Protector

Home seemed to be turning the wrong face. The colony was big, as big as a medium-sized nation, but it had stupidly turned its back! And where was Bre

And Protector’s drive was still out. Not trying to chase him down.

Was Bre

Roy saw a possibility then. Irrational, but no time to think: he swarmed out of the crash chair and scrambled down a ladder. The weapons were in the airlock. And the i

It hadn’t moved.

But if Bre

Then, irrational as it certainly was, Bre

Impossible? What was impossible to Bre

He had his answer in the roar and flash behind him. In a whistling shriek of breathing-air the Bre

Roy raised the gun.

Bre

He fielded it with his left hand and finished his turn.

Bre

Roy shifted his grip on the laser. Why didn’t Bre

Bre

Bre

His arm wasn’t hurting him at all, but the sound of Bre

What was left of Bre

Roy sagged against the wall. The cabin was going round and round. Shock. He smiled as Bre

Bre

Things were graying out, losing color. Roy was aware of Bre

Roy fainted.

He was delirious during most of what followed. He did manage to swing the cargo ship around toward Home, but his technique was sloppy, and he wound up in an escape orbit. The ships that came after him were designed for exploring the i

The injury to his arm seemed sufficient explanation for the state of coma in which they found him. It was some time before they realized that he was sick with something else. By then two of the pilots were down with it.

PROTECTOR

“A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.”

Every human protector must wake this way. A Pak wakes sentient for the first time. A human protector has human memories. He wakes clear-headed, and remembers, and thinks with a certain amount of embarrassment: I’ve been stupid.

White ceiling, clean coarse sheets over soft mattress. Mobile pastel screens on both sides of me. Window before me; a view of small, twisted trees on a somewhat patchy lawn, all bathed in sunlight that was a bit orange for Earth. Primitive facilities and lots of room: I was in a Home hospital, and I’d been stupid. If Bre

He’d told me most of it. What he’d really been after, out there beyond the edge of the Solar system with his tree-of-life supply left behind on Mars, was a variant of the tree-of-life virus that would grow in an apple or a pomegranate or something. What he’d gotten was a variant that would live in a yam grown with thalium oxide. But somewhere in there, he’d found or created a variety that would grow in a human being.

That was what he’d been pla

A mean trick to play on a defenseless colony. Such a virus probably would not restrict itself to the right age limit. It would kill anyone who wasn’t between — assuming broad limits — forty and sixty. Home would have ended as a world of childless protectors, and Bre

I got up, and startled a nurse. She was on the other side of a flexible plastic wall. We were sealed in with our infection. There were two rows of beds, and on each a half-changed protector showing signs of starvation. Probably all the proto-protectors on Home were right in this big room. Twenty-six of us.

Now what?

I thought it through, while the nurse was getting a doctor and the doctor was do

A blond young woman came in through a makeshift airlock. I frightened her by being both ugly and mobile. She politely tried to conceal it.

“We need food,” I told her. “All of us. I’d be dead now if I hadn’t been carrying a lot of superfluous muscle weight when I caught the infection.” She nodded and spoke to the nurse via a pen-sized mike.

She gave me a physical. It told her just enough to upset her badly. I should have been dead, or crippled by arthritis, by most of the rules of medicine. I did some calisthenics for her to prove that I was healthy, and held back so that she wouldn’t know how healthy. “It’s not a crippling disease,” I told her. “We’ll be able to lead normal lives once the infection has run its course. It only affects our appearance. Or had you noticed?”

She blushed. I watched her debate with herself as to whether to tell me that I had lost all hope of normal sexual relations. She decided I couldn’t handle it yet. “You will have to make some adjustments,” she said delicately.

“I suppose so.”

“This disease, is it from Earth?”

“No, from the Belt, fortunately. Made it a lot easier to control. In fact, we thought it was extinct. If I’d thought there was the slightest chance… well.”

“I hope you can tell us something about treatment. We haven’t been able to cure any of you,” she said, “Everything we tried made things worse. Even antibiotics! We lost three of you. The others didn’t seem to be getting any worse, so we just left you alone.”