Anywhen (9 page)

"So if I sneeze on patrol," Oberholzer said, "I get KP?" Lea glared at him. "No," he said, "you get shot. Shaddup and listen."

Lea's pique was understandable. His leading question had been designed to remind Oberholzer and any other green hands like him that we all, Dr. Roche included, had been brought up on birth farms, and so give Roche just
the opening he needed to abort such a line of questioning as Oberholzer was following. The sergeant did not take kindly to the failure of his rudimentary essay into dialectics.

Roche, however, explained patiently. The Earth had not been sterilized yet, and probably never would be; even now, nobody really warmed to the idea of disrupting the grand ecology of the whole home planet simply for the protection of worlds and races many light-years away, or even still undiscovered. But the intermediate step was a fact, as Roche should not have needed to point out.

For instance, there was not a pig in any herd on Earth any more, nor had there been for centuries, who was not certified to be specific-pathogen-free, by virtue of having been born along with the rest of his litter by radical hysterectomy and raised on the bottle. And there was not a man aboard the
Chisholm,
or anywhere else in space today, who had not been from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd into a totally germ-free environment—which he still carried inside his body, and which still carried him in his ship.

On the other hand, maybe I was expecting too much of a private of Marines on his first crash-rescue mission ( or, for all I knew, his first mission of any kind). As I've noted, the astrogator is traditionally one of the two officers on a crash-rescue ship who are assigned to provide intellectual companionship to the U.N.R.R.A. civilian in charge, the other being the ship's surgeon. The assumption behind the tradition seems to be that any other Giant Brains who might be aboard would be too busy. Well, there was some justice in that, for while an astrogator is very busy indeed when he's busy at all, it's in the nature of the job to be concentrated at the opposite ends of a trip, leaving a long dead space in between. I get a lot of
reading done that way: poetry, mostly. And doctoring, of course, is a notoriously off-again on-again proposition, especially with a population as small as a ship's crew to look after, and nary a germ anywhere aboard (ideally, at least).

Hence though I had never heard Roche's speech before, I had heard many like it. Up to this point I could have given it myself, and probably played a fair game of chess at the same time. Now, however, he was getting to the part that only he could testify to: the nature of the
specific
situation beneath us on this mission.

"The first explorers who landed here called the planet Savannah, though maybe 'Tundra' or 'Veldt' would have been more suitable," he was saying. "It's a dense, high-gravity world about seven thousand miles in diameter. It consists mostly of broad, grassy plains, broken here and there by volcanic ranges and some rather small oceans.

"However, they didn't explore it thoroughly, for reasons I'll get to in a moment. They made contact with the natives very early, and described them as savages but friendly. No xenologist would agree that they're savages, not from the descriptions we have. They are hunters primarily, but they also herd, and raise crops. They weave, and build boats, and navigate by the stars. They are also metalworkers, technically very ingenious, but limited by the fact that they lack the energy sources to do really large-scale, high-temperature smelting and forging, thus far.

"They have a family system, and a system of small nations or family tribes, and a certain amount of internecine warfare in bad years. Both of these facts contributed to the downfall of the first expedition to Savannah. The Earthmen inadvertently infected these initially
friendly people with a very common Earthly disease which turned out to be virulently deadly to the males of the native population. The females are not immune, but are naturally far more resistant.

"This plague played hob with the native families, and this in turn began to threaten old alliances and balances of power between the tribes, as well as the division of labor within the tribes themselves. The natives were quick to associate it with their strange visitors, and one night, without the slightest warning, they attacked the landing camp. Very few of the landing party got away alive—and there were no wounded among them."

"Poisoned darts?" Sergeant Lea said interestedly. "No," Dr. Roche returned grimly. "Quarrels."

Lea looked puzzled.

"Those are crossbow bolts," Roche explained. "In this case, heavy metal ones, launched with such high velocity that they can kill a man no matter where they hit him, through shock alone. I bring this up so you'll know in advance that full battle dress is going to be of dubious value at best. We are going to have to plan in such a way that nobody gets hit—and
without
killing or injuring so much as one native. Just how we're going to manage that, I'll have to leave up to you."

