Damon Knight - Orbit 20

Erring said, “Gerold, do you have some interest in not believing in immortality?” (That’s the first time I’ve ever heard Erring try to be unkind, thought Hanna uneasily.)

Gerold grinned savagely, and said, “Not half the interest you have in thinking I have,” and added for good measure, “Little group-therapy specialist.”

In the silence, they listened to one another’s breathing, and heard, unwillingly, the faint chanting of the Konans, far over the plain.

On the fifth and sixth days, Jon came out with Hanna again, evidently impelled by the need to write up his preliminary report. “After all,” he said, “they’ll want it pretty soon now, don’t you think?”

Hanna did not reply. The elation of telling Gerold unwelcome truths had worn off long ago. She felt depressed, guilty, and uncertain.

“Of course, you won’t have to write much. The language report from the first survey was so good.”

“I won’t write anything. I told you, I’m not putting in a report. At least not if Gerold writes what I think he will.”

Jon glanced at her uneasily,*and said “Oh, Gerold will be all right. I’ll have a talk with him, shall I?”

No answer. Hanna was thinking, Another thing. On any other planet we’d be out of the shuttle and in tents by now. Even on Achwa we were so tired of the shuttle we went outside as soon as we could. But no one’s even suggested it here. But of course the tents were army guerrilla ones, from the closing stages of the war, with walls providing one-way vision, and excellent transmission of outside sounds. In brief, very good for observation; but not for giving the secure sense of an environment shut out.

“Shall I?” asked Jon again.

“What? Oh yes, sure.” She said, testing, “How about fixing up the tents tonight? Should be all right now.”

Jon stared straight in front of him; he muttered quickly, “Too cold,” then, more loudly, “Shall I try talking to some of the locals today? It’d be easier on you if they were split into two groups. I mean, we might get on quicker.”

“If you think you can manage it,” said Hanna, hardly hearing her own reply. For Jon knew as well as she did that the tents were set to keep a steady temperature of twenty-two degrees inside, in outside temperatures ten times lower than anything they had found on Kona.

Jon was saying indignantly, “Of course I can manage it. I may not have had your experience, but I have been working two years, you know.”

“I’m sorry.” Hanna remembered now that Jon had for many years been the youngest in his child-troop. She wondered how many times, as a little boy, he had had to say “I can do it. I am big enough.”

Whatever his motives, Jon successfully detached a group of Konans from the main body, and worked steadily all the two days, though at the end he had little to report. Hanna was not surprised. She herself had finally concluded that the Konans could not, or would not, tell her any more about the deaths of the first Terran survey, and had turned belatedly to more standard enquiries about Konan life-style. She felt, guiltily, that Gerold had been partly right—they did need to know more about Konan physiology. Yet she herself, engrossed in linguistics, had neglected to make the proper enquiries.

Now, trying to make good the omission, she found again that there was no quick information to be obtained from the Konans. One morning, for instance, she elicited the statement that “We eat many things, of which the grass is one.” But it took her the rest of the day, battling through long discourses on the quality of the grass, and the proper ways of gathering it, to establish that the Konans were actually talking of the plains grass surrounding them, and that they did not eat it every day. And that still left unanswered the questions of how often, and what else, they might eat. She did try, experimentally, to pluck some grass, but though she threw her whole weight against it, not a stalk broke; which only appeared to affirm the perfection of the Konans’ digestive systems.

She and Jon returned to the shuttle on the sixth evening to find Gerold busy writing a cautious but smugly favourable report, from which he occasionally read extracts to the rest of the group. Biren, tinkering with the transmitter, announced that the relief shuttle was expected to land sometime after Kona noon the next day. Gerold said, “Good, they can take this report back, and beam it off right away.” He and Erring and Jon went into a huddle; they talked—irritatingly—too softly for the others to hear the whole conversation, but too loudly to be ignored. Alissin and Biren worked; Hanna sat and worried. It occurred to her for the first time that in raising the subject of immortality, she might well have produced the uneasiness she had used as evidence for her theory. And what other evidence had she? Conversations with a completely alien people whose language she knew only through short-term study? Her own feelings, helped by a dangerously ready facility to draw literary comparisons? I could have made a mistake, she thought. We’ve all been trained so hard to make our decisions quickly, to sum up a planet a month; we’d almost rather make a wrong decision than no decision. What if I’ve built up this tension for nothing? But all the time, the feel of the unyielding planet pressed through the walls of the shuttle at her. She could not forget the great silent plains, and the solid bar of the mountains behind. She wondered suddenly if some of the first survey had died from sheer exhaustion, trying to follow the Konans up the mountains. The plain was bad enough; every day, one tramped until one was tired, and when one turned around, the shuttle looked no distance away in the clear air, and the stretch of grass in front seemed still limitless. What then would it be like to climb a Konan mountain?

Erring stood up and said, “End of our first week on Kona, folks! Three weeks today, and we could be off it, and going back to Terra!” and the sense of longing anticipation went round the cabin almost as palpably as a breeze.

That night, when Hanna took over the watch, Alissin, who had preceded her, did not go back to sleep but set up her bench for work. “Got to prepare some experiments,” she said in answer to Hanna’s enquiring look.

“What on?”

“A type of alga. I found it in a puddle out there, and it looks as if it could be a colony food source, except that it reproduces damn slowly, even with all the accelerators that I can put on it. I’m trying a few different environments now.” There was a pause, while she adjusted the settings on an environment hemisphere; then she said, “Marginal work, really, but I can’t do much else without tissue samples from higher life forms.”

Hanna said, with ill-concealed frustration, “We probably won’t be here long enough to get them. Look at the way Gerold’s rushing to get out his preliminary report tomorrow.”

Alissin had turned to her algae samples again. She said drily, “It seems that the only quick way to test out Konan immortality would be to try to kill some, and see how difficult it is.”

It was the day on which Gerold proposed to send out his report, and Hanna wanted to spend the morning with the Konans, in the faint hope that some knowledge would arrive to clarify decision. Rather surprisingly, Jon seemed eager to come too. Alissin also volunteered; but they all knew that this was a strategic retreat from Gerold’s attempts to bully both her and Hanna into writing reports.

“Very stable weather here,” said Alissin as they set off; and it was true. The breeze was still blowing cold and steady from the mountains, the sky had never varied from its perfect steel blue, the unending ripples of grass were the same yesterday, today, and most likely tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.