Ron Merrill First North American serial rights
[540-54-5913]
Still hot and flushed from his session on the exercise machine, Jim eased himself into his seat and activated his console. The screen lit up with the image of the planet 200 kilometers below. At the moment the ship was over a forested coastal plain with a broad river winding through it. He slipped on his headphones and brought up the music program, selecting Rheingold. As he listened to the slow arpeggio of the E flat Major chord wave and ripple and become the flowing waters of the Rhine, the river slowly slid off the screen, to be replaced by ocean and then the polar ice cap.
He wanted badly to be down. In the 88 days since he'd awakened in the clone machine the cramped crew quarters of the Darwin had grown increasingly irksome. The air smelled like a dirty locker room, getting worse every day, and the water was already developing an unpleasant though allegedly harmless tang. But the pre-landing tasks were not yet half done. Starting a colony--Man's first interstellar colony--was a complex job.
As the ship moved into the southbound leg of its orbit Kathy slipped into the seat beside him. In t-shirt and shorts her slender body looked very attractive. He made his eyes move back to the screen. Denise was back in the vault, a pattern of bits locked in storage crystal. So was Kathy's husband. It would be two and a half years yet until the clone machines re-created them.
He changed programs and watched a recorded video from one of the cameras at Landing Site Four. A dozen massive brown animals, larger than elephants, slowly walked across the screen. Their gait was peculiar; they had six legs, perhaps to make it easier to support their immense weight. They'd seen two other species with six legs, both of them also massive. All the smaller animals had four legs--at least, all that had moved in range of their cameras. As a biologist, he could hardly wait to get a closer look. Of course, he'd have little time for research. More practical matters, like farming, would take first priority. And perhaps hunting--with all that big game available, hunting would probably be the most efficient way to get protein in the early years.
Landing Site Two was now almost line-of-sight and he activated another program. After a few minutes he had contact. He began by opening a window to view the test animals. It was night on this side of the planet, so the mice were active--all but two of them. He zoomed the view for a closer look. In his ear, Alberich laughed maliciously.
The five of them gathered in the galley, the only place that would hold them all at once. Cary, the captain, opened the meeting. "OK, Jim, let's have your report."
"I've got two very sick mice at LS2. In fact, they're near death. The other mice in the group are active, but their vital signs are off. This is the group that's eating planetary samples."
"What about the control group?" asked Derek.
"Their vital signs are also down, but only slightly. Not statistically significant, at least so far."
"So it's something they ate. Poisonous berries or something."
"No berries. And it's not some specific food. I checked the other animals. The rabbits on planetary food are getting sick, and so are the guinea pigs. The rats and the chickens are OK so far. But we've got three species affected, and the servos have been giving them completely orthogonal diets of local fauna. It doesn't look good."
"Could it be a disease?" asked Kathy.
"Maybe. No fever in any of the animals, but I haven't had time yet to check blood samples for microorganisms."
"In short, insufficient data," said Cary. "Let's get some more information before we panic, OK? LS1 will be up in a eight minutes."
They started to move to their consoles. "Uh, Cary," said Jim. "We might have to go down ourselves to really get the answer. I'm not sure we can get enough information from orbit."
Cary looked grim. "If we have to, we will. But I'd like to avoid it. This ship was intended to make only one landing. We've got practically unlimited power, of course, but not unlimited reaction mass. And it's not a good idea to push the design. Remember, this is a hell of a big ship; nothing this large has ever landed on a planet before. So let's learn everything we can from orbit."
"Right. Kathy, can you give me a hand on it?"
"Sure. You want some chemical analyses?"
"Yes. Let's look at some obvious things first. I'd like to start with elemental analysis. Maybe it's some kind of heavy metal poisoning."
"OK. I'll get Joanne to help me on re-programming the servos."
It was five days before they had the answer. By that time, most of the animals were dead at all four Landing Sites. Even the control groups were starting to show gross symptoms.
"OK," said Cary. "Let's lay it out and go over it. Jim, your report."
"In a word: fluorine. The native organisms use fluorine in their metabolism. In very small amounts--almost a trace element--but we find it in everything we test, animals, plants, bacteria, even seaweed from Site One."
