Oomphel in the Sky
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Henry Beam Piper >> Oomphel in the Sky
OOMPHEL ...
... IN THE SKY
By H. BEAM PIPER
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| Transcriber's Note |
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| This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact--Science |
| Fiction, November 1960. Extensive research did not uncover |
| any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was |
| renewed. |
| |
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[Illustration]
_Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will,
change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of
postulates ... so how can a man fight a native superstition with
logic? Or anything else...?_
Illustrated by Bernklau
Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt of
rounded treetops mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, in
shaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The
aircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view,
a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of two
feet at arm's length, slightly flattened on the bottom by the western
horizon. In another couple of hours it would be completely set, but by
that time Beta, the planet's G-class primary, would be at its
midafternoon hottest. He glanced at his watch. It was 1005, but that was
Galactic Standard Time, and had no relevance to anything that was
happening in the local sky. It did mean, though, that it was five
minutes short of two hours to 'cast-time.
He snapped on the communication screen in front of him, and Harry Walsh,
the news editor, looked out of it at him from the office in Bluelake,
halfway across the continent. He wanted to know how things were going.
"Just about finished. I'm going to look in at a couple more native
villages, and then I'm going to Sanders' plantation to see Gonzales. I
hope I'll have a personal statement from him, and the final
situation-progress map, in time for the 'cast. I take it Maith's still
agreeable to releasing the story at twelve-hundred?"
"Sure; he was always agreeable. The Army wants publicity; it was
Government House that wanted to sit on it, and they've given that up
now. The story's all over the place here, native city and all."
"What's the situation in town, now?"
"Oh, it's still going on. Some disorders, mostly just unrest. Lot of
street meetings that could have turned into frenzies if the police
hadn't broken them up in time. A couple of shootings, some
sleep-gassing, and a lot of arrests. Nothing to worry about--at least,
not immediately."
That was about what he thought. "Maybe it's not bad to have a little
trouble in Bluelake," he considered. "What happens out here in the
plantation country the Government House crowd can't see, and it doesn't
worry them. Well, I'll call you from Sanders'."
He blanked the screen. In the seat in front, the native pilot said:
"Some contragravity up ahead, boss." It sounded like two voices speaking
in unison, which was just what it was. "I'll have a look."
The pilot's hand, long and thin, like a squirrel's, reached up and
pulled down the fifty-power binoculars on their swinging arm. Miles
looked at the screen-map and saw a native village just ahead of the dot
of light that marked the position of the aircar. He spoke the native
name of the village aloud, and added:
"Let down there, Heshto. I'll see what's going on."
The native, still looking through the glasses, said, "Right, boss." Then
he turned.
His skin was blue-gray and looked like sponge rubber. He was humanoid,
to the extent of being an upright biped, with two arms, a head on top of
shoulders, and a torso that housed, among other oddities, four lungs.
His face wasn't even vaguely human. He had two eyes in front, close
enough for stereoscopic vision, but that was a common characteristic of
sapient life forms everywhere. His mouth was strictly for eating; he
breathed through separate intakes and outlets, one of each on either
side of his neck; he talked through the outlets and had his scent and
hearing organs in the intakes. The car was air-conditioned, which was a
mercy; an overheated Kwann exhaled through his skin, and surrounded
himself with stenches like an organic chemistry lab. But then, Kwanns
didn't come any closer to him than they could help when he was hot and
sweated, which, lately, had been most of the time.
"A V and a half of air cavalry, circling around," Heshto said. "Making
sure nobody got away. And a combat car at a couple of hundred feet and
another one just at treetop level."
He rose and went to the seat next to the pilot, pulling down the
binoculars that were focused for his own eyes. With them, he could see
the air cavalry--egg-shaped things just big enough for a seated man,
with jets and contragravity field generators below and a bristle of
machine gun muzzles in front. A couple of them jetted up for a look at
him and then went slanting down again, having recognized the Kwannon
Planetwide News Service car.
