The Tenth Planet

by Cooper, Edmund

  She gave a deep sigh. “I have lived with the Minervans longer than you have, Idris. In some ways, I admire them. In other ways, they terrify me. They have virtually eliminated the aggressive instinct—which may or may not be a good thing—but they are so devastatingly hygienic, both physically and psychologically.” She laughed, “Perhaps it would be a good thing to be beaten by an Earth man, even to be killed by an Earth man. I’ll take my chance.”

  “I like you, Mary Evans.”

  “I like you, Idris Hamilton.”

  “Well, then, we must plan for the future. By my reckoning, I have forty-seven M-days left to serve. You will share them with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I cannot guarantee that I will be good to you in the accepted sense—in the sense that such a statement is understood by Earth people. I cannot guarantee that, when my sentence is over, I will be docile according to Minervan standards. In fact, I can guarantee nothing. If you form an affection for me, or I for you, there could be much heartache.”

  “I’ll take my chance. You are the last Earth man. Perhaps, even, the last man. I’ll take my chance.”

  He kissed her, held her close. Strangely, the sagging breasts did not seem to sag any more. They were firm against him. Firm and responsive.

  “There is something else I have to tell you,” said Mary. “Manfrius de Skun is dead. He had a heart attack. He could have been saved. As you must know, transplant surgery has been developed to a very high level here. But the Triple-T people were strong enough to veto resuscitation, transplant and even the use of his cloned body … That is the way these people deal with rebels, Idris. They do not execute them. They contain them and wait patiently. Then they let nature take its course.”

  He was silent for a while. At length, he said: “Manfrius de Skun was a good man, quite possibly a great one. History will decide. He spent his best years bringing me back to life and giving me a new body … I am Manfrius de Skun’s Joker, Mary. He slipped me into the pack. Now take off your clothes and come to bed. I warn you, I am going to do my damnedest to get you with child.”

  26

  THE PSYCHIATRIST DID not approve of the presence of Mary Evans. She was a distraction. She seemed—unintentionally, no doubt—to weaken the trust relationship he hoped to establish with Idris. Nevertheless, he knew there were subtle political reasons why the Earth man should be allowed to have the company of this particular woman during his treatment. He kept his nose out of politics; but he was aware of vague plans in certain quarters to discredit Idris Hamilton yet further.

  Mary did her best to fit into the necessary routine. When the psychiatrist made his visit, she was allowed out to stroll in the avenues of Vorshinski City. But she took all her meals with Idris, exercised with him, watched tri-di with him, talked with him, slept with him.

  There was much impersonal passion in their love-making. It was, as Idris saw it, not so much a joining of Idris Hamilton and Mary Evans as a joining of the last Earth man and the last true Earth woman. You could not count the children, he reasoned, though they were born of Earth. Their conditioning and their attitudes must now be almost wholly Minervan. Earth bodies, but Minervan minds. …

  So the union with Mary was a symbolic union. Sometimes, fantasising, he saw himself as a middle-aged Adam and Mary as a slightly bedraggled Eve. Sometimes, fantasising, he imagined the two of them returning to Earth, the Garden of Eden that was less than a hundred million miles from the sun, and repopulating it. In more rational moments, he could laugh at his dreams. Between them, the new Adam and Eve would produce a disastrously limited genetic fool.

  Minervan drama, as seen on the tri-di, was pathetically naive and amateurish. It contained no violence—either physical or mental. It was pure domestic drama, full of Utopian ideals, manufactured by zombies for zombies. Most of it consisted of variations on a theme: A wished to time-pair with B; B wished to time-pair with C; C was wholly absorbed in the development of a new hydroponics/sociological/electronic/medical/atomic project and had a faithful assistant who desperately wanted to bear C’s child or become pregnant by C, depending upon the sex of A, B and C. The denouement was usually democratic, eminently mature, providing satisfaction for all parties—and as boring as hell.