Joanne spoke up. "Fluoride isn't that toxic, is it? Don't they put it in water supplies?"
"Fluoride ion isn't very toxic. But this is organofluorine compounds, which is a different matter. Kathy and I can't find out from up here how it fits into the metabolism of the native stuff; some sort of fluorinated sugar is my guess. Anyway--"
"So we can't eat any of the native stuff. But then why did the controls die?"
"Because the fluorine, like any metabolite, eventually gets excreted. Some of the native flora excrete it as methyl fluoroacetate; there's nearly 400 parts per billion of it in the atmosphere. Slow poison, but poison. It gets into the Krebs Cycle and destroys one of the enzymes."
Derek glared at him. "So we can't breath the air? What about the native life? And why the hell didn't the Probe find out about this before we came 19 light years?"
Jim started to speak but Kathy broke in. "No doubt the native life has evolved to adapt. Presumably the local versions of citrate isomerase use some sort of mechanism that isn't poisoned by fluoroacetate--but I can't do protein sequencing from orbit. As for the Probe, let's be reasonable. It had to withstand 200 gravities and function for nearly a century. The surface module only massed two kilos. We're lucky it could tell us as much as it did about the local biochemistry. It was impossible to check everything, and nobody could have predicted something as weird as this."
Jim sighed. "Actually, there was a rare poisonous plant on Earth, Gifblaar, that produced fluoroacetic acid. Extinct now, but there are records. Maybe the Probe design should have--"
"We can't go back and change the past," said Cary. "The question is what to do in the situation we have. Jim, if I understand you correctly, we can't live down there."
"No. We can't. We can't eat the plants or the animals, can't drink the water, can't breath the air."
Cary looked around at them. "OK, I'm open to suggestions."
After a moment, Kathy spoke. "Can we go home?"
Derek shook his head. "We've got a fuel reserve, of course. The idea was to give the colony practically unlimited power for the first couple of centuries by hooking generators to the reactor. The reserve is big by interplanetary standards, but for a 19-light-year trip . . ."
"We could cut down on payload," put in Cary. "Cut off and jettison the vitamin plant and the other colony equipment."
"Yeah, but it's not enough. You still don't have enough fuel for a fast trip. I ran some calculations. Figure on 8400 years to get back to Sol. I don't see how the ship can take it. Joanne?"
"Pretty iffy at best. We lost several modules of the computer on the trip here--including one of the navigation lobes. Lose one more of those and the ship forgets where it's going. The MTBF on the stuff just doesn't extend into millennia. Definitely last resort, I'd say."
"Anyway," said Derek, "they might not let us come back. Building this ship almost caused a System-wide war. Having this much power running around would clearly be a destabilizing influence, and who knows what the political situation will be by then?"
"Doesn't look like a good option," agreed Kathy. "Can we go somewhere else?"
"I checked the possibilities," said Cary. "Nearest star is Luyten 205-128, six light years--and it's an M-type with no planets in the life zone. Next is CD-49o13515 at seven light years. Another M-type, with one planet in the life zone--it's been Probed and it has life based on D amino acids. And so on. This is the only known livable planet with D-sugar-L-amino-acid life forms; that's why we came here."
Joanne said, "Even six light years is too far, anyway. Jim, how about adapting ourselves to the planet? Can you fiddle with the gene coding to make human metabolism immune to this stuff?"
Jim shook his head. "In principle, yes. But it won't work. You can't change the genetic code going into the clone machine. It has to produce a brain that is exactly the same as the original to read your memories back into it. We wouldn't be able to recreate any colonists."
"We seem to be running short of options," said Kathy. "We can't live down there, and we can't go home or to another system. Looks like all we have left is living up here--build an oneill."
"I don't think so," said Derek slowly. "We just don't have the equipment. Only three suits on board, for instance, and they're designed for short-term emergency use, not heavy construction work. Same thing for zero-gravity tools; all we have are some repair kits. We'd have to manufacture suits, long-period high-volume air recyclers--all sorts of complex technology . . . Cary, what do you think?"
