"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 airlock 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 airlock.
"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 dark of pure darkness in a glory of a myriad distant sun.
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.
"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 boys and girls! 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.