"Civilization is based upon rational thought applied to the purposes
of men. Most mistakes occur in the process of thinking. But there
can be a deep and fundamental error about purposes. It is simply a
fact that the purposes of human beings are not merely those of
rational animals. It is the profoundest of errors to believe
otherwise--to consider, for example, that prosperity, or pleasure,
or even survival, cannot be priced so high that their purchase is a
mistake."
_The Practice of Thinking_
Fitzgerald
There was a sheet of paper fastened outside the combination lock of
the Med Ship's exit port. It said that Calhoun had been taken away by
men of Two City, to tend some sick person. It said that he would be
returned. The latter part might not be believed, but the Med Ship might
not be destroyed. The colony of the landing grid might try to break
into it, but success was unlikely.
Meanwhile, it was an odd feeling to cross the grassy pastureland with
hoarfrost crunching underfoot. The grid's steel girders made a harsh
lace of blackness against the sky, with its shining ribbon slashing
across it. But Calhoun found himself reflecting that the underground
heat applied to the thousand-acre pasture had been regulated with
discretion. There was surely power enough available from the grid to
turn the area into a place of tropic warmth, in which only lush and
thick-leaved vegetation could thrive. But a storm from the frigid
mountains would destroy such plants. Hardy, low-growing, semi-arctic
grass was the only suitable ground-cover. The iciest of winds could not
freeze it so long as the ground was warmed.
Tonight's wind was biting. Calhoun had donned a parka of synthetic fur
on which frost would not congeal at any temperature, but he was forced
to draw fur before his face and adjust heated goggles before his eyes
would stop watering. Yet in the three-quarter-mile trudge to the edge
of the snow, his feet became almost uncomfortably warm.
That, though, ended where a sledge waited at the edge of the snow. Five
men had forced themselves inside the Med Ship. A sixth was on guard
beside the sledge. There had been no alarm. Now the stocky man, Hunt,
urged him to a seat upon the sledge.
"I'm reasonably able-bodied," said Calhoun mildly.
"You don't know where we're going--or how," growled Hunt.
Calhoun got on the sledge. The runners were extraordinarily long. He
could not see small details, but it appeared that the sledge had been
made of extreme length to bridge crevasses in a glacier. There were
long thin metal tubes to help. At the same time, it looked as if it
could be made flexible to twist and turn in a narrow or obstacle-strewn
path.
The six clumsily-clad men pushed it a long way, while Calhoun frowned
at riding. Then Murgatroyd shivered, and Calhoun thrust him inside the
parka. There Murgatroyd wriggled until his nose went up past Calhoun's
chin and he could sniff the outside air. From time to time he withdrew
his nose--perhaps with frost-crystals on it. But always he poked his
small black snout to sniff again. His whiskers tickled.
Two miles from the pastureland, the sledge stopped. One man fumbled
somewhere behind Calhoun's seat and a roaring noise began. All six
piled upon the long, slender snow-vehicle. It began to move. A man
swore. Then, suddenly, the sledge darted forward and went gliding up
a steep incline. It gathered speed. Twin arcs of disturbed snow rose
up on either side, like bow-waves from a speeding water-skimmer. The
sledge darted into a great ravine of purest white and the roaring sound
was multiplied by echoes.
For better than half an hour, then, Calhoun experienced a ride which
for thrills and beauty and hair-raising suspense made mere space-travel
the stodgiest of transportation. Once the sledge shot out from beetling
cliffs--all icy and glittering in the light from the sky--and hurtled
down a slope of snow so swiftly that the wind literally whistled about
the bodies of its occupants. Then the drive roared more loudly, and
there was heavy deceleration, and abruptly the sledge barely crawled.
The flexibility of the thing came into operation. Four of the crew,
each controlling one segment of the vehicle, caused it to twist and
writhe over the surface of a glacier, where pressure-ridges abounded
and pinnacles of shattered, squeezed-up ice were not uncommon.
