Page 46 of Intervention


  The old man shouted: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!" He threw down his weapon and darted into the Greyfriars churchyard.

  Jamie went to his knees with Jean clasped to his breast, hearing her mind say what her voice was unable to utter:

  Katie and David... love them... continue the work...

  He bent and kissed her, with the rational part of his brain assuring him that this could not be happening. Not to her. Not to them. Their life together had been absurdly perfect, an idyll throughout the thirteen years of their marriage and professional collaboration and the rearing of their joy-bedight offspring. This sort of ending was impossible.

  Jean said: I'm always with you.

  He kissed her again, and was aware of a terrible howling sound. Then, shockingly, he was almost bowled over by a plunging shape and knew it was Nigel, gone after the madman, screaming at the top of his lungs.

  Jean said: He mustn't. Stop him.

  When Jamie continued to cling to her, she mustered up a last coercive impulse.

  Go before it's too late!

  He lowered her carefully to the stones. People were pushing out of the pub, babbling and shouting. Several cars had stopped and their occu­pants looked out, horror-stricken. Jamie dodged pedestrians and pounded through the churchyard entrance. Beneath one of the venerable trees just softening in spring leaf was a fierce orange blaze. Nigel stood over it his scholarly face as implacable as the marble death's-heads that decorated the seventeenth-century tombs on either hand. A man writhed in the midst of the fire, making a shrill keening sound.

  Jamie ripped off his coat to blanket the flames, rolling the burning man on the wet turf. Suddenly, without a word, Nigel leapt onto Jamie's back and clawed at his eyes. Jamie levered himself upright, got a grip on the wrists of the smaller man, and pried the hands away from his face. Redness tinged the vision of one eye.

  "No, Nigel! For God's sake!"

  "Let the swine burn!" Nigel sank his teeth into Jamie's right hand. Agonized, Jamie lifted Nigel bodily and flung him headfirst against the trunk of the tree. He fell, groaning feebly, and Jamie turned again to the smoldering body beneath the raincoat.

  There were people running about the churchyard now and a sound of approaching police cars. The flames seemed to be out. Jamie pulled a fold of fabric aside and saw the charred features of the fanatic —hawk­like nose, bold brow-arches of Caledonian bone, lantern jaw — a face very much like his own. The eyes in their lidless sockets seemed to retain an uncompromising gleam and the mouth, distorted by the rictus of violent death, might have been triumphantly grinning.

  Jamie let the cloth drop back. He got up and limped over to Nigel, who appeared to be embracing the tree as he attempted to haul himself upright. One sleeve of his coat was torn and his bald pate was purpled with a massive contusion. Jamie extended his left hand to his colleague and pulled him to his feet. Nigel reciprocated by binding Jamie's bitten hand with a handkerchief.

  Police officers came and led them away, and then there was an inter­val during which they were asked the same questions over and over again with irritating persistence. Dr. Nigel Weinstein was arrested and charged with culpable homicide. Later he was released on his own re­cognizance to attend the Third Metapsychic Congress, which was held that year in Edinburgh. He did not present a paper.

  In February 1995 Weinstein was acquitted when the Scottish jury brought in a verdict of "Not Proven. " By then, however, with the world­wide publicity given the trial, the damage had been done.

  5

  SURVEY VESSEL

  KRAK RONA'AL [Kron 466-010111]

  SECTOR 14: STAR 14-893-042 [LANDA]: PLANET 4 [ASSAWOMPSET]

  GALACTIC YEAR: LA PRIME 1-357-627

  [8 AUGUST 1994]

  THE MONSTROUS KRONDAKU are a race fabled throughout the Galactic Milieu for their ancient wisdom, their merciless objectiv­ity, and their composure. But there is another aspect to the great ten­tacled invertebrates that other polities (except the Lylmik) do not sus­pect.

  At those rare times when they can be certain of being unobserved by exotic minds, the Krondaku are given to fooling around.

  The mated pairs, especially, in conditions of absolute privacy, will cast aside all decorum and circumspection and for a brief interval sub­merge themselves completely in sensory input. They revel, they wal­low, they become intoxicated voluptuaries — drinking in, above all, the supernal pla'akst sensation engendered by their ponderous amours. Only the Gi, those paragons of concupiscence, have a greater capacity for pla'akst than dallying Krondaku. When the passionate interlude ends, its memory lingers on and suffuses the normal Krondak phlegmatism with sunniness. For a while, the terrible monsters are awash with un­characteristic bonhomie.

