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Title: The Good Seed
Author: Mark Mallory
Release Date: November 22, 2019 [EBook #60761]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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the good seed
By MARK MALLORY
_The island was drowning--if they
failed to find some common ground,
both of them were doomed._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They said--as they have said of so many frontiersmen just like
him--that there must have been a woman in his past, to make him what he
was. And indeed there had, but she was no flesh-and-blood female. The
name of his lady was Victoria, whom the Greeks called Nike and early
confounded with the Pallas Athena, that sterile maiden. And at the age
of thirty-four she had Calvin Mulloy most firmly in her grasp, for he
had neither wife nor child, nor any close friend worth mentioning--only
his hungry dream for some great accomplishment.
It had harried him to the stars, that dream of his. It had driven
him to the position of top survey engineer on the new, raw planet of
Mersey, still largely unexplored and unmapped. And it had pushed him,
too, into foolishnesses like this latest one, building a sailplane out
of scrap odds and ends around the Mersey Advance Base--a sailplane
which had just this moment been caught in a storm and cracked up on an
island the size of a city backyard, between the banks of one of the
mouths of the Adze River.
The sailplane was gone the moment it hit. Actually it had come down
just short of the island and floated quickly off, what was left of
it, while Calvin was thrashing for the island with that inept stroke
of his. He pulled himself up, gasping, onto the rocks, and, with the
coolness of a logical man who has faced crises before, set himself
immediately to taking stock of his situation.
He was wet and winded, but since he was undrowned and on solid land in
the semitropics, he dismissed that part of it from his mind. It had
been full noon when he had been caught in the storm, and it could not
be much more than minutes past that now, so swiftly had everything
happened; but the black, low clouds, racing across the sky, and the
gusts of intermittent rain, cut visibility down around him.
He stood up on his small island and leaned against the wind that blew
in and up the river from the open gulf. On three sides he saw nothing
but the fast-riding waves. On the fourth, though, shading his eyes
against the occasional bursts of rain, he discerned a long, low,
curving blackness that would be one of the river shores.
There lay safety. He estimated its distance from him at less than a
hundred and fifty yards. It was merely, he told himself, a matter of
reaching it.
* * * * *
Under ordinary conditions, he would have settled down where he was and
waited for rescue. He was not more than fifteen or twenty miles from
the Advance Base, and in this storm they would waste no time waiting
for him to come in, before starting out to search for him. No sailplane
could survive in such a blow. Standing now, with the wind pushing at
him and the rain stinging against his face and hands, he found time
for a moment's wry humor at his own bad luck. On any civilized world,
such a storm would have been charted and predicted, if not controlled
entirely. Well, the more fool he, for venturing this far from Base.
It was in his favor that this world of Mersey happened to be so
Earthlike that the differences between the two planets were mostly
unimportant. Unfortunately, it was the one unimportant difference that
made his present position on the island a death trap. The gulf into
which his river emptied was merely a twentieth the area of the Gulf of
Mexico--but in this section it was extremely shallow, having an overall
average depth of around seventy-five feet. When one of these flash
storms formed suddenly out over its waters, the wind could either drain
huge tidal areas around the mouths of the Adze, or else raise the river
level within hours a matter of thirty feet.
With the onshore wind whistling about his ears right now, it was only
too obvious to Calvin that the river was rising. This rocky little bit
sticking some twelve or fifteen feet above the waves could expect to be
overwhelmed in the next few hours.
He looked about him. The island was bare except for a few straggly
bushes. He reached out for a shoot from a bush beside him. It came up
easily from the thin layer of soil that overlaid the rocks, and the
wind snatched it out of his hand. He saw it go skipping over the tops
of the waves in the direction of the shore, until a wave-slope caught
it and carried it into the next trough and out of sight. It at least,
he thought, would reach the safety of the river bank. But it would take
a thousand such slender stems, plaited into a raft, to do him any good;
and there were not that many stems, and not that much time.
Calvin turned and climbed in toward the center high point of the
island. It was only a few steps over the damp soil and rocks, but when
he stood upright on a little crown of rock and looked about him, it
seemed that the island was smaller than ever, and might be drowned at
any second by the wind-lashed waves. Moreover, there was nothing to be
seen which offered him any more help or hope of escape.
