Carv sat heavily down on a rainwashed white rock. “Better spell that out,” he said, and heard that his voice was hoarse.
“I was going to. Suppose there was a civilization that had cheap, fast interstellar travel. Most of the habitable planets they found would be sterile, wouldn’t they? I mean, life is an unlikely sort of accident.”
“We don’t have the vaguest idea how likely it is.”
“All right, pass that. Say somebody finds this planet, Sirius B-IV, and decides it would make a nice farm planet. It isn’t good for much else, mainly because of the variance in lighting, but if you dropped a specially bred food alga in the ocean, you’d have a dandy little farm. In ten years there’d be oceans of algae, free for the carting. Later, if they did decide to colonize, they could haul the stuff inland and use it for fertilizer. Best of all, it wouldn’t mutate. Not here.”
Carv shook his head to clear it. “You’ve been in space too long.”
“Carv, the plant looks bred—like a pink grapefruit. And where did all its cousins go? Now I can tell you. They got poured out of the breeding vat because they weren’t good enough.”
Low waves rolled in from the sea, low and broad beneath their blanket of cheesy green scum. “All right,” said Carv. “How can we disprove it?”
Wall looked startled. “Disprove it? Why would we want to do that?”
“Forget the glory for a minute. If you’re right, we’re trespassing on somebody’s property without knowing anything about the owner—except that he’s got dirt-cheap interstellar travel, which would make him a tough enemy. We’re also introducing our body bacteria into his pure edible algae culture. And how would we explain, if he suddenly showed up?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“We ought to cut and run right now. It’s not as if the planet was worth anything.”
“No. No, we can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
The answer gleamed in Wall’s eyes.
Turnbull, listening behind his desk with his chin resting in one hand, interrupted for the first time in minutes. “A good question. I’d have gotten out right then.”
“Not if you’d just spent six months in a two-room cell with the end of everything creeping around the blankets.”
“I see.” Turnbull’s hand moved almost imperceptibly, writing, NO WINDOWS IN OVERCEE #2! Oversized viewscreen?
“It hadn’t hit me that hard. I think I’d have taken off if I’d been sure Wall was right, and if I could have talked him into it. But I couldn’t, of course. Just the thought of going home then was enough to set Wall shaking. I thought I might have to knock him on the head when it came time to leave. We had some hibernation drugs aboard, just in case.”
He stopped. As usual, Turnbull waited him out.
“But then I’d have been all alone.” Rappaport finished his drink, his second, and got up to pour a third. The bourbon didn’t seem to affect him. “So we stood there on that rocky beach, both of us afraid to leave and both afraid to stay…”
Abruptly Wall got up and started putting his tools away. “We can’t disprove it, but we can prove it easily enough. The owners must have left artifacts around. If we find one, we run. I promise.”
“There’s a big area to search. If we had any sense we’d run now.”
“Will you drop that? All we’ve got to do is find the ramrobot probe. If there’s anyone watching this place they must have seen it come down. We’ll find footprints all over it.”
“And if there aren’t any footprints? Does that make the whole planet clean?”
Wall closed his case with a snap. Then he stood, motionless, looking very surprised. “I just thought of something,” he said.
“Oh, not again.”
“No, this is for real, Carv. The owners must have left a long time ago.”
“Why?”
“It must be thousands of years since there were enough algae here to use as a food supply. We should have seen ships taking off and landing as we came in. They’d have started their colony too, if they were going to. Now it’s gone beyond that. The planet isn’t fit for anything to live on, with the soupy oceans and the smell of things rotting.”
“No.”
“Dammit, it makes sense!”
“It’s thin. It sounds thin even to me, and I want to believe it. Also, it’s too pat. It’s just too close to the best possible solution we could dream up. You want to bet our lives on it?”