  It was in just such a mood that two senior Krondak planetologists approached the Landa solar system in the 14th Sector.

  Comparator Dota'efoo Alk'ai and her mate, Attestor Luma'eroo Tok, had received a most unusual assignment from the Sector Base on Molakar [Tau Ceti-2]. They were to go themselves, without the usual support crew consisting of a mixed bag of Milieu races, and perform an update assessment of the fourth Landa planet, which they had surveyed many Galactic millenaries ago. Once a promising prospect for coloni­zation, the world had suffered the misfortune of being within a critical distance of supernova 14-322-931B-S2. As this dying star exploded, it launched a relativistic blast wave of high-energy particles, x-rays, and gamma rays in all directions. For several centuries, the normal back­ground cosmic radiation flux through the Landa system increased by a factor of nearly five thousand, with cataclysmic effects upon the biota of the single habitable world. The blast wave had swept past Landa exactly two Galactic millenaries ago [5476 Earth years]. The 14th Sector Survey Authority decided it was now time to find out if the irradiated fourth planet had simmered down, and if it was still potentially colonizable. A full-scale resurvey was not required. Experienced field-workers such as Dota'efoo and Luma'eroo would be able to decide rather quickly whether or not the world was a write-off.

  The Landa solar system lay on the outer fringe of the Orion Arm of the Galaxy, some 6360 light-years from Molakar. Traveling at its usual brisk displacement factor of 370, the starship of the two Krondak planetologists required 17.19 subjective Galactic days to make the trip, which was executed in eighteen consecutive hyperspatial catenaries. Twice each day, as the ship entered and left subspace by means of its upsilon-field superluminal translator, the two entities within experi­enced a brief moment of horrific pain, which they bore with Krondak stoicism. But in between the translations, when they were alone to­gether in the gray limbo of the hyperspatial subuniverse, that most remote of nonlocations, the couple felt free to doff their dour racial façade and romp. They had not had a honeymoon in more than five millenaries, and its glow stayed with them as they neared the journey's end and climbed reluctantly out of the connubial vat of glycerin, imidazolidinyl urea, and iso-yohimbine.

  The terminal break through the superficies was due any minute. They headed for the survey craft's control room slithering side by side, settled into their squatting pads, and waited. A small cyan indicator on the instrumentation panel flashed on as the translator mechanism spun the upsilon-field gateway. The viewport showed only quasi-dimensional gray negation... and then there was a unique swimming snap, a zang attended by incredible agony, a zung, and relief. They had returned to normal space, in the vicinity of the Landa system.

  The smallish G1 sun was of modest mass and luminosity, unassoci­ated with solar companions. It shone golden-yellow, exhibiting mini­mal flare activity and an attractive "butterfly" corona with pearly equatorial streamers and polar plumes. Five of its family of fourteen planets were immediately visible to the multiple Krondak oculi, but all of them were gas-giants of no interest to colonization evaluators.

  Luma'eroo shut down the overdrive mechanism and fired up the subliminal gravo-magnetic propulsion generators. He switched the ship's navigation unit from automatic to tentacular. A
crawling network of faint violet fire, the rho-field, now clothed the outer hull of the dull-black spheroid. Under Luma'eroo's pilotage, it went full inertialess and proceeded to the fourth planet, moving at a sizable percentage of the speed of light. The ship took up station in a geosynchronous orbit a few hundred thousand kilometers above a bluish-green, cloud-swirled world.

  "I wish thou wouldst not hot-dog, Tok. " Dota'efoo's admonition had overtones of fond languor; the aftereffects of the recent debauch were still very much with her.

