Now he worked on, through the night. Far away—some tens or scores of millions of miles—the hospital ships of the Phaedrian fleet took off from the next outward planet. They would be coming at full speed toward Canis III. They would need the results of the work Calhoun was doing, if they were to prevent an appalling multiple plague which could wipe out all the sacrifice the building of the colony had entailed. But his work had to be exact.
It was tedious. It was exacting. It was exhaustingly time-consuming. He did have the help of previous experience, and the knowledge that the most probable molecular design would include this group of radicals and probably that, and side-chains like this might be looked for, and co-polymers might— But he was bleary-eyed and worn out before dawn came again. His eyes felt as if there were grains of sand beneath their lids. His brain felt dry—felt fibrous inside his skull, as if it were excelsior. But when the first red colors showed in the east, with the towers of the city against them, he had the blueprint of what should be the complex molecule formed in Murgatroyd's furry body.
He had just begun to realize, vaguely, that his work was done, when twin glaring lights came bouncing and plunging across the empty center of the grid. They were extraordinarily bright in the ruddy darkness. They stopped. A man jumped from the ground-car and ran toward the ship.
Calhoun wearily threw on the outer microphones and speakers.
"What's the matter now?" The man was the younger Walker.
"You're right!" called Walker's voice, strained to the breaking point. "There is sickness! Everywhere! There's an epidemic! It's just beginning! People felt tired and peevish and shut themselves away. Nobody realized! But they've got fevers! They're showing rashes! There's some delirium! The smallest children are worst—they were always quiet—but it's everywhere! We've never had real sickness before! What can we do?"
Calhoun said tiredly:
"I've got the design for an antibody. Murgatroyd made it. It's what he's for. The hospital ships from Phaedra are on the way now. They'll start turning it out in quantity and their doctors will start giving everybody shots of it."
Young Walker cried out fiercely:
"But that would mean they'd land! They'd take over! I can't let them land! I haven't the power! Nobody has! Too many of us would rather die than let them land! They lied to us. It's bad enough to have them hovering outside. If they land, there'll be fighting everywhere and forever! We can't let them help us! We won't! We'll fight—we'll die first!"
Calhoun blinked, owlishly.
"That," he said exhaustedly, "is something you have to figure out for yourself. If you're determined to die, I can't stop you. Die first or die second—it's your choice. You make it. I'm going to sleep!"
He cut off the mike and speakers. He couldn't keep his eyes open.
VII
" . . . As a strictly practical matter, a man who has to leave a task that he has finished, and wishes it to remain as he leaves it, usually finds it necessary to give the credit for his work to someone who will remain on the spot and will thereby be moved to protect and defend it so long as he lives . . ."
Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. Pp. 167–8
Murgatroyd tugged at Calhoun and shrilled anxiously into his ear.
"Chee-chee!" he cried frantically. "Chee-chee-chee!"
Calhoun blinked open his eyes. There was a crashing sound and the Med Ship swayed upon its landing fins. It almost went over. It teetered horribly, and then slowly swung back past uprightness and tilted nearly as far in the opposite direction. There were crunching sounds as the soil partly gave way beneath one landing fin.
Then Calhoun waked thoroughly. In one movement he was up and launching himself across the cabin to the control-chair. There was another violent impact. He swept his hand across the row of studs which turned on all sources of information and communication. The screens came on, and the spacephone, and the outside mikes and loud-speakers, and even the planetary communication unit which would have reported had there been any use of the electromagnetic spectrum in the atmosphere of this planet.
Bedlam filled the cabin. From the spacephone speaker a stentorian voice shouted:
"This is our last word! Permit our landing or—"
A thunderous detonation was reported by the outside mikes. The Med Ship fairly bounced. There was swirling white smoke outside the ship. It was mid-morning, now, and the giant lacy structure of the landing grid was silhouetted against a deep-blue sky. There were cracklings from some electric storm perhaps a thousand miles away. There were shoutings, also brought in by the outside mikes.
Two groups of figures, fifty or a hundred yards from the Med Ship, labored furiously over some objects on the ground. Smoke billowed out; then a heavy, blastlike "Boom!" Something came spinning through the air, end over end, with sputtering sparks trailing behind it. It fell close by the base of the upright Med Ship.
Calhoun struck down the emergency rocket stud as it exploded. The roar of the rocket filled the interior of the ship. The spacephone speaker bellowed again:
"We've got a megaton bomb missile headed down! This is our last word! Permit landing or we come in fighting!"
The object from the crude cannon went off violently. With the emergency rocket flaming to help, it lifted the Med Ship, which jerked upward, settled back—and only two of its fins touched solidity. It began to topple because there was no support for the third.
Once toppled over, it would be helpless. It could be blasted with deliberately placed charges between its hull and the ground. A crater already existed where support for the third landing fin should have been.
Calhoun pushed the stud down full. The ship steadied and lifted. It went swinging across the level center of the landing grid. Its slender, ultra-high-velocity flame knifed down through the sod, leaving a smoking, incandescent slash behind. The figures about the bomb throwers scattered and fled. The Med Ship straightened to an upright position and began to rise.
Calhoun swore. The grid was the planet's defense against landings from space, because it could fling out missiles of any size with perfect aim at any target within some hundred thousand miles—a good twelve planetary diameters. Its operators meant to defy the fleet from Phaedra and had to get rid of the Med Ship before they dared energize its coils. Now they were rid of it. Now they could throw bombs, or boulders, or anything else its force-fields could handle.
The spacephone roared again:
"On the ground there! Our missile is aimed straight for your grid! It carries a megaton fission bomb! Evacuate the area!"
Calhoun swore again. The gang, the guard, the young-warrior group at the grid would be far too self-confident to heed such a threat. If there were wiser heads on Canis III, they could not enforce their commands. A human community has to be complete or it is not workable. The civilization which had existed on Phaedra II was shattered by the coming doom of its sun. The fragments—on Phaedra, in the fleet, in each small occupied community on Canis III—were incomplete and incapable of thinking or acting in concert with any other. Every small group on this planet, certainly, gave only lip-service to the rest. The young world was inherently incapable of organizing itself, save on a miniature scale. And one such miniature group had the grid and would fight with it regardless of the wishes of any other—because that group happened to be composed of instinct-driven members of the young-warrior group.