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Title: The grandfathers' war
Author: Murray Leinster
Release Date: April 21, 2023 [eBook #70610]
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GRANDFATHERS' WAR ***
THE GRANDFATHERS' WAR
BY MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrated by van Dongen
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction October 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I.
"... No man can be fully efficient if he expects praise or
appreciation for what he does. The uncertainty of this reward, as
experienced, leads to modification of one's actions to increase its
probability.... If a man permits himself the purpose of securing
admiration, he tends to make that purpose primary and the doing of
his proper work secondary. This costs human lives...."
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ Pp. 17-18.
The little Med ship seemed absolutely motionless when the hour-off
warning whirred. Then it continued to seem motionless. The
background-noise tapes went on, making the small, unrelated sounds that
exist unnoticed in all the places where human beings dwell, but which
have to be provided in a ship in overdrive so a man don't go ship-happy
from the dead stillness. The hour-off warning was notice of a change in
the shape of things.
Calhoun put aside his book--the manual of the Med Service--and yawned.
He got up from his bunk to tidy ship. Murgatroyd, the _tormal_, opened
his eyes and regarded him drowsily, without uncoiling his furry tail
from about his nose.
"I wish," said Calhoun critically, "that I could act with your
realistic appraisal of facts, Murgatroyd! This is a case of no
importance whatever, and you treat it as such, while I fume whenever
I think of its futility. We are a token mission, Murgatroyd,--a
politeness of the Med Service, which has to respond to hysterical
summonses as well as sensible ones. Our time is thrown away!"
Murgatroyd blinked somnolently. Calhoun grinned wryly at him. The
Med ship was a fifty-ton space-vessel--very small indeed, in these
days--with a crew consisting exclusively of Calhoun and Murgatroyd
the _tormal_. It was one of those little ships the Med Service tries
to have call at every colonized planet at least once in four or five
years. The idea is to make sure that all new developments in public
health and individual medicine will spread as widely and as fast as can
be managed. There were larger Med craft to handle dangerous situations
and emergencies of novel form. But all Med ships were expected to
handle everything possible, if only because space travel consumed such
quantities of time.
This particular journey, for example: An emergency message had come
to Sector Headquarters from the planetary government of Phaedra II.
Carried on a commercial vessel in overdrive at many times the speed
of light, it had taken three months to reach Headquarters. And the
emergency in which it asked aid was absurd. There was, said the
message, a state of war between Phaedra II and Canis III. Military
action against Canis III would begin very shortly. Med Service aid for
injured and ill would be needed. It was therefore requested at once.
The bare idea of war, naturally, was ridiculous. There could not be war
between planets. Worlds communicated with each other by spaceships, to
be sure, but the Lawlor interplanetary drive would not work save in
unstressed space, and of course overdrive was equally inoperable in a
planet's gravitational field. So a ship setting out for the stars had
to be lifted not less than five planetary diameters from the ground
before it could turn on any drive of its own. Similarly, it had to be
lowered an equal distance to a landing after its drive became unusable.
Space travel was practical only because there were landing-grids--those
huge structures of steel which used the power of a planet's ionosphere
to generate the force-fields for the docking and launching of ships of
space. Hence landing-grids were necessary for landings. And no world
would land a hostile ship upon its surface. But a landing-grid could
launch bombs or missiles as well as ships, and hence could defend its
planet, absolutely. So there could be no attacks and there could be
defense, so wars could not be fought.
"The whole thing's nonsense," said Calhoun. "We'll get there, and we've
been three months on the way and the situation is six months old and
either it's all been compromised or it's long forgotten and nobody will
like being reminded of it. And we've wasted our time and talents on a
thankless job that doesn't exist, and couldn't! The universe has fallen
on evil days, Murgatroyd! And we are the victims!"
Murgatroyd leisurely uncurled his tail from about his nose. When
Calhoun talked at such length, it meant sociability. Murgatroyd got
up, and stretched, and said, "_Chee!_" He waited. If Calhoun really
meant to go in for conversation, Murgatroyd would join in. He adored
pretending that he was a human. He and his kind imitated human actions
as parrots imitated human speech. Murgatroyd frisked a little, to show
his readiness for talk.
"_Chee-chee-chee!_" he said conversationally.
"I notice that we agree," said Calhoun. "Let's clean up."
He began those small items of housekeeping which one neglects when
nothing can happen for a long time ahead. Books back in place. Files
restored to order. The special-data reels Calhoun had been required to
study. Calhoun made all neat and orderly against landing and possible
visitors.
* * * * *
Presently the breakout clock indicated twenty-five minutes more
in overdrive. Calhoun yawned again. As an interstellar service
organization, the Med Service sometimes had to do rather foolish
things. Governments run by politicians required them. Yet Med Service
representatives always had to be well-informed on problems which
appeared. During this journey Calhoun had been ordered to read up on
the ancient insanity once called the art of war. He didn't like what
he'd learned about the doings of his ancestors. He reflected that it
was lucky that such things couldn't happen anymore. He yawned again.
He was strapped in the control-chair a good ten minutes before the ship
was due to return to a normal state of things. He allowed himself the
luxury of still another yawn. He waited.
The warning tape whirred a second time. A voice said, "_When the
gong sounds, breakout will be five seconds off._" There was a heavy,
rhythmic tick-tocking. It went on and on. Then the gong and a voice
said: "_Five--four--three--t--_"
It did not complete the count. There was a tearing, rending noise and
the spitting of an arc. There was the smell of ozone. The Med ship
bucked like a plunging horse. It came out of overdrive two seconds
ahead of time. The automatic, emergency-rockets roared and it plunged
this way and changed course violently and plunged that, and seemed to
fight desperately against something that frustrated every maneuver
it tried. Calhoun's hair stood on end until he realized that the
external-field indicator showed a terrific artificial force-field
gripping the ship. He cut off the rockets as their jerkings tried to
tear him out of his chair.
There was stillness. Calhoun rasped into the spacephone:
"What's going on? This is Med Ship _Esclipus Twenty_! This is a neutral
vessel!" The term "neutral vessel" was new in Calhoun's vocabulary.
He'd learned it while studying the manners and customs of war in
overdrive. "Cut off those force-fields!"
Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly. Some erratic movement of the ship had
flung him into Calhoun's bunk, where he'd held fast to a blanket with
all four paws. Then another wild jerking threw him and the blanket
together into a corner, where he fought to get clear, chattering
bitterly the while.
"We're noncombatants!" snapped Calhoun--another new term.
A voice growled out of the spacephone speaker.
"_Set up for light-beam communication_," it said heavily. "_In the
meantime keep silence._"
Calhoun snorted. But a Med ship was not an armed vessel. There were no
armed vessels nowadays. Not in the normal course of events. But vessels
of some sort had been on the watch for a ship coming to this particular
place.
He thought of the word "blockade"--another part of his education in the
outmoded art of war. Canis III was blockaded.
He searched for the ship that had him fast. Nothing. He stepped up the
magnification of his vision-screens. Again nothing. The sun Canis
flamed ahead and below, and there were suspiciously bright stars which
by their coloring were probably planets. But the Med ship was still
well beyond the habitable part of a sol-class sun's solar system.
Calhoun pulled a photocell out of its socket and waited. A new and very
bright light winked into being. It wavered. He stuck the photocell to
the screen, covering the brightness. He plugged in its cord to an audio
amplifier. A dull humming sounded. Not quite as clearly as a spacephone
voice, but clear enough, a voice said:
"_If you are Med Ship_ Esclipus Twenty, _answer by light-beam, quoting
your orders_."
Calhoun was already stabbing another button, and somewhere a
signal-lamp was extruding itself from its recess in the hull. He said
irritably:
"I'll show my orders, but I do not put on performances of dramatic
readings! This is the devil of a business! I came here on request, to
be a ministering angel or a lady with a lamp, or something equally
improbable. I did not come to be snatched out of overdrive, even if you
have a war on. This is a Med ship!"
The slightly blurred voice said as heavily as before:
"_This is a war, yes. We expected you. We wish you to take our final
warning to Canis III. Follow us to our base and you will be briefed._"
Calhoun said tartly:
"Suppose you tow me! When you dragged me out of overdrive you played
the devil with my power!"
Murgatroyd said, "_Chee?_" and tried to stand on his hind legs to look
at the screen. Calhoun brushed him away. When acknowledgment came from
the unseen other ship, and the curious cushiony drag of the towing
began to be felt, he cut off the microphone to the light-beam. Then he
said severely to Murgatroyd:
"What I said was not quite true, Murgatroyd. But there is a war on.
To be a neutral I have to appear impressively helpless. That is what
neutrality means."
But he was far from easy in his mind. Wars between worlds were flatly
impossible. The facts of space travel made them unthinkable.
Yet there seemed to be a war. Something was happening, anyhow, which
was contrary to all the facts of life in modern times. And Calhoun was
involved in it. It demanded that he immediately change all his opinions
and all his ideas of what he might have to do. The Med Service could
not take sides in a war, of course. It had no right to help one side or
the other. Its unalterable function was to prevent the needless death
of human beings. So it could not help one combatant to victory. On the
other hand it could not merely stand by, tending the wounded, and by
alleviating individual catastrophes allow their number to mount.
"This," said Calhoun, "is the devil!"
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd.
The Med ship was being towed. Calhoun had asked for it and it was being
done. There should have been no way to tow him short of a physical
linkage between ships. There were force-fields which could perform that
function--landing-grids used them constantly--but ships did not mount
them--not ordinary ships, anyhow. That fact bothered Calhoun.
"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble," he said, scowling, "as if wars
were going back into fashion and somebody was getting set to fight
them. Who's got us, anyhow?"
The request for Med Service aid had come from Phaedra II. But the
military action--if any--had been stated to be due on Canis III. The
flaming nearby sun and its family of planets was the Canis solar
system. The odds were, therefore, that he'd been snatched out of
overdrive by the Phaedrian fleet. He'd been expected. They'd ordered
him not to use the spacephone. The local forces wouldn't care if the
planet overheard. The invaders might. Unless there were two space
fleets in emptiness, jockeying for position for a battle in the void.
But that was preposterous. There could be no battles in unstressed
space where any ship could flick into overdrive flight in the fraction
of a second!
"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun querulously, "this is all wrong! I can't
make head or tail of anything! And I've got a feeling that there is
something considerably more wrong than I can figure out! At a guess,
it's probably a Phaedrian vessel that's hooked on to us. They didn't
seem surprised when I said who I was. But--"
He checked his instrument board. He examined the screens. There were
planets of the yellow sun, which now was nearly dead ahead. Calhoun saw
an almost infinitely thin crescent, and knew that it was the sunward
world toward which he was being towed. Actually, he didn't need a tow.
He'd asked for it for no particular reason except to put whoever had
stopped him in the wrong. To injure a Med ship would be improper even
in war--especially in war.
His eyes went back to the external-field dial. There was a force-field
gripping the ship. It was of the type used by landing-grids--a type
impractical for use on shipboard. A grid to generate such a force-field
had to have one foot of diameter for roughly every ten miles of range.
A ship to have the range of his captor would have to be as big as a
planetary landing-grid. And no planetary landing-grid could handle it.
Then Calhoun's eyes popped open and his jaw dropped.
"Murgatroyd!" he said, appalled. "Confound them, it's true! They've
found a way to fight!"
Wars had not been fought for many hundreds of years, and there was no
need for them now. Calhoun had only lately been studying the records
of warfare in all its aspects and consequences, and as a medical man
he felt outraged. Organized slaughter did not seem a sane process for
arriving at political conclusions. The whole galactic culture was
based upon the happy conviction that wars could never happen again. If
it was possible, they probably would. Calhoun knew humanity well enough
to be sure of that.
"_Chee?_" said Murgatroyd inquiringly.
"You're lucky to be a _tormal_!" Calhoun told him. "You never have to
feel ashamed of your kind."
The background information he had about warfare in general made him
feel skeptical in advance about the information he would presently be
given. It would be what used to be called propaganda, given him under
the name of briefing. It would agree with him that wars in general were
horrible, but it would most plausibly point out--with deep regret--that
this particular war, fought by this particular side, was both admirable
and justified.
"Which," said Calhoun darkly, "I wouldn't believe even if it were true!"
II.
"Information secured from others is invariably inaccurate in some
fashion. A complete and reasoned statement of a series of events is
almost necessarily trimmed and distorted and edited, or it would not
appear reasonable and complete. Truly factual accounts of any series
of happenings will, if honest, contain inconsistent or irrational
elements. Reality is far too complex to be reduced to simple
statements without much suppression of fact...."
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ P. 25.
He was able to verify his guess about the means by which interstellar
war became practical, when the Med ship was landed. Normally, a landing
grid was a gigantic, squat structure of steel girders, half a mile high
and a full mile in diameter. It rested upon bedrock, was cemented into
unbreakable union with the substance of its planet, and tapped the
ionosphere for power. When the Med ship reached the abysmal darkness
of the nearest planet's shadow, there were long, long pauses in which
it hung apparently motionless in space. There were occasional vast
swingings, as if something reached out and made sure where it was. And
Calhoun made use of his nearest-object indicator and observed that
something very huge fumbled about and presently became stationary in
emptiness, and then moved swiftly and assuredly down into the blackness
which was the planet's night-side. When it and the planetary surface
were one, the Med ship began its swift descent in the grip of landing
grid-type force-fields.
