HAMMER AND ANVIL
I
“Your business?” said the house in a tone as frosty as a polar winter. Then followed a dull and reflex hiss as its vocalizing bladders automatically refilled.
At first Chybee was too startled to respond. This magnificent home had overwhelmed her even as she approached: its towering crest, its ramifying branches garlanded with countless luminants, its far-spread webs designed to protect the occupants against wingets and add their minuscule contribution to the pool of organic matter at its roots, cleverly programmed to withdraw before a visitor so that they would not be torn- all, all reflected such luxury as far surpassed her youthful experience.
But then her whole trip to and through this incredible city had been a revelation. She had heard about, had seen pictures of, the metropolis of Slah, and met travelers whom business or curiosity had lured hither. Nothing, though, had prepared her for the reality of her first-ever transcontinental flight, or the jobs she had been obliged to undertake to pay her way, constantly terrified that they would make her too late. No description could have matched the sensation of being carried pell-mell amid treetops by the scampering inverted fury of a dolmusq, with its eighteen tentacles snatching at whatever support was offered and its body straining under the weight of two-score passengers. Nor could anyone have conveyed to her the combined impact of the crowds, the noise, and the universal stench compound of pheromones, smoke from the industrial area to the west, and the reek of all the material that must go to rot in order to support the homes and food-plants of this most gigantic of cities. Never in all of history had there been one to match it, neither by land nor by sea-likely, not even in the age of legend.
From the corner of her eye she detected the house's defenses tensing, gathering pressure to snare her if, by failing to respond, she identified herself as a mindless beast. Hastily she forced out, “My name is Chybee! I've come to hear the lecture! Never say I've missed it!”
Modern and talented as the house was, that exceeded its range of responses; she had to wait for a person to answer. Eventually the thorny barrier blocking the entrance drew aside and revealed an elderly woman wearing a stern expression.
“The professor's lecture began at sundown,” she said. “It is now halfway to midnight.”
“I know!” Chybee cried, with a glance towards what little of the sky was visible through the overarching branches of this and other nearby homes. By chance the moon was framed by those and by a ring of thin cloud; it was just past the new, and its dark part was outlined by sparkles nearly as bright as those which shot continually through the upper air... a constant reminder, Chybee thought, of the rightness of her decision.
She went on pleadingly, “But I've come from Hulgrapuk to hear her! It's not my fault I've been delayed!”
“Hulgrapuk?” The woman's attitude softened instantly. “Ah! Then you must be one of Professor Wam's students, I suppose. Come in quickly, but be very quiet.”
Injunctions to be quiet struck Chybee as rather silly when the hordes of the city made such a terrible droning and buzzing noise, sometimes punctuated by loud clanging and banging from the factories whose fumes made the air so foul, but she counted herself lucky not to have been turned away, and did as she was told.
Wondering who Professor Wam might be.
The woman indicated that she should follow an upward-slanting branchway towards the crest of the house, and there she found at least five-score folk gathered in a roughly globular bower. At its focus, comfortably disposed on large and well-smoothed crotches, were three persons of advancing age whose exudations indicated they were far from happy to be in such proximity. The rest of the attendance consisted of a few males scattered among numerous females, mostly young, who were trying hard not to react to their elders' stench; that was plain from their own emanations.
Recordimals had captured Ugant's voice for her many supporters around the planet. Chybee recognized it the moment she entered, and was so excited to hear her idol in reality that she bumped against a boy not much older than herself as she sought for space to perch.
Instantly: “Chhht!” from half a score of those nearby.
But the boy curled his mantle in a grin as he made room alongside him. Muttering thanks, she settled down and concentrated... rather to the boy's disappointment, she gathered, but she was here for one purpose and one purpose only: to hear Ugant's views in her own words.
It was clear that the formal lecture must long be over, for she was engaged in debate, either with those flanking her or with some doubter elsewhere in the bower. She was saying:
“... our researches prove conclusively that the fall of the civilization which bequeathed to us most of our modern skills-indeed, which unwittingly gave us this very city, changed though it now is out of recognition by those who created it as a sea-going entity!-was due to the impact of a giant meteorite, whose traces we can only indirectly observe because it fell into deep water. Given this indisputable fact, it can only be a matter of time before another and far larger impact wipes us out too. It's all very well to argue that we must prepare to take the folk themselves into space, with whatever is necessary for their survival. I don't doubt that eventually this could be done; we know how to create life-support systems that will sustain us for long periods on the ocean bed, and they too have to be closed. We know, more or less, how to shield ourselves against the radiation we are sure of meeting out there. But I contest the possibility of achieving so grandiose a goal with the resources available. I believe rather that we, as living creatures, owe it to the principle of life itself to ensure that it survives even if we as a species cannot!”
Suddenly there was uproar. Confused, Chybee saw one of Ugant's companions turn her, or possibly his, back insultingly, as though to imply: “What use in arguing with such an idiot?” Meantime a few clear voices cut through the general turmoil; she heard “True! True!” and “Nonsense!” and then, “But the folk of Swiftyouth and Sunbride will hurl more missiles at us to prevent it!”
That was so reminiscent of what she was fleeing from, she shivered. Mistaking her response, the boy beside her said, “She does underestimate us, doesn't she?”
“Uh-who?”
“Ugant, of course!”-in a tone of high surprise. “Going on all the time about how we can't possibly succeed, and so we have to abandon the planets to bacteria! You should have been here sooner. Wam made sludge of her!”
“Wam?”
“On the left, of course! From Hulgrapuk, no less! How many scores-of-scores of padlonglaqs did she have to travel to be here this dark? That shows her dedication to the cause of truth and reason!”
I bet she had an easier journey than I did... But Chybee repressed the bitter comment, abruptly aware that she was hungry and that this bower was festooned with some of the finest food-plants she had ever set eye on.
Instead she said humbly, “And whose back is turned?”
“Oh, that's Aglabec. Hasn't dared utter a word since the start, and very right and proper too. But I'm afraid a lot of his supporters are here. I hope you aren't one of them?” He turned, suddenly suspicious.
“I don't think so,” Chybee ventured.
“You don't know you aren't? By the arc of heaven, how could anybody not know whether giving up reason in favor of dreamness is right or wrong? Unless they'd already decided in favor of dreamness!”
Aglabec...? The name floated up from memory: it had been cited by her parents. Chybee said firmly, “I'm against dreamness!”
“I'm glad of that!” said the boy caustically. But they were being called on to hush again. Wam was expanding her mantle for a counterblast.
“There is one point on which Professor Ugant and myself are entirely in agreement! I maintain that her scheme to seed the planets with microorganisms is a poor second-best, because what we must and can do is launch ourselves, or our descendants, and our entire culture into space! But we unite in despising those who spout nonsense about the nature of other planets totally at odds with scientific reality, those who claim that they can make mental voyages to Swiftyouth and Sunbride and indeed to the planets of other stars! Such people are-”
What carefully honed insult Wam had prepared, her listeners were not fated to find out. A group of about a score of young people, with a leavening of two or three older, outshouted her and simultaneously began to shake the branches. Resonance built up swiftly, and those around cried out as they strove to maintain their grip. The slogans the agitators were bellowing were like the one Chybee had caught a snatch of a few moments earlier, warnings that the folk of other planets were bound to drop more rocks from heaven if any plan to carry “alien” life thither were put into effect. But who could respect them if they were capable of slaughtering fellow beings for their own selfish ends...?
Chybee caught herself. There was no life on Swiftyouth and Sunbride; there couldn't be. Modern astronomy had proved it. Fatigue and hunger were combining to drive her into dreamness herself... plus the shock of realizing that she could never go home again. Had she really gambled the whole of her future life on this one trip to Slah, which her budder had forbidden?
Indeed she had, and the knowledge made her cling as desperately to rationality as to her swaying branch.
She barely heard a new loud voice roaring from the center of the bower, barely registered that Aglabec the leader of the agitators had finally spoken up, and was shouting:
“You're wasting your efforts! You'll never shake this lot loose from their grip on the tree of prejudice! Leave that to the folk of other worlds-they'll act to cure such foolishness in their own good time!”
Disappointed, his reluctant followers ceased making the branches thrash about. But at that point Chybee could hold her peace no longer.
Rising as best she could to full height on her swaying perch, she shouted back, “There aren't any folk on other worlds, and there never will be if you get your way! We can't live there either! Our only sane course is to hope that the seeds of life can be adapted to germinate and evolve elsewhere!”
What am I saying? Who am I saying it to?
Mocking laughter mingled with cheers. She slumped back on the branch, folding her mantle tightly around her against the storm of noise, and heard at a great distance how the company dispersed. Several in passing discourteously bumped against her, and she thought one must have been the boy from the adjacent perch. It was a shame to have made him dislike her on no acquaintance, but after what Aglabec had said... after what her parents had tried to force down her maw... after...
She had imagined herself young and strong enough to withstand any challenge the world might offer. The toll taken by her journey, her emotional crisis, her lack of food, maybe the subtle poisons some claimed to have identified in the air of Slah, proved otherwise. Her mind slid downward into chaos.
II
Reacting to the reek of hostility that permeated the bower, Wam snapped, “I knew it was a crazy idea inviting Aglabec to take part in a scientific debate!”
She swarmed down from the crotch she had occupied during the meeting and gazed disconsolately at the departing audience.
“You can't have thought it was that stupid if you came so far to join in!” Ugant retorted, stung.
“Oh, one always hopes...” Wam admitted with a sigh. “Besides, the dreamlost are gathering such strength at Hulgrapuk, even among my own students, and I imagined that things might be better here. Apparently I was wrong. What do we have to tell these folks to convince them of the doom hanging over us all?”
“Beg pardon, Professor!” a diffident voice murmured, and old Fraij, Ugant's maestradomi, slithered down to join them. “You mentioned your students just now. The one who spoke up at the end hasn't left with everybody else. I think she's been taken ill.”
“Hah! As if we didn't have enough problems already... Well, it's up to you to look after your own.” Ugant turned aside with a shrug, scanning the available food-plants in search of anything particularly delicious.
From a pouch she wore on a baldric slung about her, Wam produced a spyglass and leveled it at the other remaining occupant of the bower. After a moment she said, “She could be of a Hulgrapuk strain, I suppose, but clasped around her branch like that I can't be sure. At any rate I don't recognize her.”
Fraij said uncertainly, “I'm sorry. She said she'd come specially from Hulgrapuk, so naturally I assumed...”
“I'm afraid your assumption was wrong,” Wam murmured, and joined Ugant in her quest for refreshment, adding, “Whatever I may think of your views, by the way, I find no fault with your hospitality. Many thanks.”
But Ugant was snuffing the air, now almost cleansed as the roof-leaves flapped automatically to scour away the remanent pheromones.
“I do recognize her... I think. Fraij, do you remember a message from some youngling in that area saying her parents had gone overside into the psychoplanetary fad, and she needed arguments to combat them? About a month ago. Wasn't the trace on that very much like hers?”
Fraij hesitated, and finally shook her mantle. “I'm afraid I can't be sure. You have to remember how much correspondence I deal with that you never get to see because it's a waste of tune. However that may be,” she added with a touch of defiance, “I'm not inclined to turn her out into the branchways before I know whether she can fend for herself.”
“Well, she did sound comparatively sensible...” Ugant crammed her maw with succulent funqi and swarmed over to where the girl was lying. Another sample of her odor, and: “Hmm! I was right! Her name's something like Chylee, Chy... Chybee! I don't know why you haven't met her, Wam. From her message she seemed like just the sort of person you want for your campaign against the-You know, we need a ruder and catchier nickname for the psychoplanetarists. It might help if we persuaded our students to invent one. Ridicule is a powerful weapon, isn't it?”