Wall hoisted his case and moved toward the ship. He looked like a human tank, moving in a stormy darkness lit by shifting, glaring beams of blue light. Abruptly he said, “There’s one more point. That black border. It has to be contaminated algae. Maybe a land-living mutant; that’s why it hasn’t spread across the oceans. It would have been cleaned away if the owners were still interested.”
“All right. Hoist that thing up and let’s get inside.”
“Hmph?”
“You’ve finally said something we can check. The eastern shore must be in daylight by now. Let’s get aboard.”
At the border of space they hovered, and the Sun burned small and blinding white at the horizon. To the side Sirius A was a tiny dot of intense brilliance. Below, where gaps in the cloud cover penetrated all the way to the surface, a hair-thin black line ran along the twisting beach of Sirius B-IV’s largest continent. The silver thread of a major river exploded into a forking delta, and the delta was a black triangle shot with lines of silvery green.
“Going to use the scope?”
Carv shook his head. “We’ll see it close in a few minutes.”
“You’re in quite a hurry, Carv.”
“You bet. According to you, if that black stuff is some form of life, then this farm’s been deserted for thousands of years at least. If it isn’t, then what is it? It’s too regular to be a natural formation. Maybe it’s a conveyor belt.”
“That’s right. Calm me down. Reassure me.”
“If it is, we go up fast and run all the way home.” Carv pulled a lever and the ship dropped from under them. They fell fast. Speaking with only half his attention, Carv went on. “We’ve met just one other sentient race, and they had nothing like hands and no mechanical culture. I’m not complaining, mind you. A world wouldn’t be fit to live in without dolphins for company. But why should we get lucky twice? I don’t want to meet the farmer, Wall.”
The clouds closed over the ship. She dropped more slowly with every kilometer. Ten kilometers up she was almost hovering. Now the coast was spread below them. The black border was graded: black as night on Pluto along the sea, shading off to the color of the white sand and rocks along the landward side.
Wall said, “Maybe the tides carry the dead algae inland. They’d decay there. No, that won’t work. No moon. Nothing but solar tides.”
They were a kilometer up. And lower. And lower.
The black was moving, flowing like tar, away from the drive’s fusion flame.
Rappaport had been talking down into his cup, his words coming harsh and forced, his eyes refusing to meet Turnbull’s. Now he raised them. There was something challenging in that gaze.
Turnbull understood. “You want me to guess? I won’t. What was the black stuff?”
“I don’t know if I want to prepare you or not. Wall and I, we weren’t ready. Why should you be?”
“All right, Carver, go ahead and shock me.”
“It was people.”
Turnbull merely stared.
“We were almost down when they started to scatter from the down-blast. Until then it was just a dark field, but when they started to scatter we could see moving specks, like ants. We sheered off and landed on the water offshore. We could see them from there.”
“Carver, when you say people, do you mean—people? Human?”
“Yes. Human. Of course they didn’t act much like it…”
A hundred yards offshore, the Overcee floated nose up. Even seen from the airlock the natives were obviously human. The telesc
ope screen brought more detail.
They were no terrestrial race. Nine feet tall, men and women both, with wavy black hair growing from the eyebrows back to halfway down the spine, hanging almost to the knees. Their skins were dark, as dark as the darkest Negro, but they had chisel noses and long heads and small, thin-lipped mouths.
They paid no attention to the ship. They stood or sat or lay where they were, men and women and children jammed literally shoulder to shoulder. Most of the seaside population was grouped in large rings with men on the outside and women and children protected inside.
“All around the continent,” said Wall.
Carv could no more have answered than he could have taken his eyes off the scope screen.
Every few minutes there was a seething in the mass as some group that was too far back pulled forward to reach the shore, the food supply. The mass pushed back. On the fringes of the circles there were bloody fights, slow fights in which there were apparently no rules at all.
“How?” said Carv. “How?”
Wall said, “Maybe a ship crashed. Maybe there was a caretaker’s family here, and nobody ever came to pick them up. They must be the farmer’s children, Carv.”
“How long have they been here?”