Lea shrugged. He was used to being handed the hard ones.

"All right. Now what we
want
to do isn't quite as complicated. We need to capture a number of natives with status among their fellows—warriors will doubtless do; learn more of their language; win their confidence; and explain to them that we have a cure. And we will have to convince them that they must abandon their first natural desire, which will be to give the antivirus to their sick warriors and kings. The stuff won't work with them;
they're doomed. Instead, it will have to be given to expectant mothers, exclusively."

"That's going to take a lot of convincing," Captain Motlow said.

"Agreed. But that's one of the main reasons why I'm here. Nor is that all. There's a time limit. Unlike human beings, the natives here have a fixed mating season, so all their babies go to term at once, practically speaking. We got here as fast as we could once we learned the story, but we are right on the edge of the whelping season now. If we don't get most of this generation of pregnant females injected—for which native help is imperative; we haven't the manpower to do it ourselves—the race will be wiped out. The male children will die in infancy, and that will be that.

"That's all I know about the situation, and all anybody knows. So I have to conclude: Gentlemen, you must take it from there."

A stocky, middle-aged man with completely white hair —Clyde Bixby, the ship's surgeon—raised his hand. "One fact I think you skipped, Doctor," he said. "And I think it's interesting in this context. Why not tell the assembled company what the plague was?"

"Oh. Sure," Dr. Roche said. "It was tobacco mosaic."

Nobody but Doc Bixby seemed to believe him at first, and after all, Bixby had already had the benefit of the explanation—or as much of it as Dr. Roche knew. But a lot of them ground out their cigarettes like they were crushing poisonous snakes, all the same. Roche grinned.

"Don't worry," he said. "One reason tobacco mosaic is so abundant on Earth is because it's harmless to humans. And as far as tobacco growers are concerned, it can be controlled in the fields—not cured, but controlled—by streptomycin spraying."

"A curious thing in itself," Doc Bixby put in. "Streptomycin is no good at all against any other virus."

"Well, it's no more than indifferently good against mosaic, either," Dr. Roche emphasized. "But that's not important now. The point is: For the tobacco plant, mosaic is one of the most highly infectious diseases man has ever studied. The virus isn't a tiny but relatively complex organism, as most viruses that attack man and other animals are. Instead, it's a simple chemical compound. You can prepare it in crystal form as easily as you'd make rock salt or rock candy. It isn't alive, not until it gets into the plant cell; the life it leads thereafter is entirely `borrowed' from the host. And it's simple enough chemically so that most reagents—physical or chemical—don't destroy its integrity.

"The result is that if you walk into a greenhouse where tobacco is growing, and you're smoking a cigarette which was made from the leaf of a plant that had had mosaic, most of the growing plants will come down with the disease. They literally contract it from the smoke. And that seems to be exactly what the Savannahans did. They picked it up from cigarettes the first explorers offered them."

"As a peace pipe, maybe?" Bixby speculated.

"Maybe. If so, it's a great fat example of what a mess you can make by pushing an analogy too far."

"But why were they susceptible in the first place?" I asked.

Roche spread his hands. "God knows, Hans. It's just lucky for them that we know how the virus operates. It heads right for the chromosomes during cell division, and alters a set of genes in such a way that the daughter cells become susceptible to the disease in its overt, or 'clinical,' phase. That's why it kills off the offspring so much faster than it does the adult generation: because cell division goes on so much faster in infants."

"It sure does," Doc Bixby said. "In humans, the average is ten complete replacements of all the cells in the body per lifetime—and eight of those take place between conception and the age of two."

"Well, we can denature this virus relatively simply," Dr. Roche said. "Lucky for the Savannahans that we can—
if we can do it in time. I
think we'd better get down to business."

Sergeant Lea's expression, which had begun to look like that of an insecurely tethered balloon, turned flinty with an almost audible clink.

