A Sense of Infinity

by Howard L. Myers

  But his exhaustion, along with the dread of the heat waiting for him outside the tent, kept him from going in search of a plant from which to drain a few more c.c.'s of water. That would have to wait until night, he decided. Meanwhile he studied the directions attached to the rationmaker with care, to see if he was missing any bets in his use of the device. Carbohydrates and proteins were, after all, largely oxygen and hydrogen, so why shouldn't such a device be equipped to break these down into water?

  Finally he sighed and gave up. Such a use apparently hadn't struck the manufacturers as desirable. Stretching out on his back, Olivine closed his eyes and slept immediately.

  The sun was still high when he woke, and he had to wait five fretful hours in the tent for the cooling of twilight. There was a lamp cap in the pack, which he strapped on his head before starting his downhill trek once more.

  The Flandnan desert was coming to life with approaching darkness. He could hear the squeaky calls of small animals as he strode along, and finally got a look at a couple of them. They appeared quite ordinary desert inhabitants, rat to rabbit in size, quite possibly mammalian, and six-legged.

  He could not catch one. They did not scurry out of sight at his approach, but moved swiftly out of reach if he came too close. Olivine guessed they were not afraid of being eaten by a larger animal, but were cautious about being trampled on. At last he knocked one over with a well-aimed rock, and processed it through the rationmaker. It yielded nearly a cup of water which he gulped down quickly. Then he dumped the nutrient components, which were too dry to resynthesize into anything edible.

  Later, after darkness was complete and he had switched on his cap lamp, he killed another and made a meal off its ingredients.

  Once he caught a glimpse of a larger animal, also centauroid in structure, that would have resembled an Earth boar, except that it was as lanky as a greyhound. It slunk quickly away from his light.

  The coolness, the food, and the sounds of life around him were a healing influence on Olivine's morale. His situation, he realized, was far from hopeless.

  All he had to do was stay alive—and the rationmaker should make that simple—until a ship passed close enough to the planet to detect his nuclear powerblock. Two weeks, two months . . . six months at the outside. Space travel disasters were fairly frequent, and an overdue liner always brought search-and-rescue ships out along the liner's route to take a look at such semi-inhabitable planets as Flandna where survivors could be grounded.

  Yes, six months at the most, he told himself.

  And he couldn't be too sure, with only the light of his lamp, but the terrain seemed to be improving as he marched along. Vegetation seemed more abundant, suggesting more ground moisture. He steered clear of the larger clumps, remembering the warning he had taken from Icy's note.

  He muttered a curse at the thought of that beautiful hunk of devious, frigid femininity. If he ever got his hands on Icy . . . well, she had earned all the rough treatment he would delight in dealing her!

  He boiled at the thought and his eyes glared angrily as he strode on through the night. The hell of it was, though, that his chance of ever encountering Icy again was extremely slight. The Confederation was too big for that. You met people, separated from them to go your separate ways among the hundreds of worlds, and your paths never crossed again.

  And infuriated though he was, Olivine had no intention of ever going looking for Icy, just to punish her for dumping him. Life was too short to waste in search of vengeance . . .

  Except, of course, vengeance upon the stinking Space Patrol! What a slob he'd been, letting that crummy dogooder outfit snow him for so many years, thinking he was king of the universe when they made him a fullfledged proxad! And then had slapped him down over a little harmless payoff! As if a proxad ought to live on the miserly pay the Patrol gave him!

  He was well out of it, even as a marooned escapee from "justice", he told himself bitterly. And given half a chance he'd show that Patrol . . .

  Something tripped him and he sprawled forward, coming hard against the dry ground. Surprised but not hurt, he tried to stand up, but his booted feet pulled themselves out from under him and he sprawled again. He twisted into a sitting position and his light revealed a ropey red vine looped around his ankles. It was dragging him along on his bottom toward a small flat cluster of leaves six feet away.

  So this was one of the dangerous vegetables of Flandna! Olivine grinned tightly as he got the sonic knife out of the pack. This plant was going to find itself prey rather than predator!