By now the girl was stirring, and Wam had no chance to reply. Maw full, she too drew close.
“I think she's hungry,” she pronounced. “Fraij-?”
But the maestradomi had already signaled one of her aides, a gang of whom had appeared to clear the bower of what litter the audience had left which the house could not dispose of unaided. It was another point of agreement between those who supported Ugant and those who followed Wam that Aglabec and his sympathizers were disgustingly wasteful... to which charge the latter always retorted that what the planet offered it could reabsorb, and in any case the age of psychic escape would dawn long before it was too polluted for life in a physical body to continue. However that might be, some of them had left behind odds and ends of heavy metal and even bonded yellowite, and those could harm the germ-plasm of a house. Had they done it deliberately, or out of laziness? One would wish to believe the latter, but certain rumors now current about their behavior hinted at sabotage....
The girl pried herself loose from the branch, exuding shame from every pore. Fraij gave her a luscious fruit, and she gulped it down greedily; as though it were transfusing energy directly into her tubules-which it should, given that Ugant's home had been designed by some of the finest biologists of modern times-she shifted into a mode of pure embarrassment.
Touched, Ugant settled beside her and uttered words of comfort. And continued as she showed signs of reacting:
“You're not one of Wam's students? No? So why did you come all the way from Hulgrapuk?”
“To hear you! But I had to run away from home to do it.”
“Why so?”
“Because my parents are crazy.”
“What do you mean by that?”-with a look of alarm aimed at Wam.
“Their names are Whelwet and Yaygomitch. Do you need to know any more?”
On the point of reaching for another clump of funqi, Wam settled back on her branch and uttered a whistle of dismay.
“Even you must have heard of those two, Ugant! Of all the pernicious pith-rotted idiots...!”
“But she didn't identify them in her message,” Ugant muttered. “Chybee-you are called Chybee, aren't you?”
Excited, she tried to rise, but lacked pressure. “So you did get my note! I was afraid it had been lost! You never answered it, did you?”
Fraij said, “Girl, if you knew how many messages the professor gets every bright-!”
“That will do, Fraij,” Ugant interrupted. “Chybee, I promise that if I'd only realized who your family are, I'd... Well, I can scarcely say I'd have come running, but I would certainly have told Wam about you.”
“But-!” She sank back, at a loss. For the first time it was possible to see how pretty she was, her torso sleek and sturdy, her claws and mandibles as delicate as a flyet's. Her maw still crowded, she went on, “But I always thought you and Professor Wam were enemies! When I heard you were giving a lecture and she had agreed to reply to you, I couldn't really believe it, but I decided I had to be present, because you're both on the other side from my parents. They are crazy, aren't they? Please tell me they're crazy! And then explain how you two can be acting like friends right here and now! I mean,” she concluded beseechingly, “you don't smell like enemies to each other!”
There was a long pause. At last Wam sighed. “How wonderful it is to meet somebody who, for the most naive of reasons, has arrived at a proper conclusion. I thought the species was extinct. Shall we attempt the real debate we might have had but for your mistake in inviting Aglabec?”
For a moment Ugant seemed on the verge of explosion; then she relaxed and grinned. “I grant I didn't bargain for the presence of his fanatical followers and their trick of trying to shake the audience off the branches. I'm not used to that kind of thing. With respect to your superior experience of it, I'll concur. Who's to speak first?”
All of a sudden the enormous bower became small and intimate. Far above, the roof continued to flutter, though less vigorously because-as Chybee's own weather-sense indicated-rain was on the way, and shortly it might be called on to seal up completely. But, to her amazement and disbelief, here were two globally famous experts in the most crucial of all subjects preparing to rehearse for her alone the arguments she had staked everything to hear.
She wanted to break down, plead to be excused such a burden of knowledge. But was she to waste all the misery she had endured to get here? Pride forbade it. She took another fruit and hoped against hope that it would be enough to sustain her through her unsought ordeal.
Wam was saying, “We don't disagree that it should shortly be possible to launch a vehicle into orbit.”
“It could be done in a couple of years,” Ugant confirmed, accepting more food from one of Fraij's aides.
“We don't disagree that, given time, we could launch not just a vehicle but enough of them to create a self-contained, maneuverable vessel capable of carrying a representative community of the folk with all that's needed to support them for an indefinite period.”
“Ah! Now we come to the nub of the problem. Do we have the time you're asking to be given? Already you're talking about committing the entire effort of the planet for at least scores of years, maybe scores-of-scores!” Ugant made a dismissive gesture. “That's why I claim that our optimal course is to use what's within our grasp to launch not interplanetary landing-craft, but containers of specially modified organisms tailored to the conditions we expect to encounter on at least Swiftyouth and Sunbride, and maybe on Steadyman and Stolidchurl, or their satellites, which if all else failed could be carried to their destinations by light-pressure from the sun. If then, later on, we did succeed in launching larger vehicles, we could at least rely on the atmospheres and biospheres of those planets being changed towards our own norm, so-”
“But you can't guarantee that such a second-best project would enlist enough support to-”
“No more can you guarantee that we have as much time as you need for your version! According to the latest reports, there's a real risk of a major meteorite strike within not more than-”
“Stop! Stop!” Chybee shouted, horrified at her temerity but unable to prevent herself. “You don't know what you're talking about, either of you!”
Fraij tried to silence her, but, oddly enough, both Wam and Ugant looked at her with serious attention.
“Let her explain,” the former said at length.
Thus challenged, Chybee strove to fill her mantle for a proper answer, but could not. She merely husked, “You keep assuming that everybody else is going to fall in with your ideas, whichever of you wins the argument. It doesn't work that way! The people I've met at my home-my parents themselves-are too crazy to listen! I know! Oh, I'm sure it's wonderful to dream of other planets and other civilizations, but I don't believe they exist! Why not? Because of what you and other scientists have taught me! Of course, it's folk like you that my parents call crazy,” she appended in an ironical tone. “One thing I am sure of, though, is what I said before. You don't know what you're talking about... or at any rate you aren't talking about what most other people are prepared to do!”
There was dead silence for a while. Fraij seemed prepared to pitch Chybee bodily out of the house, and she herself cringed at her audacity. But, at long last, Wam and Ugant curved into identical smiles.
“Out of the mantles of young'uns...” Ugant said, invoking a classical quotation. “Wam, I've often felt the same way. Now I have an idea. If she's willing, could we not make good use of someone who has impeccable family connections with a psychoplanetary cult, yet who believes in my views instead of theirs?”
“Whose?”-with a disdainful curl.
“Mine, or yours, or both! You'd rather tolerate my victory than theirs, and I'd rather tolerate yours! Don't argue! For all we know, ours may be the only life-bearing planet in the universe, and it's in danger!”
“I see what you mean,” Wam muttered, just as the long-threatened rain began to drum on the roof. “Very well, it's worth a try.”
III
For a good while Chybee paid little or no attention to what was being said. The rushing sound of the rain soothed her as it flowed over the tight-folded leaves of the house and found its way through countless internal and external channels not only to the roots of its bravetrees but also to the elegant little reservoirs disposed here and there to supply its luminants and food-plants... and sundry other secondary growths whose purpose she had no inkling of.
Maybe, she thought, if her parents had enjoyed more of this sort of luxury they would not have gone out of their minds. Maybe it was bitterness at the failure of every venture they attempted which had ultimately persuaded them to spurn the real world in favor of vain and empty imaginings. Yet she and her sibs had shared their hardships, and clung nonetheless to the conviction that plans must be made, projects put into effect, to prevent life itself from being wiped out when the sun and its attendant planets entered the vast and threatening Major Cluster.
Then, quite suddenly, normal alertness returned thanks to the food she had eaten, and memory of what Wam and Ugant had proposed came real to her. She could not suppress a faint cry. At once they broke off and glanced at her.
“Of course, if you're unwilling to help...” Wam said in a huffy tone.
“But you're drafting a scheme for my life without consulting me!” Chybee countered.
“A very fair comment!” Ugant chuckled. “Forgive us, please. But you must admit that you haven't vouchsafed much about yourself. So far we know your name and your parents', and the fact that you've run away from them. Having got here, have you changed your mind? Are you planning on returning home?”
“I wouldn't dare!”
“Would your parents want it noised abroad that their budling-? One moment: do they have others?”
“Two, older than I am. But they went away long ago. Until very recently I thought of them as having betrayed the family. Now I've done the same myself. And I can't even pity my budder for losing all her offspring. She didn't lose them. She drove them out!”
“So what plans do you have for yourself now?”
“None,” Chybee admitted miserably.
“And your parents would not want it published that all their young'uns have rejected them and their ideas?”
“I'm sure they'll do their utmost to conceal it!”
“Then it all fits together,” Ugant said comfortably. “I can help you, and you can help me. Were you studying at Hulgrapuk?”
“I should have been”-with an angry curl. “But Whelwet wouldn't let me choose the subjects I wanted, archeology and astronomy. She kept saying I must learn something useful, like plant improvement. Of course, what she was really afraid of was that I might find out too much about reality for her to argue against.”
Wam moved closer. “I've never met any adult dupes of the psycho-planetary movement, only a clawful of fanatical young'uns. How do you think it's possible for grown-ups to become dreamlost, when famine is a thing of the past?”
Conscious of the flattery implicit in having so distinguished a scientist appeal to her, Chybee mustered all her wits. “Well, many people claim, of course, that it's because some poisons can derange the pith. But I think my parents brought it on themselves. They never let their budlings go hungry; I must say that in their defense. Throughout my childhood, though, they were forever denying themselves a proper diet because of some scheme or other that they wanted to invest in, which was going to be a wild success and enable us to move to a grand house like this one, and then somehow everything went wrong, and...” She ended with a shrug of her whole mantle.
“In other words,” Wam said soberly, “they were already predisposed to listen when Aglabec started voicing his crazy notions.”
“They didn't get them from Aglabec. At least, I don't think they did. Someone called Imblot-”
“She was one of my students!” Ugant exclaimed. “And one of the first to desert me for Aglabec. She-No, I won't bore you with the full story. But I do remember that Aglabec quarreled with her, and she left Slah and... Well, presumably she wound up in Hulgrapuk. Wam, have you padded across her?”
“I seem to recognize the name,” the latter grunted. “By now, though, there are so many self-styled teachers and dream-leaders competing as to who can spin the most attractive spuder-web of nonsense... I guess Whelwet and Yaygomitch have disciples of their own by this time, don't they?”
“Yes!” Chybee clenched her claws. “And it's tubule-bursting to see how decent ordinary people with their whole lives ahead of them are being lured into a dead-end path where they are sure to wind up deliberately starving themselves in search of madder and madder visions! They're renouncing everything-all hope of budding, all chance of a secure existence-because of this dreamlost belief that they can enter into psychic contact with other planets!”
“Would I be right in suggesting,” Ugant murmured, “that it was as the result of one particular person falling into this trap that you decided to run away?”
Chybee stared at her in disbelief. At last she said gustily, “I could almost believe that you have psychic powers yourself, Professor. The answer's yes. And I was so shocked by what was happening to him, I just couldn't stand it anymore. So here I am.”
“You yourself accept,” Ugant mused aloud, almost as though Chybee had not made her last confession, “that the planets are uninhabitable by any form of life as we know it.” Raising a claw, she forestalled an interruption from Wam. “Granting that we don't yet know enough about life to say it cannot evolve under any circumstances but our own, at least the chance of other intelligent species existing close at claw is very slim. Correct?”
