Read Ebook: The Planet Savers by Bradley Marion Zimmer Novick Irving H Illustrator

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Ebook has 545 lines and 30913 words, and 11 pages

Forth nodded. "You may be the only Terran ever to contract the disease and survive."

"The trailmen incubate the disease," Jay Allison said. "I should think the logical thing would be to drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on the trail cities--and wipe it out for good and all."

Dr. Forth, on the screen, looked annoyed, and Jay Allison said, with a grimace of distaste, "I didn't mean that literally. But the trailmen are not human. It wouldn't be genocide, just an exterminator's job. A public health measure."

Forth looked shocked as he realized that the younger man meant what he was saying. He said, "Galactic center would have to rule on whether they're dumb animals or intelligent non-humans, and whether they're entitled to the status of a civilization. All precedent on Darkover is toward recognizing them as men--and good God, Jay, you'd probably be called as a witness for the defense! How can you say they're not human after your experience with them? Anyway, by the time their status was finally decided, half of the recognizable humans on Darkover would be dead. We need a better solution than that."

He pushed his chair back and looked out the window.

"I won't go into the political situation," he said, "you aren't interested in Terran Empire politics, and I'm no expert either. But you'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know that Darkover's been playing the immovable object to the irresistible force. The Darkovans are more advanced in some of the non-causative sciences than we are, and until now, they wouldn't admit that Terra had a thing to contribute. However--and this is the big however--they do know, and they're willing to admit, that our medical sciences are better than theirs."

"Theirs being practically non-existent."

"Exactly--and this could be the first crack in the barrier. You may not realize the significance of this, but the Legate received an offer from the Hasturs themselves."

Jay Allison murmured, "I'm to be impressed?"

"On Darkover you'd damn well better be impressed when the Hasturs sit up and take notice."

"I understand they're telepaths or something--"

"Telepaths, psychokinetics, parapsychs, just about anything else. For all practical purposes they're the Gods of Darkover. And one of the Hasturs--a rather young and unimportant one, I'll admit, the old man's grandson--came to the Legate's office, in person, mind you. He offered, if the Terran Medical would help Darkover lick the trailmen's fever, to coach selected Terran men in matrix mechanics."

"Good Lord," Jay said. It was a concession beyond Terra's wildest dreams; for a hundred years they had tried to beg, buy or steal some knowledge of the mysterious science of matrix mechanics--that curious discipline which could turn matter into raw energy, and vice versa, without any intermediate stages and without fission by-products. Matrix mechanics had made the Darkovans virtually immune to the lure of Terra's advanced technologies.

Jay said, "Personally I think Darkovan science is over-rated. But I can see the propaganda angle--"

"Not to mention the humanitarian angle of healing--"

"Not yet. But we have a lead. During the last epidemic, a Terran scientist discovered a blood fraction containing antibodies against the fever--in the trailmen. Isolated to a serum, it might reduce the virulent 48-year epidemic form to the mild form again. Unfortunately, he died himself in the epidemic, without finishing his work, and his notebooks were overlooked until this year. We have 18,000 men, and their families, on Darkover now, Jay. Frankly, if we lose too many of them, we're going to have to pull out of Darkover--the big brass on Terra will write off the loss of a garrison of professional traders, but not of a whole Trade City colony. That's not even mentioning the prestige we'll lose if our much-vaunted Terran medical sciences can't save Darkover from an epidemic. We've got exactly five months. We can't synthesize a serum in that time. We've got to appeal to the trailmen. And that's why I called you up here. You know more about the trailmen than any living Terran. You ought to. You spent eight years in a Nest."

Jay Allison scowled, displeased. "That was years ago. I was hardly more than a baby. My father crashed on a Mapping expedition over the Hellers--God only knows what possessed him to try and take a light plane over those crosswinds. I survived the crash by the merest chance, and lived with the trailmen--so I'm told--until I was thirteen or fourteen. I don't remember much about it. Children aren't particularly observant."

Forth leaned over the desk, staring. "You speak their language, don't you?"

"I used to. I might remember it under hypnosis, I suppose. Why? Do you want me to translate something?"

"Not exactly. We were thinking of sending you on an expedition to the trailmen themselves."

