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and one hell of a bullheaded will to live. As for regenerationI don’t know. In a stable Chozwell, this sort of thing’s never happened on this scale before.”
I was terrified. I didn’t know what I’d do without Marsha to keep me in control, to provide my common sense. In a way, she was like a part of mefor so long a time now. I looked mournfully at the old man.
“Georgewhatwhat am I going to do?” I asked, voice breaking.
He looked straight at me. “Go ahead with the plan, of course. There’s 1,332 other Choz to think of, you know.”
Eighteen
Several hours later we broke Jump near the beacon we had selected earlier. By now, we knew, St. Cyril would have frantically radioed for help, and the government and the Nine Corporations, Seiglein included, would know what had gone on. Seiglein, at least, would also know from the description of the weird creatures just what the implications wereand just who was behind it.
The ghost of Patmos had struck at last.
Seiglein would know, too, from the descriptions of the strange new stuff growing not only in the quad patch but in other places we’d been, just what was going to happen. He’d know that, when the stuff spread, it would cover the whole patch around the camp, then start hitting the men and women in the camp when the food supply warranted, changing them, transforming them into Choz in that four-day ritual.
Adult Choz would breed as the virus itself spread, and spread it still more, over the face of the whole temperate zone of the planet.
Soonmaybe a year, maybe two, no morethe virus, carried on air currents through the wind patterns of the world, would hit one or both of the cities established as prototypes on St. Cyril, the larger areas of heat radiation we’d detected.
How many? Thousands would undergo the Change, and survivors, sane and insane, would undergo the Breed as well. Victims of our invasion. Victims soon incapable of using the tools to help them, cut off from
The Web of the Chozen humankind by its very real understanding that any contact with the virus could prove disastrous.
Ship’s sensors scanned the area as clean, and I linked with the beacon, equalized, and went aboard. It had been ten years or more since I’d been in one of these at allthe last time, too, as a Chozasking
help.
Now, as I manipulated the controls, set up the computer link, and sent one of the males, Jon, to be my visual standin, I was in a different position, one
of power, one of command. If only Marsha weren’t lying there, trying to hold
on to a slender life thread, all of it would have been
perfect.
“To Seiglein,” I began my transmission recording.
“This is Bar Holliday. You remember me. Once I worked for you; then, when it was most needed, I ap-pealed to you for helpand got genocide and my own attempted murder. Well, things are different now, Seiglein. I have just hit, as you must know, the new colony of St. Cyril. I have started irreversible changes of a nature you know well. That was a sample.”
I paused for effect, then continued. “You can see what it is doing to St. Cyril. Think what it would do to Derwin, or Yinching or even Earth. You can’t defend against it, you can’t fight it. I can pick any of the hundred and three plus worlds, any time, any place. I don’t even have to survivejust me, alone, even dead, would be enough to do the joband there are a lot of us now, Seiglein. A lot. Talk it over, bring it up to the Nine Families. Consider it. Then, broadcast your response on Band 241it’s not used for much. I’ll be monitoring. If you wish to talk, we’ll talk. Otherwisemore, Seiglein. More and more and more. Maybe I’ll even turn you into a Choz. Think about it. I’ll be listeningand I’ll be in touch.”
I signed off. I knew they’d be out to the beacon as soon as they could after getting the message, and I had no intention of being there when they did. I
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drained the water and atmosphere systems into my reserve tanks, and left it for them, cold, empty, ready to be blown up.
I L-jumped back toward in-system.
We passed several cycles going over the raid, the mistakes we made, our own hopes and fearsand we watched Marsha, still alive but still out, a wreck.
The younger ones could not condemn herthey, too, had felt that tremendous sense of power, the exhilarating sense of being where they belonged.
But by the ninth cycle there was still nothing on Band 241. I began to worry now, to wonder if I had miscalculated. Finally, I could stand it no longer.
“Georgelet’s monitor off St. Cyril,” I suggested, and he agreed.
The planet, of course, was externally unchanged from the way it had been before the raid. But, we knew, things were happening down there, strange and terrible to the people that we’d hit.
We could hear their frantic transmissions.
“… Crazy stuff’s all over the place,” came one voice. “It grows and spreads faster than you can chop it down. You root it out, kill it with sprays, and you find a patch ten times bigger somewhere else. I don’t know what…”
And later: “… going crazy. Some of them broke into the food stores and ate like they were starving. They’ve gone crazyand I feel like I’m starving my-self …”
And much later still, as Band 241 stayed silent:
“… lying around in comas just out on the grass or something. A few of them are eating the damned stuff. I feel so damned light-headed, high, I don’t know what it is. Some disease … Your bio boys better get in and cure this thing, fast!”
