Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

‘Then the ship got back after all?’

‘The ship got back after all. Yes. It was watched for and sighted long before it reached the skirts of the solar system. When it radiated answers to Earth’s signals, a fast pilot was sent out with a boarding party. The party found the ship’s controls partially ruined, but managed to pull it into an orbit round Earth. That was three of your generations ago. They then completely destroyed the controls – you say you saw their wreckage – and left the ship.’

‘But why, why – ’ Carappa sounded as if he were choking, ‘ – what form of warped cruelty made you leave us there? You could see how things were – all out of hand, death stalking us, the ponic tangle threatening to overwhelm us …’

His voice died. He saw too vividly the heroism of that terrible flight across the light years and back. The survivors, if only for the sake of the generations who had died, should have been saved and honoured.

‘Why were we left?’ Carappa asked brokenly.

‘There was a reason,’ Crooner said. His voice, suddenly full of compassion, became lost on Brandyholm for a moment. Brandyholm’s eye, when he turned his head only slightly on the hard floor, rested on an object he could not at first identify. With a shock, he realised it was the priest’s dazer, about a foot from his face. When Crooner knocked it flying, it had wedged between two cased pieces of equipment and he had not bothered to retrieve it. Brandyholm had only to lift his hand to grasp it.

‘… Procyon V was the only possible planet,’ Crooner was saying. ‘And surface gravity there was one and a half Gs. So there was not as much trouble as had been feared to get volunteers to start the home run. As I’ve said, the outer journey nearly ended in famine and asphyxiation. But they took off again with a stock of new carbohydrates and amino acids. That was where the trouble began. And it began almost at once, as far as we can tell.

‘Giantism began in the hydroponic tanks. It spread rapidly. A virus-borne infection swept through the crew like wild fire. Few died, but almost all were prostrated for weeks. When they recovered strength, the ship was rapidly becoming as you know it – bulging from stem to stern with the giant hydroponics, ponics as you call them.

‘You might almost suspect them of possessing intelligence, so rapidly did they adapt. Low gravity had suddenly given them a tremendous fillip. They destroyed everything, they created their own humus, partly by a rapid fruition cycle, partly by an almost symbiotic use of tiny insects, whose bodies paved the way for further growth.

‘The people of the ship lived in isolated groups among this entanglement. And they too changed. Some of the domestic animals – the ship’s piggery for instance – escaped the tangle and became wild. Others died. Soon almost the only source of food was the ponics themselves. And then men, too, began to speed up. Their life expectation eventually became not eighty years, but twenty.’

‘You mean – you live four times as long as we in the ship?’ said Carappa.

‘It is so. Which is why I always appeared slow to you. Which is why, too, one sleep-wake in four was dim. You see – ’

‘Yes, I see,’ Carappa said. ‘The daily six-hour dim-down of lighting,’ he quoted. ‘Six hours has become a whole day to us! We thought we were human beings, and we’re not. We’re – monsters, pigmies, things out of order, mechanical toys which flail their arms and legs too fast …’

He broke off, subsiding into mountainous sobs which were more impressive than his spoken outburst. Unable to raise his hands to his face, he sat shaking with internal strife while the tears burst down his crumpled countenance.

The sight roused Brandyholm to action. With one continuous, flowing movement, he seized the dazer and was on his feet. Fast as he was, Crooner could have shot him before he was on his knees: but a fatal hesitancy delayed the Earthman, a sense of compunction the others would neither have understood nor appreciated, and next moment he dropped the gun and nursed his paralysed arm to his side.

Brandyholm blew on his warm dazer triumphantly; he felt better again, more a man. The effect of the action on Carappa, too, was swift. His tears dried and he was again in command.

‘Expansion to your ego, Tom,’ he shouted. ‘I didn’t guess you had it in you! Come and undo me quickly, and we’ll settle for this fellow.’

When he was free, he grunted in satisfaction and lumbered over to Crooner, who leant, deathly white, against a radio panel.

Seizing him by the armpits, and propping him roughly up until his head rattled against the metal, Carappa said, ‘Now, Crooner, we want some information from you before Tom and I leave for Earth. You must instruct us how to get there. But first I want to know what you were doing on the ship at all.’

‘You can’t get back to Earth, Carappa,’ Crooner said. Then, as the priest’s grip tightened, he said hurriedly, ‘I’m an anthropologist. Although you are human, you people have become – owing to your environment – a completely separate race. It is doubtful if you could even inter-marry with Earthmen. When the ship first returned, it was decided you were all unfit to leave your environment: you would have died. You had already adapted to the ship’s nightmare conditions. It was decided we should not interfere with you, that your journey should continue non-stop until further speeding up and degeneration in the metabolism of your descendants brought the inevitable end.’

‘And you?’ growled Carappa.

‘I was sent as an anthropologist, to live among and observe what is, to us, a strange race. It’s a three year stretch – tough, but engrossing and – well paid. I am not the first, nor the only anthropologist. We have to undergo long training; then we are slipped in the emergency hatch, and find our way through the ponics either to Quarters or Forwards, or one of the other tribes. But they have some good brains in Forwards. The Council of Five caught one or two of my earlier colleagues, and although they gave as little as possible away, suspicions are aroused, as you know. I was lucky to get away as I have.’

‘That luck may not last,’ Carappa said threateningly. ‘You have to get Tom and me safely to Earth before you can be sure you have survived.’

Still gripping his right elbow, Crooner straightened himself.

‘That’s not in my hands,’ he said. ‘Directly I got here, I radioed to Satellite One, told them of my plight and asked them to pick me up. A rocket’s on its way over now, to take me down Earthside. My spell of field work was nearly over anyway – by Jove, won’t civilisation be good, to say nothing of a decent drink! But whether or not you come down with me is not for me to say; the boys on the rocket’ll decide that.’

‘I can shoot ’em all!’ Brandyholm snapped suddenly. He waved the gun demonstratively.

Crooner just laughed. ‘I suppose you might be able to, little man. And what good would that do you?’

There was silence, accompanied by some lip chewing from the priest.

‘The rocket’ll be here in about twenty minutes,’ Crooner announced casually. He looked more confident now.

‘It does seem rather a deadlock, Carappa,’ Brandyholm said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we went back into the ship?’

Carappa ignored the suggestion, and said smoothly to Crooner, ‘It seems, Bob, as if we shall need your help after all. As you realise, we intend you no harm, otherwise we should have shot you like a pig long before this. And don’t forget how Tom here saved your life when Wantage went beserk in the tangle.’

‘It’s useless whining at me,’ Crooner said. ‘I’m not your judge. I told you, it’s all up to the boys on the rocket.’