Beulah

Originally published in Amazing Stories, July 1977.

The one-man scout car separated from Capricorn, the mother ship, like a wee thistle expelled by a gtiant pod. Smithson endured the brief G-stress of acceleration matter-of-factly, and when Capricorn was a planetoidal pinpoint of light behind him, he reached from his harness, punched the green button that turned the scout car over to CompNec system, and watched Beulah waltz closer in the visi-screen.

A soft whistle brushed Smitty’s teeth as Beulah flaunted her details. Such a lovely and fragile looking little planet! A swirl of pink, gold, and lavender. A crystal ball splashed with joyous colors by a happily uninhibited artist.

Like the raiment of the expensive prostitutes of Maumaut-One (Smitty had the second thought) where spacemen who violated off-limits regulations sometimes paid for a night’s indescribable pleasure with their sanity.

He heard the faint click as CompNec triggered the Faran detector for the first pass around planet Beulah. A tall, lean, blond offshoot of the rugged stock so carefully chosen to colonize Mars more than a century ago, Smitty stripped his mind of vagrant musings of Maumaut-One and Beulah’s enticing beauties. His objective was frightful in its Gordian-knot simplicity: locate the starcraft — Zenith — which had disappeared without forewarning or protest on Beulah’s bosom.

Impossible, of course, such a disappearance.

Thorough probes by unmanned drones were routine when a new celestial body was discovered. Beulah was given full treatment. Before a single human being approached her, she was carefully mapped, measured, sampled, stripped of all her secrets. The detailed results of the unmanned scrutiny were a cause for rejoicing. Beulah sounded almost too good to be real. As planets go, she was barely out of her teens, born a mere two billion earth-years ago. Her gravity, mean temperature, and atmosphere rivaled the environmental pleasantries of an expensive Earthside resort. She was spotlessly virginal, samples from her surface ruling out the possible threat from any life form, animal, vegetal, viral. And being young, she was voluptuously rich in heavy elements, an untapped treasure for an always-energy-hungry race.

Drawing the first manned assignment to Beulah, Zenith had set out as if on a lark, the envy of every starcraft in the galaxy. In a single warp step, Zenith shortcut the parsecs to a point beyond Ursa Major, orbiting Beulah to once more re-affirm the data of the unmanned probes, and then setting down with a touch that wouldn’t have trembled a leaf in the hydroponic tanks.

Zenith’s crew burst out to work in the delightful warmth of a small sun with lazy blue tints, in the complete safety of conditions rivaling the most sterile laboratory.

Then silence.

Earth days passed with a growing sense of urgency and mystification. At last the million-in-one conclusion was reached: Zenith’s communications systems, including the backups, had simultaneously broken down.

The Capricorn was ordered to the vicinity of Beulah’s sun, where she would orbit safely distant from Beulah. Earth Center was unwilling to risk a second starcraft at this stage of the game — but not a one-man scout car.

Which meant Smitty.

Which is hell on ego, even if a man never really thought of himself as indispensible, Smitty thought as the first pass around Beulah came to fruitless conclusion. Smitty had the vagrant wish that the planet’s discoverer, Beulah Csweickerzski, had been born in a much earlier era when genius-I.Q. females hadn’t had macrocabs and sub-spatial radtrons to play around with.

Smitty spoke in his coffin-like confines: “Pass one. Faran results zero.”

“Declinate,” ordered the cultivated baritone of Carruthers, in command of the Capricorn.

“Declinating,” Smitty acknowledged.

The equatorial regions of Beulah filled the visi-ports. The closer view separated the colors and made them even more vivid. Beulah’s mountain ranges were crystalline and pink spires tinted by the blueish sun. Her canyons and valleys were dainty puckers. Her plains and plateaus were gently undulating waves of golden soil where breezes playfully lifted feathers of sand. Toward the southern polar region, as the car hurtled to dark side, a miniature volcano geysered, as if Beulah had noted Smitty’s presence with a saucy wink of fire.

The car swung from the dark side, and Smitty was caressed with a multi-hued dawn of auroreal beauty. Before he could fully appreciate the vista, a beep from the Faran broke the silence.

A click told him that the Faran, even as it located the missing Zenith, had fed the coordinate information into the CompNec.

Smitty started to speak. But an unaccountable shiver passed over him. A too-warm sweat greased his forehead.

Nerves? Friend, he assured himself, I was born without them.

He moistened his lips with his tongue. “Faran activated.”

“Condition?” said Carruthers from the Capricorn.

Smitty’s gaze raced over the instrument panel, “Go. All the way go.”

CompNec delayed landing for two more orbits before it was satisfied with every minute condition below. During the orbital period, the scout was a clicking, whining, humming cocoon with every device aboard at CompNec’s command putting Beulah through the wringer.

