Seeding Program Part 1

Blish, James.

Seeding Program.

BOOK ONE.

SEEDING PROGRAM.

The s.p.a.ceship resumed humming around Sweeney without his noticing the change. When Capt. Meikiejon's voice finally came again from the wall speaker, Sweeney was still lying buckled to his bunk in a curious state of .tranquility he had never known before, and couldn't possibly have described, even to himself. Though he had a pulse, he might otherwise have concluded that he was dead. It took him several minutes to respond.

"Sweeney, do you hear me? Are you all right?"

The brief hesitation in the pilot's breathing made Sweeney grin. From Meikiejon's point of view, and that of most of the rest of humanity, Sweeney was all wrong. He was, in fact, dead.

The heavily insulated cabin, with its own airlock to the out- side, and no access for Sweeney at all to the rest of the ship, was a testimonial to his wrongness. So was Meikiejon's tone: the voice of a man addressing, not another human being, but something that had to be kept in a vault.

A vault designed to protect the universe outside it not to protect its contents from the universe. . '

"Sure, I'm all right," Sweeney said, snapping the buckle and sitting up. He checked the thermometer, which still registered its undeviating minus 194 F.the mean surface temperature of Ganymede, moon number III of Jupiter. "I was- dozing, sort of. What's up?"

"I'm putting the ship into her orbit; we're about a thousand miles up from the satellite now. I thought you might want to take a look."

"Sure enough. Thanks, Mickey."

The wall speaker said, "Yeah. Talk to you later." Sweeney grappled for the guide rail and pulled himself over to the cabin's single bull'seye port, maneuvering with considerable precision. For a man to whom 1/6 Earth gravity is normal, free fall -a situation of no gravity at all-is only an extreme case.

Which was what Sweeney was, too. A human being -but an extreme case.

He looked out. He knew exactly what he would sec; he had studied it exhaustively from photos, from teletapes, from maps, and through telescopes both at home on the Moon and on Mars. When you approach Ganymede at inferior conjunc- tion, as Meikiejon was doing, the first thing that hits you in the eye is the huge oval blot called Neptune's Trident so named by the earliest Jovian explorers because it was marked with the Greek letter psi on the old Howe composite map. The name had turned out to have been well chosen: that blot is a deep, many-p.r.o.nged sea, largest at the eastern end, which runs from about 120 to 165 in longitude, and from about 10 to 33 North lat.i.tude. A sea of what? Oh, water, of course water frozen rock-solid forever, and covered with a layer of rock-dust about three inches thick.

East of the Trident, and running all the way north to the pole, is a great triangular marking called the Gouge, a tom- up, root-entwined, avalanche-shaken valley which continues right around the pole and back up into the other hemisphere, fanning out as it goes. ( Up because north to s.p.a.ce pilots, as to astronomers, is down.) There is nothing quite like the Gouge on any other planet, although at inferior conjunction, when your ship is coming down on Ganymede at the 180 meridian, it is likely to remind you of Syrtis Major on Mars.

There is, however, no real resemblance. Syrtis Major is per- haps the pleasantest land on all of Mars. The Gouge, on the other hand, is -a gouge.

On the eastern rim of this enormous scar, at long. 218, N.

lat. 32, is an isolated mountain about 9,000 feet high, which had no name as far as Sweeney knew; it was marked with the letter pi on the Howe map. Because of its isolation, it can be seen easily from Earth's Moon in a good telescope when the sunrise terminator lies in that longitude, its peak shining de- tached in the darkness like a little star. A semicircular shelf juts westward out over the Gouge from the base of Howe's pi, it sides bafflingly sheer for a world which shows no other signs of folded strata.

It was on that shelf that the other Adapted Men lived.

