The World Wreckers (11 page)

"We'll do a full-scale analysis of their breeding strength, likelihood to prosper in various other climates, and the like, when we return to the Trade City," Andrea said. "The girls have done a good job as trappers as well as guides. Meanwhile it might be a good idea to collect soil and food samples from their natural

habitats. We'll camp near here for the night, do that, and turn back in the morning."

Before long, the clearing they had reached was bustling with the activity of setting up small tents: one

for the two Amazons, one for Andrea, one for her assistants. One of the assistants wrote in a locked

record book. The Amazon girl Menella went off with her snares to fetch meat for supper. Andrea stood

under the trees, silent, her eyes fixed on the distant skyline, the black and jagged stumps rising lonely to the rain. Not a pleasant sight for any lover of trees, she thought dispassionately; but I've seen lovelier worlds than this die in a good cause. In my own way I'm dying in a good cause, helping man to spread

further, have more progress. I have no child, nor shall I ever have, but some of these great spaceports,

the giant steps mankind takes between stars, are perhaps my children.

And if a world stands in the way of technology, who is to judge the fittest to survive? One race dies;

another is born. Who should know that better than I? A race without the strength to survive dies like the better races which have come and gone before it.

They told me in the spaceport that Free Amazons were better guides and woodsmen than most men, and

so far they are right. Yet it is a strange sight to me; women who might bear children, electing of their

own free will not to do so. A sign, perhaps, of a sickness between men and women, in any world. I do

not understand men. How could I? I do not understand women, either.

Does anyone ever understand anyone? I'd better stick to my own job. I understand planets and ecologies

and I've got a job to do on this one.

She returned to her tent and unlocked a metal box with a heavy combination lock. She did not turn the

lock, but touched one finger lightly to her temple and laid a finger of her other hand against the lock.

After a moment it whirred and dropped open. From inside she took a small sealed packet, which she

thrust into her pocket, and went off into the woods.

Under the trees she knelt, dug up with her own strong hands unaided by any tool a small hole in the

ground. She picked up a handful of the soil. It was moist, soft, rain-drenched and sweet-smelling, and

alive with small invisible creeping things.

Andrea unwrapped the small package from its protective coating of impervious plastic. It looked like a

grayish dust with black flecks. It too is alive, she thought: Well, that is the way of life. New times—and new predators.

Which will survive? Can I load the dice strongly enough?
This
—she fingered the living soil of Darkover

—
or this
.

She emptied the grayish black, evil-smelling dust into the soil; covered it; fastidiously brushed the dust from her long fingers. She walked back toward the camp.

A picture rose in her mind; the crystal black virus working under the ground, against all the creeping

things, worms, nematodes, all the things that make a soil live; spreading, growing, reseeding itself to

make a dying soil even more barren.

What would I have done to those who poisoned my forests?

Why should I have done anything? We no longer had need of our forests. But on the other hand I need

shed no tears for those who came after us. If it is their turn to be swept away—well, they will go as we

went.

She checked off a mental list.

Telepaths.

Forests.

Soil.

Ocean? No. The population which remains must be fed somehow. Leave the ocean alone. In any case it

is not much used now, and as food supplies decline, the movement of men from the forests to the oceans

will cause enough social disruption in itself. So the very existence of an untapped ocean resource will

work for me; it's only necessary to make the people demand the technology which will open up the

ocean to exploring and mining."

She moved slowly back toward the camp. A whiff of sweet-smelling familiar smoke from the campfire

came to her, with a smell of cooking food. She saw Menella moving around the fire with her companion,

her own assistants watching the girls; but oddly without desire, she realized. The Free Amazons puzzled

her a little. They seemed to have the trick of coexisting with men without arousing either desire or

resentment, as if at will they could become men…

—
Dangerous ground. Don't think along those lines
!

The effort to turn off a recurrent, dangerous train of thought blanked her face almost to automatism. She reached up, not thinking, and brought down a handful of leaves and buds which, in the springtime rains,

were expanding into down-filled pods. Her hands moving slowly, by old habit, she stripped the pods to

their soft fibers and her long fingers twisted, gently, relentlessly, them into a soft thread.

Still spinning the soft fiber between her hands she walked into the camp; suddenly, realizing what she

was doing, she crumpled the thread and threw it away, and walked to the fire.

She asked, deliberately jolly, "Whatever's cooking smells good. When do we eat?"

Chapter 6

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THEY HAD issued a hospital uniform—the white synthetic smock with the red and blue caduceus of

Terran Medic and two small stars on the sleeve, indicating service on two planets—to David Hamilton,

and he was surprised at how much better it made him feel. Among other things, it meant that he melted

into nearly complete anonymity anywhere on the spaceport or in the HQ or hospital buildings; just

another Medic on the staff. It also gave him unquestioned access to any testing equipment he might

want, without the need to route his requisition through Jason Allison.

He hadn't yet been outside the hospital building, even though Regis Hastur had offered, most cordially,

to show them the city and he knew that Missy and Conner and Rondo had all taken advantage of the

invitation.

Because of this, he had not seen any of his fellow members of the project that day, and had spent the day going over the data from the physical examinations, with the final startling revelation that Missy was a

chieri. Was she too a functional hermaphrodite? He realized that without being aware of it he had from

the beginning thought of Missy as "she," although his early confusion about Keral's gender had been only partially resolved. Now, at a table apart in the cafeteria, he still held the comparison charts up

beside one another. Missy displayed all the marks of the chieri, the anomalies of inner structure and the unmistakable brain wave development. Genitally, although major structures of both sexes appeared to be

present in rudimentary form (as they are, of course, in embryonic humans) the male structures appeared

in a state of near-atrophy. So there must be at least minimal gender differences among the chieri. Missy

lied to every question we asked her; why? If she's not accustomed to being among telepaths, does she

even know we knew she was lying? Maybe when she trusts us more, she'll "come clean." She looks

younger than twenty-four; I'd have guessed her about fourteen. Teeth—well, she has twenty-two, which

may or may not mean anything, and four still unerupted, compared with twenty-four for Keral. Does this

mean she is younger?

