Far From This Earth

by Chad Oliver

  The sun drifted lower in the western sky …

  Behind them, the roaring resolved itself into a series of throaty, coughing animal snarls. It was a hunting pack, no doubt of that. The cats might be after them or they might be following another scent. In any event, they were getting close.

  The three men broke into a stumbling run. The grass cut their arms, slashed at their faces. Alston slipped and fell, got up again, ran harder. His lungs labored in his chest. His mouth was dry.

  So this is how it feels, he thought. This is how it feels to be a man as men once were, defenseless, afraid, running for the trees …

  It wasn’t a good feeling.

  The dark forest loomed ahead of him. Fifteen minutes away, ten minutes—

  He was grateful for one thing, grateful even as he scrambled and ran with the terrible roaring behind him. Pollux Five was an earthlike planet. Earth’s twin, they called her. Oh, there were a few differences here and there, but basically the world was familiar enough. No monsters, no lethal atmosphere, no gravity that crushed the human body, no problems about water …

  They could survive if they reached the trees.

  They could live, on a twin of Earth …

  Earth’s twin.

  In a sense, all of man’s far voyaging, all of the work and dreams and blood and tears he had poured into the conquest of interstellar space, had been aimed at this: a world where men might live under friendly skies, a world where there was still room to stretch. A man needs to stretch occasionally, both intellectually and emotionally. Otherwise he is dead, even if his body is still warm and his heart still pumps. A man is not an ant and he was not made to live in an anthill. There is no room for experiment in an anthill; there is no leeway for mistakes. Anthills are regimented; they merely reproduce themselves down through the millennia. And Earth had become something very like an anthill, a new and glittering kind of anthill, smothered under the weight of its own swarming population.

  Of course, Pollux Five was not the only earthlike planet, and it was by no means the first one that man had found. There were others, although they were not common. One of the consequences of the folding effect of overdrive was that it was sometimes easier to reach star systems that were remote in normal space than it was to journey to Sol’s closer neighbors; Pollux had been visited fairly late in the brief history of deep-space exploration.

  Nevertheless, Pollux Five had been an exciting find. It was a virtual twin of Earth and it seemed to be free of manlike life. That was rare indeed.

  Finding an earthlike planet, though, was less than half the battle. Once it was located, someone had to decide what to do with all that real estate. That was when the fun started.

  It took—literally—astronomical amounts of money to finance the exploration of space. It was no job for individual pioneers, no matter how wealthy they might be. No man could simply blast off into the unknown, pick himself a likely looking world, and stake out a claim.

  Governments were involved.

  Laws were involved.

  Pressure groups, politics, corporations, ethics—all entered into it. Philosophers and businessmen, dreamers and con men, bureaucrats and research men—everybody had a finger in the pie.

  In theory, the thing was simple enough. When a useful planet was discovered, which happened perhaps once a year, it was reported to UNECA—the United Nations Extraterrestrial Control Administration. UNECA then sent out a survey team to determine exactly what the situation was. The composition of the survey team depended on whether or not the planet was inhabited. The findings of the survey team formed the basis for the planetary classification.

  Planets that were radically different from Earth, as most of them were, did not usually pose much of a problem. Intelligent life-forms were practically non-existent on such worlds, and any sort of colonization was prohibitively difficult. They could be assigned to commercial corporations, if any were interested, with the proviso that basic research rights had to be respected.

  Earthlike planets were an altogether different story.

  The U.N. had emerged from the Last Wars much stronger than it had been before, not because it was perfect but because there was no workable alternative. The U.N. was liberally supplied with countries that had once been colonies themselves. Many of them were by no means rich or powerful, but they had votes. The governments of those nations were, to say the least, sensitive to anything that smelled remotely like colonialism. Even centuries after the decline of the colonial empires on Earth the old memories were very strong. It made little difference whether or not the anti-colonial sentiments made good sense. A government floats on slogans, breathes deeply in the smog of unstated premises, and feeds on non-rational behavior. The governments of U.N. members that had been colonies after 1900 fought against presumably neo-colonial ideas with all the fervor of a holy crusade—they had to, or they promptly became so many ex-governments.

  The governments of the former colonial powers, naturally, vied with one another to demonstrate how emancipated and forward-thinking they had become.

  So when an earthlike planet was found—then what?

  If the planet was uninhabited at the time of contact, then it could be exploited for scientific, commercial, or settlement purposes. The term “uninhabited” was legally defined. It meant that the planet in question was not occupied by man or manlike beings. A man or a manlike being was defined as a life-form which (a) could create and manipulate symbols, (b) had a culture, (c) had a language, and (d) was capable of rational thought in some situations, given its cultural assumptions. If the life-forms were manlike structurally—if they were more akin to the primates than to other forms of animal life—they automatically fell into Category One if they had the other requisites, and were therefore protected by Earth law. If they were not manlike structurally—a vestige of ethnocentrism, to be sure, since it made little real difference—then there were formal hearings before the World Court.

