by E. C. Tubb
‘There’s nothing more I can do. Professor. If I could isolate a specific area of damage it would help, but there’s nothing, just a general dehydration and loss of texture. The boles show no sign of developed progress, as you would expect if they contained seeds as does a melon, and the flowers are devoid of any sign of potential fruit. In any case, with only a single flower, I tend to think any seeds would be developed with the pod itself.’
‘You’ve tested the soil, of course?’
‘Yes. A general debility of the untreated area, as is to be expected. The plants themselves don’t bear luxuriant foliage. My guess is that they either originate in a loam of high fertility or are close to a forest of some kind. One with deciduous trees—the nourishment provided by the falling leaves would help to replenish the soil.’ Sighing, she added, ‘I’m guessing, of course. And it appears that I’m a bad guesser. It looks as if we’ve lost, Professor; unless a miracle happens, those plants are all going to die.’
The miracle was named Constance Boswell.
Testing the soil was a routine task, one that had grown into a habit, her hands moving in unison with her feet, the instrument probing, her eyes less interested in the reading shown on the dials than in the plants among which she moved. Not negligence in the true sense, because the readings, recorded, would later be checked and correlated in the computer held in the botanical laboratory.
It was simply that she was young, undecided as to how deeply in love she was, and enamoured by the exotic growths.
One, in particular, she had made her friend.
It stood in a shadowed portion of the screened-off area, the great flower lowered now from where it had turned towards the sun, the leaves drooping, the tracery of the bole blurred a little, the colours not so bright as once they had been. A plant, and yet something about it appealed to her. The romance, perhaps, the thought of its long, long journey to this potential haven, to be planted, to grow, to fade just before it could reach its culmination.
The irony of life, she thought, standing before it. As her life had in a sense ended that black day when the Moon had been blasted from its ancient orbit and sent into new and frightening regions of space. How many had died since then who would normally have lived? How many lives had been changed, romances ended, loves lost? Who could tell of the plans that had been made, only to be discarded in the need for survival?
Did she really love Edward Markham?
Did he really love her?
Could anyone now afford to be in love at all?
Deep thoughts, but at least, there was comfort in a flower.
She smelled the perfume even as she thought of the bloom. It embraced her like a cloud, tantalizing odours filled with the nostalgia of long-lost days. The scent of violets and roses, of the clean crispness of sheets and the rich, dark scents of tar, the thin, slightly acrid smell of petrol, the ineffable fragrance of lilacs and carnations, of mint and sage and tobacco plants, of places she had known and events now barely remembered.
It was natural to lift her face and no surprise to see the bloom hanging from its stalk and suspended just above like a gathered curtain of lace filled with the soft effulgence of twilight and vagrant beams of golden illumination that touched and gilded and turned beauty into a heart-stopping loveliness for which she could find no words, only feeling.
And natural to stand while the great flower dropped lower to enfold her face and head in aroma and softness.
To stand and wait while memory spun and danced like the upstreaming sparks from a fire fanned by a sudden rush of wind so that all the universe became a thing of pleasure so intense that it verged on the unbearable.
And time became one long, drawn-out moment of exquisite ecstasy.
CHAPTER TEN
The flooding had failed, the chilling, the heating, the darkness and the light, the blasting with added energies, the irradiation, the sonic impulses directed from carefully designed projectors.
The plants were as good as dead.
Bergman looked at them, his face betraying his disappointment, one that grew as workers removed the screens and partitions. Koenig shared his sense of failure; despite his initial objections, the growing of the seeds had become a challenge, and in any conflict in which Alpha was involved, he was filled with the urge to win.
‘Are they all like this, Victor?’
Bergman looked at the wilted leaves and shrunken boles and shrugged. ‘I’m afraid so. Connie runs the checks and she reported they were all the same. There is no point in maintaining the screens and wasting energy any longer. It was a chance and it failed.’
‘Did you retain any of the seeds?’