It landed in the center of a grid--but not a typical grid. This was
more monstrous in size than any spaceport boasted. It was not squat,
either, but as tall as it was wide. As the ship descended, he saw
lights in a control-system cell, midway to the ground. It was amazing
but obvious. The Med ship's captors had built a landing-grid which was
itself a spaceship. It was a grid which could cross the void between
stars. It could wage offensive war.
"It's infernally simple," Calhoun told Murgatroyd, distastefully. "The
regular landing-grid hooks onto something in space and pulls it to the
ground. This thing hooks onto something on the ground and pushes itself
out into space. It'll travel by Lawlor or overdrive, and when it gets
somewhere it can lock onto any part of another world and pull itself
down to that and stay anchored to it. Then it can land the fleet that
traveled with it. It's partly a floating dry dock and partly a landing
craft, and actually it's both. It's a ready-made spaceport anywhere it
chooses to land. Which means that it's the deadliest weapon in the past
thousand years!"
Murgatroyd climbed on his lap and blinked wisely at the screens. They
showed the surroundings of the now-grounded Med ship, standing on its
tail. There were innumerable stars overhead. All about, there was the
whiteness of snow. But there were lights. Ships at rest lay upon the
icy ground.
"I suspect," growled Calhoun, "that I could make a dash on emergency
rockets and get behind the horizon before they could catch me. But this
is just a regular military base!"
He considered his recent studies of historic wars, of battles and
massacres and looting and rapine. Even modern, civilized men would
revert very swiftly to savagery once they had fought a battle.
Enormities unthinkable at other times would occur promptly if men went
back to barbarity. Such things might already be present in the minds
of the crews of these spaceships.
"You and I, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "may be the only wholly rational
men on this planet. And you aren't a man."
"_Chee!_" shrilled Murgatroyd. He seemed glad of it.
"But we have to survey the situation before we attempt anything noble
and useless," Calhoun observed. "But still--what's that?"
* * * * *
He stared at a screen which showed lights on the ground moving toward
the Med ship. They were carried by men on foot, walking on the snow. As
they grew nearer it appeared that there were also weapons in the group.
They were curious, ugly instruments--like sporting rifles save that
their bores were impossibly large. They would be--Calhoun searched his
new store of information. They would be launchers of miniature rockets,
capable of firing small missiles with shaped charges which could wreck
the Med ship easily.
Thirty yards off, they separated to surround the ship. A single man
advanced.
"I'm going to let him in, Murgatroyd," observed Calhoun. "In war time,
a man is expected to be polite to anybody with a weapon capable of
blowing him up. It's one of the laws of war."
He opened both the inner and outer lock doors. The glow from inside the
ship shone out on white, untrodden snow. Calhoun stood in the opening,
observing that as his breath went out of the outer opening it turned to
white mist.
"My name is Calhoun," he said curtly to the single dark figure still
approaching. "Interstellar Medical Service. A neutral, a noncombatant,
and at the moment very much annoyed by what has happened!"
A gray-bearded man with grim eyes advanced into the light from the
opened port. He nodded.
"My name is Walker," he said, as curtly. "I suppose I'm the leader of
this military expedition. At least, my son is the leader of the ...
ah ... the enemy, which makes me the logical man to direct the attack
upon them."
Calhoun did not quite believe his ears, but he pricked them up. A
father and son on opposite sides would hardly have been trusted by
either faction, as warfare used to be conducted. And certainly their
relationship would hardly be a special qualification for leadership at
any time.
He made a gesture of invitation, and the gray-bearded man climbed the
ladder to the port. Somehow he did not lose the least trace of dignity
in climbing. He stepped solidly into the air lock and on into the cabin
of the ship.
"If I may, I'll close the lock-doors," said Calhoun, "if your men won't
misinterpret the action. It's cold outside."
The sturdy, bearded man shrugged his cape-clad shoulders.
"They'll blast your ship if you try to take off," he said. "They're in
the mood to blast something!"
With the same air of massive confidence, he moved to a seat. Murgatroyd
regarded him suspiciously. He ignored the little animal.
"Well?" he said impatiently.
"I'm Med Service," said Calhoun. "I can prove it. I should be neutral
in whatever is happening. But I was asked for by the planetary
government of Phaedra. I think it likely that your ships come from
Phaedra. Your grid ship, in particular, wouldn't be needed by the
local citizens. How does the war go?"
The stocky man's eyes burned.
"Are you laughing at me?" he demanded.
"I've been three months in overdrive," Calhoun reminded him. "I haven't
heard anything to laugh at in longer than that. No."
"The ... our enemy," said Walker bitterly, "consider that they have
won the war! But you may be able to make them realize that they have
not, and they cannot. We have been foolishly patient, but we can't risk
forbearance any longer. We mean to carry through to victory even if we
arrive at cutting our own throats for a victory celebration! And that
is not unlikely!"
Calhoun raised his eyebrows. But he nodded. His studies had told him
that a war psychology was a highly emotional one.
"Our home planet Phaedra has to be evacuated," said Walker, very grimly
indeed. "There are signs of instability in our sun. Five years since,
we sent our older children to Canis III to build a world for all of us
to move to. Our sun could burst at any time. It is certain to flare up
some time--and soon! We sent our children because the place of danger
was at home. We urged them to work feverishly. We sent the young women
as well as the men at the beginning, so that if our planet did crisp
and melt when our sun went off there would still be children of our
children to live on. When we dared--when they could feed and shelter
them--we sent younger boys and girls to safety, overburdening the new
colony with mouths to feed, but at the least staying ourselves where
the danger was! Later we sent even the small children, as the signs of
an imminent cataclysm became more threatening."
* * * * *
Calhoun nodded again. There were not many novas in the galaxy in any
one year, even among the millions of billions of stars it held. But
there had been at least one colony which had had to be shifted because
of evidence of solar instability. The job in that case was not complete
when the flare-up came. The evacuation of a world, though, would
never be an easy task. The population had to be moved light-years of
distance. Space travel takes time, even at thirty times the speed of
light. Where the time of disaster--the deadline for removal--could not
be known exactly, the course adopted by Phaedra was logical. Young
men and women were best sent off first. They could make new homes for
themselves and for others to follow them. They could work harder and
longer for the purpose than any other age-group--and they would best
assure the permanent survival of somebody! The new colony would have
to be a place of frantic, unresting labor, of feverish round-the-clock
endeavor, because the time-scale for working was necessarily unknown
but was extremely unlikely to be enough. When they could be burdened
further, younger boys and girls would be shipped--old enough to help
but not to pioneer. They could be sent to safety in a partly-built
colony. Later smaller children could be sent, needing care from their
older contemporaries. Only at long last would the adults leave their
world for the new. They would stay where the danger was until all
younger ones were secure.
"But now," said Walker thickly, "our children have made their world and
now they refuse to receive their parents and grandparents! They have a
world of young people only, under no authority but their own. They say
that we lied to them about the coming flare of Phaedra's sun: that we
enslaved them and made them use their youth to build a new world we
now demand to take over! They are willing for Phaedra's sun to burst
and kill the rest of us, so they can live as they please without a care
for us!"
Calhoun said nothing. It is a part of medical training to recognize
that information obtained from others is never wholly accurate.
Conceding the facts, he would still be getting from Walker only one
interpretation of them. There is an instinct in the young to become
independent of adults, and an instinct in adults to be protective
past all reason. There is, in one sense, always a war between the
generations on all planets, not only Phaedra and Canis III. It is a
conflict between instincts which themselves are necessary--and perhaps
the conflict as such is necessary for some purpose of the race.
"They grew tired of the effort building the colony required," said
Walker, his eyes burning as before. "So they decided to doubt its
need! They sent some of their number back to Phaedra to verify our
observations of the sun's behavior. Our observations! It happened that
they came at a time when the disturbances in the sun were temporarily
quiet. So our children decided that we were over-timid; that there was
no danger to us; that we demanded too much! They refused to build more
shelters and to clear and plant more land. They even refused to land
more ships from Phaedra, lest we burden them with more mouths to feed!
They declared for rest; for ease! They declared themselves independent
of us! They disowned us! Sharper than a serpent's tooth...."
"... Is an ungrateful child," said Calhoun. "So I've heard. So you
declared war."
"We did!" raged Walker. "We are men! Haven't we wives to protect?
We'll fight even our children for the safety of their mothers! And we
have grandchildren--on Canis III! What's happened and is happening
there ... what they're doing--" He seemed to strangle on his fury.
"Our children are lost to us. They've disowned us. They'd destroy us
and our wives, and they destroy themselves, and they will destroy our
grandchildren--We fight!"
* * * * *
Murgatroyd climbed into Calhoun's lap and cuddled close against him.
_Tormals_ are peaceful little animals The fury and the bitterness in
Walker's tone upset Murgatroyd. He took refuge from anger in closeness
to Calhoun.
"So the war's between you and your children and grandchildren,"
observed Calhoun. "As a Med ship man--what's happened to date? How has
the fighting gone? What's the state of things right now?"
"We've accomplished nothing," rasped Walker. "We've been too
soft-hearted! We don't want to kill them--not even after what they've
done! But they are willing to kill us! Only a week ago we sent a
cruiser in to broadcast propaganda. We considered that there must be
some decency left even in our children! No ship can use any drive
close to a planet, of course. We sent the cruiser in on a course to
form a parabolic semiorbit, riding momentum down close to atmosphere
above Canopolis, where it would broadcast on standard communication
frequencies and go on out to clear space again. But they used the
landing-grid to strew its path with rocks and boulders. It smashed into
them. Its hull was punctured in fifty places! Every man died!"
Calhoun did not change expression. This was an interview to learn the
facts of a situation in which the Med Service had been asked to act. It
was not an occasion in which to be horrified. He said:
"What did you expect of the Med Service when you asked for its help?"
"We thought," said Walker, very bitterly indeed, "that we would have
prisoners. We prepared hospital ships to tend our children who might be
hurt. We wanted every possible aid in that. No matter what our children
have done--"
"Yet you have no prisoners?" asked Calhoun.
He didn't grasp this affair yet. It was too far out of the ordinary
for quick judgment. Any war, in modern times, would have seemed
strange enough. But a full-scale war between parents and children on a
planetary scale was a little too much to grasp in all its implications
in a hurry.
"We've one prisoner," said Walker scornfully. "We caught him because
we hoped to do something with him. We failed. You'll take him back.
We don't want him! Before you go, you will be told our plans for
fighting; for the destruction, if we must, of our own children! But
it is better for us to destroy them than to let them destroy our
grandchildren as they are doing!"
This accusation about grandchildren did not seem conceivably true.
Calhoun, however, did not question it. He said reflectively:
"You're going about this affair in a queer fashion, whether as a war or
an exercise in parental discipline. Sending word of your plans to one's
supposed enemy, for instance--"
Walker stood up. His cheek twitched.
"At any instant now, Phaedra's sun may go! It may have done so since we
heard. And our wives--our children's mothers--are on Phaedra. If our
children have murdered them by refusing them refuge, then we will have
nothing left but the right--"
* * * * *
There was a pounding on the air-lock door.
"I'm through," rasped Walker. He went to the lock and opened the doors.
"This Med man," he said to those outside, "will come and see what we've
made ready. Then he'll take our prisoner back to Canis. He'll report
what he knows. It may do some good."
He stepped out of the air lock, flinging a command to Calhoun to Follow.
Calhoun grunted to himself. He opened a cabinet and donned heavy
winter garments. Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in alarm when it appeared
that Calhoun was going to leave him. Calhoun snapped his fingers and
Murgatroyd leaped up into his arms. Calhoun tucked him under his coat
and followed Walker down into the snow.
This, undoubtedly, was the next planet out from the colonized Canis
III. It would be Canis IV, and a very small excess of carbon dioxide in
its atmosphere would keep it warmer--by the greenhouse effect--than its
distance from the local sun would otherwise imply. The snow was winter
snow only. This was not too cold a base for military operations against
the planet next inward toward the sun.
Walker strode ahead toward the rows of spaceship hulls about the
singularly spidery grip ship. It occurred to Calhoun that astrogating
such a ship would be very much like handling an oversized, open-ended
wastebasket. A monstrous overdrive field would be needed, and keeping
its metal above brittle-point on any really long space voyage would be
difficult indeed. But it was here. It had undoubtedly lifted itself
from Phaedra. It had landed itself here, and should be able to land
on Canis and then let down after itself the war fleet now clustered
about its base. But Calhoun tried to take comfort in the difficulty
of traveling really long distances, up in the tens or twenties of
light-years, with such a creation. Possibly, just possibly, warfare
would still be limited to relatively nearby worlds--
"We thought," rumbled Walker, "that we might excavate shelters here, so
we could bring the rest of Phaedra's population here to wait out the
war--so they'd be safe if Phaedra's sun blew. But we couldn't feed them
all. So we have to blast a reception for ourselves on the world our
children have made!"