The village was typical enough to have been an illustration in a
sociography textbook--fields in a belt for a couple of hundred yards
around it, dome-thatched mud-and-wattle huts inside a pole stockade with
log storehouses built against it, their flat roofs high enough to
provide platforms for defending archers, the open oval gathering-place
in the middle. There was a big hut at one end of this, the khamdoo, the
sanctum of the adult males, off limits for women and children. A small
crowd was gathered in front of it; fifteen or twenty Terran air
cavalrymen, a couple of enlisted men from the Second Kwannon Native
Infantry, a Terran second lieutenant, and half a dozen natives. The rest
of the village population, about two hundred, of both sexes and all
ages, were lined up on the shadier side of the gathering-place, most of
them looking up apprehensively at the two combat cars which were
covering them with their guns.
Miles got to his feet as the car lurched off contragravity and the
springs of the landing-feet took up the weight. A blast of furnacelike
air struck him when he opened the door; he got out quickly and closed it
behind him. The second lieutenant had come over to meet him; he extended
his hand.
"Good day, Mr. Gilbert. We all owe you our thanks for the warning. This
would have been a real baddie if we hadn't caught it when we did."
He didn't even try to make any modest disclaimer; that was nothing more
than the exact truth.
"Well, lieutenant, I see you have things in hand here." He glanced at
the line-up along the side of the oval plaza, and then at the selected
group in front of the khamdoo. The patriarchal village chieftain in a
loose slashed shirt; the shoonoo, wearing a multiplicity of amulets and
nothing else; four or five of the village elders. "I take it the word of
the swarming didn't get this far?"
"No, this crowd still don't know what the flap's about, and I couldn't
think of anything to tell them that wouldn't be worse than no
explanation at all."
He had noticed hoes and spades flying in the fields, and the cylindrical
plastic containers the natives bought from traders, dropped when the
troops had surprised the women at work. And the shoonoo didn't have a
fire-dance cloak or any other special regalia on. If he'd heard about
the swarming, he'd have been dressed to make magic for it.
"What time did you get here, lieutenant?"
"Oh-nine-forty. I just called in and reported the village occupied, and
they told me I was the last one in, so the operation's finished."
That had been smart work. He got the lieutenant's name and unit and
mentioned it into his memophone. That had been a little under five hours
since he had convinced General Maith, in Bluelake, that the mass
labor-desertion from the Sanders plantation had been the beginning of a
swarming. Some division commanders wouldn't have been able to get a
brigade off the ground in that time, let alone landed on objective. He
said as much to the young officer.
"The way the Army responded, today, can make the people of the Colony
feel a lot more comfortable for the future."
"Why, thank you, Mr. Gilbert." The Army, on Kwannon, was rather more
used to obloquy than praise. "How did you spot what was going on so
quickly?"
This was the hundredth time, at least, that he had been asked that
today.
"Well, Paul Sanders' labor all comes from neighboring villages. If
they'd just wanted to go home and spend the end of the world with their
families, they'd have been dribbling away in small batches for the last
couple of hundred hours. Instead, they all bugged out in a bunch, they
took all the food they could carry and nothing else, and they didn't
make any trouble before they left. Then, Sanders said they'd been
building fires out in the fallow ground and moaning and chanting around
them for a couple of days, and idling on the job. Saving their strength
for the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He's probably
the lad who started it. Had a dream from the Gone Ones, I suppose."
"You mean, like this fellow here?" the lieutenant asked. "What are they,
Mr. Gilbert; priests?"
He looked quickly at the lieutenant's collar-badges. Yellow trefoil for
Third Fleet-Army Force, Roman IV for Fourth Army, 907 for his regiment,
with C under it for cavalry. That outfit had only been on Kwannon for
the last two thousand hours, but somebody should have briefed him better
than that.
He shook his head. "No, they're magicians. Everything these Kwanns do
involves magic, and the shoonoon are the professionals. When a native
runs into something serious, that his own do-it-yourself magic can't
cope with, he goes to the shoonoo. And, of course, the shoonoo works all
the magic for the community as a whole--rain-magic, protective magic for
the village and the fields, that sort of thing."
The lieutenant mopped his face on a bedraggled handkerchief. "They'll
have to struggle along somehow for a while; we have orders to round up
all the shoonoon and send them in to Bluelake."
"Yes." That hadn't been General Maith's idea; the governor had insisted
on that. "I hope it doesn't make more trouble than it prevents."
