Obedient to its mistress, the spirit of the leopard performed its task well. It jammed one of Hopkins’ feet firmly into a fork of the tree, so that his body lay along the protruding root. Then the head dipped awkwardly down, down into the insect soup.
Hopkins felt the shock through his transparent soul. That evil glutinousness seemed to press against his eyes; the insects big and small swam slowly into his mouth; he could feel them, the dead ones and the ones still dying, sail grandly down into his lungs. The leisured treacle stream came on and on and on, and treacled him into extinction.
But that, of course, was only the beginning of his troubles.
Gesture of Farewell
Across this stretch of the planet Risim ran the big groove. It was ten miles wide and over a quarter of a mile deep. A cluster of mobile buildings dotted the road, which ran straight along the middle of the groove. Today, the buildings seemed to crouch closer to the ground, for above them raged the worst storm Risim had experienced in over a thousand years.
Lester Nixon’s half-track swerved off the road and headed down a dirt trail for home, St. Elmo’s fire dancing along its roof. The violent winds carried rain – not, by ordinary standards, very much rain, but by Risim standards a deluge. Lester smiled with pleasure over it as he ploughed through puddles. He enjoyed the feel of a live planet about him.
Swerving up a steep incline, he came within sight of his house.
As befitted the home of Risim’s Resident Governor, the building stood apart from all the other of Sector One, and was on high enough ground to possess a view right across the artificial valley. Its exposed position accounted for the fact that the garage was now flat; the gale had blown it over. The unexpected sight of it strewn over the ground was not dismaying enough to wipe the smile off Lester’s broad face. Life on Risim was nothing but hard work; rebuilding a garage was a drop in the ocean; Lester was rebuilding a planet.
Lester’s smile faded only when he climbed out of the half-track and noticed his wife, Ruthmary, standing in the long, low window of their house. Leaving the vehicle in the open, he limped across to the door and let himself in, pushing through the airlock which was no longer needed.
‘What’s for supper?’ he asked heartily, when she appeared in the hall.
You could not deflect Ruthmary as simply as that.
‘Lester! I thought you were never coming home!’ she exclaimed, pressing the palms of her hands together. ‘Oh, I’ve been so scared! You’ve no idea how awful it’s been up here. I thought we’d all be blown away. Why are you so late?’
‘Communications wanted help,’ Lester said, taking her hand. ‘They had a line down, and it’ll be needed when Sector Six comes through tonight.’
‘A line down!’ she said, staring into his face. ‘They had a line down, so you stayed to help them – never mind that we had a whole garage down!’
‘Try and keep your sense of proportion, Rue,’ he said quietly, stripping off his oilskins and going over to the coal fire. ‘The garage can be re-erected at any time.’ She fluttered before him like a bird. She was a good-looking forty, although just now her face was blotchy with strain.
‘I’m keeping my sense of proportion,’ she said. ‘You’re losing yours, Lester. You’re letting this planet become your life. While you were putting that line up, I don’t suppose you once thought of me, did you?’
She interpreted his silence correctly.
‘No …’ she said, in a wounded tone. ‘It’s getting to be Risim first and last with you. You love the place. You think of it as yours! You keep forgetting what kind of people the Risimians were. You keep forgetting they must have left a booby trap for us … This isn’t a planet to love; it’s a planet to hate.’
He heard, but for a long while did not reply; he was looking out of the window. Most of the land along the ten-mile-wide groove was now under cultivation, semi-outdoor cultivation. Some of the old airtight domes were still being used for more experimental crops. Trees and wheatfields and acres of root vegetables met Lester’s eye; he could see some Shorthorns on Darbie’s farm being driven in to milk. The uplands beyond the groove were thatched here and there with green. It was all good to look upon. The vista Lester’s inward eye saw was something different. It had no green anywhere about it. When Lester had arrived on Risim, as a junior member of the Reclamation Force advance party, all this landscape had been white with CO2 rime. Bare earth, bare rock, stretched everywhere. Nothing grew. Planetary atmosphere was about a foot deep.