‘No,’ admitted Bergman. ‘There seemed little point. Either they would grow or they wouldn’t, and we are limited as to possible environments. And we had no way to tell how many were viable. As it was, less than fifty percent of the batch germinated.’ Again his shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘Well, we can’t be successful all the time. We simply have to accept failure now and again.’
A fact that life had taught him and a philosophy that his mechanical heart aided him to accept. Koenig’s heart was a thing of flesh, an engine of muscle, prone to all the emotions that have ever plagued mankind. For him there was and could be no excuse for failure. He could accept it, but he would never be able to like it.
Now, as the workers cleared the site, he looked at the bared plot and frowned. The plants reminded him of something, but for a moment he couldn’t tell what. Then it came to him—an old painting he had once seen in a museum during one of his rare vacations. A scene of men standing, some lying, all stooped, weary, broken with struggle and fatigue.
‘A battlefield,’ he said wonderingly. ‘Victor, it looks like a battlefield.’
Almost totally cleared of the partitions, the plot was a mass of leaves, boles, flowers that had shed petals, roots that lifted above the ground to writhe like boneless fingers. Some, he noted, seemed to be strangling others, and the boles, taller than a man, held a humanoid appearance, the wilted flowers the crests of helmets, the fallen petals patches of blood, the elegant traceries the markings of gaudy uniforms. The accoutrements of men who had once marched defiantly into battle, more concerned with how they looked than the possibility of mutilation and death.
He could almost hear bugles.
‘Victor?’
‘A battlefield,’ admitted Bergman. ‘You are right, John, but that is exactly what it is. Those plants must have fought for the maximum of food and water, of room in which to expand, of sunlight to call their own. The law of the jungle—kill or be killed, live or die. A survival trait that even a plentiful supply of water and fertilisers couldn’t eradicate. And we must have missed something, some essential element or ingredient they needed in order to survive.’ His hands clenched in frustrated anger. ‘If only we had known what it was!’
His anger was a betrayal of the emotion that even a mechanical heart couldn’t wholly eradicate; the anguish of the dedicated scientist who has new knowledge within his grasp, only to lose it because of a little ignorance.
Koenig said, ‘Has Nancy thought of taking cuttings, Victor?’
‘She’s thought of everything, John, but it simply isn’t possible to do as you suggest. Every plant examined so far shows the same deterioration. They are dying, are dead despite their appearance. The internal tissue is contracting, the sap has ceased to run, the roots are nothing more than extensions of inert tissue. I—’ He broke off as the last partition was removed. ‘John!’
Koenig had seen it.
A plant standing tall and firm among the others, the flower a disc of lambent colour, the bole swollen and graced with red and yellow.
One plant, the victor, and again he almost heard bugles.
‘But how?’ Bergman shook his head. ‘The girl reported they were all the same. She must have lied or been mistaken. But how could she have missed seeing that plant, John? You realise what this means?’
His hopes restored, a second ch
ance of success, the door to fresh knowledge again set ajar. But Koenig didn’t look at him, nor at the exotic growth, but at the girl who came from behind the plant.
‘Connie!’
She took a step forward as he called. Against the rich darkness of the distended bole she looked very slight and very pale.
For a moment she wavered and then, taking another step forward, said in a small voice, ‘You mustn’t hurt it. You won’t hurt it, will you? Promise not to hurt it.’
‘The plant?’
‘You mustn’t touch it. I’ve had to keep it hidden. I won’t let you hurt it.’ The thin, small voice rose to a scream. ‘I won’t let you hurt it! I . . . please! Please! Please! Please . . . !’
Koenig caught her as she fell.
Helena closed the file lying on the desk before her, leaned back in her chair, palmed her eyes and, as she lowered her hands, said, ‘I don’t begin to understand this, John, but Constance Boswell is apparently suffering from the terminal stages of pernicious anemia.’
‘Anemia?’
