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Sixteen
Inside the observatory room, Cimon, looking haggard, said, “All right. All right. Let’s get back to the point. Come on, now. Quiet! I’m accepting Rodriguez’ viewpoint. It’s good enough for me and I don’t suppose there’s anyone else here who questions Rodriguez’ professional opinion.”
(”Better not,” muttered Rodriguez, his dark eyes hot with sustained fury.)
Cimon went on. “And since there’s nothing to fear as far as infection is concerned, I’m telling Captain Follenbee that the crew may take surface leave without special protection against the atmosphere. Apparently the lack of surface leave is bad for morale. Are there any objections?”
There weren’t any.
Cimon said, ”I see no reason also why we can’t pass on to the next stage of the investigation. I propose that we set up camp at the site of the original settlement. I appoint a committee of five to trek out there. Fawkes, since he can handle the coaster; Novee and Rodriguez to handle the biological data; Vernadsky and myself to take care of the chemistry and physics.
“The rest of you will, naturally, be apprised of all pertinent data in your own specialties, and will be expected to help in suggesting lines of attack, et cetera. Eventually, we may all be out there, but for the while only this small group. And until further notice, communication between ourselves and the main group on ship will be by radio only, since if the trouble, whatever it is, turns out to be localized at settlement site, five men are enough to lose.”
Novee said, “The settlement lived on Junior several years before dying out. Over a year anyway. It could be a long time before we are certain we’re safe.”
“We,” said Cimon, “are not a settlement. We are a group of specialists who are looking for trouble. Well find it if it’s there to find, and when we do find it, we’ll beat it. And it won’t take us a couple of years, either. Now, are there any objections?”
There were none, and the meeting broke up.
Seventeen
Mark A
“They’re not taking me,” he said. “They won’t let me go with them.”
Sheffield was in the chair opposite the boy, bathed in an agony of perplexity. He said, “They may take you later on.”
“No,” said Mark fiercely, “they won’t. They hate me. Besides, I want to go now. I’ve never been on another planet before. There’s so much to see and find out. They’ve got no right to hold me back if I want to go.”
Sheffield shook his head. Mnemonics were so firmly trained into this belief that they must collect facts and that no one or nothing could or ought to stop them. Perhaps when they returned, he might recommend a certain degree of counterindoctrination. After all, Mnemonics had to live in the real world occasionally. More and more with each generation, perhaps, as they grew to play an increasing role in the Galaxy.
He tried an experiment. He said, “It may be dangerous, you know.”
“I don’t care. I’ve got to know. I’ve got to find out about this planet. Dr. Sheffield, you go to Dr. Cimon and tell him I’m going along.”
“Now, Mark.”
“If you don’t, I will.” He raised his small body from the bed in earnest of leaving that moment.
“Look, you’re excited.”
Mark’s fists clenched. “It’s not fair, Dr. Sheffield. I found this planet. It’s my planet.”
Sheffield’s conscience hit him badly. What Mark said was true in a way. No one, except Mark, knew that better than Sheffield. And no one, again except Mark, knew the history of Junior better than Sheffield.
It was only in the last twenty years that, faced with the rising tide of population pressure in the older planets and the recession of the Galactic frontier from those same older planets, the Confederation of Worlds began exploring the Galaxy systematically. Before that, human expansion went on hit or miss. Men and women in search of new land and a better life followed rumor as to the existence of habitable planets or sent out amateur groups to find something promising.
A hundred ten years before, one such group found Junior. They didn’t report their find officially because they didn’t want a crowd of land speculators, promotion men, exploiters and general riffraff following. In the next months, some of the unattached men arranged to have women brought in, so the settlement must have flourished for a while.
It was a year later, when some had died and most or all the rest were sick and dying, that they beamed a cry of help to Pretoria, the nearest inhabited planet. The Pretorian government was in some sort of crisis at the time and relayed the message to the Sector government at Altmark. Pretoria then felt justified in forgetting the matter.
The Altmark government, acting in reflex fashion, sent out a medical ship to Junior. It dropped anti-sera and various other supplies. The ship did not land because the medical officer diagnosed the matter from a distance as influenza and minimized the danger. The medical supplies, his report said, would handle the matter perfectly. It was quite possible that the crew of the ship, fearing contagion, had prevented a landing, but nothing in the official report indicated that.
There was a final report from Junior three months later to the effect that only ten people were left alive and that they were dying. They begged for help. This report was forwarded to Earth itself along with the previous medical report. The Central government, however, was a maze in which reports regularly were forgotten unless someone had sufficient personal interest, and influence, to keep them alive. No one had much interest in a far-off, unknown planet with ten dying men and women on it.
Filed and forgotten-and for a century, no human foot was felt on Junior.
Then, with the new furor over Galactic exploration, hundreds of ships began darting through the empty vastness, probing here and there. Reports trickled in, then flooded in. Some came from Hidosheki Mikoyama, who passed through the Hercules cluster twice (dying in a crash landing the second time, with his tight and despairing voice coming over the subether in a final message: “Surface coming up fast now; ship walls frictioning into red he-” and no more.)
Last year the accumulation of reports, grown past any reasonable human handling, was fed into the overworked Washington computer on a priority so high that there was only a five-month wait. The operators checked out the data for planetary habitability and lo, Abou ben Junior led all the rest.
Sheffield remembered the wild hoorah over it. The stellar system was enthusiastically proclaimed to the Galaxy and the name Junior was thought up by a bright young man in the Bureau of Outer Provinces who felt the need for personal friendliness between man and world. Junior’s virtues were magnified. Its fertility, its climate (”a New England perpetual spring”), and most of all, its vast future, were put across without any feeling of need for discretion. “For the next million years,” propagandists declared, ”Junior will grow richer. While other planets age, Junior will grow younger as the ice recedes and fresh soil is exposed. Always a new frontier; always untapped resources.”
For a million years!
It was the Bureau’s masterpiece. It was to be the tremendously successful start of a program of government-sponsored colonization. It was to be the begi
And then came Mark A