Ah! The faith man had in his magical technology and in his leaders!
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“… animals. I had this extreme craving to eat the grass outside todayand I did! I still feel funny, crazy, but some of the others are further along. The docs got it too, so they’re no help at all. I barely dragged myself in here to send this. God! My arms are dragging the ground when I’m standing up! You
wouldn’t believe …”
But they would believe, I knew. They’d know.
Medical teams came from the southern cities, and tried their best, but, before long, the virus had their measure and they, too, were more interested in sleeping and eating. Once started, the process allowed little time for other things.
And still Band 241 was silent.
What was taking them so long? I wondered. Was Seiglein content to ignore this? Even if he somehow failed to get my message it should be obvious by now what was happening on St. Cyril. Or were they waiting to convince themselves, to see how far it would go
on this scale?
Man was his own worst enemy on St. Cyril. Not knowing what was happening and getting no help from their government and corporations, they had taken the victims from some of the construction camps to their city labs and hospitals to study. In hours they had done years of the virus’s work. Long ahead of schedule, the virus was loosed on the centers of population on St. Cyril.
Through this time, Marsha clung tenaciously to the thread of life, we gave Shem a Christian burial in space, and Band 241 remained silent.
George played with the virus. He was getting strong signals from St. Cyril, but too many to sort out. My computer was better than Moses, of course, but it wasn’t designed for this sort of thing. He finally could narrow down reception to a small area and certain type of virus, but this was just a variation of the way we’d kept contact with Marsha’s band.
He played with their acidic secretions, those things
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that could break down even a spaceship wall if necessary. He had some success, to judge by the radio reports, but there were too many different things composed in too many different ways; it would take a much larger computer to handle all the stuff.
By the twenty-first cycle of monitoring, the effects were spreading in the cities. The medical men and scientists were the first to be hit, of coursethey’d been in direct contact with the virus. The largely defenseless and technologically dependent test colonies started to grind to a halt, and gardens, grass plots, and groves started sprouting this funny grass and these tuber plants.
As power and maintenance systems failed, panic set in. There were riots, terrible bouts of madness, even before the hunger struck the cities. Thousands were killed in these, thousands more in the crazed scramble for food as the thing took hold.
Chaos reigned as the change swept civilization on St. Cyril.
It was a horrible, frightening spectacle.
Since Band 241 stayed empty, I prayed someone was watching. I felt guilty as hell as things went on, although I couldn’t quite understand why.
A few cycles later we discovered what they were up to.
The sensors went off and I jumped. Something bad just come out of L-jump not far from us!
I checked, saw a large blip, somewhere between the little destroyer class and something the size of the Courrant. It was pretty far away, but I knew it was a military-class ship and that it had me as well. I backed off, causing some consternation with the speed of the getaway and lack of warning.
The ship fired at me, but I had the jump on him and was into a quick L-jump before the robomissiles could reach us. Oddly, I was in the only kind of ship that could do that and get away with itscout ships
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others couldn’t even land.
I pulled out of the jump, not apologizing to anybody, and, to my shock, saw more missiles not very far from me. They had seen my energy deflection on their sensors and changed for me. I still had some velocity from coming out of the jump and managed to make another, but I knew that I was out of there with seconds or less to spare. The bastard had fired a random 360-degree spread at me, guessing I’d make
an emergency short jump!
I laid off, coming out only a few minutes later,
half-expecting to meet more company.
There wasn’t any, but I was still close enough to the system to be able, in a couple of minutes, to receive intense radiation from the vicinity of the space I’d
just occupied.
Those missiles had been so close they’d detonated. The close shave actually helped me, in that the captain, smart as he obviously was, would believe that they’d gotten methe missiles wouldn’t detonate unless their sophisticated computer brains told them
they could hurt the target.
My computer’s better than your computer, I thought
smugly.
George was picking himself up off the wall. They’d
all been thrown about quite a bit, and some were groaning, but they’d be all right. Marsha we had webbed down, so she had been the best prepared of
all of us even if she didn’t know it.
“What the hell was that about?” George roared,
and there were several angry seconds.
Quickly, I explained what happened, and they calmed down. For a few it suddenly sunk in that we’d
almost been zapped.
George looked worried. “Do you suppose they’re going to do a Patmos operation on St. Cyril?” he asked, more of himself than me. “That’s dumbwe’ll
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just do it again and again. They must know that.”