The lieutenant was still mopping his face and looking across the
gathering-place toward Alpha, glaring above the huts.
"How much worse do you think this is going to get?" he asked.
"The heat, or the native troubles?"
"I was thinking about the heat, but both."
"Well, it'll get hotter. Not much hotter, but some. We can expect
storms, too, within twelve to fifteen hundred hours. Nobody has any idea
how bad they'll be. The last periastron was ninety years ago, and we've
only been here for sixty-odd; all we have is verbal accounts from memory
from the natives, probably garbled and exaggerated. We had pretty bad
storms right after transit a year ago; they'll be much worse this time.
Thermal convections; air starts to cool when it gets dark, and then
heats up again in double-sun daylight."
It was beginning, even now; starting to blow a little after Alpha-rise.
"How about the natives?" the lieutenant asked. "If they can get any
crazier than they are now--"
"They can, and they probably will. They think this is the end of the
world. The Last Hot Time." He used the native expression, and then
translated it into Lingua Terra. "The Sky Fire--that's Alpha--will burn
up the whole world."
"But this happens every ninety years. Mean they always acted this way at
periastron?"
He shook his head. "Race would have exterminated itself long ago if they
had. No, this is something special. The coming of the Terrans was a
sign. The Terrans came and brought oomphel to the world; this a sign
that the Last Hot Time is at hand."
"What the devil _is_ oomphel?" The lieutenant was mopping the back of
his neck with one hand, now, and trying to pull his sticky tunic loose
from his body with the other. "I hear that word all the time."
"Well, most Terrans, including the old Kwannon hands, use it to mean
trade-goods. To the natives, it means any product of Terran technology,
from paper-clips to spaceships. They think it's ... well, not exactly
supernatural; extranatural would be closer to expressing their idea.
Terrans are natural; they're just a different kind of people. But
oomphel isn't; it isn't subject to any of the laws of nature at all.
They're all positive that we don't make it. Some of them even think it
makes us."
When he got back in the car, the native pilot, Heshto, was lolling in
his seat and staring at the crowd of natives along the side of the
gathering-place with undisguised disdain. Heshto had been educated at
one of the Native Welfare Commission schools, and post-graded with
Kwannon Planetwide News. He could speak, read and write Lingua Terra. He
was a mathematician as far as long division and decimal fractions. He
knew that Kwannon was the second planet of the Gettler Beta system,
23,000 miles in circumference, rotating on its axis once in 22.8
Galactic Standard hours and making an orbital circuit around Gettler
Beta once in 372.06 axial days, and that Alpha was an M-class pulsating
variable with an average period of four hundred days, and that Beta
orbited around it in a long elipse every ninety years. He didn't believe
there was going to be a Last Hot Time. He was an intellectual, he was.
He started the contragravity-field generator as soon as Miles was in his
seat. "Where now, boss?" he asked.
"Qualpha's Village. We won't let down; just circle low over it. I want
some views of the ruins. Then to Sanders' plantation."
"O.K., boss; hold tight."
He had the car up to ten thousand feet. Aiming it in the map direction
of Qualpha's Village, he let go with everything he had--hot jets,
rocket-booster and all. The forest landscape came hurtling out of the
horizon toward them.
Qualpha's was where the trouble had first broken out, after the bug-out
from Sanders; the troops hadn't been able to get there in time, and it
had been burned. Another village, about the same distance south of the
plantation, had also gone up in flames, and at a dozen more they had
found the natives working themselves into frenzies and had had to
sleep-gas them or stun them with concussion-bombs. Those had been the
villages to which the deserters from Sanders' had themselves gone; from
every one, runners had gone out to neighboring villages--"The Gone Ones
are returning; all the People go to greet them at the Deesha-Phoo. Burn
your villages; send on the word. Hasten; the Gone Ones return!"
Saving some of those villages had been touch-and-go, too; the runners,
with hours lead-time, had gotten there ahead of the troops, and there
had been shooting at a couple of them. Then the Army contragravity began
landing at villages that couldn't have been reached in hours by foot
messengers. It had been stopped--at least for the time, and in this
area. When and where another would break out was anybody's guess.
