alien. Why, the soil itself is poisonous and has to be treated each season before it will produce edible crops, not to mention the fact that ground and surface water contains enough of the same poison to cause chromosome damage. If the water purification plant ever stops functioning, all future babies will be mutant idiots!”
“And purifying water on a larger scale won’t be simple,” added someone else, “even if we succeed in controlling the weather so that the need can be partially met by rain. We equipped the fleet as best we could, but the machines we have won’t serve an expanding population—and since the planet has no useable metals, we can’t manufacture more. The only hope is to synthesize metal, yet without proper research facilities we couldn’t achieve that if we worked for several lifetimes.”
“Yes,” admitted Noren, frowning. “Yes, I know.” He, the First Scholar, did know; and the knowledge had weighed on his mind ever since he’d been informed that he had been chosen to lead the final expedition. It had torn him inwardly, obsessed him so that he’d been barely able to sleep or to eat or even to talk with his wife. It was an insoluble dilemma: the planned colony could not survive, and yet it must.
Most of his companions had refused to recognize the hard truth, and that was understandable. More than thirty billion people—the entire population of the Six Worlds—had been doomed by the nova; it was too cruel a thing that the descendants of the few who’d escaped would also be doomed. The facts, however, were indisputable: only one planet with a breatheable atmosphere had been found during the limited interstellar exploration accomplished in the short time since the invention of the stardrive, and that one did not have the natural resources needed to support human beings.
Through the permanent use of high technology, the planet could be made livable. But it was the world of a metal-poor star, and what little metal it had once, aside from that chemically unsuitable for fabrication of machines, had apparently been extracted in past ages by miners from some other solar system who had depleted it and gone on. Their origin was unknown; no contact had ever been made with another intelligent race; to continue the search for a better planet was impossible without a source of nuclear fuel and concentrated food. In any case, the fleet’s ships would have to be dismantled to provide an adequate life-support system for the colony. They carried more equipment than people, since an opposite policy would have been self-defeating; still the equipment could not last forever, and without it, humanity would face extinction.
So far he had not tried to destroy anyone’s illusions. The morale of the Six Worlds had been raised during those last terrible weeks by the thought of the expedition that was to save one remnant of humankind, and, within the starships’ computers, the entire store of human knowledge. He’d known that if the real situation were to be grasped, the expedition’s members might give up in despair. They must not give up! They must proceed as if survival were possible, so that somehow, a solution might be found.
But now the Six Worlds were gone; the fleet was enroute to the new planet, and because the starships were not limited by the speed of light, they would get there very soon. A decision had to be made, a decision so appalling that Noren was unable to grasp its nature, however deeply he reached into his mind. The First Scholar did not want to think about the decision. To do so brought him pain, yet the people around the table must accept the fact that their mission was going to fail unless they made some drastic change in the plans formed by the Six Worlds’ now-nonexistent government.
“It would be different,” he said to them, “if the planet could support an independent colony. But it can’t. No one ever expected people to live there without supply ships. Though foods can be raised if the soil is enriched and treated and the seed irradiated, without metal no industry can be established. Even the machines for inactivating native poisons must be imported. It’s been assumed that tools and machines could easily be sent—the whole concept of expansion to worlds with insufficient resources was based on that assumption.”
“With the food shortage at home so crucial, it seemed better to send the equipment than to wait for the discovery of worlds that could become self-sufficient,” they agreed.
“But we’ve got to be self-sufficient now!” insisted one of the men. “Are you telling us we’re stuck with a world we can’t develop?”
Noren nodded gravely. “The old techniques, the ones that worked in our home solar system, won’t do,” he stated, not understanding half of what he as the First Scholar, was saying. “We don’t have enough equipment, and we don’t have the means to build it. We have problems that never occurred on the Six Worlds: problems like the poison that permeates the soil, ground water and native vegetation; the need for irradiation of our grainseed to kill fungi; and above all, the lack of metallic elements suitable for industrial use. I believe those problems can be solved. But they can’t be solved quickly! We must find a way to synthesize useable metals through nuclear fusion of other elements, and with inadequate facilities that will require generations of research. There is no shortcut.
