STRANGERS ON PARADISE
Damon Knight
Paradise was the name of the planet. Once it had been called something else, but nobody knew what.
From this distance, it was a warm blue cloud-speckled globe turning in darkness. Selby viewed it in a holotube, not directly, because there was no porthole in the isolation room, but he thought he knew how the first settlers had felt ninety years ago, seeing it for the first time after their long voyage. He felt much the same way himself; he had been in medical isolation on the entryport satellite for three months, waiting to get to the place he had dreamed of with hopeless longing all his life: a place without disease, without violence, a world that had never known the sin of Cain.
Selby (Howard W., Ph.D.) was a slender, balding man in his forties, an Irishman, a reformed drunkard, an unsuccessful poet, a professor of English literature at the University of Toronto. One of his particular interests was the work of Eleanor Petryk, the expatriate lyric poet who had lived on Paradise for thirty years, the last ten of them silent. After Petryk’s death in 2106, he had applied for a grant from the International Endowment to write a definitive critical biography of Petryk, and in two years of negotiation he had succeeded in gaining entry to Paradise. It was, he knew, going to be the peak experience of his life.
The Paradisans had pumped out his blood and replaced it with something that, they assured him, was just as efficient at carrying oxygen but was not an appetizing medium for microbes. They had taken samples of his body fluids and snippets of his flesh from here and there. He had been scanned by a dozen machines, and they had given him injections for twenty diseases and parasites they said he was carrying. Their faces, in the holotubes, had smiled pityingly when he told them he had had a clean bill of health when he was checked out in Houston.
It was like being in a hospital, except that only machines touched him, and he saw human faces only in the holotube. He had spent the time reading and watching canned information films of happy, healthy people working and playing in the golden sunlight. Their faces were smooth, their eyes bright. The burden of the films was always the same: how happy the Paradisans were, how fulfilling their lives, how proud of the world they were building.
The books were a little more informative. The planet had two large continents, one inhabited, the other desert (although from space it looked much like the other), plus a few rocky, uninhabitable island chains. The axial tilt was seven degrees. The seasons were mild. The planet was geologically inactive; there were no volcanoes, and earthquakes were unknown. The low, rounded hills offered no impediment to the global circulation of air. The soil was rich. And there was no disease.
This morning, after his hospital breakfast of orange juice, oatmeal, and toast, they had told him he would be released at noon. And that was like a hospital, too; it was almost two o’clock now, and he was still here.
“Mr. Selby.”
He turned, saw the woman’s smiling face in the holotube. “Yes?”
“We are ready for you now. Will you walk into the anteroom?”
“With the greatest of pleasure.”
The door swung open. Selby entered; the door closed behind him. The clothes he had been wearing when he arrived were on a rack; they were newly cleaned and, doubtless, disinfected. Watched by an eye on the wall, he took off his pajamas and dressed. He felt like an invalid after a long illness; the shoes and belt were unfamiliar objects.
The outer door opened. Beyond stood the nurse in her green cap and bright smile; behind her was a man in a yellow jumpsuit.
“Mr. Selby, I’m John Ledbitter. I’ll be taking you groundside as soon as you’re thumbed out.”
There were three forms to thumbprint, with multiple copies. “Thank you, Mr. Selby,” said the nurse. “It’s been a pleasure to have you with us. We hope you will enjoy your stay on Paradise.”
“Thank you.”
“Please.” That was what they said instead of “You’re welcome”; it was short for “Please don’t mention it,” but it was hard to get used to.
“This way.” He followed Ledbitter down a long corridor in which they met no one. They got into an elevator. “Hang on, please.” Selby put his arms through the straps. The elevator fell away; when it stopped, they were floating, weightless.
Ledbitter took his arm to help him out of the elevator. Alarm bells were ringing somewhere. “This way.” They pulled themselves along a cord to the jump box, a cubicle as big as Selby’s hospital room. “Please lie down here.”
They lay side by side on narrow cots. Ledbitter put up the padded rails. “Legs and arms apart, please, head straight. Make sure you are comfortable. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
Ledbitter opened the control box by his side, watching the instruments in the ceiling. “On my three,” he said. “One … two…”
Selby felt a sudden increase in weight as the satellite accelerated to match the speed of the planetary surface. After a long time the control lights blinked; the cot sprang up against him. They were on Paradise.
The jump boxes, more properly Henderson-Rosenberg devices, had made interplanetary and interstellar travel amost instantaneous—not quite, because vectors at sending and receiving stations had to be matched, but near enough. The hitch was that you couldn’t get anywhere by jump box unless someone had been there before and brought a receiving station. That meant that interstellar exploration had to proceed by conventional means: the Taylor Drive at first, then impulse engines; round trips, even to nearby stars, took twenty years or more. Paradise, colonized ninety years ago by a Geneite sect from the United States, had been the first Earthlike planet to be discovered; it was still the only one, and it was off-limits to Earthlings except on special occasions. There was not much the governments of Earth could do about that.
A uniformed woman, who said she had been assigned as his guide, took him in tow. Her name was Helga Sonnstein. She was magnificently built, clear-skinned and rosy, like all the other Paradisans he had seen so far.
They walked to the hotel on clean streets, under monorails that swooped gracefully overhead. The passersby were beautifully dressed; some of them glanced curiously at Selby. The air was so pure and fresh that simply breathing was a pleasure. The sky over the white buildings was a robin’s-egg blue. The disorientation Selby felt was somehow less than he had expected.
In his room, he looked up Karen McMorrow’s code. Her face in the holotube was pleasant, but she did not smile. “Welcome to Paradise, Mr. Selby. Are you enjoying your visit?”
“Very much, so far.”
“Can you tell me when you would like to come to the Cottage?”
“Whenever it’s convenient for you, Miss McMorrow.”
“Unfortunately, there is some family business I must take care of. In two or three days?”
“That will be perfectly fine. I have some other people to interview, and I’d like to see something of the city while I’m here.”
“Until later, then. I’m sorry for this delay.”
“Please,” said Selby.
That afternoon Miss Sonnstein took him around the city. And it was all true. The Paradisans were happy, healthy, energetic, and cheerful. He had never seen so many unlined faces, so many clear eyes and bright smiles. Even the patients in the hospital looked healthy. They were accident victims for the most part—broken legs, cuts. He was just beginning to understand what it was like to live on a world where there was no infectious disease and never had been.
He liked the Paradisans—they were immensely friendly, warm, outgoing people. It was impossible not to like them. And at the same time he envied and resented them. He understood why, but he couldn’t stop.