Jack Chalker: Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

“We Cerberans,” Bogen said softly, “swap minds, you see.”

The man reclined on a soft bedlike couch before an instrument-laden cluster in a small inner chamber of the space vehicle; he was wired, through some sort of helmet device, to the instruments around him. He looked tired, disturbed, and anxious.

“Hold it!” he called out.

The massive computer all around him seemed to pause for a brief moment “Something wrong?” the computer asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

He sat up on the recliner. “Let me take a break before starting this next one. I don’t think I can take two right on top of one another right now. Let me walk around, talk to a few people, generally relax, maybe even get some sleep. Then I’ll be ready. The Confederacy is not going to fall if I wait ten or twelve hours.”

“As you wish,” the computer responded. “However, I do think that time is of the essence. This might be the one that tells us what we need to know.”

“Maybe,” the man sighed, taking off the helmet. “But we’ve been rotting here the better part of a year with nothing much to do. Another few hours won’t mean anything. We’ll probably need all four anyway, and nobody knows when the next two will come in.”

“All that you say is logical and true,” the computer admitted. “Still, I cannot help but wonder if your hesitancy is less governed by such practical matters.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“The Lilith account has disturbed you a great deal. I can tell it by your body-function monitors.”

He sighed. “You’re right. Hell, that was me, remember. Me when I went down, and somebody I hardly knew at all when he reported. It’s kind of a shock to discover that you don’t know yourself at all.”

“Still, the work must continue,” the computer noted. “You are putting off the Cerberus report because you fear it That is not a healthy situation.”

“I’ll take itl” he snapped. “Just give me a little breathing room!”

“As you wish. Shutting down module.”

The man rose and walked back to his living quarters. He needed some depressant, he told himself. The pills were there, but he rejected them as not what he wanted. Human company. Civilized company from the civilized worlds, from the culture in which he’d been raised. A drink in the picket-ship bar, perhaps. Or two. Or more. And human beings…

In a system based on perfect order, uniformity, and harmony, the Warden Diamond was an insane asylum. Halden Warden, a Confederacy scout, had discovered the system well over two centuries earlier. Warden himself was a legend for the number of planets he had discovered, but was considered something of a nut, even for the sort of men and women who preferred to spend most of their time alone among uncharted stars. He loved his work, but he considered discovery his function, leaving just about everything else for those who would follow. He paused only long enough to take positions and beam back the information in as terse a form as possible. The trouble was, he was usually so terse people couldn’t figure out what he meant until they got there—and for the Warden Diamond he was in top form.

His initial signal was a seemingly simple “4AW.” The meaning of this signal was far from simple—it was impossible. It meant a single solar system with four inhabitable worlds, a statistical near impossibility in a galaxy in which only one out of four thousand solar systems contained anything remotely of use. It was Warden, though, who had found the impossible and named them. His entire report was pretty characteristic of his worst. Charon—looks like Hell.

Lilith—anything that pretty’s got to have a snake in it. Cerberus—looks like a real dog. Medusa—anybody who lives here would have to have rocks in his head.

And that was it That, the coordinates, and the caution “ZZ,” which meant that there was something about the place he didn’t like but that he couldn’t put his finger on. Dangerous—proceed with extreme caution.

When the first party, armed to the teeth, reached it, they immediately perceived what spooked Warden beyond the existence of the incredible four planets. They seemed to be at right angles to each other around their F-type star.

It turned out, of course, that this configuration was a freak occurrence—nobody since has seen the Diamond form as perfectly as Warden when he discovered it, and there was really nothing unnatural about such once-in-a-lifetime configurations, but the early name stuck. The Warden Diamond.

An enormous amount of space junk was in the system—asteroids, comets, you name it, as well as the usual gas giants—but the second through fifth planets were what held everyone spellbound. Each was within the life zone for temperature; all had atmospheres of nitrogen and oxygen, all had water.

Charon, at 158.551 million kilometers from its sun, was a hot, steamy jungle world with bubbling mud and horrible heat and humidity. The dominant life form seemed to be large reptilian creatures that resembled the smaller dinosaurs. Indeed, the planet did look like some visions of hell.

Lilith, at 192.355 million kilometers, was an Eden, a warm paradise all over. Heavily forested, and rich in a variety of plant life, the planet was inhabited by insects from very small to tremendous. The fruit proved edible, the grasses versatile, and even the insects were sources of protein. It was a paradise, all right, with nary a snake in sight. Yet.

Cerberus, at 240.161 million kilometers, was colder, harsher, and the strangest of the four. It appeared to be covered by an enormous deep ocean without any land masses. However, the ocean was covered by a dense growth of plants so gigantic they rose more than two or three kilometers from the seabed to the surface and beyond, forming a riot of colors and supporting a surface plant ecosystem growing on the tops of the great plants themselves. You could build cities in those treetops, and, in the temperate zones, live very comfortably from a climate point of view. But with natural resources other than wood so far out of sight as to be unreachable if available at all and with such an odd place for living, the planet was something of a dog as far as possible settlement was concerned.

Finally there was Medusa, at 307.768 million kilometers, a cold, frozen world dotted with a few forests but covered mostly with tundra and polar ice. The only one of the four with obvious signs of volcanism, it was a hard, harsh land whose only inhabitants seemed to be a mammalian assembly of Wandering herbivores preyed upon by some particularly nasty-looking carnivores. Medusa was ugly, bitter cold, and stark, compared not just to Lilith but to any of the others; the early explorers had to agree that anybody who voluntarily went to such a world to live and work would most likely have rocks in his head.

The Exploiter Team had chosen Lilith for its main base, naturally, and settled in. Nothing happened for about six months, as they lived and worked and studied under a rigid quarantine, although with their shuttlecraft they had established preliminary camps on the other three worlds as well. They were just beginning to relax when Lilith’s snake struck.

By the time all their machinery had ceased to function it was already too late. They watched first as the power drained out of all their equipment, then, frantically, as that same equipment and all other offworld artifacts started to break up into so much junk, rotting before their eyes. Within a week there was simply no sign that anything alien to Lilith had ever been there; everything was gone, even their clearings being overgrown with astonishing speed. Soon nothing at all was left—nothing but sixty-two stunned, stark-naked scientists, bewildered and scared half to death but without even the most elementary equipment to explain to them that they hadn’t all just gone stark staring mad.