We came down on Savannah that night in the ship's gig, it being impossible to land the
Chisholm
on this planet or any planet. I was aboard, because it was part of my job to pilot the cranky, graceless, ungrateful landing craft. Furthermore, I had to fly her in complete blackness over terrain I knew only in vaguely general terms; and I was under orders to land her silently, which is almost impossible to do with a vessel driven solely by two rockets (for space) and two ranjets (for air).

Sure, I wasn't going to use the rockets for landing, and I could cut the athodydes; but when I did that the gig dropped like a skimming stone. Though she was primarily an aircraft, she had very little lifting area, and could be said to glide only by courtesy ( which certainly would be extended only by somebody watching her safely through binoculars).

Nevertheless, I gave it a brave try. I wrestled her through the blackness to what seemed by the instruments to be about fifty feet above the expanse of veldt Sergeant Lea had chosen. Then I poured on enough throt
tle to get her well beyond aerodynamic flying speed, and cut her out, hoping to edge her still lower to the ground before she stalled out.

It worked, but it was rough. We were closer to the ground than I'd estimated, so we stalled out from what must have been no more than a few inches. Engines or no engines, it was
not
quiet—we could hear the screech of wet grass bursting into steam under the skids, right through both layers of hull.

I never touched the brakes. I didn't want us to come to a stop until we were as far away as possible from the echoes of that scream. I hate hot landings. By the time the gig actually lurched to a stop, we were twenty miles away from where we'd planned to be, and every face on board was livid—mine most of all.

I don't mind being a pioneer, exactly, but I hope someday they'll give me a softer horse. I wasn't aware of having said so aloud, but I must have, for behind me Sergeant Lea said sourly:

"The next time I have to land on a high-gravity planet, I hope they give
me
a thinner pilot."

I maintained a dignified, commissioned-officer's silence. Shortly I heard the faint rattle of gear behind me as the Marines unstrapped themselves, and checked their battle dress. By this time I judged myself to be enough over the shakes to risk checking my own suit, helmet, air supply, and flamer, and then the critical little device which was to be the trigger of our trap—if the trap worked. The trigger seemed to be in good order, and so did the relay assembly on my control board which was supposed to respond to it. It was Lea's job to make sure that the answering action was appropriate, and I knew I could trust him for that.

"All right, Lieutenant Pfeiffer?"

"Looks all right. Let's go."

I doused all the lights, sealed myself up, and followed the Marine squad out the airlock and down into the tall grass. I couldn't resist looking up. The sky was a deep violet, in which the stars twinkled like lightning bugs—the kind of sight you don't often enjoy in a spaceman's life. I had a notion that if I stayed here long enough to become light-adapted, I might even manage to make out a few of the simpler and more banal constellations. From here, for instance, you ought to be able to make out Orion, and begin to catch distorted hints of the constellation the Sun belongs to from far away, called the Parrot. Only a computer can analyze our constellations in space; the eye can see nothing but the always visible stars, clouds and clouds of them, glaring and motionless . . .

However, I had better sense than to daydream long on office time. I set the airlock to cycling, and touched my helmet to the closed outer seal to listen for the muted groan of the flamers. It came through right on time, a noise halfway between a low bull-fiddle note and that of a motor trying to start. Satisfied, more or less, I plodded away through the extremely tall grass.

It was lonely here. My radar sweeper kept me posted on where the gig was, and where I was supposed to go from there; but I was not going to have any company, because I was to be only one unit of a very wide circle, and the Marines were already fanning out and away from me to take up their own posts on that perimeter.

Possibly I was already being stalked, too. If so, the radar would never let me know about it, as long as the stalker kept himself bent low in the sea of grass. Above, the violet sky arched and burned. It was moonless, we had been careful enough about our timing to insure that; but there were no clouds, either. If the natives had sharp eyes, as hunters had to have, they might well see the glints of starlight on my helmet, or even on the shoulders of my suit. And I was very aware of my weight. Every step was elephantine. I had to admit to the alien night that I was not really in very good shape for a fighting man, hard though I tried to blame it all on the i.8 Gee field.