"Who the hell, pardoning the expression, who on this hell-fired world is Fiona Macwhatsis?" Leicester scowled. "I never heard of the damn girl."
Moray chuckled. "Does that matter? I happened to spend most of this wind making love to cabbage sprouts and baby bean plants, or at least listening to them telling me their troubles, but most of us spent it a little less--seriously, shall we say. Dr. Di Asturien's going to ask you the names of any possible female contacts. "
Leicester said, "The only one I remember, I had to fight for, and I lost." He rubbed the fading bruise on his chin. "Oh, wait--is this a redheaded girl, one of the Commune group?"
Moray said, "I don't know the girl by sight. But about three--fourths of the New Hebrides people are red-haired--they're mostly Scots, and a few Irish. I'd say the chances were better than average that unless the girl miscarries, you'll have a red-headed son or daughter come nine-ten months from now. So you see, Leicester, you have a stake in this world."
Leicester flushed, a slow angry blush. He said, "I don't want my descendants to live in caves and scratch the ground for a living. I want them to know what kind of world we came from."
Moray did not answer for a moment. Finally he said, "I ask you seriously--don't answer, I'm not the keeper of your conscience, but think it over--might it not be best to let our descendants evolve a technology indigenous to this world? Rather than tantalizing them with the knowledge of one that could destroy this planet?"
"I'm counting on my descendants having good sense," Leicester said.
"Go ahead and program the stuff into the computer, then, if you want to," Moray said with the same small shrug, "maybe they'll have too much good sense to use it."
Leicester turned to go. "Can I have my assistant back? Or has Camilla Del Rey been assigned to something important, like cooking or making curtains for the hospital?"
Moray shook his head. "You can have her back when she's out of the hospital," he said, "although I've got her listed as pregnant, for assignment to light work only, and I thought we'd ask her to write some elementary mathematics texts. But the computer isn't very strenuous; if she wants to go back to it, I've no objection."
He looked pointedly at the work charts cluttering his desk, and Harry Leicester, ex-captain of the starship, realized that he had been, for all practical purposes, dismissed.
Chapter
THIRTEEN
Ewen Ross hesitated over the genetic charts and looked up at Judith Lovat. "Believe me, Judy. I'm not trying to make trouble for you, but it's going to make our records a lot simpler. Who was the father?"
"You didn't believe me when I told you before," Judy said flatly, "so if you know the answer better than I do, say whatever you like."
"I hardly know how to answer you," Ewen said. "I don't remember being with you, but if you say I was--"
She shook her head stubbornly, and he sighed. "The same story of an alien. Can't you see how fantastic that is? How completely unbelievable? Are you trying to postulate that the aborigines of this world are human enough to crossbreed with our women?" He hesitated. "You aren't by any chance being funny, Judy?"
"I'm not postulating anything, Ewen. I'm not a geneticist, I'm simply an expert in dietetics. I'm simply telling you what happened."
"During a time when you were insane. Two times."
Heather touched his arm gently. "Ewen," she said, "Judy's not lying. She's telling the truth--or what she believes to be the truth. Take it easy."
"But damn it, her beliefs aren't evidence." Ewen sighed and shrugged. "All right, Judy, have it your way. But it must have been MacLeod--or Zabal. Or me. Whatever you think you remember, it must have been."
"If you say so, of course it must have been," Judy said, quietly stood up and walked away, knowing without needing to look that what Ewen had written down was father unknown; possible: MacLeod, Lewi; Zabal, Marco; Ross, Ewen.
Heather said quietly behind the closing door, "Darling, you were a little rough on her."
"I happen not to think we have room for fantasy on a world as rough as this. Damn it, Heather, I was trained to save life at all costs--all costs. And I've already had to see people die… I've let them die--when we're sane, we've got to be supersane to compensate!" the young doctor said wildly.
Heather thought about that for a minute and finally said, "Ewen, how do you judge? Maybe what seems sanity on Earth might be foolishness here. For instance, you know the Chief is training groups of the women for prenatal care and midwifery--in case, he says, we lose too many people this winter for the Medical staff to cope. He also said that he himself hadn't delivered a baby since he was an intern--you don't in the Space Service of course. Well, one of the first things he told us was; if a woman's going to miscarry, don't take any extraordinary measures to prevent it. If having the mother rest and keep warm won't save the child, nothing else; no hormones, no fetal-support drugs, nothing."
That's fantastic," Ewen said, "it's almost criminal!"
"That's what Dr. Di Asturien said," Heather told him. "On Earth, it would be criminal. But here, he said, first of all, a threatened miscarriage may be one way of nature discarding an embryo which can't adapt to the environment here--gravity, and so forth. Better to let the woman miscarry early and start over, instead of wasting six months carrying a child who will die, or grow up defective. Also, on Earth, we could afford to save defective children--lethal genes, mental retardates, congenital deformities, fetal insults, and so forth. We had elaborate machinery and medical structure for such things as exchange transfusions, growth-hormone transplants, rehabilitation and training if the child grew up defective. But here, unless some day we want to take the harsh step of exposing defective infants or killing them, we'd better keep them down to an absolute minimum--and about half the defective children born on Earth--maybe ninety per cent, nobody knows, it's such routine now on Earth to prevent a miscarriage at any cost--are the result of preventing children who really should have died, nature's mistakes, from being selected out. On a world like this, it's absolute survival for our race; we can't let lethal genes and defects get into our gene pool. See what I mean? Insanity on Earth--harsh facts for survival here. Natural selection has to take its course--and this means no heroic methods to prevent miscarriages, no extreme methods to save moribund or birth-damaged babies."
"And what's all this got to do with Judy's wild story about an alien being fathering her child?" Ewen demanded.
"Only this," Heather said, "we've got to learn to think in new ways--and not to reject things out of hand because they sound fantastic."
"You believe some nonhuman alien--oh, come, Heather! For God's sake!"
"What God?" Heather asked. "All the Gods I ever heard of belong to Earth. I don't know who fathered Judy's baby. I wasn't there. But she was, and in the absence of proof about it, I'd take her word. She's not a fanciful woman, and if she says that some alien came along and made love to her, and that she found herself pregnant, damn it, I'll believe it until it's proved otherwise. At least until I see the baby. If it's the living image of you, or Zabal, or MacLeod, maybe I'll believe Judy had a brainstorm. But during this second Wind, you behaved rationally, up to a point. MacAran behaved rationally, up to a point. Evidently after the first exposure, a little control remains on subsequent exposures to the drug, or pollen. She gave a rational account of what she did this time, and it was consistent with what happened the first time. So why not give her the benefit of the doubt?"