"I think you're right. We might be able to cobble up some sort of structure, but building a functioning oneill by our bootstraps is a forlorn hope. No orbital colony has ever been built without outside resources, and plenty of them. But we have to try something. Maybe a surface colony--we could set down on One, or one of the gas giant satellites--"
"Or here on Two," put in Joanne. "It may be deadly, but it's still the least hostile environment in this system. You wouldn't need real suits, just protective clothing and some sort of gas mask to adsorb the toxic stuff. Same thing for air supply--we wouldn't have to build a real recycler. You've got a 1.1-gee field, moderate temperatures--"
"Live in domes?" said Cary. "You're right--that gives us the best odds. If we can survive well enough, we can gene-modify our children so they can live outside."
"But we have to spend the rest of our lives in a dome. And there's 80,000 colonists in the vault who didn't sign up for that kind of life; they aren't going to be too happy," said Derek.
"It could be a lot worse," said Joanne. "What would you prefer? Stay up here in this sardine can for another year until the recycler cruds up? Better life in a dome than no life at all."
"You're talking like we've got guaranteed success. I grant you it's a hell of a lot better option than anything else we've come up with so far, but it's still a real long shot." He glanced around. "Look, we'd have to set down, improvise gas masks, improvise domes--big domes, do you know how many hectares it takes to support one human? Do some very successful farming. All this without proper equipment, and one mistake and we're dead. What if one of those humongous six-legged monsters walks through a dome? I agree we can do it theoretically, but can we do it in practice? Cary, you're the expert on this sort of thing; what are the odds that we can pull it off?"
"If don't know. Let me sit down and do some thinking and some calculations. The rest of you do the same. Let's get together a preliminary plan for the dome colony option, and see how it looks. And of course we should all keep thinking about other possibilities. Meet again at 0900 tomorrow to go over it."
Kathy tapped him on the shoulder; he pulled off his headphones and looked up at her.
"What are you listening to?" she asked.
"Goetterdaemerung," he replied. "Appropriate, don't you think?"
"I don't know. Is it that bad?"
"You tell me. I've got the food crops, of course. I can produce seed with one of the clone machines; the DNA patterns are in the vault. But I can't plant the first crop until we clear the land, sterilize it of native organisms, and put up the dome. We'll have to extend the barrier all the way down to bedrock, too. Then there's irrigation--no rain under a dome!--all the water has to be purified, of course--setting up mechanisms to monitor the ecosystem--"
"How about using hydroponics?"
"Just makes things worse--more equipment to build. No matter how I look at it, there's too much to do, and we just don't have enough hands, or enough time."
"That's what I'm finding," she said quietly. "To make the dome I've got to have polymer. OK, I can improvise equipment to make it--I think--by modifying some of the vitamin factory modules. But what do I use for raw materials? We have to find petroleum, or at least coal, and contrive drilling or mining rigs, and build some sort of small refinery . . . There's no single thing we can't do--but there are too many things to do, and not enough of us, and not enough time. The ship's food recycler wasn't designed to run for years, nobody thought it would have to; it was designed to be low mass. No matter how I calculate it, you've got to harvest your first crop within 500 days or we starve."
"The numbers I've got so far say we won't even have it planted by then."
He finished the PERT chart, saved, and sent a copy to Cary's terminal. Then he sat back, rubbing his neck, and opened a window on one of the ground cameras. It was early morning at Landing Site One. A group of small birds were pecking at the beach, running away on spindly legs whenever a wave came in. A nice example of convergent evolution; sandpipers were long extinct on earth.
It was a painful irony. They'd all come on this trip because they were tired of the crowded habitats of home. The megacities of earth, just as much as the planetary colonies or the oneills, were carefully managed artificial ecosystems. He and Denise, like the others, had longed for--and fought for--the chance to start over on a fresh empty planet, to live and raise their children in contact with real nature. They'd wanted to live in an environment that wasn't planned and controlled. Well, they'd certainly found something they hadn't planned for.
He panned the camera to the east. The rising sun blazed over the ocean . . .
. . . weiset Loge nach Walhall . . .
"Oh, no," he whispered. "Oh, God, no."
