Twelve O'Clock Tales Page 8

  “Where are Bim and Howard?” Patsu asked in exasperation what all the others were thinking. The redSun was setting now. The grassy plain before them turned scarlet, then purple under its atmospherically intensified glare.

  —Are not—popped into Andy’s mind.

  “Who thought that?” Andy asked aloud.

  “Thought what?” Hill asked.

  Andy wasn’t foolish enough to say the words. So he ignored Hill, waited until the others were busy, then went behind the lander’s antenna dish. The system’s amplified blind side would block out most of their thoughts. Not knowing whom he was addressing, or who had previously addressed him, Andy T-p’ed an emission that asked, “Where are Bim and Howard?”

  To his surprise, an answer came back:—Are not—

  Only this time the T-p wasn’t obscured by the Big Brown Buzz. Andy heard it clearly, and it definitely didn’t fit the frequency pattern of thoughts of anyone on the Dallas crew.

  —How do you know?—Andy T-ped.

  —Know—came back on a higher band than Andy had ever received on, and—paradoxically—on a lower band too than any he’d received on.

  —Where are Bim and Howard?—Andy T-ped.

  —Orange Wood—

  —Who are you?—Andy asked.

  Silence. Then a high-pitched giggle.—No distinction!—

  —What?—Andy T-ped frantically.—Who?—

  —No distinction—came back, just as he’d heard the first time, followed by a another fit of giggling.

  —Where are you?—Andy tried, and slowly spun about in place to see in what direction the giggling came from. It seemed equally forceful from every sector of a 360-degree revolution. Must be some sort of a tele-sonic distortion.

  —Where are you?—Andy tried again.

  But he couldn’t raise the T-p signal again. He pondered a few seconds, then found Willow and Hill and told them what had happened.

  “Bim and Howard were in the J-L sector,” Willow said, “It’s daylight there for another hour or so.”

  “Let’s send the others back to the Dallas” was Hill’s decision. “We three will go in skimmers to take a look.”

  “Knowing Bim,” Willow commented, “she’s probably so busy eating forbidden fruit, she’s forgotten the time.”

  They located the so-called Orange Wood easily enough once they’d arrived in the middle of K sector: it was an enormous citrus orchard—millions upon millions of trees in full fruit. And, after a short while, they spotted the abandoned skimmer. It had landed, which was against company rules. But then all of the Dallas crew had already admitted to having broken that rule: This planet was just too damn inviting not to take a closer look.

  As they circled in skimmers, Andy opened his T-perception to its widest reception range, trying for any hint of Bim or Howard’s thought frequencies. Nothing came back. They’d have to land and search on foot.

  Hill located Bim first. She was about fifteen feet off the ground, her long hair entangled in surprisingly rugged orange tree branches. It was evident that she’d decided to climb the tree—why, none of the three could say, as the fruit looked as full and rich in the lower branches as in the higher ones—and a branch supporting her feet had given way. In her drop, several lianas had twisted around her neck, strangling her. Below Bim’s dangling body, a pyramid of oranges half as tall as a person had been shaken to the ground.

  While cutting her down, they had a difficult time trying not to step on or slip on the fallen fruit. Hill took a spill. And in so doing, he revealed Howard, beneath the pyramid of maybe a thousand fallen oranges. His hands were frozen in front of his face in a vain, final effort to keep them off him. His mouth was stuffed with a large, juicy-looking Valencia. He must have been caught in the same bizarre accident as Bim. Perhaps he’d gone to save her and slipped and fallen, and then been suffocated? Although they remained looking around for another twenty minutes after recovering the bodies, neither Hill nor Willow could find any trace that the two deaths had not been a complete—if admittedly odd—accident.

  “T-p anything?” Hill asked Andy.

  “Besides you guys? No. Not a thing!”

  *

  The following sidereal day, they again landed on the planet and broke up into couples for skimmer exploration. Again, Andy was alone.

  The deaths of Bim and Howard had depressed everyone on the Dallas sufficiently for Hill to declare an unprecedented eight-hour Playby with double doses of Super-Qs for distraction. Even with the drugs, Andy had caught down-mood peripheral flashes from several crew members. The Company had psycho-selected the crew for low grief levels and synergistically mixed them for the lowest possible loss quotient. Even so, they’d been together a while, and every one of them had one reaction or another to the sudden change.

  For Andy, as significant as the deaths was the giggling T-p voice that had refused to identify itself. Now, as he sped in his skimmer over his assigned sector for the day, he openly emitted, trying to locate the T-p voice again. No luck.

  As had happened the previous day, Andy finished his work rapidly and set down the skimmer, opened an inflatable, and rested in the bright, warm, afternoon sun from the binary suns—far from any trees. A gentle breeze played over his body, wafting the scent of ripening peaches from an orchard that stretched before him. Clover and an odor like sweet marjoram added their light perfumes from the meadow into which he’d skimmed. Once again, Andy relaxed deeply in the complete T-p silence. But he didn’t make the mistake of falling asleep again.

  Good thing too. Otherwise he might have been awakened with a jolt. As it was, he sat bolt upright when he heard Roy’s and Patsu’s thoughts.