They came to a ship which was larger than any except the grid ship.
Nearby half its hull had been opened and a gigantic tent set up against
it. It was a huge machine shop. A spaceship inside was evidently the
cruiser of which Walker had spoken. Calhoun could see where ragged old
holes had been made in its hull. Men of middle age or older worked upon
it with a somehow dogged air. But Walker pointed to another object,
almost half the size of the Med ship. Men worked on that, too. It was a
missile, not man-carrying, with relatively enormous fuel-capacity for
drive-rockets.
"Look that over," commanded Walker. "That's a rocket-missile, a robot
fighting machine that we'll start from space with plenty of rocket fuel
for maneuvering. It will fight and dodge its way down into the middle
of the grid at Canopolis--which our children refuse to use to land
their parents. In three days from now we use this to blast that grid
and as much of Canopolis as may go with it from the blast of a megaton
bomb. Then our grid ship will land and our fleet will follow it down,
and we'll be aground on Canis with blast-rifles and flame and more
bombs, to fight for our rightful foothold on our children's world!
"When our fighting men are landed, our ships will begin to bring in our
wives from Phaedra--if they are still alive--while we fight to make
them safe. We'll fight our children as if they were wild beasts--the
way they've treated us! We begin this fight in just three days, when
that missile is ready and tested. If they kill us--so much the better!
But we'll make them do their murder with their hands, with their
guns, with the weapons they've doubtless made. But they shall not
murder us by disowning us! And if we have to kill them to save our
grandchildren--we begin to do so in just three days! Take them that
message!"
Calhoun said:
"I'm afraid they won't believe me."
"They'll learn they must!" growled Walker. Then he said abruptly: "What
repairs does your ship need? We'll bring it here and repair it, and
then you'll take our prisoner and carry him and your message back to
his own kind--our children!"
The irony and the fury and the frustration in his tone as he said,
"children," made Murgatroyd wriggle, underneath Calhoun's coat.
"I find," said Calhoun, "that all I need is power. You drained my
overdrive charge when you snatched my ship out of overdrive. I've extra
Duhanne cells, but one overdrive charge is a lot of power to lose."
"You'll get it back," growled Walker. "Then take the prisoner and our
warning to Canis. Get them to surrender if you can."
Calhoun considered. Under his coat, Murgatroyd said "_Chee! Chee!_" in
a tone of some indignation.
"Thinking of the way of my own father with me," said Calhoun wryly,
"and accepting your story itself as quite true--how the devil can I
make your children believe that this time you aren't bluffing? Haven't
you bluffed before?"
"We've threatened," said Walker, his eyes blazing. "Yes. And we were
too soft-hearted to carry out our threats. We've tried everything short
of force. But the time has come when we have to be ruthless! We have
our wives to consider."
"Whom," observed Calhoun, "I suspect you didn't dare have with you
because they wouldn't let you actually fight, no matter what your sons
and daughters did."
"But they're not here now!" raged Walker. "And nothing will stop us!"
Calhoun nodded. In view of the situation as a whole, he almost believed
it of the fathers of the colonists on Canis III. But he wouldn't have
believed it of his own father, regardless, and he did not think the
young people of Canis would believe it of theirs. Yet there was nothing
else for them to do.
It looked like he'd traveled three months in overdrive and
painstakingly studied much distressing information about the ancestors
of modern men, only to arrive at and witness the most heart-rending
conflict in human history.
III.
"The fact that one statement agrees with another statement does not
mean that both must be true. Too close an agreement may be proof
that both statements are false. Conversely, conflicting statements
may tend to prove each other's verity, if the conflict is in their
interpretations of the facts they narrate...."
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ P. 43.
They brought the prisoner a bare hour later. Sturdy, grizzled men
had strung a line to the Med ship's power bank, and there was that
small humming sound which nobody quite understands as power flowed
into the Duhanne cells. The power men regarded the inside of the ship
without curiosity, as if too much absorbed in private bitterness to be
interested in anything else. When they had gone, a small guard brought
the prisoner. Calhoun noted the expression on the faces of these men,
too. They hated their prisoner. But their faces showed the deep and
wrenching bitterness a man does feel when his children have abandoned
him for companions he considers worthless or worse. A man hates those
companions corrosively, and these men hated their prisoner. But they
could not help knowing that he, also, had abandoned some other father
whose feelings were like their own. So there was frustration even in
their fury.
The prisoner came lightly up the ladder into the Med ship. He was a
very young man, with a singularly fair complexion and a carriage at
once challengingly jaunty and defiant. Calhoun estimated his age
as seven years less than his own, and immediately considered him
irritatingly callow and immature because of it.
"You're my jailer, eh?" said the prisoner brightly, as he entered the
Med ship's cabin. "Or is this some new trick? They say they're sending
me back. I doubt it!"
"It's true enough," said Calhoun. "Will you dog the air-lock door,
please? Do that and we'll take off."
The young man looked at him brightly. He grinned.
"No," he said happily. "I won't."
Calhoun felt ignoble rage. There had been no great purpose in his
request. There could be none in the refusal. So he took the prisoner by
the collar and walked him into the air lock.
"We are going to be lifted soon," he said gently. "If the outer door
isn't dogged, the air will escape from the lock. When it does, you will
die. I can't save you, because if the outer door isn't dogged, all the
air in the ship will go if I should try to help you. Therefore I advise
you to dog the door."
He closed the inner door. He looked sick. Murgatroyd looked alarmedly
at him.
"If I have to deal with that kind," Calhoun told the _tormal_, "I have
to have some evidence that I mean what I say. If I don't, they'll be
classing me with their fathers!"
The Med ship stirred. Calhoun glanced at the external-field dial. The
mobile landing-grid was locking its force-field on. The little ship
lifted. It went up and up and up. Calhoun looked sicker. The air in
the lock was thinning swiftly. Two miles high. Three--
There were frantic metallic clankings. The indicator said that the
outer door was dogged tight. Calhoun opened the inner door. The young
man stumbled in, shockingly white and gasping for breath.
"Thanks," said Calhoun curtly.
He strapped himself in the control-chair. The vision-screens showed
half the universe pure darkness and the rest a blaze of many-colored
specks of light. They showed new stars appearing at the edge of the
monstrous blackness. The Med ship was rising ever more swiftly.
Presently the black area was not half the universe. It was a third.
Then a fifth. A tenth. It was a disk of pure darkness in a glory of a
myriad distant suns.
The external-field indicator dropped abruptly to zero. The Med ship was
afloat in clear space. Calhoun tried the Lawlor drive, tentatively.
It worked. The Med ship swung in a vast curved course out of the dark
planet's shadow. There was the sun Canis, flaming in space. Calhoun
made brisk observations, set a new course, and the ship sped on with an
unfelt acceleration. This was, of course, the Lawlor propulsion system,
used for distances which were mere millions of miles.
* * * * *
When the ship was entirely on automatic control, Calhoun swung around
to his unwilling companion. Murgatroyd was regarding the youthful
stranger with intense curiosity. He looked at Calhoun with some
apprehension.
"My name's Calhoun," Calhoun told him. "I'm Med Service. That's
Murgatroyd. He's a _tormal_. Who are you and how did you get captured?"
The prisoner went instantly into a pose of jaunty defiance.
"My name is Fredericks," he said blandly. "What happens next?"
"I'm headed for Canis III," said Calhoun. "In part to land you. In part
to try to do something about this war. How'd you get captured?"
"They made a raid," said young Fredericks scornfully. "They landed a
rocket out in open country. We thought it was another propaganda bomb,
like they've landed before--telling us we were scoundrels and such
bilge. I went to see if there was anything in it good for a laugh. But
it was bigger than usual. I didn't know, but men had landed in it. They
jumped me. Two of them. Piled me in the rocket and it took off. Then we
were picked up and brought where you landed. They tried to mind-launder
me!" He laughed derisively. "Showing me science stuff proving Phaedra's
sun was going to blow and cook the old home planet. Lecturing me that
we were all fools on Canis, undutiful sons and so on. Saying that to
kill our parents wouldn't pay."
"Would it?" asked Calhoun. "Pay, that is?"
Fredericks grinned in a superior manner.
"You're pulling more of it, huh? I don't know science, but I know
they've been lying to us! Look! They sent the first gang to Canis five
years ago. Didn't send equipment with them, no more than they had to.
Packed the ships full of people. They were twenty years old and so on.
They had to sweat! Had to sweat out ores and make equipment and try to
build shelters and plant food. There were more of them arriving all the
time--shipped away from Phaedra with starvation rations so more of them
could be shipped. All young people, remember! They had to sweat to keep
from starving, with all the new ones coming all the time. Everybody had
to pitch in the minute they got there. You never heard that, did you?"
"Yes," said Calhoun.
"They worked plenty!" said Fredericks scornfully. "Good little girls
and boys! When they got nearly caught up, and figured that maybe in
another month they could breathe easy, why then the old folks on
Phaedra began to ship younger kids. Me among 'em! I was fifteen, and
we hit Canis like a flood. There wasn't shelter, or food, or clothes
to spare, but they had to feed us. So we had to help by working. And
I worked! I built houses and graded streets and wrestled pipe for
plumbing and sewage--the older boys were making it--and I planted
ground and I chopped trees. No loafing! No fun! They piled us on Canis
so fast it was root hog or die. And we rooted! Then just when we began
to think that we could begin to take a breather they started dumping
little kids on us! Ten-year-olds and nine-year-olds to be fed and
watched. Seven-year-olds to have their noses wiped! No fun, no rest--"
He made an angry, spitting noise.
"Did they tell you that," he demanded.
"Yes," agreed Calhoun. "I heard that and more."
* * * * *
"All the time," raged Fredericks sullenly, "they were yelling at us
that the sun back home was swelling. It was wabbling. It was throbbing
like it was going to burst any minute! They kept us scared that any
second the ships'd stop coming because there wasn't any more Phaedra.
And we were good little boys and girls and we worked like hell. We
tried to build what the kids they sent us needed, and they kept sending
younger and younger kids. We got to the crack-up point. We couldn't
keep it up! Night, day, every day, no fun, no loafing, nothing to do
but work till you dropped, and then get up and work till you dropped
again."
He stopped. Calhoun said:
"So you stopped believing it could be that urgent. You sent some
messengers back to check and see. And Phaedra's sun looked perfectly
normal, to them. There was no visible danger. The older people showed
their scientific records, and your messengers didn't believe them. They
decided they were faked. They were tired. All of you were tired. Young
people need fun. You weren't having it. So when your messengers came
back and said the emergency was a lie--you believed them. You believed
the older people were simply dumping all their burdens on you, by lies."
"We knew it!" rasped Fredericks. "So we quit! We'd done our stuff!
We were going to take time out and do some living! We were away back
on having fun! We were away back on rest! We were away back just on
shooting the breeze! We were behind on everything! We'd been slaves,
following blueprints, digging holes and filling them up again." He
stopped. "When they said all the old folks were going to move in on
us, that was the finish! We're human! We've got a right to live like
humans! When it came to building more houses and planting more land
so more people--and old people at that--could move in to take over
bossing us some more, we'd had it! We hadn't gotten anything out of
the job for ourselves. If the old folks moved in, we never would! They
didn't mind working us to death! To hell with them!"
"The reaction," said Calhoun, "was normal. But if one assumption was
mistaken, it could still be wrong."
"What could be wrong?" demanded Fredericks angrily.
"The assumption that they lied," said Calhoun. "Maybe Phaedra's sun is
getting ready to flare. Maybe your messengers were mistaken. Maybe you
were told the truth."
Fredericks spat. Calhoun said:
"Will you clean that up, please?"
Fredericks gaped at him.
"Mop," said Calhoun. He gestured.
Fredericks sneered. Calhoun waited. Murgatroyd said agitatedly:
"_Chee! Chee! Chee!_"
Calhoun did not move. After a long time, Fredericks took the mop and
pushed it negligently over the place he'd spat on.
"Thanks," said Calhoun.
He turned back to the control board. He checked his course and referred
to the half-century-old Survey report on the Canis solar system. He
scowled. Presently he said over his shoulder:
"How has the resting worked? Does everybody feel better?"
"Enough better," said Fredericks ominously, "so we're going to keep
things the way they are! The old folks sent in a ship for a landing and
we took the landing-grid and dumped rocks where it'd run into them.
We're going to set up little grids all over, so we can fling bombs
up--we make good bombs--if they try to land anywhere besides Canopolis.
And if they do make a landing, they'll wish they hadn't! All they've
dared so far is drop printed stuff calling us names and saying we've
got to do what they say!"
