"Information secured from others is invariably inaccurate in some fashion. A complete and reasoned statement of a series of events is almost necessarily trimmed and distorted and edited, or it would not appear reasonable and complete. Truly factual accounts of any series of happenings will, if honest, contain inconsistent or irrational elements. Reality is far too complex to be reduced to simple statements without much suppression of fact . . ."
Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. P. 25.
He was able to verify his guess about the means by which interstellar war had become practical, when the Med Ship was landed. Normally, a landing grid was a gigantic, squat structure of steel girders, half a mile high and a full mile in diameter. It rested upon bedrock, was cemented into unbreakable union with the substance of its planet, and tapped the ionosphere for power. When the Med Ship reached the abysmal darkness of the nearest planet's shadow, there were long, long pauses in which it hung apparently motionless in space. There were occasional vast swingings, as if something reached out and made sure where it was. And Calhoun made use of his nearest-object indicator and observed that something very huge fumbled about and presently became stationary in emptiness, and then moved swiftly and assuredly down into the blackness which was the planet's night-side. When it and the planetary surface were one, the Med Ship began its swift descent in the grip of landing grid-type force-fields.
It landed in the center of a grid—but not a typical grid. This was more monstrous in size than any spaceport boasted. It was not squat, either, but as tall as it was wide. As the ship descended, he saw lights in a control-system cell, midway to the ground. It was amazing but obvious. The Med Ship's captors had built a landing grid which was itself a spaceship. It was a grid which could cross the void between stars. It could wage offensive war.
"It's infernally simple," Calhoun told Murgatroyd, distastefully. "The regular landing grid hooks onto something in space and pulls it to the ground. This thing hooks onto something on the ground and pushes itself out into space. It'll travel by Lawlor or overdrive, and when it gets somewhere it can lock onto any part of another world and pull itself down to that and stay anchored to it. Then it can land the fleet that traveled with it. It's partly a floating dry dock and partly a landing craft, and actually it's both. It's a ready-made spaceport anywhere it chooses to land. Which means that it's the deadliest weapon in the past thousand years!"
Murgatroyd climbed on his lap and blinked wisely at the screens. They showed the surroundings of the now-grounded Med Ship, standing on its tail. There were innumerable stars overhead. All about, there was the whiteness of snow. But there were lights. Ships at rest lay upon the icy ground.
"I suspect," growled Calhoun, "that I could make a dash on emergency rockets and get behind the horizon before they could catch me. But this is just a regular military base!"
He considered his recent studies of historic wars, of battles and massacres and looting and rapine. Even modern, civilized men would revert very swiftly to savagery once they had fought a battle. Enormities unthinkable at other times would occur promptly if men went back to barbarity. Such things might already be present in the minds of the crews of these spaceships.
"You and I, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "may be the only wholly rational men on this planet. And you aren't a man."
"Chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd. He seemed glad of it.
"But we have to survey the situation before we attempt anything noble and useless," Calhoun observed. "But still—what's that?"
He stared at a screen which showed lights on the ground moving toward the Med Ship. They were carried by men on foot, walking on the snow. As they grew nearer it appeared that there were also weapons in the group. They were curious, ugly instruments—like sporting rifles save that their bores were impossibly large. They would be— Calhoun searched his new store of information. They would be launchers of miniature rockets, capable of firing small missiles with shaped charges which could wreck the Med Ship easily.
Thirty yards off, they separated to surround the ship. A single man advanced.
"I'm going to let him in, Murgatroyd," observed Calhoun. "In war time, a man is expected to be polite to anybody with a weapon capable of blowing him up. It's one of the laws of war."
He opened both the inner and outer lock doors. The glow from inside the ship shone out on white, untrodden snow. Calhoun stood in the opening, observing that as his breath went out of the outer opening it turned to white mist.
"My name is Calhoun," he said curtly to the single dark figure still approaching. "Interstellar Medical Service. A neutral, a noncombatant, and at the moment very much annoyed by what has happened!"
A gray-bearded man with grim eyes advanced into the light from the opened port. He nodded.
"My name is Walker," he said, as curtly. "I suppose I'm the leader of this military expedition. At least, my son is the leader of the . . . ah . . . the enemy, which makes me the logical man to direct the attack upon them."