Sweeney stared down at the nearly invisible mountain with its star-fire peak for a long time, wondering why he was not reacting. Any appropriate emotion would do: antic.i.p.ation, alarm, eagerness, anything at all, even fear. For that matter, having been locked up in a safe for over two months should by now have driven him foaming to get out, even if only to join the Adapted Men. Instead, the tranquility persisted. He was unable to summon more than a momentary curiosity over Howe's pi before his eye was drawn away to Jupiter himself, looming monstrous and insanely-colored only 600,000 miles away, give or take a few thousand. And even that planet had attracted him only because it was brighter; otherwise, it had no meaning.

"Mickey?" he said, forcing himself to look back down into the Gouge.

"Right here, Sweeney. How does it look?'

"Oh, like a relief map. That's how they all look. Where are you going to put me down? Don't the orders leave it up to us?"

"Yeah. But I don't think there's any choice," Meikiejon's voice said, less hesitantly. "It'll have to be the big plateau Howe's H."

Sweeney scanned the oval mare with a mild distaste. Stand- ing on that, he would be as conspicuous as if he'd been planted in the middle of the Moon's Mare Crisium. He said so.

"You've no choice," Meikiejon repeated calmly. He burped the rockets several times. Sweeney's weight returned briefly, tried to decide which way it wanted to throw itself, and then went away again. The ship was now in its...o...b..t; but whether Meikiejon had set it up to remain put over its present co- ordinates, or instead it was to cruise criss-cross over the whole face of the satellite, Sweeney couldn't tell, and didn't ask.

The less he knew about that, the better.

"Well, it's a long drop," Sweeney said. "And that atmos- phere isn't exactly the thickest in the system. I'll have to fall in the lee of the mountain. I don't want to have to trudge a couple of hundred miles over Howe's H."

"On the other hand," Meikiejon said, "if you come down too close, our friends down there will spot your parachute.

Maybe it'd be better if we dropped you into the Gouge, after all. There's so much tumbled junk down there that the radar echoes must be tremendous -not a chance of their spotting a little thing like a man on a parachute."

"No, thank you. There's still optical spotting, and a foil parachute looks nothing like a rock spur, even to an Adapted Man. It'll have to be behind the mountain, where I'm in both optical and radar shadow at once. Besides, how could I climb out of the Gouge onto the shelf? They didn't plant themselves on the edge of a cliff for nothing."

"That's right," Meikiejon said. "Well, I've got the catapult pointed. I'll suit up and join you on the hull."

"All right. Tell me again just what you're going to do while I'm gone, so I won't find myself blowing the whistle when you're nowhere around." The sound of a suit locker being opened came tinnily over the intercom. Sweeney's chute har- ness was already strapped on, and getting the respirator and throat-mikes into place would only take a moment. Sweeney needed no other protection.

"I'm to stay up here with all power off except maintenance for 300 days," Meikiejon's voice, sounding more distant now, was repeating. "Supposedly by that time you'll have worked yourself in good with our friends down there and will know the setup. I stand ready to get a message from you on a fixed frequency. You're to send me only a set of code letters; I feed them into the computer, the comp tells me what to do and I act accordingly. If I don't hear from you after 300 days, I utter a brief but heartfelt prayer and go home. Beyond that, G.o.d help me, I don't know a thing."

"That's plenty," Sweeney told him. "Let's go."

Sweeney went out his personal airlock. Like all true inter- planetary craft, Meikiejon's ship had no overall hull. She con- sisted of her essential components, including the personnel globe, held together by a visible framework of girders and I-beams. It was one of the longest of the latter, one which was already pointed toward Howe's H, which would serve as the "catapult."

Sweeney looked up at the globe of the satellite. The old fa- miliar feeling of falling came over him for a moment; he -looked down, reorienting himself to the ship, until it went away. He'd be going in that direction soon enough.

Meikiejon came around the bulge of the personnel globe, sliding his shoes along the metal. In his bulky, misshapen s.p.a.cesuit, it was he who looked like the unhuman member of the duo.

"Ready?" he said.