"Well, Cary," said Derek. "Project management is your specialty. What's the verdict?"
Cary was as haggard as the rest of them. "It certainly doesn't look good--at least on this first pass. The critical path gives us 852 days plus or minus 74 to get to first crop, and we figure 496 days as the practical limit for food from the recycler. But remember this is just our preliminary plan. As we get into the project we'll get more information and chances are we'll come up with some tricks that will move things along faster."
There was silence. Cary looked around. "Anyone have an alternative? If not, we might as well start preparing for landing."
"Wait." Jim choked the word out. The others settled back and looked at him.
"I have an alternative. It gives us much better odds. But I don't like it."
"What?" asked Cary.
"Use the ship's drive to sterilize the entire planet."
There was silence. Finally Cary said, "That's a pretty radical solution."
"But it works. We wipe out the native life, then go down and plant our crops. We build up an ecology of pure earth-type organisms. We've got gene codes for thousands of species in the vault."
"What about the poison that's already there?" asked Derek.
"Not a serious problem," said Kathy. "Once there's no more production to replenish the methyl fluoroacetate, it should cycle out of the atmosphere pretty quickly. There will be residues in the water, particularly in the oceans, but the stuff isn't all that stable and it will be depleted after a while. Few months, maybe. But can we really do it?"
"We can do it," said Derek. "That's why there was such a fuss about building the Darwin. It wouldn't take long for the drive at full power to wipe out all life on the planet."
"What about ocean life?"
"Um . . . the gamma will be attenuated by the first few meters. But the neutrons will go down ten, twenty meters--I'll have to calculate it."
"That's all it will take," said Jim. "The stuff that lives lower down mostly feeds off what falls down from that top layer. Once you kill that, the deep-sea stuff will starve. There may be some independent ecologies around volcanic vents, but they shouldn't cause any problems."
"What about residual radiation?" asked Kathy.
"You'll get some induced radiation from the neutrons. It will raise the background a bit. We can scatter the charged stuff. We'll want to de-collimate the thrust modules--have to go EVA for that but it shouldn't be a major problem--"
"Just hold it right there!" shouted Joanne. "Have you thought about what you're proposing to do? We're talking about murdering an entire planet."
"How is it murder, Joanne?" asked Kathy. "There's nothing intelligent down there--nothing that's invented fire, anyway. The infrared scans show that."
"Our own ancestors were talking and using tools for millions of years before they mastered fire. And how do you know that the oceans down there don't hold the local equivalent of dolphins? And even if there's nothing sapient, that's still a planet full of life, living organisms, plants and animals, millions of species, trillions of individuals. You propose to broil them alive."
"She's right," said Cary. "Why did we come here? Not just for lebensraum. We could have built a dozen oneills for what it cost to construct the Darwin. We wanted to make ourselves part of a new world, a living world, a natural world. If we sterilize Two and plant our seeds on it, it becomes nothing more than a planet-sized oneill, just another constructed environment. So what good was all that expense and effort?"
"That's all very well," said Kathy. "If we'd known in advance that we'd face this choice, we wouldn't have come. But we didn't know, and we did come, and now we're here. I don't have any sadistic urge to kill off the native life-forms, but it's them or us."
"But is it?" asked Joanne. "We still have the dome option. We don't have to burn off the planet."
Derek spoke up again. "What are the odds of success with the dome option? One in ten? One in a hundred?"
"People have beaten odds like that before," said Cary.
"Sure they have. But, to quote an ancient philosopher, 'The race is not always to the swift, nor victory to the strong--but that's the way to bet.' Look, none of us are kids, and none of us are theoreticians; we've all had experience running real-life projects. The projects I've been on, mostly they've finished up behind schedule--not 42% ahead of schedule. Does anyone seriously think we can pull this off?"
"Damn it, Derek, this is a moral issue," Joanne said heatedly. "Didn't your mother teach you to revere life?"
"What about our lives, and the lives of 80,000 colonists? Who appointed you--"
"Hold on! Let's cool down," said Cary. "There's no sense arguing when we have insufficient data. Jim's proposed a second option. It sounds viable, but so far it's just an idea. Let's study it, plan it, pert it, and discuss the choice when we have a complete grip on what we're talking about."