  He reached forward and slashed at the tentacle. The knife blade skidded along the surface without making a scratch.

  Alarmed, Olivine examined the knife. It was working properly, and the sonic edge ought to slice anything softer than granite with ease. He tried it on the loop of red again with no more result than before.

  Frantic now, he began jerking with his legs, trying to kick himself free before the plant could pull him into its maw or whatever. But he could do nothing. He was dragged up beside the leafy clump, and held there. Rigid with terror, he waited for whatever was to happen next. The plant had a dead-animal stench which Olivine decided, with an hysterical giggle, was highly appropriate.

  "Icy shouldn't have lied to me," he babbled at it. "She said I was the only carnivore, but you're a carnivore, too. Aren't you?"

  The plant made no response. "What are you waiting for!" Olivine stormed in terror.

  But the plant seemed content to hold him.

  Slowly, the man calmed. He took a deep breath and let it quaver out in jerks. Whatever the plant was going to do to him, it was in no hurry about it. It was giving him time to think about escape.

  He looked again at his legs. The red tentacle was gripping tightly around his ankles, but outside his boots. If he could slide the boots off . . .

  He tried. The tentacle was bearing down too tightly for that. The boots were pressed in snuggly around his ankles. He couldn't remove them.

  For a split-second, he thought about amputating his legs just below the knee. The thought had no appeal at all.

  He stared at the plant, and frowned. How did it mean to dispose of him? It hardly seemed big enough to have a man-sized maw somewhere under its leaves. It was no larger than a two-year-old peony bush. Unless the maw was underground . . .

  Olivine laughed. Maybe the plant wasn't hungry right now, but he was. Why not try turning the tables?

  He slashed off a leaf and stuffed it into his rationmaker. The plant jerked, and dragged him a couple of inches closer. Then it became quiet again. Olivine cut off another leaf. And another. The plant writhed and twisted, but it could not stop him. Within a minute, it was reduced to a tuft of stems, the red tentacle extending up and out from the center of the tuft to make a loop that slammed around alarmingly for a few moments after the man had completed harvesting its leaves. Then it flopped to the ground, but did not loosen its grip.

  And Olivine saw where the dead-animal stench was coming from. A dead animal.

  It was one of the rabbit-sized centauroids, previously hidden under the leaves, and well along the road to decay. Decomposition was not advanced so far, though, as to obscure the marking around its rear midsection where the plant's tentacle had circled it for however long the animal had taken to die.

  The plant hadn't eaten it at all. It had merely left the body there . . . to enrich the soil!

  "I'll be damned!" grunted Olivine in dismay. "Not food, but fertilizer!" What a way to end his career! But in any event, this meant the plant wasn't a carnivore, after all. Not strictly speaking.

  He twisted as far from the putrid corpse as the tentacle would let him, and turned on the rationmaker. The organics of the leaves turned out to be about the same as those of the plant he had processed earlier. He stared at the readouts, trying to think of something appetizing to make, and decided he wasn't hungry after all. Not with that stinking animal a few feet away. He converted the polywater to normal H2O, and drank the liquids.
Then he dumped the dry nutrients.

  "More fertilizer for you," he told the plant.

  For a while then he just sat there, looking at the red tentacle. It took up slack in itself, he noticed, by making a large loose loop, tightly twisted together near the ends that disappeared into the ground and held his ankles. He tried cutting the limber loop with his knife, but failed as before. This was sterner stuff than the leaves, not only proof against the gnawing teeth of trapped animals but against the ferocious bite of a manmade cutting tool as well.

  A remarkable vegetable, that plant, he mused. Real handy with that tough tentacle, almost as if it knew what it was doing. The coil around his ankles tight and stiff as hell, and the same where the ends of the loop were twisted together. But the loop itself relaxed and floppy. As if the plant knew what part of the tentacle had work to do and what part could take it easy . . .

  Olivine snorted in self-disgust. He was wasting time admiring the plant's intelligence when he should be trying to get away from it!

  And if the plant had no use for the loose loop of tentacle right now, maybe he did. He had something more powerful than a sonic knife at his disposal.

