CHAPTER 2
Jeff opened his eyes and was back aboard the ship. He knew that his body had never left the couch, and yet—he shuddered.
They hadn't killed him. They had turned him into . . . into an animal. A powerful, bloodthirsty, hunting beast. They had taken his mind, his awareness, himself, and turned him into a wolfcat down there on the surface of this hell-hole planet they were orbiting.
An animal. Jeff felt himself trembling uncontrollably. He knew they were going to do it. They had explained it all to him for a week before they tried this test, yet the shock of its reality made him feel weak. They turned me into an animal, he repeated to himself.
And it had been exhilarating. The power of that beast! The strength of him. The thrill of hunting down that antelope and getting it.
The woman unstrapped his wrists and ankles while Dr. Carbo carefully lifted the helmet off his head. Jeff did not move; he felt exhausted.
The woman looked into his eyes searchingly. "Are you all right?" she asked.
Her name was Amanda Kolwezi, Jeff knew. She was rather good-looking, even though she was black. Not really black, he noticed for the first time. Her skin was more the color of the giant tree boles down on the planet, a rich dark brown. High cheekbones. Eyes that looked almost oriental.
"Jeff," she repeated, "are you okay?"
"Yes." He tried to nod his head. "I'm okay." But his voice was weak, little more than a whisper. He felt drained, almost helpless. Yet terribly excited.
Dr. Carbo came up beside her, smiling at him. "Just take it easy, Jeff. You did a fine job. Very good work."
Jeff started to sit up on the couch but everything seemed to sway around him. The room started to slide off at an angle and he fell back onto the soft padding.
"Jeff!" Amanda grabbed his arm.
"It's all right," Carbo said. "A little disorientation. It's to be expected. He'll be okay in a minute or two."
But he turned and stared worriedly at the monitoring panels against the wall. Jeff knew that they kept track of his body's condition: blood pressure, temperature, pulse, things like that.
For a scientist who was so important to the Village, Dr. Carbo did not look impressive to Jeff. He was short, actually a shade shorter than his assistant, Amanda; round-shouldered, round-faced, his thinning brown hair always looked like he'd just stepped in from a windstorm. He was soft-looking, even his voice was a soft tenor. His normal posture was a slouch, where Jeff expected the kind of ramrod stiffness that his teachers and Elders inculcated. Instead of the drab gray coveralls that all the students wore, this scientist dressed himself in bright-colored tunics and comfortable slacks that made him look slightly like a round little clown. Dr. Carbo's face had a brownish swarthiness to it, and he was a little jowly, with the darkish shadow of stubble across his chin, like somebody who shaved himself instead of using the treatments that kept a man's beard from growing for months at a time.
Maybe the treatments don't work for everybody, Jeff thought. Or maybe scientists don't believe in them. As a Believer, Jeff followed his Church's rules and kept his face bare. Only the Elders were allowed to grow a beard. Of course, Carbo might be a Catholic. Jeff had no idea what they believed.
Amanda came to him with a cup of steaming liquid in her hand. "Here, Pathfinder, drink this."
"Pathfinder?"
She grinned at him. "Look it up in the library. It's a book you ought to read."
A book. He shrugged and accepted the cup from her hand. Strange how the back of her hand was so dark, yet the palm was perfectly pink. The liquid felt warm and good. Jeff wondered how the raw meat of the antelope, still blood-hot, would taste. The thought startled him, jarred him so thoroughly that he almost dropped the cup. Neither Carbo nor Amanda seemed to notice, though.
"How do you feel now?" she asked.
"Okay . . . I guess."
Dr. Carbo nodded and headed back for the control room. Jeff drained his cup and put it down on the couch's headrest.
"Think you can stand up now?" Amanda asked.
"Yeah. Sure."
She slid her arm around his shoulders and helped Jeff to his feet. He stood uncertainly for a moment, finding that he actually was enjoying the nearness of her, the touch of her hands, the scent of her skin. Jeff had never been this close to a black woman before. Back home, in the Church-run housing enclaves with their shrubbery-decorated electrified walls and laser-armed security systems, blacks were the equals of whites—so equal that they lived in their own enclaves, went to their own schools, and even prayed in their own churches.
