Polymath

by John Brunner

  But Delvia… In the end there had been no fuss over terminating her pregnancy. When she was told about it following the stocktaking assembly, she had meekly accepted Jerode’s rebuke and demanded a shot to get rid of it The idea wasn’t one to which he could bring many of the refugees around, but Lex was beginning to suspect that this involuntary colony could do with many more Delvias and far fewer Ornelles and Nalines.

  Dragging his sled, he made his way back toward the point where his gang of amateur salvagemen were checking equipment after the morning’s diving. Spacesuits, tough as they were, might tear on a sharp projection; hatchets—essential now that the summer life of the sea was teeming—were blunted and had to be reground; one helmet was cracked and would have to be patched somehow; the boat was lying bottom-up on the sand while one of the girls, her pink tonguetip between her teeth, was chipping away masses of hard-shelled sessile animals which had clung to the hull.

  He was lucky, Lex thought He had a keen team. The strong element of physical danger in this underwater work had sorted them out for him.

  Not to mention their willingness to work under a young leader….

  “Lex! Lex!”

  He spun around. Running toward him from the direction of the river was Cheffy, waving and shouting. One glance told him this was urgent. He left the sled where it was and ran to meet him.

  “What is it?” he called, thinking over a whole range of possible catastrophes. Cheffy was working on what they referred to, with a wry awareness of exaggeration, as the civil engineering projects of the town: water supply, sanitation, and heating for the inevitable winter.

  “Just you come and look!” Cheffy snapped, whirling around and making back the way he had come. Better built for running than he had been when he landed here, he still was going too fast to have breath to spare for talk.

  It was only a matter of moments before they came in sight of what had been yesterday a wide calm expanse of steadily flowing water, discolored by suspended silt and the larvae of some as-yet unidentified species of aquatic creature that metamorphosed to the adult stage when the river carried it into salt water.

  Yesterday? This morning, even, when Lex came down to start work!

  Now it was reduced to a trickle. Irregular curves of mud had been exposed; a few writhing creatures lay gasping in puddles, and water-weeds were already turning gray-yellow and deliquescing into a stinking mess from exposure to the full sun. The mouth of the estuary normally passed such a flow that the course of the fresh water could be traced a hundred feet from shore. Now the sea was trespassing into the riverbed.

  Lex halted, appalled. They had staked everything on the river! Cheffy was planning to draw water for drinking and washing via a sedimentation system a mile upstream, to replace the crude bucket-hoists they still depended on. They had decided to install piped water for every house and flush-sanitation for every twenty-five people. At the moment, since the sea was barred to them for swimming anyway and there was no tide to return the effluent, they were content to let the offshore current disperse their sewage, which was at least an advance on the crude latrines of the first month here; but pipes made of hollow tree-trunks sealed with plastic film were being readied—one and a half miles of them—to take their drains well away from the town.

  And now… this!

  He wasn’t the only person Cheffy had summoned to witness the horrifying phenomenon. Jerode was here already. Work had stopped on all the riverside projects, and members of the subteams in charge of them were clustered around, speculating in low, worried voices. On glancing upstream Lex saw that two or three of the team who had been constructing the sedimentation tanks were making their way down the middle of the drying riverbed.

  Jerode, acknowledging his arrival with a nod, called to Lex. “What do you make of all this?”

  “When did it happen?” Lex countered grimly.

  “The level began to drop about an hour ago, maybe an hour and a half,” Cheffy said. “It was slow to start with, so I guess we didn’t notice for a while. Then it dropped really sharply. You could watch it going down, like water running out of a tub. Do you think it’s a seasonal stop-page? Because if so we can just tear up our plans.”

  “No, not a seasonal stoppage,” Lex said. “Remember we got here at the end of the summer, and this river was still deep and wide. Besides, if it were only a question of the headwaters not being fed—with snow or whatever—the stream would dry up slowly over days or weeks. This is due to a blockage higher up. A solid obstacle.”

