Polymath

by John Brunner

  Indeed, their plight was unique. Who else in all of history had been compelled to found their present not on what had gone before, but on what was yet to come?

  So, in this oven-heat of summer when the air shimmered on the hills and the still sea gazed up at images of itself miraged on the horizon, everything said to him without ceasing, “Visualize! Predict! Plan!”

  Immediate plans, contingent plans, emergency plans. Practice routines, normal routines, emergency routines. He could frame one plan and perfect it, and something would happen to undermine his careful scheme. That job required this tool, and with it could be done in a few days. Unfortunately this tool had been left on the riverbed and swept away with Cheffy’s lost equipment. Was it quicker to evolve an alternative method, or replace the tool by getting Rothers to melt down steel in his solar furnace and have Aldric cast it, so that one of the women could file it sharp with a power-grinder borrowed from Fritch and driven off a solar collector sheet normally employed by Delvia to charge accumulators and then fit the blade with a wooden handle which someone else had turned from a branch, sanded smooth and bound with scarce wire against splitting, time invested one hour? The lack of the power-tool affected work on the new buildings, while the lack of the collector sheet might mean a shortage of charged accumulators and the need for more might crop up anywhere—in Bendle’s lab-hut, out at the sedimentation plant, in the infirmary, anywhere.

  Proof was all about them that Jerode had set scores of crucial projects in motion during his tenure. What Lex found most terrifying was that despite Jerode’s work he never stopped thinking of new tasks, equally important.

  And always, especially when he saw Hosper or Jesset pass by but at any other time as well, his mind was clouded by the thought of the other refugees on the plateau, driven by madmen to waste their energy and possibly their lives.

  But he was adamant that no attack should be made on the plateau before arrangements had been made for an influx of three to four hundred survivors, most of them side or injured, all weak. Moreover, if—as seemed likely—toward the end of summer their overused diet-synthe-sizers began to break down, there would have to be food in store, enough to last until spring. In addition it was self-defeating to use power for heating only to lose it through bad insulation, and though their improvised wind-mills had worked amazingly well they would be inadequate for the enlarged community…. And there was an increasing number of married couples for whom Fritch was providing separate accommodation, only that absorbed a lot of extra building material, and time, and also increased the demand for heat because more external walls were exposed to the wind…. And at about the same time as coping with hundreds of sick and helpless adults the first births would be occurring, and babies would need frighteningly thorough care because the four infants who had been brought here had all died….

  We have means of neutralizing another of the native allergens, but the only way we can produce the compound on a scale large enough to be useful is by altering a diet-synthesizer. The changes will be irreversible with our limited equipment, but they will allow us to eat this land-plant, this seaweed, and this animal. Shall we do it? No. We need our diet-synthesizers for the winter, when we can’t get those things to eat.

  It’s about Ornelle. She stole a stack of tubing from the main boiler and ran off saying she was going to make a spaceship so we can all go home. So it’s finally happened. Tell Jerode.

  Eighteen people down with acute diarrhea and a mild fever. Aykin, Fritch, Zanice, and Lodette are among them. We think it’s analogous to amoeboid dysentery; it can be cured by the same drugs, but we have exactly five doses left Jesset says it sounds like something that’s endemic on the plateau, in which case we’re due for a lot of it Can we spare a diet-synthesizer long enough to produce a hundred doses for future use? Yes, but be quick. We can’t afford to let key people be ill

  Sixty-five people have the sickness today. Same request. Fritch is better, so we’re on course. This time no. If it didn’t kill people on the plateau it won’t here. Put them on synthesizer cake and boiled water and see how long they take to recover of their own accord. Identify the infective organism and work out a way to neutralize it before it’s swallowed.

  About the other refugees: couldn’t we liberate them by—? Sorry, Hosper. It won’t work for this reason and that reason. It’s no good moving before we’re ready.

  The long term. Always the dreadfully long term.

  How many pregnancies approved? I can’t recall. Thirty-eight so far. That’s enough; close the register.

