Doctor Who: The Leisure Hive (2 page)
This was regarded as one of the most glorious moments of Argolin chivalry.
Just when it seemed possible that the Argolin might — unaided - wipe themselves off the face of the planet, someone (a non-Argolin) discovered the means of interplanetary flight. The surviving Argolin could breathe again. At last they could devote themselves to conquest. They stopped killing each other and occupied themselves with killing the inhabitants of other planets-according to the strictest rules of Argolin chivalry, of course.
Their conquests continued until they came across a race as warlike as their own.
The Foamasi were green and scaly, reptilian in appearance, vaguely resembling man-sized lizards. Like the Argolin, they too dominated their environment by sheer aggressiveness. Unlike the Argolin, however, they did not develop into a knightly, aristocratic society. Cold-blooded, more numerous than the humanoids, the individual in Foamasi society was less important than the clan, the extended family. It was the clan against the world. One family pitted its wits and its members against another, winner take all, no quarter given or asked.
The only rules were those of the jungle. Kill or be killed; eat or wind up as the shish kebab. Every Foamasi enjoyed complete existential freedom of action. Nothing was forbidden: no act of violence was too extreme. He could do anything he liked to anyone else, just as long as they were not members of his own extended family. The family was sacred. For good reason; they were often your only protection against other Foamasi.
The consequence of this was that no Foamasi ever dined with a non-member of his family unless he carried with him the full range of poison antidotes in Pharmocopoeia and wore a suit of titanium alloy chain mail, guaranteed proof against any weapon or projectile short of an artillery shell.
In place of the Argolin knight, that faintly ludicrous figure
sans peur sans reproche
, the Foamasi found their folk heroes amongst professional hit men: assassins. The poisoner, the strangler, the wielder of the fastest electric stiletto, were celebrated in song and story.
Since they were an intensely competitive race by nature, it is not perhaps surprising that the Foamasi formalized their natural predeliction for sudden death. Murder came to be regarded not only as one of the fine arts, along with water sculpture and aural architecture, but also the sport of kings and the entertainment of the crowd. Television helped. The big festivals were televised. Even minor inter-family competitions were followed with avid interest. Inevitably wagers were made on the result, and before long several Foamasi clans moved in and organized gambling on a planetary scale. Thus began a division of the race into two different branches, the punters and the bookies, those who bet and those who organized the betting: what came to be called the White and Black Foamasi - although this had nothing whatsoever to do with scale colour, since all Foamasi were uniformly green.
Sharing one galaxy, it was only a matter of time before the Argolin and the Foamasi met. And once that occurred it took them precisely six minutes to become locked in pointless, hopeless combat.
The excuse for the war - not that either side really needed one - was a minor asteroid which lay roughly halfway between Argolin and Foamasi territory. This chunk of space dirt held together by frozen methane was only thirty kilometres in diameter, and known to be useless as an outpost and valueless as a source of mineral wealth. Nonetheless both sides laid claim to it.
The Argolin sent a ship to establish a garrison on the place. So did the Foamasi. The two ships met on collision course in orbit around the asteroid. The Argolin commander demanded that the Foamasi vessel change course. The Foamasi captain insisted that if anyone was to change course it must be the Argolin. Before the question could be resolved one way or the other the two ships struck head on. The resulting fireball melted the frozen methane and vaporised several kilotons of space debris and destroyed the asteroid. It also caused a war.
It must be admitted that the war between Argolis and Foamas was not the most destructive on record. On a scale of I to 12 according to the Shebunken Formula, which was devised by Prof. Igor Shebunken of the University of New Caledonia to measure the destructiveness of international or interplanetary conflict, the Argolin-Foamasi War scored a mere 10.3, somewhere below total destruction and above the semi-genocidal level.