Once they stopped short and slender rods reached out and touched, and
the sledge slid delicately over them and was itself a bridge across a
crevasse in the ice that went down unguessably. Then it went on and
the rods were retrieved. Minutes later the sledge-motor was roaring
loudly, but it barely crawled up to what appeared to be a mountain
crest--there were ranges of mountains extending beyond seeing in the
weird blue-and-golden skylight--and then there was a breathtaking dash
and a plunge into what was incredibly a natural tunnel beside the
course of an ice-river--and abruptly there was a vast valley below.
This was their destination. Some thousands of feet down in the very
valley-bottom there was a strange, two-mile-long patch of darkness.
The blue-gold light showed no color there, but it was actually an
artificially warmed pastureland like that within and about the landing
grid. But from this dark patch vapors ascended, and rolled, and
gathered to form a misty roof--which was swept away and torn to tatters
by an unseen wind.
The sledge slowed and stopped beside a precipitous upcrop of stone
while still high above the valley bottom. A voice called sharply:
"It's us," growled Hunt's deep voice. "We got him. Everything all
right?"
... "No!" rasped the invisible voice. "They broke out--he broke out and
got her loose, and they run off again. We shoulda killed 'em and had
done with it!"
Everything stopped. The men on the sledge seemed to become still in
the shock of pure disaster, pure frustration. Calhoun waited. Hunt was
motionless. Then one of the men on the sledge spat elaborately. Then
another stirred.
"Had your work for nothing," rasped the voice from the shadow. "The
trouble that's started goes for nothing, too!"
Calhoun asked crisply:
"What's this? My special patients ran away?"
"That the Med man we heard about?" The invisible speaker was almost
derisive with anger. "Sure! They've run off, all right! Man and girl
together. After we made trouble with Three City by not killin' 'em and
One City by sneakin' over to get you! Three City men'll come boiling
over--" The voice raised in pitch, expressing scorn and fury. "Because
they fell in love! We shoulda killed 'em right off or let 'em die in
the snow like they wanted in the first place!"
* * * * *
Calhoun nodded almost imperceptibly to himself. When there is a
syndrome forbidding association between societies, it is a part
of the society's interior struggle against morbidity that there
shall be forbidden romances. The practice of exogamy is necessary
for racial health, hence there is an instinct for it. The more
sternly a small population restricts its human contacts to its own
members, the more repressed the exogamic impulse becomes. It is never
consciously recognized for what it is. But especially when repressed,
other-than-customary contacts trigger it explosively. The romantic
appeal of a stranger is at once a wise provision of nature and a cause
of incredible furies and disasters. It is notorious that spaceship
crews are inordinately popular where colonies are small and strangers
infrequent. It is no less notorious that a girl may be destitute of
suitors on her own world, but has nearly her choice of husbands if she
merely saves the ship fare to another.
Calhoun could have predicted defiances of tradition and law and
quarantine alike, as soon as he began to learn the state of things
here. The frenzied rage produced by this specific case was normal.
Some young girl must have loved terribly, and some young man been no
less impassioned, to accept expulsion from society on a world where
there was no food except in hydroponic gardens and artificially warmed
pastures. It was no less than suicide for those who loved. It was no
less than a cause for battle among those who did not.
The deep-voiced Hunt said now, in leaden, heavy tones:
"Cap it. This is my doing. It was my daughter I did it for. I wanted to
keep her from dying. I'll pay for trying. They'll be satisfied in Three
City and in One alike if you tell 'em it's my fault and I've been drove
out for trouble-making."
Calhoun said sharply:
"What's that? What's going on now?"
The man in the shadows answered--by his tone as much to express disgust
as to give information.
"His daughter Nym was on sentry-duty against Three City sneaks. They
had a sentry against us. The two of 'em talked across the valley
between 'em. They had walkies to report with. They used 'em to talk.
Presently she sneaked a vision screen out of store. He prob'ly did,
too. So presently they figured it was worth dyin' to die together. They
run off for the hotlands. No chance to make it, o'course!"