Calhoun had the inner planet, Canis III, firmly in the center of his
forward screen. He said negligently:
"How about the little kids? Most of you have quit work, you say--"
"There's not much work," bragged Fredericks. "We had to make stuff
automatic as we built it, so we could all keep on making more things
and not lose hands tending stuff we'd made. We got the designs from
home. We do all right without working much!"
Calhoun reflected. If it were possible for any society to exist without
private property, it would be this society, composed exclusively of the
young. They do not want money as such. They want what it buys--now.
There would be no capitalists in a world populated only by the younger
generation from Phaedra. It would be an interesting sort of society,
but thought for the future would be markedly lacking.
* * * * *
"But," said Calhoun, "what about the small children? The ones who need
to be taken care of? You haven't got anything automatic to take care of
them?"
"Pretty near!" Fredericks boasted. "Some of the girls like tending
kids. Homely girls, mostly. But there's too many little ones. So we
hooked up a psych circuit with multiple outlets for them. Some of
the girls play with a couple of the kids, and that keeps the others
satisfied. There was somebody studying pre-psych on Phaedra, and he
was sent off with the rest to dig holes and build houses. He fixed up
that trick so the girl he liked would be willing to take time off from
tending kids. There's plenty of good technicians on Canis III! We can
make out!"
There were evidently some very good technicians. But Calhoun began to
feel sick. A psych circuit, of course, was not in itself a harmful
device. It was a part of individual psychiatric equipment--not
Med Service work--and its value was proved. In clinical use it
permitted a psychiatrist to share the consciousness of his patient
during interviews. He no longer had painfully to interpret his
patient's thought-processes by what he said. He could observe the
thought-processes themselves. He could trace the blocks, the mental
sore spots, the ugly, not-human urges which can become obsessions.
Yes. A psych circuit was an admirable device in itself. But it was not
a good thing to use for baby-tending.
There would be a great room in which hundreds of small children would
sit raptly with psych-circuit receptors on their heads. They would
sit quietly--very quietly--giggling to themselves, or murmuring.
They would be having a very wonderful time. Nearby there would be a
smaller room in which one or two other children played. There would be
older girls to help these few children actually play. With what they
considered adult attention every second, and with deep affection for
their self-appointed nurses--why the children who actually played would
have the very perfection of childhood pleasure. And their experience
would be shared by--would simultaneously be known and felt by--would be
the conscious and complete experience of each of the hundreds of other
children tuned in on it by psych circuit. Each would feel every thrill
and sensation of those who truly thrilled and experienced.
But the children so kept happy would not be kept exercised, nor
stimulated to act, or think, or react for themselves. The effect of
psych-circuit child-care would be that of drugs for keeping children
from needing attention. The merely receiving children would lose all
initiative, all purpose, all energy. They would come to wait for
somebody else to play for them. And the death rate among them would
be high and the health rate among those who lived would be low, and
the injury to their personalities would be permanent if they played by
proxy long enough.
And there was another uglier thought. In a society such as must exist
on Canis III, there would be adolescents and post-adolescents who could
secure incredible, fascinating pleasures for themselves--once they
realized what could be done with a psych circuit.
Calhoun said evenly:
"In thirty minutes or so you can call Canopolis on spacephone. I'd like
you to call ahead. Will there be anybody on duty at the grid?"
Fredericks said negligently:
"There's usually somebody hanging out there. It makes a good club.
But they're always hoping the old folks will try something. If they
do--there's the grid to take care of them!"
"We're landing with or without help," said Calhoun. "But if you don't
call ahead and convince somebody that one of their own is returning
from the wars, they might take care of us with the landing-grid."
Fredericks kept his jaunty air.
"What'll I say about you?"
"This is a Med ship," said Calhoun with precision. "According to the
Interstellar Treaty Organization agreement, every planet's population
can determine its government. Every planet is necessarily independent.
I have nothing to do with who runs things, or who they trade or
communicate with. I have nothing to do with anything but public health.
But they'll have heard about Med ships. You had, hadn't you?"
"Y-yes," agreed Fredericks. "When I went to school. Before I was
shipped off to here."
"Right," said Calhoun. "So you can figure out what to say."
He turned back to the control board, watching the steadily swelling
gibbous disk of the planet as the Med ship drew near. Presently he
reached out and cut the drive. He switched on the spacephone.
"Go ahead," he said dryly. "Talk us down or into trouble, just as you
please."
IV.
"Experience directs that any assurance, at any time, that there is
nothing wrong or that everything is all right, be regarded with
suspicion. Certainly doctors often encounter patients who are
ignorant of the nature of their trouble and its cause, and in
addition have had their symptoms appear so slowly and so gradually
that they were never noticed and still are not realized...."
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ P. 68.
It was a very singular society on Canis III. After long and markedly
irrelevant argument by spacephone, the Med ship went down to ground
in the grip of the Canopolis landing-grid. This was managed with a
deftness amounting to artistry. Whoever handled the controls did so
with that impassioned perfection with which a young man can handle
a mechanism he understands and worships. But it did not follow that
so accomplished an operator would think beyond the perfection of
performance. He came out and grinned proudly at the Med ship when it
rested, light as a feather, on the clear, grassy space in the center of
the city's landing-grid. He was a gangling seventeen or eighteen.
A gang--not a guard--of similar age came swaggering to interview
the two in the landed spacecraft. Fredericks named where he'd been
working and what he'd been doing and how he'd been taken prisoner.
Nobody bothered to check his statements. But his age was almost a
guarantee that he belonged on Canis. When he began his experiences as a
prisoner among their enemies, all pretense of suspicion dropped away.
The gang at the spaceport interjected questions, and whooped at some
of his answers, and slapped each other and themselves ecstatically
when he related some of the things he'd said and done in enemy hands,
and talked loudly and boastfully of what they would do if the old
folks tried to carry out their threats. But Calhoun observed no real
preparations beyond the perfect working condition of the grid itself.
Still, that ought to defend the planet adequately--except against such
a mobile spaceport as he'd been captured by, himself.
When they turned to him for added reasons to despise the older
generation, Calhoun said coldly:
"If you ask me, they can take over any time they're willing to kill a
few of you to clear the way. Certainly if the way you're running this
particular job is a sample!"
They bristled. And Calhoun marveled at the tribal organization which
had sprung up among them. What Fredericks had said in the ship began
to fit neatly into place with what once had been pure anthropological
theory. He'd had to learn it because a medical man must know more than
diseases. He must also know the humans who have them. Oddments of
culture-instinct theory popped into his memory and applied exactly to
what he was discovering. The theory says that the tribal cultures from
which even the most civilized social organisms stem--were not human
inventions. The fundamental facts of human society exist because human
instinct directs them, in exact parallel to the basic design of the
social lives of ants and bees. It seemed to Calhoun that he was seeing,
direct, the operation of pure instinct in the divisions of function in
the society he had encountered.
Here, where a guard must be mounted against enemies, he found young
warriors. They took the task because it was their instinct. It was
an hereditary impulse for young men of their age to act as youthful
warriors at a post of danger. There was nothing more important to
them than prestige among their fellows. They did not want wisdom,
or security, or families, or possessions. The instinct of their
age-group directed them as specifically as successive generations of
social insects are directed. They moved about in gangs. They boasted
vaingloriously. They loafed conspicuously and they would take lunatic
risks for no reason whatsoever.
But they would never build cities of themselves. That was the impulse
of older men. In particular, the warrior age-group would be capable of
immense and admirable skill in handling anything which interested them,
but they would never devise automatic devices to keep a city going with
next to no attention. They simply would not think so far ahead. They
would fight and they would quarrel and they would brag. But if this
eccentric world had survived so far, it must have additional tribal
structure--it must have some more dedicated leadership than these
flamboyant young men who guarded inadequately and operated perfectly
the mechanism of a spaceport facility they would never have built.
* * * * *
"I've got to talk to somebody higher up," said Calhoun irritably. "A
chief, really--a boss. Your war with your parents isn't my affair. I'm
here on Med Service business. I'm supposed to check the public health
situation with the local authorities and exchange information with
them. So far as I'm concerned, this is a routine job."
The statement was not altogether truthful. In a sense, preventing
unnecessary deaths was routine, and in that meaning Calhoun had exactly
the same purpose on Canis III as on any other planet to which he might
be sent. But the health hazards here were not routine. A society is an
organism. It is a whole. Instinct-theory says that it can only survive
as a whole, which must be composed of such-and-such parts. This society
had suffered trauma, from the predicted dissolution of Phaedra's sun.
Very many lives would be lost, unnecessarily, unless the results of
that traumatic experience could be healed. But Calhoun's obligation was
not to be stated in such terms to these young men.
"Who is running things?" demanded Calhoun. "A man named Walker said his
son was bossing things here. He was pretty bitter about it, too! Who's
looking after the distribution of food, and who's assigning who to
raise more, and who's seeing that the small children get fed and cared
for?"
The spaceport gang looked blank. Then someone said negligently:
"We take turns getting stuff to eat, for ourselves. The ones who landed
here first, mostly, go around yelling at everybody. Sometimes the
things they want get done. But they're mostly married now. They live in
a center over yonder."
He gestured. Calhoun accepted it as a directive.
"Can somebody take me there?" he asked.
Fredericks said grandly:
"I'll do it. Going that way, anyhow. Who's got a ground-car I can use?
My girl'll be worrying about me. Been worrying because she didn't know
the old folks took me prisoner."
His proposal to acquire a ground-car was greeted with derision.
There were ground-cars, but those that did not need repairs were
jealously reserved by individuals for themselves and their closest
friends. There was squabbling. Presently a scowling young man agreed
to deliver Calhoun to the general area in which the first-landed of
the colonists--now grown grim and authoritative--made their homes.
It was annoying to wait while so simple a matter was discussed so
vociferously. By the time it was settled, Fredericks had gone off in
disgust.
The scowling youth produced his ground-car. Calhoun got in. Murgatroyd,
of course, was not left behind. And the car was magnificent in
polish and performance. Lavish effort and real ability had gone into
its grooming and adjustment. With a spinning of wheels, it shot
into immediate high speed. The dark-browed younglings drove with
hair-raising recklessness and expertness. He traversed the city in
minutes, and at a speed which allowed Calhoun only glimpses. But he
could see that it was almost unoccupied.
Canopolis had been built by the youth of Phaedra to the designs of
their elders for the reception of immigrants from the mother planet. It
had been put up in frantic haste and used only as a receiving-depot.
It had needed impassioned and dedicated labor, and sustained and
exhausting concentration to get it and the rest of the colonial
facilities built against a deadline of doom. But now its builders
were fed up with it. It was practically empty. The last arrivals
had scattered to places where food supplies were nearer and a more
satisfactory way of life was possible. There were broken windows and
spattered walls. There was untidiness everywhere. But there had been
great pains taken in the building. Some partly-completed enterprises
showed highly competent workmanship.
Then the city ended and was a giant pile of structures which fell
swiftly behind. The highways were improvised. They could be made
more perfect later. Across the horizon there were jerry-built
villages--temporary by design, because there had been such desperate
need for so many of them so soon.
* * * * *
The ground-car came to a stop with a screaming of brakes at the edge of
such a jerry-built group of small houses. A woman ran to hiding. A man
ran into view. Another, and another, and another. They came ominously
toward the car.
"Hop out," said the scowling driver. He grinned faintly. "They don't
want me here. But I stirred 'em up, eh?"
Calhoun stepped out of the ground-car. It whirled on one pair of wheels
and sped back to the city, its driver turning to make a derisive
gesture at the men who had appeared. They were still quite young
men--younger than Calhoun. They looked at him steadily.
He growled to himself. Then he called:
"I'm looking for somebody named Walker. He's supposed to be top man
here."
A tense young man said sardonically:
"I'm Walker. But I'm not tops. Where'd you come from? With a Med
Service uniform and a _tormal_ on your shoulder you're not one of us!
Have you come to argue that we ought to give in to Phaedra?"
Calhoun snorted.
"I've a message that an attack from space is due in three days, but
that's all from Phaedra. I'm a Med Service man. How's the health
situation? How are you equipped for doctors and such? How about
hospitals? How's the death rate?"
The younger Walker grinned savagely.
"This is a new colony. I doubt there are a hundred people on the planet
over twenty-five. How many doctors would there be in a population like
ours? I don't think there is a death rate. Do you know how we came to
be here?"
"Your father told me," said Calhoun, "at the military base on the next
planet out. They're getting ready for an attack--and they asked me to
warn you about it. Three days from now."
Young Walker ground his teeth.
"They won't dare attack. We'll smash them if they do. They lied to us!
Worked us to death--"
"And no death rate?" asked Calhoun.
The younger man knitted his brows.
"There's no use your arguing with us. This is our world! We made it and
we're keeping it! They made fools of us long enough!"
"And you've no health problems at all?"
The sardonic young man hesitated. One of the others said coldly:
"Make him happy. Let him talk to the women. They're worried about some
of the kids."
Calhoun breathed a private sigh of relief. These relatively mature
young men were the first-landed colonists. They'd had the hardest
of all the tasks put upon the younger generation by the adults
of Phaedra. They'd had the most back-breaking labor and the most
urgent responsibilities. They'd been worked and stressed to the
breaking-point. They'd finally arrived at a decision of desperation.