  How much more accommodation being laid out? Increase of thirty percent. Not enough. Shortage of timber. Then find some clay upriver and float it down on rafts in ton lots; we’ll make adobe kilns and bake some bricks. Use poured silica for the damp-course.

  Lodette, we’re in rags. Linen used to be made from natural fibers prepared by rotting, pounding, sunning, etcetera. I want something like that.

  Minty, here’s a nice tough fiber. A spinning wheel works like this. A loom works like that.

  Jesset, this is woven cloth. Some sort of garment that can be made up in a couple of hours, please.

  Bendle, the sap of some trees can be spread on cloth and heat-treated to make it tough, resilient, and water-proof. We shall need shoes this winter.

  Rothers, Jesset is going to make clothes. I want sewing needles and scissors. Here’s a drawing.

  Yes, Bendle? Oh. Well, how about the cortex of the trees? Animal-hide? Anything we can sew or mold or cut into usable footwear.

  Yes, Jesset? Dyestuffs? Fine, but check for allergic reactions before a single garment is put on.

  Yes, Minty? Oh, a waterwheel! Yes, why not? I’ll draw you one. You could use an endless belt of your own thread to drive the loom.

  No shortage of ideas, at least….

  Proposal: put a coffer-dam around the hull of the ship, pump out the water, cut up the metal with the thirty-five hundred degree beam of a solar furnace. Might work, Aykin, but not this summer, I’m afraid.

  Proposal hydroponics tanks in every living-house to supply fresh plant-food during the winter. Good idea, but ask Bendle if we know enough about the needs of the native flora, Jerode if the diet supplement would repay the effort, Aldric if he can provide enough light to grow them. Three yeses or don’t bother to come back.

  Proposal: sneak over the edge of the plateau by night and kidnap Gomes and his cronies. Oh, stop bothering me.

  Proposal: blow up the other ship so Gomes no longer has an excuse to drive his workers. You must be joking.

  Proposal: then you suggest a way to help those poor devils! I promise. Yes, yes, I swear I will!

  Proposal: get out of that chair and come for a walk, because you’ll make yourself ill if you don’t take a break.

  Lex leaned back and smiled up at Delvia. He said, “That’s the best idea I’ve heard for at least three days.”

  Then he went on looking at her, thoughtfully. She had put on one of Jesset’s rough but serviceable outfits consisting of a thigh-length tunic without sleeves, having big useful pockets made from a turnup of the lower hem. In winter they would be combined with breeches buttoning at the ankle, and a coat. Most of the community had gladly replaced their original tattered clothing, though nothing was being thrown away that had any life in it.

  Her hair was sun-bleached almost to whiteness, and she had the deep tan that all the outdoor workers had acquired. It had become known-—there was no way of preventing it—that Lex was favoring her, and though people seemed a little puzzled, most were content to accept that they must have misjudged her. Life was much easier for her now, and she had lost her former air of continual tension.

  He pushed back his chair and told the two women who were acting as his secretaries that he would be back in half an hour. Taking Delvia’s arm, he walked out into the sunshine.

  They turned toward the riverbank. When they had gone a hundred yards or so, he spoke meditatively.

  “You’re right; I am
driving myself pretty hard. Know what the worst thing is?”

  She shook her head.

  “The sheer number of separate items. Soap, timber, glue, nails, hammers, needles, spools for thread, cook-pots, spades and shovels, towels, blankets, bandages, boots…. I calculate that before the end of the summer we shall have to put more than a thousand things into production.”

  “So we can stay here in comfort,” Delvia said.

  “So we can stay here,” he corrected. “Where none of us want to be.” There was a pause. With a hasty shift of subject he went on, “By the way, has Naline talked to you? I hear she’s—uh—very much calmer.”

  “Yes. She seems to have realized how stupid she was. I think she’s going to grow up fast from now on, eventually turn out a nice person. I wish I could say the same about Ornelle. Is her case really hopeless?”