Wam subsided, and Chybee said uncertainly, “Well, we have discovered that Sunbride must be much too hot, let alone the asteroids that orbit closer to the sun, which are in any case too small to hold an atmosphere. And even Swiftyouth is probably already too cold. Some people think they've detected seasonal changes there, but they might as easily be due to melting icecaps moistening deserts during the summer as to any form of life. And what we know of the larger planets, further out, suggests that they are terribly cold and there are gigantic storms in their immensely deep gas-mantles. Just possibly their satellites might provide a home for life, but the lack of solar radiation makes it so unlikely... Oh, Professor! This is absurd! I'm talking as though I were trying to persuade some of my parents' dupes not to commit themselves to dream-ness, whereas you know all this much better than I!”
“You have no idea how reassuring it is to find a person like you,” Ugant sighed. “If you'd followed formal courses in astronomy, you might just be parroting what your instructors had told you. But you said you haven't. Yet you take the result of our studies seriously. Someone is listening, at least.”
“And sometimes I can't help wondering why,” muttered Wam. “Dreams of colorful and exotic alien civilizations are obviously more attractive than dull and boring facts. The giant planets which you, like us, believe to be vast balls of chilly gas-are not they among the favorite playgrounds of the psychoplanetarists?”
“Indeed yes!” Chybee shuddered. “They like them particularly because they are so huge. Thus, when two-well-teachers, or dream-leaders, make contrary claims about the nature of their inhabitants, Imblot can reconcile them with one another on the grounds that on such a vast globe there's room for scores, scores-of-scores, of different species and different cultures.”
“That may be relatively harmless,” Ugant opined. “What frightens me above all is this new yarn that's spreading so rapidly, most likely thanks to a pithstorm on the part of Aglabec himself.”
“You mean the idea that our ancestors were on the verge of spaceflight, so alien creatures hurled the Greatest Meteorite at them?” Wam twisted her mantle in pure disgust. “Yes, I'm worried too at the way it's catching on here. Chybee, had you heard of it in Hulgrapuk?”
“It's very popular there,” the girl muttered. “Just the sort of notion my parents love to claw hold of!”
“Not only your parents,” Ugant said. She turned back to Wam. “I'll tell you what worries me most. I'm starting to suspect that sooner or later projects like yours and mine will be attacked-physically attacked-by people who've completely swallowed this kind of loathsome nonsense and now feel genuinely afraid that if either of us achieves success we can look forward to another hammer-blow from on high.”
“But we have to anyway!” Chybee cried.
“Yes indeed!” Wam said. “That's why it's at once so subtle and so dangerous, and also why Ugant proposes to enlist your help. Will you do as she suggests?”
Chybee searched her memory for details of Ugant's plan, and failed to find them. She had been too distracted during the earlier part of the discussion. At length she said, “Perhaps if you could explain a bit more...?”
“It's very simple.” Ugant hunched forward. “What we don't understand, what we desperately need to understand, is how to prevent the spread of this-this mental disorder. As you mentioned just now, some folk suspect that modern air-pollution has already rendered a counterattack hopeless. Even our ancestors, according to the few records we've managed to excavate or recover from under the sea, realized that tampering with metals can be dangerous to our sanity-not just radioactive metals, either, like stumpium and sluggium, but any which don't occur naturally in chemically reactive form. If I start using too many technical terms, warn me.”
“I understand you fine so far!”
“Oh, I wish there were laqs more like you in Slah, then! But we're trapped by this fundamental paradox: no substance of organic origin can withstand the kind of energy we need to deploy if we're to launch even the most basic vehicle into space. Correct, Wam?”
“I wish I didn't have to agree, but I must,” the other scientist grumbled. “Though I won't accept the view that we've been poisoned into insanity. If that's the case, then our opponents can just as well argue that we too have lost our wits. Hmm?”
“Not so long as we benefit from the best available advice concerning our homes and our diet. But few people share our good fortune-Yes, Chybee?”
“I was thinking only a moment ago that if my parents had been as well off as you, then maybe...” She broke off in embarrassment, but she had given no offense. Ugant was nodding approval.
“One reason why I feel that trying to go the whole way at once is over-risky! We might harm the very people we're most eager to protect from the consequences of their own folly... All right, Wam! I'm not trying to reopen the whole argument! I'm just asking Chybee whether she's willing to act as a spy for us, pretend she's still a dedicated follower of Aglabec and infiltrate the psychoplanetarist movement on our behalf. I won't insist on an immediate answer. Before you return home, I want you to look over my experimental setup. We'll take her along, and leave it to her to judge whether what we're doing justifies our making such a demand.”
IV
In fact, by first bright Chybee had already made up her mind. What alternative lay before her? Even at Hulgrapuk, far smaller than Slah, she had seen too many young people struggling for survival because they had quit the fertile countryside, or life at sea, to seek a more glamorous existence in the urban branchways, ignorant of the fact that in a city every fruit, every funqus, every crotch where one might hope to rest, belonged to somebody else, perhaps with a claim stretching back scores-of-scores of years. Consequently they often fell into the clutches of the psychoplanetarists, who offered them a meager diet (spiked, some claimed, with pith-confusing drugs) in order to recruit yet more worshipful admirers for their fantastic visions. If she could do something to save even a clawful of potential victims-
No: she was too honest to believe the yarn she was spinning herself. There was nothing impersonal or public-spirited about the decision she had reached. It stemmed partly from the fact that she was terrified she might otherwise creep home in a year or two's time, dreamlost from hunger and misery, reduced to just another of what Wam had termed “dupes,” and partly from... She hesitated to confront her knowledge, but at last she managed it.
She wanted revenge, precisely as Ugant had guessed. She wanted a revenge against all those who had stolen his future from a boy called Isarg.
Before dawn the rain drifted westward. As soon as the sun broached the horizon, creatures she recognized only by descriptions she had heard appeared to groom and cleanse the occupants of the bower: expensive variants of the cleanlickers used in medicine since ancient times. At first she was reluctant, but they exuded such alluring perfumes that she was soon won over, and readily submitted to their mindless yet enjoyable attentions.
A little later Fraij announced that Ugant's scudder was ready for them, and a storm-pulse afflicted Chybee. On the rare occasions when she had ridden one before, it had been in the wild forest around Hulgrapuk; the idea of traversing Slah in competition with so many dolmusqs, haulimals and-come to that-people, alarmed her.
But Ugant was being unbelievably generous and helpful, and it was such a privilege to be in her and Wam's company. As best she might, she controlled her reaction.
She could not, of course, conceal it entirely; her exudates betrayed her. Ugant, however, was affability itself as the beast swung into the interlocking tree-crowns and headed east, adroitly dodging other traffic without further orders, and her small talk was calmative, at least.
“Is this the first time you've been to Slah? Yes? But perhaps you know the story of how it came about?”
“I'm not sure,” Chybee muttered, thinking how many padlongs they were from the ground. Once beyond the city boundary, things might not be so bad; here, though, everything happened so fast!
“As nearly as we can establish, Slah was once a city of the People of the Sea,” Ugant expounded in a perfectly relaxed tone. “That may sound ridiculous, given how far it now lies above sea-level, but our researches have confirmed what for countless generations was only a folktale. When the Greatest Meteorite hit, the city Voosla was borne many padlonglaqs from the nearest ocean. Naturally the over-pressure killed its inhabitants.
“But by chance enough salt water was carried up with it to fill that valley you see to our left-yes? All the creatures originally composing the city died off too, but their secondary growths flourished thanks not only to the nutriment offered by the carcasses of the barqs and junqs and whatever that it was assembled from, but also to the availability of the same kind of dissolved salts they had been used to before. By the time the temporary lake drained away or was diluted by rainfall, the plants had adapted themselves and spread to occupy much of the area we're now looking down on. Naturally, when the folk started to recover from the effects of the meteorite, this was one of the places they made for first, to see whether anything useful could be found hereabouts. There must have been several brilliant biologists in the community, because some of the food-plants in particular were unique. You've probably been enjoying them all your life without realizing they were rediscovered right here.”
“The changes weren't just brought about by the plants' new environment,” Wam put in. “The radiation flux as the meteorite hit may account for some of them, and sunshine must have been cut off for scores of years by the dust and vapor it threw up. Besides, it's unlikely that there was a single meteorite. The one which moved Slah to its present position was probably the biggest among a full-scale storm. By boiling off part of their mass in the upper air, the others spread metallic poisons clear around the globe. And that could happen again at any time!”
“Ah, we're clearing the edge of the city at last,” Ugant exclaimed. “Stop fretting, Chybee! The air will be a lot fresher from here on, space-budded poisons or not!”
And, still apparently convinced that chitchat was all the girl needed to help her relax, she continued pointing out sights of interest as the scudder hurtled onward, no longer having to make do with the random grip afforded by bravetree branches within Slah itself, where the wear and tear of traffic might lead to accidents if a single overloaded vehicle added too great a strain, but racing along a specially planted line of toughtrees that slanted around a range of gentle hills. Below, morning sun gleamed on a stream diverted and partly canalized to make a route for freight-pitchens, mindlessly plodding from loq to loq with their massive burdens. Now and then flashes showed how they were being overtaken by courier-pitchens, but of course most urgent messages were conveyed these days by nervograp or by air. Above, looming as vast and brilliant as the sparse white clouds, passenger-floaters were gathering for a landfall at Slah: some, Chybee knew, must have crossed three oceans since the beginning of their voyage. And how much air had been gulped into their ever-flexing bellowers to drive them over such colossal distances? If mere interference by the folk could bring about such incredible modifications, then...!
“Is something wrong?” Ugant said suddenly.
“No-But I mean yes!” she exclaimed. “If plants were changed, and... Well, don't they also think that some kinds of animal were exterminated too?”
“It's generally accepted that that's what happened,” Ugant confirmed gravely. “Many fossils have been found that scarcely resemble the species we're familiar with.”
“So what about ourselves?”
The scudder, relieved at having reached open country, was swinging along with a pulsating rhythm; now and then it had to overtake another vehicle, so the rhythm quickened, and occasionally it had to slow because traffic grew too dense for speed. For a while Wam and Ugant seemed to be absorbed by it. If they were exuding pheromones, the wind of their rapid passage carried them away.
Finally, though, Ugant sighed loudly.
“To quote my colleague and rival: I wish I could disagree, but I can't. We were altered by the Greatest Meteorite. We had the most amazing luck, to be candid. Or, putting it another way, our ancestors planned better than they imagined. Would you believe that some of the records we've recovered suggest we were in a fair way to extinction before the meteorite?”
“Ugant!”-in a warning tone from Wam. “Galdu hasn't published her findings yet, and they may be adrift.”
Chybee was feeling light-pithed by now. Never before had she imagined that her idols, the scientists, could argue as fiercely as any psychoplanetarist maintaining that her, or his, version of life on the moons of Stolidchurl must be more accurate than anybody else's.
She said, “Oh, spin your webs for me! You said I was coming along today to make up my own mind!”
But they both took the remark seriously. Ugant said, “If we can't convince her, who can we hope to convince?”
Wam shrank back, abashed. “You're right. And Galdu's primary evidence, at least, does seem convincing.”
“She's a pastudier, remember, working in a field you and I know little about... What it comes to, Chybee, is this.” Adapting herself to the swaying of the scudder as it rose to pass over the lowest point along the line of hills that up to now they had been paralleling, Ugant drew closer. “None of our biologists can see how we could have escaped dying out ourselves unless some genius of the far past foresaw the need to protect us against just such an event as the fall of the Greatest Meteorite. Almost all the large animals on the planet disappeared because they were-like us-symbiotes. The regular adaptive resource of the 'female' sex among them was to become more male. In the end, naturally, this resulted in a zero bud-rate. But because we'd been somehow altered, the process came to a dead stop in the folk. In you and me, that means.”