But apparently things could be worse. It is the custom, everywhere, for
women to make themselves into whatever is most attractive to men. Young
girls, in particular, will adopt any tradition which is approved of by
their prospective husbands. And in a society to be formed brand-new,
appalling new traditions could be started. But they hadn't. Deep-rooted
instincts still worked. Women--young women--and girls appeared still
to feel concern for young children which were not even their own. And
Fredericks' story--
"By all means," agreed Calhoun. "If there's something wrong with the
health of children--"
Young Walker gestured and turned back toward the houses. He scowled as
he walked. Presently he said defensively:
"You probably noticed there aren't many people in the city?"
"Yes," said Calhoun. "I noticed."
"We're not fully organized yet," said Walker, more defensively still.
"We weren't doing anything but build. We've got to get organized before
we'll have a regular economic system. Some of the later-comers don't
know anything but building. When they're ready for it, the city will be
occupied. We'll have as sound a system for production and distribution
of goods as anywhere else. But we've just finished a revolution. In a
sense we're still in it. But presently this world will be pretty much
like any other--only better."
"I see," said Calhoun.
"Most people live in the little settlements, like this--close to the
crops we grow. People raise their own food, and so on. In a way you may
think we're primitive, but we've got some good technicians! When they
get over not having to work for the old folks and finish making things
just for themselves--we'll do all right. After all, we weren't trained
to make a complete world. Just to make a world for the older people on
Phaedra to take over! But we've taken it over for ourselves!"
"Yes," agreed Calhoun politely.
"We'll work out the other things," said young Walker truculently.
"We'll have money, and credit, and hiring each other and so on. Right
now defending ourselves is the top thing in everybody's mind."
"Yes," agreed Calhoun again. He was regarded as not quite an enemy, but
he was not accepted as wholly neutral.
"The older ones of us are married," Walker said firmly, "and we feel
responsibility, and we're keeping things pretty well in line. We were
lied to, though, and we resent it. And we aren't letting in the old
people to try to run us, when we've proved we can make and run a world
ourselves!"
* * * * *
Calhoun said nothing. They reached a house. Walker turned to enter it,
with a gesture for Calhoun to accompany him. Calhoun halted.
"Just a moment. The person who drove me here--when he turned up, at
least one woman ran away and you men came out ... well ... pretty
pugnaciously."
Walker flushed angrily.
"I said we had technicians. Some of them made a gadget to help take
care of the children. That's harmless. But they want to use it to ...
to spy on older people with it. On us! Invasion of privacy. We don't
like ... well ... they try to set up psych circuits near our homes.
They ... think it's fun to ... know what people say and do--"
"Psych circuits can be useful," observed Calhoun, "or they can be
pretty monstrous. On the other hand--"
"No decent man would do it!" snapped young Walker. "And no girl would
have anything to do with anybody--But there are some crazy fools--"
"You have described," said Calhoun dryly, "a criminal class. Only
instead of stealing other people's possessions they want to steal their
sensations. Peeping-Tom stuff, eavesdropping on what other people feel
about those they care for, as well as what they do and say. In a way
it's a delinquency problem, isn't it?"
"There can't be a civilization without problems," said Walker. "But
we're going to--" He opened a door. "My wife works with the kids the
old people dumped on us. This way."
He motioned Calhoun inside the house. It was one of the shelters
built during the frenzied building program designed to make an
emergency refuge for the population of a planet. It was the roughest
of machine-tool constructions. The floors were not finished. The walls
were not smooth. The equipment showed. But there had been attempts to
do something about the crudity. Colors had been used to try to make it
homelike.
When a girl came in from the next room, Calhoun understood completely.
She was a little younger than her husband, but not much. She regarded
Calhoun with that anxiety with which a housekeeper always regards an
unexpected visitor, hoping he will not notice defects. This young
wife had those feminine instincts which are much older than tradition.
Obligations and loyalties may be thrown aside, but a housewife's idea
of her role is unchangeable.
"This is a Med Service man," said Walker briefly, indicating Calhoun.
"I told him there was a health problem about some of the children." To
Calhoun he said curtly: "This is my wife Elsa."
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" from where he clung to Calhoun's neck. He was
suddenly reassured. He scrambled down to the floor. Elsa smiled at him.
"He's tame!" she said delightedly. "Maybe--"
Calhoun extended his hand. She took it. Murgatroyd, swaggering,
extended his own black paw. Instead of conflict and hatred, here,
Murgatroyd seemed to sense an amiable sociability such as he was used
to. He felt more at home. He began zestfully to act like the human
being he liked to pretend he was.
"He's delightful!" said the girl. "May I show him to Jak?"
Young Walker said:
"Elsa's been helping with the smaller kids. She says there's something
the matter that she doesn't understand. She has one of the kids here.
Bring him, Elsa."
She vanished. A moment later she brought in a small boy. He was
probably six or seven. She carried him. He was thin. His eyes were
bright, but he was completely passive in her arms. She put him down in
a chair and he looked about alertly enough, but he simply did not move.
He saw Murgatroyd, and beamed. Murgatroyd went over to the human who
was near his own size. Swaggering, he offered his paw once more. The
boy giggled, but his hand lay in his lap.
"He doesn't do anything!" said Elsa distressedly. "His muscles work,
but he doesn't work them! He just sits and waits for things to be done
for him! He acts as if he'd lost the idea of moving, or doing anything
at all! And--it's beginning to show up among the other children! They
just sit! They're bright enough ... they see and understand--but they
just sit!"
Calhoun examined the boy. His expression grew carefully impassive. But
he winced as he touched the pipestem arms and legs. What muscles were
there were almost like dough.
When he straightened up, despite himself his mouth was awry. Young
Walker's wife said anxiously:
"Do you know what's the matter with him?"
"Basically," said Calhoun with a sort of desperate irony, "he's in
revolt. As the rest of you are in revolt against Phaedra, he's in
revolt against you. You needed rest you didn't get and recreation you
couldn't have and something besides back-breaking labor under a load
that grew heavier minute by minute for years. You revolted, and you've
a fine justification for the war in which you're engaged. But he has
needed something he hasn't had, too. So he's revolting against his
lack--as you did--and he's dying as you will presently do from exactly
the same final cause."
Walker frowned ominously.
"I don't understand what you're saying!" he said harshly.
Calhoun moistened his lips.
"I spoke unprofessionally. The real cause of his present troubles and
your future ones is that a social system has been shattered. The pieces
can't live by themselves. And I don't know what medical measures can
be taken to cure an injured civilization. As a medical man, I may be
whipped. But I'd better check--Did I say, by the way, that the war
fleet from Phaedra is going to attack in just three days?"
V.
"... Truth is the accord of an idea with a thing. Very often an
individual fails to discover the truth about some matter because he
neglects to become informed about something. But even more often,
the truth is never found out because somebody refuses to entertain
an idea...."
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ Pp. 101-2.
On the first day, Calhoun went grimly to the _creches_ that had been
set up by the first-arrived young colonists when ships began to
discharge really young children at the landing-grid in Canopolis. The
_creches_ were not too much like orphanages, of course, but the younger
generation of Phaedra had been put in a very rough situation by the
adults. If the time of the imminent solar explosion had been known,
the matter could have been better handled. Actually, the explosion had
been delayed--to date--for nearly five years from the discovery that
it must occur. If that much leeway could have been predicted, older
men and many machines would have been sent at first. But the bursting
could not be computed. It was a matter of probability. Such-and-such
unrhythmic variables must inevitably coincide sooner or later. When
they did--final and ultimate catastrophe. The sun would flare terribly
and destroy all life in its solar system. It could be calculated that
the odds were even that the explosion would happen within one year,
two to one within two, and five to one within three. The odds were
enormous against Phaedra surviving as long as it had. The people of the
mother-world had had a highly improbable break.
But in cold common sense they'd done the sensible thing. They'd tried
to save those of their children who could take care of themselves
first, and added others as they dared. But the burden on the young
colonists had been monstrous. Even adults would have tended to grow
warped with such pressure to mine, build, plough, and sow, as was put
upon the youngsters. There had never been more than barely enough of
food--and more mouths were always on the way. There had never been
extra shelter, and younger and ever younger cargoes were constantly
arriving, each needing more of shelter and of care than the ones
before. And there was the world of adults still to be provided for.
Calhoun met the girls who had devoted themselves to the quasi-orphaned
children. They bore themselves with rather touching airs of authority
among the smaller children. But they were capable of ferocity, on
occasion. They had the need, sometimes, not to defend their charges but
themselves against the clumsily romantic advances of loutish teen-agers
who considered themselves fascinating.
They had done very well.
The small children were exactly what Calhoun had anticipated--in every
way. The small boy Calhoun had seen first was an extreme case, but the
results of play by proxy were visible everywhere. Calhoun constrainedly
inspected one after another of the children shelters. He was anxiously
watched by the sober young faces of the nurses. But they giggled when
Murgatroyd tried to go through Calhoun's actions of taking temperatures
and the like. He had to be stopped when he attempted to take a
throat-swabbing which Calhoun had said was pure routine.
After the fourth such inspection he said to Elsa:
"I don't need to see any more. What's happened to the boys the same age
as these girl nurses--the thirteen and fourteen and fifteen-year-olds?"
Elsa said uncomfortably:
"They're mostly off in the wilds. They hunt and fish and pioneer. They
don't care about girls. Some of them grow things.... I don't think
there'd be enough food if they didn't, even though we're not getting
anybody new to feed."
Calhoun nodded. In all the cities of the galaxy, small children of both
sexes were to be seen everywhere, and girls of the early teen-ages,
and adults. But the boys' age-group he'd mentioned always made itself
invisible. It congregated in groups away from the public eye, and
engaged in adventurous games and quite futile explorations. It was
socially quite self-sufficient everywhere.
"Your husband," said Calhoun, carefully impassive, "had better try to
gather in some of them. As I remember it, they're capable of a rather
admirable romantic idea of duty--for a while. We're going to need some
romanticists presently."
Elsa had faith in Calhoun now, because he seemed concerned about the
children. She said unhappily:
"Do you really think the ... old people will attack? I've grown older
since I've been here. Those of us who came first are almost like the
people on Phaedra--some ways. The younger people are inclined to be
suspicious of us because we ... try to guide them."
"If you're confiding that you think there may be two sides to this
war," Calhoun told her, "you are quite right. But see what your husband
can do about gathering some of the hunting-and-fishing members of the
community. I've got to get back to my ship."
* * * * *
He got himself driven back to the landing-grid. Walker did not drive
him, but another of the now-suspect men of twenty-five or so, from
the shelter village of the first-landed colonists. He was one of
those who'd worked with Walker from the beginning and with him had
been most embittered. Now he found himself almost a member of an older
generation. He was still bitter against the people of Phaedra, but--
"This whole business is a mess!" he said darkly as he drove through
the nearly deserted city toward the landing-grid. "We've got to figure
out a way to organize things that'll be better than the old way. But
no organization at all is no good, either! We've got some tough young
characters who like it this way, but they've got to be tamed down!"
Calhoun had his own unsettling suspicions. There have always been
splendid ideas of social systems which will make earthly paradises for
their inhabitants. Here, by happen-chance, there had come to be a world
inhabited only by the young. He tried to put aside, for the moment,
what he was unhappily sure he'd find out back at the ship. He tried to
think about this seemingly perfect opportunity for a new and better
organization of human lives.
But he couldn't believe in it. Culture-instinct theory is pretty
well worked out. The Med Service considered it proven that the basic
pattern of human societies is instinctual rather than evolved by trial
and error. The individual human being passes through a series of
instinct-patterns which fit him at different times to perform different
functions in a social organization which can vary but never change its
kind. It has to make use of the successive functions its members are
driven by instinct to perform. If it does not use its members, or give
scope to their instincts, it cannot survive. The more lethal attempts
at novel societies tried not only to make all their members alike, but
tried to make them all alike at all ages. Which could not work.
Calhoun thought unhappily of the tests he meant to make in the Med
ship. As the ground-car swerved into the great open center of the grid,
he said:
"My job is doing Med Service. I can't advise you how to plan a new
world. If I could, I wouldn't. But whoever does have authority here had
better think about some very immediate troubles."
"We'll fight if Phaedra attacks!" said the driver darkly. "They'll
never get to ground alive, and if they do--they'll wish they hadn't!"
"I wasn't thinking of Phaedra," said Calhoun.
* * * * *
The car stopped close by the Med ship. He got out. There had been
attempts to enter the ship in his absence. The gang which occupied the
control building and in theory protected Canis III against attack from
the sky had tried to satisfy their curiosity about the little ship.
They'd even used torches on the metal. But they hadn't gotten in.
