“The four moons—I could see them even though the sky was bright,” Judy said. “He didn’t say anything but I could hear him thinking.”
MacLeod said, “We all seem to have had that delusion. If it’s a delusion.”
“It’s sure to be,” Ewen said. “We’ve found no trace of any other form of intelligent life here. Forget it, Judy,” he added gently, “sleep. When we all get back to the ship—well, there will have to be some form of inquiry.”
Dereliction, neglect of duty is the least it will be. Can I plead temporary insanity?
He watched Heather settle Judy down into her sleeping bag. When the older woman finally slept he said wearily, “We ought to bury Marco. I hate to do it without an autopsy, but the only alternative is to carry him back to the ship.”
MacLeod said, “We’re going to look awfully damned foolish going back and claiming we all went mad at once.” He did not took at Heather and Ewen as he added, rather sheepishly, “I feel like a ghastly fool—group sex never has been my kick—”
Heather said firmly, “We’ll all have to forgive each other, and forget about it. It just happened, that’s all. And for all we know it happened to them too—” she stopped, struck with a horrifying thought. “Imagine that sort of thing happening to two hundred people . . .”
“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” MacLeod said with a shudder.
Ewen said that mass insanity was nothing new. “Whole villages. The dancing madness in the middle ages. And attacks of ergotism—from spoiled rye made into bread.”
Heather said, “I don’t think whatever it was got far enough down the mountain.”
“Another of your hunches, I suppose,” Ewen said, but not unkindly. “At this point I suspect we’re all too close to it. Let’s stop theorizing without facts and wait until we have some facts.”
“Does this qualify as a fact?” Judy said, sitting up suddenly. They had all thought her asleep; she fumbled in the torn neck of her blouse and drew out something wrapped in leaves. “This—or these.” She handed Ewen a small blue stone, like a star sapphire.
“Beautiful,” he said slowly, “but you found it in the woods—”
“Right,” she said. “I found this, too.”
She stretched it out to him, and for a moment the others, crowding close, literally could not believe their eyes.
It was less than six inches long. The handle was made of something like shaped bone, delicate but quite without ornamentation. As for the rest, there was no question what it was.
It was a small flint knife.
CHAPTER SIX
In the ten days the exploring party had been absent from the ship in the clearing, the clearing seemed to have grown. Two or three more small buildings had grown up around the ship; and at one edge of the clearing a fenced-off area had been plowed and a small sign proclaimed AGRICULTURAL TESTING AREA.
“That ought to do something for our food,” MacLeod said, but Judith made no answer, and Ewen looked at her sharply. She had been curiously apathetic since That Day—that was how they all thought of it—and he was desperately worried about her. He wasn’t a psychologist, but he knew that there was something gravely wrong. Damn it, I did everything wrong. I let Marco die, I haven’t been able to bring Judy back to reality.
They came into the camp almost unnoticed, and for a moment MacAran felt a sharp stab of apprehension. Where was everybody? Had they all run amuck that day, had the madness overtaken all of them down here too? When he and Camilla had come down to the lower camp, to find Heather and Ewen and MacLeod still talking themselves hoarse in the attempt to find some explanation, it had been a bad moment. If madness lay on this planet, ready to claim them all, how could they survive? What worse things lay here waiting for them? Now, looking around the empty clearing, MacAran felt again the sharp stab of fear; then he saw a little group of people in Medic uniform coming out of the hospital tent, and further on, a crew going up into the ship. He relaxed; everything looked normal.
But then, so do we. . . .
“What’s the first thing to do?” he asked. “Do we report straight to the Captain?”
“I should, at least,” Camilla said. She looked thinner, almost haggard. MacAran wanted to take her hand and comfort her, although he was not sure for what. Since they had lain in each other’s arms on the mountainside, he had felt a deep gnawing hunger for her, an almost fierce protectiveness; yet she turned away from him at every point, withdrawing into her old sharp self-sufficiency. MacAran felt hurt and resentful, and somehow lost. He dared not touch her, and it made him irritable.