“And,” he added, “if we’re to survive, the population must be built up during those generations. We’re far too few to maintain the technology necessary for the support of such research, or to produce enough descendants with creative minds.”
“How can the population be built up when we must ration our tools and machines merely to supply the population that already exists?”
“There’s no easy answer,” Noren admitted. “We can’t save the human race unless the population grows, yet it can’t grow without the equipment only technology can provide—”
“Why can’t it?” a woman interrupted. “For thousands of years people lived on our mother world without any technology at all, and the population grew very rapidly.”
“And our forebears weren’t used to the comforts of civilization as we are,” another woman added.
“We’re going to have to do without comforts,” retorted somebody grimly.
“Yes. But it’s not as simple as that.” Noren sighed. From the First Scholar’s mind came the realization that these people were all scientists, all highly educated and very intelligent, whose background was in itself blinding them to what a lack of such background would imply.
“Just suppose we did learn to live the way primitive peoples once lived,” he said wearily. “Forget about luxuries like prefabricated shelters, powered transportation, communication networks, lighting, farm machinery, imported tools, clothing and medicines: all the things that colonists would normally have. Assume only that cropland was initially fertilized with the chemicals we’ve brought and treated each season to inactivate the native poison, that the grainseed was irradiated, that weather was controlled to provide enough rain for the crops, that a water purification plant of sufficient capacity to supplement rain catchment was built, and that provision was made for recycling of wastes. Of course, we must also assume nuclear power to maintain these essentials, and we must assume that vaccines for the local diseases could be developed before the drug supplies gave out. Under those conditions, do you think our descendants could last indefinitely?”
“Why not?” several men began confidently; but the faces of others grew thoughtful. “No,” said one of the women in a low voice. “No, it wouldn’t work. As long as we were alive, we could keep things going. Maybe we could teach our children enough so that they could. But our grandchildren, born into a non-industrialized world—”
“They wouldn’t understand,” another conceded, “The machines would be magic to them; they wouldn’t be able to fix them if they broke dawn, much less find a way to synthesize the metal needed to supply an increasing population. They’d have to be nuclear scientists for that, and the people of primitive agricultural societies just can’t be educated as nuclear scientists. They haven’t the background, and what’s more, they don’t care. People care about things that seem relevant to the life they know.”
“No community can be primitive and technological at the same time,” someone else declared, “unless it’s importing what its people can’t make. Civilization and technology go hand in hand. We’re going to be stranded on a planet where advanced technology is required if humanity’s merely to stay alive—that is, if it’s to stay human and not fall prey to the chromosome damage that would reduce its intelligence to the animal level. If our grandchildren lose that technology, they’ll have no chance to start over from scratch; and they will lose it if they revert to primitive ways.”
“Lose knowledge?” protested a young man skeptically. “The knowledge will be there in the computers; it will be preserved forever.”
“The knowledge will not be retrievable from the computers,” said Noren, “after the power plant breaks down.”
For a moment nobody spoke; they sat horror-stricken, stunned by a fact so obvious that they did not see how it had been overlooked. They’d grown up believing that the memory of a computer was more eternal than the shape of the land; on the Six Worlds the information stored in the computers had remained accessible until the final holocaust. But they knew, of course, that electronically-stored data would be as meaningless without power as if it had never existed at all.
“We’ve been in a state of shock,” Noren said. “Six weeks ago we learned that thirty billion people were about to die; it’s hardly surprising if we failed to think rationally. But we must do so now—”
“All this talk is meaningless,” a man broke in abruptly. “It doesn’t matter how long the equipment lasts; it would make no difference if we had enough to supply endless generations. There won’t be endless generations. The women among us are experienced scientists, too old to bear many children, and the people at the research station will begin to die when they hear about the nova”
“That’s crazy,” objected another. “Why should they?”
“What happened on the Six Worlds?”
“All right, there was panic. Some people went mad, some killed themselves. But that was different; they were going to die anyway, and they were afraid.”
“The members of this expedition were chosen from the Interplanetary Association of Scientists,” the man reminded him. “Medical and psychological screening tests were given to eligible couples, the same tests administered to those previously sent. Of the ones who passed, all had an equal chance in the lottery; yet some of them committed suicide even before the lots were drawn.”
