Bedlam Planet Read Online Free PDF Page B

had to be a specialist; it was essential that the best available skills of Earth should be available to draw on when required. On the other hand, all of the colonists were likewise dilettanti. They had to be able to talk to each other and understand the key concepts in every other discipline besides their own. Well, that was a simple enough matter when it came to doing things like roping in volunteer help to string power and phone lines. You couldn’t live on modern Earth without using power-grids and communications networks.
    But faced with the idea that this awareness inside the skull—this ego, this creature called “I”—actually depended on processes which could be extracted and isolated in a lab experiment, most people tended to shy off. While being dutifully aware of the way in which potassium cyanide halted metabolism, or the carriage of oxygen by the oxyhaemoglobin of the red cells, they still preferred in the ultimate resort to think in subjective terms: “hungry, I eat; tired, I rest.”
    Cogito, ergo sum.
    It was one thing to come out of the sanctuary of the ship, peel down the soft bark layers of a woodplant, saw the harder xylem beneath into planks and beams whichcould be dried stiffly into place and form shelters. That was akin to going camping, a sort of flirtation with the primitive, and implied adventure. It overlaid the crude facts of survival with a gloss of play.
    But when it came to risking the delicate balance of their very bodies on the assurance of someone whose data they could not fully understand, it was different.
    Yet, for all he had struggled to find one, he could propose no alternative to the suggestion he had already voiced. The crash of the
Pinta
had deprived the colony of irreplaceable biological resources. Each ship’s computer memories had been assigned a speciality, and what survived included little more than an abstract of certain key areas of modern biographical knowledge. Similarly, although each ship had been allotted a complete cross-section of essential equipment, so that if two ships had been lost the crew of the third could live in he remaining ship and tackle the problem of moving out on the new world’s surface by slow degrees, no one of the three was intended to carry out the complete job at the original rate. There simply wasn’t any cargo capacity. The colony was likely to have to survive independently of help from Earth for about a century; it would take that long, said the economists, to make up the fantastic drain on terrestrial resources caused by the first expedition. You could have built fifty cities with the materials absorbed in the project; you could have populated an ancient empire with the people who became directly or indirectly involved.
    That meant that a choice between duplicating a certain item of equipment or including another couple in the crew must always be resolved in favour of the crew. To spread out and populate the new world without risking the consequences of inbreeding, the colonists needed a gene-pool as large as could be made available. And so far tectogenetic modification was only an experimental technique, not one which people struggling to stay alive on an alien world could expect to be employing within one generation.
    On the other hand—and here he shared the instant, frightened resentment of the non-biologists who had heard his explanation—it seemed incredibly frustrating that an organism far too small to be visible should now threaten their success not with some spectacular illness, but simply with a process of undermining their welfare.
    It would be intolerable to see the vigour and enthusiasm of the colonists drained away by the insidious leech of scurvy. But at the edge of his mind the shadow lurked, which was Death. He was as sure as he could be that Earthly plants grown in Asgard soil contained a substance which would negate the impact of the local bacterium on the human metabolism. It didn’t really want ascorbic acid; that