The car was slowing and losing altitude, and ahead he could see thin
smoke rising above the trees. He moved forward beside the pilot and
pulled down his glasses; with them he could distinguish the ruins of the
village. He called Bluelake, and then put his face to the view-finder
and began transmitting in the view.
It had been a village like the one he had just visited, mud-and-wattle
huts around an oval gathering-place, stockade, and fields beyond. Heshto
brought the car down to a few hundred feet and came coasting in on
momentum helped by an occasional spurt of the cold-jets. A few sections
of the stockade still stood, and one side of the khamdoo hadn't fallen,
but the rest of the structures were flat. There wasn't a soul, human or
parahuman, in sight; the only living thing was a small black-and-gray
quadruped investigating some bundles that had been dropped in the
fields, in hope of finding something tasty. He got a view of
that--everybody liked animal pictures on a newscast--and then he was
swinging the pickup over the still-burning ruins. In the ashes of every
hut he could see the remains of something like a viewscreen or a
nuclear-electric stove or a refrigerator or a sewing machine. He knew
how dearly the Kwanns cherished such possessions. That they had
destroyed them grieved him. But the Last Hot Time was at hand; the whole
world would be destroyed by fire, and then the Gone Ones would return.
So there were uprisings on the plantations. Paul Sanders had been
lucky; his Kwanns had just picked up and left. But he had always gotten
along well with the natives, and his plantation house was literally a
castle and he had plenty of armament. There had been other planters who
had made the double mistake of incurring the enmity of their native
labor and of living in unfortified houses. A lot of them weren't around,
any more, and their plantations were gutted ruins.
And there were plantations on which the natives had destroyed the klooba
plants and smashed the crystal which lived symbiotically upon them. They
thought the Terrans were using the living crystals to make magic. Not
too far off, at that; the properties of Kwannon biocrystals had opened a
major breakthrough in subnucleonic physics and initiated half a dozen
technologies. New kinds of oomphel. And down in the south, where the
spongy and resinous trees were drying in the heat, they were starting
forest fires and perishing in them in hecatombs. And to the north, they
were swarming into the mountains; building great fires there, too, and
attacking the Terran radar and radio beacons.
Fire was a factor common to all these frenzies. Nothing could happen
without magical assistance; the way to bring on the Last Hot Time was
People.
Maybe the ones who died in the frenzies and the swarmings were the lucky
ones at that. They wouldn't live to be crushed by disappointment when
the Sky Fire receded as Beta went into the long swing toward apastron.
The surviving shoonoon wouldn't be the lucky ones, that was for sure.
The magician-in-public-practice needs only to make one really bad
mistake before he is done to some unpleasantly ingenious death by his
clientry, and this was going to turn out to be the biggest
magico-prophetic blooper in all the long unrecorded history of Kwannon.
A few minutes after the car turned south from the ruined village, he
could see contragravity-vehicles in the air ahead, and then the fields
and buildings of the Sanders plantation. A lot more contragravity was
grounded in the fallow fields, and there were rows of pneumatic
balloon-tents, and field-kitchens, and a whole park of engineering
equipment. Work was going on in the klooba-fields, too; about three
hundred natives were cutting open the six-foot leafy balls and getting
out the biocrystals. Three of the plantation airjeeps, each with a pair
of machine guns, were guarding them, but they didn't seem to be having
any trouble. He saw Sanders in another jeep, and had Heshto put the car
alongside.
"How's it going, Paul?" he asked over his radio. "I see you have some
help, now."
"Everybody's from Qualpha's, and from Darshat's," Sanders replied. "The
Army had no place to put them, after they burned themselves out." He
laughed happily. "Miles, I'm going to save my whole crop! I thought I
was wiped out, this morning."
He would have been, if Gonzales hadn't brought those Kwanns in. The
klooba was beginning to wither; if left unharvested, the biocrystals
would die along with their hosts and crack into worthlessness. Like all
the other planters, Sanders had started no new crystals since the hot
weather, and would start none until the worst of the heat was over. He'd
need every crystal he could sell to tide him over.
[Illustration]
"The Welfarers'll make a big forced-labor scandal out of this," he
predicted.
"Why, such an idea." Sanders was scandalized. "I'm not forcing them to
eat."
