The Grandfathers' War

V

On the first day, Calhoun went grimly to the crèches that had been set up by the first-arrived young colonists when ships began to discharge really young children at the landing grid in Canopolis. The crèches were not too much like orphanages, of course, but the younger generation of Phaedra had been put in a very rough situation by the adults. If the time of the imminent solar explosion had been known, the matter could have been better handled. Actually, the explosion had been delayed—to date—for nearly five years from the discovery that it must occur. If that much leeway could have been predicted, older men and many machines would have been sent at first. But the bursting could not be computed. It was a matter of probability. Such-and-such unrhythmic variables must inevitably coincide sooner or later. When they did—final and ultimate catastrophe. The sun would flare terribly and destroy all life in its solar system. It could be calculated that the odds were even that the explosion would happen within one year, two to one within two, and five to one within three. The odds were enormous against Phaedra surviving as long as it had. The people of the mother-world had had a highly improbable break.

But in cold common sense they'd done the sensible thing. They'd tried to save those of their children who could take care of themselves first, and added others as they dared. But the burden on the young colonists had been monstrous. Even adults would have tended to grow warped with such pressure to mine, build, plough, and sow, as was put upon the youngsters. There had never been more than barely enough of food—and more mouths were always on the way. There had never been extra shelter, and younger and ever younger cargoes were constantly arriving, each needing more of shelter and of care than the ones before. And there was the world of adults still to be provided for.

Calhoun met the girls who had devoted themselves to the quasi-orphaned children. They bore themselves with rather touching airs of authority among the smaller children. But they were capable of ferocity, on occasion. They had the need, sometimes, not to defend their charges but themselves against the clumsily romantic advances of loutish teen-agers who considered themselves fascinating.

They had done very well.

The small children were exactly what Calhoun had anticipated—in every way. The small boy Calhoun had seen first was an extreme case, but the results of play by proxy were visible everywhere. Calhoun constrainedly inspected one after another of the children's shelters. He was anxiously watched by the sober young faces of the nurses. But they giggled when Murgatroyd tried to go through Calhoun's actions of taking temperatures and the like. He had to be stopped when he attempted to take a throat-swabbing which Calhoun had said was pure routine.

After the fourth such inspection he said to Elsa:

"I don't need to see any more. What's happened to the boys the same age as these girl nurses—the thirteen and fourteen and fifteen-year-olds?"

Elsa said uncomfortably:

"They're mostly off in the wilds. They hunt and fish and pioneer. They don't care about girls. Some of them grow things . . . I don't think there'd be enough food if they didn't, even though we're not getting anybody new to feed."

Calhoun nodded. In all the cities of the galaxy, small children of both sexes were to be seen everywhere, and girls of the early teen-ages, and adults. But the boys' age-group he'd mentioned always made itself invisible. It congregated in groups away from the public eye, and engaged in adventurous games and quite futile explorations. It was socially quite self-sufficient everywhere.

"Your husband," said Calhoun, carefully impassive, "had better try to gather in some of them. As I remember it, they're capable of a rather admirable romantic idea of duty—for a while. We're going to need some romanticists presently."

Elsa had faith in Calhoun now, because he seemed concerned about the children. She said unhappily:

"Do you really think the . . . old people will attack? I've grown older since I've been here. Those of us who came first are almost like the people on Phaedra—some ways. The younger people are inclined to be suspicious of us because we . . . try to guide them."

"If you're confiding that you think there may be two sides to this war," Calhoun told her, "you are quite right. But see what your husband can do about gathering some of the hunting-and-fishing members of the community. I've got to get back to my ship."

He got himself driven back to the landing grid. Walker did not drive him, but another of the now-suspect men of twenty-five or so, from the shelter village of the first-landed colonists. He was one of those who'd worked with Walker from the beginning and with him had been most embittered. Now he found himself almost a member of an older generation. He was still bitter against the people of Phaedra, but—

"This whole business is a mess," he said darkly as he drove through the nearly deserted city toward the landing grid. "We've got to figure out a way to organize things that'll be better than the old way. But no organization at all is no good, either! We've got some tough young characters who like it this way, but they've got to be tamed down."

Calhoun had his own unsettling suspicions. There have always been splendid ideas of social systems which will make earthly paradises for their inhabitants. Here, by happenchance, there had come to be a world inhabited only by the young. He tried to put aside, for the moment, what he was unhappily sure he'd find out back at the ship. He tried to think about this seemingly perfect opportunity for a new and better organization of human lives.

But he couldn't believe in it. Culture-instinct theory is pretty well worked out. The Med Service considered it proven that the basic pattern of human societies is instinctual rather than evolved by trial and error. The individual human being passes through a series of instinct-patterns which fit him at different times to perform different functions in a social organization which can vary but never change its kind. It has to make use of the successive functions its members are driven by instinct to perform. If it does not use its members, or give scope to their instincts, it cannot survive. The more lethal attempts at novel societies tried not only to make all their members alike, but tried to make them all alike at all ages. Which could not work.

Calhoun thought unhappily of the tests he meant to make in the Med Ship. As the ground-car swerved into the great open center of the grid, he said:

"My job is doing Med Service. I can't advise you how to plan a new world. If I could, I wouldn't. But whoever does have authority here had better think about some very immediate troubles."

"We'll fight if Phaedra attacks," said the driver darkly. "They'll never get to ground alive, and if they do—they'll wish they hadn't!"

"I wasn't thinking of Phaedra," said Calhoun.

The car stopped close by the Med Ship. He got out. There had been attempts to enter the ship in his absence. The gang which occupied the control building and in theory protected Canis III against attack from the sky had tried to satisfy their curiosity about the little ship. They'd even used torches on the metal. But they hadn't gotten in.