‘It seems incredible, doesn’t it?’
‘Could there be a mistake?’ Koenig was baffled. ‘When did she have her last physical?’
‘Ten days ago. She worked with radioactive isotopes and I checked her for any contamination. Results negative. Since then she has been working fulltime with the Botanical Section under Nancy Coleman. I’ve checked and she hasn’t been anywhere near a source of radioactivity. In any case, the anemia wouldn’t have progressed so fast and so far and, had it been due to contamination, there would have been other symptoms. As I said, John, I don’t begin to understand it.’
‘Can you cure her?’
A question Edward Markham repeated as, together with Dr Mathias, she and Koenig joined him where he waited patiently beside the patient’s bed. He was, Koenig noticed, sitting very close, the thin fingers of the girl held fast in his own,
‘We can save her,’ promised Helena. ‘It will take massive transfusions of fresh blood and she will need care and rest, but she’ll be all right, given time. The main thing is to prevent a recurrence of the condition. You know her well, I understand.’
‘I’m in love with her.’
‘Which makes her a very fortunate young woman. You, then, naturally see her often. When was the last time?’ Helena frowned at the answer. ‘So long? Did your duties keep you apart?’
‘No, it’s just that for days now she hasn’t wanted to see me. She claimed that she was busy all the time with those damned plants—I’m sorry Commander, Doctor.’
‘Forget it,’ said Koenig. ‘So she said she was too busy to see you. Was she? I mean, did you check in any way?’ Then, as the young man hesitated, he said, ‘I’m not accusing you of violating her privacy, but only of acting like a man in love. Did she spend much time with the plants?’
‘All of it.’ Markham looked at where the girl lay. ‘She wasn’t lying in the sense that she was busy, but only in the sense that she didn’t have to be. She didn’t have to actually work if she hadn’t wanted to be with me. She didn’t have to lie, I wouldn’t have liked it and I would have argued a little, but, hell, I love her and what she wants is all I care about. Dr Russell, is there anything I can do?’
‘There isn’t at the moment. You haven’t the same type blood, so I can’t use you as a donor, but we have all we need. Just leave her with us now. When she’s better she’ll want to see you, I’m sure. Bob?’
Mathias said, ‘Come on, lad. Let’s get on with the job. And how about you? Haven’t you anything to take care of?’
Work was the best antidote for grief. Koenig said, ‘Report to maintenance, Edward. They could use a hand in stripping an Eagle, and you’re good at the job. And Carter’s running a simulator course. Ask him nicely and maybe he’ll let you sit in on it.’
He stepped back as the young man left the ward and orderlies came forward wheeling equipment. As Mathias set to work, he gestured Helena to her office.
‘Anemia,’ he said when they were inside. ‘It’s almost like saying the girl has a fit of the vapours. How long has it been since you treated a case of anemia?’
‘A long time, John.’
‘Which means it’s rare?’
‘No. It means that now it’s very easy to treat. We cure it by means of injections of liver extract and vitamin B-12. I’m talking of normal anemia, you understand, not that caused by cancer, such as leukaemia.’
‘And there’s no doubt the girl isn’t suffering from that?’
‘None.’ Her voice hardened a little. ‘I appreciate your concern, John, but I do know my job.’
‘Did I say you didn’t?’ He flared with a sudden anger, but he quickly suppressed it. ‘I’m sorry, Helena, but I need to be certain. The thing’s a mystery. She didn’t do anything or go anywhere aside from tending those plants. And you didn’t see her as I did—dazed, crazed, too weak to stand. Something caused her to act like that, and I have to find out what it was. How long will it be before she can be questioned?’
‘Not long, John. I’ll let you know.’
The battlefield was deserted, the workers gone, the entire area empty aside from watchful security guards. On the plot of ground the alien plants looked withered, shrunken, many missing where the botanists had reaped their harvest, boles and flowers and tissue taken to be sectioned and sealed and stored for later examination. Specimens snatched from dissolution, a poor reward against what might have been.
