Tài liệu The Planet Savers doc

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The chubby man scribbled something on a card. "Interesting. In-ter-
est-ing. Do you know where we are?"
I looked around the office. "In the Terran Headquarters. From your
uniform, I'd say we were on Floor 8—Medical."
He nodded and scribbled again, pursing his lips. "Can you—uh—tell
me what planet we are on?"
I had to laugh. "Darkover," I chuckled, "I hope! And if you want the
names of the moons, or the date of the founding of the Trade City, or
something—"
He gave in, laughing with me. "Remember where you were born?"
"On Samarra. I came here when I was three years old—my father was
in Mapping and Exploring—" I stopped short, in shock. "He's dead!"
"Can you tell me your father's name?"
"Same as mine. Jay—Jason—" the flash of memory closed down in the
middle of a word. It had been a good try, but it hadn't quite worked. The
doctor said soothingly, "We're doing very well."
"You haven't told me anything," I accused. "Who are you? Why are
you asking me all these questions?"
He pointed to a sign on his desk. I scowled and spelled out the letters.
"Randall … Forth … Director … Department … " and Dr. Forth made a
note. I said aloud, "It is—Doctor Forth, isn't it?"
"Don't you know?"
I looked down at myself, and shook my head. "Maybe I'm Doctor
Forth," I said, noticing for the first time that I was also wearing a white
coat with the caduceus emblem of Medical. But it had the wrong feel, as
if I were dressed in somebody else's clothes. I was no doctor, was I? I
pushed back one sleeve slightly, exposing a long, triangular scar under
the cuff. Dr. Forth—by now I was sure he was Dr. Forth—followed the
direction of my eyes.
"Where did you get the scar?"
"Knife fight. One of the bands of those-who-may-not-enter-cities
caught us on the slopes, and we—" the memory thinned out again, and I
said despairingly, "It's all confused! What's the matter? Why am I up on
Medical? Have I had an accident? Amnesia?"
"Not exactly. I'll explain."
I got up and walked to the window, unsteadily because my feet
wanted to walk slowly while I felt like bursting through some invisible
net and striding there at one bound. Once I got to the window the room
stayed put while I gulped down great breaths of warm sweetish air. I
said, "I could use a drink."
5
"Good idea. Though I don't usually recommend it." Forth reached into
a drawer for a flat bottle; poured tea-colored liquid into a throwaway
cup. After a minute he poured more for himself. "Here. And sit down,
man. You make me nervous, hovering like that."
I didn't sit down. I strode to the door and flung it open. Forth's voice
was low and unhurried.
"What's the matter? You can go out, if you want to, but won't you sit
down and talk to me for a minute? Anyway, where do you want to go?"
The question made me uncomfortable. I took a couple of long breaths
and came back into the room. Forth said, "Drink this," and I poured it
down. He refilled the cup unasked, and I swallowed that too and felt the
hard lump in my middle begin to loosen up and dissolve.
Forth said, "Claustrophobia too. Typical," and scribbled on the card
some more. I was getting tired of that performance. I turned on him to
tell him so, then suddenly felt amused—or maybe it was the liquor
working in me. He seemed such a funny little man, shutting himself up
inside an office like this and talking about claustrophobia and watching
me as if I were a big bug. I tossed the cup into a disposal.
"Isn't it about time for a few of those explanations?"
"If you think you can take it. How do you feel now?"
"Fine." I sat down on the couch again, leaning back and stretching out
my long legs comfortably. "What did you put in that drink?"
He chuckled. "Trade secret. Now; the easiest way to explain would be
to let you watch a film we made yesterday."
"To watch—" I stopped. "It's your time we're wasting."
He punched a button on the desk, spoke into a mouthpiece.
"Surveillance? Give us a monitor on—" he spoke a string of incompre-
hensible numbers, while I lounged at ease on the couch. Forth waited for
an answer, then touched another button and steel louvers closed noise-
lessly over the windows, blacking them out. I rose in sudden panic, then
relaxed as the room went dark. The darkness felt oddly more normal
than the light, and I leaned back and watched the flickers clear as one
wall of the office became a large visionscreen. Forth came and sat beside
me on the leather couch, but in the picture Forth was there, sitting at his
desk, watching another man, a stranger, walk into the office.