On each pass, Smitty kept the Zenith in sight through the ports as long as possible. The giant craft rested on a vast golden plain like a silver egg slightly more than a mile in diameter at its girth. It appeared undamaged. It suggested that its crew and the two thousand technicians it had ferried here as a primary work force were busy at normal tasks on the two hundred levels of its interior.

But Zenith had arrived for outdoors work, geological surveys, the erection of basic structures around which mining towns would grow. And surely the scout car’s presence would have been detected. How come there was no show of interest in the arrival of a fresh human presence?

Smitty wondered if CompNec was hesitating because of the dead stillness down there.

Even as the thought formed, it broke off. It seemed to Smitty that a faint new sound had slipped into the activity of the scout. Not a sound, really. Something akin to a whisper heard only in the core of his brain. A coy, coaxing suggestion to trip the manual, by-pass CompNec, and plunge the scout manually into the beautiful golden sands.

His breath was throttled, his throat dry. He shook off the feeling of slimy fear. Imagination again, he told himself, and I thought it toughened with age. He managed a grin. Maybe I’m younger than the calendar says. Just a frequently horny, always happy kid at heart, that’s me.

While the scout was traversing the dark side, CompNec made its decision. The CD panel began clicking off the minutes and seconds to touchdown.

Smitty watched blue-hued early morning burst through the ports and went through the discomfort of deceleration with his usual stoicism, nevertheless expelling a breath of relief when the scout bumped to rest.

A glance through the left port revealed to him that the scout had landed within fifty yards of Zenith’s gleaming mass.

Once more the strange hesitancy quivered through him. He experienced it for a long moment before a stubborn set came to his jaw. Come off it, Smitty, he thought, or I’m going to get sore as hell at you.

With an uncalled-for shortness, he spoke aloud; “Am beginning EVA.”

“Condition yellow,” Carruthers replied from the distant Capricorn. It meant that every resource within the vast hollow globe was geared to Smitty’s personal safety.

Shucking out of his harness, Smitty suddenly froze in a half-erect, very awkward attitude. He tilted his head as if listening.

Condition yellow... You, Smitty... You’re yellow... A bumpkin from Mars... Why do you think they tagged you for the Beulah landing? Because they’re a cruddy bunch of maggots, that’s why... Little two-legged beasties always ganging up with each other... Slobbering protein into their steamy guts... Creeping to special places to rid themselves of waste to keep from befouling themselves...

The rigidity in Smitty’s muscles dissolved. He stood blinking, as if wondering for the briefest moment where he was. He punched the Valan control and watched a section in the scout’s side slide rearward to offer a three-by-six feet opening to the golden sands and blue-tinged sky outside.

He moved out and quickly started toward the Zenith. Dimly, he felt that he had omitted certain details but they didn’t seem important. He circled the Zenith, a tall, lithe figure in Bradspan, the almost weightless material standard in space clothing, a shield against heat, cold, sudden pressure changes, and smaller doses of high energy radiation.

Back in the scout car, the voice of Carruthers was pouring earnestly from the speaker: “What’s delaying your checklist for EVA, Smitty? Come in, Smitty... Request EVA checklist... Come in...

Vaguely, Smitty realized that the scout was emitting yapping noises at him. Why didn’t Carruthers just shut up?

Why not trot back and smash the speaker to keep them off his back? It seemed like a great idea, but it could wait. The shimmering veil before Smitty was much more intriguing. A rainbow, no less, touching the feathery golden ground at his feet and sweeping to a height beyond that of the Zenith. With a frightful but delightful little shiver racing through his shoulders Smitty stepped into the indigo and orange transparency.

The golden land was no longer barren, but riotous with the richest vegetation to seek life from a planet. Nothing but flowers of every color everywhere, from tiny silver buds to enormous yellow blooms strewn to farthest distances.

He heard movement, dry, rustling, unpleasant. Squinting, he saw a familiar figure a dozen feet away, writhing through the flower jungle on its bell.

Me? he thought with some amazement.

That creepy, crawling thing is me?

It most surely was. He was writhing and thrashing around, goaded by all his human anxieties, dislikes, uncertainties, giving himself over to reasonless hatred and greed. He was blindly tearing at and destroying the plants, and soon the scene was one of stinking rot, where the land had once been clean.

He backed away, bitterly ashamed, feeling that he should die for his depredations. And the veil lifted, and once more he was standing in the shadow of Zenith wondering what had come over him.

This wasn’t really the time or place for theoretical explanations. He had a job to do here, something to do with Zenith and the reason for the cessation of all evidence of life aboard it.