  He picked up the loop, bent it double, and shoved the bend into the receiving compartment of his rationmaker. Then, holding the lid down as tightly as he could he turned on the rationmaker.

  The plant went into frenzy. The effect was explosive in its violence and suddenness. The tentacle whipped about like the end of a high-voltage cable, slashing the ground and occasionally the man with a fury of blind blows.

  Stunned, grimacing from the beating, Olivine crawled away, gripping the rationmaker for dear life. But he couldn't seem to escape the rain of blows even after he had tumbled half a dozen meters away.

  Cursing, he counterattacked, stuffing more of the tentacle into the rationmaker. Through a fog of pain and wrath he realized that his ankles had been released as soon as he turned the device on, but he was accepting no surrender. He kept stuffing until there was nothing left to stuff. Then he slapped the lid shut and stared about wildly, in search of another enemy to attack.

  Only when his light swept across the torn hole in the ground by the small animal's corpse did he realize how complete his victory had been. In its frenzy the plant had worked its roots free, and they had gone into the rationmaker, too.

  Shivering, partly from reaction and partly from the growing chill of the night, Olivine jerked the tent from his pack, inflated it, crawled inside, and turned on the heater. After resting a moment, he undressed and treated the stinging welts raised by the lashing tentacle. Warm but exhausted, he looked at the rationmaker, and decided he was too tired to fool with it. He lay down and napped for a while.

  A light patter of rain roused him. He sat up and looked at his watch. It was ten hours past sunset, and at a rough guess six hours until dawn, as near as he could judge from the length of the previous day. He would have to measure star motions, he told himself, for an accurate timing of Flandna's rotation, so he could recalibrate his watch accordingly.

  But right now he ought to be thinking about some means of capturing the rain pattering on the roof of his tent . . .

  Before he could get any plan into operation, the rain stopped. He cursed and turned his attention to the readouts on the rationmaker.

  What he saw brought a grin. The tentacle plant had held a large amount of water, he guessed in the roots, and polywater also. The poison content had been extremely high, and he assumed it was these unidentified poisons which accounted for the tentacle's toughness. Usable food components were low, and that was O.K. because he was more thirsty than hungry at the moment. He drank the normal water and decided to save the polywater for later. In fact, if he could find something to store it in, he might build up an emergency supply. He opened the rationmaker's polywater compartment and peered in to estimate the bulk of its contents. The polywater, in a clear colloidal mass, looking like a sagging glob of gelatin slightly larger than a tennis ball, sat quivering in the center of the cubical space.

  But it didn't stay there.

  As soon as the compartment was open, a pseudopod of the stuff formed and reached up toward Olivine's face. Startled the man jumped back. The pseudopod fell short and slopped down the side of the rationmaker and onto the tent floor. Rapidly the globule remaining in the compartment flowed into this lengthening ribbon until the whole mass was out.

  While the wriggle of polywater resembled a plant tentacle only in form, that resemblance was enough to freeze Olivine for the moment it required for escape from the rationmaker. But now he realized he had nothing to fear from the stuff. It was, after all, pure H20, differing from ordinary water only in that its molecules were strung together into supermolecules, which made it about half again as dense as ordinary water and about fifteen times as viscous. It was "plastic" water, so to speak . . . stuff that had been discovered back in the Twentieth Century and had a myriad of uses, principally as a lubricant since it remained stable and liquid from over six hundred degrees Centigrade down to forty below. And so what if the stuff had suddenly formed into a tentacle shape and slid out of the rationmaker when he opened the lid? After all, there were dozens of mnemoplastics—stuff that tended to regain an earlier shape—on the market. Tangline was one of the bestknown of these. Why not plastic water that was mnemonic?

  The wriggle was now oozing across the tent floor—running downhill, Olivine told himself—like a thin, transparent snake. It was approaching the heatercooler, which it could gum up, and Olivine was about to move the device out of the way when the polywater halted. It was motionless for a few seconds, and then began bending itself. It formed a loop with its front section, then lifted its remaining length, in a series of 180–degree bends, to form a grid standing vertically over the loop base.

