Life Force, page 8
"Boss," the workman yelled, "you'd better get out here fast."
Matt and Teddy followed Moore out, Teddy bumping her thigh painfully on the corner of a table. The workman who had called Moore ran ahead toward the bank of the river. Matt arrived just after Moore, who had moved surprisingly fast for a man of his age. Teddy, breathing hard and rubbing her thigh, came to stand beside him.
A cut had been started in the tree that was in the way of Moore's veranda. The long blade of an impulse cutter was still caught in the shallow cut, the weight of the power head causing it to vibrate slightly as the electric motor hummed, the blade jammed. At the foot of the tree lay a mass of yellowish white over which two men were working frantically, colored to the elbows by the yellowish-white powder. With a gasp, Teddy realized that the mound of yellowish white was a man. She could tell mainly by the fact that the mound was heaving. The two workmen were frantically trying to brush away the yellowish-white dust from the man's face.
A medic came rushing up, carrying a kit. He pushed a workman aside and rammed his fingers into the man's mouth, digging out sticky, dampened powder. "My God," the medic said, "he's crammed full of the stuff." He ran his fingers down the man's throat and dug out more of the gummy mass that clogged mouth and nostrils.
"What the hell is it?" Moore asked.
"I dunno, boss," a workman said. "We didn't see anything, just heard the cutter going and then Eddie coughing and gasping and he was like this, all covered with this dust."
The medic was fitting a mask to Eddie's face and there was a hiss as the respirator began to try to force oxygen into the man's lungs. Eddie's body jerked, chest pumping, and then he was still.
"Got to get him to the clinic on the ship," the medic said. Two workmen leaped to help carry the man, who was no longer gasping for air. "Get a move on," the medic yelled.
Matt bent, touched the yellowish-white powder that lay in piles on the ground. "Very fine," he said. "Where did it come from?"
"Out of the tree?" Moore asked, bending to look closely. He saw only a dampness of juices seeping out around the stuck: blade of the cutter, wrestled the cutter out of the tree, looked at the cut again. "Nope, there was too much of it to be sawdust from this small cut. Wet sap seeping out."
Matt sniffed at the powder. It had the fragrance of the small flowers that bloomed all around the large leaves of some of the trees. He walked upstream a bit to a point where he could reach a low limb whose leaves were in bloom and touched the flowers. His finger came away with a film of yellowish-white dust. "It's pollen," he said. "Pollen from the flowers." He shook the limb and a dusting of pollen fell. "But the tree that fellow was cutting wasn't in bloom, so he didn't just shake down pollen from the vibration of the cutter."
"He was covered from head to toe," Teddy said. "So much of it. It was inches thick all over him."
Teddy looked around and saw the graceful, huge, obviously old trees in a new light. She'd been on Beauty so long that she'd started taking things for granted. The planet had been so benign, so kind. She'd started seeing the trees, the grasses, the various vegetation much as if she had been looking at the vegetation of Earth, as something commonplace, ever-present, harmless. But these trees, with their huge, round leaves and their masses of tiny, fragrant flowers were not on Earth, but on an alien planet about which they really knew so little.
"Get some samples of that stuff and take it to the lab on the ship," Sandy Moore told a workman. He ran his hands through his sun-bleached hair. "I don't like losing a man."
"Maybe they revived him," Teddy said.
"I hope so," Moore said, but his hopes were dashed as a workman came running from the direction of the ship.
"Boss," the man said, "Eddie's dead. His lungs are all gummed up with that stuff, the doc says."
Teddy turned away. Where Eddie had lain there was a crude drawing of his body outlined by the yellowish-white pollen. The river gurgled quietly. The wind sighed in the leaves of the trees and the flowers perfumed the air. From far off came the muffled boom of a sonic blast as one of the survey ships made a run. The sound seemed an incongruous contrast to the quietness of the river, the sigh of the wind and, somehow, very, very lonely.