He was standing before an open, Level One portal in the shady side of Zenith. Comparatively small in the bottom curve of the vast silvery egg, Level One housed little more than secondary airlocks — and the primary lift which could take Smitty to all of the upper reaches of Zenith.

A few strides carried him inside Level One, across the short distance to the lift. He stepped inside and punched a button. The door whisked closed, and a pressure on the soles of his feet told him the lift was moving.

Smitty glanced about. The lift was a cubicle large enough to carry a hundred people or several tons of machinery. He felt quite small in it. Then he suddenly giggled.

“...You find the concept amusing, Pupil Smithson?” Professor Gwaltney snapped the question. He was a thin, stooped, harried man who always seemed steeped in misery. He certainly might have been. With only a third degree certificate, Earth side Institute, attesting the limits of his capacities, he had spent his life teaching in a behind-the-times classroom in the dreary Martian colonies. He disliked his students almost as much as the bitter environment. They were a tough, hardy, often brilliant lot, constant reminders of his own shortcomings.

At his question, the other five-year-old boys and girls slipped looks in Smitty’s direction. They were giving him silent support because he was the professor’s pet hate this quarter.

“Perhaps you do not conceive the concept of sentience, Pupil Smithson?”

“I believe I do, sir,” a snub-nosed, tow-headed, age-five Smitty said politely. “Sentience, as we interpret it today, is a quality of whatever kind, form, or degree, not necessarily dependent on a brain...”

“Yes, yes, Smithson! On your classroom best, aren’t you? And the vocabulary! My, aren’t we progressing during our turns at the RXI teaching device. Since we are so brilliant today, please recall for the benefit of the class the basic types and forms of sentience found thus far in non-brain material.”

“Insects, sir. Sometimes their sentience reaches the level of intelligence. And the rolling stones of Gerviki-A...”

“You hesitate, Pupil Smithson?” Gwaltney’s sparse brows shot up in mock amazement.

Smitty’s cheeks took on some of the reddish hues of the cold terrain outside. “Having lived all my life here on Mars where rocks are just rocks...”

“Aha!” Gwaltney interrupted. “You’re showing the end of your intellectual rope, Pupil Smithson!”

“Sir,” and now he was coldly pale with a shard of Martian ice in his young eyes, “just because I have not seen them, I’m not stupid enough to deny the rolling stones. They have been observed for almost a century now.”

“In what way are they sentient?”

“When Gerviki-A was discovered, the greenish stones were all in small clusters atop the low hills of the planet. It was found out that if an outside force dislodged a stone, it inched its way back up the hill to rejoin its cluster. If a stone was removed from one cluster to another it eventually returned to its own cluster. And of course plants on many planets have a form of sentience demonstrated by their reaching for sunlight, withdrawal from frost, their power to hibernate.”

“Quite, Pupil Smithson. And the will to live among plants...”

Gwaltney and the classroom vanished — and all the plants were dead.

Smitty was standing on Zenith’s level three, dwarfed by the tier upon tier of hydroponic tanks crowded ceiling high, their orderly rows leaving only small corridors for passage. The stench of rotten vegetation choked him. He struggled for breath, staring in disbelief.

The scene should have been fresh and colorful. Giant red strawberries from earth; acres of flotney buds from Venus; delicious ochre beans from dome-sheltered farms on Mars; and a thousand other varieties from a hundred other planets to please the sight, smell, and taste of the star-craft’s human cargo.

But all were dead. Torn from their roots. Spilled in noisome masses in the corridors or hanging limp over the sides of the tanks.

Smitty stumbled backward into the lift and jammed his hand against the control for Level Central.

“Postulate: Beulah was devoid of all life until the arrival of Zenith,” he mumbled. “Postulate: The plants are all dead. Conclusion: The crew destroyed the plants.”

Unless the plants had ravaged and killed each other.

He neared the vastness of Level Central with the feeling that a cold compress was squeezing his heart, and he stepped out prepared for shock. But the sight that met his eyes was beyond shock. He stood paralyzed, unable to admit the reality of the scene.

The dead littered Level Central, grotesquely, in every position, all bearing the marks of the most savage violence. Thousands, bloated or desiccated with rot, in the open grave that Zenith had become. Here was a remains with an eye torn out, throat ripped away. There, a hand with flesh falling away still clutching the mechanics laser pencil from tool storage with which it had cut another crewman in half. A girl with an old-fashioned butcher knife from the galley between her shoulder blades.

Out of the wreckage and rot rose features familiar to Smitty. He stared at what was left of Bidlow who, like himself, had come from Mars. He jerked his eyes away, and there was Rudemacher.