  The grid was directly in the path of the flow of warm air from the heater. The polywater was warming itself! Olivine stared in surprise, then shrugged. "O.K., stuff, you're alive, I've got a flexible mind. Nobody ever heard of living polywater before, though. And I can't figure out how you work."

  He bent down to peer closely at the highest segment of the grid the wriggle had formed, looking for internal structure. There ought to be a gut, or a nerve ganglia, or a sense organ, or something. But he could see nothing but clear colloid. Not even a speck of lint picked up from the tent floor.

  Olivine sat back, thinking hard. Slowly, he began to reach some tentative conclusions.

  What he had here, evidently, was about the simplest life form imaginable—pure water so structured molecularly as to function volitionally. And its life process was probably equally simple, such as soaking up heat, as it was doing now, to be expended in maintaining its form and in moving itself about. And also, he guessed, for whatever amount of thinking it might be capable of. Heat could create free electrons within the polywater, and speed their motion . . . in short, could produce tiny electrical flows in the molecular lattice. So the creature must think electrically, and sense the same way. What it could learn about its environment in that manner . . . well, that would take some experimenting to find out.

  For a while Olivine mulled over the fact that the creature's surface had to be a one-atom-thick layer of hydrogen, but that didn't lead him to any informative conclusions, so he gave up on it.

  The practical consideration was that he, by chance, had discovered a new life form of a startlingly basic type. Something not even the Space Patrol nor the CIT computer knew about. He had happened to be marooned on this particular planet with a new type of rationmaker that let polywater come through the analysis process as polywater. Certainly the CIT computer couldn't predict something it didn't know existed!

  So, he thought with grim satisfaction, when the doodle leaped out of the rationmaker at him, an unknown factor entered the equation of former Proxad Omar Olivine. All he had to do was find a way to bring that factor into play . . .

  Rescue came at dawn four days later.

  Olivine came out of his tent as usua
l, then froze at the sight of a Patrol pick-up bug standing not a dozen meters away.

  "Good morning, Ollie," came a voice from the bug's exterior speaker. "I trust you slept well."

  Olivine nodded dumbly, trying to tell himself this was what he had been hoping for. But capture was hard to accept emotionally, desirable though he knew it to be.

  "That you, Coralon?" he asked, thinking the voice sounded familiar.

  "Right, old buddy. I happened to be passing close when HQ got the word you were stranded here, and I was sidetracked to give you chauffeur service, back to you-know-where. Are we going to do it the easy way?" For a moment Olivine hesitated, eying the bug's gunsnouts that were capable of blasting him to bloodbutter, stunning him, or tanglining him, depending on which button Proxad Dayn Coralon chose to push in the control room of his ship hovering out in space.

  Olivine shrugged. "I'll go quietly just this once, Danny, as a personal favor to an old pal."

  "Good boy!" Coralon's voice approved.

  "What about my stuff?" asked Olivine, looking toward the tent. "Shall I just leave it?"

  "No. Better not. It's stolen property, so we'd better bring it along. Pack up."

  Olivine deflated the tent and began stuffing it and the other equipment into the pack.

  "How did HQ find out about me?" he asked as he worked.

  "A call one of our scouts monitored at the edge of the Roost area," Coralon replied. "It seemed that your partners in crime on the Glumers Jo wanted to get past the Rooster pickets without being shot at. They were trying to explain how a con man and a no-talent doll could grab a port-service ship and get away with it. They had to explain about you, including how they had dumped you on Flandna. Perhaps the Roosters would have got around to picking you up. The Patrol decided to beat them to you, so here we are."

  That last, Olivine realized, was meant as a light goad, inviting him to try to make a break for cover in expectation of later rescue by the Roosters. He was having none of that! Despite the "old buddy" talk of Proxad Coralon, Olivine knew that his one-time classmate at the Space Academy would relish an excuse to butter him. After all, to goody-goods like Dayn Coralon, Olivine was that lowest of criminals, the turncoat crooked cop.