Critical Threshold Read online

  While my team did the initial work required to begin the work of bringing the people back to a state of bodily health Nathan, assisted by Mariel and occasionally Karen, mounted his own program of investigation. They made little progress in trying to get information from the people and came to pin their hopes more on the collection of indirect evidence. They began to mount comprehensive searches of the old buildings, especially the ones in the village itself, which had presumably been more than just dwellings.

  They confirmed without much trouble that both ships had, in fact, reached Dendra. The empty shells of those ships contributed the structural frameworks for virtually all the oldest edifices. All the tools and implements possessed and used by the colonists had been improvised from the cannibalized ships. Many of those tools were still around, having seen relatively little use in the intervening years. Some of the fuel cells still carried a full charge. This was understandable with respect to the cell powering the radio, but it seemed incredible that so little of the meager supply of available power given to the original colonists had been used. It seemed that the legacy of Earth—poor enough as it was—had been unappreciated.

  One particular fraction of that legacy—the most important part of all—was missing altogether. The searches turned up not the least sign of the massive library that the colonists had brought with them, the wealth of knowledge which was the most significant wealth the colony could hope to possess for many generations.

  All in all, the situation was tragic, and mysterious. The original colonists had come more than a hundred light-years in search of a new world and a new life, not only for themselves but also, and primarily, for their children and their children’s children. And it had all gone to waste. They had not only failed but had, it seemed, left no explanation of their failure. They had bequeathed to the few survivors of the potential host of their children’s children only the ruins of what they had brought from Earth. Pitiful ruins. They had not managed to make anything that belonged to the forest a part of the life they handed down. Their legacy contained neither a pattern for survival nor even a will to survive. Had the Daedalus arrived twenty or forty years later, we might well have found nothing but bones.

  How could they have let it happen? I asked myself, many times. How could they have failed so completely?

  The people in the settlement were victims, and the more I found out about them the more it seemed to me that they were victims not of chance or alien circumstances but of their own ancestors, who had, even if only by default, delivered them into their present desolation. They had not “regressed” into listless barbarity, but had been abandoned to it.

  It was not until the evening of the second day that we managed to turn up a significant, or apparently-significant, piece of evidence relating to the early colonists.

  It was a book. It was hand-made. Some books, printed on imperishable plastic, would have been among the stored information brought out from Earth, but books are, for the most part, a little too bulky to recommend themselves for expensive spacelift. As a distribution-system rather than a storage-system, however, books are extremely useful and books are one of the items one looks to find on the priority list of artifacts to be manufactured in situ by a new colony. The content of such books may be expected to reflect the primary concerns and ambitions of the colonists.

  The book which Nathan found was about the forest. The forest had apparently contributed significantly to its make-up, for it was bound in bark and appeared to have been sewn and glued with native materials. Only the pages, sewn in one by one, had been recovered from materials taken from the ships. The book had suffered over the years, but was internally sound and the handwritten pages could still be read.

  The book was a guide, not to replace, but rather to supplement, the survey reports which must have been the handbook to survival used by the settlers. Although a considerable amount of work had gone into it, it was not an end-product so much as a work perpetually in progress, being steadily extended, improved and revised. It had numerous illustrations, some hand-colored with inks of presumably local origin. As a commentary it was practical in tone and style. Unlike the survey reports, which classified things as edible or inedible, with precise analyses of nutritional value, the book classified things as pleasant or unpleasant to eat, with recommendations as to cooking and preparation. Where the survey reports described a certain kind of cat-like predator the book provided an illustration with the comment in capitals: THIS ANIMAL IS DANGEROUS. And so on.

  Rough-and-ready though it was, the book must have been the central reservoir of the information collected by the original colonists during their constructive years. It was difficult to estimate how much time had gone into the assembly of the information it contained, primarily because we could not estimate the number of contributors. In the six hundred and some pages we could detect at least twenty different hands, but how many minds had supplied the hands with information we could not guess.

  I spent the second night reading the book and trying to digest its content. I was allowed to monopolize it primarily because I was the one who would have to make use of the information when I went into the forest.

  The one thing the book did not contain was any historical or journalistic material on the colony itself. Nor was there any internal evidence to suggest why the book had been abandoned. No one had written an epilogue, nor so much as a single bitter footnote to hint at the reasons for the death of everything it represented. It seemed that whatever disaster had come had struck suddenly and without foreboding, like lightning from a clear sky.

  Or had it?

  “The strangest thing of all,” I said, “is that we should have found this one book, all alone. Where are the others, and why is this not with them?”

  The question was addressed to Nathan, in the early hours of the morning of the third day. The only other member of the party present was Pete Rolving, who was still operating on the ship’s clock despite the fact that eight-hourly watches and systems checks were no longer required. Work on the ship invariably seemed to expand to fill as much time as Pete could find to make available for it.