Seventeen hundred and sixty-two Argolin struck the planet of Foamas, reducing it to a burned crisp. A red-hot cinder incapable of supporting even calorific bacteria. The two thousand or so Foamasi missiles which struck Argolis didn't have quite the same effect. True, the missiles burned off the surface of the planet and hurled the debris into the stratosphere. There, owing to gravitational forces, the dust remained. Ultra-violet light from Argolis' four suns turned the dust into a veritable symphony of colour.
A million rainbows, perpetually shifting, forming a&nd re-forming, glowed with jewelled splendour over the desert that was now the planet Argolis.
The Argolin, those who survived, were not slow to take advantage of this. They turned Argolis into the first of the Leisure Planets.
The time was ripe for such developments.
Thanks to the technological revolution of seventy-five years before, which had freed the inhabitants of three-quarters of the galaxy from the necessity of work, time began to hang heavy on everyone's hands (or whatever limbs they were blessed with). War and crime seemed to provide the most popular alternative to the agony of boredom. Then, just when it seemed that the whole galaxy would descend into barbarism, Hyperion C. Blackadder, an Irish missile research engineer working on Tethys, stumbled across the principle of hyperspace drive. (Literally stumbled across it, in fact. He found himself on Io before he realized what had happened, and spent the next four) years trying to return to Tethys.) Blackadder's discovery revolutionized intergalactic travel. It brought the farthest reaches of the galaxy within only a few days travelling time. You could travel from Odin-3 to Xeros-9 in under a week.
Once it was discovered that there were few technical limits to the size of vessels that could operate in hyperspace, the entrepreneurs moved in. Intergalactic travel was soon open to every sensate being with enough interplanetary credits to purchase a ticket. And so creatures from over forty different star systems went traipsing around the galaxy in search of recreation, good weather, and a really cheap holiday.
Many of them went to Argolis.
Because Argolis was special.
From inside the safety of the great glass Leisure Hive the planet was a wonder to behold. Visitors never tired of sitting and watching the incredible ever changing colours. It was as if nature had become painter and Argolis her canvas.
But it was a deceptive beauty. A dangerous beauty. The picture had to be kept behind glass. Because the atmosphere of the planet was poisonous to most forms of life in the galaxy. Almost nothing could breathe the air of Argolis and survive. You could look; you could admire; but you couldn't walk the sands of Argolis and draw in deep lungfuls of Argolin air.
When the tourists grew bored with the ever-changing colours, there was always the Experiential Grid to entertain them-that masterpiece of Argolin technology, the climax of a century of study of a theoretical sub-atomic particle, the tachyon.
The irony of it was that in order to survive, the aristocratic knights of Argolis, once the scourge of the galaxy, were now reduced to becoming tourist guides to their own destroyed planeta job they performed with cheerless efficiency.
The figure in the holograph was soberly suited and wore an air of restrained gloom, like a high-class mortician. He was, in fact, the Terran business adviser to Argblin Leisure Enterprises Inc. which, like so many galactic commercial operations, was now registered for tax purposes on Terra.
Over the years Earth had transformed itself from a polluted, dying world into a tax haven. (The Cayman Islands of the Galaxy, as one wag put it.) Its population, reduced by a series of wars to under twenty million souls, had all become accountants or service engineers for the tea-dispensing machines which proliferated in Terran offices.
Augustus Brock spoke into the hyperspatial desk communicator in his office in New Delphi. His holographic image was projected into the Council Chamber of Argolis ninety-three light years away with only a slight time lag caused by the inevitable hyperspace distortion.
Brock was one of Terra's top accountants. As such he was used to rapt attention if not instant comprehension, as he picked over the entrails of some commercial enterprise. He was not encouraging about Argolis.
'I must tell you that all our predictions, even those based on optimum exploitation of existing facilities indicate a probable financial down-run.'
The four Argolin remained impassive. Not by the slightest change of expression, not by the flicker of an emotion, did they reveal that they hadn't the faintest idea what the accountant was talking about.
'And that,' went on the Terran, encouraged, 'Is the optimistic scenario.'
Pangol, the youngest member of the Argolin Council, glanced at his fellow members with some irritation. You could take Argolin impassivity too far, he thought. 'What's that mean in plain language?' he demanded.
