John Brunner by A Planet of Your Own Read Free Book Online Page A

with any of the automatic mechanisms
constitutes sabotage of the Zygra Company's
operations. Accordingly you are no longer a contracted employee of the Zygra Company."
    "No!" he screamed, wrenching
loose his shattered arm and cradling it in the other. He kicked the alarm unit
as if he could make it suffer as much as he did.
    "You
are no longer a contracted employee of the Zygra Company."
    He recovered a little of his self-control,
thought of having his arm mended, and went stumbling to the medicare unit, a coffin-sized block of automatics sited at the base of the observation
dome. He pushed its switches awkwardly with his good hand, trying to avoid
jarring the other arm.
    "You are no longer a contracted employee
of the Zygra Company," said the unit.
    " Wha -a-at?" The voice was shrill; Evan barely knew it
for his own rather than another recorded signal. "But you can't do this to
me! You can't—it's inhuman!"
    They could.
    Two
hours later, having set his arm crudely in a sort of splint without benefit of
anesthetic, he settled to his own satisfaction that there was no longer any
automatic device on the station prepared to serve him. Even the autochef was included in the ban; it spat stinking burned
fat at him. The shower, too—that delivered a stream of boiling water. In the
smoke and steam his ambitions evaporated: goodbye house, goodbye girls, goodbye
geriatric treatment, goodbye Dickery Evan. For
without the autochef he would starve before the
harvesting ship was due.
    "Then
we'll make sure those radiated swine don't enjoy what they've done to me,"
he promised between clenched teeth, and went to see what weapons he could find.
    But
he had only killed one pelt, chopping it to messy shreds in the water, before
the nearest monitor came chugging up and seized him in its powerful mechanical
arms, to carry him off across the lonely swamps and abandon him to his fate on
a drifting mat of weed. The force with which he was dumped made the bones of
his arm grind together again, and the dazzling-bright pain blotted out his
consciousness.
    Ignorant
even of identity, heedless of his fate, Dickery Evan
floated on the sluggish solar tides of Zygra .

VII
    A rms aching , hands sore from gripping the crude paddle,
Horst Lampeter kept thinking of Solomon and how real,
how physical, this work made his loss seem. Their boat was difficult enough to
drive along anyway, consisting as it did of only a rough frame supporting them
on half a hundred pieces of bladderwrack , the cysts
inflated by lungpower and resealed with a gummy exudation from the stems of dinglybells . Every other day it was necessary to check the
whole caboodle and replace a dozen or so of the cysts which were starting to
rot.
    But while Solomon had been with them paddling had been
disproportionately easier. He'd driven his blade harder than Horst and Coberley put together—Victor could be ignored, since he was the weakest of any of them
and often fainted after a couple of hours in full sun. Also, Solomon had been
able to crack an occasional joke, tell a story, true or invented, or sing bawdy
songs in his resonant bass voice.
    Now he rots among the roots .... He'd have made a joke of
that too—or a new verse for one of his songs.
    "Take the right-hand side of that weed
ahead!" Victor called in his thin, piping imitation of a shout.
    "Does
it matter?" Coberley snarled. "We don't even
know if we're on the same half of the damned planet as the main station!"
    "But
we are," Victor insisted, sounding close to tears. Horst suspected that
both he and Coberley had been equally affected by
the death of Solomon, though none of them—including himself—had said how much
he was missed. They gave their feelings away all the time, nonetheless: Coberley had been more than ever irascible since the
disaster, while Victor had taken to whimpering aloud.
    "Haven't we seen the monitors
nearby?" Victor went on.
    "Haven't
we seen that the pelts they were driving were ripe ones? Haven't I