“I begin to understand!” Martin said excitedly. ‘The tiny fraction of the original population remaining on Keida was too small to support the pre-Exodus financial structures, so you adopted an exchange and barter system. Your own specialist experience is exchanged for the First’s fuel oil, out-of-season food, or whatever else you need. But that makes you a very important person back there. Quite apart from the medical service provided to your own people, you are one of the city’s prime resources…”
The Keidi held up one hand. “You may deduce the answers to your own questions if you wish, but they will still count. Well?”
“Please go on,” Martin said.
“The First is certainly there,” the doctor went on, “because the mother-to-be is second generation by direct descent, so he would not be anywhere else. Almost certainly the delay is due to his trying to decide whether or not to place himself under an obligation to a couple of Galactics.
“After what the Federation did to Keida,” he continued, ‘‘they do not like you people. That should not surprise you. They would like nothing better than that you leave this world alone. I’m surprised your offer of help wasn’t rejected at once. The condition of the female must be serious.”
“But surely they know that we want only to help,” Martin protested, “that we won’t insist on them honoring their obligation because, well, they have nothing we want.”
‘They have information,” the Keidi reminded him.
Martin was silent. Over the past two decades such blind, unreasoning hostility had become completely foreign to his experience, not only among the Citizens of the Federation World but also on the planets whose intelligent and visually frightful inhabitants he had learned to understand. Some of the Teldins and the Blind Ones had displayed hostility, until the reason for it was understood and the misunderstandings in speech and behavior which had caused it were modified.
But he was forgetting that the tiny remnant of the population left on Keida was not normal people. They — were the antisocial elements, the beings who had failed to pass the very liberal requirements for citizenship, the Keidi predators-in short, the wolves who now had only other wolves instead of sheep on which to prey. They were the Undesirables.
But was this aging medic, whose cloak and staff were still dripping rainwater onto the deck at his feet, and who was trying to bring aid to an expectant mother, was he an Undesirable? And would the soon-to-be-born offspring of the First’s grandchild he was visiting inherit the mother’s Undesirability? And what about the descendants of all the other Undesirables on this mutilated planet?
For the first time since he had been given this ill-defined assignment, Martin felt seriously troubled. The Federation, surely the most philosophically and technologically advanced structure conceivable by mortal minds, should not be responsible for a situation which was so grossly unfair and morally wrong. Was the Federation simply the end result of major population surgery, and a refusal to even consider the fate of the Undesirables, discarded and still proliferating on their denuded homeworlds?
The answer, based on his knowledge of the induction procedures used on many worlds, was yes. But then why had he been sent here? Was it to investigate the situation and try to devise a method of separating children and grandchildren from their Undesirable elders, and somehow influence them into induction centers for testing before they became so tainted by environmental and behavioral influences as to be unsalvageable?
Surely not, Martin thought, that would be a cruel and even more undesirable answer.
The Keidi had stopped talking and was waiting for more questions.
Beth, whose thought processes paralleled Martin’s to closely that he sometimes wondered if she was telepathic, said, “Judging by your friendly approach to us and the very laudable work you intend to do after what should have been a long, uncomfortable, and probably dangerous journey, I have difficulty in believing that you are an Undesirable or that…”
She broke off as the muscles around the Keidi’s horn tightened suddenly into spasm. Then they relaxed slightly and he said, “You will never use that word to any Keidi. You will not use it to me again.”
Red-faced with embarrassment, Beth was opening her mouth to apologize when the speaker came suddenly to life.
“Intruder, Camp Eleven,” the voice said briskly. “You may proceed. Your passenger will indicate the landing area on arrival. A vehicle will await him. No others will leave the ship, nor will they appear at an open exit port. Is this understood?”
“Understood,” Beth responded. “We’re on our way.”
When Camp Eleven was below them, Martin told the doctor that the hypership’s library included physiological and clinical data on all Federation World species, and that the Keida material was instantly available if needed. But the doctor did not respond other than to point out the landing area. Plainly he was still angry at being called an Undesirable, and it seemed that the First’s people did not want to speak to them either because the camp transmitter was also silent.
They were watching the vehicle carrying the doctor as it was heading toward the perimeter fence, when Beth said “I’m sorry. I had no intention of hurting his feelings. But he is old enough to have been one of the original Undesirables, and must be fully aware of the reasons why they were left behind, so I don’t understand his extreme sensitivity to the use of the word. Have I messed up your contact?”
Martin thought for a moment, then said, “Don’t worry about it. If you hadn’t used the word I would have, sooner or later, with the same result. But I’m pretty sure that our friend is not, in fact, one of the original Undesirables.”
He could well imagine the tiny minority of Keida’s rejects convincing themselves that they were superior rather than inferior beings. They had been left to survive as best they could on a virtually empty, scarred, and exhausted world, with only the unwanted scraps of their old technology and culture remaining to them, while their soft, comfort-loving fellows left for the Federation World. They had survived and adapted and reorganized, well enough for the supervisor to assign Beth and Martin to find out what was happening on Keida. So a certain pride in their inferiority, even an intense reverse snobbery and anger toward the soft outsiders who considered them to be inferior, was understandable.
But their Keidi doctor did not fit that neat psychological pigeonhole.
He had been the only person in his city to speak to diem, and give advice and information. He had not been over friendly, but neither had he been blindly hostile like the First’s people, and he had known about many other-species life forms. The mural depicting these life forms could only be seen inside the induction centers, from which Undesirables were automatically excluded.
“You’re thinking out loud again,” Beth said suddenly. “If he isn’t an Undesirable, what is he?”
“A potential Citizen who chose not to go through the induction procedure,” Martin replied. “Maybe he had an aversion to following the crowd, or the crowd going to the Federation World contained the usual proportion of medics while the Undesirables who remained had few, if Any. I’m beginning to like this Keidi.”
As they watched the doctor’s vehicle moving along the old, neatly repaired roadways between the rows of long, low buildings, Martin decided that Frontier Camp Eleven was what it had always been, a military base. Such establishments were not needed on the Federation World so they had been left on Keida, untouched and unoccupied except by the warrior Undesirables-as opposed to the civilians temporarily in uniform-who felt at home in them. The taller, windowless buildings grouped around the landing area would once have contained aircraft and surface vehicles, and possibly still did, although the people qualified to maintain them had a dying breed.