  “The library isn’t here,” said Nathan. “I wasn’t sure of that before, but I am now. It would be too big to hide so effectively that our search could have missed it. And if it isn’t here that implies that it was either destroyed or removed.”

  “All except for this one,” I repeated.

  Nathan looked at it. It lay open on the table in front of me, and his eyes ran over the lines of spidery handwriting, studded with marginal notes and blotches where statements had been erased after due consideration.

  “If the colonists moved on elsewhere,” I said. “This is the one book that they absolutely would not leave behind. Not if they were going to carry all the rest with them.”

  “Mightn’t it also be the one book that they’d hold back from destruction?” he asked, trying the idea out for size.

  “Why would they destroy everything else?” I asked, raising the obvious objection. “Including the survey reports to which this is really only a sequel?”

  “True,” he admitted, and went on without pause to new possibilities. “Then suppose, instead, that only some of the colonists left. Suppose the colony split into two—half staying here, half seeking fresh pastures. Suppose that they decided to divide up the assets. The ones who went away couldn’t carry the bodywork of the ships, or the cleared land, or the standing buildings, so they took as their share what was portable, or they tried. And in the bargaining, the ones who stayed claimed this.”

  Before I could raise the three hundred obvious objections to this theory, Pete chipped in.

  “Suppose,” he said, “that there were duplicate copies. Then, wherever the library is, there could be this too. You don’t have to make out a special case for it then.”

  “That’s a possibility,” I said. “If they had the materials available, it would make sense to keep critical information like this in duplicate. But the whole no
tion of the colony splitting in two is absurd. How could that possibly be in anyone’s interest. To halve the legacy would leave no one with a sufficiency.”

  “You’re right,” said Nathan. “It is absurd. But it isn’t impossible. And what’s more, absurdity isn’t necessarily the same thing as implausibility. Not when you’re dealing with the behavior of humans—especially humans in groups.”

  I must have looked at him with open-mouthed astonishment. But I also thought about what he had said. Somehow, it didn’t seem as unlikely as all that. I could imagine it happening. Internecine strife, violent disagreements and arguments forcing more and more commitment, more and more extremism and polarization of ideas. A small community, unable to get along as a single corporate entity, splitting into two....

  ...and dividing up all that they possessed, leaving neither fraction with the necessities of life?

  It was absurd. But was it believable?

  Was it more believable, for instance, than the idea that someone had taken it upon himself to destroy, obliterating without trace, the whole data bank brought by the colonists from Earth? Or the hypothesis that some inconceivable event had somehow resulted in the accidental destruction of everything but the one remaining book, and had simultaneously destroyed all the chances the colonists had ever had of establishing themselves in this tiny area?

  I reached out with my hands, and closed the book, closing, as I did so, the discussion of the issues which had been raised. There seemed no point in continuing, as we were already hopelessly lost in imaginative realms so remote from probability.

  “The whole situation,” I said, “is threatening to drive me out of my mind.”

  “Mmm,” said Nathan, pensively. “That’s something else I felt I ought to mention.” There was a new note in his voice. A note of anxiety.

  “How do you mean?” I said, not understanding.

  “If you cast your mind back,” he said, “to the very beginning of the affair on Floria, you may remember something you said to me about Mariel. You said that you were set against the idea of her being sent on this expedition, because, for one thing, you didn’t believe she could use her talent to deal with aliens, and for another, because you thought it might just make her receptive enough to alien minds to drive her out of her own.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it. Whether you’re right about the aliens, I don’t know. No one really knows how Mariel’s talent works. I guess we’ll find out whether she’s useful or not next year, on the first colony we visit where there are intelligent indigenes. But in the meantime these people here are sick, Alex. For whatever reason, their heads aren’t straight. You heard what Mariel had to say about the difficulties of trying to work with disturbed minds, and quite frankly, I think she understated the case.

  “I think the people here are having a bad effect on her, Alex. She’s trying hard to make contact with them—to open lines of communication. And I think she’s trying too hard. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to have her empathizing with people who are mentally ill. I think there’s a very real danger to her—a danger of infection.”

  I let the idea sink in. “I don’t know,” I said. “To me, she always seems...uncomfortable. I don’t talk to her much. And I don’t really know much about her talent. She told me that it was simply intuitive non-verbal communication—being able to read in face muscles what isn’t said in words.”