Even then, he was not moved to despair. He saw no way out, but this
simply reinforced his conviction that the way out was hiding about him
somewhere, and he must look that much harder for it.
He was going to step down out of the full force of the wind, when he
happened to notice a rounded object nestling in a little hollow of the
rock below him, about a dozen or so feet away.
* * * * *
He went and stood over it, seeing that his first guess as to its nature
had been correct. It was one of the intelligent traveling plants
that wandered around the oceans of this world. It should have been at
home in this situation. Evidently, however, it had made the mistake
of coming ashore here to seed. It was now rooted in the soil of the
island, facing death as surely as he; if the wind or the waves tore it
from its own helplessly anchored roots.
"Can you understand me?" he asked it.
There was an odd sort of croaking from it, which seemed to shape itself
into words, though the how of it remained baffling to the ear. It was
a sort of supplemental telepathy at work, over and above the rough
attempts to imitate human speech. Some of these intelligent plants
they had got to know in this area could communicate with them in this
fashion, though most could not.
"I know you, man," said the plant. "I have seen your gathering." It was
referring to the Advance Base, which had attracted a steady stream of
the plant visitors at first.
"Know any way to get ashore?" Calvin asked.
"There is none," said the plant.
"I can't see any, either."
"There is none," repeated the plant.
"Everyone to his own opinion," said Calvin. Almost he sneered a little.
He turned his gaze once more about the island. "In my book, them that
_won't_ be beat _can't_ be beat. That's maybe where we're different,
plant."
He left the plant and went for a walk about the island. It had been
in his mind that possibly a drifting log or some such could have
been caught by the island and he could use this to get ashore. He
found nothing. For a few minutes, at one end of the island, he stood
fascinated, watching a long sloping black rock with a crack in it,
reaching down into the water. There was a small tuft of moss growing
in the crack about five inches above where the waves were slapping. As
he watched, the waves slapped higher and higher, until he turned away
abruptly, shivering, before he could see the water actually reach and
cover the little clump of green.
For the first time a realization that he might not get off the island
touched him. It was not yet fear, this realization, but it reached
deep into him and he felt it, suddenly, like a pressure against his
heart. As the moss was being covered, so could he be covered, by the
far-reaching inexorable advance of the water.
And then this was wiped away by an abrupt outburst of anger and
self-ridicule that he--who had been through so many dangers--should
find himself pinned by so commonplace a threat. A man, he told
himself, could die of drowning anywhere. There was no need to go
light-years from his place of birth to find such a death. It made all
dying--and all living--seem small and futile and insignificant, and he
did not like that feeling.
* * * * *
Calvin went back to the plant in its little hollow, tight-hugging to
the ground and half-sheltered from the wind, and looked down on its
dusky basketball-sized shape, the tough hide swollen and ready to burst
with seeds.
"So you think there's no way out," he said roughly.
"There is none," said the plant.
"Why don't you just let yourself go if you think like that?" Calvin
said. "Why try to keep down out of the wind, if the waves'll get you
anyway, later?"
The plant did not answer for a while.
"I do not want to die," it said then. "As long as I am alive, there is
the possibility of some great improbable chance saving me."
"Oh," said Calvin, and he himself was silent in turn. "I thought you'd
given up."
"I cannot give up," said the plant. "I am still alive. But I know there
is no way to safety."
"You make a lot of sense." Calvin straightened up to squint through the
rain at the dark and distant line of the shore. "How much more time
would you say we had before the water covers this rock?"
"The eighth part of a daylight period, perhaps more, perhaps less. The
water can rise either faster or more slowly."
"Any chance of it cresting and going down?"
"That would be a great improbable chance such as that of which I
spoke," said the plant.
Calvin rotated slowly, surveying the water around them. Bits and pieces
of flotsam were streaming by them on their way before the wind, now
angling toward the near bank. But none were close enough or large
enough to do Calvin any good.
"Look," said Calvin abruptly, "there's a fisheries survey station
upriver here, not too far. Now, I could dig up the soil holding your
roots. If I did that, would you get to the survey station as fast as
you could and tell them I'm stranded here?"
"I would be glad to," said the plant. "But you cannot dig me up. My
roots have penetrated into the rock. If you tried to dig me up, they
would break off--and I would die that much sooner."