Sweeney nodded and lay face down on the I-beam, snap- ping the guide-clips on his harness into place around it. He could feel Meikiejon's mitts at his back, fastening the JATO unit; he could see nothing now, however, but the wooden sled that would protect his body from the beam.

"Okay," the pilot said. "Good luck, Sweeney."

"Thanks. Count me off, Mickey."

"Coming up on five seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

Hack."

The JATO unit shuddered and dealt Sweeney a nearly par- alyzing blow between his shoulder-blades. For an instant the acceleration drove him down into his harness, and the sled spraddled against the metal of the I-beam.

Then, suddenly, the vibration stopped. He was flying free.

A little belatedly, he jerked the release ring.

The sled went-curving away from under him, dwindling rapidly among the stars. The pressure at his back cut out as the JATO unit, still under power, flamed ahead of him. The instantly-dissipated flick of heat from its exhaust made him ill for a moment; then it bad vanished. It would hit too hard to leave anything where it landed but a hole.

Nothing was left but Sweeney, falling toward Ganymede, head first. '

From almost the beginning, from that day unremember- ably early in his childhood when he had first realized that the underground dome on the Moon was all there was to the universe for n.o.body but himself, Sweeney had wanted to be human; wanted it with a vague, impersonal ache which set quickly into a chill bitterness of manner and outlook at his unique everyday life, and in dreams with flares of searing loneliness which became more infrequent but also more in- tense as he matured, until such a night would leave him as shaken and mute, sometimes for several days at a stretch, as an escape from a major accident.

The cadre of psychologists, psychiatrists and a.n.a.lysts as- signed to him did what they could, but that was not very much. Sweeney's history contained almost nothing that was manipulable by any system of psychotherapy developed to help human beings. Nor were the members of the cadre ever able to agree among themselves what the prime goal of such therapy should be: whether to help Sweeney to live with the facts of his essential inhumanity, or to fan instead that sin- gle spark of hope which the non-medical people on the Moon were constantly holding out toward Sweeney as the sole rea- son for his existence.

The facts were simple and implacable. Sweeney was an Adapted Man -adapted, in this instance, to the bitter cold, the light gravity, and the thin stink of atmosphere which pre- vailed on Ganymede. The blood that ran in his veins, and the sol substrate of his every cell, was nine-tenths liquid am- monia; his bones were Ice IV; his respiration was a complex hydrogen-to-methane cycle based not upon catalysis by an iron-bearing pigment, but upon the locking and unlocking of a double sulfur bond; and he could survive for weeks, if he had to, upon a diet of rock dust.

He had always been this way. What had made him so had happened to him literally before he had been conceived: the application, to the germ cells which had later united to form him, of an elaborate constellation of techniques-selective mitotic poisoning, pinpoint X-irradiation, tectogenetic micro- surgery, compet.i.tive metabolic inhibition, and perhaps fifty more whose names he had never even heard -which collect- ively had been christened "pantropy." The word, freely re- translated, meant "changing everything" and it fitted.

As the pantropists had changed in advance the human pat- tern in Sweeney's shape and chemistry, so they had changed his education, his world, his thoughts, even his ancestors. You didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand, Dr. Alfven had once explained proudly to Sweeney over the intercom. Even the ultimate germ cells were the emergents of a hundred previous generations, bred one from another be- fore they had pa.s.sed the zygote stage like one-celled animals, each one bia.s.sed a little farther toward the cyanide and ice and everything nice that little boys like Sweeney were made of. The psych cadre picked off Dr. Alfven at the end of that same week, at the regular review of the tapes of what had been said to Sweeney and what he had found to say back, but they need hardly have taken the trouble. Sweeney had never heard a nursery rhyme, any more than he had ever experi- enced the birth trauma or been exposed to the Oedipus com- plex. He was a law unto himself, with most of the whereases blank.

