Bedlam Planet by John Brunner Page B

foils holding it level four feet above the peaks of the gentle summer waves, he considered that paradox, and decided that it wasn’t a paradox at all. Asgard was a very beautiful world—more so than Earth, indeed, for man’s callousness and stupidity had not raped its plains into deserts nor smeared its rich valleys with ugly, monotonous townscapes. He yearned symbolically for Earth simply because that was the place from which he had set out, the place where he had been given the chance to gratify his explorer’s urge. Exploration for its own sake was a luxury Asgard would not be able to afford for generations.
    And yet…
    He thought about the people among whom he was seemingly stranded for the rest of his life, when he had meant at most to spend a year with them and then return taking whichever of them had proved unable to endure the stress of the new world. Was he not fortunate to have escaped that duty? By the time they caved in and abandoned their self-respect to the point of creeping home, whipped-dog-fashion, the failed colonists would have been abominable travelling companions, most likely needing to be kept tranked to their eyeballs for the entire duration of the voyage.
    And were these people not as stimulating, as intelligent, as talented, as might have been found in any city on Earth to which he could have retired? Maybe more so, for in a city they would be diluted among a vast horde of nonentities, needing to be sought out and put in touch with one another, whereas here they were concentrated and united.
    Yes, all that is true. But somehow it doesn’t reach me where it counts.
    He felt he was groping towards the recognition of an important truth, which perhaps no one else among the colonists except Parvati would have reached. The day was bright and warm again, with a breeze just vigorous enough to cream the occasional wavetop into foam, so that the deep emerald sea was touched with a veining of white, as though it were all one flowing gemstone; the sun gleamed on the polished nodules of the wood-plants which decorated the crowns of the nearby islands, a warm red-brown between the colours of mahogany and sequoia-bark, and lay like warm syrup among the close-set shrubs and bushes which filled the intervening valleys. To many human beings, could they have been snatched forward from barbarous ages in the past, the mere sight would have suggested paradise.
    And still ought to. Only …
    The formulation of the concept he sensed, but could not pin down, was like trying to mould wisps of smokeinto a statue. Sighing, he made the usual automatic check of his instruments and found nothing was wrong—that also being usual—before starting a fresh attempt to sort out his ideas.
    He spread out one of his charts across his knees and studied it, because of a point which looking at the nearby islands had brought to mind.
    I wonder if our skills are too great? It took men a hundred thousand years to go from grunts and fire-hardened sticks to adequate maps of their home planet. This map took about a hundred hours: photographs from space, collated to eliminate the fuzziness which cloud-cover imposed on the image, converted automatically into contoured equivalents, and printed by the score.
    And yet that wasn’t what he was after, either. The skills of any given moment were the product of human thinking, whether they were on the Neolithic level or the Nuclear. His voyage in the
Argo
was about as remarkable, in perspective, as the travels of its legendary namesake, although, given modern longevity treatments, he had devoted less of his lifespan to his travels than those ancient Greeks.
    On the other hand, of course, one might argue that the scale of the challenges men faced had not kept pace with their ingenuity. He glanced up from the map to identify an island which, by his chart, should just be passing on his starboard side, and noticed how very closely it resembled the one where men had settled. This he had been struck by on