Murray Leinster - The Lonely Planet

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The Lonely Planet

CHAPTER 1

PROTEAN PLANT

ALYX WAS VERY lonely before men came to it. It did not know that it was lonely, to be sure.

Perhaps it did not know anything, for it had no need for knowledge. It had need only for memory, and all

its memories were simple. Warmth and coolness; sunshine and dark; rain and dryness. Nothing else,

even though Alyx was incredibly old. It was the first thing upon its planet which had possessed

consciousness.

In the beginning there were probably other living things. Possibly there were quintillions of

animalcules, rotifera, bacteria, and amoebae in the steaming pool in which Alyx began. Maybe Alyx was

merely one of similar creatures, as multitudinous as the stars and smaller than motes, which swam and

lived and died in noisesome slime beneath a cloud-hung, dripping sky. But that was a long time ago.

Millions of years ago. Hundreds of millions of years now gone.

When men came, they thought at first the planet was dead. Alyx was the name they gave to the

globe which circled about its lonely sun. One day a Space Patrol survey-ship winked into being from

overdrive some millions of miles from the sun. It hung there, making conscientious determinations of

the spectrum, magnetic field, spot-activity and other solar data.

Matter-of-factly, the ship then swam through emptiness to the lonely planet. There were clouds

over its surface, and there were icecaps. The surface was irregular, betokening mountains, but there were

no seas. The observers in the survey-ship were in the act of making note that it was a desert, without

vegetation, when the analyzers reported protoplasm on the surface. So the survey-ship approached.

Alyx the creature was discovered when the ship descendëd on landing jets toward the surface. As

the jets touched ground, tumult arose. There were clouds of steam, convulsive heavings of what seemed

to be brown earth. A great gap of writhing agony appeared below the ship. Horrible, rippling movements

spread over the surface and seemed alive, as far as the eye could reach.

The survey-ship shot upward. It touched solidity at the edge of the northern icecap. It remained a

month, examining the planet—or rather, examining Alyx, which covered all the planet’s surface save at

the poles.

The report stated that the planet was covered by a single creature, which was definitely one creature

and definitely alive. The ordinary distinction between animal and vegetable life did not apply to Alyx. It

was cellular, to be sure, and therefore presumably could divide, but it had not been observed to do so. Its

parts were not independent members of a colony, like coral polyps. They constituted one creature, which

was at once utterly simple and infinitely diverse.

It broke down the rocks of its planet, like microorganisms, and made use of their mineral content

for food, like plankton. It made use of light for photosynthesis to create complex compounds, like plants.

It was capable of amoeboid movement, like a low order of animal life. And it had consciousness. It

responded to stimuli—such as the searing of its surface—with anguished heavings and withdrawals from

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the pain.

For the rest, the observers on the survey-ship were inclined to gibber incoherently. Then a junior

lieutenant named Jon Haslip made a diffident suggestion. It was only a guess, but they proved he was

right.

The creature which was Alyx had consciousness of a type never before encountered. It responded

not only to physical stimuli but to thoughts. It did whatever one imagined it doing. If one imagined it

turning green for more efficient absorption of sunlight, it turned green. There were tiny pigment-

granules in its cells to account for the phenomenon. If one imagined it turning red, It turned red. And if

one imagined it extending a pseudopod, cautiously, to examine an observation-instrument placed at its

border on the ice cap, it projected a pseudopod, cautiously, to examine that instrument.

Haslip never got any real credit for his suggestion. It was mentioned once, in a footnote of a

volume called the Report of the Hatycon Expedition to Alyx, Vol. IV, Chap., 4, p. 97. Then it was

forgotten. But a biologist named Katistan acquired some fame in scientific circles for his exposition of

the origin and development of Alyx.

“In some remote and mindless age,” he wrote, “there was purely automaton-like response to stimuli

on the part of the one-celled creatures which—as on Earth and elsewhere—were the earliest forms of

life on the planet. Then, in time, perhaps a cosmic ray produced a mutation in one individual among

those creatures: Perhaps a creature then undistinguishable from its fellows, swimming feebly in some

fetid pool. By the mutation, that creature became possessed of purpose, which is consciousness in its

most primitive form, and its purpose was food. Its fellows had no purpose, because they remained

automata which responded only to external stimuli. The purpose of the mutated creature affected them

as a stimulus. They responded. They swam to the purposeful creature and became its food. It became the

solitary inhabitant of its pool, growing hugely. It continued to have a purpose, which was food.

“There was nourishment in the mud and stones at the bottom of that pool. It continued to grow

because it was the only creature on its planet with purpose, and the other creatures had no defense

against purpose. Evolution did not provide an enemy, because chance did not provide a competitive

purpose, which implies a mind. Other creatures did not develop an ability to resist its mind-stimuli,

which directed them to become its prey.”

Here Katistan’s theorizing becomes obscure for a while. Then:

“On Earth and other planets, telepathy is difficult because our remotest cellular ancestors developed

a defensive block against each other’s mind-stimuli. On Alyx, the planet, no such defense came into

being, so that one creature overwhelmed the planet and became Alyx, the creature; which in time

covered everything. It had all food, all moisture, everything it could conceive of. It was content. And

because it had never faced a mind-possessing enemy, it developed no defense against mind. It was

defenseless against its own weapon.

“But that did not matter until men came. Then, with no telepathic block, such as we possess, it was

unable to resist the minds of men. It must, by its very nature, respond to whatever a man wills or even

imagines. Alyx is a creature which covers a planet, but is in fact a slave to any man who lands upon it. It

will obey his every thought. It is a living, self-supporting robot, an abject servant to any creature with

purpose it encounters.”

Thus Katistan's The Report of ihe Halycon Expedition to Alyx contains interesting pictures of the

result of the condition he described. There are photographs of great jungles which the creature Alyx

tortured itself to form of its own substance when men from other planets remembered and imagined

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