  If the planet was inhabited, things got complicated. How much of the planet was inhabited? How different were the cultures in different areas of the planet? It could—and did—take teams of anthropologists decades just to determine what the situation was. Suppose the situation had been reversed and Earth had been the planet contacted, say around 1800. How could there be a single policy for Earth? What one guideline would have sufficed for the Arunta of Australia, the Baganda of Africa, the Plains Indians, and the King of England? In essence, however, the basic rule was simple enough. If the local culture, whether isolated or planet-wide, was not sufficiently far advanced to understand a treaty, then Earth adopted a hands-off policy for that particular culture. If the culture was hostile, the same policy applied. If treaties were possible—and the ships had come a long way to turn back without ramming one through—they had to be very carefully drawn. Native cultures could not be “exploited” or subjected to “drastic manipulation.” They could not be “coerced.” There had to be a “fair” return on commercial transactions. There had to be observers …

  All this was theory, of course

  In practice, there were loopholes.

  There were fine points of the law. Exactly what, for instance, constituted “drastic manipulation,” and what did understanding a treaty mean?

  And other planets were a long, long way from Earth …

  There were other problems.

  Take an “earthlike” planet, for example. What precisely did that mean? Which Earth? The Earth of the Sahara? The Arctic? The Pacific Ocean? The Rocky Mountains?

  Even a twin of Earth could be full of surprises.

  And evolution can be the biggest joker of them all.

  Start with similar cells in a similar environment and the results can be unpredictable. There can be radical differences, both large and small—both birds and mammals, after all, developed from something already as complex as a reptile. And the results can be similar but not the same. A shark and a porpoise look a lot alike at first glance, but it is unwise to confuse the two
.

  Take a twin of Earth.

  Take a world like Pollux Five.

  Take a world that rotates on its axis in the same period as the Earth, a world that revolves around its sun in a terrestrial year.

  Take a world that seems familiar.

  Take a world with only a few differences, here and there …

  Alston Lane plunged into the forest. The transition was abrupt: one moment he was running across the grassy plain, and the next the great trees had closed in around him. He forced himself to keep on going for perhaps a hundred yards before he stopped to catch his breath. Tony Morales was right behind him and Roger Pennock, huffing and puffing, lumbered up within a minute.

  “Brother,” Alston panted, “am I completely out of shape!”

  “When it comes to track meets,” Tony said, “they can include me out.”

  Their voices were tiny things, lost in the immensity of the rain forest. Alston looked around him with a feeling that was close to awe. The place was more like a cathedral than anything else. It was not really a jungle; there was practically no undergrowth. The trees were straight and tall, some of them growing to a height that must have been more than three hundred feet. There were few lower branches and the upper canopies of leaves screened off the light from the forest floor. It was dark and gloomy around the bases of the immense trees, and Alston doubted that it was much brighter in the middle of the day. The air was still and humid. Gnarled vines crawled up the tree trunks, seeking the light. There was a fine, steady rain of debris falling from the hidden world above: bugs and pollen and bits of leaves and bark. It made for a rich, dark soil that felt like a sponge. Alston saw brightly colored birds swooping down out of the shadows, and there was a continual chirping and chattering filtering down through the thick air that only served to accentuate the silence of the world below.

  “Quite a place,” Roger Pennock said, scooping up a handful of the moist soil and staring at it. “Must get a couple of hundred inches of rain a year, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Looks like it,” Alston agreed. “But how about all that savanna country right next door? There must be a pretty sharp break in the rainfall pattern—”

  Tony Morales put his hands on his hips and looked up. “Speaking of the savanna country right next door, what’s to prevent those cats from coming in here? It looks pretty damned open to me.”

  “I doubt that they spend much time in here,” Alston said. “There’s no food for them.”

  “There is now,” Roger reminded him. “Namely, us.”

  Tony grinned. “I think you were pointing out one advantage that a man has over a lion awhile back, Alston. He can climb trees, I think you said. Let’s see you climb one of these babies.”

  Alston looked again at the great trees and felt something less than optimistic. The trees were big, too big to get his arms around, and there weren’t any convenient low branches. All of the foliage was up high, fighting for the sunlight. Of course, not all of the trees were giants. There were some little fellows only forty feet high. They didn’t have to get to the top of the forest; they just had to get off the ground.

  “I think the vines are our best bet,” he said slowly. “If we could follow them around the trunks we might be able to get up to the lower branches, find a place where we could rest.”

  “Too bad our floaters won’t work in reverse,” Tony said.

  “They won’t break a fall much from forty or fifty feet up, either,” Alston pointed out. “We’re on our own, to coin an original phrase.”

  Roger stared up at the trees. “I’d just as soon climb a mountain. We need an ape, not a man.”

  Alston shrugged. “We’ve still got a little ape in us, Rog. Let’s see if we can use it.”

  Roger looked extremely dubious. “I think we’re asking for trouble.”

  “Look,” Alston said impatiently. “It’s getting dark, right? In another hour we won’t have any light at all down here. Maybe those cats will let us alone, sure. But what if they don’t? Do you want to try to run up one of those things in the dark?”