  —Hey—Andy T-p’ed back.—Get out of my sector! You’re in T-p range!—

  No response followed, so he called the lander itself for a radio relay to their skimmer. Willow had remained there at planet-fall. She told Andy he was wrong. Roy and Patsu were way over in sector X-Z, eleven hundred kilometers away.

  But Andy had heard them T-p. He now wondered why.

  —You still there?—he T-p’ed them.

  Giggles. The same ones as yesterday.

  —Where are they?—he T-p’ed the question.

  —In flower—

  Despite the surrounding giggles, the tone was less than amused.

  —Are they…not are?—he T-p’ed, remembering the construction put on yesterday’s tragedy.

  —Not yet!—followed by a cascade of giggling.

  Andy didn’t like the sound of that at all. He jumped into the skimmer and set it for their sector, calling Willow from the air, telling her he was going after the two. She said not to. Hill and Native were in Sector T, much closer. They’d go look.

  Andy arrived back at the lander just as Hill reported in. He and Native had found Roy and Patsu unconscious, but still alive—and completely stoned out among a sea of poppies. The pale purple and white blooms they’d been walking through were able to explode their morphinid alkalis into the surrounding air. Roy and Patsu had been felled in minutes. Native had gotten punchy on the stuff the second he stepped out of the skimmer. Hill put on a protective mask, but he was a bit dizzy too. At least they were all safe now.

  *

  “That’s it,” Hill declared, once the crew had all arrived back at the lander. “This planet is off-limits.”

  Patsu and Native argued that even Old Earth possessed its natural dangers—poisonous plants, feral animals, earthquakes, landslides, floods, tidal waves. They simply have to recognize what exactly constituted a hazard here. More exploration was required to do so.

  “It’s not as though we’re being consciously attacked or anything!” Roy agreed. “It’s partly stupid mistakes leading to equally stupid accidents.”

  “What if it’s a pattern of them?” Hill asked. “Patsu, give me the improbability statistics on nine people in two days. Two killed and two nearly killed.”

  Patsu did a quick calculation and came up with a high figure. Too high for mere chaotic
improbability. Too high for Hill’s liking.

  “Let’s face it, crew,” he said. “Despite Andy’s extremely limited T-p contact with someone or something or other, the planet itself seems quite barren of intelligent life. On the other hand, it does seem to be equipped with what can only be called a rather subtle, but effective, self-defense system. For all we know, it already belongs to someone. It’s their farm world, perhaps, or their garden world. And we’re the intruders. I say we leave.”

  “I’m not sure how limited the T-p contact was,” Andy argued. “It had to be awfully strong to interconnect me to Patsu and Roy from so far away.”

  “How intelligent would you rate the voice that T-p’ed you?” Native asked.

  Andy couldn’t say: too little conversation.

  “What exactly did the T-p say?” Willow wanted to know.

  Andy repeated both “conversations,” which even he had to admit were both of very short duration and most primitive. And the giggles. In terms of time spent during the entire T-p’ing, Ho Wang calculated the giggling occupied about three-quarters of the messages Andy received. Ho speculated that it was some sort of semi-consciousness. Perhaps even a ’droidlike alarm system.

  Which was possible, Andy had to admit. But why then did he still intuit a larger intelligence? Because he did. He couldn’t explain why.

  The others listened to his arguments, and as he spoke, Andy T-p’ed them, carefully sorting each one’s reality from wish fulfillment. They were coming down against the planet, against him.

  Hill didn’t need to T-p the crew to recognize that despite their high hopes for a Company planet-find of Class A, and the bonus and the rep-hit that would accompany it, none of the others were eager to subject themselves to possible death, no matter how rare or picturesque the place might be. Hill called for a vote on whether to call off human exploration or not. It worked out six to one against Andy.

  “That’s it,” Hill concluded. “We’ll reconnoiter one more week with mobile ’droids on planet. If there are no more bizarre accidents to them, the planet receives a Class D designation: for further exploration only with extreme caution.”

  The decision make Andy shudder. He’d actually come to anticipate a full thirty-day tour on the planet surface. He’d get more pure T-p silence here than in a so-called thought-proofed room anywhere else. Not to mention deeper sleep. No, it was just too pleasant to give up without a fight. Then too, he had T-p’ed a voice, had communicated with someone, or something, twice. That was his function on the Dallas among the crew. He couldn’t just brush it off. Especially since that voice had allowed him to save Roy and Patsu’s lives. Progress in communication had been achieved. Continued further contact was imperative!

  Andy began to argue these points. Surely, if he was in contact with a voice that had twice warned him, no harm would likely befall him. And he might discover the source of the T-p emissions. Surely any company team that came in after the Dallas would need that kind of information and as much of it as he could provide.

  Willow didn’t like the idea, and the others seemed neutral, so once again they voted: Should Andy join the ’droids on the planet while the crew returned. Two votes no, five votes yes. Andy was pleased.

  The others returned to the Dallas and sent back mobile ’droids. Andy continued to go down to the surface daily.

