First Cycle Part 9

"Not too much. We can bombard their planet with radio-guided rockets from here,"

she said. "And we can case the bombs in cobalt."

"Cobalt? What would that do?" Zalgo asked.

"The energy-release of an ordinary fission-bomb would be enough to convert a cobalt casing-of ordinary cobalt-50-into radioactive cobalt-60. That's a gamma-emitter, with a five-year half-life. A thousand or so of them would drench that planet with lingering radiation for the next five centuries; the whole planet would be literally sterilized, as far as any air-breathing life was concerned. And that would be the end of Tizzy-Puzzy and the Organic State, and lying and cheating and trying to Halzorro the whole planet; and we could go back to living like civilized people."

There was a stir about the table; everybody, even the Zaganno representatives, looked at her aghast.

"You're not serious about that, Yssa?" Vandro asked. Then he nodded. "Yes, you are."

"But if we were to do anything like that-could we go on as before?" Zalgo asked.

"Bearing the guilt of a billion murders?""I suppose," Yssa said, sadly, "what I'm offering you is a choice of guilt. Doing this would not be easy; none of us would ever forget it. We would have to bear it with us all the rest of our lives. But, if we don't, what do we then have to live with? The knowledge that our children will surely be born into a world of fear and tyranny. Fear of the gra.s.s- heads, and tyranny of the World Combine we'll have to organize in self-protection. And the ever-present possibility that the gra.s.s-heads might break through whatever protective ring we form; and then our children would either be slaves or dead."

She looked slowly around the group. "There are very few of us here who haven't been forced, at one time or another, to kill somebody in self-defense, or defense of our property. None of us think of that as murder. Well, neither is this. It's a matter of our whole world defending itself against murderers and thieves and tyrants."

"But...after all, Yssa, "the old man said, "they are Our Sister's Children."

"Tisse and Puzza and Vran!" Yssa fairly screamed the obscenities. "After all these years, and all that's happened in them, are we still tangling ourselves in that silly metaphor? Our Sister's Vermin, you mean. s.h.i.+ning Sister has bugs in her fur. And I think we should scrub them out for her! And, speaking of that, there's an old saying: If you sleep with dirty people, you'll wake with your fur full of bugs. Well, look at what's crawling on us! Here we are talking about setting up a World Combine-eighty or ninety of us, making plans for everybody on the planet. And, since everybody never goes along with anything, no matter how good for them it's supposed to be, the plans will take coercion to carry out. The next thing, we'll be setting up orders and regulations, telling people what they must do, and what they can't do, and organizing a world-wide police gang to enforce our decisions. Why don't we just call it an organic state and be done with it?"

There was a long silence, while those about the table stared at each other. Then Yssa continued: "Well, Citizen brain-cells? What do you see when you look at each other? What have these vermin of s.h.i.+ning Sister done to us even without attacking?"

"Yssa's right," Vandro said. "I'd sooner see our planet depopulated than see our children enslaved to a government. What an obscene concept this 'government' business is. When one person has power over another, he is corrupted by it. On s.h.i.+ning Sister both the power and the corruption are total. We must never let the filthiness of one person dominating another by some kind of hereditary bondage-called 'government'-come to this world. And the best-the only-way to prevent it is to sterilize the source of the infection."

Zalgo took a deep breath, and then nodded. "It's a decision that will be hard to live with," he said, "but it's the right decision. I vote for-sterilization."

Vandro turned to Yssa. "How long will it take to produce the bombs, and the rockets to carry them."

Yssa sat down, suddenly looking very old and vulnerable. "About two years for the bombs," she said. "But, even if we start work at the same time on the rockets and launching sites, they'll take longer. I'd say about three years, total. Three years..."

Chapter Fifteen

Captain Absalom Carpenter consolidated some of his hand-written notes and spoke some more of his report into the expedition log, and then fixed himself another cold drink. From somewhere near at hand came the steady chuck, chuck, chuck, of machetes and the intermittent howl of a chain-saw as a working-party cleared the jungle away from the main entrance of the big temple, or palace, or whatever it was. The giant ruined structure was in better condition than anything else they'd found on the planet so far, and even it didn't look too promising.