'Bankruptcy.' The Terran turned away and played a brief arpeggio on the keyboard of his computer. He checked the computer display and shook his head sorrowfully. 'Indeed I will go further,' he said. 'Projection-wise, based on thirty different economic scenarios provided by our business augury department-total bankruptcy/
No one spoke.
Once again Brock looked round the Argolin Council, wondering if anyone had taken in what he had said. He decided to repeat his prophecy: 'Total bankruptcy.'
Morix, the senior member of the Council, spoke gently as if explaining simple facts to a child. 'We've always known the Leisure Hive was expensive to maintain,' he said. 'And it's true that last year's bookings were down—'
'They're even worse this year!'
' —but surely in the long run—'
'There won't be any long run,' said Brock. 'Don't you understand?' He took a deep breath and plunged on. 'Shielding the Hive from radiation alone eats up 61.5 per cent of your income, even when you're booked solid the whole year round. And for the past two years the Hive has been less than fully booked, even in the high season. How much longer do you think you will be able to preserve the integrity of the Hive? If the technical reports are to be believed, some of the shielding is already due for replacement.'
'What about next year's bookings?'
'They could be mildly described as disastrous. They will amount to thirty per cent or less of this year's bookings.'
Pangol stirred angrily in his chair. 'You are our booking agent as well as our accountant,' he snapped. 'Bookings are your responsibility. If you are not up to the task, we can always find ourselves another agent.'
Morix laid his hand on the young man's arm. 'Calmly,' he admonished. 'With dignity. Remember, we are Argolin.'
'Dignity!' cried Pangol. 'It is the Argolin disease. We need more than dignity in order to survive in the world.'
But Brock, who privately agreed with the young Argolin, refused to be deflected from his argument. 'The facts,' he said, making a steeple of his fingers, 'do not suggest that any change of booking agency, advertising policy, or even accountant will affect the trend.'
'I do not understand what has gone wrong,' complained Morix. 'After all we were the first in the field of Leisure Planets.'
'Precisely,' agreed Brock. 'The glorious past is, I regret to say, as is so often the case, past. Argolis is simply out of date. Other Leisure Planets have moved with the times. They are constantly looking for new pleasures and delights for their visitors.'
One by one he ticked them off on his fingers. 'Non-gravity swimming pools. You can dive upwards or downwards into or out of the pool. Then there are robotic gladiatorial games. Psychic gymnasia.
'Look,' he went on it's your planet. Make it more attractive to visitors and they will flock here in their thousands-and keep coming back.'
'Easier said than done,' observed Morix.
'What other Leisure Planet has pioneered a whole new science?' demanded Pangol.
'I suppose you're referring to tachyonics,' replied Brock. 'If you will remember, each year I have pointed out to the Board that you simply cannot continue to invest vast sums in research. The tachyon is a scientific curiosity, nothing more.'
Pangol clenched his fists. The tachyon represented the Argolin holy of holies, the one intellectual frontier they had made their own.
It was of course typical of the Argolin that they should have embraced something as abstruse as the tachyon-which is a hypothetical particle first propounded by Terran physicists in the twentieth century. Einstein's special theory of relativity led many of them to the view that there was a yet undiscovered particle possessed of the most extraordinary properties. This particle, they theorised, only came into existence when it was already travelling faster than the speed of light. On the face of it, this seemed to make nonsense of Einstein's own theory, which proposed the velocity of light as a constant. But the physicists suggested an ingenious solution to the problem.
One of the curious properties of this particle, they claimed, was that two tachyons would be able to occupy the same space at the same moment in time-with only the minimum of elbow-rubbing and general bad temper. Normally in the world of physics such behaviour would result in a massive explosion. It didn't in the case of the tachyon because the particle possessed either imaginary momentum and energy or else imaginary mass. No one was quite sure which, because no one had ever succeeded in isolating a tachyon and subjecting it to any tests.