Calhoun did. Murgatroyd chattered shrilly when he was put down. He
scampered relievedly about the cabin, plainly rejoicing at being once
more in familiar surroundings. Calhoun paid no attention. He closed
and dogged the air-lock door. He switched on the spacephone and said
shortly:
"Med Ship _Esclipus Twenty_ calling Phaedrian fleet! Med Ship _Esclipus
Twenty_ calling--"
The loud-speaker fairly deafened him as somebody yelled into another
spacephone mike in the grid-control building.
"_Hey! You in the ship! Stop that! No talking with the enemy!_"
Calhoun turned down the incoming volume and said patiently:
"Med Ship _Esclipus Twenty_ calling fleet from Phaedra. Come in, fleet
from Phaedra! Med Ship _Esclipus Twenty_ calling--"
There was a chorus of yellings from the nearby building. The motley,
swaggering, self-appointed landing-grid guard had tried to break into
the ship out of curiosity, but they were vastly indignant when Calhoun
did something of which they disapproved. They made it impossible for
him to have heard a reply from the space fleet presumably overhead.
But after a moment someone in the control house evidently elbowed the
others aside and shouted:
"_You! Keep that up and we'll smash you! We've got the grid to do it
with, too!_"
Calhoun said curtly:
"Med ship to Control. I've something to tell you. Suppose you listen.
But not on spacephone. Have your best grid technician come outside and
then I shall tell him by speaker."
He snapped off the spacephone and watched. The control building fairly
erupted indignant youths. After a moment he saw the gangling one
who'd grinned so proudly when the Med ship was landed with absolute
perfection. The others shouted and scowled at the ship.
Calhoun threw on the outside speaker--normally used for communication
with a ground crew before lifting.
"I'm set," said Calhoun coldly, "for overdrive travel. My Duhanne cells
are charged to the limit. If you try to form a force-field around this
ship, I'll dump half a dozen overdrive charges into it in one jolt that
will blow every coil you've got! And then how'll you fight the ships
from Phaedra? I'm going to talk to them on spacephone. Listen in if you
like. Monitor it. But don't try to bother me!"
He threw on the spacephone again and patiently resumed his calling:
"Med ship _Esclipus Twenty_ calling fleet from Phaedra! Med ship
calling fleet from Phaedra--"
He saw violent argument outside the grid's control building. Some
of the young figures raged. But the youth who'd handled the grid so
professionally raged at them. Calhoun hadn't made an idle threat. A
grid-field could be blown out. A grid could be made useless by one of
the ships it handled. When a ship like Calhoun's went into overdrive,
it put out something like four ounces of pure energy to form a
field in which it could travel past the speed of light. In terms of
horsepower or kilowatt hours, so much force would be meaningless. It
was too big. It was a quantity of energy whose mass was close to four
ounces. When the ship broke out of overdrive, that power was largely
returned to storage. The loss was negligible, compared to the total.
But, turned loose into a grid's force-field, even three or four such
charges would work havoc with the grid's equipment.
* * * * *
Calhoun got an answer from emptiness just as the members of the group
by the control building shouted each other down and went inside to
listen with bitter unease and suspicion to his talk with the enemy.
"_Phaedra fleet calling_," said a growling voice in the spacephone
speaker. "_What do you want?_"
"To exercise my authority as a Med Service officer," said Calhoun
heavily. "I warn you that I now declare this planet under quarantine.
All contact with it from space is forbidden until health hazards here
are under control. You will inform all other spacecraft and any other
spaceport you may contact of this quarantine. Message ends."
Silence. A long silence. The growling voice rasped:
"_What's that? Repeat it!_"
Calhoun repeated it. He switched off the phone and unpacked the
throat-swabbings he'd made at the four children's shelters in turn.
He opened up his laboratory equipment. He put a dilution of one
throat-swabbing into a culture slide that allowed living organisms to
be examined as they multiplied. He began to check his highly specific
suspicions. Presently he was testing them with minute traces of various
antibodies. He made rough but reasonably certain identifications. His
expression grew very, very sober. He took another swab sample and put
it through the same process. A third, and fourth, and fifth, and tenth.
He looked very grim.
It was sunset outside when there was a hammering on the ship's hull. He
switched on a microphone and speaker.
"What do you want?" he asked flatly.
The angry voice of young Walker came from the gathering darkness. The
screens showed a dozen or more inhabitants of Canis III milling angrily
about him. Some were of the young-warrior age. They engaged in bitter
argument. But the younger Walker, and four or five with him, faced the
ship with ominous quietness.
"_What's this nonsense about quarantine?_" demanded Walker harshly,
from outside. "_Not that we've space-commerce to lose, but what does it
mean?_"
"It means," Calhoun told him, "that your brave new world rates as a
slum. You've kept kids quiet with psych circuits, and they haven't
eaten properly and haven't exercised at all. They're weak from
malnutrition and feeble from not doing their own playing. They're like
slum children used to be in past ages. Here on Canis you're about ready
to wipe yourselves out. You may have done it."
"_You're crazy!_" snapped Walker. But he was upset.
"In the four shelters I visited," Calhoun said drearily, "I spotted
four cases of early diphtheria, two of typhoid, three of scarlet
fever and measles, and samples of nearly any other disease you care
to name. The kids have been developing those diseases out of weakness
and from the reservoir of infections we humans always carry with us.
They'd reached the contagious stage before I saw them--but all the kids
are kept so quiet that nobody noticed that they were sick. They've
certainly spread to each other and their nurses, and therefore out into
your general population, all the infections needed for a first-rate
multiple epidemic. And you've no doctors, no antibiotics--not even
injectors to administer shots with if you had them."
"_You're crazy!_" cried young Walker. "_Crazy! Isn't this a Phaedra
trick to make us give in?_"
"Phaedra's trick," said Calhoun more drearily than before, "is an atom
bomb they're going to drop into this landing-grid--I suspect quarantine
or no quarantine--in just two days more. Considering the total
situation, I don't think that matters."
VI.
"... The most difficult of enterprises is to secure the co-operation
of others in enterprises those others did not think of first...."
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ P. 189.
Calhoun worked all night, tending and inspecting the culture incubators
which were part of the Med ship's technical equipment. In the
children's shelters, he'd swabbed throats. In the ship, he'd diluted
the swabbings and examined them microscopically. He'd been depressingly
assured of his very worst fears as a medical man--all of which could
have been worked out in detail from the psych circuit system of child
care boastfully described by Fredericks. He could have written out
his present results in advance from a glance at the child Jak shown
him by the younger Walker's wife. But he hated to find that objective
information agreed with what he would have predicted by theory.
In every human body there are always germs. The process of good health
is in part a continual combat with slight and unnoticed infections.
Because of victories over small invasions, a human body acquires
defenses against larger invasions of contagion. Without such constant
small victories, a body ceases to keep its defenses strong against
beach-heads of infection. Yet malnutrition or even exhaustion can
weaken a body once admirably equipped for this sort of guerilla warfare.
If an undernourished child fails to win one skirmish, he can become
overwhelmed by a contagion the same child would never have known about
had he only been a little stronger. But, overwhelmed, he is a sporadic
case of disease--a case not traceable to another clinical case. And
then he is the origin of an epidemic. In slum conditions a disease
not known in years can arise and spread like wild-fire. With the best
of intentions and great technical ingenuity, the younger-generation
colonists of Canis III had made that process inevitable among the
younger children who were their last-imposed burden. The children were
under-exercised, under-stimulated, and hence under par in appetite and
nutrition. And it is an axiom of the Med Service that a single underfed
child can endanger an entire planet.
Calhoun proved the fact with appalling certainty. His cultures
astounded even him. But by dawn he had applied Murgatroyd's special
genetic abilities to them. Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a protesting
tone when Calhoun did what was necessary at that small patch on his
flank which was quite insensitive. But then Murgatroyd shook himself
and admiringly scowled back at Calhoun, imitating the intent and
worried air that Calhoun wore. Then he followed Calhoun about in high
good spirits, strutting on his hind legs, man-fashion, and pretending
to set out imaginary apparatus as Calhoun did, long ahead of time for
what he hoped would occur.
Presently Murgatroyd tired--a little quicker than usual--and went to
sleep. Calhoun bent over him and counted his respiration and heart
beat. Murgatroyd slept on. Calhoun gnawed his fingers in anxious
expectation.
He'd come on this assignment with some resentment because he thought
it foolish. He'd carried on with increasing dismay as he found it not
absurd. Now he watched over Murgatroyd with the emotional concern a
medical man feels when lives depend upon his professional efficiency,
but that efficiency depends on something beyond his control. Murgatroyd
was that something this time--but there was one other.
The _tormal_ was a pleasant little animal, and Calhoun liked him very
much. But _tormals_ were crew-members of one-man Med ships because
their metabolism was very similar to that of humans, but no _tormal_
had ever been known to die of an infectious disease. They could play
host to human infections, but only once and only lightly. It appeared
that the furry little creatures had a hair-trigger sensitivity to
bacterial toxins. The presence of infective material in their blood
streams produced instant and violent reaction--and the production
of antibodies in large quantity. Theorists said that _tormals_ had
dynamic immunity-systems instead of passive ones, like humans. Their
body-chemistry seemed to look truculently for microscopic enemies to
destroy, rather than to wait for something to develop before they
fought it.
If he reacted normally, now, in a matter of hours his blood stream
would be saturated with antibodies--or an antibody--lethal to the
cultures Calhoun had injected. There was, however, one unfortunate
fact. Murgatroyd weighed perhaps twenty pounds. There was most of a
planetary population needing antibodies only he could produce.
He slept from breakfast-time to lunch. He breathed slightly faster than
he should. His heart beat was troubled.
* * * * *
Calhoun swore a little when noon came. He looked at the equipment all
laid out for biological micro-analysis--tiny test tubes holding half
a drop, reagent flasks dispensing fractions of milliliters, tools and
scales much tinier than doll-size. If he could determine the structure
and formula of an antibody--or antibodies--that Murgatroyd's tiny body
formed--why synthesis in quantity should be possible. Only the Med ship
had not materials for so great an amount of product.
There was only one chance. Calhoun threw the spacephone switch.
Instantly a voice came from the Speaker.
"... _ing Med Ship_ Esclipus Twenty! _Phaedra fleet calling Med Ship_
Esclipus Twenty!"
"Med ship answering," said Calhoun. "What is it?"
The voice went on: "_Calling Med Ship_ Twenty! _Calling Med Ship_
Esclipus Twenty! _Calling_--" It went on interminably. It was a very
long way off, if it took so long for Calhoun's answer to be heard.
But the call-formula broke off. "_Med ship! Our doctors want to know
the trouble on Canis! Can we help? We've hospital ships equipped and
ready!_"
"The question," said Calhoun steadily, "is whether I can make a
formula-and-structure identification, and whether you can synthesize
what I identify. How's your lab? How are you supplied with biological
crudes?"
He waited. By the interval between his answer and a reply to it, the
ship he'd communicated with was some five million miles or more away.
But it was still not as far as the next outward planet where the
Phaedrian fleet was based.
While he waited for his answer, Calhoun heard murmurings. They would
come from the control building at the side of the grid. The loutish,
suspicious gang there was listening. Calhoun had threatened to wreck
the grid if they tried anything on the Med ship--but he could do
nothing unless they tried to use a force-field. They listened in,
muttering among themselves.
A long time later the voice from space came back. The fleet of the
older generation of Phaedra was grounded, save for observation ships
like the one speaking. The fleet had full biological equipment for any
emergency. It could synthesize any desired compound up to--The degree
of complexity and the classification was satisfactory.
"Day before yesterday," said Calhoun, "when you had me aground on
Canis IV, your leader Walker said your children on this planet were
destroying your grandchildren. He didn't say how. But the process
is well under way--only the whole population will probably go with
them. Most of the population, anyhow. I'm going to need those hospital
ships and your best biological chemists--I hope! Get them started this
way--fast! I'll try to make a deal for at least the hospital ships to
be allowed to land. Over."
He did not flick off the spacephone. He listened. And a bitter,
envenomed voice came from nearby:
"_Sure! Sure! We'll let 'em land ships they say are hospital ships,
loaded down with men and guns! We'll land 'em ourselves, we will!_"
There was a click. The spacephone in the control building was turned
off.
* * * * *
Calhoun turned back to the sleeping Murgatroyd. There was a movement
about the grid-control building. Sleek, glistening ground-cars hurtled
away--two of them. Calhoun turned then to the planetary communicator.
It could break in on any wave-length used for radio communication under
a planet's Heaviside roof. He had to get in touch with Walker or some
other of the first-landed colonists. They were still embittered against
their home world, but they must be beginning to realize that Calhoun
had told the truth about the youngest children. They'd find sickness if
they looked for it.
But the planetary communicator picked up nothing. No radiation
wave-length was in use. There was no organized news service. The young
people on Canis III were too self-centered to care about news. There
were no entertainment programs. Only show-offs would want to broadcast,
and show-offs would not make the apparatus.
So Calhoun could not communicate save by spacephone, with a range of
millions of miles, and the ship's exterior loud-speakers, with a range
of hundreds of feet. If he left the Med ship, he wasn't likely to be
able to fight his way back in. He couldn't find the younger Walker on
foot, in any case, and he did not know anyone else to seek.