“I expect he’ll want to see all of us,” he said. “We have to report Marco’s death, and where we buried him. And we have a lot of information for him. Not to mention the flint knife.”
“Yes. If the planet’s inhabited that creates another problem,” MacLeod said, but he did not elaborate.
Captain Leicester was with a crew inside the ship but an officer outside told the party that he had given orders that he was to be called the moment they returned, and sent for him. They waited in the small dome, none of them knowing what they were going to say.
Captain Leicester came into the dome. He looked somehow older, his face drawn with new lines. Camilla rose as he came in, but he motioned her to a seat again.
“Forget the protocol, Lieutenant,” he said kindly, “you all look tired; was it a hard trip? I see Dr. Zabal is not with you.”
“He’s dead, sir,” Ewen said quietly, “he died from the bites of poisonous insects. I’ll make a complete report later.”
“Make it to the Medic Chief,” the Captain said, “I’m not qualified to understand anyway. You others can bring up your reports at the next meeting—tonight, I suppose. Mr. MacAran, did you manage to get the calculations you were hoping for?”
MacAran nodded. “Yes; as near as we can figure, the planet is somewhat larger than Earth, which means, with the lighter gravity, that its mass must be somewhat less. Sir, I can discuss all that later; just now I must ask you one question. Did anything unusual happen here while we were gone?”
The Captain’s lined face ridged, displeased. “How do you mean, unusual? This whole planet is unusual, and nothing that happens here can be called routine.”
Ewen said, “I mean anything like illness or mass insanity, sir.”
Leicester frowned. “I can’t imagine what you could be talking about,” he said. “No, no reports from Medic of any illness.”
“What Dr. Ross means is that we all had an attack of something like delirium,” MacAran told him. “It was the day after the second night without rain. It was widespread enough to hit Camilla—Lieutenant Del Rey—and myself, on the peaks, and to hit the other group almost six thousand feet lower down. We all behaved—well, irresponsibly, sir.”
“Irresponsibly?” He scowled, his eyes fierce on them. “Irresponsibly,” Ewen met the Captain’s eyes, his fists clenched. “Dr. Zabal was recovering; we ran off into the woods and left him alone so that he got up in delirium, ran off on his own and strained his heart—which is why he died. Judgment was impaired; we ate untested fruits and fungus. There were—various delusional processes.”
Judith Lovat said firmly, “They were not all delusional.”
Ewen looked at her and shook his head. “I don’t think Dr. Lovat is in any state to judge, sir. We seem all to have had delusions about reading one another’s thoughts, anyway.”
The Captain drew a long, harried breath. “This will have to go to the Medics. No, we had nothing like that here. I suggest you all go and make your reports to the appropriate chiefs, or write them up to present at the meeting tonight. Lieutenant Del Rey, I want your report myself. I’ll see the rest of you later.”
“One more thing, sir,” MacAran said. “This planet is inhabited.” He drew out the flint knife from his pack, handed it over. But the Captain barely looked at it. He said, “Take it to Major Frazer; he’s the staff anthropologist. Tell him I’ll want a report tonight. Now if the
rest of you will excuse us, please—”
MacAran felt the curious flatness of anticlimax as they left the Captain and Camilla together. While he hunted through the camp for anthropologist Frazer, he slowly identified his own feeling as jealousy. How could he compete with Captain Leicester? Oh, this was rubbish, the captain was old enough to be Camilla’s father. Did he honestly believe Camilla was in love with the Captain?
No. But she’s emotionally all tied up with him and that’s worse.
If he had been disappointed by the Captain’s lack of response to the flint knife, Major Frazer’s response left nothing to be desired.
“I’ve been saying since we landed that this world was habitable,” he said, turning the knife over in his hands, “and here’s proof that it’s inhabited—by something intelligent, at least.”