"The Welfarers don't think anybody ought to have to work to eat. They
think everybody ought to be fed whether they do anything to earn it or
not, and if you try to make people earn their food, you're guilty of
economic coercion. And if you're in business for yourself and want them
to work for you, you're an exploiter and you ought to be eliminated as a
class. Haven't you been trying to run a plantation on this planet, under
this Colonial Government, long enough to have found that out, Paul?"
Brigadier General Ramon Gonzales had taken over the first--counting
down from the landing-stage--floor of the plantation house for his
headquarters. His headquarters company had pulled out removable
partitions and turned four rooms into one, and moved in enough screens
and teleprinters and photoprint machines and computers to have outfitted
the main newsroom of _Planetwide News_. The place had the feel of a
newsroom--a newsroom after a big story has broken and the 'cast has gone
on the air and everybody--in this case about twenty Terran officers and
non-coms, half women--standing about watching screens and smoking and
thinking about getting a follow-up ready.
Gonzales himself was relaxing in Sanders' business-room, with his belt
off and his tunic open. He had black eyes and black hair and mustache,
and a slightly equine face that went well with his Old Terran Spanish
name. There was another officer with him, considerably younger--Captain
Foxx Travis, Major General Maith's aide.
"Well, is there anything we can do for you, Miles?" Gonzales asked,
after they had exchanged greetings and sat down.
"Why, could I have your final situation-progress map? And would you be
willing to make a statement on audio-visual." He looked at his watch.
"We have about twenty minutes before the 'cast."
"You have a map," Gonzales said, as though he were walking tiptoe from
one word to another. "It accurately represents the situation as of the
moment, but I'm afraid some minor unavoidable inaccuracies may have
crept in while marking the positions and times for the earlier phases of
the operation. I teleprinted a copy to _Planetwide_ along with the one I
sent to Division Headquarters."
He understood about that and nodded. Gonzales was zipping up his tunic
and putting on his belt and sidearm. That told him, before the brigadier
general spoke again, that he was agreeable to the audio-visual
appearance and statement. He called the recording studio at _Planetwide_
while Gonzales was inspecting himself in the mirror and told them to get
set for a recording. It only ran a few minutes; Gonzales, speaking
without notes, gave a brief description of the operation.
"At present," he concluded, "we have every native village and every
plantation and trading-post within two hundred miles of the Sanders
plantation occupied. We feel that this swarming has been definitely
stopped, but we will continue the occupation for at least the next
hundred to two hundred hours. In the meantime, the natives in the
occupied villages are being put to work building shelters for themselves
against the anticipated storms."
"I hadn't heard about that," Miles said, as the general returned to his
chair and picked up his drink again.
"Yes. They'll need something better than these thatched huts when the
storms start, and working on them will keep them out of mischief.
Standard megaton-kilometer field shelters, earth and log construction. I
think they'll be adequate for anything that happens at periastron."
Anything designed to resist the heat, blast and radiation effects of a
megaton thermonuclear bomb at a kilometer ought to stand up under what
was coming. At least, the periastron effects; there was another angle to
it.
"The Native Welfare Commission isn't going to take kindly to that.
That's supposed to be their job."
"Then why the devil haven't they done it?" Gonzales demanded angrily.
"I've viewed every native village in this area by screen, and I haven't
seen one that's equipped with anything better than those log
storage-bins against the stockades."
"There was a project to provide shelters for the periastron storms set
up ten years ago. They spent one year arguing about how the natives
survived storms prior to the Terrans' arrival here. According to the
older natives, they got into those log storage-houses you were
mentioning; only about one out of three in any village survived. I could
have told them that. Did tell them, repeatedly, on the air. Then, after
they decided that shelters were needed, they spent another year hassling
over who would be responsible for designing them. Your predecessor here,
General Nokami, offered the services of his engineer officers. He was
frostily informed that this was a humanitarian and not a military
project."
Ramon Gonzales began swearing, then apologized for the interruption.
"Then what?" he asked.
"Apology unnecessary. Then they did get a shelter designed, and started
teaching some of the students at the native schools how to build them,
and then the meteorologists told them it was no good. It was a dugout
shelter; the weathermen said there'd be rainfall measured in meters
instead of inches and anybody who got caught in one of those dugouts
would be drowned like a rat."