Besides, there was work to be done in the ship.
Before Murgatroyd waked, the two ground-cars had returned. At
intervals, nearly a dozen other cars followed to the control building,
hurtling across the grid's clear center with magnificent clouds of dust
following them. They braked violently when they arrived. Youths piled
out. Some of them yelled at the Med ship and made threatening gestures.
They swarmed into the building.
Murgatroyd said tentatively, "_Chee?_"
He was awake. Calhoun could have embraced him.
"Now we see what we see!" he said grimly. "I hope you've done your
stuff, Murgatroyd!"
Murgatroyd came obligingly to him, and Calhoun lifted him to the
table he had ready. Again, what he did did not hurt. A tiny patch
on Murgatroyd's side had been made permanently insensitive shortly
after he was born. Calhoun extracted a quantity of what he hoped was
a highly concentrated bacterial antagonist. He took thirty CCs in
all. He clumped the red cells. He separated the serum. He diluted an
infinitesimal bit of it and with a steady hand added it to a slide
of the same cultures--living--on which Murgatroyd's dynamic immunity
system had worked.
The cultures died immediately.
Calhoun had an antibody sample which could end the intolerable
now-spreading disaster on the world of young people--_if_ he could
analyze it swiftly and accurately, and _if_ the hospital ships from
Phaedra could be landed, and _if_ they could synthesize some highly
complex antibody compounds, and _if_ the inhabitants of Canis III would
lay aside their hatred--
He heard a tapping sound on the Med ship's hull. He looked at a screen.
Two youths stood in the doorway of the control building, leisurely
shooting at the Med ship with sporting weapons.
Calhoun set to work. Sporting rifles were not apt to do much damage.
For an hour, while there was the occasional clanking of a missile
against the ship's outer planking, he worked at the infinitely delicate
job of separating serum from its antibody content. For another hour he
tried to separate the antibody into fractions. Incredibly, it would not
separate. It was one substance only.
There was a crackling sound and the whole ship shivered. The screen
showed a cloud of smoke drifting away. The members of the grid-guard
had detonated some explosive--intended for mining, most likely--against
one of the landing-fins.
Calhoun swore. His call to the Phaedrian fleet was the cause. The
grid-guard meant to allow no landing. He'd threatened to blow out their
controls if they tried to use the grid on the Med ship, but they wanted
it ready for use as a weapon against the space fleet. They couldn't use
it against him. He couldn't damage it unless they tried. They wanted
him away.
He went back to his work. From time to time, annoyedly, he looked up
at the outside. Presently a young-warrior group moved toward the ship,
carrying something very heavy. A larger charge of explosive, perhaps.
He waited until they were within yards of the ship. He stabbed the
emergency-rocket button. A thin, pencillike rod of flame shot downward
between the landing-fins. It was blue-white--the white of a sun's
surface. For one instant it splashed out hungrily before it bored and
melted a hole into the ground itself into which to flow. But in that
instant it had ignited the covering of the burden the youths carried.
They dropped it and fled. The pencil flame bored deeper and deeper into
the ground. Clouds of smoke and steam arose.
There was a lurid flash. The burden that the young warriors had
abandoned, vanished in a flare that looked like a lightning bolt.
The ship quivered from the detonation. A crater appeared where the
explosive had been.
Calhoun cut off the emergency rocket, which had burned for ten seconds
at one-quarter thrust.
* * * * *
Sunset came and night fell for the second time. He noticed, abruptly,
that some of the ground-cars from about the control building went
racing away. But they did not pass close to the Med ship in their
departure. He labored on. He'd spent nearly thirty hours making
cultures from the specimens swabbed from children's throats, and
injecting Murgatroyd, and waiting for his reaction, and then separating
a tiny quantity of antibody--which would not total more than the dust
from a butterfly's wing--from the serum he obtained.
Now he worked on, through the night. Far away--some tens or scores of
millions of miles--the hospital ships of the Phaedrian fleet took off
from the next outward planet. They would be coming at full speed toward
Canis III. They would need the results of the work Calhoun was doing,
if they were to prevent an appalling multiple plague which could wipe
out all the sacrifice the building of the colony had entailed. But his
work had to be exact.
It was tedious. It was exacting. It was exhaustingly time-consuming. He
did have the help of previous experience, and the knowledge that the
most probable molecular design would include this group of radicals
and probably that, and side-chains like this might be looked for, and
co-polymers might--But he was bleary-eyed and worn out before dawn came
again. His eyes felt as if there were grains of sand beneath their
lids. His brain felt dry--felt fibrous inside his skull, as if it were
excelsior. But when the first red colors showed in the east, with the
towers of the city against them, he had the blueprint of what should be
the complex molecule formed in Murgatroyd's furry body.
He had just begun to realize, vaguely, that his work was done, when
twin glaring lights came bouncing and plunging across the empty center
of the grid. They were extraordinarily bright in the ruddy darkness.
They stopped. A man jumped from the ground-car and ran toward the ship.
Calhoun wearily threw on the outer microphones and speakers.
"What's the matter now?" The man was the younger Walker.
"You're right!" called Walker's voice, strained to the breaking
point. "There is sickness! Everywhere! There's an epidemic! It's just
beginning! People felt tired and peevish and shut themselves away.
Nobody realized! But they've got fevers! They're showing rashes!
There's some delirium! The smallest children are worst--they were
always quiet--but it's everywhere! We've never had real sickness
before! What can we do?"
Calhoun said tiredly:
"I've got the design for an antibody. Murgatroyd made it. It's what
he's for. The hospital ships from Phaedra are on the way now. They'll
start turning it out in quantity and their doctors will start giving
everybody shots of it."
Young Walker cried out fiercely:
"But that would mean they'd land! They'd take over! I can't let them
land! I haven't the power! Nobody has! Too many of us would rather
die than let them land! They lied to us. It's bad enough to have them
hovering outside. If they land, there'll be fighting everywhere and
forever! We can't let them help us! We won't! We'll fight--we'll die
first!"
Calhoun blinked, owlishly.
"That," he said exhaustedly, "is something you have to figure out for
yourself. If you're determined to die, I can't stop you. Die first or
die second--it's your choice. You make it. I'm going to sleep!"
He cut off the mike and speakers. He couldn't keep his eyes open.
VII.
"... As a strictly practical matter, a man who has to leave a task
that he has finished, and wishes it to remain as he leaves it,
usually finds it necessary to give the credit for his work to
someone who will remain on the spot and will thereby be moved to
protect and defend it so long as he lives...."
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ Pp. 167-8.
Murgatroyd tugged at Calhoun and shrilled anxiously into his ear.
"_Chee-chee!_" he cried frantically. "_Chee-chee-chee!_"
Calhoun blinked open his eyes. There was a crashing sound and the Med
ship swayed upon its landing-fins. It almost went over. It teetered
horribly, and then slowly swung back past uprightness and tilted nearly
as far in the opposite direction. There were crunching sounds as the
soil partly gave way beneath one landing fin.
Then Calhoun waked thoroughly. In one movement he was up and launching
himself across the cabin to the control-chair. There was another
violent impact. He swept his hand across the row of studs which turned
on all sources of information and communication. The screens came on,
and the spacephone, and the outside mikes and loud-speakers, and even
the planetary communication unit which would have reported had there
been any use of the electromagnetic spectrum in the atmosphere of this
planet.
Bedlam filled the cabin. From the spacephone speaker a stentorian voice
shouted:
"_This is our last word! Permit our landing or_--"
A thunderous detonation was reported by the outside mikes. The Med ship
fairly bounced. There was swirling white smoke outside the ship. It was
mid-morning, now, and the giant lacy structure of the landing-grid was
silhouetted against a deep-blue sky. There were cracklings from some
electric storm perhaps a thousand miles away. There were shoutings,
also brought in by the outside mikes.
Two groups of figures, fifty or a hundred yards from the Med ship,
labored furiously over some objects on the ground. Smoke billowed out;
then a heavy, blastlike "_Boom!_" Something came spinning through the
air, end over end, with sputtering sparks trailing behind it. It fell
close by the base of the upright Med ship.
Calhoun struck down the emergency rocket stud as it exploded. The roar
of the rocket filled the interior of the ship. The spacephone speaker
bellowed again:
"_We've got a megaton-bomb missile headed down! This is our last word!
Permit landing or we come in fighting!_"
The object from the crude cannon went off violently. With the emergency
rocket flaming to help, it lifted the Med ship, which jerked upward,
settled back--and only two of its fins touched solidity. It began to
topple because there was no support for the third.
Once toppled over, it would be helpless. It could be blasted with
deliberately placed charges between its hull and the ground. A crater
already existed where support for the third landing fin should have
been.
Calhoun pushed the stud down full. The ship steadied and lifted.
It went swinging across the level center of the landing-grid. Its
slender, ultra-high-velocity flame knifed down through the sod,
leaving a smoking, incandescent slash behind. The figures about the
bomb-throwers scattered and fled. The Med ship straightened to an
upright position and began to rise.
Calhoun swore. The grid was the planet's defense against landings
from space, because it could fling out missiles of any size with
perfect aim at any target within some hundred thousand miles--a good
twelve planetary diameters. Its operators meant to defy the fleet from
Phaedra and had to get rid of the Med ship before they dared energize
its coils. Now they were rid of it. Now they could throw bombs, or
boulders, or anything else its force-fields could handle.
The spacephone roared again:
"_On the ground there! Our missile is aimed straight for your grid! It
carries a megaton fission bomb! Evacuate the area!_"
* * * * *
Calhoun swore again. The gang, the guard, the young-warrior group at
the grid would be far too self-confident to heed such a threat. If
there were wiser heads on Canis III, they could not enforce their
commands. A human community has to be complete or it is not workable.
The civilization which had existed on Phaedra II was shattered by
the coming doom of its sun. The fragments--on Phaedra, in the fleet,
in each small occupied community on Canis III--were incomplete and
incapable of thinking or acting in concert with any other. Every small
group on this planet, certainly, gave only lip-service to the rest.
The young world was inherently incapable of organizing itself, save on
a miniature scale. And one such miniature group had the grid and would
fight with it regardless of the wishes of any other--because that group
happened to be composed of instinct-driven members of the young-warrior
group.
But he was still within the half-mile-high fence of the grid's steel
structure. He strapped himself in his seat. The ship rose and rose.
It came level with the top of the colony's one defense against space.
The peculiar, corrugated copper lip of that structure, formed into the
force-field guide which made it usable, swung toward him. He raised the
rocket-thrust and shot skyward.
A deafening bellow came from the speakers:
"_Yeah! Go on out and join the old folk! We'll get you!_"
Obviously, the voice was from the ground below him. The ship flashed
upward. Calhoun rasped into the spacephone mike, himself:
"Med ship calling fleet! Call back that missile! I've got the antibody
structure! This is no time for fighting! Call your missile back!"
Derisive laughter--again from the ground. Then the heavy, growling
voice of an older man.
"_Keep out of the way, Med ship! These young fools are destroying
themselves. Now they're destroying our grandchildren! If we hadn't been
soft-hearted before--if we'd fought them from the beginning--the little
ones wouldn't be dying now! Keep out of the way! If you can help us,
it'll be after we've won the war!_"
The sky turned purple, at the height Calhoun had reached. It went
black. The sun Canis flamed and flared against a background of ebony
space, sprinkled with a thousand million colored stars. The Med ship
continued to rise.
Calhoun felt singularly and helplessly alone. Below him the sunlit
surface of a world spread out, its edge already curving, cloud-masses
in its atmosphere veiling the details of mountains and green-clad
plains. There was the blue of ocean, creeping in. The city of the
landing-grid was tiny, now. The brown of ploughed fields was no longer
divided into rectangular shapes. It was a mere brownish haze between
the colorings of as-yet-untouched virgin areas. The colonists of Canis
III had so far made only a part of the new world their own. Many times
more remained to be turned to human use.
The rear screen showed something coming upward. Masses of stuff,
without shape but with terrific velocity. It was inchoate, indefinite
stuff. It was plain dirt from the center of the landing-grid's floor,
flung upward with the horrible power available for the landing and
launching of ships. And, focused upon it, the force-fields of the grid
could control it absolutely for a hundred thousand miles.
Calhoun swerved, ever so slightly. His own velocity had reached miles
per second, but the formless mass following him was traveling at
tens. It would not matter what such a hurtling missile was. At such
a velocity it would not strike like a mass, but like a meteor-shower,
flaring into incandescence when it touched and vaporizing the Med ship
with itself in the flame of impact.
But the grid would have to let go before it hit. There was monstrous
stored power in the ship's Duhanne cells. If so much raw energy
were released into anything on which a force-field was focused, it
would destroy the source of the field. The grid could control its
battering-ram until the very last fraction of a second, but then it
must release--and its operator knew it.
Calhoun swung his ship frantically.