The hotlands could hardly be anything but the warm equatorial belt of
the planet.
"We should've let them go on and die," said the stocky Hunt, drearily,
"but I persuaded men to help me bring 'em back. We were careful against
sickness! And we ... I ... locked them separate and I ... I hoped
my daughter mightn't die of the Three City sickness. I even hoped
that young man wouldn't die of the sickness they say we have that we
don't notice and they die of. Then we heard your call to One City. We
couldn't answer it, but we heard all you said, even to the bargain
about the cow. And ... we'd heard of Med men who cured sickness.
I ... hoped you could save Nym from dying of the Three City sickness
or passing it in our city. My friends risked much to bring you here.
But ... my daughter and the man have fled again."
"And nobody's goin' to risk any more!" rasped the voice from the shadow
of the cliff. "We held a council! It's decided! They're gone and we got
to burn out the places they was in! No more! You don't head the Council
any more, either! We decided that, too. And no Med man! The Council
ruled it!"
Calhoun nodded yet again. It is a part of fear, elaborately to ignore
everything that can be denied about the thing feared. Which includes
rational measures against it. This was a symptom of the state of things
which constituted a Med Service emergency, because it caused needless
deaths.
Hunt made a gesture which was at once commanding and filled with
despair.
"I'll take the Med man back so One City can use him if they dare and
not blame you for me taking him. I'll have to take the sledge--but he's
used it so it'd have to be burned anyhow. You men be sure to burn your
clothes. Three City'll be satisfied because I'm lost to balance for
their man lost. The Med man will tell One City I'm drove out. You've
lost me and my daughter too, and Three City's lost a man. One City'll
growl and threaten, but they win by this. They won't risk a showdown."
Silence again. As if reluctantly, one man of the party that had
abducted Calhoun moved away from the sledge and toward the abysmally
deep shadow of the cliff. Hunt said harshly:
"Don't forget to burn your clothes! You others, get off the sledge. I'm
taking the Med man back and there's no need for a war because I made
the mistake and I'm paying for it."
The remaining men of the kidnaping-party stepped off the sledge into
the trampled snow, just here. One said clumsily:
"Sorry, Hunt. Luck!"
"What luck could I have?" asked the stocky man, wearily.
* * * * *
The roaring of the sledge's drive, which had been a mere muffled
throbbing, rose to a booming bellow. The snow-vehicle surged forward,
heading downward into the valley with the dark area below. Half a mile
down, it began to sweep in a great circle to return upon its former
track. Calhoun twisted in his seat and shouted above the roar. He
made violent gestures. The deep-voiced Hunt, driving from a standing
position behind the seat, slowed the sledge. It came nearly to a stop
and hissing noises from snow passing beneath it could be heard.
"What's the matter?" His tone was lifeless. "What d'you want?"
"Two people have run away," said Calhoun vexedly. "Your daughter Nym
and a man from Three City--whatever that is. You're driven out to
prevent fighting between the cities."
"Yes," said Hunt, without expression.
"Then let's go get the runaways," said Calhoun irritably, "before
they die in the snow! After all, you got me to have me save them! And
there's no need for anybody to die unless they have to!"
Hunt said without any expression at all:
"They're heading for the hotlands--where they'd never get. It's my
meaning to take you back to your ship, and then find them and give them
the sledge so's they'll ... so Nym will keep on living a while longer."
He moved to shift the controls and set the sledge again in motion. His
state of mind was familiar enough to Calhoun--shock or despair so great
that he could feel no other emotion. He would not react to argument.
He could not weigh it. He'd made a despairing conclusion and he was
lost to all thought beyond carrying it out. His intention was not
simply a violent reaction to a single event, such as an elopement. He
intended desperate means by which a complex situation could be kept
from becoming a catastrophe to others. Three City had to be dealt with
in this fashion, and One City in that, and it was requisite that he
die, himself. Not only for his daughter but for his community. He had
resolved to go to his death for good and sufficient reasons. To get his
attention to anything else, he would have to be shocked into something
other than despair.