  “That’s part of it,” said Nathan, “but not the whole. Doctors trying to analyze her ability have said that—have told her that—but they were the sort of men who went looking for a simple explanation, determined to find one. Any explanation was better than none—you know how some scientists try to minimize events rather than accepting their own ignorance. It’s a rebellion against the kind of supernatural explanations people are all too ready to invent where scientists can’t provide an immediate answer. Yes, there’s a certain degree of simple non-verbal communication involved. But there’s also complex nonverbal communication. I don’t want to use the word telepathy or the manifold vulgarizations of it. But Mariel can empathize with people to an extraordinary degree, and I think that in this particular case she could get hurt doing it. People in her kind of mental situation live, inevitably, in a schizoid world. It’s not uncommon for them to become schizophrenic.”

  “Especially,” I said, “if they’re forced to live and work with schizophrenics. A whole community of them.”

  He nodded.

  “You could be right,” I affirmed. “But what can we do about it? Lock her up for the duration?”

  “I want you to take her with you,” he said. “Into the forest. Away from here. For a while. It’s a temporary solution, but it gives us time to think.”

  I didn’t like the idea, and I didn’t bother to pretend that I did. I was uneasy in Mariel’s presence. The idea that she knew more about what was going on in my mind than I chose to let out of normal channels made me uneasy. It wasn’t that I had anything to hide, but just the simple fact—the idea of being perennially open to invasion.

  “I intended to go alone,” I said.

  “I’d advise against that anyhow,” said Nathan. “It may be dangerous out there. You know as well as I do that it would be unwise.”

  “I can’t take Conrad or Linda,” I said. “They have too much to do here. It’s not just a matter of getting the people healthy, it’s a matter of getting the fields healthy, reestablishing a base for adequate survival and expansion. I feel bad enough myself about turning my back on the real, obvious work for the business of simple exploring, without even knowing what I’m looking for.”

  “The answer, as you said, is in the forest,” he reminded me.

  “Sure,” I said. “But the forest covers the whole world. Where do I start looking? Do I just wander round waiting for inspiration? That seems to be all there is. But I can’t take half the strength away from the immediate task, now can I?”

  “You can’t take Conrad or Linda,” agreed Nathan. “And my job is definitely here. But I think it would be as well if you took Mariel, for her own protection. And I think Karen should go with you, too. Not to help you find any answers to awkward questions, but as insurance against the possibility of something going wrong.”

  “Pete won’t relish being left to look after the ship on his own,” I said.

  “The regulation about keeping two people on board at all times is a precautionary measure,” Nathan pointed out. “In a sense, it’s exactly the same precaution you should take. We can stick to it. Conrad and Linda will have to do more work in the lab than out there, and if we break it once in a while the sky won’t fall. This isn’t Floria—we know we have nothing to fear so far as threats to the hardware are concerned.”

  What he was saying was sensible enough. It was tempting fate to go into the forest alone. And maybe it was important to get Mariel out of the firing line. As long as Karen came too, I supposed that I could cope with my uneasiness with respect to the girl. Nathan had obviously thought it all out in advance.

  “She’s going to know,” I pointed out. “When we tell her. She’s going to know what we’re doing and why.”

  “The thing I worry about,” said Nathan, “is whether we know what we’re doing, and why. I’m sure of myself, but not of you. You don’t help her much, you know. You avoid her. You dislike her.”

  “Not personally,” I said. “I can’t help my prejudice about the mind-reading. Maybe if I stayed here, and Conrad investigated the forest....”

  “That’s not an answer,” he said.

  I had to admit that it wasn’t.

  “Fair enough,” I conceded. “We’ll do it your way.”

  “Get some sleep,” he advised. “There’s no point in trying to commit the book to memory. You can take it out with you. But I think you should start drawing equipment when you wake up. Make a start when you can. If the forest is where the answer can be found, we need it as soon as humanly possible. Otherwise e
verything we do here, or try to do, might turn out to be meaningless.”

  I couldn’t resist it. I’d spent two days and three nights not saying it.

  “This world should never have been colonized,” I said, as I got up, heading for my bunk. “Those people out there are all that’s left of a noble experiment in political chicanery. You know that, don’t you?”

  His face slipped into a noncommittal mask.

  “Don’t start looking for the answers you want to find, Alex,” he said. “If you do, you might find no answers at all. And even when we know the full story, even then it’s not for you to judge. It’s not for any of us.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “It’s for each and every one of us. Everybody must judge.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The settlement’s supply of fresh water was a small stream which cut diagonally across the corner that was furthest down the slope. One of the endpapers of the guidebook Nathan had found was a map, which showed that the stream wound its way on through the clustered hills to a valley where it joined a river of some magnitude. The river ran away to the north in a series of long sinuous curves, into the sub-tropical zone rather than toward the southern ocean.

  The map plotted the river’s course over something more than a hundred miles—five or six days’ journey on foot—and ended with a rather tentative circle representing a lake. The course of the river lay between two great ridges and I hazarded a guess that the lower portion of the map had been constructed on the basis of what could be seen from the top of the higher ridge.