Calhoun did not quite believe his ears, but he pricked them up. A father and son on opposite sides would hardly have been trusted by either faction, as warfare used to be conducted. And certainly their relationship would hardly be a special qualification for leadership at any time.
He made a gesture of invitation, and the gray-bearded man climbed the ladder to the port. Somehow he did not lose the least trace of dignity in climbing. He stepped solidly into the air lock and on into the cabin of the ship.
"If I may, I'll close the lock-doors," said Calhoun, "if your men won't misinterpret the action. It's cold outside."
The sturdy, bearded man shrugged his cape-clad shoulders.
"They'll blast your ship if you try to take off," he said. "They're in the mood to blast something!"
With the same air of massive confidence, he moved to a seat. Murgatroyd regarded him suspiciously. He ignored the little animal.
"Well?" he said impatiently.
"I'm Med Service," said Calhoun. "I can prove it. I should be neutral in whatever is happening. But I was asked for by the planetary government of Phaedra. I think it likely that your ships come from Phaedra. Your grid ship, in particular, wouldn't be needed by the local citizens. How does the war go?"
The stocky man's eyes burned.
"Are you laughing at me?" he demanded.
"I've been three months in overdrive," Calhoun reminded him. "I haven't heard anything to laugh at in longer than that. No."
"The . . . our enemy," said Walker bitterly, "consider that they have won the war. But you may be able to make them realize that they have not, and they cannot. We have been foolishly patient, but we can't risk forbearance any longer. We mean to carry through to victory even if we arrive at cutting our own throats for a victory celebration. And that is not unlikely!"
Calhoun raised his eyebrows. But he nodded. His studies had told him that a war psychology was a highly emotional one.
"Our home planet Phaedra has to be evacuated," said Walker, very grimly indeed. "There are signs of instability in our sun. Five years since, we sent our older children to Canis III to build a world for all of us to move to. Our sun could burst at any time. It is certain to flare up some time—and soon! We sent our children because the place of danger was at home. We urged them to work feverishly. We sent the young women as well as the men at the beginning, so that if our planet did crisp and melt when our sun went off there would still be children of our children to live on. When we dared—when they could feed and shelter them—we sent younger boys and girls to safety, overburdening the new colony with mouths to feed, but at the least staying ourselves where the danger was! Later we sent even the small children, as the signs of an imminent cataclysm became more threatening."
Calhoun nodded again. There were not many novas in the galaxy in any one year, even among the millions of billions of stars it held. But there had been at least one colony which had had to be shifted because of evidence of solar instability. The job in that case was not complete when the flareup came. The evacuation of a world, though, would never be an easy task. The population had to be moved light-years of distance. Space-travel takes time, even at thirty times the speed of light. Where the time of disaster—the deadline for removal—could not be known exactly, the course adopted by Phaedra was logical. Young men and women were best sent off first. They could make new homes for themselves and for others to follow them. They could work harder and longer for the purpose than any other age-group—and they would best assure the permanent survival of somebody. The new colony would have to be a place of frantic, unresting labor, of feverish round-the-clock endeavor, because the time-scale for working was necessarily unknown but was extremely unlikely to be enough. When they could be burdened further, younger boys and girls would be shipped—old enough to help but not to pioneer. They could be sent to safety in a partly-built colony. Later smaller children could be sent, needing care from their older contemporaries. Only at long last would the adults leave their world for the new. They would stay where the danger was until all the younger ones were secure.
"But now," said Walker thickly, "our children have made their world and now they refuse to receive their parents and grandparents! They have a world of young people only, under no authority but their own. They say that we lied to them about the coming flare of Phaedra's sun: that we enslaved them and made them use their youth to build a new world we now demand to take over. They are willing for Phaedra's sun to burst and kill the rest of us, so they can live as they please without a care for us!"
Calhoun said nothing. It is a part of medical training to recognize that information obtained from others is never wholly accurate. Conceding the facts, he would still be getting from Walker only one interpretation of them. There is an instinct in the young to become independent of adults, and an instinct in adults to be protective past all reason. There is, in one sense, always a war between the generations on all planets, not only Phaedra and Canis III. It is a conflict between instincts which themselves are necessary—and perhaps the conflict as such is necessary for some purpose of the race.