“Thousands of years at least. Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands.” Wall turned his empty eyes away from the screen. He swiveled his couch so he was looking at the back wall of the cabin. His dreary words flowed out into the cabin.
“Picture it, Carv. Nothing in the world but an ocean of algae and a few people. Then a few hundred people, then hundreds of thousands. They’d never have been allowed near here unless they’d had the bacteria cleaned out of them to keep the algae from being contaminated. Nothing to make tools out of, nothing but rock and bone. No way of smelting ores, because they wouldn’t even have fire. There’s nothing to burn. They had no diseases, no contraceptives, and no recreation but breeding. The population would have exploded like a bomb. Because nobody would starve to death, Carv. For thousands of years nobody would starve on Sirius B-IV.”
“They’re starving now.”
“Some of them. The ones that can’t reach the shore.” Wall turned back to the scope screen. “One continual war,” he said after awhile. “I’ll bet their height comes from natural selection.”
Carv hadn’t moved for a long time. He had noticed that there were always a few men inside each protective circle, and that there were always men outside going inside and men inside going outside. Breeding more people to guard each circle. More people for Sirius B-IV.
The shore was a seething blackness. In infrared light it would have shown brightly, at a temperature of 98.6° Fahrenheit.
“Let’s go home,” said Wall.
“Okay.”
“And did you?”
“No.”
“In God’s name, why not?”
“We couldn’t. We had to see it all, Turnbull. I don’t understand it, but we did, both of us. So I took the ship up and dropped it a kilometer inshore, and we got out and started walking toward the sea.
“Right away, we started finding skeletons. Some were clean. A lot of them looked like Egyptian mummies, skeletons with black dried skin stretched tight over the bones. Always there was a continuous low rustle of—well, I guess it was conversation. From the beach. I don’t know what they could have had to talk about.
“The skeletons got thicker as we went along. Some of them had daggers of splintered bone. One had a chipped stone fist ax. You see, Turnbull, they were intelligent. They could make tools, if they could find anything to make tools out of.
“After we’d been walking awhile we saw that some of the skeletons were alive. Dying and drying under that overcast blue sky. I’d thought that sky was pretty once. Now it was—horrible. You could see a shifting blue beam spear down on the sand and sweep across it like a spotlight until it picked out a mummy. Sometimes the mummy would turn over and cover its eyes.
“Wall’s face was livid, like a dead man’s. I knew it wasn’t just the light. We’d been walking about five minutes, and the dead and living skeletons were all around us. The live ones all stared at us, apathetically, but still staring, as if we were the only things in the world worth looking at. If they had anything to wonder with, they must have been wondering what it was that could move and still not be human. We couldn’t have looked human to them. We had shoes and coveralls on, and we were too small.
“Wall said, ‘I’ve been wondering about the clean skeletons. There shouldn’t be any decay bacteria here.’
“I didn’t answer. I was thinking how much this looked like a combination of Hell and Belsen. The only thing that might have made it tolerable was the surrealistic blue lighting. We couldn’t really believe what we were seeing.
“‘There weren’t enough fats in the algae,’ said Wall. ‘There was enough of everything else, but no fats.’
“We were closer to the beach now. And some of the mummies were beginning to stir. I watched a pair behind a dune who looked like they were trying to kill each other, and then suddenly I realized what Wall had said.
“I took his arm and turned to go back. Some of the long skeletons were trying to get up. I knew what they were thinking. There may be meat in those limp coverings. Wet meat, with water in it. There just may. I pulled at Wall and started to run.
“He wouldn’t run. He tried to pull loose. I had to leave him. They couldn’t catch me, they were too starved, and I was jumping like a grasshopper. But they got Wall, all right. I heard his destruct capsule go off. Just a muffled pop.”
“So you came home.”
“Uh huh.” Rappaport looked up like a man waking from a nightmare. “It took seven months. All alone.”
“Any idea why Wall killed himself?”
“You crazy? He didn’t want to get eaten.”
