The Grandfathers' War

VI

Calhoun worked all night, tending and inspecting the culture incubators which were part of the Med Ship's technical equipment. In the children's shelters, he'd swabbed throats. In the ship, he'd diluted the swabbings and examined them microscopically. He'd been depressingly assured of his very worst fears as a medical man—all of which could have been worked out in detail from the psych circuit system of child care boastfully described by Fredericks. He could have written out his present results in advance from a glance at the child Jak shown him by the younger Walker's wife. But he hated to find that objective information agreed with what he would have predicted by theory.

In every human body there are always germs. The process of good health is in part a continual combat with slight and unnoticed infections. Because of victories over small invasions, a human body acquires defenses against larger invasions of contagion. Without such constant small victories, a body ceases to keep its defenses strong against beachheads of infection. Yet malnutrition or even exhaustion can weaken a body once admirably equipped for this sort of guerilla warfare.

If an undernourished child fails to win one skirmish, he can become overwhelmed by a contagion the same child would never have known about had he only been a little stronger. But, overwhelmed, he is a sporadic case of disease—a case not traceable to another clinical case. And then he is the origin of an epidemic. In slum conditions a disease not known in years can arise and spread like wildfire. With the best of intentions and great technical ingenuity, the younger-generation colonists of Canis III had made that process inevitable among the younger children who were their last-imposed burden. The children were under-exercised, under-stimulated, and hence under par in appetite and nutrition. And it is an axiom of the Med Service that a single underfed child can endanger an entire planet.

Calhoun proved the fact with appalling certainty. His cultures astounded even him. But by dawn he had applied Murgatroyd's special genetic abilities to them. Murgatroyd said "Chee!" in a protesting tone when Calhoun did what was necessary at that small patch on his flank which was quite insensitive. But then Murgatroyd shook himself and admiringly scowled back at Calhoun, imitating the intent and worried air that Calhoun wore. Then he followed Calhoun about in high good spirits, strutting on his hind legs, man-fashion, and pretending to set out imaginary apparatus as Calhoun did, long ahead of time for what he hoped would occur.

Presently Murgatroyd tired—a little quicker than usual—and went to sleep. Calhoun bent over him and counted his respiration and heart beat. Murgatroyd slept on. Calhoun gnawed his fingers in anxious expectation.

He'd come on this assignment with some resentment because he thought it foolish. He'd carried on with increasing dismay as he found it not absurd. Now he watched over Murgatroyd with the emotional concern a medical man feels when lives depend upon his professional efficiency, but that efficiency depends on something beyond his control. Murgatroyd was that something this time—but there was one other.

The tormal was a pleasant little animal, and Calhoun liked him very much. But tormals were crew-members of one-man Med Ships because their metabolism was very similar to that of humans, but no tormal had ever been known to die of an infectious disease. They could play host to human infections, but only once and only lightly. It appeared that the furry little creatures had a hair-trigger sensitivity to bacterial toxins. The presence of infective material in their blood streams produced instant and violent reaction—and the production of antibodies in large quantity. Theorists said that tormals had dynamic immunity-systems instead of passive ones, like humans. Their body-chemistry seemed to look truculently for microscopic enemies to destroy, rather than to wait for something to develop before they fought it.

If he reacted normally, now, in a matter of hours his blood stream would be saturated with antibodies—or an antibody—lethal to the cultures Calhoun had injected. There was, however, one unfortunate fact. Murgatroyd weighed perhaps twenty pounds. There was most of a planetary population needing antibodies only he could produce.

He slept from breakfast-time to lunch. He breathed slightly faster than he should. His heart beat was troubled.

Calhoun swore a little when noon came. He looked at the equipment all laid out for biological microanalysis—tiny test tubes holding half a drop, reagent flasks dispensing fractions of milliliters, tools and scales much tinier than doll-size. If he could determine the structure and formula of an antibody—or antibodies—that Murgatroyd's tiny body formed—why synthesis in quantity should be possible. Only the Med Ship had not materials for so great an amount of product.

There was only one chance. Calhoun threw the spacephone switch. Instantly a voice came from the speaker.

" . . . calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Phaedra fleet calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Calling—" It went on interminably. It was a very long way off, if it took so long for Calhoun's answer to be heard. But the call-formula broke off. "Med Ship! Our doctors want to know the trouble on Canis! Can we help? We've hospital ships equipped and ready!"

"The question," said Calhoun steadily, "is whether I can make a formula-and-structure identification, and whether you can synthesize what I identify. How's your lab? How are you supplied with biological crudes?"

He waited. By the interval between his answer and a reply to it, the ship he'd communicated with was some five million miles or more away. But it was still not as far as the next outward planet where the Phaedrian fleet was based.

While he waited for his answer, Calhoun heard murmurings. They would come from the control building at the side of the grid. The loutish, suspicious gang there was listening. Calhoun had threatened to wreck the grid if they tried anything on the Med Ship—but he could do nothing unless they tried to use a force-field. They listened in, muttering among themselves.

A long time later the voice from space came back. The fleet of the older generation of Phaedra was grounded, save for observation ships like the one speaking. The fleet had full biological equipment for any emergency. It could synthesize any desired compound up to— The degree of complexity and the classification was satisfactory.