"They grew tired of the effort building the colony required," said Walker, his eyes burning as before. "So they decided to doubt its need. They sent some of their number back to Phaedra to verify our observations of the sun's behavior. Our observations! It happened that they came at a time when the disturbances in the sun were temporarily quiet. So our children decided that we were overtimid; that there was no danger to us; that we demanded too much. They refused to build more shelters and to clear and plant more land. They even refused to land more ships from Phaedra, lest we burden them with more mouths to feed. They declared for rest; for ease. They declared themselves independent of us! They disowned us! Sharper than a serpent's tooth . . ."
" . . . Is an ungrateful child," said Calhoun. "So I've heard. So you declared war."
"We did!" raged Walker. "We are men! Haven't we wives to protect? We'll fight even our children for the safety of their mothers! And we have grandchildren—on Canis III! What's happened and is happening there . . . what they're doing—" He seemed to strangle on his fury. "Our children are lost to us. They've disowned us. They'd destroy us and our wives, and they destroy themselves, and they will destroy our grandchildren— We fight!"
Murgatroyd climbed into Calhoun's lap and cuddled close against him. Tormals are peaceful little animals. The fury and the bitterness in Walker's tone upset Murgatroyd. He took refuge from anger in closeness to Calhoun.
"So the war's between you and your children and grandchildren," observed Calhoun. "As a Med Ship man—what's happened to date? How has the fighting gone? What's the state of things right now?"
"We've accomplished nothing," rasped Walker. "We've been too softhearted! We don't want to kill them—not even after what they've done. But they are willing to kill us! Only a week ago we sent a cruiser in to broadcast propaganda. We considered that there must be some decency left even in our children. No ship can use any drive close to a planet, of course. We sent the cruiser in on a course to form a parabolic semiorbit, riding momentum down close to atmosphere above Canopolis, where it would broadcast on standard communication frequencies and go on out to clear space again. But they used the landing grid to strew its path with rocks and boulders. It smashed into them. Its hull was punctured in fifty places! Every man died!"
Calhoun did not change expression. This was an interview to learn the facts of a situation in which the Med Service had been asked to act. It was not an occasion in which to be horrified. He said:
"What did you expect of the Med Service when you asked for its help?"
"We thought," said Walker, very bitterly indeed, "that we would have prisoners. We prepared hospital ships to tend our children who might be hurt. We wanted every possible aid in that. No matter what our children have done—"
"Yet you have no prisoners?" asked Calhoun.
He didn't grasp this affair yet. It was too far out of the ordinary for quick judgment. Any war, in modern times, would have seemed strange enough. But a full-scale war between parents and children on a planetary scale was a little too much to grasp in all its implications in a hurry.
"We've one prisoner," said Walker scornfully. "We caught him because we hoped to do something with him. We failed. You'll take him back. We don't want him! Before you go, you will be told our plans for fighting; for the destruction, if we must, of our own children. But it is better for us to destroy them than to let them destroy our grandchildren as they are doing."
This accusation about grandchildren did not seem conceivably true. Calhoun, however, did not question it. He said reflectively:
"You're going about this affair in a queer fashion, whether as a war or an exercise in parental discipline. Sending word of your plans to one's supposed enemy, for instance—"
Walker stood up. His cheek twitched.
"At any instant now, Phaedra's sun may go! It may have done so since we heard. And our wives—our children's mothers—are on Phaedra. If our children have murdered them by refusing them refuge, then we will have nothing left but the right—"
There was a pounding on the airlock door.
"I'm through," rasped Walker. He went to the lock and opened the doors. "This Med man," he said to those outside, "will come and see what we've made ready. Then he'll take our prisoner back to Canis. He'll report what he knows. It may do some good."
He stepped out of the airlock, flinging a command to Calhoun to follow.
Calhoun grunted to himself. He opened a cabinet and donned heavy winter garments. Murgatroyd said "Chee!" in alarm when it appeared that Calhoun was going to leave him. Calhoun snapped his fingers and Murgatroyd leaped up into his arms. Calhoun tucked him under his coat and followed Walker down into the snow.
This, undoubtedly, was the next planet out from the colonized Canis III. It would be Canis IV, and a very small excess of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere would keep it warmer—by the greenhouse effect—than its distance from the local sun would otherwise imply. The snow was winter snow only. This was not too cold a base for military operations against the planet next inward toward the sun.
