The Star Road Page 9

  “Team loyalty, an instinct?” Li frowned again. “I don’t know if I can see that.”

  “Take my word for it, then,” said Janssen, “but it’s easy enough to check.” He looked down at the shorter man. “Not only humans, a lot of the social animals have the same reflex. Porpoises hold another porpoise up on top of the water after he’s been knocked unconscious, so that he won’t drown—that’s because the porpoise breathing mechanism is conscious, not unconscious like ours. Land animals too.”

  “Elephants . . .” muttered Clancy, suddenly remembering. But none of the other men were paying any attention to him.

  “Under an instinct like that,” Janssen was going on, raspingly, to the R. and E. Service Head, “the loyalty of every team member is to the team. And every other man on it. And the loyalty of the team’s to him, in return. As long as there’s a spark of life left in him, his teammates will do anything they can, at any cost to themselves, to care for him, to rescue him, or bring him home safely—”

  “Lief, not one of your spiels, please—” began the shorter man, but Janssen overrode him by sheer power of voice.

  “But” went on the Commandant, “the minute he’s dead, their obligation’s lifted. Because they all know that now he has to be replaced by a new man on the Team, someone to whom the loyalty they used to owe the dead man will have to be transferred. What tripped up those hobgoblins on XN-4010 was the fact that Clancy here couldn’t be sure Plotchin was dead. It didn’t matter how much be hated Plotchin; or how overwhelming the evidence was that Plotchin was dead, or that trying to save Plotchin might only mean throwing his own life away, too. As long as the slightest chance was there that Plotchin could be rescued, Clancy was obligated by his Team instinct to do his best for his teammate. That’s why Clancy brought the man in, in spite of how he felt about him, personally, and in spite of all those aliens could do, and in spite of the near physical impossibility, even under the lower gravity there, of carting a frozen dead man, weighing nearly as much as he did, for miles.”

  Janssen stopped talking. All the while he had been speaking, Li’s face had been growing sourer and sourer, like a man who has discovered a worm in the apple into which he has just bitten.

  “Can I talk now?” demanded Li. The querulous note in his voice was mounting to a pugnacious whine.

  “Go ahead,” said Janssen.

  “All right.” The smaller man drew a deep breath. “What’s this all about? You got me over here to see this man, telling me you had something to show me. Evidently you wanted to prove to me he’s a hero. All right, I agree. He’s a hero. Now, what about it?”

  Janssen turned to Jeph.

  “Shut the door, there,” he ordered. Jeph complied. Janssen’s eyes raked from the Line Team Captain to Clancy. “And if either of you breathe a word of what you hear in this room from now on, I’ll personally see that you get posted out on a job two hundred light-years from Earth, and forgotten there.”

  IX

  Clancy’s stomach floated suddenly inside him, as if an elevator he was in had just dropped away under the soles of his feet. His premonitions of trouble on seeing Janssen had been only too correct. Here, the man who had evidently lost five years of battles with the head of R. and E. was about to take one more swing at the other Service Head, using Clancy as a club. Two guesses, thought Clancy, as to what the outcome would be—and what would happen to Clancy himself as a result.

  He had escaped the hobgoblins on XN-4010, only to be trapped and used by the super-hobgoblin of all—his own tough-talking, but ineffective Line Service Commandant. There he was now—Janssen—tying into Li as if he’d been the winner all these last five years, instead of the other way around.

  “I’m glad to hear you admit that, Charlie,” Janssen was snapping, “because Clancy here is a hero. A real, live hero. A man who damn near killed himself doing a superhuman job in the face of inimical alien action to save his teammate. Only he nearly didn’t make it, because he was already chewed down past the exhaustion point when he started. Not just from fighting his job and the aliens—but from being worn thin by a round damn dozen of your Service’s useless ivory-tower experiments, built into his working suit!”

  Li stared at him.

  “What’re you talking about?” bristled Li. “It was the collar-innovation on his own suit that kept him from being brained when that rock hit his helmet. If it hadn’t been for the experimental cryogenic unit in Plotchin’s suit, Plotchin wouldn’t be alive now!”