  By the sixth day, after he’d covered more than half of the section they had mapped out, Andy was convinced he’d been right. The ’droids, of course, were near impossible to destroy, but they hadn’t encountered a single mishap, not even a displaced one, like poppies spewing out powdered drugs in the air. Of course, it was possible that the planet’s defense system only reacted to alien life, not to alien machines.

  Meanwhile, every afternoon, Andy would relax deeply and communicate a bit more with the T-p voice.

  Or was it voices? It was difficult to decide which. He was sometimes reminded of the Swamp Moths of Epsilon Vega, that same feeling of a million voices mixed into one larger, representative voice, all possessing the same thoughts. At other times, the voice, seemed to have a single, even a singular, personality—pesky, yet sweetly frivolous; shy, yet impulsive and bold; deliberately, mischievously unhelpful with anything that could be construed as a fact.

  Through T-p, Andy learned names on the planet—the names of certain fruit and vegetables, trees, hills, even lakes. But he never discovered who the voice belonged to, nor where the other sentient beings were—if there were any others. At times, the voice seemed woefully ignorant, in the way a four-year-old human was, so that he had to wonder how mature the voice really was.

  His reports each night back on the Dallas were as full of detail as he could make them. The others’ response was always the same question: “So you made no progress?”

  Andy knew what was happening with the remaining six crew members. Having been disappointed, they were already finished with this planet. They were anticipating the next planet-fall, merely waiting until the mobile ’droids were done. With Bim and Howard gone, all kinds of new combinations of Playby and its concomitant relationships were forming and reforming. He’d seen it happen too often before from close up to doubt that they were far more interested in each other than in whatever he might discover. Of them all, only Hill and Willow still even kept speaking to him every night, and he was feeling less and less like one of them, and more and more like—well, not like Bim and Howard so much, but not far off either. Finally Andy asked Hill if he could spend nights on the planet’s surface, rather than on board. At first, the others appeared to be insulted; then sad, then angry, then annoyed. Finally they seemed to give up on him altogether. A vote was taken and they all said sure.

  As for the planet, Hill and Willow had already agreed that it would receive no higher than a Class D designation, and thus remain off all beaten paths, no matter what Andy or the ’droids came up with.

  *

  Giggle, giggle.

  —Where are the others?—Andy T-p’ed.

  Silence. Then—What means others?—

  —You know, more than one. I am one—Andy explained.—Those who died in the Orange Wood, they were others.—

  It was day seven and Andy was getting nowhere.

  —Replaceable—followed by more giggles.—No distinction—

  It was astounding to Andy how many fairly ordinary concepts known to a dozen intelligent species that the Company had already encountered were not known by the still elusive voice; children, parents, male, female, good, evil, God. Not a clue. All the voice seemed to know was names. The only actual concepts it seemed able to delineate were “are” and “not are” as well as “care” and “hurt.”

  —You hurt?—it would ask Andy every day during his daily rest periods. Those and his naps had grown longer and more frequent now that he didn’t have the distraction of other crew-mates and the Big Brown Buzz.

  —Not hurt—he would reply.

  —You care?—it would then ask.

  —I care—he would reply.

  —I care—the voice would reiterate. Then giggle a bit and vanish.

  Perhaps that was why, on day seven, when the mobile ’droids were done with their work, the Company’s work on this planet done, Andy decided not to go into the lander with them back to the Dallas. Instead he took the skimmer and went to hide in the Peppermint Woods: the densest forest they had found on the planet. All the while, he admitted to himself that he was acting totally irrationally. At first he told himself that it was the principle of the thing, and he was taking a stand. The planet had been misclassified, and he would prove it.

  The next day, Hill sent down a lander full of hunter ’droids. But Andy could T-p their simple mechanisms a hundred kilometers away. Not for nothing were T-ps like Andy given high official rank in the Company, given status and power and often great wealth too. Their ability to read minds as well as to elude anyone or anything other than another T-p made them close to invincible. The hunter ’droids returned back to the lander empty-hand
ed.

  Andy did keep channels open at times to the Dallas, to listen in on the crew, as it voted that night. Willow alone wanted to remain and keep looking for him—even in person if need be. Even Roy, his favorite Playby companion, voted against them staying. But it was evident to all, even Willow, that what had begun on Deneb 3 several months ago had finally worked itself out here, on this planet. T-ps were known to always be the most sensitive and thus the most difficult crew members. More than one had cracked up on board—with disastrous results for all. No one, not even Willow, looked forward to that happening. No sirree. That could get really hazardous to their health.

  Furthermore, following the mobile ’droids’ full inspection and the ship computer’s own fullest analysis, even that Class D designation seemed high for the planet. Every known chemical and mineral on the new Universal Valence Chart did exist somewhere or other upon the little world, true, but all of them in equal quantities, and none sufficient for serious mining. The timber from those billions of trees was all of an ultra-porous, low-pulp quality. The rich-looking foodstuffs that grew so abundantly were lacking in nutrients essential to human life. Although perfectly edible, it wouldn’t break down in the human alimentary system—it merely passed through, undigested.