Seeding Program Part 3

Coming back to the station, he saw a pinnah-bird. It bur- rowed into the nearest drift as soon as it saw him, but for the preceding instant he had had company. He never saw it again, but now and then he thought about it.

The question, put simply, was: What was he going to do now?

That he was thoroughly in love with Mike Leverault could no longer be argued. It was doubly difficult to come to grips with the emotion, however, because he did not know the name of it, and so had to reason each time with the raw experience itself, rather than with the more convenient symbol. Each time be thought about it, it shook him all over again. But there it was.

As for the colonists, he was certain that they were not criminals in any way, except by Earth's arbitary fiat. They were a hard-working, courageous, decent lot, and had offered to Sweeney the first disinterested friendliness he had ever known.

And, like all the colonists, Sweeney could not help but ad- mire RuUman.

There, in those three propositions, rested the case against using the radio.

The time for reporting to Meikiejon was almost up. The inert transceiver on the table before Sweeney had only to send a single one of five notes, and the colony on Ganymede would be ended. The notes were coded: - WAVVY: Have custody need pickup NAVVY: Have custody need help WANY: Need custody have help AAVYV: Need custody need pickup YYAWY: Have custody have pickup What response the computer on board the s.h.i.+p would make, what course of action it would dictate in response to any one of those signals was unknown, but that was now almost be- side the point. Any response would be inappropriate, since not one of the five signals fitted the actual situationdespite all the intellectual travail which had gone into tailoring them.

If no note were sent, Meikiejon would go away at the end of 300 days. That might mean that Pullman's "project," what- ever that was, would go throughbut that wouldn't save the colony. It would take Earth a minimum of two generations to breed and mature another Sweeney from the artificially main- tained ovaries of mercifully long-dead s.h.i.+rley Leverault, and it was hardly likely that Earth would even try. Earth probably.

knew more than Sweeney did about the "project"it would be difficult to know lessand if Sweeney himself failed to stop it, the next attempt would most likely arrive as a bomb.

Earth would stop wanting "those men" back, once it became evident that she couldn't get them even through so subtle a double agent as Sweeney.

Item: chain reaction. There was, Sweeney knew, a consider- able amount of deuterium on Ganymede, some of it locked in the icy wastes of Neptune's Trident, a lesser amount scat- tered through the rocks in the form of lithium deuteride. A fission bomb going off here would stand an excellent chance of starting a fusion explosion which would detonate the whole satellite. If any still-active fragment of that explosion should hit Jupiter, only a bare 665,000 miles away now, that. planet would be quite large enough to sustain a Beth~ or carbon cycle; it was diffuse, but it alone among the planets had the ma.s.s. The wave front of that unimaginable catastrophe would boil Earth's seas in their beds; it might alsothe probability was about ~s -triggerr a nova outburst from the Sun, though n.o.body would stay alive to be grateful very long if it didn't.

Since Sweeney knew this, he had to a.s.sume that it was com- mon knowledge, and that Earth would use chemical explosives only on Ganymede. But would it? Common knowledge and Sweeney had had precious little contact so far.

Still, it hardly mattered. If Earth bombed the colony, it would be all up with him, regardless. Even the limited com- panions.h.i.+p, the wordless love, the sense that he might yet be born, all would be gone. He would be gone. So might the little world.

But if he signalled Meikiejon and the computer, ha would be taken alive away from Mike, away from RuUman, away from the colony, away and away. He would stay his own dead self. He might even have a new chance to learn that same endless lesson about the shapes loneliness can take; or, Earth might work a miracle and turn him into a live, Jay-positive human being. - The wind rose and rose. The congruent furies of the storms inside and outside Sweeney mounted together. Their con- gruence made a cla.s.sic example, had he been able to rec- ognize it, of the literary device called "the pathetic fallacy"

but Sweeney had never read any fiction, and recognizing na- ture in the process of imitating art would have been of no use to him anyhow.

He did not even know that, when the crisis of the exterior storm began to wear away the windward edge of the weather station's foundations with a million teeth of invisible wrath, his lonely battle to save the station might have made an epic.