“Humanoid?” MacAran asked, and Frazer shrugged. “How could we know that? There have been intelligent life-forms reported from three or four other planets; so far they have reported one simian, one feline, and three unclassifiable—xenobiology isn’t my speciality. One artifact doesn’t tell us anything—how many shapes are there that a knife could be designed in? But it fits a human hand well enough, although it’s a little small.”
Meals for crew and passengers were served in one large area, and when MacAran went for his noon meal he hoped to see Camilla; but she came in late and went directly to a group of other crew members. MacAran could not catch her eye and had the distinct feeling that she was avoiding him. While he was morosely eating his plateful of rations, Ewen came up to him.
“Rafe, they want us all at a Medical meeting if you have nothing else to do. They’re trying to analyze what happened to us.”
“Do you honestly think it will do any good, Ewen? We’ve all been talking it over—”
Ewen shrugged. “Mine is not to reason why,” he said. “You’re not under the authority of the Medic staff, of course, but still—”
MacAran asked, “Were they very rough on you about Zabal’s death?”
“Not really. Both Heather and Judy testified that we were all out of contact. But they want your report, and everything you can tell them about Camilla.”
MacAran shrugged and went along with him.
The Medic meeting was held at one end of the hospital tent, half empty now—the more seriously injured had died, the less so had been restored to duty. There were four qualified doctors, half a dozen nurses, and a few assorted scientific personnel to listen to the reports they made.
After listening to all of them in turn, the Chief Medical Officer, a dignified white-haired man named Di Asturien, said slowly, “It sounds like some form of airborne infection. Possibly a virus.”
“But nothing like that turned up in our air samples,” MacLeod argued, “and the effect was more like that of a drug.”
“An airborne drug? It seems unlikely,” Di Asturien said, “although the aphrodisiac effect seems to have been considerable also. Do I correctly assume that there was some sexual stimulation effect on all of you?”
Ewen said, “I already mentioned that, sir. It seemed to affect all three of us—Miss Stuart, Dr. MacLeod and myself. It had no such effect on Dr. Zabal to my knowledge, but he was in a moribund condition.”
“Mr. MacAran?”
He felt for some strange reason embarrassed, but before Di Asturien’s cool clinical eyes he said, “Yes, sir. You can check this with Lieutenant Del Rey if you like.”
“Hm. I understand, Dr. Ross, that you and Miss Stuart are currently paired in any case, so perhaps we can discount that. But Mr. MacAran, you and the Lieutenant—”
“I’m interested in her,” he said steadily, “but as far as I know she’s completely indifferent to me. Even hostile. Except under the influence of—of whatever happened to us.” He faced it, then. Camilla had not turned to him as a woman to a man she cared for. She had simply been affected by the virus, or drug, or whatever strange thing had sent them all mad. What to him had been love, to her had been madness—and now she resented it.
To his immense relief the Medic Chief did not pursue the subject. “Doctor Lovat?”
Judy did not look up. She said quietly, “I can’t say. I can’t remember. What I think I remember may very well be entirely delusion.”
Di Asturien said, “I wish you would co-operate with us, Dr. Lovat.”
“I’d rather not.” Judy went on fingering something in her lap, and no persuasion could force her to say any more.
Di Asturien said, “In about a week, then, we’ll have to test all three of you for possible pregnancy.”
“How can that be necessary?” Heather asked. “I, at least, am taking regular anti shots. I’m not sure about Camilla, but I suspect crew regulations require it for anyone between twenty and forty-five.”
Di Asturien looked disturbed. “That’s true,” he said, “but there is something very peculiar which we discovered in a Medic meeting yesterday. Tell them, Nurse Raimondi.”
Margaret Raimondi said, “I’m in charge of keeping records and issuing contraceptive and sanitary supplies for all women of menstrual age, both crew and passengers. You all know the drill; every two weeks, at the time of menstruation and halfway between, every woman reports for either a single shot of hormone or, in some cases, a patch strip to send small doses of hormones into the blood, which suppress ovulation. There are a total of one hundred and nineteen women surviving in the right age bracket, which means, with an average arbitrary cycle of thirty days, approximately four women would be reporting every day, either for menstrual supplies or for the appropriate shot or patch which is given four days after onset of menstruation. It’s been ten days since the crash, which means about one-third of the women should have reported to me for one reason or the other. Say forty.”
