Polymath

by John Brunner

  Jesset smiled, sharp animal teeth glinting. “Where do you think I’ve been this past half hour? Didn’t you realize I was late? And what do you think happened to my shirt?”

  She raised her right hand, which she had kept in shadow, and revealed that she was holding another gun.

  “I didn’t have a chance to talk it over with you,” she said to Hosper. “But it just struck me, it would be much safer to do things the other way around. Cardevant was due to relieve Probian, so I went with him. I had to make love to him, of course.” She pulled a face. “But it was worth it. He won’t be any more trouble tonight”

  “What did you do?” Hosper asked faintly.

  “Strangled him.” In an offhand tone.’ “Just enough to knock him out. Then I tied him up with strips of my shirt and stuffed some in his mouth. But he may work loose, so let’s not waste any time. You take that side, I’ll take this.”

  More than somewhat impressed with this harmless-looking but ferocious young woman, the strangers carefully moved their chains, trying not to clink them, so that they could be cut loose with the fewest possible bolts from the guns.

  The plateau was eerie in the starlight as they picked their way across it, fearing that at any instant the sound of movement would come from the spaceship, that a light or a gun would be turned on them. But Hosper and Jesset had promised that Gomes and the others would be in an exhausted slumber—indeed, they themselves were apparently sustained by sheer willpower—and they reached the river without difficulty. There was no guard on the dam.

  When they reached the rock-face beyond, Lex stepped aside.

  “I’m going to wait here,” he said. “You go about a mile downstream, where there’s a clear spot on the left bank—you know the one I mean, Baffin? We made a halt there last summer, on our way up. I noticed it still isn’t over-grown.”

  Baffin nodded.

  “Wait until you hear the dam break, then move off. I’ll rejoin you in about seven minutes. Make the best progress you can—I’ll catch up OK. I imagine Gomes will be too distracted to worry about us for at least several more minutes. I’m going to try to keep that mile between us all the way to the coast. They wont even see us, let alone get within shooting distance. It’ll be tough going, I’m afraid, drinking river-water filtered through our clothes and eating salad-tree leaves when we find them. But we’ll make it.”

  The handlight, its beam narrowed to a pencil, showed him a worried look on Lodette’s face. He clapped her shoulder. “Don’t look so miserable! You’re plumper than the rest of us—you’ll last out best of all. Right? Hosper, may I have your gun, please?”

  Hosper passed it over. He seemed on the point of saying something, but changed his mind. Together with the rest, he faded into the dark.

  Lex waited a while to make sure he was fully night-adjusted. His infrared vision had been improved by the technicians who had worked to make him polymath material, and he always saw more clearly than an unmodified human, but it took about five minutes to achieve full range after seeing by an artificial light such as the handlamp. Then he moved silently away from the river to a sheltering rock from which he could inspect the face of the dam in detail.

  What their chances were of reaching the coast, he was not sure. If only they had been able to steal some food and canteens of water… But the provision stores were as closely guarded as the guns; so many attempts had been made to steal food, Hosper had told them, that Gomes had finally decreed a death penalty. No one doubted he would carry it out.

  Lex was shaken by the enormity of the thing he was fighting. Until now he had known about desperate men reverting to the primitive only as an abstract, an idea he had been taught about that related to nothing in recent history. Now he had seen it become reality, and he was appalled. This might have happened down at the coast, too. Instead of assemblies to discuss their problems, they might have gathered to hear Arbogast promulgate new decrees about working fifteen hours to earn one cake of synthetic food, to see a recalcitrant whipped for arguing back….

  It was unaccountable that the sufferer in the image which came to mind looked like Delvia and no one else.

  Time enough, he judged, for the others to get their head start. He could see the water behind the dam, still slightly warmer than the surrounding ground, like a fuzzily glowing coal misted by ash. He leveled the energy gun, using the rock as a prop for his elbow, and put a single bolt into the spot which he had selected as the weakest.

