The Grandfathers' War

III

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.

"Did they tell you that?" he demanded.

"Yes," agreed Calhoun. "I heard that and more."

"All the time," raged Fredericks sullenly, "they were yelling at us that the sun back home was swelling. It was wobbling. It was throbbing like it was going to burst any minute! They kept us scared that any second the ships'd stop coming because there wasn't any more Phaedra. And we were good little boys and girls and we worked like hell. We tried to build what the kids they sent us needed, and they kept sending younger and younger kids. We got to the crack-up point. We couldn't keep it up! Night, day, every day, no fun, no loafing, nothing to do but work till you dropped, and then get up and work till you dropped again."

He stopped. Calhoun said:

"So you stopped believing it could be that urgent. You sent some messengers back to check and see. And Phaedra's sun looked perfectly normal, to them. There was no visible danger. The older people showed their scientific records, and your messengers didn't believe them. They decided they were faked. They were tired. All of you were tired. Young people need fun. You weren't having it. So when your messengers came back and said the emergency was a lie—you believed them. You believed the older people were simply dumping all their burdens on you, by lies."

"We knew it!" rasped Fredericks. "So we quit! We'd done our stuff! We were going to take time out and do some living! We were away back on having fun! We were away back on rest! We were away back just on shooting the breeze! We were behind on everything! We'd been slaves, following blueprints, digging holes and filling them up again." He stopped. "When they said all the old folks were going to move in on us, that was the finish! We're human! We've got a right to live like humans! When it came to building more houses and planting more land so more people—and old people at that—could move in to take over bossing us some more, we'd had it! We hadn't gotten anything out of the job for ourselves. If the old folks moved in, we never would! They didn't mind working us to death! To hell with them!"

"The reaction," said Calhoun, "was normal. But if one assumption was mistaken, it could still be wrong."

"What could be wrong?" demanded Fredericks angrily.

"The assumption that they lied," said Calhoun. "Maybe Phaedra's sun is getting ready to flare. Maybe your messengers were mistaken. Maybe you were told the truth."

Fredericks spat. Calhoun said:

"Will you clean that up, please?"

Fredericks gaped at him.

"Mop," said Calhoun. He gestured.

Fredericks sneered. Calhoun waited. Murgatroyd said agitatedly:

"Chee! Chee! Chee!"

Calhoun did not move. After a long time, Fredericks took the mop and pushed it negligently over the place he'd spat on.

"Thanks," said Calhoun.

He turned back to the control board. He checked his course and referred to the half-century-old Survey report on the Canis solar system. He scowled. Presently he said over his shoulder:

"How has the resting worked? Does everybody feel better?"

"Enough better," said Fredericks ominously, "so we're going to keep things the way they are. The old folks sent in a ship for a landing and we took the landing grid and dumped rocks where it'd run into them. We're going to set up little grids all over, so we can fling bombs up—we make good bombs—if they try to land anywhere besides Canopolis. And if they do make a landing, they'll wish they hadn't. All they've dared so far is drop printed stuff calling us names and saying we've got to do what they say."

Calhoun had the inner planet, Canis III, firmly in the center of his forward screen. He said negligently:

"How about the little kids? Most of you have quit work, you say—"

"There's not much work," bragged Fredericks. "We had to make stuff automatic as we built it, so we could all keep on making more things and not lose hands tending stuff we'd made. We got the designs from home. We do all right without working much!"

Calhoun reflected. If it were possible for any society to exist without private property, it would be this society, composed exclusively of the young. They do not want money as such. They want what it buys—now. There would be no capitalists in a world populated only by the younger generation from Phaedra. It would be an interesting sort of society, but thought for the future would be markedly lacking.

"But," said Calhoun, "what about the small children? The ones who need to be taken care of? You haven't got anything automatic to take care of them?"

"Pretty near!" Fredericks boasted. "Some of the girls like tending kids. Homely girls, mostly. But there's too many little ones. So we hooked up a psych circuit with multiple outlets for them. Some of the girls play with a couple of the kids, and that keeps the others satisfied. There was somebody studying pre-psych on Phaedra, and he was sent off with the rest to dig holes and build houses. He fixed up that trick so the girl he liked would be willing to take time off from tending kids. There's plenty of good technicians on Canis III! We can make out!"

There were evidently some very good technicians. But Calhoun began to feel sick. A psych circuit, of course, was not in itself a harmful device. It was a part of individual psychiatric equipment—not Med Service work—and its value was proved. In clinical use it permitted a psychiatrist to share the consciousness of his patient during interviews. He no longer had painfully to interpret his patient's thought-processes by what he said. He could observe the thought-processes themselves. He could trace the blocks, the mental sore spots, the ugly, not-human urges which can become obsessions.

Yes. A psych circuit was an admirable device in itself. But it was not a good thing to use for baby-tending.

There would be a great room in which hundreds of small children would sit raptly with psych-circuit receptors on their heads. They would sit quietly—very quietly—giggling to themselves, or murmuring. They would be having a very wonderful time. Nearby there would be a smaller room in which one or two other children played. There would be older girls to help these few children actually play. With what they considered adult attention every second, and with deep affection for their self-appointed nurses—why the children who actually played would have the very perfection of childhood pleasure. And their experience would be shared by—would simultaneously be known and felt by—would be the conscious and complete experience of each of the hundreds of other children tuned in on it by psych circuit. Each would feel every thrill and sensation of those who truly thrilled and experienced.

But the children so kept happy would not be kept exercised, nor stimulated to act, or think, or react for themselves. The effect of psych-circuit child-care would be that of drugs for keeping children from needing attention. The merely receiving children would lose all initiative, all purpose, all energy. They would come to wait for somebody else to play for them. And the death rate among them would be high and the health rate among those who lived would be low, and the injury to their personalities would be permanent if they played by proxy long enough.

And there was another uglier thought. In a society such as must exist on Canis III, there would be adolescents and post-adolescents who could secure incredible, fascinating pleasures for themselves—once they realized what could be done with a psych circuit.

Calhoun said evenly:

"In thirty minutes or so you can call Canopolis on space phone. I'd like you to call ahead. Will there be anybody on duty at the grid?"

Fredericks said negligently:

"There's usually somebody hanging out there. It makes a good club. But they're always hoping the old folks will try something. If they do—there's the grid to take care of them!"

"We're landing with or without help," said Calhoun. "But if you don't call ahead and convince somebody that one of their own is returning from the wars, they might take care of us with the landing grid."

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."