"Man, this isn't anything!" Benedict Sokolov, the sociographer, declared, gulping a slug of rum and waving his cigar. He was short and fat, and aggressively unshaven and rumpled to advertise his civilian status. "Wait until you see Hetaira; that planet really got clobbered! There isn't a city, or even a really big town anywhere. But every place where a city or town ought to be, there's one of those great G.o.ddam big puddles of fused gla.s.s."

The captain nodded. "Most of the bombs that came down on this planet must have burst in the water. We've found surprisingly few craters on land. Of course, the Hetairans were using cobalt fission-bombs; a water burst would spread more radioactivity around, which must have been what they had in mind. There must have been some pretty impressive tidal waves; probably swept right across all but the biggest land-ma.s.ses."

"What this crowd, here, used on Hetaira was thermonuclears," Kent Pickering, the physicist, said. He was slender and gray; and as foppishly neat and well-groomed as Sokolov was untidy. "Lithium-Hydrides; real king-size jobs. The fusion-ma.s.s of each one must have been on the order of four or five tons."

"I'll bet they made something to see, when they went off," Gert van Zyl, the biologist, said.

"From a long, long distance," Pickering told him. "I was on Beta Hydrae II when Carlos von Schlichten bombed Keegark; fact is, I was aboard the gun-cutter that dropped the bomb. To give you some sense of comparison, a round of pistol ammunition is to the Keegark bomb as the Keegark bomb is to one of the ones used on Hetaira. I haven't even tried to estimate the temperature at the center of one of those blasts, but the entire planet must have been swept by storms of incandescent gas, at from five hundred to a thousand degrees Centigrade."

"How does the isotope-decay dating compare with the dating here on Thala.s.sa?"

Carpenter asked.

"As we expected," Pickering said. "Some six hundred years, give or take ten percent.

It's obvious that the rockets must have been launched simultaneously from both planets.

The two flights must have pa.s.sed each other in s.p.a.ce. Neither planet would have had a chance to do anything more after they started landing. You know, that wasn't really a war. That was a suicide pact. Like a duel with submachine guns at two paces."

"These two peoples must have really loved each other," Carpenter said. He turned his attention to the biologist. "What's the life situation?" he asked. "I only glanced at your report; I got it a couple of hours ago."

"Well," van Zyle said, "there's a variety of invertebrate life in some of the larger bodies of water. And, surprisingly, we found quite a few insects. I should imagine theireggs are highly cold-resistant and were protected by having been frozen into deep ice, maybe hundreds or thousands of years before the blast. There is a wide variety of plant life, all deep-rooted perennials. At a hasty guess, I'd say that they had spread from no more than five or six places on the planet, which escaped the worst of the heat-storms by some fluke. And we found one form of mobile land-life-a nasty crawling thing like a ten-centimeter leech, in the mud flats around the small sea on the outside hemisphere. It seems to be the highest form of life on the planet. Has Ozukami made any progress on the first planet since I left?"

"Why, yes," Carpenter said, picking up his gla.s.s. "It's really quite extraordinary. It's been-what?-four days, and they can already communicate to some extent. Seem to be a really intelligent people. Look a lot like us-humanoid, I mean-but covered with fur.

It was a mining colony from what we've called Hetaira. Been stranded there for six hundred years. They've been quite clever about surviving under those conditions, but they're slowly dying off. Probably lowered reproduction rates due to the natural radioactivity in the rocks they're surrounded by."

The Captain paused for another pull at his drink. "They have no real idea of what's happened here," he said. "They're out of sight of either planet. All they know for sure is that, six hundred years ago, their s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+ps stopped coming. They surmise that there was an atomic war, and that their people's technological base was so knocked out that they could no longer build s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+ps. They're wondering what's taking the re-building so long."

"How did they react when Ozukami told them?"

"He hasn't told them yet," Carpenter said. "They want to go home. How do you tell them that their home-planet is now a sheet of gla.s.s? Or that their nearest living relative is now a ten-centimeter leech?"

"I certainly don't know," van Zyle said. "I would say that's Zucker's job. He's the s.h.i.+p psychologist. Where is he?"

Carpenter indicated the sleeping-shelter behind him with his thumb. "In there," he said. "He's been drinking, which he is not used to, so I had to put him to bed. He doesn't know, either."