“If I flunk out of cadet school here on Earthside, Smitty, I’ll panhandle my way to Maumaut-One and end it all in one glorious night. You don’t have my problems because you’re a tough and smart Martian bastard with the genetic changes worked by three generations in the environment.”

Rudemacher had made it. Graduation. Assignment to space vessel. Three promotions. Finally a starcraft. Rudemacher had made it all the way to planet Beulah before flunking out. All the way to the insanity that had caused those aboard Zenith to butcher each other until none was left. How had the last one died? Of wounds? Or by his or her own hand when nothing else remained to kill?

Level Central vanished.

“Do you understand, Pupil Smithson?”

“I think so, sir.”

“I think so, I think so,” Professor Gwaltney mimicked. He seemed even more miserable today than usual. “Try to understand, Pupil. Planets are endowed by the Creator with certain powers to nurture life in one form or another, however bizarre the form may appear to us. Mother Earth is a most meaningful connotation, Pupil Smithson. Without earth, you could not have been, even though you are a step-child of Mother Mars. You will never know earth, however long you may go there, as I know her. I was born there.” Gwaltney seemed about to weep. “You were not. And for that you are to be pitied...”

Gwaltney spiraled off to limbo, and Smitty was once more on Level Central, Zenith starcraft. A soft smile came to his lips. He began moving about, freely now. The lovely golden light of Beulah was filtering through the very substance of Zenith, touching each magnificently rotten face, every beautifully ripped abdomen and slashed torso.

Death... Gossamer and golden, like the light of Beulah.

It had remained for Beulah, childless mother, to reveal the fullness of truth to his once-cluttered mind. Even old Gwaltney was beautiful now, being long since dead.

With robot precision, Smitty departed the Zenith, climbed into the scout car, punched out CompNec, took manual control, and lifted from Beulah’s warm bosom.

He reached escape velocity on the third orbit. At the moment when he broke Beulah’s gravitational grip, he punched the activator that unsheathed the belly-mounted laser. The weapon made the scout car, pound for pound, one of the deadliest antagonists in the universe.

Then Smitty turned on full power and aimed the scout on direct collision course with Capricorn...

“I think he’d coming around now,” the familiarity of the voice nagged Smitty. Through a wall of pain, he struggled to place it. Scoville. Of course. Doctor Scoville.

Smitty groaned. “My head... what a headache!”

He felt a needle bite his arm. “Another half-CC of wequerin should help that,” Scoville’s voice said.

Smitty was just managing to hang on second by second, never so sick or miserable in his entire life. He felt the hardness of a surgical or examination table beneath his back, the restraint of webbing across his body. Sick bay. Scoville. It all added up. He was back aboard the Capricorn. In sick bay. And he was going to vomit all over the place any moment now.

Then the wequerin settled his stomach and wiped away the headache in one gentle stroke. He opened his eyes. Scoville’s big, round face was hovering above him on one side, while on the other Carruthers’ thinner more ascetic features were regarding him with deep concern.

When he saw Smitty’s eyes open, Carruthers exhaled a breath of relief. “You gave us a very bad moment, punching out the CompNec as you did,” Carruthers said. Even in criticism, the commander’s voice was pleasant and polite. “We had to hit you with long-range temporary neural implosion to take command of the scout car away from you.”

“Thanks, boss,” Smitty said. “It was even worth the headache.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” Carruthers smiled. Dark, suave, he glanced at the doctor. “De-briefing? While Smitty’s fresh on it?”

Scoville shrugged. “The wequerin will leave him wobbly for a few minutes. Otherwise, he seems no worse for wear. Sometimes I think even a Jupiterian ice slide couldn’t kill these colonial Martians.”

“For which we re all most grateful,” Carruthers said.

Ten minutes later, Smitty was standing at a tall visi-port in a debriefing room. He was sipping a glass of port, which Carruthers always included in his Earthside requisitions.

Smitty lowered the glass slowly from his lips, studying the breathtaking round beauty of Beulah hovering safely in the far distance.

“To begin with, Commander, we’re all going to have trouble believing this one, like the ancients had trouble with Galileo’s telescope and Louis Pasteur’s invisible bugs. But I think we’ve just come across our first extremely sentient planet... and she is having none of this motherhood bit. Absolutely. Positively. She wants no brats digging life out of her breasts and lousing up her virginal purity with flotsam and junk and sewerage. No little stinkers scarring her with pain when they yield to senseless emotion and kill each other. No snot-noses contemptuous of her even as they draw life from her.”

Smitty paused, still intently looking at Beulah. “None of the headaches of motherhood for that one, Commander, even if she has to practice abortion...”

Smitty gave a long sigh. “Of course, that’s her side of it. But from our point of view... how could anything so lovely be such a double-dyed bitch?