  Where was drama that could equal Oedipus Rex, Julius Caesar, The Masterbuilder, St. Joan, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? Lost in the mists of time. There were, apparently, no Minervan dramatists with the brilliance of Shakespeare, the passion of an Ibsen, the earthiness of a Tennessee Williams. There were just no Minervan dramatists. They were all too goddamned safe. They never suffered, they were never threatened, they were never called upon to make sacrifices. They were the perfect hygienic products of a perfect hygienic welfare state. They were zombies.

  It was the same with music. Nothing to compare, however remotely, with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—even Strauss. No fire. No passion. No violence. The best that could be offered was comparable to the worst of Mozart. Even the folk music and songs had a uniform dullness.

  The Minervans had obviously a brilliant command of science and technology to enable them to maintain a stable population on or under a frozen planet for thirty centuries but, somehow, the artistic impulse—the creative imagination that gives meaning to life—seemed to have died. And all that was left of mankind now were ten thousand hygienic, totally adjusted zombies, a handful of brainwashed Earth children, a resuscitated middle-aged Adam and a faded Eve. The odds were pretty heavy against getting a replay of the Garden of Eden set-up.

  Or so Idris thought until his second female visitor appeared.

  She had the entirely delightful name of Damaris de Gaulle. The surname was familiar. Idris racked his brains. Some time in the twentieth century, he recalled, there had been a French general called de Gaulle, who had played a minor part in the Second World War. Perhaps this girl had some distant, tenuous kinship with him.

  Damaris de Gaulle was very young. She could hardly be much more than ten M-years old, less than twenty E-years. She had long, blonde, flowing hair, slightly coarse features, and a well-formed body that would be good for child-bearing.

  She gave a cool, self-assured and rather hostile glance at Mary, and confined her conversation to Idris.

  “We know that this room is not monitored in any way, so it is possible to talk freely,” she said. “I will be honest and direct with you. I would like you to be honest and direct with me.”

  “Who are we?” asked Idris.

  “It is not important. But we call ourselves the Friends of the Ways. We are young people. We are night people. May I call you Captain?”

  Idris laughed. “You may call me what you wish. Captain, if you like. It is singularly inappropriate because I lost my last command. But that does not matter. Why have you come to see me? Curiosity? The barbaric Earth man at bay?”

  Damaris smiled. “They call you the Jesus Freak, but I prefer Captain. It is more dignified. It has a ring of authority.”

  “Who calls me the Jesus Freak?”

  “The Friends of the Ways. It is because of an ancient myth. You must know it, of course. There was once a man of Earth called Jesus—one of the Friends who is a historian claims that his real name was Joshua bar David, but no matter—who was executed for revolutionary activity. But somebody called Judas Pilate resuscitated him by a brain transplant, and he then founded the first true commune in Soviet Russia. It flourished mightily, I understand, until the capitalist countries of the west bombed it to extinction … The Friends of the Ways call you the Jesus Freak because of obvious parallels and because they hope you will lead them to establish a new commune that is free from the dreadful constrictions of Talbot’s Creed. Will you lead them?”

  With a considerable effort, Idris restrained the impulse to laugh. It was understandable that the Minervans had telescoped Earth’s history. But, Jesus Lenin strikes again! That was hard to swallow.

  “Who are you asking me to lead?”

  “The youth of Minerva.”

  “A
ll the youth of Minerva?”

  Damaris tossed back her golden hair. “All the youth of Minerva who want to destroy this fossilized system of existence,” she said. “When you are released, Captain, travel the ways at night. You will find us. And if you are truly the Jesus Freak, you will help us. You will lead us to the creation of a Great Society. Now I must go … Will you lead us?”

  “I will meet your Friends of the Ways. If they are worth leading, I will lead them to something. I cannot promise that it will be a Soviet commune. I can promise that it will be better than Talbot’s Creed and the static society you have now.”

  “That is good enough for us,” said Damaris de Gaulle.

  When she had gone, Mary said: “You are hellbent on destroying yourself, Idris.”