With Amanda at his side, Jeff walked on spongy legs out of the small laboratory chamber with its stainless-steel walls and plastic-tiled flooring, through the open door to the control room. The walls were soft-textured there, the floor thickly carpeted. Dr. Carbo was sitting at the central console, talking on the picturephone to a narrow-eyed, white-haired, bony death's-head of a man. Jeff recognized him instantly: Bishop Foy, chairman of the Council, the unquestioned leader of the Village.
"He's made solid contact with the animal," Carbo was saying. "If we can establish that good a contact every time, we can use this wolfcat and then go on to adapt other animals."
Bishop Foy's lips pulled back in something approaching a smile. His big uneven teeth made him look even more like a skull. "Do you believe that other . . ." he hesitated, noticing that Jeff had entered the control room, ". . . other students will be able to establish contact with the creatures down there?"
Carbo made a vague gesture with his right hand. "We shall see. If one student has done it, it stands to reason that others should be able to do so."
Jeff felt a pang of anger at that. He didn't know how many of the scientists and Elders of the Village had tried to make contact with the animals down on the surface of the planet. He had been the first to succeed. Instead of congratulating him, they were saying it wasn't anything so special. If he did it, others could. With the anger, though, came an instant reflex of guilt. Pride, Jeff told himself. Sinful pride. He offered a swift, silent prayer to Nirvan. But the prideful anger still simmered inside him.
"So your conclusion is that this test was a complete success," Foy said. His voice was thin and scratchy; it sounded irritable, as though even this good news annoyed him.
Carbo answered, "A success, yes, of course. But we don't know yet if he can control the animal."
"I understand. But he did make firm contact. All the sensory inputs came through? Even visual?"
"Yes," Carbo replied.
"Then the animals aren't blind, after all."
"Those scaly-looking areas across the top of the head are infrared receptors. We knew that. Apparently they have a visual cortex and can see in the infrared wavelengths, where we can't."
Bishop Foy nodded silently.
"Polchek and his zoologists will want to bring a wolfcat up here to dissect," Carbo muttered.
But Foy's thoughts were elsewhere. "The crews who've been down to the surface reported that vision is nearly useless there, even with infrared sensors. The cloud cover blocks out all the sunlight. You can't see more than five meters ahead. Your sense of distance and direction goes haywire."
"Our sensors must be set at the wrong frequencies," Carbo answered. "Come and look at today's tapes. When we see through the animal's eyes everything is bright and clear."
Foy blinked his narrow, deepset eyes and said nothing.
"If a wolfcat were brought to Earth," Carbo went on, his soft voice picking up speed with enthusiasm, "it would probably be just as blind as we are on Altair VI."
"Perhaps. Perhaps," Bishop Foy replied impatiently. "Bring the tapes to my office as soon as you can. There are many details I must discuss with you, in private."
The picture screen abruptly went blank.
Carbo stared at it for a moment, then made an elaborate shrug that took in his shoulders, arms, hands, and even the expression on his face. He turned to Amanda and said, "Make sure he gets plenty of food and rest. He has a lot of work ahead of him."
Amanda gave a small sigh and motioned Jeff toward the door that led out of the control room. Jeff went with her, feeling more like a laboratory animal than a human being. I wonder if they're going to dissect my brain when this is all finished? he asked himself.
The official name of the ship was Melvin L. Calvin, but the five hundred students, Elders, and scientists aboard called it simply, the Village.
It did not look like the sleek starships Jeff had seen on video shows, nor like the ungainly rockets that had explored the Moon and the planets of Earth's solar system—all of which were so far away now that the Sun itself was no more than a pinpoint of light, one of the millions of stars that could be seen through the ship's viewports.
The Village was a cluster of globes, bubbles of plastic and metal linked by spidery tubes. It had no front or back in the usual sense, no up or down. Each globe housed a few dozen people, or was a facility of some sort: a library, a meeting hall, a grassy park lined with trees.