  Lex gave a grim nod. “With our resources, the doc tells me. She takes everything she can lay hands on now and puts it on a pile, says she’s going to make us a space-ship to go home in.” He hesitated, and added in a lower tone, “I’ve never seen incurable insanity before. It isn’t pretty.”

  “I imagine few people alive today have seen it,” Delvia said. “But then, few people can realize how many individual things are involved in even a village society like ours. I certainly didn’t. Lex, am I being very dumb, or is this a sensible question? I’ve been wondering over and over why we couldn’t at least put an operating subradio into orbit. I’d have thought if we could do all this…” She gestured at the settlement they were leaving behind.

  Lex thought for a moment. Then he said, “Do you have a watch?”

  “Yes. But of course I’m not wearing it because—oh, you know! Nobody wears a watch now.”

  “Do you think a watch is as complicated as a subradio?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Even so, the timekeeping element of a modern watch is a crystal, machined to monomolecular tolerances, in a state of permanent resonance. In order to adjust it to the length of day we have here, we worked out that we’d need”—he began to count on his fingers—“ultrasonic cutting-tools, which we don’t have microscopes, which we don’t have; a surface interferometer, which we don’t have; a billimicron gauge, which we do have, but it’s bent; a vacuum work-chamber; a radiation dust-sweep and gasgetter; a standard clock to calibrate it against; and about five years’ observation to calibrate the standard.

  Now to build the ultrasonic cutting-tool, you’d need—”

  “All right, all right!” Smiling, Delvia put her hands over her ears. “But, look! We have the subradios—I mean we had, in the ship. Couldn’t we have taken them out, and put them into orbit with a recording and a solar collector?”

  “Yes, we just about could have,” Lex said. “Aldric figured it out after we landed. Only not, unfortunately, in working order. His idea was to build a kind of gun out of the ship’s disaster-box launcher; those shaped charges pack a lot of power, plenty to put a hundred pounds into orbit The trouble was, the g-forces would smash flat anything we tried to fire.”

  “Then why didn’t we leave the box in orbit before we came down?” Delvia pressed.

  “Because we were worn out, half starved, and on the verge of suffocating,” Lex snapped. “Forgotten?”

  “Of course I haven’t, but I’d have thought that you—”

  “I tried,” Lex said. “I was so ill and exhausted I had to give up. And if you tell anyone I tried and failed, I’ll—never speak to you again.”

  The confession hung in the air like a cloud between them. They had come now to the riverside, and were standing looking inland toward the rapidly enlarging sedimentation plant They could see Cheffy’s team man-handling lengths of wooden pipe into position, and hear occasional shouted orders.

  Suddenly there was a break in the rhythm of the work. One of the upriver guards—whom Lex had allowed himself almost to forget because he was already so obsessed With the plight of the other refugees—came running along the bank waving and shouting.

  “People coming down the river! About a dozen of them! I saw a gun-beam! Stand to! Stand to!”

  Lex drew a deep breath, all else instantly forgotten. So after all this time action was to be forced on him when he still was not ready. It wasn’t likely that Gomes would have let runaways steal guns from him a second time. This must be the long-feared raid.

  XX

  He could scarcely recall how he had found the time to issue such detailed instructions, but he had done it, and they had been faithfully carried out. In addition to the camouflaged watchposts in the trees, from which the approaching party had just been spotted, he had ordered the preparation of what he thought of as a kind of trip-wire. A mile or so beyond the watchposts, but in plain sight of them, he had had more than twenty holes dug in the riverbank, so sited that it was hardly possible to avoid them; these holes had been covered with old black plastic, creased and torn so badly as to be useless for other purposes, to simulate the relaxed appearance of the bag-mouths of the underground carnivore.

  Since Cardevant’s party had found these to be so dangerous, Lex had reasoned that anyone else Gomes might send downriver would tend to panic on seeing such a cluster of the horrible objects. No matter how cautiously they had approached up to that point, they would be tempted to burn out what they took for a monster specimen, and by the time they realized it was a dummy their gun-beams would have given them away.