  Jerode, who had come closer, nodded. “That makes sense. What could have caused it—a landslide? Or…” He scratched his bald pate thoughtfully. “I seem to recall that back on Earth they have an animal which dams rivers. A—a beeger?”

  “Beaver!” Cheffy exclaimed. “Yes, of course. Lex, do you reckon there could be a dam-building animal here?”

  “There not only could be,” Lex said after a pause. “There is.”

  Cheffy and Jerode stared at him, puzzled.

  “Man,” Lex said. “If you remember, we found that this river leads directly to where the other party set down.”

  “Lex, that’s absurd!” Jerode snapped. “We’ve tried and tried to make contact with them—we’re still trying now and then—and there’s total radio silence. They must be dead!” And added in a lower tone, “Much as it galls me to find I’m agreeing with Ornelle.”

  Lex shrugged. “Didn’t mean you to take me so seriously, Doc. All I was saying was: it’s possible for all we know.”

  “Look—whatever it is that stopped the water,” Cheffy said, “we’ve simply got to get it back! With explosives if we have to.”

  Jerode hesitated. “Yes, of course…. Well, I was intending to put a proposal to the next assembly, since things are—I mean were—going so well. Another expedition to the plateau, to find out if there are any survivors up there, see if their ship’s worth cannibalizing if there aren’t. As a matter of fact”—he rounded on Lex—“I was going to ask if you’d lead it.”

  IX

  The news about the river spread like wildfire. Within half an hour all work had stopped except Fritch’s, and he was keeping his gang on the job only because they were halfway through raising a main roof-beam, thirty feet long, thick, and very heavy. Everyone who had been on the beach drifted back, even Lex’s salvage team, and the rest of Cheffy’s upstream workers came shouting to know what they should do now. It was inevitable that someone should suggest an emergency assembly.

  As usual, rumors that an assembly was in the offing brought the self-important—Nanseltine, Rothers, and their kind—clustering around Jerode like flies on honey, to pester him with ill-considered ideas and nonnegotiable demands. It took the better part of an hour to drive people back to work with assurances that the assembly would meet at dusk.

  Then Jerode sent for the members of the steering committee and called them to the headquarters hut to discuss their only reasonable course of action.

  “I don’t see why we have to argue,” Fritch said. He seemed more annoyed by being called away from work than worried by the Joss of the river. “Someone’s got to walk upstream and find the blockage, then either clear it or, if it’s too big, come back for help. All we have to decide is who shall go.”

  Jerode cleared his throat. “I had it in mind to propose Lex.”

  Everyone except Ornelle nodded approval. Jerode added, “Though he hasn’t said he’s willing yet.”

  “Oh, I’ll go,” Lex said with a shrug. “And you won’t lose much work from my team, either. We’ve got about as much as we can out of our own ship now. Anything more will require flame-cutters, and until we can stabilize an underwater arc or maybe find a way of making pure fluorine we have nothing to touch the metal of the hull. Oxyhydrogen flames are easy, but they’re not hot enough. So I think it would be a good idea if, after we clear the blockage, I take my team on up to the plateau. If Ornelle’s belief is justified, our experience in carving up our own ship will be very usefu
l when it comes to tackling the other one.”

  “I thought you’d come around to thinking the others might be alive after all,” Cheffy said. “Might have built a dam.”

  “I only meant to point out,” Lex said patiently, “that a dam-building animal does exist here. I’m sorry if I answered your question too literally.”

  “Yes, Bendle?” Jerode said hastily. Cheffy sounded uncharacteristically bad-tempered. Well he might be, with all his cherished schemes hanging fire for an indefinite period.

  The gray-haired biologist leaned forward, rubbing a strawberry rash on his cheek, souvenir of an encounter with the plant they had nicknamed blisterweed. “I’m not sure about Lex taking his entire salvage team. I suggest you take one of my people, someone intimately acquainted with the local flora and fauna. Perhaps one of Fritch’s people, too, in case you need expert advice on how best to demolish the blockage.”

