James Blish - Seedling Stars 1 - Seeding Program

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THE SEEDLING STARS
James Blish
BOOK ONE - SEEDING PROGRAM
The spaceship 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 outside,
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 bulls-eye 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 conjunction, 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-pronged sea, largest at the eastern end,
which runs from about 120 to 165 in longitude, and from about 10
to 33 North latitude. 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 space 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 perhaps
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 detached 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: anticipation, 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. Standing
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 orbit; 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 atmosphere 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 harness 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, God 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
interplanetary craft, Meikiejon's ship had no overall hull. She
consisted 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 familiar
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 shoe s along the metal. In his bulky, misshapen spacesuit, 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, snapping 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 paralyzing
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 had 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 unrememberably early
in his childhood when he had first realized that the underground
dome on the Moon was all there was to the universe for nobody 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
intense 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 analysts assigned
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 single spark of hope which the non-medical people on the
Moon were constantly holding out toward Sweeney as the sole
reason for his existence.
The facts were simple and implacable. Sweeney was an Ada pted
Man - adapted, in this instance, to the bitter cold, the light gravity,
and the thin stink of atmosphere which prevailed on Ganymede.
The blood that ran in his veins, and the sol substrate of his every
cell, was nine-tenths liquid ammonia; 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 microsurgery, competitive
metabolic inhibition, and perhaps fifty more whose names he had
never even heard - which collectively had been christened
"pantropy." The word, freely re-translated, meant "changing
everything” and it fitted.
As the pantropists had changed in advance the human pattern
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 before they had passed the
zygote stage like one-celled animals, each one biassed 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 experienced the birth
trauma or been exposed to the Oedipus complex. 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 accompanied by
the polite and beautifully uniformed private police 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 periodically 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 participants 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 spacesuits, 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 recaptured 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 recaptured - 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 associates were
criminals, but how grievous their crime had been was a question 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 (except 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 Sweeney 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 expectation, and Sweeney's
training helped to make him suspicious 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 unexpectedly
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 monitoring chamber on some
trumped-up errand hardly a minute later. There were many such
instances, but inevitably Sweeney 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 command 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 normal 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 temperature in the col was considerably
below what had been allowable 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 anonymous. 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 anticipated. 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 Ganymede 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 bombshell you are.
You must be Shirley Leverault's child, then - but 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 explosion
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 occasionally
out here. "There were still some intercom lines left through to there;
my mother used to spend a lot of time listening 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 accumulator 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 di d."
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.
"It's still quite astounding, having to rethink this whole episode
after so many years," Rullman said. "With all due respect, Mr.
Sweeney, it's hard to imagine Shirley Leverault going through such
an ordeal and all alone, too, except for a child she could never even
touch, a child as difficult and technical to tend as an atomic pile. I
remember her as a frail, low-spirited girl, trailing along after us
listlessly because Robert was in the project." He frowned
reminiscently. "She used to say. It's his job.' She never thought of it
as anything more than that."
"I was her job," Sweeney said evenly. The Port cops had tried to
train him to speak bitterly when he mentioned his mother, but he
had never been able to capture the emotion that they wanted him to
imitate. He had found, however, that if he rapped out the syllables
almost without inflection, they were satisfied with the effect. "You
misjudged her. Dr. Rullman - or else she changed after Dad was
killed. She had guts enough for ten. And she got paid for it in the
end. In the only coin the Port cops know how to pay."
"I'm sorry," Rullman said gently. "But at least you got away. I'm
sure that's as she would have wanted it. Where did the ship you
spoke of come from?"
"Why, we always had it. It belonged to Dad, I suppose. It was
stored in a natural chimney near our dome. When the cops broke
into the monitoring room, I went out the other side of the dome,
while they were busy with mother, and beat it. There wasn't
anything I could have done"
"Of course, of course," Rullman said, his voice low and quiet.
"You wouldn't have lasted a second in their air. You did the right
thing. Go on."
"Well, I got to the ship and got it off. I didn't have time to save
anything but myself. They followed me all the way, but they didn't
shoot. I think there's still one of them upstairs now."
"We'll sweep for him, but there's nothing we can do about him in
any case except keep him located. You bailed out, I gather."
"Yes. Otherwise I wouldn't have had a chance they seemed to
want me back in the worst way. They must have the ship by now,
and the coordinates for the colony too."
"Oh, they've had those coordinates since we first landed,"
Rullman said. "You were lucky, Mr. Sweeney, and bold. too. You
bring back a sense of immediacy that I haven't felt for years, since
our first escape. But there's one more problem."
摘要：

THESEEDLINGSTARSJamesBlishBOOKONE-SEEDINGPROGRAMThespaceshipresumedhummingaroundSweeneywithouthisnoticingthechange.WhenCapt.Meikiejon'svoicefinallycameagainfromthewallspeaker,Sweeneywasstilllyingbuckledtohisbunkinacuriousstateoftranquilityhehadneverknownbefore,andcouldn'tpossiblyhavedescribed,evento...

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