It could only be replaced by a greater hatred.
Calhoun ground his teeth. The Med Ship hurtled out from the sunlit Canis III. Somewhere—not many thousands of miles away—the fleet of Phaedra clustered. Its crews were raging, but they were sick with anxiety about the enemies they prepared to fight. Aground there was hatred among the older of the colonists—the young-warrior group in particular, because that is the group in which hate is appropriate—and there was no less a sickish disturbance because even in being right they were wrong. Every decent impulse that had been played upon to make them exhaust themselves, before their revolt, now protested the consequences of their revolt. Yet they believed that in revolting they were justified.
Murgatroyd did not like the continued roar of emergency-rockets. He climbed up on Calhoun's lap and protested.
"Chee!" he said urgently. "Chee-chee!"
Calhoun grunted.
"Murgatroyd," he said, "it is a Med Service rule that a Med Ship man is expendable in case of need. I'm very much afraid that we've got to be expended. Hang on, now! We try some action!"
He turned the Med Ship end for end and fed full power to the rockets. The ship would decelerate even faster than it had gathered speed. He set the nearest-object indicator to high gain. It showed the now-retreating mass of stone and soil from Canis. Calhoun then set up a scanner to examine a particular part of the sky.
"Since fathers can be insulted," he observed, "they've made a missile to fight its way down through anything that's thrown at it. It'll be remote-controlled for the purpose. It's very doubtful that there's a spaceship on the planet to fight it back. There's been no reference to one, anyhow. So what the missile will have to fight off will be stuff from the landing-grid only. Which is good. Moreover, fathers being what they are, regardless, that missile won't be a high-speed one. They'll want to be able to call it back at the last minute. They'll hope to."
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd, insisting that he didn't like the rocket-roar.
"So we will make ourselves as unpopular as possible with the fathers," observed Calhoun, "and if we live through it we will make ourselves even more cordially hated by the sons. And then they will be able to tolerate each other a little, because they both hate us so much. And so the public-health situation on Canis III may be resolved. Ah!"
The nearest-object indicator showed something moving toward the Med Ship. The scanner repeated the information in greater detail. There was a small object headed toward the planet from empty space. Its velocity and course—
Calhoun put on double acceleration to intercept it, while he pointed the ship quartering so he'd continue to lose outward speed.
Ten minutes later the spacephone growled:
"Med Ship! What do you think you're doing?"
"Getting in trouble," said Calhoun briefly.
Silence. The screens showed a tiny pin point of moving light, far away toward emptiness. Calhoun computed his course. He changed it.
"Med Ship!" rasped the spacephone. "Keep out of the way of our missile! It's a megaton bomb!"
Calhoun said irrelevantly:
"Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a bloody nose." He added. "I know what it is."
"Let it alone!" rasped the voice. "The grid on the ground has spotted it. They're sending up rocks to fight it."
"They're rotten marksmen," said Calhoun. "They missed me!"
He aimed his ship. He knew the capacities of his ship as only a man who'd handled one for a long time could. He knew quite exactly what it could do.
The rocket from remoteness—the megaton-bomb guided missile—came smoking furiously from the stars. Calhoun seemed to throw his ship into a collision course. The rocket swerved to avoid him, though guided from many thousands of miles away. There was a trivial time-lag, too, between the time its scanners picked up a picture and transmitted it, and the transmission reached the Phaedrian fleet and the controlling impulses reached the missile in response. Calhoun counted on that. He had to. But he wasn't trying for a collision. He was forcing evasive action. He secured it. The rocket slanted itself to dart aside, and Calhoun threw the Med Ship into a flip-flop and—it was a hair-raising thing—slashed the rocket lengthwise with his rocket flame. That flame was less than half an inch thick, but it was of the temperature of the surface of a star, and in emptiness it was some hundreds of yards long. It sliced the rocket neatly. It flamed hideously, and even so far, Calhoun felt a cushioned impact from the flame. But that was the missile's rocket fuel. An atom bomb is the one known kind of bomb which will not be exploded by being sliced in half.
The fragments of the guided missile went on toward the planet, but they were harmless.
"All right!" said the spacephone icily—but Calhoun thought there was relief in the voice. "You've only delayed our landing and lost a good many lives to disease!"
Calhoun swallowed something he suspected was his heart, come up into his throat.
"Now," he said, "we'll see if that's true!"
His ship had lost its spaceward velocity before it met the missile. Now it was gaining velocity toward the planet. He cut off the rocket to observe. He swung the hull about and gave a couple of short rocket blasts.
"I'd better get economical," he told Murgatroyd. "Rocket fuel is hard to come by, this far out in space. If I don't watch out, we'll be caught in orbit, here, with no way to get down. I don't think the local inhabitants would be inclined to help us."
His lateral dash at the missile had given him something close to orbital speed relative to the planet's surface, though. The Med Ship went floating, with seemingly infinite leisure, around the vast bulge of the embattled world. In less than half an hour it was deep in the blackness of Canis' nighttime shadow. In three-quarters of an hour it came out again at the sunrise edge, barely four hundred miles high.
"Not quite speed enough for a true orbit," he told Murgatroyd critically. "I'd give a lot for a good map!"
He watched alertly. He could gain more height if he needed to, but he was worried about rocket fuel. It is intended for dire emergencies only. It weighed too much to be carried in quantity.
He spotted the city of Canopolis on the horizon. He became furiously busy. He inverted the little ship and dived down into atmosphere. He killed speed with rocket flames and air friction together, falling recklessly the while. He was barely two miles high when he swept past a ridge of mountains and the city lay ahead and below. He could have crashed just short of it. But he spent more fuel to stay aloft. He used the rockets twice. Delicately.
At a ground speed of perhaps as little as two hundred miles an hour, supported at the end by a jetting, hair-thin rocket flame that was like a rod of electric arc-fire, he swept across the top of the landing grid. The swordlike flame washed briefly over the nearer edge. Very briefly. The flame cut a slash down through steel girders and heavy copper cables together. The rockets roared furiously. That one disabling cut at the grid had been on a downward, darting drift. Now the ship shouted, and swooped up, and on—and it swept above the far side of the grid only yards from the wide strip of copper which guided its force-fields out into space. Here it cut cables, girders, and force-field guide together for better than two hundred feet from the top. The grid was useless until painstaking labor had made the damage good.