Murray Leinster

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”