Calhoun did. Murgatroyd chattered shrilly when he was put down. He scampered relievedly about the cabin, plainly rejoicing at being once more in familiar surroundings. Calhoun paid no attention. He closed and dogged the air-lock door. He switched on the spacephone and said shortly:

"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling Phaedrian fleet. Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling—"

The loud-speaker fairly deafened him as somebody yelled into another spacephone mike in the grid-control building.

"Hey! You in the ship! Stop that! No talking with the enemy!"

Calhoun turned down the incoming volume and said patiently:

"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling fleet from Phaedra. Come in, fleet from Phaedra! Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling—"

There was a chorus of yelling from the nearby building. The motley, swaggering, self-appointed landing-grid guard had tried to break into the ship out of curiosity, but they were vastly indignant when Calhoun did something of which they disapproved. They made it impossible for him to have heard a reply from the space fleet presumably overhead. But after a moment someone in the control house evidently elbowed the others aside and shouted:

"You! Keep that up and we'll smash you! We've got the grid to do it with, too!"

Calhoun said curtly:

"Med Ship to Control. I've something to tell you. Suppose you listen. But not on spacephone. Have your best grid technician come outside and then I shall tell him by speaker."

He snapped off the spacephone and watched. The control building fairly erupted indignant youths. After a moment he saw the gangling one who'd grinned so proudly when the Med Ship was landed with absolute perfection. The others shouted and scowled at the ship.

Calhoun threw on the outside speaker—normally used for communication with a ground crew before lifting.

"I'm set," said Calhoun coldly, "for overdrive travel. My Duhanne cells are charged to the limit. If you try to form a force-field around this ship, I'll dump half a dozen overdrive charges into it in one jolt that will blow every coil you've got! And then how'll you fight the ships from Phaedra? I'm going to talk to them on spacephone. Listen in if you like. Monitor it. But don't try to bother me!"

He threw on the spacephone again and patiently resumed his calling:

"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling fleet from Phaedra! Med Ship calling fleet from Phaedra—"

He saw violent argument outside the grid's control building. Some of the young figures raged. But the youth who'd handled the grid so professionally raged at them. Calhoun hadn't made an idle threat. A grid-field could be blown out. A grid could be made useless by one of the ships it handled. When a ship like Calhoun's went into overdrive, it put out something like four ounces of pure energy to form a field in which it could travel past the speed of light. In terms of horsepower or kilowatt hours, so much force would be meaningless. It was too big. It was a quantity of energy whose mass was close to four ounces. When the ship broke out of overdrive, that power was largely returned to storage. The loss was negligible, compared to the total. But, turned loose into a grid's force-field, even three or four such charges would work havoc with the grid's equipment.

Calhoun got an answer from emptiness just as the members of the group by the control building shouted each other down and went inside to listen with bitter unease and suspicion to his talk with the enemy.

"Phaedra fleet calling," said a growling voice in the spacephone speaker. "What do you want?"

"To exercise my authority as a Med Service officer," said Calhoun heavily. "I warn you that I now declare this planet under quarantine. All contact with it from space is forbidden until health hazards here are under control. You will inform all other spacecraft and any other spaceport you may contact of this quarantine. Message ends."

Silence. A long silence. The growling voice rasped:

"What's that? Repeat it!"

Calhoun repeated it. He switched off the phone and unpacked the throat-swabbings he'd made at the four children's shelters in turn. He opened up his laboratory equipment. He put a dilution of one throat-swabbing into a culture slide that allowed living organisms to be examined as they multiplied. He began to check his highly specific suspicions. Presently he was testing them with minute traces of various antibodies. He made rough but reasonably certain identifications. His expression grew very, very sober. He took another swab sample and put it through the same process. A third, and fourth, and fifth, and tenth. He looked very grim.

It was sunset outside when there was a hammering on the ship's hull. He switched on a microphone and speaker.

"What do you want?" he asked flatly.

The angry voice of young Walker came from the gathering darkness. The screens showed a dozen or more inhabitants of Canis III milling angrily about him. Some were of the young-warrior age. They engaged in bitter argument. But the younger Walker, and four or five with him, faced the ship with ominous quietness.

"What's this nonsense about quarantine?" demanded Walker harshly, from outside. "Not that we've space-commerce to lose, but what does it mean?"

"It means," Calhoun told him, "that your brave new world rates as a slum. You've kept kids quiet with psych circuits, and they haven't eaten properly and haven't exercised at all. They're weak from malnutrition and feeble from not doing their own playing. They're like slum children used to be in past ages. Here on Canis you're about ready to wipe yourselves out. You may have done it."

"You're crazy!" snapped Walker. But he was upset.

"In the four shelters I visited," Calhoun said drearily, "I spotted four cases of early diphtheria, two of typhoid, three of scarlet fever and measles, and samples of nearly any other disease you care to name. The kids have been developing those diseases out of weakness and from the reservoir of infections we humans always carry with us. They'd reached the contagious stage before I saw them—but all the kids are kept so quiet that nobody noticed that they were sick. They've certainly spread to each other and their nurses, and therefore out into your general population, all the infections needed for a first-rate multiple epidemic. And you've no doctors, no antibiotics—not even injectors to administer shots if you had them."

"You're crazy!" cried the young Walker. "Crazy! Isn't this a Phaedra trick to make us give in?"

"Phaedra's trick," said Calhoun more drearily than before, "is an atom bomb they're going to drop into this landing grid—I suspect quarantine or no quarantine—in just two days more. Considering the total situation, I don't think that matters."