That was fifteen years ago. The RF had made the rock flower.
‘It is a planet to love,’ Lester Nixon said, turning back to his wife as a fresh cascade of rain swept the windows.
Ruthmary was staring out too. He did not need telling what she saw. She saw only the arbitrary miles-wide furrow chopped out by the giant excavators, the humble quarters of Sector One, the jagged background of unreclaimed land, pitted still by a thousand years of falling meteorites. Certainly Risim was as yet not a woman’s world; Ruthmary’s expression told Lester she might have been looking over the wastes of Hell.
‘Love!’ she said, making it sound like a dirty word. ‘Risim’s a desert, and a few blades of grass won’t conceal the fact. It killed little Alec; it has swallowed up our youth. And if you can say you love it, you must be mad.’
‘I asked you never to mention Alec, Rue,’ he said, mildly enough. Talk of his dead son reminded him of his daughter. ‘Where’s Jackie?’
‘Upstairs,’ she said shortly.
As Lester started to go, Ruthmary caught his arm.
‘You know the real reason why I hate Risim, Lester,’ she half-whispered.
‘Yes. You’re afraid it may blow up at any minute,’ he said steadily, refusing to look into her eyes.
‘Not at any minute,’ she said. ‘At every minute. I’m always afraid – not just for myself: for Jackie, for you, even for the convicts. Angagulalatun blew up. So did Cobatt II. So did Vicinzo. The Reclamation Forces on all of them were destroyed.’
‘We may be luckier,’ he said curtly, for this was something he had no wish to discuss. ‘Don’t think of it.’
Her nails were biting into his sleeve. She was shouting now, to make herself heard above the wind.
‘I can’t stop thinking of it!’ she said. ‘Can’t you see, Lester, I’m asking you to let me go back to Earth. I just can’t bear it here any longer. I’ve got to go!’
‘Alone?’ he asked.
‘Why not? You – ’ she cried, then stopped, reading the look on his face, realising what she had just said.
‘Oh, Lester …’ she began, suddenly cold. She could see how deeply she had hurt him by her indifference. It came back to her that she knew Lester very well; always living with someone makes us forget they are not strangers. He was an odd man, with a sensitive side to his nature which could never find expression in words. Now he staggered as if she had sunk a pickaxe into him.
‘Lester, my dear, I didn’t mean – ’ she started. But he went out, slamming the door in her face, not waiting for her explanation. And what was there to explain? They had abruptly stopped loving each other; it was inexplicable. Ruthmary leaned against the door; she listened to its slamming over and over again in her mind, dreading its implications. Lester did not slam doors. He was the kind who always left them open.
The daylight grew weirder now. Lester, as he ran up the stairs to Jackie, glanced out at the purple glare; Risim had never looked like this before. All around the sun floated pale sun-dogs, phantoms of the real thing, and behind them wavered the aurora – the new aurora. The garish effect, when it could be glimpsed through cloud, was of polka dots imposed on shot silk.
Before he opened her door, Lester could hear Jackie sobbing. He went in and found her lying across the bed, her toes stubbing the floor, rucking up the bedside rug. She did not look up when he spoke her name. Sitting beside her, Lester rested his hands on her thin shoulders. He thought: perhaps our worst troubles come when we are thirteen years
old, when we’ve lost the resilience of childhood and have yet to gain the strength of an adult.
‘You’re a big girl to be scared by a little storm,’ he said aloud.
She looked up then, her face tear-stained.
‘Mummy says the planet may blow up at any minute,’ she said.
That, of course, would be it. The anger came up like choking fumes in Lester’s throat. He coughed it down and said, ‘Now listen, Jackie girl, what’s going on outside has nothing to do with anywhere blowing up. That’s just one of your mother’s silly stories, and I’m going to tell you a far nicer one.’
‘What’s yours about?’ she asked suspiciously, flinching as the room was deluged in lightning.
‘My story’s about why the air is behaving so funnily outside,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you why it’s a good thing and not a bad thing. You see, when you were born, lying in your cradle in this selfsame room, you could look out of the window and see space coming right down and touching the bare land. Well, maybe by then there was air in the groove, but there was not much to spread about elsewhere. You could see the stars come right down and touch those distant mountains, even by day.