Calhoun brought his hand out of its pocket. He held a blaster. He'd
pocketed the weapon before he went to examine the cow. He'd had the
power to stop his own abduction at any instant. But a medical man does
not refuse a call for professional service.
Now he pointed the blaster to one side and pressed the stud. A
half-acre of snow burst into steam. It bellowed upward and went
writhing away in the peculiar blue-gold glow of this world at night.
"I don't want to be taken back to my ship," said Calhoun firmly. "I
want to catch those runaways and do whatever's necessary so they won't
die at all. The situation here has been thrown into my lap. It's a
Med Service obligation to intervene in problems of public health, and
there's surely a public-health problem here!"
Murgatroyd wriggled vigorously under Calhoun's parka. He'd heard the
spitting of the blaster and the roaring of exploded steam. He was
disturbed. The stocky man stared.
"What's that?" he demanded blankly. "You pick up--"
"We're going to pick up your daughter and the man she's with," Calhoun
told him crossly. "There's an isolation syndrome and what looks like a
Crusoe problem here! It's got to be dealt with! As a matter of public
health!"
The stocky Hunt started at him. Calhoun's intentions were unimaginable
to him. He floundered among incredible ideas.
"We medics," said Calhoun, "made it necessary for men to invent
interplanetary travel because we kept people from dying and the
population on old Earth got too large. Then we made interstellar
travel necessary because we continued to keep people from dying and
one solar system wasn't big enough. We're responsible for nine-tenths
of civilization as it exists today, because we produced the conditions
that make civilization necessary! And since on this planet civilization
is going downhill and people are dying without necessity, I have the
plain obligation to stop it! So let's go pick up your daughter Nym and
this sweetheart of hers, and keep them from dying and get civilization
on the upgrade again!"
The former leader of the kidnapers said hoarsely:
"You mean--" Then he stammered. "Th-th-they're heading for the
hotlands. No other way to go. Watch for their tracks!"
* * * * *
The drive-engine bellowed. The sledge raced ahead. And now it did not
complete the circle that had been begun, to head back to the landing
grid. Now it straightened and rushed in a splendid roaring fierceness
down between the sides of the valley. It left behind the dark patch
with its whirling mists. It flung aside bow-waves of fine snow, which
made rainbows in the half-light which was darkness here. It rushed and
rushed and rushed, leaving behind a depression which was a singular
permanent proof of its passage.
Calhoun cringed a little against the wind. He could see little or
nothing of what was ahead. The sprayed wings of upflung snow prevented
it. Hunt, standing erect, could do better. Murgatroyd, inside the
parka, again wriggled his nose out into the stinging wind and withdrew
it precipitately.
Hunt drove as if confident of where to go. Calhoun dourly began to fit
things into the standard pattern of how such things went. There were
self-evidently three cities or colonies on this planet. They'd been
named and he'd seen three patches of pasture from the stratosphere. One
was plainly warmed by power applied underground--electric power from
the landing grid's output. The one now falling behind was less likely
to be electrically heated. Steam seemed more probable because of the
vapor-veil above it. This sledge was surely fuel-powered. At a guess,
a ram-jet drove it. Such motors were simple enough to make, once the
principle of air inflow at low speeds was known. Two City--somewhere
to the rear--might operate on a fuel technology which could be based
on fossil oil or gas. The power-source for Three City could not now be
guessed.
Calhoun scowled as he tried to fill in the picture. His factual data
was still limited. There was the misty golden ribbon in space. It was
assuredly beyond the technical capacity of cities suffering from an
isolation syndrome. He'd guessed at hydroponic gardens underground.
There was surely no surface city near the landing grid, and the city
entrance they'd just left was in the face of a cliff. Such items
pointed to a limited technical capacity. Both, also, suggested mining
as the original purpose of the human colony or colonies here.
Only mining would make a colony self-supporting in an arctic climate.
This world could have been colonized to secure rare metals from it.