Chapter Twelve
Genna Darden dried herself in a soothing rush of arid, heated air. She fluffed her short, ash-blonde hair, glanced at herself in a full-length mirror, pinched her flesh at the waist between thumb and forefinger and nodded in satisfaction. She could not even pinch half an inch. She stepped from the sanitary area of her apartment in the nude, slim and lithe, rounded, Venus emerging from her bath. When she noted the gaze of the man propped up on her bed, she posed for him, smiling naturally, the pose seeming not at all affected. She was Genna, and she was Icelandic, and icy blonde, and her skin looked as if it had never seen the African sun. It had, but never without a protective coating.
"Genna, Genna," the man on the bed said softly. He showed wear, not age, although his hair was grizzled, cut short and stiff. His upper torso showed the results of regular workouts on handball courts and in swimming pools, his hands were blunt-fingered, but the nails were carefully kept. He had a nose once broken and never repaired. That nose made a statement to the effect that this man didn't give a damn what others thought. His steel-colored eyes were warmed, at the moment, by the glow of Genna's skin, but it was evident that they could be as hard as the metal whose color they imitated. His name was Shardan. A few, Genna among them, knew his first name, but, knowing it, forgot it. He was Shardan. To close friends, such as Genna, Shard.
"Come live with me and be my love," he whispered, as Genna moved to the bed, sat on the edge.
"All right," Genna said.
"I'm serious," Shardan said, putting one of his strong hands on a shapely knee.
"I have to go to work," Genna said. "Unfortunately, I am but a poor, working, Icelandic girl who does not have the freedom, as some do, to loll in bed and report to my office by communicator."
"Live with me," Shardan said, "and set your own hours."
"Ah, Shard," she whispered.
Shardan laughed. "Not quite ready to give up the excitement of being ambitious?"
"I do like my work. I think it is important."
"Damned important," Shardan said. "It can be done, if not as well, by others."
Genna rose and went to a chest, pulled out filmy, silken things and, facing Shardan, began to dress. "You have made no comment on what I told you last night," she said.
"I have thought about it," Shardan said, sighing as he sat up.
"And?"
"Everything is as you said. The planet is to be devoted exclusively to animals. Some African herd animals are already there. Reznor has built and is continuing to build facilities to conduct animal research, to oversee the implantation of Earth animals in various locations. A second ground facility is underway, and an exceptionally good alert system has been put into place around the planet. Reznor has converted a colonizer to carry animals and the ship is making round trips from Earth to the planet as soon as it can safely be turned around."
Genna was not at all surprised that Shardan knew the current status of Reznor's project. "And is there nothing that can be done?"
Shardan spread his hands. "I'm not sure anything should be done." He thought he knew why Genna was so interested, so incensed by Reznor's skillful tactics which had resulted in the prevention of human settlement on a fine planet. He knew many things about her, some things, perhaps, that she did not know he knew.
Genna's resentment about giving an entire planet over to animals had deep roots, going back to her childhood and the Icelandic mentality that was a product of being hard working and high-achieving, yet confined to a tiny, inhospitable island whose meager natural resources and lack of expansion room limited both an Icelander's world and his imagination. While the majority of people in the world bred like flies, Icelandic girls had implants at puberty and had to have government permits to remove the birth control implants and could never have more than two children. This fact alone influenced the women of the island. Deprived of the natural satisfaction of choosing their own time for children, they generally expressed nature's most powerful urge, the urge to procreate, in enticing, heart-pounding ways. In the new age of morality, Icelandic women were not amoral, they were just natural, and it was natural for a girl like Genna to have a man if she wanted him.
Oddly enough, very few Icelanders had migrated out to the new worlds. Many of the young ones left the island and, more often than not, achieved success in whatever field they chose. They were not, in general, anti-colonization. If others wanted to leave the Earth, that was well and good. As for them, the great world outside Iceland was so beautiful and so varied that they could do all the expansion they cared to right on Earth. In Genna's case, this meant coming to Africa to work as interagency coordinator for the Bureau of Colonization. But even though Genna had no desire to settle elsewhere, the waste of good living space on animals was upsetting.