‘But every month, the view changed just a little. As you grew up, so did Risim. As you put on weight, it put on air. You two have grown up together.
‘Now it seems as if Risim is coming of age. Why, the air’s breathable almost half a mile up – it will soon be settled enough for us to be able to use planes and helicopters. You’ve seen how in every sector the land’s coming back to life again; now the air’s doing the same. It’s not just so many thousand cubic yards of released oxygen and carbon dioxide any more; it’s a planetary atmosphere. An ionosphere is in the process of establishing itself. That’s what all the noise and colour is about.’
‘I don’t think I want to live on a planet with an “onosphere”,’ Jackie said, making bubbly noises into a handkerchief.
‘It should soon settle down,’ Lester replied. ‘Then we won’t notice it any more. In fact, it’ll be a great help to us for radio and suchlike. At present, the ultra-violet from the sun is charging all the gas particles in the sky; and, although it may sound and look rather alarming, it’s really a sign that all our work here is being blessed.’
Jackie cocked her head on one side to peer into his solemn face.
‘Mummy says you’ve got a creator complex,’ she announced. ‘What is a creator complex, Daddy?’
It was not a time when Lester Nixon wanted personal troubles. His schedules for the next few days were even busier than usual. On the morrow he had to drive over to Sector Three, Tod Clitheroe’s sector, and officiate at the ocean seeding. Sector Six, as Lester had reminded Ruthmary, was advancing to its new territories in the night; he would have to visit them within the next two or three days to see that the basic planning jobs were carried out efficiently.
Tired, Lester went early to bed. Usually, he allowed himself twenty minutes of constructive thought before sliding smoothly into sleep. Tonight, the thoughts were not constructive, nor would they let him rest. He worried about Jackie, he worried about Ruthmary. The unfortunate thing was that he could see his wife’s point of view; she cared for the refinements of life, which were scarce on Risim. Even her beloved music tapes were few and well worn. And although she could, in her fashion, appreciate the mighty transformation of Risim, she discounted it with the thought that it might all blow to Kingdom Come at any day.
So she blamed all her troubles on Lester, who had brought her here as a bride. She believed he thought himself a god, bringing light where there was only darkness, and she had begun to hate him for it.
‘Now she’s trying to win Jackie over to her ideas,’ Lester muttered aloud. Brushing his hair back from his forehead, he sat up in bed. Ruthmary’s breathing came steadily from the other side of the room. Beyond the shutters, the aurora still fluttered.
Lester got out of bed, dressed, went downstairs. It was nearly midnight. He had never felt less like sleep.
After some indecision, he put on thick clothes and boots, slung an oxygen mask over his shoulder in case it should be needed, and let himself into the night air.
The cold knocked his cheekbones. Twenty degrees of frost, he estimated. It would be sharper than that before morning, under the thin air-blanket. Lester could remember when evening brought dips of two hundred degrees below freezing. He was getting old; he could remember too much.
Without bothering to drag out the half-track, he walked down into the center of the groove. It was a fine night. The rain, the thin cloud, had gone; only the aurora remained, flapping overhead like a gigantic mauve bat. In the distance, the combined wheels of Sector Six could be heard, moving up the highway. You couldn’t hear a thing on Risim in the old days.
For this special occasion, Sector One’s only filling station was open and ablaze with light. Lester limped over to it, greeting its owner and standing with him by the pumps as the leading vehicles of the big convoy appeared down the road.
These RF vehicles were leviathans. They towered like ships as they lumbered by. Bulldozers, eledozers, rock-snorkers, grabs, drills, furnaces, and pounders; some tracked, some on balloon tyres as high as a house, some on trailers, they began to growl majestically past the garage. Machines had ruined Risim over a thousand years ago; now machines – these machines – were patching her up again.
Behind the RF vehicles came the smaller traffic, mainly mobile living quarters. It would be twelve hours before they had all passed.