“I didn’t know that!” several people exclaimed in dismay. Noren was silent; the First Scholar had known, but he had tried to forget.
“It was kept quiet,” the man said. “But the fact is that most people who’ve grown up with the idea that they’re part of an advanced culture with thirty billion citizens just can’t live with the knowledge that it’s gone.”
“We’re living with it,” someone pointed out.
“That means nothing, since if we were among these who couldn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”
“There might be another explanation for those suicides,” someone else suggested. “They might have sacrificed themselves to give others a greater chance in the lottery.”
“A few, maybe. Not very many.” In a tone of unshakable certainty the man asserted, “Emotionally, the research station workers belong to the Six Worlds, not to the new world; they signed up for short tours of duty and never planned to settle there. They have no children, for they’re waiting to start their families when they get home. They’ve been getting news from home on every supply ship. When they hear that all civilized planets have been destroyed—that humanity has been wiped out except at that one alien base—their spirit will be fatally crushed. They not may kill themselves, but they won’t carry on the human race, either.”
“They’ll not have much choice once the supply of birth control drugs gives out. Besides, pioneers have always managed in the past.”
“These people didn’t choose to be pioneers. They weren’t reared in the kind of society pioneers come from; the Six Worlds’ was so complex that they never developed any independence. They had no desire to break away. Right now they’re probably scared to death because the regular ship’s late! Oh, they’ll have babies in time—but a lot of those babies will be subhuman mutants because when the people learn the truth, their hope will die, and they’ll stop bothering to avoid unpurified water.”
“You’re mistaken,” Noren contended. “Surely it will work the other way. They’ll know that they’ve got to be more careful than ever, that everything in the future depends on them.”
“I wish I could agree. But they’ll also know that there isn’t likely to be much future, and not everyone has your courage, sir.”
Noren did not feel very courageous; as the First Scholar he was tired and despondent, and he knew that a dreadful decision was soon to be made. “In any case,” he said slowly, “we seem more or less agreed that the colony is in grave peril one way or another, and that if we can’t come up with a solution, there’s little hope for it.”
“There is no solution. The colony will die, and humanity with it; and when the power goes off, humanity’s knowledge will be lost.”
“Is—is this all . . . futile, then?” a woman faltered. “Have we launched this expedition for nothing? I won’t believe there’s no way to save future generations!”
The time had come, Noren realized, to speak of his plan: the desperate, horrifying pl
an he did not wish to think of. “There may be one,” he found himself saying, “if we dare to use it—”
Across the room from him a door burst open. A man stood there, a man who quavered, “Sir, we’ve illness aboard! Three people are stricken!”
Noren jumped to his feet. “Illness? That’s impossible; we all had medical checkups and everything on this ship was disinfected.”
“It hasn’t been diagnosed yet.” With still greater distress the man added, “One of those ill is your wife, sir.”
Noren’s heart lurched; the room swirled around him and then began to dissolve. He found himself transported to another, after the manner of dreams. For a brief instant he knew he was dreaming, but he was quickly engulfed once more by the emotions of the First Scholar.
He stood by a bed upon which a woman was lying. She had long, dark hair, like Talyra’s, but he could not see her face. Only her voice came to him, the voice of the woman he loved.
“What use is there going on?” she demanded feebly. “Who are we, a mere scattering of people in a fleet of ships bound through emptiness to an alien world, to say that the human race is worth preserving? There is nothing left, darling! Don’t you understand? Everything’s gone; there’s nothing to look back to anymore.”
“I understand,” he told her, forcing the words through trembling lips. “I watched! I saw it, you did not—and I say that there is a reason to go on! If we don’t, the colony has no chance at all.”
“Why should it have? That world was never meant for humans. Our species wasn’t meant to outlast the sun. We should have died when the others did.”
He knelt beside her, holding her close to him. “Think of those who came before us,” he insisted. “Think of all the labor, all the suffering of the generations past—”
“I am thinking of it! I’m thinking it will be better not to start that again; what end did it serve?”
“None, if we give up now. We have a responsibility.”