  “I doubt that it will ever become a popular sport,” Roger admitted.

  “Come on, Chimp,” Tony said to Alston. “Show us how it’s done!”

  Alston took a deep breath. He thought he could still hear the roaring of the big cats, but he wasn’t certain. He didn’t particularly care for the idea of waiting around to find out how close the cats would come or whether or not they would kill at night. It seemed to him that the trees were the lesser of two evils.

  He sought out a tree trunk that was thick with vines. He groped for a hand-hold, pulled himself up, groped for a purchase for his feet. He worked his way along the vine, moving up in a spiral. He got about six feet off the ground before he fell.

  He picked himself up, swearing.

  “Great,” Tony said. “Now let’s see you swing hand over hand.”

  Alston ignored him. He bent down and took off his shoes. He hesitated a moment, then stripped off his socks as well. The much advertised human foot, he reflected, was not worth much for climbing. It had evolved too far, into a platform designed for standing on solid ground. Still, it worked better than a shoe that wouldn’t grip at all.

  He started up again.

  It was better this time. He did not fall. He could curl his toes enough to support his weight while his hands slid along the rough vine. But the climb was murderously difficult. He was soaked in sweat before he had gotten up fifteen feet. And he made an unwelcome discovery. There were antlike insects living in the bark of the tree. They bit him with maddening persistence as he climbed.

  He did not look back. He just kept hauling himself up the vine. He had the image of the dark branches above him fixed in his mind. If he could reach the branches, he could wedge himself into a crotch in the tree. He could rest.

  He didn’t even think about trying to get back down again.

  He didn’t think about anything except gripping the vine that wound around the tree.

  It took him half an hour. They were the longest thirty minutes of his life. His feet were bleeding. His hands were raw and scratched. His shirt was black from the bark of the tree. His skin swollen with insect bites. He pulled himself onto the first branch that he reached. He forked his legs over it and pressed his back against the trunk of the tree. It was anything but comfortable and his balance was precarious. He didn’t care. He could not move another inch.

  His body trembled with exhaustion.

  Dimly, he was aware that Tony and Roger had followed his trail. They crawled up from the depths, like fish surfacing from a strange sea, and found branches of their own.

  All of them were too tired to speak.

  It had grown quite dark. Alston felt as though he were suspended in some in-between world. The early stars above him were screened by the higher branches. Below him, the forest floor was lost in the gloom. As his eyes gradually adjusted, he could see great white blossoms around him. In fact, there was a fairly lush growth clinging to the trees. The plants used the trees as platforms that thrust them up toward the sunlight. Orchids, ferns, air plants, flowering vines—all of them fighting for space and light. They were probably epiphytes rather than parasites, Alston thought.

  It was a new world, a world that was hardly visible from the ground, a world that was entered simply by climbing a few feet up a tree. And there were other worlds above him. His training taught him that, even though they were worlds he had never experienced. There must be zones of life in the trees, changing with the altitude and the amount of available light, zones of life that continued to the very top of the forest.

  The notion occurred to him that when men explored a planet they left quite a lot of it out. They mapped the surface, that tiny fraction of a world where a man lived his life. Below the surface and above the surface—well, there was a sizeable amount of territory that the most determined explorer never even saw.

  How many trees did Livingstone climb?

  Alston felt
his strength returning slowly. His breathing steadied and the sweat on his exposed skin began to dry. It was a little cooler at this height and he seemed to be above the ants. There were still insects in the air—gnats and flies and bees—but they were not too troublesome. He stirred slightly on his perch and tried to think.

  “We look like one of those old pictures,” he said, breaking the silence. “Remember them? ‘How many faces can you find in this picture?’”

  “Laugh in the face of death,” Tony Morales muttered. “Standard operating procedure for heroes.”

  Roger Pennock didn’t say anything. The effort of the climb added to the after-effects of the rap on the head hadn’t done the biologist any good.

  Alston managed to talk Roger into swallowing a couple of the food capsules from the emergency pack. That was all he could do. There was no way he could get any of the capsules for himself or for Tony without risking losing them. He figured they could wait until morning; Roger was the one who needed them most.

  He tried to settle himself more comfortably against the tree. He rapidly found out that there just wasn’t any satisfactory position. Tired as he was, it was impossible for him to sleep. Whenever he dozed off, he would slump to one side and lose his balance. He had some dandy semi-conscious falling dreams but he got precious little rest.

  The night was very long and very dark. It rained once, briefly, and he could hear the heavy drops pattering on the leaves above him. The forest was not completely silent even when the rain was not falling. There were sounds of movement in the overhead branches: sudden scurrying noises, as though something fairly large was moving through the trees. Twice, he thought he heard voices or calls from the roof of the forest.

  He could not see anything. Pollux Five had no moon and the starlight was too faint to penetrate the canopy of leaves.

  Nevertheless, he had the distinct impression that he could be seen.

  He was certain that something was watching him.