  “Sounds sensible,” Fritch said reluctantly. “Though I hope you don’t keep my man away too long, Lex.”

  “I’ll try not to,” Lex murmured. He could read their opinions on their faces: He’s a capable young fellow, tough, levelheaded—and rather him than me.

  “Very well, then,” Jerode said. “Now the question of numbers. How many can we spare altogether?”

  Everyone looked at Lex. “How many do you think you need?” Aldric demanded.

  “Half a dozen should be enough,” Lex answered. “We only have seven energy guns.”

  “Are you thinking of taking them all?” Ornelle burst out. “Suppose while you’re away we—”

  “Suppose nothing!” Fritch snapped. “He’s right. They’re more important to people venturing into strange country than they are to us down here.”

  “But if we lose—”

  “You’d rather lose people than guns?”

  Ornelle subsided, cheeks fiery. Fritch went on, “And what rations should we give you, Lex—enough for a week?”

  “About that. We could carry more, but I don’t think we could carry water for much longer. It’s heavy, and in this heat we’re likely to drink a lot. Could you ask for a volunteer from your gang, then? And you, Bendle? I know who else from my own team I’d like to have with me.”

  “That seems to be settled, then,” Fritch said with satisfaction. “Doc, while I happen to be here: about that hut you want expanded into a proper infirmary…”

  The assembly met in gathering darkness. The lights taken from the ship, which had been used throughout last winter, had begun to fail, and there was so far no way of fabricating replacements, though the informative Cheffy had referred to lamp filaments made of carbonized thread. Accordingly posts had been set up on which resinous torches flared and reeked. Curiously, people seemed to like this crude illumination, as though fire symbolized some innate friendliness in nature.

  There had been no trouble picking Lex’s team. From among his own salvage workers he invited Minty, a wiry woman in her early thirties with the spare figure of an athlete, and brawny, imperturbable Aykin; these two had been among the first couples to indicate their intention of starting a family, and Lex took that as a sign of determination.

  Then, before he spoke to the other pair he’d had in mind, a point struck him which he’d overlooked in committee. He himself knew the route to the other party’s site because he had accompanied Arbogast when he led a brief and hazardous trip there. Of course, by then the country had been dying toward winter; at this time of year it would look very different. Nonetheless, just in case something happened to himself, it would be a good idea to have one person along who had also been that way before. He knew who he wanted, too: a tall fair man called Baffin, who had studied hydraulics and hydrodynamics and ought in any case to get another look at the river.

  “Oh, take him!” Cheffy said. “There’s nothing for him to do until the water comes back!”

  Fritch recommended a sober young man called Aggereth, to whom Lex bunked close in the single men’s house. He thought the choice a good one; Aggereth was reliable and hard-working. Bendle’s recommendation was a woman, Lodette, plump-faced and dark-skinned. She had been concentrating on the study of the inland fauna and knew almost as much about it as Bendle himself.

  Lastly, Jerode came hurrying in search of him with a new suggestion: should the party not include one of the girls who had constituted themselves an emergency nursing staff last winter and were now spending most of their time studying medicine and surgery from the ship’s manu-als? Zanice would be pleased to go along, a gray-eyed blonde woman of forty-odd, known to Lex by sight like everyone in the town, though he could not remember ever exchanging a word with her.

  So: a balanced group, with a good range of skills. Lex was well-pleased with the outcome.

  Against the risk that not everyone else would be, though, and in accordance with Jerode’s principle of allowing people to be seen to volunteer when a tough job was ahead, even if in fact they’d made up their minds long before, Lex asked his chosen six to scatter themselves among the crowd at assembly time and come forward when he called for them. There was no risk of a rush of volunteers; there would be a psychological lag. What he was worried about was the problem of people who might try to argue that he was unsuited to lead the party. In the event, no one actually rose and said so out loud.

  Nor, fortunately, did anybody—even Ornelle—harp on the expedition’s subsidiary purpose, that of visiting the other party’s site. It was quietly accepted as a logical thing to do while people were upriver.