Shardan knew that he was not the only man who had ever seen Genna slip into something clinging and flimsy and then cover that perfect, slim, rounded body with a modified Bureau uniform skirt and blouse and jacket, and that didn't bother him. He was sincere in his often repeated offer to take her permanently, and would have done so gladly, but he knew, too, that she was one of the world's great natural assets, uninhibited, natural, sensuous. Those qualities made her a very good interagency coordinator. He, himself, although he was one of the most self-contained men in the world, a man who was not only entrusted with secrets but with their protection, often lowered his defenses just a bit and told Genna more than he would have told anyone else in her position. That quality, the ability to make men want to please her, would make her, he knew, a valuable employee. So when he was turned down, not unkindly, on his offer to have her come with him and be his love, his counter offer was a position at Intel, and that, too, was always refused, though not ungratefully.
"Something should be done," Genna said. "Shall I have breakfast sent up?"
"No. I'll grab something on the way to the office," Shardan said. "I don't think it would be worth the hassle. Legally, that planet is a possession of the United States by act of Congress under provisions of the Pax Five treaties."
"But something could be done?" she persisted.
"Not right away, I'd think," Shardan said. "Later on, if the governmental and freelance explorers fail to find good planets for, oh, a period of four or five years, then some gentle pressure might be brought to bear on the United States."
"By whom?" Genna asked.
"It would have to come from the Pax Five Council, first. A few screams of outrage from the maggot countries would help." Shardan had little regard for those large, differently hued areas of exploding population. "A few bleeding heart media people could amplify the screams from the deprived poor." He mused for a moment, scratching his chest. "It would have to be orchestrated carefully for the public opinion you'd be seeking would have to come from the haves, from the bleeding heart sectors of the advanced nations, and you'll find in those same sectors of the population a strong sentiment for, quote, ecology, unquote. The whole thing would backfire on you if Reznor began a counter campaign pointing out the plight of some obscure species whose last habitat was being destroyed by development. If there's anything the liberals of this world love more than the downtrodden poor, it's the downtrodden, obscure species of animal, or bug, or plant. Now they'll allow the grizzly bear to become a zoo animal because the grizzly is on their lands, and they'll allow low-cost housing to be built in the habitat of the Venus's-flytrap in North Carolina, the only place it can grow outside a greenhouse, because it's their downtrodden poor who need new apartments to dirty and destroy. But if it's someone else's land, say in Africa, or Asia, or on a distant planet that has nothing to do with them, they might sympathize with the poor animals instead of the poor people."
"If you were going to try to do something about it, before it was too late, where would you start?" Genna asked.
Shardan gave it some thought. "Well, I'd want your boss on my side."
Genna smiled.
"No problem, huh?" Shardan stood, stretched. He was a well-built man, in very good condition for his age. "And I'd start cultivating some molder of public opinion, some media giant with an international audience. I'd move very slowly. There's time. It's a big, empty planet. There are a half dozen continental land masses, and some nice islands. It'll take decades for Reznor to even really begin his work there, and there'll be empty, wasted, habitable land areas for fifty or a hundred years. I'd aim for just a chink in the armor, a concession on Reznor's part to allow one continent, or one large island to be opened up to human settlement. After that? Well, all you have to do is look at the history of Earth. In a hundred years or so some follower of Reznor would have to begin to move animals off that planet to make room for the huddled masses."
"To put pressure on the United States from the Pax Five," Genna said. "You could engineer this."
"So can you." He had a sudden inspiration. "But you could do it better from an Intel base. You'd have more information, more possible points of entree to influential individuals at the Pax Five level, more resources."
"And your cooperation?" she asked, coming to kiss him lightly.
"I'm shameless. Yes, I would buy you with that promise, if that is what it would take."
"Then that is a possibility for the future," Genna said. "I must go now."
"I'll be in Paris tonight," Shardan said.