In actuality, the Village was like a barge or a houseboat that had no real propulsive power of its own. It had been towed from Earth to Altair VI by a squat, stubby vehicle that was little more than a massive engine with a tiny bubble of living quarters for its crew: Captain Olaf Gunnerson, his son, daughter, and son-in-law—and their computer.
Gunnerson was a professional star-sailor, and his vehicle was nothing more than a tugboat. But it was a tug that could span interstellar distances, for a fee.
His engines were gravity field drives, not rockets. Generating the kind of gravity warps made in nature by Black Holes, the gravity field drive allowed the human race to expand outward among the stars—again, for a fee.
The first to go had been robots, of course. Riding the earliest gravity field ships, they had explored the dead gas giant worlds of Barnard's Star and returned in less time than it took light to span the distance. Physicists argued bitterly over whether or not the gravity drive actually propelled the ships faster than light. One of the rock-bottom principles of the universe was being shaken, and campuses all over Earth trembled with the ferocity of the debate. The younger physicists declared that Einstein had been overthrown. Their elders insisted that this was not possible; even though the ships had seemed to go faster than light, what had actually happened was that the gravity warp had bent spacetime so out of shape that the ships left the universe momentarily and then re-entered it elsewhere, lightyears away.
The politicians didn't care which way the physicists decided. They now had a tool in their hands that they could use.
"Colonize the stars!" they cried.
They started to build starships, to be filled with the poorest, most ignorant, least desirable people of Earth. "Export your problems," they whispered to one another. "Send them off to where they'll never bother us again."
But before they could do that, before they could exile the unemployed, the uneducated, the untouchables, they had to send out their best and their brightest—to pave the way.
The least desirable people of Earth could not be launched out into the interstellar void to fend for themselves. Not even the politicians were that insensitive. Robot ships were built to find Earthlike worlds, and then teams of the eager, bright, idealistic young men and women of Earth were sent to prepare these worlds for the colonists to come.
To these young men and women, the politicians sang of challenge and commitment. "Tame the new worlds!" they urged. And the eager, bright, idealistic young men and women took up the challenge. Just as the politicians' social technicians had predicted they would.
Jeff made his way back to the dome where he lived. He was twenty-three years old, an undergraduate degree in meteorology freshly awarded him. He had been aiming for a doctorate in weather modification when the call to "Tame the new worlds!" had overtaken him. After six months in the Village, he wondered if he had chosen wisely.
He was slightly taller than average, yet no one thought of him as "big," not even he himself. Jeff had the broad shoulders and strong arms of a farm boy, and a slow, easy smile that often prompted strangers to think he was easy-going, perhaps even lazy. His hair was dark and thick, his eyes the gray of a stormy sea. His psychological profile showed him so close to all the norms that the social technicians thought him dull (only the psychologically weak or unusual interested them). They were quite surprised when their own computers picked him as the student best qualified psychologically to attempt making contact with one of the animals of Altair VI.
He lived in one of the Village's domes with nearly three dozen other students. They were all within a year or two of his own age. Half of them were women. All of them, naturally, were reliable Church members, Believers who had been sent by their Church to tame this new world for all the Believers who were to come as colonists.
All the students had taken vows of celibacy as a matter of course, just as they had while on campus. Sex was a powerful weapon for either good or evil; it had to be channelled properly.
Their vows were duly registered with Bishop Foy, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Village. The vows were also protected by the network of security cameras that watched every dormitory room, every meeting hall, every corridor and chamber of the Village. And the cameras were backed up by dorm mothers in each of the Village's residential domes. The dorm mother in Jeff's dome was a flour-white giantess with the unlikely name of Bettina Brown. The students had quickly dubbed her Brunhilda. She was flaxen haired, fully two meters tall, almost as wide, and strong enough to pick up two students Jeff's size, one in each ham-fisted hand, and shake them until their teeth rattled.
Between Brunhilda and the computer-monitored sensors, Jeff and his dorm mates had little chance for mischief. And little time. Their hours were filled with work, study, and prayer. Even though the gravity field drive made the jump to Altair almost instantaneously, Gunnerson's tug had to tow them for two months out to the edge of the solar system before the jump could be made, and then for two more months they spiralled inward to take up an orbit around the sixth planet of Altair.