  “No, love,” he retorted tranquilly. “I am hellbent on saving myself. Somehow, I and you are going back to Earth. You have a child in your belly, though you have not yet told me. He will walk on the soil of his home planet or I will die getting him there. Do you read me?”

  “I read you,” said Mary Evans, her eyes suddenly bright. “I read you loud and clear.”

  27

  WHEN IDRIS WAS released after serving his term of ‘corrective treatment’, his freedom was made conditional. He was already resigned to the indefinite ban on any contact, other than chance meeting in a public place, with Zylonia de Herrens. But his release order contained other and more sinister restrictions.

  He was released into the custody of Mary Evans, who was required to stand surety for his good behaviour. This meant simply that when he next transgressed—if he transgressed—Mary might suffer also. Two for the price of one. It was, he realised instantly, a kind of blackmail. Though no orthodox Minervan would have regarded it as such.

  More sinister was the fact that he was required to report to the psychiatric clinic of Vorshinski Hospital every ten days for E.E.G. brain rhythm analysis and for subjective interrogation by a psychiatrist empowered to use a sophisticated kind of polygraph to determine whether or not his answers were truthful.

  He was also required not to attend or address any public meeting or gathering—carefully defined as a group of not less than five people—without prior notice to and approval by the President of Vorshinski Council.

  Most sinister of all, he was required until further notice (which probably meant for ever) to abstain from contributing to the genetic pool. Which meant, simply, that he was not allowed to fertilize any female.

  But Mary was already pregnant. As soon as the fact were discovered—and it could not be hidden for very long—she would have to undergo compulsory abortion; and quite probably both she and Idris would be punished. Even apart from the ban on Idris, every pregnancy had to have prior approval, a fact of which Mary had been aware, though she had shut it out of her mind, probably because she desperately wanted to be pregnant by Idris. The Adam and Eve syndrome …

  The fact that perfect birth-control was freely available would make the pregnancy look like a deliberate flouting of Minervan law.

  One way or another, Idris realised, the Triple-T faction was going to be able to completely discredit the last Earth man. Time was on their side. Then any hope he might have entertained of peacefully persuading the Minervans to abandon their policy of psychological hibernation would be utterly ruined.

  If anything was to be done about the situation, it would have to be done quickly.

  Mary Evans had an apartment in Talbot City, uncomfortably near the home—if you could call a standardised living module a home—of Zylonia de Herrens. Idris had been offered a module of his own, ironically the apartment of the late Manfrius de Skun in central Vorshinski. It had been stripped of any possessions left by its previous occupant, and it looked pretty much the same as the other living units he had seen. But he would not take it. Though he did not believe in ghosts, he had too much respect and affection for the man who had brought him back from the dead to take over what had been his home and impose a new personality on it.

  So he moved into Mary’s apartment. And, on the first night of freedom, because he had little to lose, he left Mary at home in bed, blissfully exhausted after a passionate love-making, and went to seek the Friends of the Ways.

  The automated transport that connected the Five Cities was not unlike the underground railways that had once existed in such cities as London, Paris and Moscow. Except that the monorail cars were open to the crystalline and pleasantly illuminated surfaces of the tunnels; and there were no guards, drivers, ticket collectors. The movement of cars from station to station was smooth, fast, almost silent, unattended and free. The monorail service operated automatically round the clock. In the arbitrary morning of the M-day, it carried manual labourers, skilled workers, technicians, bureaucrats, scientists to their posts. In the small hours, it still carried a number of shift-workers and late visitors but it also carried the Friends of the Ways. The Night People. The rebellious youth of Minerva who had made the public cars of the monorail system their own meeting place.

  Idris boarded a car at Talbot. It was empty. The car stayed at Talbot station for a few moments. Then a taped voice said quietly: “Please do not board or leave this car. Please do not board or leave this car.” Then a buzzer sounded, and the car sped evenly along the tunnel to Vorshinski. The journey was not long. The Five Cities were separated from each other by only a few kilometres. Between one city and the next, there were two or three small request stops where the cars did not stop, though they slowed down considerably, unless a passenger pressed one of the red buttons that were placed near every seat.