"And I will be busy," Genna said. "Call me when you return, dear Shard."
Chapter Thirteen
The body of Eddie Jones, the first man to die on Beauty, was flown back to the medical labs at Africa House. Matt was invited to watch the autopsy by the medical people, but with the first slash of sharp scalpel into dead, white, human flesh, he bolted and waited for the results in his office. He was there now, stomach still a bit queasy, booted feet on the edge of his desk, reading the doctor's initial report. When Teddy came in, dressed in cute little tan shorts and a loose blouse, he looked up and made a face.
"I told Sandy Moore to hold off cutting down that tree," Teddy said.
Matt nodded. "The man drowned," he said.
Teddy waited.
"On pollen. It filled his lungs and became pasty and allowed no oxygen to get through."
"Terrible," Teddy said, placing herself carefully on the edge of Matt's desk where he couldn't reach her. But Matt's mind was, for once, not on Teddy's nice legs.
"Kerry Hertz wants to fly over to America and take a look at the flowering trees," Teddy said.
"Fine. Tell her to requisition any equipment or material she needs, and draft anyone she wants to help her." He tossed the autopsy report onto the desk. "Damn it, Teddy, those pollen grains are minute. How did so much of it get on and in that man?"
"That's what Kerry hopes to find out," Teddy said.
"I think I'd better go over there myself," Matt said.
"Me, too. I feel sort of responsible since I was the one who signed the variant slip."
They flew over in the same exploration ship with Kerry Hertz. She had taken surprisingly little equipment, and had not asked anyone to go with her. When they landed, work was going on normally, except on the river side near the tree that still oozed sap from the shallow cut in its bole. Kerry Hertz examined the cut, touched her finger to the oozing sap. Then she strolled up and down the river for a few minutes, returned to her little pile of equipment and selected an instrument, asked for a ladder, and used the ladder to climb high enough to suck pollen from the tiny flowers that ringed one big leaf. She repeated the operation, pausing to make notes after each sampling, until she had moved about a hundred yards away from the tree that grew where Moore wanted to put his veranda.
Kerry's hair and nose were dusted with pollen when she came back to where Matt, Teddy, and Sandy Moore waited, seated on the grass beside the river and having a cool one.
"There's hardly any pollen left on the flowers nearest the tree," Kerry said. "The farther you get away from the tree the more pollen there is left on the flowers."
"So?" Matt asked.
"Making a rough estimate of the amount of pollen that fell on—for a lack of a better description—that poor man, it took the total pollen load of approximately thirty or forty trees."
"And how did it get on him?" Matt asked.
"You tell me," Kerry said. "On Valhalla there's a weed that can spit its pollen about ten yards with the proper wind. The pollen has acidity and can irritate the skin. But on Valhalla we found out things like that before we started building and bringing in people."
"Well, I'm so damned glad you people were so intelligent on Valhalla," Matt said. "I'd appreciate it, Dr. Hertz, if you'd quit comparing us to the Germanic perfection of Valhalla and just concentrate on telling me how a man got enough pollen into his lungs, in a very brief period of time, to die of asphyxiation."
"Our fearless leader is testy today," Kerry said, smiling at Teddy. She turned her smile to Matt. "I'd suggest, since we seem to be determined to rush forward single-mindedly on this planet, that you continue the cut on that tree and see if anything happens."
"No," Teddy said quickly. One dead man was enough for her. She didn't have the faintest idea how it had happened, but it had happened when, for the first time, man attacked a major plant form.
"I'll do it," Sandy said. "I'll wear a breather."
"It makes sense, Teddy," Matt said.
Teddy chewed on her lower lip. "All right," she said, "but a full suit, not just a breather."
"All right," Moore said, springing to her feet. He was back within minutes, driving a material transporter with a sealed cab and its own life support system. He parked the transporter where its windscreen would give a good view of the tree, but far enough away so that if and when the tree fell it would not hit the vehicle. The he came waddling toward them with an impulse cutter in his hands.