Like Forth, the newcomer wore a white coat with the caduceus em-
blems. I disliked the man on sight. He was tall and lean and composed,
with a dour face set in thin lines. I guessed that he was somewhere in his
6
thirties. Dr Forth-in-the-film said, "Sit down, Doctor," and I drew a long
breath, overwhelmed by a curious, certain sensation.
I have been here before. I have seen this happen before.
(And curiously formless I felt. I sat and watched, and I knew I was
watching, and sitting. But it was in that dreamlike fashion, where the
dreamer at once watches his visions and participates in them… .)
"Sit down, Doctor," Forth said, "did you bring in the reports?"
Jay Allison carefully took the indicated seat, poised nervously on the
edge of the chair. He sat very straight, leaning forward only a little to
hand a thick folder of papers across the desk. Forth took it, but didn't
open it. "What do you think, Dr. Allison?"
"There is no possible room for doubt." Jay Allison spoke precisely, in a
rather high-pitched and emphatic tone. "It follows the statistical pattern
for all recorded attacks of 48-year fever … by the way, sir, haven't we
any better name than that for this particular disease? The term '48-year
fever' connotes a fever of 48 years duration, rather than a pandemic re-
curring every 48 years."
"A fever that lasted 48 years would be quite a fever," Dr. Forth said
with the shadow of a grim smile. "Nevertheless that's the only name we
have so far. Name it and you can have it. Allison's disease?"
Jay Allison greeted this pleasantry with a repressive frown. "As I un-
derstand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the
once-every-48-years conjunction of the four moons, which explains why
the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably
eccentric orbits—I don't know anything about that part, I'm quoting Dr.
Moore. If there's an animal vector to the disease, we've never discovered
it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain districts, the
next month a hundred-odd cases all over this part of the planet. Then it
skips exactly three months without increase. The next upswing puts the
number of reported cases in the thousands, and three months after that, it
reaches real pandemic proportions and decimates the entire human pop-
ulation of Darkover."
"That's about it," Forth admitted. They bent together over the folder,
Jay Allison drawing back slightly to avoid touching the other man.
Forth said, "We Terrans have had a Trade compact on Darkover for a
hundred and fifty-two years. The first outbreak of this 48-year fever
killed all but a dozen men out of three hundred. The Darkovans were
worse off than we were. The last outbreak wasn't quite so bad, but it was
7
bad enough, I've heard. It has an 87 per cent mortality—for humans, that
is. I understand the trailmen don't die of it."
"The Darkovans call it the trailmen's fever, Dr. Forth, because the trail-
men are virtually immune to it. It remains in their midst as a mild ail-
ment taken by children. When it breaks out into the virulent form every
48 years, most of the trailmen are already immune. I took the disease
myself as a child—maybe you heard?"
Forth nodded. "You may be the only Terran ever to contract the dis-
ease and survive."
"The trailmen incubate the disease," Jay Allison said. "I should think
the logical thing would be to drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on the
trail cities—and wipe it out for good and all."
(Sitting on the Sofa in Forth's dark office, I stiffened with such fury
that he shook my shoulder and muttered, "Easy, there, man!")
Dr. Forth, on the screen, looked annoyed, and Jay Allison said, with a
grimace of distaste, "I didn't mean that literally. But the trailmen are not
human. It wouldn't be genocide, just an exterminator's job. A public
health measure."
Forth looked shocked as he realized that the younger man meant what
he was saying. He said, "Galactic center would have to rule on whether
they're dumb animals or intelligent non-humans, and whether they're
entitled to the status of a civilization. All precedent on Darkover is to-
ward recognizing them as men—and good God, Jay, you'd probably be
called as a witness for the defense! How can you say they're not human
after your experience with them? Anyway, by the time their status was
finally decided, half of the recognizable humans on Darkover would be
dead. We need a better solution than that."
He pushed his chair back and looked out the window.
"I won't go into the political situation," he said, "you aren't interested
in Terran Empire politics, and I'm no expert either. But you'd have to be
deaf, dumb and blind not to know that Darkover's been playing the im-
movable object to the irresistible force. The Darkovans are
more advanced in some of the non-causative sciences than we are, and
until now, they wouldn't admit that Terra had a thing to contribute.
However—and this is the big however—they do know, and they're will-
ing to admit, that our medical sciences are better than theirs."