* * * * *
The mass of speeding planet-matter raced past no more than hundreds of
yards away. It was released. It would go on through empty space for
months or years--perhaps forever.
Calhoun swung back to his upward course. Now he sent raging commands
before him:
"Pull back that missile! You can't land a bomb on Canis! There are
people there! You can't drop a bomb on Canis!"
There was no answer. He raged again:
"Med ship calling Phaedra fleet! There's disease on Canis! Your
children and grandchildren are stricken! You can't fight your way
to help them! You can't blast your way to sickbeds! You've got to
negotiate! You've got to compromise! You've got to make a bargain or
you and they together--"
A snarling voice from the ground said spitefully:
"_Never mind, little Med man! Let 'em try to land! Let 'em try to take
over and boss us! We listened to them long enough! Let 'em try to land
and see what happens! We've got their fleet spotted! We'll take care of
them!_"
Then the growling tones Calhoun had come to associate with Phaedra:
"_You keep out of the way, Med Ship. If our young children are sick,
we're going to them! We're just beyond the area in which no drive will
work. When the grid has been blasted our landing ship will go down and
we'll come in! Our missile is only half an hour from target now! We'll
begin our landing in three hours or less! Out of the way!_"
Calhoun said very bitter and extremely impolite words. But he faced
an absolute emotional stalemate between enemies of whom both were in
the wrong. The frantic anger of the adults of Phaedra, barred from the
world to which they'd sent their children first so they could stay
where doom awaited, was matched by the embittered revolt of the young
people who had been worked past endurance and burdened past anyone's
power to tolerate. There could be no compromise. It was not possible
for either side to confess even partial defeat by the other. The
quarrel had to be fought to a finish as between the opposing sides, and
then hatred would remain no matter which side won. Such hatred could
not be reasoned with.
It could only be replaced by a greater hatred.
Calhoun ground his teeth. The Med ship hurtled out from the sunlit
Canis III. Somewhere--not many thousands of miles away--the fleet of
Phaedra clustered. Its crews were raging, but they were sick with
anxiety about the enemies they prepared to fight. Aground there was
hatred among the older of the colonists--the young-warrior group in
particular, because that is the group in which hate is appropriate--and
there was no less a sickish disturbance because even in being right
they were wrong. Every decent impulse that had been played upon to
make them exhaust themselves, before their revolt, now protested the
consequences of their revolt. Yet they believed that in revolting they
were justified.
Murgatroyd did not like the continued roar of emergency-rockets. He
climbed up on Calhoun's lap and protested.
"_Chee!_" he said urgently. "_Chee-chee!_"
Calhoun grunted.
"Murgatroyd," he said, "it is a Med service rule that a Med ship man is
expendable in case of need. I'm very much afraid that we've got to be
expended. Hang on, now! We try some action!"
* * * * *
He turned the Med ship end for end and fed full power to the rockets.
The ship would decelerate even faster than it had gathered speed.
He set the nearest-object indicator to high gain. It showed the
now-retreating mass of stone and soil from Canis. Calhoun then set up a
scanner to examine a particular part of the sky.
"Since fathers can be insulted," he observed, "they've made a missile
to fight its way down through anything that's thrown at it. It'll be
remote-controlled for the purpose. It's very doubtful that there's a
spaceship on the planet to fight it back. There's been no reference to
one, anyhow. So what the missile will have to fight off will be stuff
from the landing-grid only. Which is good. Moreover, fathers being what
they are, regardless, that missile won't be a high-speed one. They'll
want to be able to call it back at the last minute. They'll hope to."
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd, insisting that he didn't like the
rocket-roar.
"So we will make ourselves as unpopular as possible with the fathers,"
observed Calhoun, "and if we live through it we will make ourselves
even more cordially hated by the sons. And then they will be able to
tolerate each other a little, because they both hate us so much. And so
the public-health situation on Canis III may be resolved. Ah!"
The nearest-object indicator showed something moving toward the Med
ship. The scanner repeated the information in greater detail. There
was a small object headed toward the planet from empty space. Its
velocity and course--
Calhoun put on double acceleration to intercept it, while he pointed
the ship quartering so he'd continue to lose outward speed.
Ten minutes later the spacephone growled:
"_Med ship! What do you think you're doing?_"
"Getting in trouble," said Calhoun briefly.
Silence. The screens showed a tiny pin point of moving light, far away
toward emptiness. Calhoun computed his course. He changed it.
"_Med ship!_" rasped the spacephone. "_Keep out of the way of our
missile! It's a megaton bomb!_"
Calhoun said irrelevantly:
"Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a bloody nose." He
added. "I know what it is."
"_Let it alone!_" rasped the voice. "_The grid on the ground has
spotted it. They're sending up rocks to fight it._"
"They're rotten marksmen," said Calhoun. "They missed me!"
He aimed his ship. He knew the capacities of his ship as only a man
who'd handled one for a long time could. He knew quite exactly what it
could do.
The rocket from remoteness--the megaton-bomb guided missile--came
smoking furiously from the stars. Calhoun seemed to throw his ship into
a collision course. The rocket swerved to avoid him, though guided
from many thousands of miles away. There was a trivial time-lag, too,
between the time its scanners picked up a picture and transmitted it,
and the transmission reached the Phaedrian fleet and the controlling
impulses reached the missile in response. Calhoun counted on that. He
had to. But he wasn't trying for a collision. He was forcing evasive
action. He secured it. The rocket slanted itself to dart aside, and
Calhoun threw the Med ship into a flip-flop and--it was a hair-raising
thing--slashed the rocket lengthwise with his rocket flame. That flame
was less than half an inch thick, but it was of the temperature of
the surface of a star, and in emptiness it was some hundreds of yards
long. It sliced the rocket neatly. It flamed hideously, and even so
far, Calhoun felt a cushioned impact from the flame. But that was the
missile's rocket fuel. An atom bomb is the one known kind of bomb which
will not be exploded by being sliced in half.
The fragments of the guided missile went on toward the planet, but they
were harmless.
"_All right!_" said the spacephone icily--but Calhoun thought there was
relief in the voice. "_You've only delayed our landing and lost a good
many lives to disease!_"
Calhoun swallowed something he suspected was his heart, come up into
his throat.
"Now," he said, "we'll see if that's true!"
* * * * *
His ship had lost its spaceward velocity before it met the missile.
Now it was gaining velocity toward the planet. He cut off the rocket
to observe. He swung the hull about and gave a couple of short rocket
blasts.
"I'd better get economical," he told Murgatroyd. "Rocket fuel is hard
to come by, this far out in space. If I don't watch out, we'll be
caught in orbit, here, with no way to get down! I don't think the local
inhabitants would be inclined to help us."
His lateral dash at the missile had given him something close to
orbital speed relative to the planet's surface, though. The Med ship
went floating, with seemingly infinite leisure, around the vast bulge
of the embattled world. In less than half an hour it was deep in the
blackness of Canis' nighttime shadow. In three-quarters of an hour it
came out again at the sunrise edge, barely four hundred miles high.
"Not quite speed enough for a true orbit," he told Murgatroyd
critically. "I'd give a lot for a good map!"
He watched alertly. He could gain more height if he needed to, but he
was worried about rocket fuel. It is intended for dire emergencies
only. It weighed too much to be carried in quantity.
He spotted the city of Canopolis on the horizon. He became furiously
busy. He inverted the little ship and dived down into atmosphere. He
killed speed with rocket flames and air friction together, falling
recklessly the while. He was barely two miles high when he swept past
a ridge of mountains and the city lay ahead and below. He could have
crashed just short of it. But he spent more fuel to stay aloft. He used
the rockets twice. Delicately.
At a ground speed of perhaps as little as two hundred miles an hour,
supported at the end by a jetting, hair-thin rocket flame that was
like a rod of electric arc-fire, he swept across the top of the
landing-grid. The swordlike flame washed briefly over the nearer edge.
Very briefly. The flame cut a slash down through steel girders and
heavy copper cables together. The rockets roared furiously. That one
disabling cut at the grid had been on a downward, darting drift. Now
the ship shouted, and swooped up, and on--and it swept above the far
side of the grid only yards from the wide strip of copper which guided
its force-fields out into space. Here it cut cables, girders, and
force-field guide together for better than two hundred feet from the
top. The grid was useless until painstaking labor had made the damage
good.
Calhoun used nearly the last of his fuel for height while he said
crisply on the spacephone:
"Calling fleet! Calling fleet! Med ship calling fleet! I've disabled
the landing-grid on Canopolis! You can come in now and take care of the
sick. There are no weapons aground to speak of and if you don't get
trigger-happy there should be no fighting. I'll be landed off somewhere
in the hills to the north of the town. If the local inhabitants don't
pack explosives out and crack the ship to get at me, I'll have the
facts on the antibody ready for you. In fact, as soon as I get down
I'll give them to you by spacephone, just in case."
It was a near thing, though. His rocket fuel was exhausted when he hit
the ground. The flame sputtered and stopped when the ship was three
feet from touching. It fell over, splintering trees. It was distinctly
a rough landing.
Murgatroyd was very indignant about it. He scolded shrilly while
Calhoun unstrapped himself from the chair and when he looked out to see
where they were.
* * * * *
It was a week later when the Med ship--brought to the grid for repair
and refueling--was ready for space again. The original landing-grid
still stood, of course. But it was straddled and overwhelmed, huge as
it was, by the utterly gigantic flying grid from Phaedra. There were
not many ships aground, though. As Calhoun moved toward the control
building, now connected by cable to the control quarters in the flying
grid, one of the few ships remaining seemed to fall toward the sky. A
second ship followed only seconds later.
He went into the control building. Walker the elder, from Phaedra,
nodded remotely as he entered. The younger Walker scowled at him. He
had been in consultation with his father, and the atmosphere was one of
great reserve.
"Hm-m-m," said the elder Walker, gruffly. "What's the report?"
"Fairly good," said Calhoun. "There was one lot of antibody that
seems to have been a trifle under strength. But the general situation
seems satisfactory. There'll be a few more cases of one thing and
another, of course--cases that are incubating now. But they'll do
all right on the antibody shots. They have so far, at any rate." He
said to the younger Walker, "You did a very good job rounding up the
thirteen-to-fifteen-year-olds to escort the fleet doctors and handle
the patients for them. They took themselves very seriously. They were
ideal for the job. Your young-warrior group--"
"A lot of them," said young Walker dourly, "have taken to the woods.
They swear they'll never give in!"
"How about the girls?"
Young Walker shrugged.
"They're fluttering about and beginning to talk about clothes. When
older women arrive there'll be dress-making--"
"And the lads in the woods," said Calhoun, "will come out to fascinate,
and be fascinated instead. Do you think there'll be really much
trouble?"
"No-o-o," said young Walker sourly. "Some of ... our younger crowd seem
relieved to be rid of responsibility."
"But," interposed the older Walker, gruffly, "he wants it. He thrives
on it. He'll get it!" He hrrumphed. "The same with the others who
showed what they could do here. We oldsters need them. We don't plan
any ... ah ... reprisals."
Calhoun raised his eyebrows.
"Should I be surprised?"
The older Walker snorted.
"You didn't expect us to fall into each other's arms after what's
happened, did you? No! But we are going to try to ignore our ...
differences as much as we can. We won't forget them, though."
"I suspect," said Calhoun, "that they'll be harder to remember than
you think. You had a culture that split apart. Its pieces were
incomplete--and a society has to be complete to survive. It isn't a
human invention. It's something we have an instinct for--as birds have
an instinct to build nests. When we build a culture according to our
instincts, we get along. When that's impossible--there's trouble." Then
he said, "I'm not trying to lecture you."
"Oh," said the elder Walker. "You aren't?"
Calhoun grinned.
"I thought I'd be the most unpopular man on this planet," he said
cheerfully. "And I am. I interfered in everybody's business and nobody
carried out his plans the way he wanted to. But at least nobody feels
like he won. You'll be pleased when I lift the quarantine and take
off, won't you?"
The older Walker said scornfully:
"We're paying no attention to your quarantine! Our fleet's loading up
our wives on Phaedra, to ferry them here as fast as overdrive will do
it! D'you think we'd pay any attention to your quarantine?"
Calhoun grinned again. The younger Walker said painfully:
"I suppose you think we should--" He stopped, and said very carefully:
"What you did was for our good, all right, but it hurts us more than it
does you. In twenty years, maybe, we'll be able to laugh at ourselves.
Then we'll feel grateful. Now we know what we owe you, but we don't
like it."
"And that," said Calhoun, "means that everything is back to normal.
That's the traditional attitude toward all medical men--owe them a lot
and hate to pay. I'll sign the quarantine release and take off as soon
as you give me some rocket fuel, just in case of emergency."
"Right away!" said the two Walkers, in unison.
Calhoun snapped his fingers. Murgatroyd swaggered to his side. Calhoun
took the little _tormal_'s black paw in his hand.
"Come along, Murgatroyd," he said cheerfully. "You're the only person
I really treated badly, and you don't mind. I suppose the moral of all
this is that a _tormal_ is a man's best friend."
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