“Not a complete dead stop,” Wam objected. “Another such calamity, and...!”
“Now you're arguing for Galdu's most extreme ideas!” crowed Ugant. “A moment ago-Still, that's of no significance right now. What is important is that once again young Chybee here has clawed hold of something most people overlook even when they have access to the evidence. I'm impressed by this girl, you know!”
“Save the compliments,” Wam grunted. “Stick to the point she originally set out to make. Yes, Chybee, there was a change in us too, and the only reason we can conceive for it is that some of our ancestors must have arranged it. Compared with that gigantic achievement, what use are our petty undertakings unless they result in the exportation to space of our entire culture?”
“I thought we were going to sink our differences for the time being!” Ugant began.
But Chybee had already burst out, “How? How was it done?”
“We think most of the food-plants we rely on had been modified,” came Ugant's sober answer. “We think they had been so far modified that merely by eating them we arrested part of what until then had been our normal evolutionary adaptation. We think-some people think, in deference to Wam's reservations, but I'm an admirer of Galdu-that had it not been for this most important of all inventions, we would have long ago become extinct. If you and I met one of our male ancestors right now, for instance, we couldn't bud together. We'd been used for generations to believing that evolution took place over countless score-score years. Suddenly it turns out that someone, long ago, must have ensured a change in us such that next tune a crisis of habitability occurred on this planet-”
“Stop! Stop!” Chybee cried, and a moment later added in an apologetic tone, “You did tell me that if you started to use too many technical terms.”
Ugant relaxed with a mantle-wide grin.
“Point well taken,” she murmured. “Well, a crisis of habitability is what follows, for instance, a meteorite fall or an ice-age. What, with deference and respect to our forepadders, we are trying to avoid by creating such research projects as the one you can now see yonder.”
She gestured with one claw, and Chybee turned her eye as the scudder relaxed into a crotch at journey's end. What met it dismayed and baffled her. Across a broad and level plain flanked by low hills, not familiar plants but objects unlike anything she had encountered before extended nearly to the skyline.
“All this has been created,” Ugant said, “because what saved us last time may all too easily not save us twice.”
V
“How much do you know about the dual principles of flight?” Ugant inquired of Chybee as they padded between countless huge and glistening globes, each larger than any unmodified bladder she had ever seen. Because pumplekins were forcing them full of pure wetgas, and there was inevitable leakage-though it was not poisonous-their surroundings were making the girl's weather-sense queasy. Sensing her distress, the professor went on to spell out information most of which in fact she knew.
“The first clues must have come from cloudcrawlers so long ago we have no record of it. Archeological records indicate that we also owe to the study of natural floaters the discovery that air is a mixture of several elements. Of course, it was a long time before the lightest could be separated out by more efficient means than occur in nature. And floaters drift at the mercy of the wind, so it again took a considerable while before we invented bellowers like those over there”-with a jab of one claw towards a bank of tubular creatures slumped in resting posture on a wooden rack. “How did you travel from Hulgrapuk to Slah?”
“I flew,” Chybee told her, wide-eyed with wonder.
“So you've seen them in operation, gulping air and tightening so as to compress it to the highest temperature they can endure, and then expelling it rearward. We got to that principle by studying the seeds emitted by certain rock-plants. But of course it's also how we swim, isn't it? And there's even a possibility that our remotest ancestors may have exploited the same technique by squirting air from under their hind mantles. You know we evolved from carnivores that haunted the overgrowth of the primeval forest?”
“My parents don't believe in evolution,” Chybee said.
“Ridiculous!” Wam exclaimed. “How can anybody not?”
“According to them, intelligence came into existence everywhere at the same tune as the whole universe. On every world but ours, mind-power controls matter directly. That's how Swiftyouth and Sunbride hurled the Greatest Meteorite at us. Our world alone is imperfect. They even try to make out that other planets' satellites don't sparkle or show phases, but are always at the full.”
Wam threw up her claws in despair. “Then they are insane! Surely even making a model, with a clump of luminants in the middle to represent the sun, would suffice to-”
“Oh, I tried it once!” Chybee interrupted bitterly. “I was punished by being forbidden to set pad outside our home for a whole moonlong!”
“What were you supposed to learn from that?”
“I suppose: not to contradict my budder...” Chybee gathered her forces with an effort. “Please go on, Professor Ugant. I'm most interested.”
With a doubtful glance at her, as though suspecting sarcasm, Ugant complied.
“What, though, you might well say, does our ability to fly through the air have to do with flying into vacant space? After all, we know that even the largest and lightest floaters we can construct, with the most powerful bellowers we can breed to drive them, can never exceed a certain altitude. So we must resort to something totally new. And there it is.”
Again following her gesture, Ugant saw a long straight row of unfamiliar trees, boughs carefully warped so as to create a continuous series of lings from which hung worn but shiny metal plates and scores of nervograp tendrils.
“Ah!” Wam said. “I've seen pictures of that. Isn't it where you test your drivers?”
“Correct. And the storage bladders beyond are the ones we had to devise specially to contain their fuel. What can you show to match them?”
Wam shrugged. “As yet, we've concentrated less on this aspect of the task than on what we regard as all-important: eventual survival of the folk in space.”
“But what's the good of solving that problem,” Ugant snapped, “if you don't possess a means to send them there?”
“With you working on one half of the job, and me on the other...” Wam countered disprongingly, and Ugant had to smile as they moved on towards the curiously distorted trees. Hereabouts there was a stench of burning, not like ordinary fire, but as though something Chybee had never encountered had given off heat worse than focused sunlight. Under the warped trees there was no mosh such as had cushioned their pads since leaving the scudder; indeed, the very texture of the soil changed, becoming hard-becoming crisp.
“You're in luck,” Ugant said suddenly, gazing along the tree-line to its further end and pointing out a signal made by someone waving a cluster of leaves. “There's a test due very shortly. Come on, and I'll introduce you to Hyge, our technical director.”
Excitedly Chybee hastened after her companions. They led her past a house laced about with nervograps, which challenged them in a far harsher tone than Ugant's home, but the professor calmed it with a single word. Some distance beyond, a score of young people were at work under the direction of a tall woman who proved to be Hyge herself, putting finishing touches to a gleaming cylinder in a branch-sprung cradle. It contained more mass of metal than Chybee had ever seen; she touched it timidly to convince herself that it was real.
In a few brief words Ugant summed up the purpose of their visit, and Hyge dipped respectfully to Wam.
“This is an honor, Professor! I've followed your research for years. Ugant and I don't always see eye to eye, but we do share a great admiration for your pioneering experiments in spatial life-support. How are you getting on with your attempt to create a vacuum?”
“Fine!” was Wam's prompt answer. “But unless and until we resolve our other differences, I don't foresee that we shall work together. Suppose you continue with your test? It may impress me so much that... Well, you never know.”
Smiling, Hyge called her assistants back to the house, while Ugant whispered explanations to Chybee.
“To drive a vehicle those last score padlonglaqs out of the atmosphere, there's only one available technique. If there isn't any air to gulp and squirt out, then you have to take along your own gas. We borrowed the idea from certain sea-creatures which come up to the surface, fill their bladders with air, and then rely on diving to compress it to the point where it's useful. When they let it go, it enables them to pounce on their prey almost as our forebudders must have done.”
“I don't like to be reminded that our ancestors ate other animals,” Chybee confessed.
“How interesting! I wonder whether that may account for some of the reaction people like your parents display when confronted by the brutal necessity of recycling during a spaceflight... But we can discuss that later. Right now you need to understand that what Hyge has set up for testing is a driver full of two of the most reactive chemicals we've ever discovered. When they're mixed, they combust and force out a mass of hot gas. This propels the cylinder forward at enormous speed. Our idea is to lift such a cylinder-with a payload of adapted spores and seeds-to the greatest altitude a floater can achieve. Then, by using the special star-seekers we've developed, we can orient it along the desired flight-path, and from there it will easily reach orbital height and velocity.”
“But scaling it up to carry what we'll need for actual survival out there is-” Wam began.
“Out of the question!” Ugant conceded in a triumphant tone. “Now will you agree that our best course is to-?”
Hyge cut in. “Scaling up is just a matter of resources. Save your disputes until after we find out whether our new budling works! Don't look at the jet! Slack down to tornado status! Keep your mandibles and vents wide open! The overpressure from this one will be fierce!”
And, after checking that the cylinder's course was clear of obstructions and that all the stations from which reports were to be made were functional, she slid back a plank of stiffbark in the control house's floor and imposed her full weight on something Chybee could not clearly see but which she guessed to be a modified form of mishle, one of the rare secondary growths known as flashplants which, after the passage of a thunderstorm, could kill animal prey by discharging a violent spark, and would then let down tendrils to digest the carcass.
Instantly there was a terrible roaring noise. The cylinder uttered a prong of dazzling flame-”Look that way!” Ugant shouted, and when Chybee proved too fascinated to respond, swung her bodily around and made her gaze along the tree-row-and sped forward on a course that carried it exactly through the center of the wooden rings, clearing the metal plates by less than a clawide.
Almost as soon as it had begun, the test was over bar the echoes it evoked from the hills, and a rousing cheer rang out. But it was barely loud enough to overcome the deafness they were all suffering. Chybee, who had not prepared herself for pressure as great as Hyge had warned of, felt as though she had been beaten from crest to pads.
“Oh, I'm glad we were here to witness that,” said Ugant softly. “Wam, aren't you impressed?”
“She should be,” Hyge put in caustically, checking the recordimals connected to the incoming nervograps. “That's the first time our guidimals have kept the cylinder level through every last one of the rings. And if we can repeat that, we'll have no problem aiming straight up!”
“Are you all right, Chybee?” Ugant demanded as she recovered from her fit of euphoria.
“I-uh...” But pretense was useless. “I wasn't ready for such a shock. I was still full of questions. Like: what are the metal plates for?”
“Oh, those,” Hyge murmured. “Well, you see, not even the most sensitive of our detectors can respond to signals emitted by the cylinder as it rushes past faster than sound. If you were standing right near the arrival point, you'd be hit by a sonic blast, a wave of air compressed until it's practically solid. Even this far away it can be painful, can't it? So we had to find a method of translating the impact into something our normal instruments can read. What we do is compress metal plates against shielded nervograp inputs, compensating for the natural elasticity of the trees, which we developed from a species known to be highly gale-resistant-”
She broke off. Chybee had slumped against Ugant.
“Does she need help?” Hyge demanded. “I can send an aide to fetch-”
At the same tune making it clear by her exudates that this would be an unwarrantable interference with her immediate preoccupations.
“No need to worry,” Ugant said softly, comforting the girl with touch after gentle touch of her claws. “She's a bit distraught, that's all. Wam and I are at fault; on the way here we should have explained more clearly what we were going to show her.”
“Yes, I'm all right,” Chybee whispered, forcing herself back to an upright posture, though lower than normal. “I just decided that all your efforts mustn't go to waste. So I'm willing and eager to do what Ugant wants.”
“What's that?” Hyge inquired with a twist of curiosity as her assistants started to arrive with the first of the non-remote readings.
“You'll find out,” Ugant promised. “And with luck it may make the future safe for sanity. If it does, of course-well, then, the name of Chybee will be famous!”