"Theirs being practically non-existent."
8
"Exactly—and this could be the first crack in the barrier. You may not
realize the significance of this, but the Legate received an offer from the
Hasturs themselves."
Jay Allison murmured, "I'm to be impressed?"
"On Darkover you'd damn well better be impressed when the Hasturs
sit up and take notice."
"I understand they're telepaths or something—"
"Telepaths, psychokinetics, parapsychs, just about anything else. For
all practical purposes they're the Gods of Darkover. And one of the Has-
turs—a rather young and unimportant one, I'll admit, the old man's
grandson—came to the Legate's office, in person, mind you. He offered,
if the Terran Medical would help Darkover lick the trailmen's fever, to
coach selected Terran men in matrix mechanics."
"Good Lord," Jay said. It was a concession beyond Terra's wildest
dreams; for a hundred years they had tried to beg, buy or steal some
knowledge of the mysterious science of matrix mechanics—that curious
discipline which could turn matter into raw energy, and vice versa,
without any intermediate stages and without fission by-products. Matrix
mechanics had made the Darkovans virtually immune to the lure of
Terra's advanced technologies.
Jay said, "Personally I think Darkovan science is over-rated. But I can
see the propaganda angle—"
"Not to mention the humanitarian angle of healing—"
Jay Allison gave one of his cold shrugs. "The real angle seems to be
this; can we cure the 48-year fever?"
"Not yet. But we have a lead. During the last epidemic, a Terran scient-
ist discovered a blood fraction containing antibodies against the
fever—in the trailmen. Isolated to a serum, it might reduce the virulent
48-year epidemic form to the mild form again. Unfortunately, he died
himself in the epidemic, without finishing his work, and his notebooks
were overlooked until this year. We have 18,000 men, and their families,
on Darkover now, Jay. Frankly, if we lose too many of them, we're going
to have to pull out of Darkover—the big brass on Terra will write off the
loss of a garrison of professional traders, but not of a whole Trade City
colony. That's not even mentioning the prestige we'll lose if our much-
vaunted Terran medical sciences can't save Darkover from an epidemic.
We've got exactly five months. We can't synthesize a serum in that time.
We've got to appeal to the trailmen. And that's why I called you up here.
9
You know more about the trailmen than any living Terran. You ought to.
You spent eight years in a Nest."
(In Forth's darkened office I sat up straighter, with a flash of returning
memory. Jay Allison, I judged, was several years older than I, but we
had one thing in common; this cold fish of a man shared with myself that
experience of marvelous years spent in an alien world!)
Jay Allison scowled, displeased. "That was years ago. I was hardly
more than a baby. My father crashed on a Mapping expedition over the
Hellers—God only knows what possessed him to try and take a light
plane over those crosswinds. I survived the crash by the merest chance,
and lived with the trailmen—so I'm told—until I was thirteen or four-
teen. I don't remember much about it. Children aren't particularly
observant."
Forth leaned over the desk, staring. "You speak their language, don't
you?"
"I used to. I might remember it under hypnosis, I suppose. Why? Do
you want me to translate something?"
"Not exactly. We were thinking of sending you on an expedition to the
trailmen themselves."
(In the darkened office, watching Jay's startled face, I thought; God,
what an adventure! I wonder—I wonder if they want me to go with
him?)
Forth was explaining: "It would be a difficult trek. You know what the
Hellers are like. Still, you used to climb mountains, as a hobby, before
you went into Medical—"
"I outgrew the childishness of hobbies many years ago, sir," Jay said
stiffly.
"We'd get you the best guides we could, Terran and Darkovan. But
they couldn't do the one thing you can do. You know the trailmen, Jay.
You might be able to persuade them to do the one thing they've never
done before."
"What's that?" Jay Allison sounded suspicious.
"Come out of the mountains. Send us volunteers—blood donors—we
might, if we had enough blood to work on, be able to isolate the right
fraction, and synthesize it, in time to prevent the epidemic from really
taking hold. Jay, it's a tough mission and it's dangerous as all hell, but
somebody's got to do it, and I'm afraid you're the only qualified man."
"I like my first suggestion better. Bomb the trailmen—and the
Hellers—right off the planet." Jay's face was set in lines of loathing,
10
which he controlled after a minute, and said, "I—I didn't mean that. The-
oretically I can see the necessity, only—" he stopped and swallowed.