“Then why wouldn’t he run?”
“It wasn’t that he wanted to kill himself, Turnbull. He just decided it wasn’t worthwhile saving himself. Another six months in the Overcee, with the blind spots pulling at his eyes and that nightmare of a world constantly on his mind—it wasn’t worth it.”
“I’ll bet the Overcee was a pigpen before you blew it up.”
Rappaport flushed. “What’s that to you?”
“You didn’t think it was worthwhile either. When a Belter stops being neat it’s because he wants to die. A dirty ship is deadly. The air plant gets fouled. Things float around loose, ready to knock your brains out when the drive goes on. You forget where you put the meteor patches—”
“All right. I made it, didn’t I?”
“And now you think we should give up space.”
Rappaport’s voice went squeaky with emotion. “Turnbull, aren’t you convinced yet? We’ve got a paradise here, and you want to leave it for—that. Why? Why?”
“To build other paradises, maybe. Ours didn’t happen by accident. Our ancestors did it all, starting with not much more than what was on Sirius B-IV.”
“They had a helluva lot more.” A faint slurring told that the bourbon was finally getting to Rappaport.
“Maybe they did at that. But now there’s a better reason. These people you left on the beach. They need our help. And with a new Overcee, we can give it to them. What do they need most, Carver? Trees or meat animals?”
“Animals.” Rappaport shuddered and drank.
“Well, that could be argued. But pass it. First we’ll have to make soil.” Turnbull leaned back in his chair, face upturned, talking half to himself. “Algae mixed with crushed rock. Bacteria to break the rock down. Earthworms. Then grass…”
“Got it all planned out, do you? And you’ll talk the UN into it, too. Turnbull, you’re good. But you’ve missed something.”
“Better tell me now then.”
Rappaport got carefully to his feet. He came over to the desk, just a little unsteadily, and leaned on it so that he stared down into Turnbull’s eyes from a foot away. “You’ve been assuming that those people on
the beach really were the farmer’s race. That Sirius B-IV has been deserted for a long, long time. But what if some kind of carnivore seeded that planet? Then what? The algae wouldn’t be for them. They’d let the algae grow, plant food animals, then go away until the animals were jammed shoulder to shoulder along the coast. Food animals! You understand, Turnbull?”
“Yes. I hadn’t thought of that. And they’d breed them for size…”
The room was deadly quiet.
“Well?”
“Well, we’ll simply have to take that chance, won’t we?”
• • •
• • •
Primary colors streamed up from beneath the Warlock’s fingers, roiled and expanded beneath the beamed roof. Heads turned at the other tables. The clattering of table knives stopped. Then came sounds of delight and appreciative fingersnapping, for a spell the Warlock had last used to blind an enemy army.
THE MAGIC GOES AWAY, 1978
CONVERGENT SERIES
I hold a doctorate, but it’s honorary, a D. Litt. The rank I earned was a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
I haven’t used my math training much. This story is as close as I get to pure math.
One Chris Silbermann wants to make a movie out of it.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
It was a girl in my anthropology class who got me interested in magic. Her name was Ann, and she called herself a white witch, though I never saw her work an effective spell. She lost interest in me and married somebody, at which point I lost interest in her; but by that time magic had become the subject of my thesis in anthropology. I couldn’t quit, and wouldn’t if I could. Magic fascinated me.
The thesis was due in a month. I had a hundred pages of notes on primitive, medieval, Oriental, and modern magic. Modern magic meaning psionics devices and such. Did you know that certain African tribes don’t believe in natural death? To them, every death is due to witchcraft, and in every case the witch must be found and killed. Some of these tribes are actually dying out due to the number of witchcraft trials and executions. Medieval Europe was just as bad in many ways, but they stopped in time…I’d tried several ways of conjuring Christian and other demons, purely in a spirit of research, and I’d put a Taoist curse on Professor Pauling. It hadn’t worked. Mrs. Miller was letting me use the apartment-house basement for experiments.