Protector

“A good thing you stopped before you got to me.”

She thought that was callous. Had she but known. I was the only man on Home who had so much as heard the word Pak.

I spent the next few days force-feeding the other patients. They would not eat of themselves; there was no taste of tree-of-life root in normal food. They were all near death. Bre

Between times I learned what I could about the industries of Home. I used the hospital library tapes. I set up possible defenses against a Pak attack, using a probable two million breeders — we’d have to set up a dictatorship, there just wasn’t time for anything else, and we’d lose some of the population that way — and exactly twenty-six protectors. I set up alternate lines of defense using twenty-four and twenty-two protectors, in case we didn’t all make it through transition. But these were just thought problems. Twenty-six wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, not from what I could learn of Home’s level of civilization.

When the other patients woke I could put it to them. They knew more of Home. They might get answers different from mine. I waited. There was time. The Pak scouts were nine months away.

I worked out ways to destroy Home, using a Pak scout pair. I redesigned Protector, using what we’d learned of Pak scouts since Bre

In six days they started waking up. Twenty-four of us. Doctors Martin and Cowles had caught the infection from their patients; they were still changing.

It was a joyful thing, talking to men whose minds matched my own. Poor Bre

We had to learn if Bre

We made our plans accordingly.

We smashed our way through the plastic airlock and swarmed through the hospital. It was all over before the hospital perso

The Claytown police presently surrounded the hospital; but by then we could assume that everyone in the hospital was infected. In the night we scattered.

In the days that followed we attacked hospitals, drug stores, the single pharmaceutical plant. We destroyed television stations to slow the spread of news. People would panic if they learned of a new disease that took the minds of its victims and started spreading itself intelligently. They would find the truth no less horrible.

We found panic enough. Home’s populace fought us as they would have fought devils out of Hell. Ten of us died that way, trapped and bound not to kill potential protectors.

And six of us were caught trying to save their families, equipping them with pressure suits or pressure tents to keep out the virus, and hiding them where they could. It wasn’t necessary to kill them. We confined them until the breeders in question were dead or in transition.

In a week it was over.

In three weeks they started to wake up.

We began building our defenses.

It has seemed only reasonable to novelize this report. So much of it is conjecture. I never knew Lucas Garner, Nick Sohl, Phssthpok, Einar Nilsson et al. You may take Truesdale as true to life, on the theory that I wouldn’t lie without a reason. The rest are probably accurate enough.

Still, Bre

We have good reason for not beaming this back to human space, not just yet. Bre

But the Pak fleet remains ahead of us, though the Pak scouts are gone. (That was fun. We set up mock-cities all over Home, just city lights and lines of highways and fusion sources to stand for power plants. It never occurred to the Pak that we might consider Home expendable.) Almost certainly we can wipe out this fleet; but how many followed them? Were the ships of the second fleet redesigned, improved? if we survive that long, we’ll have to follow their trail right back into the Core explosion. If we lose one or another battle, why, some survivor will beam this back at every world in human space.

In which case:

Bre

You’ll be smarter than they are. You can whip them. But don’t wait. If this reaches you, then a Pak fleet that was tough enough to destroy us is following just behind this laser pulse, at near lightspeed. Now move!

Goodbye and good luck. I love you.