He noticed, of course, that Alfven failed to show up when his next round was due, but this was commonplace. Scientists came and went around the great sealed cavern, always ac- companied by the polite and beautifully uniformed private po- lice of the Greater Earth Port Authority, but they rarely lasted very long. Even among the psych cadre there was always a peculiar tension, a furious constraint which erupted periodi- cally into pitched shouting battles. Sweeney never found out what the shouting was about because the sound to the outside was always cut as soon as the quarrels began, but he noticed that some of the partic.i.p.ants never showed up again.

"Where's Dr. Emory? Isn't this his day?"

"He finished his tour of duty."

"But I want to talk to him. He promised to bring me a book.

Won't he be back for a visit?"

"I don't think so, Sweeney. He's retired. Don't worry about him, he'll get along just fine, I'll bring you your book."

It was after the third of these incidents that Sweeney was let out on the surface of the Moon for the first time guarded, it was true, by five men in s.p.a.cesuits, but Sweeney didn't care. The new freedom seemed enormous to him, and his own suit, only a token compared to what the Port cops had to wear, hardly seemed to exist. It was his first foretaste of the liberty he was to have, if the many hints could be trusted, after his job was done. He could even see the Earth, where people lived.

About the job he knew everything there was to know, and knew it as second nature. It had been drummed into him from his cold and lonely infancy, always with the same command at the end: "We must have those men back."

Those six words were the reason for Sweeney; they were also Sweeney's sole hope. The Adapted Men had to be recap- tured and brought back to Earth or more exactly, back to the dome on the Moon, the only place besides Ganymede where they could be kept alive. And if they could not all be recap- tured -he was to entertain this only as a possibility he must at least come back with Dr. Jacob Rullman. Only Rullman would be sure to know the ultimate secret: how to turn an Adapted Man back into a human being.

Sweeney understood that Rullman 'and his a.s.sociates were criminals, but how grievous their crime had been was a ques- tion he had never tried to answer for himself. His standards were too sketchy. It was clear from the beginning, however, that the colony on Ganymede had been set up without Earth's sanction, by methods of which Earth did not approve (ex- cept for special cases like Sweeney), and that Earth wanted it broken up. Not by force, for Earth wanted to know first what Rullman knew, but by the elaborate artifice which was Sween- ey himself.

We must have those men back. After that, the hints said never promising anything directly Sweeney could be made human, and know a better freedom than walking the airless surface of the Moon with five guards.

It was usually after one of these hints that one of those suddenly soundless quarrels would break out among the staff.

Any man of normal intelligence would have come to suspect that the hints were less than well founded upon any. real ex- pectation, and Sweeney's training helped to make him sus- picious early; but in the long run he did not care. The hints offered his only hope and he accepted them with hope but without expectation. Besides, the few opening words of such quarrels which he had overheard before the intercom clicked off had suggested that there was more to the disagreement than simple doubt of the convertibility of an Adapted Man.

It had been Emory, for instance, who had burst out unex- pectedly and explosively: "But suppose Rullman was right?"

Click.

Right about what? Is a lawbreaker ever "right?" Sweeney could not know. Then there had been the technie who had said "It's the cost that's the trouble with terra-forming"

what did that mean? -and had been hustled out of the mon- itoring chamber on some trumped-up errand hardly a minute later. There were many such instances, but inevitably Sween- ey failed to put the fragments together into any pattern. He decided only that they did not bear directly upon his chances of becoming human, and promptly abandoned them in the vast desert of his general ignorance.

In the long run, only the command was real the com- mand and the nightmares. We must have those men back.

Those six words were the reason .why Sweeney, like a man whose last effort to awaken has failed, was falling head first toward Ganymede.

The Adapted Men found Sweeney halfway up the great col which provided the only access to their cliff-edge colony from the plateau of Howe's H. He did not recognize them; they conformed to none of the photographs he had memorized; but they accepted his story readily enough. And he had not needed to pretend exhaustion -Ganymede's gravity was nor- mal to him, but it had been a long trek and a longer climb.