The time was spent studying planetology, planetary engineering, and all the other special knowledge they would need to transform Altair VI into a fully Earthlike world, suitable for large-scale colonization. And praying. Prayer was as much a part of their lives as breathing. They prayed when they woke up in the morning. They prayed before each meal and after it. Every task began with a prayer for strength and success. Every night ended with a prayer that their efforts to tame Altair VI might prove fruitful.
But they might as well have saved their energy. Their first few weeks of struggling with the wildly inhospitable environment of Altair VI convinced even the most devout Believers that the planet was beyond redemption, no matter what the robot explorers had reported.
If they could have, they would have returned to Earth.
"It was weird," Jeff was saying to his friends. "It was like—blast, I can't tell you what it was like. There aren't any words for it."
They were sitting around one of the larger tables in the dome's autocafeteria, a dozen students, including Laura, the redhead that Jeff had lusted over so badly that he spent hours in the chapel trying to pray her out of his mind. It did little good.
Most of the students added decorations to their drab coveralls, to put a little color and individuality into their dress: a bright scarf, a medallion or a jewelled pin. Jeff himself clipped the gold symbol of his school's meteorology club to his breast pocket every morning. Laura did not need any decorations; her flame-red hair and jade-green eyes were all the color she needed.
Like all the student domes, theirs was built to remind them of a university campus. The rooms around the periphery of the dome were deliberately decorated in the genteel shabbiness of academia. The center of the dome was a grassy quadrangle edged with scrawny young trees that stretched their branches toward the artificial sun hanging at the dome's zenith.
Every student had an individual dormitory room. Jeff's had seemed spacious to him when the voyage began; now it was starting to feel cramped and tiny. The autocafeteria was a favorite meeting place, with its food dispensers, long straight rows of tables, and general openness. Even the surveillance cameras were tucked away where they wouldn't be too obvious.
Dom Petrocelli was the self-appointed student leader of Jeff's dome, not because he was bigger physically or faster intellectually than the others. Dom was a Convert, and always behaved as though he had to prove to the other Believers that his faith was true. Besides, he seemed to enjoy hurting people with his sarcastic tongue.
He leaned back in the plastic cafeteria chair, making it squeak under him, and eyed Jeff with an amused smile.
"So you got inside the wolfcat's brain, is that it?" he asked.
"Right," Jeff said eagerly. "It was like we shared our minds."
"Must have boosted your IQ a hundred points!" Petrocelli smirked.
The others laughed, and Jeff joined the laughter too, even though he was thinking what a wolfcat could do to Petrocelli's thick skull.
As the giggling died down, Laura—who was sitting next to Jeff—asked, "You really killed one of those deers?"
Jeff replied, "The wolfcat did. I didn't try to stop him."
Laura was very pretty, especially when she smiled. Red hair the color of autumn leaves, deep green eyes, skin like cream. "I don't understand how this mind-sharing business works. It sounds kind of . . . well, psychic, almost."
"No," Jeff said. "It's just electronics. You know the kind of electronic probes they put into criminals' brains, to control their violent behavior?"
Laura and several others nodded.
"Well, that's what we're using. Dr. Peterson and a team of scientists went down to the planet's surface a few weeks ago, stunned some of the animals, and put probes in their brains."
Petrocelli yawned ostentatiously. "We all know that. And they almost killed two men doing it."
Ignoring him, Jeff went on, "Then they hook somebody up to the equipment in Dr. Carbo's lab. It's kind of like a video show, except that you see what the wolfcat is seeing, you feel what he feels. Your mind is linked to the wolfcat's mind."
"I thought they weren't going to try that anymore," one of the other girls said. "Isn't it awfully dangerous? The first two people who tried it both died, didn't they?"
"And Dr. Mannheim is in the cryonics freezer, totally out of it."
"Well, I made contact," Jeff said, trying to keep his pride from showing. "We've made the first step toward taming this planet."
Petrocelli started to make a comment, but the sad-faced little engineer next to him said first, "Well, we'd better tame this planet. They won't let us back home until we do."
Nods of agreement went around the table. They all knew that they would either tame Altair VI or die there.