"We've accomplished nothing," rasped Walker. "We've been too softhearted! 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 airlock 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 airlock, 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'd 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."