"Please say what you were going to say."
"I wonder if I am as well qualified as you think? No—don't inter-
rupt—I find the natives of Darkover distasteful, even the humans. As for
the trailmen—"
(I was getting mad and impatient. I whispered to Forth in the dark-
ness, "Shut the damn film off! You couldn't send that guy on an errand
like that! I'd rather—"
(Forth snapped, "Shut up and listen!"
(I shut up and the film continued to repeat.)
Jay Allison was not acting. He was pained and disgusted. Forth
wouldn't let him finish his explanation of why he had refused even to
teach in the Medical college established for Darkovans by the Terran em-
pire. He interrupted, and he sounded irritated.
"We know all that. It evidently never occurred to you, Jay, that it's an
inconvenience to us—that all this vital knowledge should lie, purely by
accident, in the hands of the one man who's too damned stubborn to use
it?"
Jay didn't move an eyelash, where I would have squirmed, "I have al-
ways been aware of that, Doctor."
Forth drew a long breath. "I'll concede you're not suitable at the mo-
ment, Jay. But what do you know of applied psychodynamics?"
"Very little, I'm sorry to say." Allison didn't sound sorry, though. He
sounded bored to death with the whole conversation.
"May I be blunt—and personal?"
"Please do. I'm not at all sensitive."
"Basically, then, Doctor Allison, a person as contained and repressed
as yourself usually has a clearly defined subsidiary personality. In neur-
otic individuals this complex of personality traits sometimes splits off,
and we get a syndrome known as multiple, or alternate personality."
"I've scanned a few of the classic cases. Wasn't there a woman with
four separate personalities?"
"Exactly. However, you aren't neurotic, and ordinarily there would not
be the slightest chance of your repressed alternate taking over your
personality."
"Thank you," Jay murmured ironically, "I'd be losing sleep over that."
"Nevertheless I presume you do have such a subsidiary personality, al-
though he would normally never manifest. This subsidiary—let's call
11
him Jay
2
—would embody all the characteristics which you repress. He
would be gregarious, where you are retiring and studious; adventurous
where you are cautious; talkative while you are taciturn; he would per-
haps enjoy action for its own sake, while you exercise faithfully in the
gymnasium only for your health's sake; and he might even remember
the trailmen with pleasure rather than dislike."
"In short—a blend of all the undesirable characteristics?"
"One could put it that way. Certainly he would be a blend of all the
characteristics which you, Jay
1
, consider undesirable. But—if released by
hypnotism and suggestion, he might be suitable for the job in hand."
"But how do you know I actually have such an—alternate?"
"I don't. But it's a good guess. Most repressed—" Forth coughed and
amended, "most disciplined personalities possess such a suppressed sec-
ondary personality. Don't you occasionally—rather rarely—find yourself
doing things which are entirely out of character for you?"
I could almost feel Allison taking it in, as he confessed, "Well—yes. For
instance—the other day—although I dress conservatively at all times—"
he glanced at his uniform coat, "I found myself buying—" he stopped
again and his face went an unlovely terra-cotta color as he finally
mumbled, "a flowered red sports shirt."
Sitting in the dark I felt vaguely sorry for the poor gawk, disturbed by,
ashamed of the only human impulses he ever had. On the screen Allison
frowned fiercely, "A crazy impulse."
"You could say that, or say it was an action of the suppressed Jay
2
.
How about it, Allison? You may be the only Terran on Darkover, maybe
the only human, who could get into a trailman's Nest without being
murdered."
"Sir—as a citizen of the Empire, I don't have any choice, do I?"
"Jay, look," Forth said, and I felt him trying to reach through the barri-
cade and touch, really touch that cold contained young man, "we
couldn't order any man to do anything like this. Aside from the ordinary
dangers, it could destroy your personal balance, maybe permanently. I'm
asking you to volunteer something above and beyond the call of duty.
Man to man—what do you say?"
I would have been moved by his words. Even at secondhand I was
moved by them. Jay Allison looked at the floor, and I saw him twist his
long well-kept surgeon's hands and crack the knuckles with an odd ges-
ture. Finally he said, "I haven't any choice either way, Doctor. I'll take the
chance. I'll go to the trailmen."
12
The screen went dark again and Forth flicked the light on. He said,
"Well?"
