The Grandfathers' War

I

The little Med Ship seemed absolutely motionless when the hour-off warning whirred. Then it continued to seem motionless. The background-noise tapes went on, making the small, unrelated sounds that exist unnoticed in all the places where human beings dwell, but which have to be provided in a ship in overdrive so a man doesn't go ship-happy from the dead stillness. The hour-off warning was notice of a change in the shape of things.

Calhoun put aside his book—the manual of the Med Service—and yawned. He got up from his bunk to tidy ship. Murgatroyd, the tormal, opened his eyes and regarded him drowsily, without uncoiling his furry tail from about his nose.

"I wish," said Calhoun critically, "that I could act with your realistic appraisal of facts, Murgatroyd. This is a case of no importance whatever, and you treat it as such, while I fume whenever I think of its futility. We are a token mission, Murgatroyd—a politeness of the Med Service, which has to respond to hysterical summonses as well as sensible ones. Our time is thrown away!"

Murgatroyd blinked somnolently. Calhoun grinned wryly at him. The Med Ship was a fifty-ton space-vessel—very small indeed, in these days—with a crew consisting exclusively of Calhoun and Murgatroyd the tormal. It was one of those little ships the Med Service tries to have call at every colonized planet at least once in four or five years. The idea is to make sure that all new developments in public health and individual medicine will spread as widely and as fast as can be managed. There were larger Med craft to handle dangerous situations and emergencies of novel form. But all Med Ships were expected to handle everything possible, if only because space travel consumed such quantities of time.

This particular journey, for example: An emergency message had come to Sector Headquarters from the planetary government of Phaedra II. Carried on a commercial vessel in overdrive at many times the speed of light, it had taken three months to reach Headquarters. And the emergency in which it asked aid was absurd. There was, said the message, a state of war between Phaedra II and Canis III. Military action against Canis III would begin very shortly. Med Service aid for injured and ill would be needed. It was therefore requested at once.

The bare idea of war, naturally, was ridiculous. There could not be war between planets. Worlds communicated with each other by spaceships, to be sure, but the Lawlor interplanetary drive would not work save in unstressed space, and of course overdrive was equally inoperable in a planet's gravitational field. So a ship setting out for the stars had to be lifted not less than five planetary diameters from the ground before it could turn on any drive of its own. Similarly, it had to be lowered an equal distance to a landing after its drive became unusable. Space travel was practical only because there were landing grids—those huge structures of steel which used the power of a planet's ionosphere to generate the force-fields for the docking and launching of ships of space. Hence landing grids were necessary for landings. And no world would land a hostile ship upon its surface. But a landing grid could launch bombs or missiles as well as ships, and hence could defend its planet, absolutely. So there could be no attacks and there could be defense, so wars could not be fought.

"The whole thing's nonsense," said Calhoun. "We'll get there, and we've been three months on the way and the situation is six months old and either it's all been compromised or it's long forgotten and nobody will like being reminded of it. And we've wasted our time and talents on a thankless job that doesn't exist, and couldn't. The universe has fallen on evil days, Murgatroyd! And we are the victims!"

Murgatroyd leisurely uncurled his tail from about his nose. When Calhoun talked at such length, it meant sociability. Murgatroyd got up, and stretched, and said, "Chee!" He waited. If Calhoun really meant to go in for conversation, Murgatroyd would join in. Murgatroyd frisked a little, to show his readiness for talk.

"Chee-chee-chee!" he said conversationally.

"I notice that we agree," said Calhoun. "Let's clean up."

He began those small items of housekeeping which one neglects when nothing can happen for a long time ahead. Books back in place. Files restored to order. The special-data reels Calhoun had been required to study. Calhoun made all neat and orderly against landing and possible visitors.

Presently the breakout clock indicated twenty-five minutes more in overdrive. Calhoun yawned again. As an interstellar service organization, the Med Service sometimes had to do rather foolish things. Governments run by politicians required them. Yet Med Service representatives always had to be well-informed on problems which appeared. During this journey Calhoun had been ordered to read up on the ancient insanity once called the art of war. He didn't like what he'd learned about the doings of his ancestors. He reflected that it was lucky that such things couldn't happen anymore. He yawned again.

He was strapped in the control-chair a good ten minutes before the ship was due to return to a normal state of things. He allowed himself the luxury of still another yawn. He waited.

The warning tape whirred a second time. A voice said, "When the gong sounds, breakout will be five seconds off." There was a heavy, rhythmic tick-tocking. It went on and on. Then the gong and a voice said: "Five—four—three—t—"

It did not complete the count. There was a tearing, rending noise and the spitting of an arc. There was the smell of ozone. The Med Ship bucked like a plunging horse. It came out of overdrive two seconds ahead of time. The automatic, emergency-rockets roared and it plunged this way and changed course violently and plunged that, and seemed to fight desperately against something that frustrated every maneuver it tried. Calhoun's hair stood on end until he realized that the external-field indicator showed a terrific artificial force-field gripping the ship. He cut off the rockets as their jerkings tried to tear him out of his chair.

There was stillness. Calhoun rasped into the space-phone:

"What's going on? This is Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! This is a neutral vessel!" The term "neutral vessel" was new in Calhoun's vocabulary. He'd learned it while studying the manners and customs of war in overdrive. "Cut off those force-fields!"

Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly. Some erratic movement of the ship had flung him into Calhoun's bunk, where he'd held fast to a blanket with all four paws. Then another wild jerking threw him and the blanket together into a corner, where he fought to get clear, chattering bitterly the while.

"We're noncombatants!" snapped Calhoun—another new term.

A voice growled out of the spacephone speaker.