  “Sure. Two!” snarled Janssen. “Two gadgets paid off, but of—what? A total of twenty-three, for both men’s suits? What did the other twenty-one gadgets do for either of them? I’ll tell you. Nothing! Nothing, except to wear them out to the point where they were ready to cut each other’s throat like half the rest of my men on the Line Teams nowadays!”

  Li’s face was palely furious behind the black mustache.

  “Sorry. I don’t see that!” he snapped. “Your man’s still only a hero because the cryogenic unit gave him a revivable teammate to bring back. And credit for the cryogenic unit being in Plotchin’s suit belongs to us!”

  “You think so?” grated Janssen. Li’s voice had gone high in tone with the argument. Janssen’s was going down into a bass growl. Both men looked ready to start swinging at each other at any minute. Janssen’s gray mustache bristled at Li. “Stop and think again for a moment. What if your cryogenic unit hadn’t worked? What if Plotchin had actually been dead? Clancy wouldn’t have had any way of knowing it, for sure. And so he'd have brought Plotchin in, anyway! You think you can take his hero status away from him just because your unit worked? He did what he did out of a sense of duty to his teammate—and whether there was a live man or a dead one on top of him at the time doesn’t matter.”

  “So?” snarled Li.

  “So!” barked Janssen. “I’ve been lying back and waiting for something to hang you with, Charlie, for four years. Now I’ve got it. I’m starting to punch buttons the minute I leave this hospital. We’re both of us responsible to Earth Central, and Earth Central’s responsible to the taxpayers. I’m going to set the wheels going to bring my hero up in front of a full-dress Central Investigating Committee—to determine whether the excessive number of experiments your Service has been forcing upon my Line Teams might not have caused the Relay Station installation on XN-4010 to fail in the face of attack by inimical aliens, who then might have gone undiscovered and eventually posed a threat to the whole Line, if not to the whole human race.”

  Clancy had a sudden, irrational impulse to pull the bedcovers up over his head and pretend they had all gone away.

  “Are you crazy?” snarled Li. “You tried fighting me, five years ago, when we first got Central permission to test experimental equipment under working conditions, on your Line Teams. And Central went right along with me all the way.”

  “That was then, Charlie!” Janssen grated. “That was then, when you had all the little glittery, magic-seeming wonder-world-tomorrow type of gadgets to demonstrate on the TV screens and grab the headlines. All I had was honest argument. But now it’s the other way around. All you’ve got is more of the same—but I’ve got the real glitter. I’ve got a hero. Not a fake hero, flanged up for the purpose. But a true hero— an honest hero. You can’t shoot him down no matter what angle you try from. And I’ve got villains—real villains, in those alien hobgoblins, or whatever they are. I’m going to win this inquiry the same way you won the last one. Not in the Committee Room, but out in the News Services. I can get you and your experiment wiped clean out of my Service, Charlie! And I’ll play hell with your next year’s appropriations, to boot!”

  Janssen shut up, his mustache stiff with anger. Clancy held his breath, resisting the impulse to shut his eyes. The Line Service Commandant had taken his swing; and now—how, Clancy did not know, but there would undoubtedly turn out to be a way—Li would lower the boom.

  “All right,” said Li, bitterly. “Damn you, Lief! You know I can’t afford a
ny threat to next year’s appropriations now that the drone by-pass system is ready to go into field testing! Name your price!”

  Clancy blinked. He opened his eyes very wide and stared at Li.

  “But you wipe me out, and you’ll regret it, Lief!” continued the R. and E. Head, bursting out before Clancy could get his brains unscrambled. “Admit it or not, but a lot of our ivory-tower gadgets, as you call them, have ended up as standard equipment, saving the lives of men on your Teams!”

  “Don’t deny it!” snapped Janssen. “I don’t deny it and never did. And I don’t want to wipe you out. I just want to get back the right to put some limit on the number of wildeyed ideas my men have to test for your lab jockeys! That’s all!”