"You would, would you?" grunted Calvin. But the question was
rhetorical. Already his mind was busy searching for some other way out.
For the first time in his life, he felt the touch of cold about his
heart. Could this be fear, he wondered. But he had never been afraid of
death.
Crouching down again to be out of the wind and rain, he told himself
that knowledge still remained a tool he could use. The plant must know
something that was, perhaps, useless to it, but that could be twisted
to a human's advantage.
"What made you come to a place like this to seed?" he asked.
"Twenty nights and days ago, when I first took root here," said the
plant, "this land was safe. The signs were good for fair weather. And
this place was easy of access from the water. I am not built to travel
far on land."
"How would you manage in a storm like this, if you were not rooted
down?"
"I would go with the wind until I found shelter," said the plant. "The
wind and waves would not harm me then. They hurt only whatever stands
firm and opposes them."
"You can't communicate with others of your people from here, can you?"
asked Calvin.
"There are none close," said the plant. "Anyway, what could they do?"
"They could get a message to the fisheries station, to get help out
here for us."
"What help could help me?" said the plant. "And in any case they could
not go against the wind. They would have to be upwind of the station,
even to help you."
"We could try it."
"We could try it," agreed the plant. "But first one of my kind must
come into speaking range. We still hunt our great improbable chance."
* * * * *
There was a moment's silence between them in the wind and rain. The
river was noisy, working against the rock of the island.
"There must be something that would give us a better chance than just
sitting here," said Calvin.
The plant did not answer.
"What are you thinking about?" demanded Calvin.
"I am thinking of the irony of our situation," said the plant. "You are
free to wander the water, but cannot. I can wander the water, but I am
not free to do so. This is death, and it is a strange thing."
"I don't get you."
"I only mean that it makes no difference--that I am what I am, or that
you are what you are. We could be any things that would die when the
waves finally cover the island."
"Right enough," said Calvin impatiently. "What about it?"
"Nothing about it, man," said the plant. "I was only thinking."
"Don't waste your time on philosophy," said Calvin harshly. "Use some
of that brain power on a way to get loose and get off."
"Perhaps that and philosophy are one and the same."
"You're not going to convince me of that," said Calvin, getting up.
"I'm going to take another look around the island."
* * * * *
The island, as he walked around its short margin, showed itself to be
definitely smaller. He paused again by the black rock. The moss was
lost now, under the water, and the crack was all but under as well. He
stood shielding his eyes against the wind-driven rain, peering across
at the still visible shore. The waves, he noted, were not extreme--some
four or five feet in height--which meant that the storm proper was
probably paralleling the land some distance out in the gulf.
He clenched his fists in sudden frustration. If only he had hung on to
the sailplane--or any decent-sized chunk of it! At least going into the
water then would have been a gamble with some faint chance of success.
He had nowhere else to go, after rounding the island. He went back to
the plant.
"Man," said the plant, "one of my people has been blown to shelter a
little downstream."
Calvin straightened up eagerly, turning to stare into the wind.
"You cannot see him," said the plant. "He is caught below the river
bend and cannot break loose against the force of the wind. But he is
close enough to talk. And he sends you good news."
"Me?" Calvin hunkered down beside the plant. "Good news?"
"There is a large tree torn loose from the bank and floating this way.
It should strike the little bit of land where we are here."
"Strike it? Are you positive?"
"There are the wind and the water and the tree. They can move only to
one destination--this island. Go quickly to the windward point of the
island. The tree will be coming shortly."
Calvin jerked erect and turned, wild triumph bursting in him.
"Good-by, man," said the plant.
But he was already plunging toward the downstream end of the island. He
reached it and, shielding his eyes with a hand, peered desperately out
over the water. The waves hammered upon his boots as he stood there,
and then he saw it, a mass of branches upon which the wind was blowing
as on a sail, green against black, coming toward him.
* * * * *
He crouched, wrung with impatience, as the tree drifted swiftly through
the water toward him, too ponderous to rise and fall more than a little
with the waves and presenting a galleonlike appearance of mass and
invincibility. As it came closer, a fear that it would, in spite of the
plant's assurances, miss the island, crept into his heart and chilled
it.