  "The sooner we get this evaluation over with, the sooner we can begin the trip back to Molakar. " Luma'eroo's primary eyes retained a misty periwinkle color and his integument was flushed with the telltale rosy blotches of fulfillment. "This mission is hardly likely to end pos­itively, Alk'ai, given the proximity of the poor planet to the supernova. "

  "I daresay thou art right, " Dota'efoo said, stroking his warty dorsal prominence with absent-minded affection as she stared out the main viewport, "Just look. The cloud cover has deteriorated to only about fifty percent and there are polar ice caps now. The atmospheric ozone layer must have been zapped to a green frazzle. All-in-All pity the life-forms!... "

  "I'm going to call up a precis of our last survey. It's been a long time — and thanks to thee, O alluring source of hyperhedonia, my mnemonic faculties are just the least bit unresponsive. " He flicked a request to the computer and the abbreviated data flashed into both their minds:

  EVALUATION SUMMARY— 14-893-042-4

  This eminently habitable world is a typical small metallolithoid with an equatorial radius of [5902 km] and a mean density of [5.462 gm/cm3]. It has a nickel-iron core and is internally heated by natural radioactiv­ity. The dipolar magnetic field is classed 06:2:05:9. Planet Four is at­tended by three interlocked moons: A is a coreless lithoid giant with a diameter 0. 22 and a mass 0. 01 that of the primary; B and C are lithoid midgets scarcely 1/1000th as massive as A, orbiting at the equilateral points of the giant. Planet Four has an axial tilt of 19.35 degrees and a nearly circular orbit around its sun. Its year is equivalent to 611.3 Galactic days and its day 93 time units. The planetary albedo is 39.7 percent.

  The atmosphere of Planet Four is generally within acceptable parame­ters for Milieu races: 22.15 percent oxygen, 0.05 percent carbon dioxide, and 77.23 percent nitrogen, with the balance consisting of noble gases, hydrogen, ozone, miscellaneous trace gases, miscellaneous suspended particulates, and varying amounts of dihydrogen oxide vapor. Clouds formed of the latter shroud about 62 percent of the planetary surface.

  Land areas comprise 19 percent of Planet Four, and 81 percent is cov­ered with dihydrogen oxide oceans with an average salinity of 3.03 percent. Nearly 20 percent of the hydrosphere is epicontinental and very shallow. There are many freshwater lakes of small area. The lithosphere has a Class 4 motile-plate structure with a basaltic abyssal sea-floor and granitic continents. Two continents are of moderate size and five are much smaller. There are myriads of continental-class is­lands and many extensive island-arcs at oceanic plate boundaries. Con­tinental mountain ranges have formed adjacent to the active subduction zones of the two principal land masses, and some of their peaks exceed [6000 m] in height. The continents also feature eroded highland rem­nants of earlier cycles of continental drift. There is moderate vulcanism in the island-arcs, along mid-oceanic ridges, and in the subduction ranges.

  Planet Four has a generally warm and humid maritime climate, lacking polar or continental glaciation. Tropical conditions prevail in the equa­torial belt, with full-summer temperatures exceeding [40°C] and no winter. The midlatitude continental temperature range is: summer — above [40°C]; winter — above [10°C]. Island temperatures are generally lower than continental in summer and higher in winter. One small continent near the North Pole has a summer maximum temperature of [23°C] and a winter minimum of [-5°C]. There is only one small desert, in the rain-shadow of the coast range at the equatorial region of the largest continent.

  Life-forms of Planet Four are C-H-O-N-S-Fe proteinoid, predominantly aerobic. Both the oceans and the land harbor large populations of protist and multicellular autotrophs. There are some 690,000 species of photoautotrophic, chemoautotrophic, and mixotrophic plants — with green photoautotrophs making up the majority of micro- and macroflora. About 60 percent of the energy they bind is taken up by heterotrophic life-forms. Heterotrophs include some 2,000,000 species of protists, plants, and animals — marine, amphibian, terrestrial, and semiaerial. Most of the animals and about half of the protists and plants are mobile. Higher species of animals display homeostasis, bilateral symmetry, disexuality, and endoskeletal body structure, with increasing cephaliza­tion in the more highly evolved species. The most advanced life-form is a presapient ovoviviparous semierect terrestrial biped with a brain clas­sification of 67:3:462. It is stalled in its cephalic evolution by a low birth rate and the presence in its ecosystem of six major predators, two of them aerial.

  PRELIMINARY PLANETOLOGICAL RATING:

  Suited for colonization, with optional ecological modification to the Fifth Degree.

  WEIGHTED RACIAL COMPATIBILITY PERCENTAGE:

  Simb: 89. Gi: 80. Poltroyan: 48. Krondak: 13.