  The plan had worked to perfection. It did not depend on radio, which might have been overheard by the intruders, or on a landline phone, for which they did not possess the spare cable, or on a line-of-sight beam phone which would have tied up precious lasers unproductively. As a result, he had been able to send Delvia running through the town calling the alarm when the party from the plateau were still out of earshot, and to reach the watchpost on the right bank of the river while they were still working out that they had been fooled.

  Elbing was manning this watchpost; he had found his pegleg more and more of a handicap, and was glad to volunteer for this chore and release someone else for work he could not do. As Lex scrambled up beside him into his cage of boughs with the leaves still on, he gave a smile of greeting.

  “They can’t figure what hit them,” he said. “Want a look?” He moved aside from the eyepiece of the ship telescope with which the post was equipped.

  “With a murmur of thanks Lex leaned toward it. The scope wasn’t intended for such short-range work, and magnified so much that he could hardly get the whole of a area’s height into view at once, but there was the distinct compensation that the newcomers’ faces were as clear as they would have been at five paces.

  “Gomes!’ he exclaimed. “And Probian! Then maybe this isn’t a raid after all. Maybe they’ve been driven to desperation and want a parley.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Elbing grunted. “Every last one of them has a gun, and we have two between eight hundred of us.”

  True enough, Lex noted. Now, Gomes’s party was milling around on the opposite bank; Probian was angrily holding up a piece of charred plastic and swearing at the way they had been duped, while others poked sticks suspiciously into the pits as though unwilling to believe their eyes. It would obviously be several minutes before they moved on; he had the chance to study them at leisure.

  There were eleven men altogether, he counted. An unusual number, with the interesting implication that only one gun had been left on the plateau. Who, incidentally, could Gomes have put in charge during his absence? After the defection of Hosper and Jesset it must have been hard for him to trust anybody. Was Cardevant with the party? Lex scrutinized each face in turn and found he wasn’t So it was probably him, though of course he might be dead, or too sick to travel.

  “I had this kind of wild hope,” Elbing ventured, “that they might have been driven out and come to beg for asylum. But that was before I saw they all had guns. What do you think, Lex?”

  “Well, the likeliest explanation is that Gomes
is finding his problems too much for him. But if things are really bad on the plateau, he’d be afraid that if he sent a deputy to the coast—even Probian—that might be the last he’d hear of him. He must be less worried about leaving his base than losing another of his handful of supporters.”

  “What could he need so badly that he has to come here in person, though?”

  “Oh, it could be a lot of things—food, medical supplies, technical data….” Lex shrugged.

  “Think he’s going to try to take what he wants at gunpoint?”

  “Possibly. But if he has any sense at all, he’ll more likely claim that he’s in sight of getting his ship aloft, or maybe putting a subradio up at least, and wants aid to finish the job. He’ll let the guns speak for themselves.”

  “You think he does have any sense, then? Way I hear it, he’s pretty much out of his skull, isn’t he?”

  “If he were raving mad, then by this time one of his cronies would have ousted him. No, he must still be in possession of most of his faculties, maybe all of them apart from this obsession of his, and his streak of brutality.” Lex sat back from the scope.

  “Yes, I’m convinced he’s on the verge of desperation. Everything points to it. Now I want the party to arrive in town in a bad state: nervy, on edge, as well as just tired and sick which they certainly must be. You have something to put the wind up them, don’t you?”

  Elbing grinned, pointing to a row of cords knotted around a branch within arm’s reach. “We fixed about twenty or thirty of these in the bushes. I can make branches move at the corner of their eyes, that kind of thing. If they shoot, the cords will be cut and just snap back out of the way, so they won’t find what caused the movement.”

  “Perfect. And we’ll lay on a sort of show for them when they enter the town. I want them to get a first impression that’ll kind of cow them. Try to hold them up as much as possible with your string-pulling, hm? It may take a while to get everybody organized.”