Whole chapters, whole cantos, whole acts of what might have been conscious heroism in another man, in a human being, were thrown away while Sweeney went about his business, his mind on his lonely debate.

There was no signal he could send that would tell Meikie- jon or the computer the truth. He did not have custody of the men Earth wanted, and he didn't want to have it, so it would be idiotic to ask for help to get it. He no longer believed that Earth "must have those men back," either for Earth's pur- posesmysterious though they remainedor for his own, essentially hopeless though his own appeared to be.

But any signal would take him off Ganymedeif he wanted to be taken.

The crisis, he saw, was over. He made the station fast.

He checked the radio once more. It worked. He snapped the turning pointer to one of its copper contacts and closed the key, sending Meikiejon VVANY. After half an hour. the set's oscillator began to peep rhythmically, indicating that Meikiejon was still in Ganymede's sky, and had heard.

Sweeney left the set on the table in the station, went back to the mountain, and told Rullman what he was and what he had done.

Rullman's fury was completely quiet, and a thousand times more frightening than the most uncontrolled rage could have been. He simply sat behind his desk and looked at Sweeney, all the kindness gone out of his face, and the warmth out of his eyes. After a few moments, Sweeney realized that the blankness of Rullman's eyes meant that he was not seeing him at all; his mind was turned inward. So was his rage.

"I'm astonished," he said, in a voice so even that it seemed to contain no surprise at all. "Most of all, I'm astonished at myself. I should have antic.i.p.ated something like this. But I didn't dream that they had the knowledge, or the guile, to stake everything on a -long-term program like this. I have been, in short, an idiot."

His voice took on, for a moment, a shade of color, but it was so scathing that it made Sweeney recoil. And yet no sin- gle word of condemnation of Sweeney had yet been forth- coming from Rullman; the man was, instead, strafing himself.

Sweeney said tentatively: "How could you have known? There were a lot of points where I might have given myself away, but I was doing my d.a.m.ndest not to. I might have kept the secret still longer, if I'd wanted it that way."

"You?" Rullman said. The single syllable was worse than a blow. "You're as blameless as a machine, Donald. I know too much about pantropy to think otherwise. It's very easy to iso- late an Adapted infant, prevent him from becoming a human being at all, if you've sufficient ill-will to want to. Your be- havior was predictable, after all."

"Was it?" Sweeney said, a little grimly. "I came and told you, didn't I?"

"And what if you did? Can that change matters now? I'm sure that Earth included that very high probability in its plans. Insofar as you have loyalties at all, they were bound to become divided; but it was probably calculated that they would stay dividedthat is, would not change completely.

And so here you are, trying to play both ends against the mid- dleyou yourself being the middleby betraying your mas- querade to me at the same time you betray the colony to Earth. Nothing can be accomplished by that."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure," Rullman said stonily. '1 suppose they offered you an inducement. Judging by the questions you've asked me before, they must have promised to make an Earth-normal human being out of youas soon as they found out from us how to do that. But the fact of the matter is that it can't be done at all, and you know it. And now there's no future for you with us, either. I'm sorry for you, Donald, believe me; it's not your fault that they made you into a creature instead of a person. But you are nothing now but a bomb that's already gone off."

Sweeney had never known his father, and the hegemony of the Port cops had been too diffuse to instill in him any fo- cussed, automatic respect for persons standing in loco par- entis. He discovered, suddenly, that he was furious with Rull- man.

"That's a silly d.a.m.n speech," he said, staring down and across the desk at the seated, slightly bowed man. "Nothing's gone off yet. There's plenty of information I can give you that you might use, if you waat to work to get it. Of course if you've given up in advance"

Rullman looked up. "What do you know?" he said, with some puzzlement. "You said yourself that it would be the computer on board this Capt. Meikiejon's s.h.i.+p that would decide the course of action. And you can't communicate ef- fectively with Meikiejon. This is a strange time to be bluffing, Donald."

"Why would I bluff? I know more about what Earth is likely to do with my message than anybody else in the colony.

