Тэлмидж Пауэлл - Beulah

Condition yellow... You, Smitty... You’re yellow... A bumpkin from Mars... Why do you think they tagged you for the Beulah landing? Because they’re a cruddy bunch of maggots, that’s why... Little two-legged beasties always ganging up with each other... Slobbering protein into their steamy guts... Creeping to special places to rid themselves of waste to keep from befouling themselves...

The rigidity in Smitty’s muscles dissolved. He stood blinking, as if wondering for the briefest moment where he was. He punched the Valan control and watched a section in the scout’s side slide rearward to offer a three-by-six feet opening to the golden sands and blue-tinged sky outside.

He moved out and quickly started toward the Zenith. Dimly, he felt that he had omitted certain details but they didn’t seem important. He circled the Zenith, a tall, lithe figure in Bradspan, the almost weightless material standard in space clothing, a shield against heat, cold, sudden pressure changes, and smaller doses of high energy radiation.

Back in the scout car, the voice of Carruthers was pouring earnestly from the speaker: “What’s delaying your checklist for EVA, Smitty? Come in, Smitty... Request EVA checklist... Come in...

Vaguely, Smitty realized that the scout was emitting yapping noises at him. Why didn’t Carruthers just shut up?

Why not trot back and smash the speaker to keep them off his back? It seemed like a great idea, but it could wait. The shimmering veil before Smitty was much more intriguing. A rainbow, no less, touching the feathery golden ground at his feet and sweeping to a height beyond that of the Zenith. With a frightful but delightful little shiver racing through his shoulders Smitty stepped into the indigo and orange transparency.

The golden land was no longer barren, but riotous with the richest vegetation to seek life from a planet. Nothing but flowers of every color everywhere, from tiny silver buds to enormous yellow blooms strewn to farthest distances.

He heard movement, dry, rustling, unpleasant. Squinting, he saw a familiar figure a dozen feet away, writhing through the flower jungle on its bell.

Me? he thought with some amazement.

That creepy, crawling thing is me?

It most surely was. He was writhing and thrashing around, goaded by all his human anxieties, dislikes, uncertainties, giving himself over to reasonless hatred and greed. He was blindly tearing at and destroying the plants, and soon the scene was one of stinking rot, where the land had once been clean.

He backed away, bitterly ashamed, feeling that he should die for his depredations. And the veil lifted, and once more he was standing in the shadow of Zenith wondering what had come over him.

This wasn’t really the time or place for theoretical explanations. He had a job to do here, something to do with Zenith and the reason for the cessation of all evidence of life aboard it.

He was standing before an open, Level One portal in the shady side of Zenith. Comparatively small in the bottom curve of the vast silvery egg, Level One housed little more than secondary airlocks — and the primary lift which could take Smitty to all of the upper reaches of Zenith.

A few strides carried him inside Level One, across the short distance to the lift. He stepped inside and punched a button. The door whisked closed, and a pressure on the soles of his feet told him the lift was moving.

Smitty glanced about. The lift was a cubicle large enough to carry a hundred people or several tons of machinery. He felt quite small in it. Then he suddenly giggled.

“...You find the concept amusing, Pupil Smithson?” Professor Gwaltney snapped the question. He was a thin, stooped, harried man who always seemed steeped in misery. He certainly might have been. With only a third degree certificate, Earth side Institute, attesting the limits of his capacities, he had spent his life teaching in a behind-the-times classroom in the dreary Martian colonies. He disliked his students almost as much as the bitter environment. They were a tough, hardy, often brilliant lot, constant reminders of his own shortcomings.

At his question, the other five-year-old boys and girls slipped looks in Smitty’s direction. They were giving him silent support because he was the professor’s pet hate this quarter.

“Perhaps you do not conceive the concept of sentience, Pupil Smithson?”

“I believe I do, sir,” a snub-nosed, tow-headed, age-five Smitty said politely. “Sentience, as we interpret it today, is a quality of whatever kind, form, or degree, not necessarily dependent on a brain...”

“Yes, yes, Smithson! On your classroom best, aren’t you? And the vocabulary! My, aren’t we progressing during our turns at the RXI teaching device. Since we are so brilliant today, please recall for the benefit of the class the basic types and forms of sentience found thus far in non-brain material.”

“Insects, sir. Sometimes their sentience reaches the level of intelligence. And the rolling stones of Gerviki-A...”

“You hesitate, Pupil Smithson?” Gwaltney’s sparse brows shot up in mock amazement.

Smitty’s cheeks took on some of the reddish hues of the cold terrain outside. “Having lived all my life here on Mars where rocks are just rocks...”

“Aha!” Gwaltney interrupted. “You’re showing the end of your intellectual rope, Pupil Smithson!”

“Sir,” and now he was coldly pale with a shard of Martian ice in his young eyes, “just because I have not seen them, I’m not stupid enough to deny the rolling stones. They have been observed for almost a century now.”

“In what way are they sentient?”

“When Gerviki-A was discovered, the greenish stones were all in small clusters atop the low hills of the planet. It was found out that if an outside force dislodged a stone, it inched its way back up the hill to rejoin its cluster. If a stone was removed from one cluster to another it eventually returned to its own cluster. And of course plants on many planets have a form of sentience demonstrated by their reaching for sunlight, withdrawal from frost, their power to hibernate.”

“Quite, Pupil Smithson. And the will to live among plants...”

Gwaltney and the classroom vanished — and all the plants were dead.

Smitty was standing on Zenith’s level three, dwarfed by the tier upon tier of hydroponic tanks crowded ceiling high, their orderly rows leaving only small corridors for passage. The stench of rotten vegetation choked him. He struggled for breath, staring in disbelief.

The scene should have been fresh and colorful. Giant red strawberries from earth; acres of flotney buds from Venus; delicious ochre beans from dome-sheltered farms on Mars; and a thousand other varieties from a hundred other planets to please the sight, smell, and taste of the star-craft’s human cargo.

But all were dead. Torn from their roots. Spilled in noisome masses in the corridors or hanging limp over the sides of the tanks.

Smitty stumbled backward into the lift and jammed his hand against the control for Level Central.

“Postulate: Beulah was devoid of all life until the arrival of Zenith,” he mumbled. “Postulate: The plants are all dead. Conclusion: The crew destroyed the plants.”

Unless the plants had ravaged and killed each other.

He neared the vastness of Level Central with the feeling that a cold compress was squeezing his heart, and he stepped out prepared for shock. But the sight that met his eyes was beyond shock. He stood paralyzed, unable to admit the reality of the scene.

The dead littered Level Central, grotesquely, in every position, all bearing the marks of the most savage violence. Thousands, bloated or desiccated with rot, in the open grave that Zenith had become. Here was a remains with an eye torn out, throat ripped away. There, a hand with flesh falling away still clutching the mechanics laser pencil from tool storage with which it had cut another crewman in half. A girl with an old-fashioned butcher knife from the galley between her shoulder blades.