It seemed to Calvin that it was veering--that it would pass to windward
of the island, between him and the dimly seen shore. The thought of
losing it was more than he could bear to consider; and with a sudden
burst of panic, he threw himself into the waves, beating clumsily and
frantically for it.
The river took him into its massive fury. He had forgotten the strength
of it. His first dive took him under an incoming wave, and he emerged,
gasping, into the trough behind, with water exploding in his face.
He kicked and threw his arms about, but the slow and futile-seeming
beatings of his limbs appeared helpless as the fluttering of a
butterfly in a collector's net. He choked for air, and, rising on the
crest of one wave, found himself turned backward to face the island,
and being swept past it.
Fear came home to him then. He lashed out, fighting only for the
solid ground of the island and his life. His world became a place of
foam and fury. He strained for air. He dug for the island. And then,
suddenly, he felt himself flung upon hard rock and gasping, crawling,
he emerged onto safety.
He hung there on hands and knees, battered and panting. Then the
remembrance of the tree cut like a knife to the core of his fear-soaked
being. He staggered up, and, looking about, saw that he was almost to
the far end of the island. He turned. Above him, at the windward point,
the tree itself was just now grounding, branches first, and swinging
about as the long trunk, caught by the waves, pulled it around and
onward.
With an inarticulate cry, he ran toward it. But the mass of water
against the heavy tree trunk was already pulling the branches from
their tanglings with the rock. It floated free. Taking the wind once
more in its sail of leaves, it moved slowly--and then more swiftly on
past the far side of the island.
He scrambled up his side of the island's crest. But when he reached its
top and could see the tree again, it was already moving past and out
from the island, too swiftly for him to catch it, even if he had been
the swimmer he had just proved himself not to be.
He dropped on his knees, there on the island's rocky spine, and
watched it fade in the grayness of the rain, until the green of its
branches was lost in a grayish blob, and this in the general welter of
storm and waves. And suddenly a dark horror of death closed over him,
blotting out all the scene.
* * * * *
A voice roused him. "That is too bad," said the plant.
He turned his head numbly. He was kneeling less than half a dozen feet
from the little hollow where the plant still sheltered. He looked at it
now, dazed, as if he could not remember what it was, nor how it came to
talk to him. Then his eyes cleared a little of their shock and he crept
over to it on hands and knees and crouched in the shelter of the hollow.
"The water is rising more swiftly," said the plant. "It will be not
long now."
"No!" said Calvin. The word was lost in the sound of the waves and
wind, as though it had never been. Nor, the minute it was spoken,
could he remember what he had meant to deny by it. It had been only a
response without thought, an instinctive negation.
"You make me wonder," said the plant, after a little, "why it hurts you
so--this thought of dying. Since you first became alive, you have faced
ultimate death. And you have not faced it alone. All things die. This
storm must die. This rock on which we lie will not exist forever. Even
worlds and suns come at last to their ends, and galaxies, perhaps even
the Universe."
Calvin shook his head. He did not answer.
"You are a fighting people," said the plant, almost as if to itself.
"Well and good. Perhaps a life like mine, yielding, giving to the
forces of nature, traveling before the wind, sees less than you see, of
a reason for clawing hold on existence. But still it seems to me that
even a fighter would be glad at last to quit the struggle, when there
is no other choice."
"Not here," said Calvin thickly. "Not now."
"Why not here, why not now," said the plant, "when it has to be
somewhere and sometime?"
Calvin did not answer.
"I feel sorry for you," said the plant. "I do not like to see things
suffer."
Raising his head a little and looking around him, Calvin could see the
water, risen high around them, so that waves were splashing on all
sides, less than the length of his own body away.
"It wouldn't make sense to you," said Calvin then, raising his rain-wet
face toward the plant. "You're old by your standards. I'm young. I've
got things to do. You don't understand."
"No," the plant agreed. "I do not understand."
* * * * *
Calvin crawled a little closer to the plant, into the hollow, until
he could see the vibrating air-sac that produced the voice of the
plant. "Don't you see? I've got to do something--I've got to feel I've
accomplished something--before I quit."
"What something?" asked the plant.
"I don't _know_!" cried Calvin. "I just know I haven't! I feel thrown
away!"
"What is living? It is feeling and thinking. It is seeding and trying
to understand. It is companionship of your own people. What more is
there?"