Koenig could not help but be impressed.
The single survivor had been shrouded in a room of its own, plastic sheeting hiding it from casual view, the upper transparency allowing the passage of actinic light that Nancy Coleman was certain was essential to its continued development.
‘Now that it is nearing maturity, it will need all the energy it can get. Water, too, of course, and nutrients, but nothing can replace actual light. It is obvious now that it uses photosynthesis just as our own plants do. Now, if only it were possible to isolate the incredible growth-factor, then we would have solved the problem of a food supply for all time.’
She glanced at the plant, lost in a dream, her eyes filled with the reflected thoughts of wheat as high as trees, of potatoes as large as pumpkins and grown in a matter of days.
Bergman was engrossed in something else.
‘I’ve been monitoring the internal sounds, John,’ he said as Koenig joined him where he stood beside the great bole. ‘Whatever’s happening in there is very active. Listen.’ Attaching a suction microphone to the wall of the bole, he threw a switch, and from the speaker of the amplifier he held, Koenig heard a series of oddly disturbing noises. They resembled liquid gushings, slithers, murmurs, the beat of something that could have been a heart.
‘Pumps?’
‘Possibly,’ said Bergman. ‘Plants normally circulate their fluids by osmosis, but this obviously has developed a different system. It could account for the phenomenal continuance of growth after the initial stages.’
‘Didn’t you spot any pumping mechanism before?’ Koenig listened again to the sound. ‘Something like a heart?’
‘No, John, we didn’t. And the sound you are now hearing is comparatively recent. It could be that the pumping system previously used was of a different order, perhaps a series of small impulses that would merge into a common blur. And that’s another thing. The plant seems to be growing in a series of metabolic jumps. It’s almost as if it changes its nature as it goes along—like a beetroot, which turns into a potato, a pea, an ear of wheat, a melon. I’m exaggerating, but the analogy holds. It’s almost as if it’s adapting to fit its environment.’
‘Adapting?’ Koenig was thoughtful. ‘As a cactus, say, would adapt to a moist climate in order to survive?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And is this common?’
‘I don’t know, John.’ Bergman spread his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘I’m not a botanist. Some of the lichens, perhaps, but I’m only guessing.’
Nancy Co
leman corrected his guess.
‘No plant—and that includes the lichens and even the algae—can change like that, Commander. They are governed as we are by their genetic structure. You wouldn’t expect a man to grow wings in order to adapt to a mountainside life, would you? Or claws? Or develop webbed feet because he lives in a marsh? No, of course not, and a plant is as rigid in its development. Some things they can do—they can lie dormant for long periods of time waiting for a favourable environment. They can apparently die and spring to life from encysted spores—and now I am talking about the simplest plants, you understand. But they can’t change from one species to another.’
‘As this alien does?’
‘As it appears to do,’ she corrected. ‘We don’t have any information as to its natural growth progression, so all we can do is make intelligent guesses. And,’ she added pointedly, ‘some of them aren’t so intelligent.’
‘Like the thing developing a heart?’
‘Plants don’t have hearts,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Commander. Plants don’t have hearts, no matter what you may hear from inside.’
No hearts and no insect vitamins, either, but this thing contained elements only to be found in animal and other forms of life. He thought of the lepidoptera, the order that contained butterflies and moths, the larvae of which fed on plants. Did this thing contain another parasite? Would Alpha again be menaced by an alien creature almost impossible to destroy?
‘John!’ Bergman had seen his face and the expression it carried. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I don’t know, Victor, but there could be.’ Koenig lifted the commlock from his belt. ‘Security, send extra men to Rural Area One. Personal armour and heavy equipment. Have semi-portable lasers set up at the entrance to the cavern and at strategic points inside.’ He added after a moment, ‘And set mines in the entrance ready to explode on order. I want charges heavy enough to bring down the roof.’