"Right," said Joanne. "Sorry, Derek."
"Me too," said Derek. "Good thing Cary's making the decision."
Cary scowled at them. "Think again. As far as I'm concerned, this is a policy decision, and I so rule it. So it's the majority vote of the crew. Debate at 0900 tomorrow, vote at 1030. Any objections?" He looked around. "Then that's how I'll log it. Let's get to work."
He zoomed out from the chart until the bubbles shrank to dots and the lines were too thin to make out. It still more than filled the screen. He opened a window on the "fuzzy logic" AI evaluator. It took several seconds to generate the answer.
OPTION ONE: DOMEPROJECT Version 1.37
ODDS OF SUCCESS: 0.023
He sat, looking but not seeing, for several minutes. Then he sighed, and split the screen. Another chart appeared, less complex than the first but still fantastically convoluted. Again he ordered an evaluation.
OPTION TWO: BURNPROJECT Version 1.11
ODDS OF SUCCESS: 0.84
Kathy looked over at him. "If you could make decisions by the numbers, it would be easy, wouldn't it?"
"I suppose so. Not that I really believe in those numbers; there are too many fudge factors in there. I guess they're somewhere in the ballpark. But do they really matter?"
He cleared the screen and began opening windows at random.
WINDOW: The planet turned beneath him, blue and green and brown and white and achingly beautiful . . .
WINDOW: The list of 80,000 colonists scrolled slowly, name and sex and DNA index numbers . . .
WINDOW: It was afternoon at Landing Site One, and four seal-like creatures with dark green fur had crawled up on the sand, one of them obviously an infant . . .
WINDOW: Denise in profile, her Greek nose prominent, then turned to face him, smiling. "Sweet dreams, Darling. We'll meet next on the new world, and I'll bear your children there. I love--"
He punched the power switch and sat staring at the black rectangle.
Cary glanced at the chronometer. "It's only 0954. Nobody have anything more to say? Jim, how about you? You haven't spoken."
He shook his head. "It's hard enough to make up my own mind. I can't presume to advise anyone else."
Cary looked around. "All right. Debate is hereby closed. Vote now, or should we think it over till 1030? Yes, Joanne."
"Move we vote now. Let's get it over with."
"Any dissent? Very well. Order is reverse seniority. Derek, your vote, please."
"Burn option," said Derek without hesitation. But his eyes were fixed on the galley table.
"Joanne?"
"You know where I stand. Dome option."
"Kathy?"
She started to speak, then cleared her throat and tried again. "Burn option."
"Jim?"
They were looking at him now, all four of them, and his heart was pounding in his ears. He forced himself to meet their eyes, one by one, then looked steadily at Cary and said:
"Burn option."
Cary glanced around, then spoke. "My vote is for the burn option. The vote is four to one, and will be so logged. Sorry, Joanne. Meeting adjourned. We've got a big project ahead of us; let's get to work."
"Question, Cary," said Derek. "Did your vote reflect your true feelings? Or was it--"
"You'll never know," said Cary quietly. "Now. Let's suit up and get started on those thrust modules."
Many of the leaves were still green, but he knew they'd soon turn brown. A few mounds of fur on the ground showed where the big six-legged creatures had already succumbed to the radiation. There were no scavenger birds on the carcasses; they were dead too. The land was dead, and the ocean was dying. The bodies would lie there, but not rotting, for not even the bacteria would survive. The corpus delicti would remain to accuse them when they landed.
Joanne drifted alongside him. "Are you some kind of masochist?"
"if we can do it, we can look at what we've done. We owe them that, at least."
"We owe them something else," said Cary from the other side. "We owe it to them to succeed, to turn that 84% chance of survival into 100%. Otherwise it was all for nothing. So why are you goofing off?"
He smile wryly. "Right."
He closed the window on Landing Site Four and brought up the hypertext module for agricultural species. He'd have to choose very carefully the mix of crops for the first planting; they wouldn't get a second chance. Then he put on his headphones, opened another window to the music program, and started Parsifal.