Keral's chart. Similar structural features.
I wish I knew his own language! I gather even Regis can't talk
to him freely because of the language barrier. That would be a really meaningful use for telepathy!

He shut off the feeling of warmth he got from thinking about Keral ever since that instant of rapport, and returned to scientific objectivity. Externally Keral appeared rather more male than female; fluoroscopy

showed undeveloped although present and potentially serviceable female organs, but on superficial

inspection naked, both Jason and David had taken him for male until the fluoroscope showed otherwise.

Why did our questions about sexuality disturb him? With his intelligence, and the lack of nudity taboos,

it doesn't seem to make sense.

He put the two charts back into the folder as he saw Conner approaching him across the cafeteria,

carrying a laden tray. The dark face looked sad, abstracted and lonely, but brightened a little as he

stopped at David's table:

"Join you?"

"Glad to have you." David made room. "Back from the city? What's it like?"

"Fascinating, though I've seen stranger around the galaxy."

"Did you all come back? Rondo, Missy—"

"No, they chose to stay," Conner said. "They evidently have more tolerance of crowds than I do. Regis told me I could learn to barricade my—esp sensors, I think he said—and learn to get along in crowds.

He admitted, though, that I'll probably never feel happy about 'em. I gather it's just one of the drawbacks of being—what we are."

"How did you find out what you were?" David asked; but Conner's flinch was so perceptible that he said quickly, "Skip it. Forget I asked."

"Some day. When I'm more—detached," Conner said. "It's pleasant, not being the only telepath around, but it's going to take some getting used to."

They ate in a companionable silence, but David felt vaguely uneasy, remembering that he had an

unpleasant and intrusive duty ahead. How in the hell did you tell a near stranger that you had unwittingly played voyeur on an emotional experience that had evidently meant a good deal to that stranger?
Damn

Regis for shoving this off on me!
It would be simpler if I could either like or trust Missy, but considering that everything she said to me or Jason was a flat-out lie, I feel uneasy about her.

And the closer I am to Conner the more uneasy I feel. She can't care about him. He's too—too

straightforward. Too nice. Or must have been before whatever it was that threw him into a tailspin.

Conner looked up from his plate, piled with an odd-tasting mixture—fruit and beans?—into David's

eyes. His grin was laced with irony. "I gathered from something Regis said today that there's a fairly elaborate etiquette of the privacies and the decencies in a telepath society to rub off the raw edges," he said. "Obviously none of us has had a chance to develop it, but there must be something indicating that it's rude to think about a man in his presence, Dr. Hamilton."

David wished his face was as dark as Conner's; he knew he was blushing. "I'm sorry; I haven't learned the code, either, if there is one, Conner. And won't you call me David?"

Conner, still piling food into his mouth, said, "I didn't get it all, but let's level with each other. Why am I on your mind? I was thinking it was good to have a doctor on the project who realized I was more than

just a case; what were you thinking about me?"

"First, that you were a David too, and wondering what to call you," the younger man temporized. "The rest—well, not here. Why not come up to my quarters and we can talk?"

"Pleasure. Have you noticed these?" On his way out, Conner stopped at a machine which dispensed small packs of a mixed fruit-nut-candy snack. He said, apologetically, "I seem to be always hungry. I think it's the air here."

David picked up a handful of the bars. He had tasted them earlier; they were evidently, like most of the

food in the HQ building, a local product. He said, "One thing everybody on the project seems to have in common is abnormally high metabolisms, which suggests telepathy demands a high energy output.

Although I understand it appears in a trance state too." He noticed a package under Conner's arm. "Been souvenir hunting already?"

"No. Danilo gave it to me and suggested I put it up in my room, and that maybe I'd find it an interesting piece of machinery. It goes without saying that I'm going to check it out carefully; I'm inclined to trust Danilo—but I wouldn't put it past them to use us for some experiments, either, just to see how we react."

They moved in silence up the long elevators toward David's small room in the HQ. Inside, David busied

himself putting the charts neatly on the built-in desk while Conner unwrapped the small machine. He

moved a lever and a dull vibration began in the room. David felt it jarring his brain, cutting off sight and hearing—

No. He could see and hear as well as ever. What was cut off was the sudden sense of an extra sight and

hearing; not cut off, exactly, scrambled. Like the blind spots of a migraine headache, interfering with

vision without actually stopping it…

"Well, I'll be damned," Conner said quietly, moving the levers to a null position that cut off the vibration. David felt himself extended to normal again. "And they say, around this end of the galaxy, that the Darkovans have no technology?"

David said, not knowing exactly how he knew, but as sure as if he was reading it off a printed page,

"None that the Terran Empire can understand, they mean. I want to study that thing too, Conner. When we learn how a gadget will shut off telepathy, we will have gone a long way toward knowing what

telepathy is. But I'd bet good money that they themselves don't know exactly why these things work, just

how to build them. That's typical of societies with a low level of technology. Think how long the

Terrans used electricity without understanding its structure, back in the early days of space."

"Might be." Conner was examining the structure with slender competent fingers. "I'll bet this dingus is what they call a telepathic damper. I heard the phrase used when I was in the city. Wonder why they