A landrover swerved into the garage, and a squat man swaddled in furs jumped out.
‘I thought that was you, Governor!’ he exclaimed. ‘How’re you doing?’
Lester shook hands warmly with him. This was Brandy Mireball, Commander of Sector Six, and an old friend of Lester’s.
They talked eagerly together for some minutes, swinging their arms to keep warm, until Lester said, ‘Your convoy looks as if it could forge on without you to wet-nurse it for an hour or two. Come on up to the house for a warm-up and a gossip.’
At once a look of reserve passed over Brandy’s big, square face.
‘Er – well, no. I’d better be moving, Governor,’ he said. ‘Besides, you don’t want to trouble your wife at this time of night.’
Or at any other time, Lester thought grimly. He had forgotten that Brandy was, officially, a convict; now he recalled the frosty reception Ruthmary had given him, the last and only time they had met. Brandy had too much pride in him to welcome a repetition of that meeting.
Ruthmary, unlike Lester, had never failed once in the last fifteen years to remember that ninety-nine per cent of the men under her husband were the offerings of other planets’ jails. He preferred to think of himself as the creator of a world, rather than the governor of a penal settlement. But of course only criminals could be expected to operate on a planet that might disintegrate at any time.
‘There’s a room ahind my office you like to borrer,’ the owner of the garage volunteered.
‘Thanks,’ Lester said.
The room was comfortable and had a good coal fire burning; coal was the cheapest fuel in Sector One, wood the dearest. Lester meditated briefly on what a fine thing it was that he had to bring a friend here to entertain him. Even a governor was inescapably governed.
Brandy was full of information about the new territory Sector Six was taking over. It was nothing but shop, and Lester listened with interest. The territory would not be easy to lick into shape; preliminary surveys had indicated that it was mainly high ground, broken and fissured by a thousand years of extremes of heat and cold.
‘And it contains the ruins of the chief city of Risim,’ said Brandy, looking hard at Lester.
Lester shrugged.
‘It’ll all have to go,’ he said. ‘Those are always RF orders: obliterate every trace of the enemy civilisation.’
‘I know that. I’m not worried about that,’ Brandy said. ‘I think you know, too, what I’m driving at, Governor. If the
re’s a booby trap anywhere on Risim, waiting to blow us to bits, chances are it’ll be in the capital city.’
‘It wasn’t in the capital on Cobatt II.’
‘It was on Angagulalatun. And on Vicinzo.’
Silence drifted like ice between the two men.
‘I’ve got some drink here, Governor,’ Brandy said, sheepishly bringing a flask out of his pocket. ‘Have a swig.’
Lester accepted gratefully. He had not had a drink since the last time he and Brandy had met. The stuff was supposed to be prohibited, but the more settled the planet became, the more drink there was about. Some of the men seemed to have stills working as soon as they pitched camp.
‘Just how seriously do you take this booby trap business, Brandy?’ Lester asked.
‘I don’t let it rule my life,’ Brandy said cautiously.
‘But do you seriously believe the Risimians would stoop to such a thing? They were an old and cultured race.’
Brandy laughed harshly. ‘What a question!’ he said. ‘Men’ll stoop to anything. Besides, look at it from the Risimians’ point of view. They were our enemies. Right? That galactic bust-up, the Hub Wars, was about the toughest thing that’s ever happened. And the Gobblers that won the war for us were about the nastiest weapons ever invented. Right? They could make a planet uninhabitable within an hour – as they did here. Now: if you think your planet’s going to be made uninhabitable, what do you say to yourself? You say: Right, then it stays uninhabitable; if we can’t live on it, no other –––––’s going to, either.
‘And it’s a simple enough matter, if you’re as advanced as Cobatt or Vicinzo – or Risim – was, to plant a little device that will be triggered off when the enemy finally gets to it.’
They argued the point back and forward, as every man on Risim had done ever since the RF landed, fifteen years ago. The trouble was, that the vital issue – whether or not the Risimians had planned a revenge – would always remain open: until Risim blew up or a booby trap was discovered.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 26
