Fredericks kept his jaunty air.
"What'll I say about you?"
"This is a Med Ship," said Calhoun with precision. "According to the Interstellar Treaty Organization agreement every planet's population can determine its government. Every planet is necessarily independent. I have nothing to do with who runs things, or who they trade or communicate with. I have nothing to do with anything but public health. But they'll have heard about Med Ships. You had, hadn't you?"
"Y—yes," agreed Fredericks. "When I went to school. Before I was shipped off to here."
"Right," said Calhoun. "So you can figure out what to say."
He turned back to the control board, watching the steadily swelling gibbous disk of the planet as the Med Ship drew near. Presently he reached out and cut the drive. He switched on the spacephone.
"Go ahead," he said dryly. "Talk us down or into trouble, just as you please."
IV
"Experience directs that any assurance, at any time, that there is nothing wrong or that everything is all right, be regarded with suspicion. Certainly doctors often encounter patients who are ignorant of the nature of their trouble and its cause, and in addition have had their symptoms appear so slowly and so gradually that they were never noticed and still are not realized . . ."
Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. P. 68.
It was a very singular society on Canis III. After long and markedly irrelevant argument by spacephone, the Med Ship went down to ground in the grip of the Canopolis landing grid. This was managed with a deftness amounting to artistry. Whoever handled the controls did so with that impassioned perfection with which a young man can handle a mechanism he understands and worships. But it did not follow that so accomplished an operator would think beyond the perfection of performance. 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. The gang at the spaceport interjected questions, and whooped at some of his answers, and slapped each other and themselves ecstatically when he related some of the things he'd said and done in enemy hands, and talked loudly and boastfully of what they would do if the old folks tried to carry out their threats. But Calhoun observed no real preparations beyond the perfect working condition of the grid itself. Still, that ought to defend the planet adequately—except against such a mobile spaceport as he'd been captured by, himself.
When they turned to him for added reasons to despise the older generation, Calhoun said coldly:
"If you ask me, they can take over any time they're willing to kill a few of you to clear the way. Certainly if the way you're running this particular job is a sample!"
They bristled. 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. The fundamental facts of human society exist because human instinct directs them, in exact parallel to the basic design of the social lives of ants and bees. It seemed to Calhoun that he was seeing, direct, the operation of pure instinct in the divisions of function in the society he had encountered.
Here, where a guard must be mounted against enemies, he found young warriors. They took the task because it was their instinct. It was an hereditary impulse for young men of their age to act as youthful warriors at a post of danger. There was nothing more important to them than prestige among their fellows. They did not want wisdom, or security, or families, or possessions. The instinct of their age-group directed them as specifically as successive generations of social insects are directed. They moved about in gangs. They boasted vaingloriously. They loafed conspicuously and they would take lunatic risks for no reason whatsoever.
But they would never build cities of themselves. The was the impulse of older men. In particular, the warrior age-group would be capable of immense and admirable skill in handling anything which interested them, but they would never devise automatic devices to keep a city going with next to no attention. They simply would not think so far ahead. They would fight and they would quarrel and they would brag. But if this eccentric world had survived so far, it must have additional tribal structure—it must have some more dedicated leadership than these flamboyant young men who guarded inadequately and operated perfectly the mechanism of a spaceport facility they would never have built.
"I've got to talk to somebody higher up," said Calhoun irritably. "A chief, really—a boss. Your war with your parents isn't my affair. I'm here on Med Service business. I'm supposed to check the public health situation with the local authorities and exchange information with them. So far as I'm concerned, this is a routine job."
The statement was not altogether truthful. 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. But Calhoun's obligation was not to be stated in such terms to these young men.
"Who is running things?" demanded Calhoun. "A man named Walker said his son was bossing things here. He was pretty bitter about it, too! Who's looking after the distribution of food, and who's assigning who to raise more, and who's seeing that the small children get fed and cared for?"
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."
His proposal to acquire a ground-car was greeted with derision. There were ground-cars, but those that did not need repairs were jealously reserved by individuals for themselves and their closest friends. There was squabbling. Presently a scowling young man agreed to deliver Calhoun to the general area in which the first-landed of the colonists—now grown grim and authoritative—made their homes. It was annoying to wait while so simple a matter was discussed so vociferously. By the time it was settled, Fredericks had gone off in disgust.