  He did not wait to see if he had been correct. He knew it. He turned immediately and began to race down the riverbed a few yards ahead of the trickling water.

  The mud sealing the hurdles was washing away; the mud packed between the rocks that supported the uprights was becoming wet, slippery, acting as a lubricant now. Timing the process in his head, Lex ran like a deer, never glancing back. Four minutes of bounding and jumping. Five. The weight of the water was shifting the hurdles, bowing them outward.

  Six minutes—and Lex hurled himself out of the stream-bed to fall sprawling on the bank, crushing alien plants and unable to do more than hope he wouldn’t encounter a strand of blisterweed, while the flood went thundering past. On the first waves were broken hurdles, sticks, leaves, flotsam of a dozen kinds. Spray lashed up as the unpent fury of the water plunged over its old falls and rapids. Stones ground on each other, crying like paincrazed beasts.

  A breeze was coming off the high ground behind him. He tried to tune his ears and detect whether there were already shouts above the rush of water, but he could hear nothing and he had no time to spare. In a world that seemed shrouded by mist, where bare ground was gray-dark and vegetation and anything else fractionally warmer was gray-pale, he moved into the river-fringing vegetation.

  Another couple of minutes, and he had caught up with the main party. They had advanced only a short distance from the spot where he had told them to wait until the dam broke. He ignored their muttered congratulations, closed his eyes against the handlight beam, and thrust between them to take the lead.

  “Keep that light away from me,” he instructed. “I’m dark-adapted now, and I’ve got to stay that way until dawn. It doesn’t matter how much noise you make—what counts is to cover all the ground we can. Lodette, watch for blisterweed and anything else dangerous. Jesset, let Baffin have your gun. He’s the only one of us except me who’s made the trip before when the river was full, so he’ll have a margin of extra attention to spare for danger. Now come on!”

  He plunged forward.

  It was only a few more minutes before there was a commotion behind them, easily audible now that the main flood from the dam had passed and the river was flowing more normally. There were shouts too distant for words to be identified, and from the rear of the party Hosper called that he’d seen a gun-beam.

  “Keep moving!” was Lex’s only answer. But privately he was hoping against hope that Gomes would not become so frantic that he would tell his men to burn a path for themselves. It would exhaust the charges in their guns quickly, but it would give them an advantage of speed which might prove decisive. After all, they needed only to get within sight of the fugitives to finish them off.

  It became a sort of nightmare after that, in which springy branches slashed at their faces and legs, sharp-edged leaves prickled and scratched, and animals which were infinitely alarming because unseen were heard scrambling among the undergrowth. Their throats became dry, their chests ached with gulping air, and behind them the noise of pursuit grew louder.

  “Lex!” It was Jesset’s voice, acid-shrill. “They’re using their guns to burn a path now!”

  He acknowledged the information by setting a quicker pace still, but that was no answer, and he knew it. It was out of the question to burn their own path—for one thing, they had only two guns, neither fully charged, and for another the pursuers would eventually reach the point at which the fugitives had begun to clear the way, and their work would have been done for them.

  “Ah-ah-ach!” It had been going
to be a cry of pain; willpower turned it into a mere moan. But it sounded like a death-knell. Lex spun around, remembering to shut his eyes and preserve his dark-adjustment.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry, Lex.” Aggereth, fighting pain to steady his voice. “It’s my ankle. I put my foot in a hole. I guess I can keep going, though.”

  “Zanice!” Lex said. “Quickly—look at it.”

  A pause while her deft fingers moved over the injury. A sigh of dismay. “That’s bad,” she reported. “A serious sprain—muscles torn. It’s going to hurt, Aggereth.”

  “It does already,” he admitted between clenched teeth.

  Now what to do? They couldn’t abandon him; they couldn’t carry him and maintain their speed…. This looked like disaster.

  And yet—! Lex had opened his eyes forgetfully, and was staring around at the enclosing vegetation. Something teased his memory. Those shoots! Those luscious ones with asparaguslike heads on them!

  “Zanice, can you do anything for his ankle?” he demanded.