Walker strode ahead toward the rows of spaceship hulls about the singularly spidery grip ship. It occurred to Calhoun that astrogating such a ship would be very much like handling an oversized, open-ended wastebasket. A monstrous overdrive field would be needed, and keeping its metal above brittle-point on any really long space voyage would be difficult indeed. But it was here. It had undoubtedly lifted itself from Phaedra. It had landed itself here, and should be able to land on Canis and then let down after itself the war fleet now clustered about its base. But Calhoun tried to take comfort in the difficulty of traveling really long distances, up in the tens or twenties of light-years, with such a creation. Possibly, just possibly, warfare would still be limited to relatively nearby worlds—
"We thought," rumbled Walker, "that we might excavate shelters here, so we could bring the rest of Phaedra's population here to wait out the war—so they'd be safe if Phaedra's sun blew. But we couldn't feed them all. So we have to blast a reception for ourselves on the world our children have made!"
They came to a ship which was larger than any except the grid ship. Nearby half its hull had been opened and a gigantic tent set up against it. It was a huge machine shop. A spaceship inside was evidently the cruiser of which Walker had spoken. Calhoun could see where ragged old holes had been made in its hull. Men of middle age or older worked upon it with a somehow dogged air. But Walker pointed to another object, almost half the size of the Med Ship. Men worked on that, too. It was a missile, not man-carrying, with relatively enormous fuel capacity for drive-rockets.
"Look that over," commanded Walker. "That's a rocket-missile, a robot fighting machine that we'll start from space with plenty of rocket-fuel for maneuvering. It will fight and dodge its way down into the middle of the grid at Canopolis—which our children refuse to use to land their parents. In three days from now we use this to blast that grid and as much of Canopolis as may go with it from the blast of a megaton bomb. Then our grid ship will land and our fleet will follow it down, and we'll be aground on Canis with blast-rifles and flame and more bombs, to fight for our rightful foothold on our children's world!
"When our fighting men are landed, our ships will begin to bring in our wives from Phaedra—if they are still alive—while we fight to make them safe. We'll fight our children as if they were wild beasts—the way they've treated us! We begin this fight in just three days, when that missile is ready and tested. If they kill us—so much the better! But we'll make them do their murder with their hands, with their guns, with the weapons they'd doubtless made. But they shall not murder us by disowning us! And if we have to kill them to save our grandchildren—we begin to do so in just three days. Take them that message!"
Calhoun said:
"I'm afraid they won't believe me."
"They'll learn they must," growled Walker. Then he said abruptly: "What repairs does your ship need? We'll bring it here and repair it, and then you'll take our prisoner and carry him and your message back to his own kind—our children!"
The irony and the fury and the frustration in his tone as he said, "children," made Murgatroyd wriggle, underneath Calhoun's coat.
"I find," said Calhoun, "that all I need is power. You drained my overdrive charge when you snatched my ship out of overdrive. I've extra Duhanne cells, but one overdrive charge is a lot of power to lose."
"You'll get it back," growled Walker. "Then take the prisoner and our warning to Canis. Get them to surrender if you can."
Calhoun considered. Under his coat, Murgatroyd said "Chee! Chee!" in a tone of some indignation.
"Thinking of the way of my own father with me," said Calhoun wryly, "and accepting your story itself as quite true—how the devil can I make your children believe that this time you aren't bluffing? Haven't you bluffed before?"
"We've threatened," said Walker, his eyes blazing. "Yes. And we were too soft-hearted to carry out our threats. We've tried everything short of force. But the time has come when we have to be ruthless! We have our wives to consider."
"Whom," observed Calhoun, "I suspect you didn't dare have with you because they wouldn't let you actually fight, no matter what your sons and daughters did."
"But they're not here now!" raged Walker. "And nothing will stop us!"
Calhoun nodded. In view of the situation as a whole, he almost believed it of the fathers of the colonists on Canis III. But he wouldn't have believed it of his own father, regardless, and he did not think the young people of Canis would believe it of theirs. Yet there was nothing else for them to do.
It looked like he'd traveled three months in overdrive and painstakingly studied much distressing information about the ancestors of modern men, only to arrive at and witness the most heart-rending conflict in human history.