VI
Here, houses and food-plants alike were neglected and ill-doing, surviving as best they could on what garbage was thrown to rot at their roots. Many rain-channels were blocked and nobody had bothered to clear them, allowing precious growths to die off. Even a heavy storm might not suffice to wash away all the stoppages; several were sprouting weeds whose interlocking tendrils would hold against any but the most violent onslaught of water. There were scores of people in sight, most of them young, but with few exceptions they were thin and slack, and their mantles were patched with old or the scars of disease.
Chybee almost cried out in dismay. She had thought things bad enough at Hulgrapuk, but in that far smaller city there was no district which had been so completely taken over by the psychoplanetarists. How could anybody bear to live here, let alone come sight-seeing as that well-fed couple yonder were obviously doing?
She caught a snatch of their conversation. “It's a different life-style,” the woman was saying. “Simpler, nearer to nature, independent of things like nervograps and scudders and luxury imports. You have to admire the underlying principle.”
Preening a little as he noticed Chybee looking at him, the man retorted, “If living the simple life means you have to put up with all sorts of loathsome diseases, I'd rather settle for the modern way.”
“Come now, you must admit that it's a devastatingly attractive notion.”
Still arguing, they drifted on along the branchways.
But the woman was right. There was something subtly alluring about this run-down quarter of Slah, and the reason for it was all around them. The air was permeated with the pheromones of people experiencing utter certainty. A single breath was enough to convey the message. Here, the aroma indicated, one might find refuge from constant warnings about how any dark or bright might bring just such another meteorite as had carried an ocean-going city far inland to create the foundations of modern Slah. (How deep underpad were those foundations now? Some of the oldest houses' roots were alleged to stretch for padlonglaqs, though of course not directly downward...)
And, inevitably, the path to that sense of security lay through hunger. Why should anyone worry about tending foot-plants, then? Why should anyone care if the rain-channels got stopped up? Why should anyone object if a patch of mold started growing on her or his mantle? It all liberated precious dreams which could be recounted to innumerably eager listeners. It all helped to reduce the intolerable burden of reality.
Moreover, there was an extra benefit to be gained from moving to this squalid district. It was the lowest-lying part of Slah, sheltered by thickly vegetated hills, and the prevailing wind rarely did more than stir the pool of air it trapped. Little by little, the pheromone density was building up to the point where feedback could set in. Some tune soon now its inhabitants might conceivably cease to argue about the content of their visions. No longer would there be endless disputes about the shape and language of the folk in Stumpalong. Gradually the chemical signals they were receiving would unify their mental patterns. And then: mass collective insanity...
It had never happened in living memory, but it was theoretically possible. Archeological records indicated that certain now-vanished epidemic diseases had had a similar effect in the far past, possibly accounting for the collapse of once-great cities. All this and more had been explained to Chybee by Ugant and her friends after Wam's return to Hulgrapuk: Glig the biologist, Galdu the pastudier, Airm the city councilor... the last, the most pitiable, because she was worn out from trying to persuade her colleagues that the psychoplanetarist quarter represented a real danger to the rest of the citizens.
What a topsy-turvy universe Chybee's prong-of-the-moment decision had brought her into, where she could pity a major public figure in the world's greatest metropolis! Yet how could she not react so when she listened to what Airm had to complain about?
“They always think it's other people's budlings who wind up in that slum!” she had explained over and over. “Well, I grant that's been the case up till now. Young'uns from prosperous and comfortable homes are relatively immune. What are they going to do, though, if this threatened mass hysteria actually sets in? The likeliest effect will be to make all the victims decide they have to drive the rest of us around to their way of thinking, correct? And how could they achieve that goal? By spoiling other people's food! By cutting off nutrients and water from their homes, by fouling cargoes at the docks, even by spreading drugs which suppress normal appetite! Worse yet, they could poison our haulimals, and how could we feed everybody without them? If Slah attempted to support its citizens off its internal resources, we'd all be dreamlost within a moon-long! What are we going to do?”
Hearing that, the full magnitude of what she was committed to came home to Chybee. A few brights ago, all she had thought of was escape from her crazy parents. Now, because of who her parents were, she was embarquing on a course that might mean the difference between collapse and survival for the planet's most populous city. She could scarcely credit how completely, as a result of Ugant's unpremeditated suggestion, people were coming to rely on her.
Was she equal to the task? She greatly feared she was not; nothing had prepared her for such immense responsibility. True, she had chided her budder again and again for continuing to treat her like a budling when she believed she was grown-up enough to think for herself. What a world of difference there was, though, between the ambition and the reality!
But the reality was the buried ruin of Voosla, deep beneath the branchways scudders swarmed along. The reality was the corpses of its inhabitants that had rotted to fertilize evolving plants. The reality was that modern Slah could be overrun by scores-of-scores of madfolk. The reality was that unless Ugant and Hyge and Wam saw their efforts crested with success life itself might be abolished by the mindless workings of celestial chance.
She had not so far found words to explain what had overcome her while watching Hyge's driver being demonstrated. In her most secret pith, though, she had already started to compare it with what her parents, and their psychoplanetarist friends, called “stardazzle”-a moment of total conviction after which one could never be the same.
At its simplest, she had abruptly decided that so much effort and ingenuity, dedicated to so worthwhile a goal, must not be allowed to go to waste because of a bunch of dreamlost fools.
Hidden under her mantle was a bunch of leaves which, so Glig had assured her, would protect her against the insidious effect of the local pheromones. She slipped one into her mandibles as she reviewed heir immediate task. They wanted her to ingratiate herself with the psychoplanetarists; she was to establish what food they ate and what if any drugs they used, and bring away samples not just of those but, if possible, mantle-scrapings or other cells from their very bodies.
Ugant had been blunt. She had said, “If necessary accept a bud from one of them! Embryonic cells are among the most sensitive of all. Glig can rid you of it later without even a scar, if that worries you”-glancing down at the two bud-marks on her own torso. “But that would help us beyond measure in determining how close we are to disaster.”
Chybee hoped against hope it wouldn't come to that...
Well, she had stood here gazing about long enough. Now she must act. Presumably she ought to start by getting into conversation with somebody. But who? Most of those nearby were clearly lost in worlds of their own. Over there, for example: a girl about her own age, very slowly stripping the twigs off a dying branch and putting them one by one into her mandibles. She looked as though, once having settled to her task, she might never rise again.
And to her left: a boy trying to twist his eye around far enough to inspect his mantle which, as Chybee could see-but he couldn't-was patched with slimy green and must be hurting dreadfully.
She knew, though, what kind of answer she would get were she to offer help. She had seen similar cases at home. Her parents even admired young'uns like that, claiming that they were making progress along the path that led to mind being freed from matter, so that it could exert total power instead of merely moving a perishable carcass. She had often angered them by asking why, if that were so, they themselves didn't go out and rub up against the foulest and most disease-blotched folk they could find.
She tried not to remember that by now Isarg might all too easily have wound up in a similar plight.
So she left the boy to his endless futile attempts to view his own back, and moved along the branchway. The pheromones grew stronger with every padlong.
Abruptly she grew aware that people were staring at her. It wasn't surprising. At Ugant's she had enjoyed the best diet of her life, and she was tall and plump-too much so, in fact, to suit the role she was supposed to adopt. Who could believe she was a dedicated psychoplanetarist when she was in this condition?
She clung desperately to her recollection of how well favored Aglabec had appeared at Ugant's house. More than once, thinking back over his appearance, she had wondered whether he was sharing his followers' privations. If not, did that imply that he was crazy for some other reason? Was he spreading his lies for personal power and gain? If only one of the scientists she had met at Ugant's had broached the subject... But none had, and she was too timid to suggest the idea herself.
Suddenly she wanted to flee. It was too late. Three young'uns-two girls and a boy-detached themselves from the group who had been looking at her with vast curiosity and approached in such a way as to cut off her retreat. She summoned all her self-control.
“Hello! My name's Chybee and I'm from Hulgrapuk. Maybe you heard tell of my parents Whelwet and Yaygomitch? They sent me here to dig into a report they picked up off the wind, about how it was the folk of Swiftyouth and Sunbride that threw the Greatest Meteorite at us. I can trade information about life on Sluggard's moons for fuller details.”
She curled her mantle into an ingratiating posture and waited for their response.
It came in the form of excitement. One of the girls said, “I didn't know Sluggard had any moons!”
“Sure it does!” the boy countered. “Much too small to see, but there they are! Five, right?”-to Chybee.
Ugant and her friends had briefed Chybee carefully. “Only four. What they thought was a fifth turned out to be last year's red comet on its way to us.”
“I made contact with the folk on that comet!” the other girl declared.
How can anyone be so crazy as to believe that comets are inhabited? But Chybee kept such thoughts to herself as far as her exudants allowed; at least the all-pervading pheromones masked most of them.
“Well, if your budder is Whelwet,” the first girl said, “I know who'll want to talk to you. Come with us. We're on our way to meet with Aglabec himself!”
Oh, NO!
But there was no gainsaying them; they fell in on either side like an escort and swept her along.
VII
At least the leaves Glig had provided were working. Chybee had no idea what they were, but the scientists of Slah had many secrets. Not only did they protect against the terrifying pheromones surrounding her; they seemed also to mask her own exudations. And that too was terrifying, in a way. It was a popular pastime for younglings at Hulgrapuk and elsewhere to reenact stories from the legendary past, but only the very young could so far submerge themselves in a false identity as to make each other and their audience believe in the roles they were playing. As soon as they started to secrete adult odors, the illusion waned.
But suppose adults too could fake such a transformation. Suppose, for instance, Aglabec had figured out a way...?
She wanted not to think about him, for fear of betraying her imposture, but her companions kept chattering on with mad enthusiasm, saying how he must be the greatest male teacher since Awb. Privately, Chybee did not believe Awb had ever existed. She had often been punished by her parents for saying so. If she were to voice a similar opinion right now, though, she could surely look forward to something worse than the penalties meted out to a budling. What if Aglabec were to recognize her from the meeting at Ugant's? She could only reassure herself that there had been too many people present for anybody to single out one person's trace, and try and believe that he would have refused on principle to register what she said.
Struggling to divert the conversation along another path, she demanded what the trio's names were. The replies added to her dismay.
“I'm Witnessunbride,” stated the first girl.
“And I, Cometaster!” declared the other.
While the boy said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, “Startoucher!” He added with curiosity, “Do Chybee and Whelwet and Yaygomitch have arcane meanings? At Slah we discard our old names after entering the knowledge state.”
But before Chybee could reply, Witnessunbride rounded on him. “And your new one is ridiculous! I could cite five-score of us who know more about what goes on under other stars than you do! Don't take him seriously, Chybee! But how and why did you choose your new name?”
Chybee was briefly at a loss. Then inspiration struck. She said with contempt she did not need to feign, “Some of us, including me and my parents, felt no call to change our names, because they turned out to have significance in the speech of other worlds.”
Impressed, Cometaster said, “And yours means...?”
With stiff dignity, Chybee answered, “Those who attain enlightenment will recognize its purport in due time.”
The other three exchanged glances.
“Aglabec is going to be very interested in you,” said Witnessunbride. “He's the only other person I ever heard say anything like that. And the only other person so advanced he can contact other planets without needing to fast. That is, assuming you got your knowledge about Sluggard direct. Did you? Or were you just told it by your budder or someone?”
Chybee was so taken aback by the audacity of Aglabec's excuse for being in better fettle than his disciples, she could not think of a suitable answer. Luckily they mistook her silence for wounded pride.
“Hurry up!” Startoucher said. “It's nearly sunset!”