  “Well, I can bind it up. He’ll be able to hobble on it. Or maybe we could break a treebranch to serve as a crutch.”

  Where was the thing? Lex was moving from left to right, parting the lower fronds and peering at the ground. Here a sort of mosslike plant was widespread, forming a smooth, slightly spongy carpet, and it was very hard to make out details. He had almost decided that he’d have to sacrifice his dark-adaptation and use the handlight when at last he spotted it, and gave a low whistle. A huge one! Eight feet across at the least, underneath the mossy covering, but showing through it because it was marginally warmer than the soil. And not just one, but another, and another, like the scabs of a loathsome disease.

  He said, fighting to keep his jubilation from his voice, “Well, at least you picked a good spot to have your accident, Aggereth. Baffin, take a look here.”

  He shut his eyes as Baffin moved up with the light, and said wonderingly, “But there are five—six…. Damn, how many are there?”

  “Enough!” snapped Lex. “Aykin! Pick up Aggereth; carry him across the river—”

  “Here?” Baffin interjected.

  “Yes, here! Take a pole and jab the riverbed before you put your feet down—that sapling there will do fine. Make sure there are none of these traps on the other bank. Go a hundred yards along. Zanice, bind up Aggereth’s ankle there. Go on, the lot of you. Wait for Baffin and me. We won’t be long.”

  “What are you going to do?” Hosper demanded.

  “You’ll see.”

  The others, unquestioning, obeyed. As soon as they were safely across the river Lex began to claw down branches and throw them as an extra disguise across the traps. Baffin copied him.

  “That’s enough,” Lex said at length. “They’re coming close. Now we’ll burn a short false pathway toward them, to make it look as though this is where we started panicking. Then we’ll adjourn downriver.”

  The lights and blazing guns of the pursuers came nearer.

  In breathless silence Lex and Baffin saw them approach the end of the false pathway their own guns had burned. They halted uncertainly and looked puzzled.

  “Keep moving, you fools!” shouted a voice—Carde-vant’s, hoarse after what Jesset had done to him. “They must be getting desperate! Remember we have a dozen guns against their two!”

  Lex turned and sent a bolt into the vegetation a hundred yards downriver—but on this bank.

  “There!” Cardevant shouted, and the pursuers charged onward.

  The ground opened under their feet. Four—five—six of them seemed to shrink suddenly to half their height. Those behind stopped and shouted; those who were trapped screamed in mortal terror. Out in the river, there was a sound of bubbling as the buried carnivore drew in the water which was also necessary to its metabolism.

  The others pulled at the captives’ arms, failed to move them; they kicked away the disguising branches Lex had spread on the ground and fired at the ghastly engulfing black bags. But the prisoners screamed worse than ever. One, wrenched free, had lost a leg to the gun-beam; another was rejected as the carnivore writhed in agony, but was already dead when his companions dragged him clear.

  “I—I can’t watch anymore,” Baffin whispered, his face white as death.

  “Nor can I,” Lex said. With the grim look of an executioner he turned and led Baffin to rejoin the others across the river.

  The moans and screams died away behind.

  XVI

  “I’m a fool,” Cheffy said dispiritedly. “I took it for granted that because Lex’s party had failed to contact us they must also have failed to get the river back. So when it did come flooding down in the middle of the night it swept away tools, prepared pipes—things on which we’d spent a lot of hard work, then left lying in the dry river-bed.”

  “It can’t be helped,” Jerode said, looking around the committee table. “At least the return of the water has provided a distraction for our troublemakers.”

  “Meaning me?” Ornelle from the foot of the table. She curled her lip. Against his best judgment Jerode had given in to her insistence that she be permitted to rejoin the committee. She did appear to have recovered from her breakdown, but so far her contributions had been unconstructive, and she was taking every remark she could as a personal insult.

  “Meaning me?” she repeated louder, when the others tried to ignore her. “What you mean is, you hope the river question will distract people from doing the right thing by Naline!”