There could be a pipeline from an oil field or from a gas well field
near a landing grid. Local technological use of gas or oil to process
ores might produce ingots of rare metal worth interstellar freight
charges. One could even guess that metal reduced by heat-chemistry
could be transported in oil suspension over terrain and under
conditions when other forms of surface transportation were impractical.
If the colony began as a unit of that sort, it would require only very
occasional visits of spacecraft to carry away its products. It could
be a company-planet, colonized and maintained by a single interstellar
corporation. It could have been established a hundred and fifty or two
hundred years before, when the interstellar service organizations were
in their infancy and only operated where they were asked to serve. Such
a colony might not even be on record in the Medical Service files.
And that would account for everything. When for some reason the mines
became unprofitable, this colony would not be maintained. The people
who wished to leave would be taken off--of course. But some would
elect to stay behind in the warmed, familiar cities they and their
fathers had been born in. They couldn't imagine moving to a strange and
unfamiliar world.
So much was normal reasoning. Now the strictly technical logic of the
Med Service took over to explain the current state of things. In one
century or less an isolated community could lose, absolutely, its
defenses against diseases to which it was never exposed. Amerinds were
without defense against smallpox, back on Earth. A brown race scattered
among thousands of tiny islands was nearly wiped out by measles when
it was introduced. Any contact between a long-isolated community and
another--perhaps itself long-isolated--would bring out violently any
kind of contagion that might exist in either.
There was the mechanism of carriers. The real frequency of
disease-carriers in the human race had been established less than two
generations ago. A very small, isolated population could easily contain
a carrier or carriers of some infection. They could spread it so freely
that every member of their group acquired immunity during infancy.
But a different isolated group might contain a carrier of a different
infection and be immune but distributive of it.
It was literally true that each of the three cities might have
developed in their first century of isolation a separate immunity to
one disease and a separate defenselessness against all others. A member
of one community might be actually deadly to a member of either of the
others whom he met face to face.
With icy wind blowing upon him as the sledge rushed on, Calhoun wryly
realized that all this was wholly familiar. It was taught, nowadays,
that something of the sort had caused the ancient, primitive human
belief that women were perilous to men, and a man must exercise great
precaution to avoid evil _mana_ emanating from his prospective bride.
When wives were acquired by capture and all human communities were
small and fiercely self-isolated--why each unsanitary tribal group
might easily acquire a condition like that assumed in cities One, Two,
and Three. The primitive suspicion of woman would have its basis in
reality if the women of one tribe possessed immunity to some deadly
microbe their skin or garments harbored--and if their successful
abductors had no defense against it.
The speeding sledge swerved. It leaned inward against the turn. It
swerved again, throwing monstrous sheets of snow aloft. Then the
drive-jet lessened its roar. The shimmering bow-waves ceased. The
sledge slowed to a mere headlong glide.
"Their trail!" Hunt cried in Calhoun's ear.
Calhoun saw depressions in the snow. There were two sets of pear-shaped
dents in the otherwise virgin surface. Two man beings, wearing oblong
frames on their feet, criss-crossed with cordage to support them atop
the snow, had trudged ahead, here, through the gold-blue night.
* * * * *
Calhoun knew exactly what had happened. He could make the modifications
the local situation imposed upon a standard pattern, and reconstitute a
complete experience leading up to now.
A girl in heavy, clumsy garments had mounted guard in a Two City
sentry-post above a snow-filled mountain valley. There were long and
bitter-cold hours of watching, in which nothing whatever happened.
Eternal snows seemed eternally the same, and there was little in life
but monotony. But she'd known that across the valley there was another
lonely watcher from an alien city, the touch of whose hand or even
whose breath would mean sickness and death. She'd have mused upon the
strangeness that protected her in this loneliness--because her touch
or her breath would be contagion upon him, too. She'd have begun by
feeling a vague dread of the other sentry. But presently, perhaps,
there came a furtive call on the walkie-frequency used by sentries for
communication with their own cities.