  The questions were much what he had expected. Was the river dry simply because it was summer? There hadn’t been any rain here for nearly two months, after all, had there? What about arrangements for drinking and washing until the river was flowing again? Why had the self-appointed leaders of the community allowed such a thing to happen? (The last wasn’t said in so many words, but it was implicit in the acid face of Nanseltine’s wife, who spent most of the meeting having a furious but whispered argument with her husband. However, Nanseltine seemed to be learning a bit of sense at long last and didn’t rise to her gibes.)

  Lex was pleased when a ripple of laughter effectively silenced Rothers, who had raised some totally irrelevant point, and left Jerode free to call on him as nominated leader of the expedition.

  On his request for companions, the six got up—not too hurriedly—and stood while he noted them, nodded, and beckoned them to him. But there was one other volunteer, not someone he had expected, indeed almost the last person he would have imagined as willing to go… let alone eager.

  “I want to come,” Delvia said in a clear firm voice.

  Now what was to be done? Lex’s mind raced. He saw that Naline—still, despite everything, dogging the older girl’s footsteps—was reaching up and tugging at Delvia’s hand to make her sit down again. Impatiently Delvia shook the fingers loose. Lex began to recite the qualifications of those he wanted as companions, hoping to show that every important requirement was taken care of, but no one paid any attention. They were looking at Delvia.

  Although it was cool after sunset, she had added nothing to her working dress—undress, rather. Now she was apparently regretting it, with several hundred pairs of eyes on her. Perhaps embarrassment would change her mind, make her sit down? No, Lex decided regretfully. Not in Delvia’s case.

  Well, he’d have to improvise a reason for turning her down.

  “Uh… the team needn’t be any larger anyway, and besides we’re already going to deprive the town of several key people while we’re away. One more still would be—”

  “Starshine,” Delvia interrupted. “I’m not ‘key people.’ What I do is so simple I mainly figured it out by myself. And Naline has worked with me right from the start. There’s nothing I can do that she can’t.”

  Transparently true. Lex gave Jerode a worried glance, wondering if the doctor had an inspiration. Taking his momentary silence for resignation, however, Delvia started to pick her way through the seated crowd.

  “No!�
� Suddenly there was a shrill cry, and Naline was on her feet, clawing at Delvia’s back. “No! You aren’t going to go!”

  Her hand caught the piece of cloth which was Delvia’s only covering; there was a ripping sound and it tore free. With an oath Delvia spun around.

  Tears coursing down her cheeks, voice rough-edged with hysteria, Naline shrieked, “Why don’t you say why you want to go? Why don’t you say it’s to get away from me? Why don’t you say it’s so you can screw Lex the way you’ve had every other man you could drag into the bushes?” She raised the cloth in her hand, head-high, and waved it wildly. “What do you want with this, anyway? Practically everyone else has had your clothes off already!”

  She hurled the rag away from her, whirled, and with her hands out before her like a blind girl fled into the darkness.

  There was total stillness, as though the audience were trying to believe that this thing hadn’t happened. It was broken by Delvia in a tone of absolute self-possession.

  She said, “May I have my tabard back, please?”

  It was passed to her. She sorted it out after a fashion and knotted it about her hips more or less as it had been before. Then, with arrogance that took Lex’s breath away, she resumed walking toward him.

  “Someone had better go after Naline,” Lex said to Jerode out of the side of his mouth.

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor muttered. He looked around for someone suitable, but Zanice had caught the exchange and was already on her way. Lex drew a deep breath. Well, it was being forced on him.

  “Delvia!” he said. “Please go back to your place.”

  She stopped, cocking her head. “Oh! So you’re afraid Naline was telling the truth, are you?”

  “I don’t think she said anything that was news to us,” Lex said brutally. “Whether you can be blamed for it or not, Delvia, everyone knows you’re impulsive. We’re going into wild country, facing unknown dangers. You’d be too much of a risk.”