My experience with Earth is more recent. I wouldn't have come to you at all if I'd thought the situation to be hopelessand if I hadn't carefully picked the one message to send to Meik- iejon that I thought left the colony some hope. I'm not strad- dling. I'm on your side. To send no message at all would have been the worst possible thing to do. This way, we may have a grace period."

"And just how," Rullman said slowly, "can you expect me to trust you?"

"That's your problem," Sweeney said brusquely. "If I really am still straddling, it's because the colony's failed to convince me that my future lies here. And if that's the case, l's not aloneand it's the colony's own fault for being so secretive with its own people."

"Secretive?" Rullman said, with open astonishment now.

"About what?"

"About the 'project.' About the original crime Earth wants you for. About why Earth wants you backyou in particular, Dr. Rullman."

"b.u.t.that's common knowledge, Donald. All of it."

"Maybe so. But it isn't common to meand most of the original settlers take it all so much for granted that they can't talk about it, except in little cryptic references, like a private joke everybody's supposed to know. But everybody doesn't; did you know .that? I've found that about half your second generation here has only the foggiest notion of the past.

The amount of information available here to a newcomer whether he's newly arrived like me, or just plain newborn you could stick in a pinnah-bird's eye. And that's dangerous.

It's why I could have betrayed the colony completely -if I hadn't decided against it, and you couldn't have stopped me."

Rullman leaned back and was quiet for quite a long time.

"Children often don't ask questions when they think they're already expected to know the answers," he murmured. He looked considerably more thunderstnick than he had when Sweeney made his original announcement. "They like to ap- pear knowing even when they aren't. It gives them status in their own eyes."

"Children and spies," Sweeney said. "There are certain questions neither of them can ask, and for almost the same reasons. And the phonier the children's knowledge actually is, the easier for the spy to get around among the adults."

"I begin to see," Rullman said. "We thought we were im- mune to spying, because an Earth spy couldn't live here with- out elaborate, detectable protections. But that was a problem in physics, and that kind of problem is soluble. We should have a.s.sumed so from the beginning. Instead, we made our- selves socially as vulnerable as possible."

"That's how I see it. I'll bet that my father wouldn't have let you get away with it if he'd been able to get away with you. He was supposed to have been an expert in that kind of thing. I don't know; I never knew him. And I suppose it's be- side the point, anyhow."

"No," Rullman said. "It's very much to the point, and I think you've just. proven it, Donald. Your father couldn't pre- vent it, but perhaps he's given us an instrument for repairing it."

"Meaning me?"

"Yes. Ringer or no ringer, the blood you carryand the geneshave been with us from the beginning, and I know how they show their effects. I see them now. Sit down, Don- ald. I begin to hope. What shall we do?"

"First of all," Sweeney said, "please, please tell me what this colony is all about!"

It was a difficult a.s.signment.

Item: the Authorities. Long before s.p.a.ce travel, big cities in the United States had fallen so far behind any possibility of controlling their own traffic problems as to make purely political solutions chimerical. No city administration could spend the amount of money needed for a radical cure, with- out being ousted in the next elections by the enraged drivers and pedestrians who most needed the help.

Increasingly, the traffic problems were turned over, with grat.i.tude and many privileges, to semi-public Port, Bridge and Highway Authorities: huge capital-investment ventures modelled upon the Port of New York Authority, which had shown its ability to build and/or run such huge operations as the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge, Teterboro, LaGuardia, Idlewild and Newark airports, and many lesser facilities. By 1960 it was possible to travel from the tip of Florida to the border of Maine entirely over Authority-owned territory, if one could pay the appropriate tolls (and didn't mind being shot at iq the Poconos by embat- tled land-owners who were still resisting the gigantic Incadel project).

item', the tolls. The Authorities were creations of the states, usually acting in pairs, and as such en)oyed legal protections not available to other private firms engaged in interstate com- merce. Among these protections, in the typical enabling act, was a provision that "the two said states will not . . . diminish or impair the power of the Authority to establish, levy and collect tolls and other charges . . ." The federal government helped; although the Federal Bridge Act of 1946 required that the collection of tolls must cease with the payment of amor- tization, Congress almost never invoked the Act against any Authority. Conseq.uently, the tolls never dropped; by 1953 the Port of New York Authority was reporting a profit of over twenty million dollars a year, and annual collections were in- creasing at the rate of ten per cent a year.