Very probably she did not answer at first. But she might listen. And
she would hear a young man's voice, filled with curiosity about the
sentry who watched as he did.
There'd come a day when she'd answer shyly. And there would be
relief and a certain fascination in talking to someone so much like
herself--but so alien and so deadly! Of course there could be no harm
in talking to someone who would flee from actual face-to-face contact
as desperately as herself. They might come to joke about their mutual
dangerousness. They might find it amusing that cities which dared not
meet should hate. Then there'd come a vast curiosity to see each other.
They'd discuss that frankly--because what possible evil could come, if
two persons were deadly to each other should they actually approach?
Then there'd come a time when they looked at each other breathlessly
in vision-screens they'd secretly stolen from their separate cities'
stores. There could be no harm. They were only curious! But she would
see someone at once infinitely strange but utterly dear, and he would
see someone lovely beyond the girls of his own city. Then they would
regret the alienness which made them perilous to each other. Then they
would resent it fiercely. They'd end by denying it.
So across the wide valley of eternal snow there would travel whispers
of desperate rebellion, and then firmly resolute murmurings, and then
what seemed the most obvious of truths--that it would be much more
satisfactory to die together than to live apart. And insane plannings
would follow--arrangements by which two trembling young folk would meet
secretly and flee. Toward the hotlands, to be sure, but without any
belief than that the days before death, while they were together, were
more precious than the lifetimes they would give up to secure them.
Calhoun could see all this very clearly, and he assured himself that he
regarded it with ironic detachment. He asserted in his own mind that
it was merely the manifestation of that blind impulse to exogamy which
makes spacemen romantic in far spaceports and invests an outer-planet
girl with glamour. But it was something more. It was also that strange
and unreasonable and solely human trait which causes one to rejoice
selflessly that someone else exists, so that his or her own life and
happiness is put into its place of proper insignificance in the cosmos.
It may begin in instinct, but it becomes an achievement only humans can
encompass.
Hunt knew it--the stocky, deep-voiced despairing figure who stared
hungrily for the daughter who had defied him and for whom he was an
exile from all food and warmth.
He flung out a mittened hand.
"There!" he cried joyously. "It's them!"
There was a dark speck in the blue-gold night-glow. As the sledge swept
close, there were two small figures who stood close together. They
defiantly faced the approaching sledge. As its drive-motor stopped
and it merely glided on, its runners whispering on the snow, the girl
snatched away the cold-mask which all the inhabitants of this planet
wore out-of-doors. She raised her face to the man. They kissed.
And then the young man desperately raised a knife. It glittered in the
light of the ribbon in the sky. And--
Calhoun's blaster made its inadequate rasping noise. The knife-blade
turned incandescent for two-thirds of its length. The young man dropped
the suddenly searing handle. The knife sank hissing into the snow.
"It's always thrilling to be dramatic," said Calhoun severely, "but I
assure you it's much more satisfying to be sane. The young lady's name
is Nym, I believe. I do not know the gentleman. But Nym's father and
myself have come to put the technical resources of two civilizations
at your disposal as a first step toward treatment of the pandemic
isolation syndrome on this planet, which with the complications that
have developed amounts to a Crusoe health problem."
Murgatroyd tried feverishly to get his head out of Calhoun's parka
past his chin. He'd heard a blaster. He sensed excitement. His nose
emerged, whiffing frantically. Calhoun pushed it back.
"Tell them, Hunt," he said irritably. "Tell them what we're here for
and what you've done already!"
The girl's father told her unsteadily--almost humbly, for some
reason--that the jet-sledge had come to take her and her sweetheart--to
be her husband--to the hotlands where at least they would not die of
cold. Calhoun added crossly that he believed there would even be food
there--because of the ribbon in the sky.
Trembling and abashed, the fugitives got on the sledge. Its motor
roared. It surged toward the hotlands under the golden glow of that
ribbon--which obviously had no rational explanation unless somebody had
made a grave mistake. But Calhoun had not.