"Day before yesterday," said Calhoun, "when you had me aground on Canis IV, your leader Walker said your children on this planet were destroying your grandchildren. He didn't say how. But the process is well under way—only the whole population will probably go with them. Most of the population, anyhow. I'm going to need those hospital ships and your best biological chemists—I hope! Get them started this way—fast! I'll try to make a deal for at least the hospital ships to be allowed to land. Over."

He did not flick off the spacephone. He listened. And a bitter, envenomed voice came from nearby:

"Sure! Sure! We'll let 'em land ships they say are hospital ships, loaded down with men and guns! We'll land 'em ourselves, we will!"

There was a click. The spacephone in the control building was turned off.

Calhoun turned back to the sleeping Murgatroyd. There was a movement about the grid-control building. Sleek, glistening ground-cars hurtled away—two of them. Calhoun turned then to the planetary communicator. It could break in on any wave-length used for radio communication under a planet's Heaviside roof. He had to get in touch with Walker or some other of the first-landed colonists. They were still embittered against their home world, but they must be beginning to realize that Calhoun had told the truth about the youngest children. They'd find sickness if they looked for it.

But the planetary communicator picked up nothing. No radiation wave-length was in use. There was no organized news service. The young people on Canis III were too self-centered to care about news. There were no entertainment programs. Only show-offs would want to broadcast, and show-offs would not make the apparatus.

So Calhoun could not communicate save by spacephone, with a range of millions of miles, and the ship's exterior loud-speakers, with a range of hundreds of feet. If he left the Med Ship, he wasn't likely to be able to fight his way back in. He couldn't find the younger Walker on foot, in any case, and he did not know anyone else to seek.

Besides, there was work to be done in the ship.

Before Murgatroyd waked, the two ground-cars had returned. At intervals, nearly a dozen other cars followed to the control building, hurtling across the grid's clear center with magnificent clouds of dust following them. They braked violently when they arrived. Youths piled out. Some of them yelled at the Med Ship and made threatening gestures. They swarmed into the building.

Murgatroyd said tentatively, "Chee?"

He was awake. Calhoun could have embraced him.

"Now we see what we see," he said grimly. "I hope you've done your stuff, Murgatroyd!"

Murgatroyd came obligingly to him, and Calhoun lifted him to the table he had ready. Calhoun extracted a quantity of what he hoped was a highly concentrated bacterial antagonist. He took thirty CCs in all. He clumped the red cells. He separated the serum. He diluted an infinitesimal bit of it and with a steady hand added it to a slide of the same cultures—living—on which Murgatroyd's dynamic immunity system had worked.

The cultures died immediately.

Calhoun had an antibody sample which could end the intolerable now-spreading disaster on the world of young people—if he could analyze it swiftly and accurately, and if the hospital ships from Phaedra could be landed, and if they could synthesize some highly complex antibody compounds, and if the inhabitants of Canis III would lay aside their hatred—

He heard a tapping sound on the Med Ship's hull. He looked at a screen. Two youths stood in the doorway of the control building, leisurely shooting at the Med Ship with sporting weapons.

Calhoun set to work. Sporting rifles were not apt to do much damage.

For an hour, while there was the occasional clanking of a missile against the ship's outer planking, he worked at the infinitely delicate job of separating serum from its antibody content. For another hour he tried to separate the antibody into fractions. Incredibly, it would not separate. It was one substance only.

There was a crackling sound and the whole ship shivered. The screen showed a cloud of smoke drifting away. The members of the grid-guard had detonated some explosive—intended for mining, most likely—against one of the landing-fins.

Calhoun swore. His call to the Phaedrian fleet was the cause. The grid-guard meant to allow no landing. He'd threatened to blow out their controls if they tried to use the grid on the Med Ship, but they wanted it ready for use as a weapon against the space fleet. They couldn't use it against him. He couldn't damage it unless they tried. They wanted him away.

He went back to his work. From time to time, annoyedly, he looked up at the outside. Presently a young-warrior group moved toward the ship, carrying something very heavy. A larger charge of explosive, perhaps.

He waited until they were within yards of the ship. He stabbed the emergency-rocket button. A thin, pencil-like rod of flame shot downward between the landing-fins. It was blue-white—the white of a sun's surface. For one instant it splashed out hungrily before it bored and melted a hole into the ground itself into which to flow. But in that instant it had ignited the covering of the burden the youths carried. They dropped it and fled. The pencil flame bored deeper and deeper into the ground. Clouds of smoke and steam arose.

There was a lurid flash. The burden that the young warriors had abandoned vanished in a flare that looked like a lightning bolt. The ship quivered from the detonation. A crater appeared where the explosive had been.

Calhoun cut off the emergency rocket, which had burned for ten seconds at one-quarter thrust.

Sunset came and night fell for the second time. He noticed, abruptly, that some of the ground-cars from about the control building went racing away. But they did not pass close to the Med Ship in their departure. He labored on. He'd spent nearly thirty hours making cultures from the specimens swabbed from children's throats, and injecting Murgatroyd, and waiting for his reaction, and then separating a tiny quantity of antibody—which would not total more than the dust from a butterfly's wing—from the serum he obtained.

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.