Some of the take went into the development of new facili- tiesmost of them so placed as to increase the take, rather than solve the traffic problem. Again the Port of New York Authority led the way; it built, against all sense, a third tube for the Lincoln Tunnel, thus pouring eight and a half million more cars per year into Manhattan's mid-town area, where the city was already strangling for want of any adequate ducts to take away the then-current traffic.

Item: the Port cops. The Authorities had been authorized from the beginning to police their own prertises. As the Au- thorities got bigger, so did the private police forces.

By the time s.p.a.ce travel arrived, the Authorities owned it.

They had taken pains to see that it fell to them; they had learned from their airport operationswhich, almost alone among their projects, always showed a losstba.t nothing less than total control is good enough. And characteristically, they never took any interest in any form of s.p.a.ce-travel which did not involve enormous expenditures; otherwise they could take no profits from sub-contracting, no profits from fast amortiza- tion of loans, no profits from the laws allowing them fast tax writeoffs for new construction, no profits from the indefi- nitely protracted collection of tolls and fees after the initial cost and the upkeep had been recovered.

At the world's first commercial s.p.a.ceport, Port Earth, it cost s.h.i.+p owners $5000 each and every time their s.h.i.+ps touched the ground. Landing fees had been outlawed in private at- mosphere flying for years, but the Greater Earth Port Autho- rity operated under its own set of precedents; it made land- ing fees for s.p.a.cecraft routine. And it maintained the first Port police force which was bigger than the armed forces of the nation which had given it its franchise; after a while, the distinction was wiped out, and the Port cops were the armed farces of the United States. It was not difficult to do, since the Greater Earth Port authority was actually a holding com- pany embracing every other Authority in the country, includ- ing Port Earth.

And when people, soon after s.p.a.ceflight, began to ask each other, "How shall we colonize the planets?," the Greater Earth Port Authority had its answer ready.

Item: terrafonning.

Terraformingremaking the planets into near-images of the Earth, so that Earth-normal people could live on them.

Port Earth was prepared to start small. Port Earth wanted to move Mars out of its...o...b..t to a point somewhat closer to the sun, and make the minor adjustments needed in the orbits of the other planets; to transport to Mars about enough water to empty the Indian Oceanonly a pittance to Earth, after all, and not 10 per cent of what would be needed later to terra- form Venus; to carry to the little planet top-soil about equal in area to the state of Iowa, in order to get started at growing plants which would slowly change the atmosphere of Mars; and so on. The whole thing, Port Earth pointed out reasonably, was perfectly feasible from the point of view of the available supplies and energy resources, and it would cost less than thirty-three billion dollars. The Greater Earth Port Authority was prepared to recover that sum at no cost in taxes in less thap a century, through such items as $50 rocket- mail stamps, $10,000 Mars landing fees, $1,000 one-way strap-down tickets, 100-per-desert-acre land t.i.tles, and so on.

Of course the fees would continue after the cost was re- coveredfor maintenance.

And what, after all, the Authority asked reasonably, was the alternative? Nothing but domes. The Greater Earth Port Au- thority hated domes. They cost too little to begin with, and the volume of traffic to and from them would always be miniscule.

Experience on the Moon had made that painfully clear. And the public hated domes, too; it had already shown a ma.s.s re- luctance to live under them.

As for the governments, other than that of the United States, that the Authority still tolerated, none of them had any love for domes, or for the kind of limited colonization that the domes stood for. They needed to get rid of their pul- lulating ma.s.ses by the bucket-full, not by the eye-dropper-fuU.

If the Authority knew that emigration increases the home population rather than cuts it, the Authority carefully re- framed from saying so to the governments involved; they could redisoover Franklin's Law for themselves. Domes were out; terraforming was in.