“And they haven’t been,” Dr. Di Asturien said. “How many women have reported since the crash?”
“Nine,” said Nurse Raimondi grimly. “Nine. This means that two-thirds of the women involved have had their biological cycles disrupted on this planet—either by the change in gravity, or by some hormone disruption. And since the standard contraceptive we use is entirely keyed to the internal cycle, we have no way of telling whether it’s effective or not.”
MacAran didn’t need to be told how serious this was. A wave of pregnancies could indeed be emotionally disruptive. Infants—or even young children—could not endure interstellar FTL drive; and since the universal acceptance of reliable contraceptives, and the population laws on overcrowded Earth, a wave of feeling had made abortion completely unthinkable. Unwanted children were simply never conceived. But would there be any alternative here?
Dr. Di Asturien said, “Of course, on new planets women are often sterile for a few months, largely because of the changes in air and gravity. But we can’t count on it.”
MacAran was thinking, if Camllla is pregnant, will she hate me? The thought that a child of theirs might have to be destroyed was frightening. Ewen asked soberly, “What are we going to do, Doctor? We can’t demand that two hundred adult men and women take a vow of chastity!”
“Obviously not. That would be worse for mental health than the other dangers,” Di Asturien said, “but we must warn everyone that we’re no longer sure about the effectiveness of our contraceptive program.”
“I can see that. And as soon as possible.”
Di Asturien said, “The Captain has called a mass meeting tonight—crew and colonists. Maybe I can announce it there.” He made a wry face. “I’m not looking forward to it. It’s going to be an awfully damned unpopular announcement. As if we didn’t have enough troubles already!”
The mass meeting was held in the hospital tent, the only place big enough to hold the crew and passengers all at once. It had begun to cloud over by midafternoon and when the meeting was called, a thin fine cold rain was falling and distant lightning could be seen over the peaks of the hills. The members of the exploring party sat together at the front, in case they were called on for a report
, but Camilla was not among them. She came in with Captain Leicester and the rest of the crew officers, and MacAran noticed that they had all put on formal uniform. Somehow that struck him as a bad sign. Why should they try to emphasize their solidarity and authority that way?
The electricians on the crew had put up a rostrum and rigged an elementary public address system, so that the Captain’s voice, low and rather hoarse, could be heard throughout the big room.
“I have asked you all to come here tonight,” he said, “instead of reporting only to your leaders, because in spite of every precaution, in a group this size rumors can get started, and can also get out of hand. First, I will give you what good news there is to give. To the best of our knowledge and belief, the air and water on this planet will support life indefinitely without damage to health, and the soil will probably grow Earth crops to supplement our food supply during the period of time while we are forced to remain here. Now I must give you the news which is not so good. The damage to the ship’s drive units and computers is far more extensive than originally believed, and there is no possibility of immediate or rapid repairs. Although eventually it may be possible to become spaceborne, with our current personnel and materials, we cannot make repairs at all.”
He paused, and a stir of voices, appalled, apprehensive, rose in the room. Captain Leicester raised his hand.
“I am not saying that we should lose hope,” he said. “But in our current state we cannot make repairs. To get this ship off the surface of the planet is going to demand extensive changes in our present setup and will be a very long-range project demanding the total co-operation of every man and woman in this room.”
Silence, and MacAran wondered what he meant by that. What exactly was the Captain saying? Could repairs be made or couldn’t they?
“This may sound like a contradictory statement,” the Captain went on. “We have not the material to make repairs. However, we do have, among all of us, the knowledge to make repairs; and we have an unexplored planet at our disposal, where we can certainly find the raw materials and build the material to make repairs.”
Darkover: First Contact Page 8