"Set up for light-beam communication," it said heavily. "In the meantime keep silence."

Calhoun snorted. But a Med Ship was not an armed vessel. There were no armed vessels nowadays. Not in the normal course of events. But vessels of some sort had been on the watch for a ship coming to this particular place.

He thought of the word "blockade"—another part of his education in the outmoded art of war. Canis III was blockaded.

He searched for the ship that had him fast. Nothing. He stepped up the magnification of his visionscreens. Again nothing. The sun Canis flamed ahead and below, and there were suspiciously bright stars which by their coloring were probably planets. But the Med Ship was still well beyond the habitable part of a Sol-class sun's solar system.

Calhoun pulled a photocell out of its socket and waited. A new and very bright light winked into being. It wavered. He stuck the photocell to the screen, covering the brightness. He plugged its cord to an audio amplifier. A dull humming sounded. Not quite as clearly as a spacephone voice, but clear enough, a voice said:

"If you are Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty, answer by light beam, quoting your orders."

Calhoun was already stabbing another button, and somewhere a signal-lamp was extruding itself from its recess in the hull. He said irritably:

"I'll show my orders, but I do not put on performances of dramatic readings! This is the devil of a business! I came here on request, to be a ministering angel or a lady with a lamp, or something equally improbable. I did not come to be snatched out of overdrive, even if you have a war on. This is a Med Ship!"

The slightly blurred voice said as heavily as before:

"This is a war, yes. We expected you. We wish you to take our final warning to Canis III. Follow us to our base and you will be briefed."

Calhoun said tartly:

"Suppose you tow me! When you dragged me out of overdrive you played the devil with my power!"

Murgatroyd said, "Chee?" and tried to stand on his hind legs to look at the screen. Calhoun brushed him away. When acknowledgment came from the unseen other ship, and the curious cushiony drag of the towing began to be felt, he cut off the microphone to the lightbeam. Then he said severely to Murgatroyd:

"What I said was not quite true, Murgatroyd. But there is a war on. To be a neutral I have to appear impressively helpless. That is what neutrality means."

But he was far from easy in his mind. Wars between worlds were flatly impossible. The facts of space travel made them unthinkable.

Yet there seemed to be a war. Something was happening, anyhow, which was contrary to all the facts of life in modern times. And Calhoun was involved in it. It demanded that he immediately change all his opinions and all his ideas of what he might have to do. The Med Service could not take sides in a war, of course. It had no right to help one side or the other. Its unalterable function was to prevent the needless death of human beings. So it could not help one combatant to victory. On the other hand it could not merely stand by, tending the wounded, and by alleviating individual catastrophes allow their numbers to mount.

"This," said Calhoun, "is the devil!"

"Chee!" said Murgatroyd.

The Med Ship was being towed. Calhoun had asked for it and it was being done. There should have been no way to tow him short of a physical linkage between ships. There were force-fields which could perform that function—landing grids used them constantly—but ships did not mount them—not ordinary ships, anyhow. That fact bothered Calhoun.

"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble," he said, scowling, "as if wars were going back into fashion and somebody was getting set to fight them. Who's got us, anyhow?"

The request for Med Service aid had come from Phaedra II. But the military action—if any—had been stated to be due on Canis III. The flaming nearby sun and its family of planets was the Canis solar system. The odds were, therefore, that he'd been snatched out of overdrive by the Phaedrian fleet. He'd been expected. They'd ordered him not to use the spacephone. The local forces wouldn't care if the planet overheard. The invaders might. Unless there were two space fleets in emptiness, jockeying for position for a battle in the void. But that was preposterous. There could be no battles in unstressed space where any ship could flick into overdrive flight in the fraction of a second!

"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun querulously, "this is all wrong! I can't make head or tail or anything! And I've got a feeling that there is something considerably more wrong than I can figure out. At a guess, it's probably a Phaedrian vessel that's hooked on to us. They didn't seem surprised when I said who I was. But—"

He checked his instrument board. He examined the screens. There were planets of the yellow sun, which now was nearly dead ahead. Calhoun saw an almost infinitely thin crescent, and knew that it was the sunward world toward which he was being towed. Actually, he didn't need a tow. He'd asked for it for no particular reason except to put whoever had stopped him in the wrong. To injure a Med Ship would be improper even in war—especially in war.

His eyes went back to the external-field dial. There was a force-field gripping the ship. It was of the type used by landing grids—a type impractical for use on shipboard. A grid to generate such a force-field had to have one foot of diameter for roughly every ten miles of range. A ship to have the range of his captor would have to be as big as a planetary landing grid. And no planetary landing grid could handle it.

Then Calhoun's eyes popped open and his jaw dropped.

"Murgatroyd!" he said, appalled. "Confound them, it's true! They've found a way to fight!"

Wars had not been fought for many hundreds of years, and there was no need for them now. Calhoun had only lately been studying the records of warfare in all its aspects and consequences, and as a medical man he felt outraged. Organized slaughter did not seem a sane process for arriving at political conclusions. The whole galactic culture was based upon the happy conviction that wars could never happen again. If it was possible, they probably would. Calhoun knew humanity well enough to be sure of that.

"Chee?" said Murgatroyd inquiringly.

"You're lucky to be a tormal!" Calhoun told him. "You never have to feel ashamed of your kind."

The background information he had about warfare in general made him feel skeptical in advance about the information he would presently be given. It would be what used to be called propaganda, given him under the name of briefing. It would agree with him that wars in general were horrible, but it would most plausibly point out—with deep regret—that this particular war, fought by this particular side, was both admirable and justified.

"Which," said Calhoun darkly, "I wouldn't believe even if it were true!"