Forth was explaining: "It would be a difficult trek. You know what the Hellers are like. Still, you used to climb mountains, as a hobby, before you went into Medical--"

"I outgrew the childishness of hobbies many years ago, sir," Jay said stiffly.

"What's that?" Jay Allison sounded suspicious.

"Come out of the mountains. Send us volunteers--blood donors--we might, if we had enough blood to work on, be able to isolate the right fraction, and synthesize it, in time to prevent the epidemic from really taking hold. Jay, it's a tough mission and it's dangerous as all hell, but somebody's got to do it, and I'm afraid you're the only qualified man."

"I like my first suggestion better. Bomb the trailmen--and the Hellers--right off the planet." Jay's face was set in lines of loathing, which he controlled after a minute, and said, "I--I didn't mean that. Theoretically I can see the necessity, only--" he stopped and swallowed.

"Please say what you were going to say."

"I wonder if I am as well qualified as you think? No--don't interrupt--I find the natives of Darkover distasteful, even the humans. As for the trailmen--"

Jay Allison was not acting. He was pained and disgusted. Forth wouldn't let him finish his explanation of why he had refused even to teach in the Medical college established for Darkovans by the Terran empire. He interrupted, and he sounded irritated.

"We know all that. It evidently never occurred to you, Jay, that it's an inconvenience to us--that all this vital knowledge should lie, purely by accident, in the hands of the one man who's too damned stubborn to use it?"

Jay didn't move an eyelash, where I would have squirmed, "I have always been aware of that, Doctor."

Forth drew a long breath. "I'll concede you're not suitable at the moment, Jay. But what do you know of applied psychodynamics?"

"Very little, I'm sorry to say." Allison didn't sound sorry, though. He sounded bored to death with the whole conversation.

"May I be blunt--and personal?"

"Please do. I'm not at all sensitive."

"Basically, then, Doctor Allison, a person as contained and repressed as yourself usually has a clearly defined subsidiary personality. In neurotic individuals this complex of personality traits sometimes splits off, and we get a syndrome known as multiple, or alternate personality."

"I've scanned a few of the classic cases. Wasn't there a woman with four separate personalities?"

"Exactly. However, you aren't neurotic, and ordinarily there would not be the slightest chance of your repressed alternate taking over your personality."

"Thank you," Jay murmured ironically, "I'd be losing sleep over that."

"In short--a blend of all the undesirable characteristics?"

"But how do you know I actually have such an--alternate?"

I could almost feel Allison taking it in, as he confessed, "Well--yes. For instance--the other day--although I dress conservatively at all times--" he glanced at his uniform coat, "I found myself buying--" he stopped again and his face went an unlovely terra-cotta color as he finally mumbled, "a flowered red sports shirt."

Sitting in the dark I felt vaguely sorry for the poor gawk, disturbed by, ashamed of the only human impulses he ever had. On the screen Allison frowned fiercely, "A crazy impulse."

"Sir--as a citizen of the Empire, I don't have any choice, do I?"

I would have been moved by his words. Even at secondhand I was moved by them. Jay Allison looked at the floor, and I saw him twist his long well-kept surgeon's hands and crack the knuckles with an odd gesture. Finally he said, "I haven't any choice either way, Doctor. I'll take the chance. I'll go to the trailmen."

The screen went dark again and Forth flicked the light on. He said, "Well?"

I gave it back, in his own intonation, "Well?" and was exasperated to find that I was twisting my own knuckles in the nervous gesture of Allison's painful decision. I jerked them apart and got up.

Forth was staring at me. "So you've remembered that?"

"Hell, yes," I said, "my dad crashed in the Hellers, and a band of trailmen found me, half dead. I lived there until I was about fifteen, then their Old-One decided I was too human for them, and they took me out through Dammerung Pass and arranged to have me brought here. Sure, it's all coming back now. I spent five years in the Spacemen's Orphanage, then I went to work taking Terran tourists on hunting parties and so on, because I liked being around the mountains. I--" I stopped. Forth was staring at me.

"You think you'd like this job?"

"It would be tough," I said, considering. "The People of the Sky--" "--don't like outsiders, but they might be persuaded. The worst part would be getting there. The plane, or the 'copter, isn't built that can get through the crosswinds around the Hellers and land inside them. We'd have to go on foot, all the way from Carthon. I'd need professional climbers--mountaineers."

"Then you don't share Allison's attitude?"

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