  “All right,” said Li. He, too was relaxing, though his face was still sour. “You’ve got it.”

  “And we’ll draw up an intra-Service agreement,” said Janssen.

  “All right.” Li’s glance swung balefully to fasten for a second on Clancy. “I suppose you know you’ll be holding up progress?”

  “That won’t matter so much,” said Janssen, “as long as I’m upholding my Linemen.”

  “Excuse me,” Li answered stiffly, looking back at him, “I don’t see that. As far as I’m concerned, progress comes before the individual.”

  “It does, does it?” said Janssen. “Well, let me tell you something. You get yourself a fresh crop of laboratory boys out of the colleges, every year, all you want, to work in your nice, neat, air-conditioned labs. But I get only so many men for work on the Line—because it takes a special type and there’s only so many of that type born each generation!”

  Clancy stared guiltily at Janssen. Clancy’s conscience was undergoing an uncomfortable feeling—as if he had just been punched in the pit of his stomach.

  “I know,” Li was answering, with a sour glance at Clancy. “Heroes.”

  “Heroes, hell!” exploded Janssen. “Race horses! That’s what my boys are—race horses! And you wanted to turn them into pack mules for your own purposes. Not damn likely! Not any more damn likely than I was to roll over on my back and let you get away with using a full-dress Central Investigation Committee to get permission to stick your nose into my Line Service! Open your eyes for once, Charlie! Use your imagination on something living! Can you imagine what it’s like to do what these men do, jammed at best into the few clear cubic feet of a tiny transit ship you could cover with a large tent? And at worst—living in their suits out on the job for days on end, working harder than any manual laborer’s worked on Earth in fifty years, always under strange conditions and unknown dangers like those hobgoblins on XN-4010?”

  Janssen had to stop for a second to draw breath.

  “Can you imagine doing that?” he went on. “Just to put in a Line Station for a million fat tourists to use; just about the time you’re maybe getting killed or crippled putting in another Station out on some world the tourists have never heard of yet?”

  “No, I can’t,” he said, dryly. “And I don’t believe any normal, sensible man can. If the work’s that bad, what makes any of your men want to do it?”

  “Listen.” Clancy propped himself up on one elbow. His conscience and the recognition of how wrong he had been about Janssen was finally bringing him into the fight. It was late. But better late than never.

  “Listen—” he said again to Li. “You get a feeling you can’t describe at the end of a job—when a working Station finally goes into the line. You feel good. You know you’ve done something, out there. Nobody else did it, but you—and nobody can take it away from you, that you’ve done it!”

  “I see.” The short man’s mustache lifted a little. He turned to the door, opened it, and looked back at Janssen. “They’re romantics, your Linemen. That’s it in a nutshell. Isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, Charlie,” said the Commandant coldly. “You named it.”

  “Yes,” said Li, “and no doubt the rest of the race has to have them for things like building the Line. But, if you’ll excuse me, personally I can’t see romantics. Or romanticism, either.”

  He went out shutting the door.

  “No,” said Janssen, grimly, looking at the closed door. “You wouldn’t. Your kind never does. But we manage to get things done in spite of you, one way or another.”

  He glared suddenly at Clancy, who was staring at him with a powerful intensity.

  “What’re you gawking at, Lineman?” he barked.

  Nothing,” said Clancy.

  THE CHRISTMAS PRESENT

  “What is Christmas?” asked Harvey.

  “It’s the time when they give you presents,” Allan Dumay told him. Allan was squatted on his mudshoes, a grubby figure of a little six-year-old boy, in the waning light over the inlet, talking to the Cidorian. “Tonight’s Christmas Eve. My daddy cut a thorn tree and my mother’s inside now, trimming it.”

  “Trimming?” echoed the Cidorian. He floated awash in the cool water of the inlet. Someone—perhaps it was Allan’s father—had named him Harvey a long time ago. Now nobody called him by any other name.

  “That’s putting things on the tree,” said Allan. “To make it beautiful. Do you know what beautiful is, Harvey?”