And, hastening towards the fringe of this decrepit quarter, he explained how it was that he and his friends were going to meet Aglabec in person.
“Every full moon, unless he's traveling to spread his knowledge, he returns to us, going from home to home to visit his oldest and most loyal followers. Sometimes, when he's due to leave for a long trip, sick people choose to liberate their minds in his presence, for fear of never seeing him again. Isn't that marvelous?”
To liberate-? Oh. Chybee hoped against hope that Glig's leaves would mask the signs of her nausea. Hastily she said, “How did you earn your name?”
“Witnessunbride is jealous of it,” Startoucher said with a pout of his mantle. “But I'm fully entitled! Aglabec told me so-he said there are going to be a lot more cases like mine, people who start getting knowledge from other stars instead of just our local planets. Well, I mean I must have done! None of what I see and hear matches with what other people get from Sunbride, or Swiftyouth, or Stolidchurl, or anywhere! Unless, of course-”
He broke off, while Chybee wondered how anyone could be deluded by so transparently silly an explanation. But it was politic to seem interested. She said, “Unless what?”
“I was going to say: unless it comes from somewhere like the moons of Sluggard. But if that were so, then Aglabec would have told me, wouldn't he?”
Much relieved, he hurried on in advance of the group, announcing that they were almost at their destination and it looked as though Aglabec must already have arrived, since nobody was outside watching out for him.
Oh, why could these people not have been on their way to a meeting where she could melt into the crowd? Inside a house, how could she disguise her true detestation of Aglabec? How could she keep up the pretense that she and her parents were still on good terms?
She would simply have to try.
The house was a little better cared for than most in the area. In its main bower Aglabec rested in a curved crotch, surrounded by fervent admirers. He acknowledged the late arrivals with a courteous dip; if his gaze rested longer on Chybee than the others, that could be ascribed to her being a stranger and much better nourished than the rest... except himself.
“As I was about to say before you came in,” he stated in resonant tones, “it always does my pith good to learn how many more people are coming around to the view that we must not and dare not allow scientists to persist in their crazy attempts to launch artificial moons and even space-going cities. They are, of course, impervious to reason; it's futile to warn them that they risk forcing our planetary neighbors to act against us in self-defense. I know! I've tried, and I haven't yet given up, but it's a weary task... Scientists they call themselves!”-with vast contempt “Yet they don't appear to realize how dangerous it would be to convey life from one planet to another. Some of them are actually plotting to do precisely that: to export bacteria and other organisms to Swiftyouth and Sunbride, to infect them, to contaminate them! How would they like it if the prong were in the other claw? Luckily for us, all the planetfolk we've contacted so far seem to be cognizant of the risks. They would never dream of doing such a thing, would they?”
Able to relax a little now that it was plain that Aglabec did not after all remember her, Chybee joined in the murmur of agreement which greeted his declaration. Witnessunbride, to her surprise, did not, and Aglabec inquired why.
“You did once say,” the girl ventured, “that next tune we try to fly into space we can look forward to being stopped not by another gigantic meteorite but perhaps something subtler, like a plague.”
“Ah, I'm glad that registered. My compliments on your excellent recollection. Yes, I did say that. Moreover a number of our comrades have reinforced me, have they not? There is, however, a great moral difference between seeding organisms into space merely to conduct a blind and futile experiment, and doing so with infinite reluctance in order to prevent invasion from another world. What point is there, anyhow, in traveling through space? It would be absurdly dangerous; it would be terribly slow, and living in such confinement-even assuming we can survive in the absence of gravity, which has not been proved-would be a strain on anybody's sanity. What purpose would it serve to deliver a briqload of lunatics to another world? In any case, those of us who have discovered how to make mental voyages have chosen the path that avoids all such perils. If not instantaneously, then at speeds which exceed that of light itself, we can find ourselves on virtually any planet, any moon, we choose, to be greeted by the inhabitants as honored guests, because we understand and accept the reasons why we must not make a physical journey. If the discipline we have to endure in order to achieve our goal is harsh, so be it. Once we have been stardazzled, the need for it dies away, and we can enjoy the best not of 'both' worlds but of as many as we like! I emphasize that because I notice among us a stranger who seems unwilling to enter upon the pathway of privation.”
All eyes turned on Chybee, who mustered maximum self-control. She was saved from immediate speech, though, by Startoucher.
“She's already been 'dazzled! She can tell us about life on Sluggard's moons! I never met anyone who's been in contact with those folk before-except you, of course,” he added deferentially. “And she came all the way from Hulgrapuk specially to find out about how it was Sunbride and Swiftyouth that hurled the Greatest Meteorite at us.”
“Halgrapuk,” Aglabec repeated, his voice and attitude abruptly chill. “Now, that is a city I have little truck with. To my vast regret, the traitor Imblot, whom some of you may remember, who rebelled against me on the grounds that I was a 'mere male,' has established a certain following there. It would not in the least surprise me if by now she had persuaded a clawful of ignorant dupes that there is no need to fast, or cultivate the welcome assistance of a moldy mantle, in order to attain the knowledge state. But, as you know very well, it is granted only to a dedicated few to learn that mind is all and matter is nothing. It is dependence on the material world which blinds us to this central truth. Our luxury homes, our modern transport and communications, our telescopes and our recordimals and everything we prize in the ordinary way-those are the very obstacles that stand between us and enlightenment. If they did not, why, then there would be enough mental force in this very bower to put a stop to what the so-called scientists are doing!”
He hunched forward. “Who are you, girl? By what right do you claim to have been stardazzled?”
Terrified, Chybee could do nothing but concentrate on masking her reactions. With a puzzled glance at her, Cometaster said, “Her name is Chybee and her parents are Whelwet and Yaygomitch. At least that's what she told us.”
“You're a long way from enlightenment, then, you three, despite having dared to take new names!” Aglabec quit the crotch he had been resting in and erupted to full height. “I hereby decree you shall renounce them! Revert to what you were called before! It will be a fit punishment for your indescribable stupidity!”
Cringing in dismay, the trio huddled together as though their dream-leader's wrath were a physical storm.
“But-but what have we done that's so bad?” whimpered Startoucher-that-was.
“You brought among us, right here into my presence, a follower and a budling of followers of Imblot! You took her story at mantle value, didn't you? You forgot that I have many enemies, who will stop at nothing to ruin my work!” Aglabec checked suddenly, leaning towards the petrified Chybee.
“I thought so,” he said at last. “I've seen you before, haven't I? You were at Ugant's, at the pointless so-called debate she organized. Very well! Since you've chosen to come here, we shall find out why before we let you go. It may take some tune, but we'll pry the truth out of you whether you like it or not!”
VIII
Being in so much better health, Chybee might have fought free of any two, or even three, of Aglabec's adorers. But, as he himself watched with a cynical air, everyone else in the bower either seized hold of her or moved to block the only way of escape. A tight grasp muffled her intended cry for help... though, in this quarter of Slah, who would have paid attention, let alone come to her rescue?
Half-stifled, wholly terrified, she felt herself being enclosed in some kind of lightproof bag that shut the world away. Still she resisted, but within moments she discovered that it was also airtight, and she must breathe her own exudations. Just enough power of reason remained to warn her that if she went on struggling she would lose consciousness at once, and the sole service she could do herself was to try and work out what her captors intended. She let her body go limp, hoarding the sour-gas in her tubules.
“What shall we do with her?” demanded a voice much like ex-Startoucher's; perhaps it was his, and he was eager to curry new favor with his dream-leader.
“There's a place I know,” replied Aglabec curtly. “Just follow me.”
And Chybee was hoisted up unkindly by three or four bearers and carried bodily away.
If only odors as well as sounds could have penetrated the bag! Then she might have stood some chance of working out where she was being taken. As it was, she had to rely on fragmentary clues: there, the moan of an overloaded draftimal; there, the chant of someone selling rhygote spice; there again, the boastful chatter of a gang of young'uns...
But so much might have identified any part of any large city, and the strain of concentration was too great. Despairing, at the last possible moment she surrendered her grip on awareness, wondering whether she would die.
“Water!” someone shouted, and doused her with it. She opened her maw, but not soon enough. By the time she had registered that she was still alive, reflex had dropped her to the floor, gasping for any drop that might remain. But she lay on an irregular mesh of tree-roots with wide gaps between them; it drained away. There was a stench of ancient rot. What light reached her came from phosphorescent molds, not decent luminants.
Moaning, she tried to raise her eye quickly enough to identify the person who had soaked her. She failed. A barrier of tightly woven branches was being knotted into place above her. A harsh laugh was followed by slithering as her tormentor departed.
But at least she wasn't dead.
Summoning all her remaining energy, Chybee felt for any spongy-soft areas that might have absorbed a little of the water. She found two or three, and though the taint nauseated her, she contrived to squeeze out enough to relieve the dryness of her maw.
By degrees she recovered enough to take stock of her predicament. The roots she was trapped among were so tough there was no hope of clawing or gnawing through them. The sole opening was blocked. Her weather-sense informed her that she was far below the bower where she had encountered Aglabec. There was one and only one explanation which fitted. He had ordered her brought to the deep foundations of Slah, where nobody had lived for scores-of-scores of years. Above her there must be layer upon layer of dead and living houses, totaling such a mass that it amazed her to find this gap had survived without collapsing.
With bitter amusement she realized how fitting his choice had been. Did he not wish to lure everyone into the pit of the dead past, instead of letting the folk expand towards the future?
And those he could not dupe, he would imprison...
Was she close to the outcrop of rock which must account for the existence of this tiny open volume, little wider than she herself was long? She hunted about her for a probe-a twig, anything-and met only slimy decay and tough unbreakable stems.
At that point she realized she was wasting energy. What she needed more than all else was something to eat. Because otherwise...
Oh, it was clear as sunlight. They were going to starve her. When she was as dreamlost as Isarg, they would lay siege to her mind with fawning talk. In the end she would accept passively whatever Aglabec chose to say, until she betrayed Ugant and Hyge and Wam, until-
No! It must not happen! Feverishly she scoured her prison, tasting the foulest patches of rot in the hope that some trace of nourishment might inhere in them... and at last slumped into the least uncomfortable corner, having found not a whit of anything less than utterly disgusting. Somehow she had lost even Glig's protective leaves. She could only hope they hadn't been noticed and identified.
Well, if all else failed, she could gulp down some poisonous mess and cheat Aglabec that way. But she was determined not to let him overcome her hatred of him and all he stood for. She would fight back as long as she could.
And surely, long before she was driven to such straits, Ugant would have started to worry and sent out searchers!
Compacting her body to conserve warmth, for there was a dank chill draught here, redolent of loathsome decay, she set about giving herself instructions for resistance, even though already a hint of anger colored her thoughts when she remembered Ugant so prosperous in her fine home, so ready to enlist a stranger in her cause...
The only way she had to measure time was by the changing air-pressure of successive dawns and sunsets, for as it turned out the person who had been assigned to pour water over her-the absolute minimum needed to keep her alive-was also instructed to do so at random intervals. Sometimes the chilly shower occurred four tunes in a single day; then a whole one might pass without it, and she was almost reduced to begging as she watched, in the wan glow of the molds, how her mantle was shrinking from thirst. Enough of her pride remained thus far to protect her against that humiliation. But she could discern how hunger was taking its toll. At first she had kept careful count of darks and brights; then after a while she was alarmed to realize she no longer knew precisely how long she had been shut up. Her trust in Ugant gave way first to doubt, then to sullen resentment. The pangs of anger multiplied, until it came to seem that the scientist, not Aglabec, was her true captor, because as yet she had not succeeded in locating this secret prison.