  The taped voice announced each sub-station in advance. “You are now approaching Talbot Farm … You are now approaching Talbot Hydroponics … You are now approaching Vorshinski Power …”

  Because the cars were open, with only a transparent plastic screen at the front, there was the illusion of a warm, pleasant wind in the tunnel. Idris liked the invigorating feel of the artificial wind in his hair. It reminded him of the winds of Earth.

  At Vorshinski Power, as the car slowed on its run through the sub-station, two figures came to the edge of the platform and vaulted neatly and expertly over the low sides of the car. They could have halted the car had they so wished. Each sub-station was equipped with request-stop buttons. But, evidently, they preferred this athletic and somewhat dangerous way of boarding a car.

  They were both very young—not more than about twenty-two by Earth reckoning.

  “Hi,” said the girl.

  The boy carried an instrument that looked like a mandolin. “We are the Friends of the Ways, Idris Hamilton. Welcome to our party.”

  Before Idris could say anything, the taped voice announced: “You are now approaching Vorshinski City.”

  The car stopped at Vorshinski. Three more young people boarded it, one of them a girl. They were obviously well acquainted with the two who had leaped aboard at Vorshinski Power. Besides the new intake of the Friends of the Ways, four middle-aged people—shift-workers probably—boarded the car. They viewed the young people with evident distaste and sat as far away from them as possible.

  All four of them got off at Brandt Hydroponics.

  The girl who had boarded at Vorshinski City came to Idris and kissed him on the cheek. “Hello, Earth man. Would you break somebody’s arm if you desired to possess me?” She laughed.

  Idris was nonplussed. He did not know what to make of these youngsters.

  A young man offered him a flask. “Drink,” he said. “You have found the Friends. The Friends have found you. Drink.”

  “What is it?”

  “The water of life. The drink of the Friends.”

  In fact, it was kafra, the Minervan substitute for brandy. Idris took a swallow from the flask and handed it back. The young man also drank, then passed it to the others.

  The car slowed down at Brandt Farm. Two more Friends jumped skilfully aboard.

  “The androids who stepped out at Brandt Hydro will by now have reported that you
are with the Friends,” said the young man who had offered the kafra. “One of them was my mother.”

  “Why do you call them androids? They seemed quite ordinary people to me.”

  “Because they accept and do what they are told to accept and do. They have lost a little of their humanity.”

  “Will it matter that they have reported what I am doing?”

  The young man shrugged. “Not to us. Possibly to you … You, Idris Hamilton are regarded as a threat to society. We are tolerated as fools. Drink.” Again he offered a flask of kafra. “My name is Egon. You are my brother.”

  “Thank you, brother,” said Idris with sarcasm. “Will you be my brother when they want to lock me up again?”

  “Your brother now and for always,” said Egon. “You are our captain. You will tell us what to do.”

  At Aragon City more Friends boarded the car. They brought more kafra, more musical instruments.

  The boy who had the mandolin started strumming and began to sing a ballad.

  “The last man of Earth, yea, yea.

  What is he worth? Yea, yea.

  Will he lead us back to life,

  Even if it brings us bloody strife?

  Yea, yea, yea!

  The last man of Earth, yea, yea,

  Idris Hamilton got rebirth, yea, yea.

  He got rebirth to set us free,

  to give the Green Planet back to you and me.

  Yea, yea, yea!

  The last man of Earth, yea, yea.

  We know what he’s worth, yea, yea.

  He’s worth the living and he’s worth the dying.

  We’ll follow him and there’ll be no crying.

  Yea, yea, yea!”

  At Chiang City Damaris de Gaulle stepped on to the car. “Captain Hamilton,” she said, “I love you. You are truly the Jesus Freak.”

  28