Then came pantropy.

If this third alternative to the problem of colonizing the planets had come as a surprise to the Authority, and to Port Earth, they had n.o.body to blame for it but themselves.

There had been plenty of harbingers. The notion of modi- fying the human stock genetically to live on the planets as they were found, rather than changing the planets to accom- modate the people, had been old with Olaf Stapledon; it had been touched upon by many later writers; it went back, in es- sence, as far as Proteus,-and as deep into the human mind as the werewolf, the vampire, the fairy changeling, the trans- migrated soul.

But suddenly it was possible; and, not very long afterwards, it was a fact.

The Authority hated it. Pantropy involved a high initial in- vestment to produce the first colonists, but it was a method which with refinement would become cheaper arid cheaper.

Once the colonists were planted, it required no investment at all; the colonists were comfortable on their adopted world, and could produce new colonists without outside help. Pan- tropy, furthermore, was at its most expensive less than half -as costly as the setting-up of the smallest and least difficult dome.

Compared to the cost of terraforming even so favorable a planet as Mars, it cost nothing at all, from the Authority's point of view.

And there was no way to collect tolls against even the ini- tial expense. It was too cheap to bother with.

WILL YOUR CHILD BE A MONSTER?.

If a number of influential scientists have their way, some child or grandchild of yours may eke out his life in the frozen wastes of Pluto, where even the sun is only a spark in the skyand will be unable to return to Earth until after he dies, if then!

Yes, even now there are plans afoot to change inno- cent unborn children into alien creatures who would die terribly the moment that they set foot upon the green planet of their ancestors. Impatient with the slow but steady pace of man's conquest of Mars, prominent ivory-.

tower thinkers are working out ways to produce all kinds of travesties upon the human formtfavesties which will be able to survive, somehow, in the bitterest and most untamed of planetary infernos.

The process which may produce these pitiful freaks at enormous expenseis called "pantropy." It is al- ready in imperfect and dangerous existence. Chief among its prophets is white-haired, dreamy-eyed Dr. Jacob Rullman, who. . .

"Stop," Sweeney said.

He put his fingertips to his temples, and then, trembling, took them away again and looked at Rullman. The scientist put down the old magazine clipping, which even in its telfon sheath was as yellow as paelta after its half-life in Gany- mede's air. Rullman's own hands were quite steady; and what there was left of his hair was as reddish-brown as ever.

"Those lies II'm sorry. But they work, I know they work.

That's what they filled me up with. It's different when you realize how vicious they are."

"I know," Rullman said, gently. "It's easy to do. Bringing up an Adapted child is a special process, the child is always isolated and anxious to imitate, you may tell it anything you wish; it has no choice but to believe, it's desperate for closer contact, for acceptance, for the embraces 'it can never have.

It's the ultimate in bottle-babies: the breast that might have fed it may be just on the other side of the gla.s.s, but it also lies generations in the past. Even the voice of 'the mother comes along a wireif it comes along at all. I know, Donald, believe me. It happened to me, too. And it's very hard."

"Jacob Rullman was"

"My remote, immediate father. My mother died early. They often do, of the deprivation, I believe; like yours. But my father taught me the truth, there in the Moon caves, before he was killed."

Sweeney took a deep breath. "I'm learning all that now.

Go on."

"Are you sure, Donald?"

"Go on. I need to know, arid it's not too late. Please."

"Well," Rullman said reflectively, "the Authority got laws pa.s.sed against pantropy, but for a while the laws didn't have many teeth; Congress was leary of forbidding vivisection at the same time, and didn't know exactly what it was being asked to forbid; Port didn't want to be too explicit. My father was detennined to see pantropy tried while the laws still pro vided some loopholeshe knew well enough that they'd be stiffened as soon as Port thought it safe to stiffen them. And he was convinced that we'd never colonize the stars by dome- building or terraforming. Those might work on some of our local planetsMars, Venusbut not outside."

"Outside? How would anybody get there?"