He was surprised to find, nevertheless, that he had enjoyed it. For the first time in his life he had walked unguarded, either by men or by mechanisms, on a world where he felt physically at home; a world without walls, a world where he was essentially alone. The air was rich and pleasant, the winds came from wherever they chose to blow, the tempera- ture in the col was considerably below what had been allow- able in the dome on the Moon, and there was sky all around him, tinged with indigo and speckled with stars that twinkled now and then.

He would have to be careful. It would be all too easy to accept Ganymede as home. He had been warned against that, but somehow he had failed to realize that the danger would be not merely real, but seductive.

The young men took him swiftly the rest of the way to the colony. They had been as incurious as they had been anony- mous. Rullman was different. The look of stunned disbelief on the scientist's face, as Sweeney was led into his high- ceilinged, rock-walled office, was so total as to be frightening.

He said: "What's this!"

"We found him climbing the col. We thought he'd gotten lost, but he says he belongs to the parent flight."

"Impossible," Rullman said. "Quite impossible." And then he fell silent, studying the newcomer from crown to toe. The expression of shock dimmed only slightly.

The long scrutiny gave Sweeney time to look back. Rullman was older than his pictures, but that was natural; if anything, he looked a little less marked by age than Sweeney had an- tic.i.p.ated. He was spare, partly bald, and slope-shouldered, but the comfortable pod under his belt-line which had shown in the photos was almost gone now. Evidently living on Gany- mede had hardened him some. The pictures bad failed to prepare Sweeney for the man's eyes: they were as hooded and unsettling as an owl's.

"You'd better tell me who you are," Rullman said at last.

"And how you got here. You aren't one of us, that's certain."

"I'm Donald Leverault Sweeney," Sweeney said. "Maybe I'm not one of you, but my mother said I was. I got here in her ship. She said you'd take me in."

Rullman shook his head. "That's impossible, too. Excuse me, Mr. Sweeney; but you've probably no idea what a bomb- sh.e.l.l you are. You must be Shirley Leverault's child, thenbut how did you get here? How did you survive all this time?

Who kept you alive, and tended you, after we left the Moon?

And above all, how did you get away from the Port cops? We knew that Port Earth found our Moon lab even before we abandoned it. I can hardly believe that you even exist."

Nevertheless, the scientist's expression of flat incredulity was softening moment by moment. He was, Sweeney judged, already beginning to buy it. And necessarily: there Sweeney stood before him, breathing Ganymede's air, standing easily in Ganymede's gravity, with Ganymede's dust on his cold skin, a fact among inarguable facts.

"The Port cops found the big dome, all right," Sweeney said. "But they never found the little one, the pilot plant. Dad blew up the tunnel between the two before they landed -he was killed in the rock-slide. Of course I was still just. a cell in a jug when that happened."

"I see," Rullman said thoughtfully. "We picked up an ex- plosion on our ship's instruments before we took off. But we thought it was the Port raiders beginning to bomb, unexpected though that was. Then they didn't destroy the big lab either, after all?"

"No," Sweeney said. Rullman surely must know that; radio talk between Earth and Moon must be detectable at least oc- casionally out here. "There were still some intercom lines left through to there; my mother used to spend a lot of time lis- tening in on what was going on. So did I, after I was old enough to understand it. That was how we found out that the Ganymedian colony hadn't been bombed out, either."

"But where did you get your power?"

"Most of it from our own strontium"" cell. Everything was shielded so the cops couldn't detect any 'stray fields. When the cell finally began to give out, we had to tap Port's main ac- c.u.mulator line -just for a little bit at first, but the drain kept going up." He shrugged. "Sooner or later they were bound to spot it and did."

Rullman was momentarily silent, and Sweeney knew that he was doing the pertinent arithmetic in his head, comparing the 20-year half-life of strontium"" with Sweeney's and the Adapted Men's chronology. The figures would jibe, of course.

The Port cops' briefing had been thorough about little details like that.