  “No,” said Harvey. “I have never seen beautiful.” But he was wrong—even as, for a different reason, those humans were wrong who called Cidor an ugly swamp-planet because there was nothing green or familiar on the low mudflats that rose from its planet-wide fresh-water sea—only the stunted, dangerous thorn tree and the trailing weed. There was beauty on Cidor, but it was a different beauty. It was a black-and-silver world where the thorn trees stood up like fine ink sketches against the cloud-torn sky; and this was beautiful. The great and solemn fishes that moved about the uncharted pathways of its seas were beautiful with the beauty of large, far-traveled ships. And even Harvey, though he did not know it himself, was most beautiful of all with his swelling iridescent jellyfish body and the yard-long mantle of silver filaments spreading out through it and down through the water. Only his voice was croaky and unbeautiful, for a constricted air-sac is not built for the manufacture of human words.

  “You can look at my tree when it’s ready,” said Allan. “That way you can tell.”

  “Thank you,” said Harvey.

  “You wait and see. There’ll be colored lights. And bright balls and stars; and presents all wrapped up.”

  “I would like to see it,” said Harvey.

  Up the slope of the dyked land that was the edge of the Dumay farm, reclaimed from the sea, the kitchen door of the house opened and a pale, warm finger of light reached out long over the black earth to touch the boy and the Cidorian. A woman stood silhouetted against the light.

  “Time to come in, Allan,” called his mother’s voice.

  “I’m coming,” he called back.

  “Right away! Right now!”

  Slowly, he got to his feet.

  “If she’s got the tree ready, I’ll come tell you,” he said, to Harvey.

  “I will wait,” said Harvey.

  Allan turned and went slowly up the slope to the house, swinging his small body in the automatic rhythm of the mud-shoes. The open doorway waited for him and took him in— into the light and human comfort of the house.

  “Take your shoes off,” said his mother, “so you don’t track mud in.”

  “Is the tree all ready?” asked Allan, fumbling with the fastenings of his calf-high boots.

  “I want you to eat first,” said his mother. “Dinner’s all ready.” She steered him to the table. “Now, don’t gulp. There’s plenty of time.”

  “Is Daddy going to be home in time for us to open the presents?”

  “You don’t open your presents until morning. Daddy’ll be back by then. He just had to go upriver to the supply house. He’ll start back as soon as it’s light; he’ll be here before you wake up.”

  “That’s right,” said Allan, solemnly, above his plate; “he shouldn’t go out on the water at night beca
use that’s when the water-bulls come up under your boat and you can’t see them in the dark.”

  “Hush,” said his mother, patting him on the shoulder. “There’s no water-bulls around here.”

  “There’s water-bulls everywhere. Harvey says so.”

  “Hush now, and eat your dinner. Your daddy’s not going out on the water at night.”

  Allan hurried with his dinner.

  “My plate’s clean!” he called at last. “Can I go now?”

  “All right,” she said. “Put your plate and silverware into the dishwasher.”

  He gathered up his eating utensils and crammed them into the dishwasher; then ran into the next room. He stopped suddenly, staring at the thorn tree. He could not move—it was as if a huge, cold wave had suddenly risen up to smash into him and wash all the happy warmth out of him. Then he was aware of the sound of his mother’s footsteps coming up behind him; and suddenly her arms were around him.

  “Oh, honey!” she said, holding him close, “you didn’t expect it to be like last year, did you, on the ship that brought us here? They had a real Christmas tree, supplied by the space lines, and real ornaments. We had to just make do with what we had.”

  Suddenly he was sobbing violently. He turned around and clung to her. “—not a—Christmas tree—” he managed to choke out.

  “But, sweetheart, it is!” He felt her hand, soothing the rumpled hair of his head. “It isn’t how it looks that makes it a Christmas tree. It’s how we think about it, and what it means to us. What makes Christmas is the loving and the giving—not how the Christmas tree looks, or how the presents are wrapped. Don’t you know that?”