"You have to do something."
"Do what?"
"Something important. Something to feel satisfied about." A wave,
higher than the rest, slapped the rock a bare couple of feet below them
and sent spray stinging in against them. "You have to say, 'Look, maybe
it wasn't much, but I did this.'"
"What kind of this?"
"How do I know?" shouted Calvin. "Something--maybe something nobody
else did--maybe something that hasn't been done before!"
"For yourself?" said the plant. A higher wave slapped at the very rim
of their hollow, and a little water ran over and down to pool around
them. Calvin felt it cold around his knees and wrists. "Or for the
doing?"
"For the doing! For the doing!"
"If it is for the doing, can you take no comfort from the fact there
are others of your own kind to do it?"
Another wave came in on them. Calvin moved spasmodically right up
against the plant and put his arms around it, holding on.
"I have seeded ten times and done much thinking," said the
plant--rather muffledly, for Calvin's body was pressing against its
air-sac. "I have not thought of anything really new, or startling, or
great, but I am satisfied." It paused a moment as a new wave drenched
them and receded. They were half awash in the hollow now, and the
waves came regularly. "I do not see how this is so different from what
you have done. But I am content." Another and stronger wave rocked
them. The plant made a sound that might have been of pain at its roots
tearing. "Have you seeded?"
"No," said Calvin, and all at once, like light breaking at last into
the dark cave of his being, in this twelfth hour, it came to him--all
of what he had robbed himself in his search for a victory. Choking on a
wave, he clung to the plant with frenzied strength. "Nothing!" The word
came torn from him as if by some ruthless hand. "I've got nothing!"
"Then I understand at last," said the plant. "For of all things, the
most terrible is to die unfruitful. It is no good to say we _will_
not be beaten, because there is always waiting, somewhere, that which
can beat us. And then a life that is seedless goes down to defeat
finally and forever. But when one has seeded, there is no ending of the
battle, and life mounts on life until the light is reached by those far
generations in which we have had our own small but necessary part. Then
our personal defeat has been nothing, for though we died, we are still
living, and though we fell, we conquered."
But Calvin, clinging to the plant with both arms, saw only the water
closing over him.
"Too late--" he choked. "Too late--too late--"
"No," bubbled the plant. "Not too late yet. This changes things. For
I have seeded ten times and passed on my life. But you--I did not
understand. I did not realize your need."
* * * * *
The flood, cresting, ran clear and strong, the waves breaking heavily
on the drowned shore by the river mouth. The rescue spinner, two hours
out of Base and descending once again through the fleeting murk,
checked at the sight of a begrimed human figure, staggering along the
slick margin of the shore, carrying something large and limp under one
arm, and with the other arm poking at the ground with a stick.
The spinner came down almost on top of him, and the two men in it
reached to catch Calvin. He could hardly stand, let alone stumble
forward, but stumble he did.
"Cal!" said the pilot. "Hold up! It's us."
"Let go," said Calvin thickly. He pulled loose, dug with his stick,
dropped something from the limp thing into the hole he had made, and
moved on.
"You out of your head, Cal?" cried the co-pilot. "Come on, we've got to
get you back to the hospital."
"No," said Calvin, pulling away again.
"What're you doing?" demanded the pilot. "What've you got there?"
"Think-plant. Dead," said Calvin, continuing his work. "_Let go!_" He
fought weakly, but so fiercely that they did turn him loose again. "You
don't understand. Saved my life."
"Saved your life?" The pilot followed him. "How?"
"I was on an island. In the river. Flood coming up." Calvin dug a fresh
hole in the ground. "It could have lived a little longer. It let me
pull it ahead of time--so I'd have something to float to shore on." He
turned exhaustion-bleared eyes on them. "Saved my life."
The pilot and the co-pilot looked at each other as two men look at each
other over the head of a child, or a madman.
"All right, Cal," said the pilot. "So it saved your life. But how come
you've got to do this? And what _are_ you doing, anyhow?"
"What am I doing?" Calvin paused entirely and turned to face them.
"What am I doing?" he repeated on a rising note of wonder. "Why, you
damn fools, I'm doing the first real thing I ever did in my life! I'm
saving the lives of these seeds!"
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