  "Well, " Dota'efoo noted sadly, "even a quick visual scan shows that the place was severely damaged. The cloud cover's down to about fifty percent. The climate has cooled to the ice-age stage, and the concomi­tant lowering of sea level has exposed nearly all of the continental shelves. The greater percentage of the islands has merged into dry land. "

  "So much for Gi colonization. Without plenty of island trysting sites, their reproductive psychology packs up and the eggs are sterile. " Luma'eroo activated a battery of monitoring devices at the same time that he sent the craft plunging out of orbit. When the black spheroid reached the planetary tropopause it came to an abrupt halt, hovering in the deep-blue sky while thin jet-stream winds hummed around it. "At least the magnetosphere has recovered to its normal value. Reversed, though. "

  "I was afraid of that. Is the ozone layer rebuilt?"

  "To within normal parameters for the Gi sun. " He twiddled with the radiation-monitoring unit, which was overdue for a refit. "Albedo's down to twenty-eight overall. UV and solar wind penetration to surface within normal range. Ditto the cosmic radiation. "

  Dota'efoo studied the atmosphere analysis. "Oxygen is down by a full two percent, and nitrogen is up one. Carbon dioxide has gone from .05 to .03... And just look at the biotic differentiation read-out! We've lost nearly half of the plant species and an even larger percentage of the animals to hard radiation overdose, UV exposure, or general niche de­terioration. "

  "It could have been worse, Alk'ai, and the place was perhaps overspeciated. Residual populations have probably expanded to fill most of the vacant niches — to say nothing of the successful mutations. The grosser supernova damage to the biota seems to have healed. " "But the world is still ruined. "

  He blinked his primary optics in doleful agreement. "It is no longer libidinously stimulating enough for the Gi and it is now too cold and dry for the Simbiari. It remains too warm, too deficient in oxygen partial-pressure, and too gravity-strong for us Krondaku. That leaves only the Poltroyans as potential colonizers — but the place is probably too warm for them as well, except in the circumpolar regions. "

  "And don't forget, we'd also have to do ecological modification of a high degree to accommodate our little mauve brethren. This planet never did have enough sulfur springs or useful species of purple anaerobic photosynthesizers for their tastes. "

  "Too true, " he agreed. "Shall we bother doing a surface recon? Or wouldst thou prefer that we simply mark it for a dead loss and minimize the insult to our freshly heightened sensibilities?"

  She hesitated. "I would like to descend, Tok — if thou wouldst in­dulge me. We did spend so much time on the original survey. Besides, it's fitting to give it the utmost benefit of the doubt. "

  "I agree. " Disdaining the instrumentation, he did a fast me
tapsychic farscan of the largest continent, which projected some distance into the North Temperate Zone. This part of the world, which had the most landmass, was at the onset of winter; but there was as yet no snow on the ground and the vegetation was still adequately lush. "Let us visit the eastern coast of the major continent, Alk'ai. There is a great river now traversing the old continental shelf and a rather interesting embayment. "

  "Very well. "

  The survey vessel plummeted toward the planetary surface in a straight line, shielded by its rho-field from the constraints of gravity-inertia and by a temporary sigma-field from atmospheric ablation. The region Luma'eroo had selected was just at the terminator, and so they landed just as the sun was going down behind low hills, painting a dancing golden pathway across the indigo waters of the windswept bay. There was abundant plant-life. On the hills and on the exposed head­land where the ship rested were stands of trees with sturdy ligneous stems and deep-green aciform leaves. Other species of trees in the low­lands on either side of the river showed the beginning of chlorophyll degeneration in their obviously deciduous foliage, which was stained in startling coppery, xanthic, and rubineous hues.

  The Krondaku emerged carefully from the ship and moved with dif­ficulty in the gravitational field that was nearly twice their racial opti­mum. They slithered over a ground cover of low-growing anthophytes. Some were dried out; others, still green, bore star-shaped pink, yellow, or white sexual organs. The air tasted of terpineol, geranyl acetate, coumarin, and phenylethyl alcohol. There was also a distinctive chloride-iodide exudation from the marine organisms at the rocky mar­gin of the sea. An offshore breeze made a rustling sound as it passed through the needle-leaf trees, and waves crashed on the seaward side of the headland. Up in one of the trees, an invisible creature voiced a complex warbling ululation having a frequency between two thousand and four thousand cycles per second. Small white-winged animals in a ragged V-formation flew low over the bay waves, heading toward the open sea.