I gave it back, in his own intonation, "Well?" and was exasperated to
find that I was twisting my own knuckles in the nervous gesture of
Allison's painful decision. I jerked them apart and got up.
"I suppose it didn't work, with that cold fish, and you decided to come
to me instead? Sure, I'll go to the trailmen for you. Not with that Allis-
on—I wouldn't go anywhere with that guy—but I speak the
trailmen's language, and without hypnosis either."
Forth was staring at me. "So you've remembered that?"
"Hell, yes," I said, "my dad crashed in the Hellers, and a band of trail-
men found me, half dead. I lived there until I was about fifteen, then
their Old-One decided I was too human for them, and they took me out
through Dammerung Pass and arranged to have me brought here. Sure,
it's all coming back now. I spent five years in the Spacemen's Orphanage,
then I went to work taking Terran tourists on hunting parties and so on,
because I liked being around the mountains. I—" I stopped. Forth was
staring at me.
"You think you'd like this job?"
"It would be tough," I said, considering. "The People of the Sky—"
(using the trailmen's name for themselves) "—don't like outsiders, but
they might be persuaded. The worst part would be getting there. The
plane, or the 'copter, isn't built that can get through the crosswinds
around the Hellers and land inside them. We'd have to go on foot, all the
way from Carthon. I'd need professional climbers—mountaineers."
"Then you don't share Allison's attitude?"
"Dammit, don't insult me!" I discovered that I was on my feet again,
pacing the office restlessly. Forth stared and mused aloud, "What's per-
sonality anyway? A mask of emotions, superimposed on the body and
the intellect. Change the point of view, change the emotions and desires,
and even with the same body and the same past experiences, you have a
new man."
I swung round in mid-step. A new and terrible suspicion, too mon-
strous to name, was creeping up on me. Forth touched a button and the
face of Jay Allison, immobile, appeared on the visionscreen. Forth put a
mirror in my hand. He said, "Jason Allison, look at yourself."
I looked.
"No," I said. And again, "No. No. No."
13
Forth didn't argue. He pointed, with a stubby finger. "Look—" he
moved the finger as he spoke, "height of forehead. Set of cheekbones.
Your eyebrows look different, and your mouth, because the expression is
different. But bony structure—the nose, the chin—"
I heard myself make a queer sound; dashed the mirror to the floor. He
grabbed my forearm. "Steady, man!"
I found a scrap of my voice. It didn't sound like Allison's. "Then
I'm—Jay
2
? Jay Allison with amnesia?"
"Not exactly." Forth mopped his forehead with an immaculate sleeve
and it came away damp with sweat, "No—not Jay Allison as I know
him!" He drew a long breath. "And sit down. Whoever you are, sitdown!"
I sat. Gingerly. Not sure.
"But the man Jay might have been, given a different temperamental bi-
as. I'd say—the man Jay Allison started out to be. The man he refused to
be. Within his subconscious, he built up barriers against a whole series of
memories, and the subliminal threshold—"
"Doc, I don't understand the psycho talk."
Forth stared. "And you do remember the trailmen's language. I
thought so. Allison's personality is suppressed in you, as yours was in
him."
"One thing, Doc. I don't know a thing about blood fractions or epidem-
ics. My half of the personality didn't study medicine." I took up the mir-
ror again and broodingly studied the face there. The high thin cheeks,
high forehead shaded by coarse dark hair which Jay Allison had slicked
down now heavily rumpled. I still didn't think I looked anything like the
doctor. Our voices were nothing alike either; his had been pitched rather
high, falsetto. My own, as nearly as I could judge, was a full octave deep-
er, and more resonant. Yet they issued from the same vocal chords, un-
less Forth was having a reasonless, macabre joke.
"Did I honest-to-God study medicine? It's the last thing I'd think about.
It's an honest trade, I guess, but I've never been that intellectual."
"You—or rather, Jay Allison is a specialist in Darkovan parasitology,
as well as a very competent surgeon." Forth was sitting with his chin in
his hands, watching me intently. He scowled and said, "If anything, the
physical change is more startling than the other. I wouldn't have recog-
nized you."
"That tallies with me. I don't recognize myself." I added, "—and the
queer thing is, I didn't even like Jay Allison, to put it mildly. If he—I can't
say he, can I?"
14