  “You’ve heard what I had to say about Naline,” Jerode returned curtly. “We are discussing a different subject. Now, as I was about to say: several people are demanding an assembly to consider the return of the river and the disappearance of Lex and his party.”

  Fritch slapped the table, open-palmed. “Pretty soon well be spending our whole time arguing instead of getting on with our work! I’m opposed.”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t really matter whether we’re in favor or not,” Aldric said. “These few days without adequate water, the psychological effects of the thundery weather, all the rest of it—it’s brought it home to people that what lies ahead isn’t just a little hard work, but a damned hard life. A hell of a lot of tempers have come to the boil. Some of my best men are scarcely on speaking terms with each other. I think we’ll have to arrange an opportunity for them to blow off some pressure, Doc.”

  There was a pause. Bendle said eventually, “What can have become of Lex’s party? Could they have been over-whelmed by the water? I mean, if the blockage broke of its own accord.”

  “No,” Aldric grunted. “If they’d already been trapped by it at the time they failed to call us up, then the flood would have been on us an hour or two later instead of in the middle of the night. Much more likely is that the radio’s broken, or they accidentally shorted out their accumulator.”

  “Isn’t it a shame we didn’t force Lex to take Delvia with him?” Ornelle said. “That would have been a perfect solution.”

  “I’d far rather you were lost!” Fritch snapped. “You’re getting on my nerves, know that?”

  Ornelle rounded on the big architect, flushing. “Oh, I’m not surprised you’d rather have Del than me, Fritch! I guess you’re one of her customers, aren’t you? How’s she taking her pay? Are you building her a little brothel of her own?”

  “Oh, shut up, Ornelle!” Cheffy flared. Jerode banged on the table as all of a sudden everyone started shouting at once. Ornelle leaped to her feet and planted her fists on the table, leaning forward with a glare.

  “I will not be quiet!” she exclaimed. “I’m sick of all this get-you-nowhere chatter! All this garbage about ‘must let the people blow off pressure’ and ‘goodness what can possibly have happened to Lex?’—it’s turned my stomach. I know damned well what must have become of them!”

  “Then tell us!” Fritch barked. She swung to face him.

  “Where were you when the river started running again? In bed asleep, hm
? I wasn’t. I was out for a walk. I couldn’t sleep for worrying about poor Naline.” She drew a deep breath, and an unpleasant sneer crossed her face. “It wasn’t cloudy any longer on the high ground. You could see a long way. There were flashes up where the river runs.”

  “So?” Aldric snapped. “Must have been lightning!”

  “It was not. The storm was all over. What I saw was guns being fired. Some of the vegetation burned for quite a long time, a couple of minutes.”

  “What?” Hoarsely, from two or three throats.

  “I…” Seeming to speak against his will, Cheffy licked his lips. “I came out when I heard the water. And—yes, I looked up the hill too, and I saw flashes. I did take them for lightning, but now I think back, I guess they could have been gun-beams. I’m not sure, of course. But they could have.”

  “Thank you.” Honey-sweet, sarcasm flavored Ornelle’s words. “I take it you were too concerned with your lost tools and pipes to give it any more thought? Well, I hadn’t been careless like that. So I worked it all out. Why was Lex so eager to go to the plateau? Because he wanted to get our river back? I don’t believe it!” Again she sucked in a deep, rib-straining breath. “What they were after was the other party’s ship. They didn’t contact us when they should have because they found it could be repaired. When they realized we’d come searching for them if there wasn’t some reason why we shouldn’t, they staged this little drama with their guns to make us think they’d been eaten by animals or something. They knew we’d be awake and see them shooting because the noise of the water would have woken us up. Now they’ll take the other ship and get away!”

  The paranoid quality of the fantasy she had erected had shocked her listeners so much that for a long moment open mouths and horrified expressions were her only response. Jerode was wondering at the back of his mind what provisions could be made here to confine and treat the insane, when he heard a shout from outside which made him more relieved than he would have imagined possible.