Then voices began to whisper to her.
At first she was aware that what she heard formed part of Aglabec's plot. Out of sight behind the mesh of roots must be two or three of his disciples, under orders to confuse her by telling fantastic tales about life in Swiftyouth and Sunbride, Steadyman and Stolidchurl and Sluggard and their multiple moons unknown before the telescope. She called to them, demanding food, and they refused to answer, but kept on with their whispering.
For a while she argued, reciting what astronomers had worked out from the planets' spectra concerning conditions there, inquiring why anyone should believe Aglabec rather than Ugant and her colleagues. At last, when she was so weak she could scarcely raise herself to half normal height, she received an answer.
Someone said, and it could have been Startoucher: “You and all those like you want to deny life. But we affirm it. We share the fiery joy of existence near the sun. We enjoy the frozen beauty of the giant worlds. We know what it means to be weighed down by gravity a score-score-fold, and not to care, because we borrow bodies suited to it. From searing heat to bitter cold, we transcend the dull plain world of every day, and eventually we shall perceive the universe. When our task is done, no one will care if this petty planet is destroyed.”
“The destiny of bodies is to rot,” said another voice. “The destiny of mind is glorious!”
“I'm losing mine!” whimpered Chybee against her will. The confession was greeted with a chuckle, then with silence.
But it didn't last. After she had made one last futile search for something she might eat, new whispering began. This time she could not convince herself there was anybody talking to her. There was only one voice, and it was inside her very pith, and it was her own, so how could she deny what it said? It told her that life must exist everywhere, in an infinite range of guises, and that only a fool could imagine that this was its sole and unique haven. It told her she was guilty of despair, when she needed only to look within her and seek the truth. It echoed and repeated what her parents told their followers, what they had learned from Imblot... but she was a traitor, wasn't she? She'd dismissed Aglabec as a “mere male” although Aglabec was powerful, all-powerful, exercised the right of life and death over this person Chybee...
Occasionally she stirred as though touched by a sharp prong. Then the suspicion did cross her mind that some of her thoughts were being imposed from outside. But she lacked the energy to claw hold of the idea. Likewise, she sometimes experienced the shock of realizing that she was beginning to digest her own tissue, and that her mantle was patched with molds like those afflicting her cage of roots, as though the tiny organisms had decided she too was fit to putrefy. But she shut such notions out of thinking, obsessed with yearning for the beautiful visions of life on other worlds which she had been promised. Where were they? Why could she only perceive this horrible, this revolting dungeon?
Because... Ah, but bliss, but miracle! Something sweet and delicious had been poured into her mandibles, restoring her strength. She strove to thank whoever had aided her at last, and could only whimper, but at least the sound was recognizable.
“Ugant...?”
“Ah, so it was Ugant who reduced you to this plight!”
A booming voice, a waft of pheromones redolent of well-being and authority. Timidly she agreed.
“She sent you to spy on us, was that it?”
“Yes, yes! More food, more food!”
“Of course you shall have more! I'm appalled to find you in such a state because of what Ugant did! Help her out, quickly!”
Suddenly she was surrounded by familiar figures: Aglabec, ex-Cometaster, ex-Startoucher. She curled her limp mantle into a sketch for gratitude as they half led, half carried her upward, pausing now and then to offer more of the delicious liquor which had so revived her.
At last they reached the open air, under a clear sky sown with stars. Weakly she raised a claw to indicate Stumpalong.
“I see the folk up yonder!” she declared. She did not, but she knew it was what her saviors expected.
There was a puff of excitement from the young people. Aglabec canceled it with a quick gesture.
“You believe at last?” he challenged Chybee.
“How could I not, after all the visions that have come to me?”
“Are you obliged to Ugant for them?”-in a stern commanding tone.
“Ugant? What I've been through, all my suffering, was due to her! You saved me, though! You saved me!”
“Then,” said Aglabec with enormous satisfaction, “you must tell us what Ugant is planning, and all the ways in which we can forestall her frightful plot.”
IX
But Aglabec did not begin his interrogation at once, as though afraid that Chybee's obedience might still be colored by excessive eagerness to please. He had her taken to the home of one of his followers, a certain Olgo. It was neither large nor well kept, but in comparison with the place where she had been incarcerated it was paradise. There she babbled of indebtedness while her sore mantle was tended and food and drink were meted out to her, enough to restore part of her lost bulk, but far from all.
This, though, was only half the treatment he had decided on. Much more important was the fact that by dark and by bright other of his disciples came to visit, and greeted her as one saved for the cause of truth, and sat by her telling wondrous stories about their mental voyages to the planets. Dimly she remembered there was a reason not to believe such yarns, but she was afraid to claw hold of it; she knew, though nobody had said so, that if she expressed the slightest doubt she would be returned to captivity.
Besides, the pheromones inciting to credulity were denser than ever, not only within the house but throughout the psychoplanetarist quarter. Docile under the impact of them, she listened passively as she heard about the vigorous inhabitants of Sunbride, reveling in the brilliance of the solar glare, absorbing and transmuting it until by willpower alone they could sculpture mountain ranges to amuse themselves... or hurl a giant rock on any reckless race that tried to bridge the spatial void.
Others told her of the ancient culture on Swiftyouth, so far advanced that bodies were scarcely necessary to them anymore. There, she learned, budding and death had long been obsolete; perfected minds could don and doff a physical envelope at whim.
Yet more marvels were recounted to her, concerning the giant planets each of which was itself a conscious being, the end-product of craws of years of evolution, so perfectly and so precariously adapted that a single seed from any other world might destroy them, and thus waste the fruit of an age-long study of the universe. (Dimly Chybee realized that this contradicted what she had been told at Hulgrapuk, but that of course was due to Imblot's heresy.) To such colossal beings even the inhabitants of their own moons were dangerous; therefore the latter had been taught, by channels of mental communication, to rest content with their own little spheres. Awed, yet determined to fulfill their several destinies, they had set about contacting intelligences more like themselves, using techniques the giant worlds had pioneered, with success in every case bar one: this world whose moon was dead.
“Our world!” Chybee whispered, and they praised her for her flawless understanding.
“Perhaps, in the very long ago,” someone said, “our moon too was an abode of life. But arrogant fools down here must have sent a vessel thither. What else can account for it being barren, when none other of the solar family is so except the asteroids, which orbit too close to the sun?”
“Not even they, in one sense,” someone else objected. “We know of life existing in hot gas-glouds, don't we? I think some of them make use of the asteroids, for purposes we dare not dream of!”
All the listeners murmured, “Very likely!”
And one of them added with a sigh, “What miracles must be taking place in the Major Cluster! What would I not give to eavesdrop on the feelings of a new-budded star!”
“Oh, yes!” whispered Chybee. “Oh, yes!”
They turned to her, their exudations sympathetic and inviting. Thus encouraged, she went on, “And to think that what Ugant and Hyge are planning could despoil it all!”
“Would you not work with us to stop them?” demanded her hostess, Olgo.
“Of course! I want to! It's my duty!”
A wave of satisfaction-odor rose from the company, and one who was near the entrance slipped away, shortly to return with Aglabec in high excitement.
“At last!” he said as he accepted the place of honor at the center of the bower. “I've been making inquiries about the situation at Hulgrapuk. It seems that the traitor Imblot has ensnared many folk there who should be wiser than a youngling like yourself. Yet you came hither, did you not, in search of truth?”
“I did!” Chybee confirmed excitedly.
“Well, you were guided to where I was, even though you failed to understand the reason. Now you've been shown the error of your ways, are you resolved to make amends?”
“With all my pith! I never dreamed what harm would stem from what Ugant and Hyge are doing!”
“And what exactly does that amount to?”
So she described what she had seen at the test site-the metal tube with its prong of fire, the huge floaters designed to lift it to the limits of the atmosphere, the instruments which reported on its behavior even when it was traveling faster than sound. At each new revelation the company uttered fresh gusts of horror, until by the end Chybee was dreadfully ashamed of her own words.
“You said they're close to success?” Aglabec demanded at last.
“Very close indeed!”
“That breeds with what I've been hearing recently.” The dream-leader pleated his mantle into a frown. “We must move against them before it's too late. Chybee, have you been in contact with Ugant or any of her associates since-well, since our meeting before last?”
There was a reason for his awkward turn of phrase; she was aware of the fact, but the reason itself eluded her. She uttered a vehement denial, and Olgo confirmed that at no time had she been away from the supervision of someone utterly trustworthy.
“Very well, then,” Aglabec decided. “We must rely on you for a delicate mission. Presumably Ugant will be expecting you to make a report. You are to go back to the test site, but this time on our behalf, to lull the suspicions of those who work there. To make assurance doubly sure, I'll send you with a companion, supposedly someone you've converted to the scientists' views. Creez, I offer you a chance to redeem yourself!”
And Creez was he who had braggartly been known as Startoucher... and who voiced a question Chybee meant to.
“But how can we possibly conceal our true opinions?”
“I will give you a-a medicine,” Aglabec said after a fractional hesitation. “It will suffice for a short time.”
That too should have been significant, Chybee thought. Once again, though, the notion was elusive.
“Now pass the news,” said Aglabec, rising. “At dawn tomorrow we shall strike a blow against the scientists such as it will take them a laq of years to recover from! By then, I trust, no one will any longer pay attention to their foolishness! You, Creez and Chybee, come with me, and receive your full instructions.”
All the next dark the word spread among the psychoplanetarists, and the pool of pheromones in their quarter of Slah became tinged with violent excitement. Around dawn they started to emerge from their homes and move towards the test site, not in a concerted mass but in small groups, so as not to alert the authorities. The morning breeze today was very light, and few outsiders caught wind of what was happening.
Aglabec was not with them. He had declared that he was too well known and too easily recognizable.
Chybee and Creez, fortified with the “medicine” which disguised pheromones, went in advance of the others. They were to announce an urgent report for Ugant or Hyge, which would require everyone working at the site to be called together. For so long the psychoplanetarists had merely talked instead of acting, Aglabec was convinced this simple stratagem would suffice to postpone any warning of the actual attack. And the nature of the latter was the plainest possible. The huge bladders being filled to raise the rocket contained fiercely inflammable gas; let but one firebrand fall among them, and the site would be a desert.
“Though of course,” Aglabec had declared, “we only want them to yield to our threats, and-like you, Chybee-acknowledge that the popular will is against them.”
With a nervous chuckle Creez had said, “I'm glad of that!”
And now he and Chybee were cresting the range of hills separating the city from the site, formerly a bank of the salt lake where Voosla had taken root. On the way she had repeatedly described for him what he must expect to see. But the moment she had a clear view from the top of the rise she stopped dead, trembling.
“What's wrong?” Creez demanded.
“It's changed,” she quavered, looking hither and yon in search of something familiar. Where was the row of distorted trees along which Hyge's pride and joy had become a shining streak to the accompaniment of sudden thunder? Where was the monstrous cylinder itself, built of such a deal of costly metal, with its clever means of guidance warranted to thrive in outer space? Where was the control-house, which surely should have been visible from here?
Nothing of what she remembered was to be seen, save a mass of gigantic bladders swelling like live things in the day's new warmth, rising at the midpoint of the valley into a slowly writhing column tethered by ropes and nets.
“It looks as though they're actually going to try a shot into space!”
Chybee whispered, striving to concentrate on her errand. The clean morning air was stirring buried memories, and they were discomforting.
“Then we have to hurry!”
“Yes-yes, of course! But where is everybody?”
“We must go and look,” Creez declared, and urged her down the slope.