“They may think they got us,” I pointed out. “And they don’t know about the Nijinsky. That disappearance is just one of the mysteries of space.”
He shook his head. “No, they can’t really know that was us back there. I think they just figured we were part of the routine traffic and wanted to be sure we hadn’t been down there, maybe a new carrier. No, that’s not the plot. They came here to do something, not catch us.”
I frowned. “I’m not sure I want to try that captain again,” I told him. “He’s goodvery good.”
The biologist nodded. “I agree. No use in letting him know we’re alive anyway. We can wait. Any signs as to what he’s doing?”
I shook my head. “It’d be several minutes before the energy pulses would reach us here anyway. Don’t forget our velocity is geometric. We’re a good ways from St. Cyril.”
George sat up on his tail and cocked his head, thinking.
“Now, let’s see,” he mumbled, “what would I do if I were they? Bomb it out? No, not this time. That failed before.” He looked at me. “Fix any spacecraft down there or in orbital station that might have been contaminated so they can’t go anyplace, that’s for sure.”
“Right,” I agreed. ‘Td hate to have to make a planetfall from anywhere in the next few days. I’ll bet they’ll zap half a dozen innocent ships too slow with the answers.”
He shrugged. “Spreading panic is part of our own operation. Remember, fifteen of us are taking on seven hundred billion people. No, we have to think. If they gave in to us, they’d lose. It’s surrender, nothing less. We would dictate terms.”
“But our terms are pretty mild!” I pointed out. “St. Cyril would be enough!”
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“They don’t know that,” George pointed out. “Besides, it’s enough for a while, but that wouldn’t last forever. You must know that as much as they. And we’re biologically compatible in the most basic respectwe need the same kind of worlds. You yourself told me the odds on finding a new Terraformable world. They’d have to halve that at leastand we can breed faster, Choziform anything compatible with the virus. Their whole economy, their whole system is based upon continued expansion. They’ll know that.” “But we’ve been over this a hundred times before,”
I protested.
“That was different. Planning a great expedition
and getting the result you expect are two different things. Plotters have stars in their eyeswe had to.
We had no choice but to do this.”
“So they aren’t blowing the place upnot yet, any-way,” I summed up. “I’d have gotten the energy pulses by now. And they aren’t giving in to us, either. So
what are they doing?”
“If I were they, I’d buy timeas much time as
possible,” the biologist replied. “First, I’d quarantine St. Cyril, so I’d have some samples of what I was up against. Seiglein blew it with Patmoshe let Moses get away, be missed us, and then he blew up the only place that would give him the clues to meet a future threat. He was dumb. The Nine Families aren’t dumb as a group. No, I’d keep St. Cyril and let it be Choziformedand I’d watch, and keep notes, and
I’d study it.”
“But they can’t get too close,” I pointed out. “The
virus will get them, too.”
George shrugged. “They can drop nurds and analyze
the stuff in chambers like you have, only better, with the best computers and best biological minds they have. It’ll be tough, but eventually they’ll come up
with something.”
“Like what?” I asked, getting a little nervous now.
The others were crowded around, listening as well.
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“An antitoxin, something that would kill the virus but nothing else.”
I thought about that one. “That’s possible?”
He nodded. “Oh, certainly. There’s a cure for everything sooner or later. Kill the virus and you destroy the Choz, but leave the place Terraformable. That’s what St. Cyril will betheir lab. The people down there will be their lab animals. Sooner or later they’ll find the answer.”
I felt crushed. I looked over at Marsha, still unconscious. I thought of Shem, floating somewhere out there,forever.
For nothing.
All for nothing.
One of the younger members of the raiding party looked stricken, and said what we all were thinking then.
“Then, we’ve lost,” he said in anguish.
I looked at him, at George, at Marsha, at the ship. I thought about the colony on the Nijinsky, the billions dead on Patmos. I thought about being shot at, tricked, suckered, pushed around by everybody from the Seiglein Corporation to Moses to circumstance.
It boiled up in me, in a fury that must have shown a frightening, dangerous aura to the others. They edged away from me.
It wasn’t going to end like this. It. Was. Not. Going. To. End. Like. This!
I whirled around, shouting for Cain to take his perch above the control board.
“Nobody beats Bar Holliday!” I said with grim menace. I turned to them, my aura so bright I could almost feel it. “Prepare for L-jump,” I snapped. The alarm rang, the figures were in.
“Where are we going?” George asked nervously.
“Back,” I said, not looking around. “Back to the Nijinsky. Back to take one last, desperate gamble.”
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Nineteen