A moment later they were in the weirdest environment she had ever imagined, under a roof of colossal swollen globes that looked massive enough to crush them, yet swayed at every slightest touch of the breeze, straining at their leashes and lending the light an eerie, fearful quality, now brighter, now darker, according to the way it was reflected from each bladder to its neighbor.
“It's like being underwater!” Creez muttered.
“My weather-sense disagrees,” Chybee answered curtly, fighting to maintain her self-control. “Listen! Don't I sense somebody?”
“Over there! Something's agitating the bladders!”
And, moments later, they came upon a work-team wielding nets and choppers, harvesting more and ever more full bladders to be added to the soaring column. One of them had incautiously collected so many, she risked being hoisted off her pads by a puff of wind.
Keeping up her pretense with all her might, Chybee hailed them.
“Is Ugant here, or Hyge? We have an urgent message!”
Resigning half her anti-burden to a colleague, the one who had so nearly soared into the sky looked her over.
“I remember you!” she said suddenly. “Weren't you here with Ugant a moonlong past?”
All that time ago? Chybee struggled more valiantly than ever to remember her promise to Aglabec.
“Is she here now? I have to talk to her!”
“Well, of course! Didn't you know? Today's the day for the trial launch-that is, if we turn out to have enough floaters for a really high lift, which is what we're working out right now. We got our first consignment of modified spores of the kind which ought to reproduce on Swiftyouth, and the line-up of the planets is ideal for them to be carried there by light-pressure! Of course, we can't be certain things will all go off okay, but we're doing our utmost. Only there have been some nasty rumors going around, about crazy psychoplanetarists who'd like to wreck the shot.”
“That's exactly what I've come to warn you about!” Chybee exclaimed, seizing her opening. “I've been among them for-well, ever since I last saw Ugant! Call everybody together, please, right away! I have important news!”
“Say, I recall Ugant mentioning that you'd agreed to go undercover for us,” said another of the work-team. “But what about him?”-gesturing at Creez.
“It's thanks to him that I know what I do!” Chybee improvised frantically. Something was wrong. Something was changing her mind against her will. She was still thinner and lower than when she set off on Ugant's mission, but with regained well-being those buried memories were growing stronger... particularly now that she was clear of psychoplanetarist pheromones.
“Hurry!” she moaned. “Hurry, please!”
But they wouldn't. They didn't. With maddening slowness they debated what to do, and at last agreed to guide her and Creez to the control-house, whence messages could be sent faster by nervograp.
She was going to be too late after all, Chybee thought despairingly as she plodded after them under the canopy of translucent globes. Oh, to think that so much effort, so many hopes and ambitions must go to waste because-
Because Aglabec knows how to disguise the pheromones which otherwise would betray his true convictions.
Enlightenment overcame her. Suddenly she realized what was meant by being stardazzled.
She looked about her with a clear eye. They had reached the entrance platform of the control-house, whence Ugant was emerging with cries of excitement. Chybee ignored her. From here she could plainly see the way the bladders were humped, netful by netful, in a carefully planned spiral. Without being told she deduced that the first batch due for release must be that over there; then those; then those-and lastly those through which could now and then be glimpsed the shining metal of Hyge's cylinder.
And on the hills which she and Creez had lately crossed: Aglabec's disciples, surging this way like a sullen flood. They were passing flame from each to the next under a smear of smoke, igniting firebrands turn and turn about, seeking a vantage point from which to hurl them.
“But Aglabec promised-!” Creez exclaimed. Chybee cut him short.
“He lied! He's always lied to all his followers! He has a means to hide his lying, and he gave some to us for this mission! Ugant, forgive me, but they starved and tortured me until I couldn't help myself!”
Taken aback, the scientist said, “Starved? Tortured? Oh, it can't be true! I knew they were crazy, but surely even they-”
“No time!” Chybee shouted as Hyge too emerged from the control-house. “Everybody slack down to tornado status! I mean now!”
This drill was known to all the personnel from their test-firings. A single glance at the threat posed by the psychoplanetarists and their multiplying firebrands caused them to respond as though by mindless reflex, dragging Creez inside with them.
But, seizing one of the work-team's choppers, Chybee flung herself over the side of the platform and rushed back the way she had come.
Without realizing until she had an overview of the complete spiral, she had noticed how the bladders were lashed to pumplekins by clusters, each connected by only a single bond for the sake of lightness, and if she could sever just one of those ropes, one that was all-important, there was a thin, faint, tenuous chance that when Aglabec's crazed disciples began to fling their torches, then...
But which one? Where? She had imagined she fully understood the layout, yet she came to an abrupt halt, baffled and terrified. Had she wandered off course in her panic? All these groups of bladders looked alike, and all the ropes that tethered them-
A chance gust parted the dense globes and showed her the horde of attackers moving down the slope with grim determination, poising to toss their firebrands, heedless of any hurt that might come to them. Well, she had long craved vengeance on behalf of her friend Isarg; how could she do less than match their foolhardiness?
With sudden frantic energy she began to slash at every restraining rope in reach, and cluster after cluster of the bladders hurtled upward as though desperate to join the clouds.
To the psychoplanetarists perhaps it seemed that their prey was about to escape. At any rate, instead of padding purposefully onward they broke into a rush, and some of those at the rear, craving futile glory, threw their brands so that they landed among the others in the front ranks. A reek of fury greeted the burns they inflicted, and many of the foremost spun around, yelling with pain. Later, Chybee found herself able to believe that that fortunate accident must have saved her life. At the moment, however, she had no time to reason, but frenziedly went on cutting rope after rope after rope...
Abruptly she realized the sky above was clear, but the attackers had recovered from their setback, and were once more advancing on the remaining floaters.
Flinging aside her chopper, she fled towards the control-house, her mind failing again as she exhausted her ultimate resources. Suddenly there was a dull roaring noise, and a brilliant flare, and heat ravaged her mantle and dreadful overpressure strained her tubules.
She slumped forward to seek what shelter was offered by a dip in the ground, welcoming her agony.
For one who had been a double traitor, it felt like just and proper punishment.
X
Piece by painful piece Chybee reconstructed her knowledge of the world. While being carried to a healing-house she heard a voice say, “She cut loose just enough of the bladders to create a fire-break. Naturally it's a setback, but it'll only mean a couple of moonlongs' extra work.”
Later, while her burns were being tended: “A lot of the poor fools inhaled flame, or leaked to death because their tubules ruptured, or ulcerations on their mantles burst. But of course the updraft swept away the mutual reinforcement of their pheromones. Once they realized what a state they'd been reduced to, the survivors scattered, begging for help. Apparently they're ashamed of what they tried to do. It doesn't square with the perfect morality of these imaginary other worlds of theirs. So there's hope for them yet-or a good proportion, at any rate.”
Chybee wanted to ask about their dream-leader, but for a long tune she lacked the necessary energy to squeeze air past the edge of her mantle. By the time she could talk again, she found she was in the presence of distinguished well-wishers: Ugant, Wam, Glig, Airm, Hyge...
“What about Aglabec?” she husked. As one, they exuded anger and disappointment. At length Ugant replied.
“He's found a score of witnesses to certify that you came to him pleading for enlightenment, and that what he subjected you to was no more than the normal course of instruction all his disciples willingly undergo.”
“It's a he!” Chybee burst out, struggling to raise herself from the mosh-padded crotch she rested in.
“Sure it is,” Glig the biologist said soothingly. “So are all the fables he's spun to entrap his dupes. But he defeated himself after a fashion. The 'medicine' he provided to disguise your exudates when you returned to the test site has been known to us for scores of years; it's based on the juice of the plant whose leaves I gave you. His version, though, doesn't only suppress one's own pheromones and protect against the effect of others'. It eventually breaks down the barrier between imagination and direct perception. No one can survive long after that stage sets in, and he's been using the stuff for years. Very probably he was already insane when he called out his followers to attack the test site-”
“He must have been,” Airm put in. “Even though the shot was almost ready, his disciples weren't. If he'd waited a little longer, their madness might have been contagious!”
She ended with a shrug of relief.
“Insane or not, he mustn't be allowed to get away with what he did!” Chybee cried.
“Somehow I don't believe he will,” said Wam with a mysterious air. “And I've come back specially from Hulgrapuk to witness the event that ought to prove his downfall.”
“It's expected to occur not next dark, but the dark after that,” Ugant said, rising. “By then you should be well enough to leave here. I'll send my scudder to collect you at sundown and bring you to my place. I rather think you're going to enjoy the show we have for you.”
Turning to leave, she added, “By the way, you do know how grateful we all are, don't you?”
“And not just us,” Airm confirmed. “The whole of Slah is in your debt, for giving us an excuse to clear out the pestilential lair of the psychoplanetarists. We've been flushing it with clean air for days now, and by the time we're done there won't be a trace of that alluring stench.”
“But if Aglabec is still free-” Chybee said, confused.
“It isn't going to make the slightest difference.”
At the crest of Ugant's home was an open bower where a good-quality telescope was mounted. Thither, on a balmy night under a sky clear but for stars and the normal complement of meteors, they conveyed Chybee, weak, perhaps scarred for life, but in possession of her wits again.
Not until they had plied her with the finest food and liquor that the house could boast did they consent to turn to the subject preying on her pith: the promised doom of Aglabec.
With infuriating leisureliness, after consulting a time-pulser hung beside the telescope, Ugant finally invited her to take her place at its ocular and stare at Swiftyouth.
“That's where we're going to send our spores,” she said. “Before the end of summer, certainly, we shall have grown enough floaters, we shall have retested our star-seeker, we shall have enlarged and improved our driver. Once beyond the atmosphere, at a precisely calculated moment, the raw heat of the sun will expand and eventually explode a carefully aligned container, so that it will broadcast spores into the path Swiftyouth will follow as it reaches perihelion... Why, you're shaking! What in the world for?”
“I don't know!” came the helpless answer. “But... Well, just suppose we're wrong after all. Just suppose not all of what Aglabec teaches is complete invention! Do we have the right to put at risk creatures on another world?”
There was a pause. At length Ugant said grayly, “If there are any life forms on Swiftyouth-and I admit that, without voyaging there, we can never be certain-then they are due for suffering worse than any we have been through. Be patient. Watch.”
Not knowing precisely why, Chybee obeyed, and waited. And then, just as she was about to abandon the telescope with a cry of annoyance...
That tiny reddish disc changed to white, and shone out more brilliantly than half the stars.
“Congratulate your colleagues at the Hulgrapuk Observatory, Wam,” said Ugant dryly. “They were most precise in their calculations.”
“But what are you showing me?” demanded Chybee.
“The kind of proof we needed to destroy Aglabec,” the scientist replied composedly. “We maintain a constant watch for massive bodies drifting into the system. Recently we spotted one larger than any on record, or more precisely a whole cluster of them, perhaps the nucleus of a giant comet which was stripped of its gas when passing by a hot white star, then whipped into the void again. At first we were afraid they might collide with us, but luckily... Well, you're seeing what saved us: the attraction of an outer planet. So how exactly is Aglabec going to account for the collision of Swiftyouth with not one meteorite but maybe half a score of them, each greater than the one that washed Voosla and half an ocean high into the hills?”
At that very moment the whitened disc of Swiftyouth redoubled in brilliance. Chybee drew back from the ocular and tried to laugh at the prospect of Aglabec's discomfiture.
But she could not, any more than she could explain why to her concerned companions. She only knew she was in mourning of a sudden, for all the marvelous and lovely beings on-or in-the other planets, whom she had known so briefly and who now, even to imagination, were lost for evermore.