Shall I see you again?
There are so many chances, both for good and evil, child. Only time knows, I dare not promise you. With a gentle touch, he folded her in the fur–lined cloak in which, earlier, he had wrapped her. She nodded, trying to hold back her tears; only when he had disappeared into the forest did she break down and follow, weeping, the small furred alien who came to lead her down the strange paths.
“You are the logical suspect,” Captain Leicester said harshly. “You have never made any secret of the fact that you don’t want to leave this planet, and the sabotage of the computer means that you will get your way, and that we will never be able to leave here.”
“No, Captain, you’re quite wrong,” Moray looked him in the face without flinching. “I have known all along that we would never leave this planet. It did occur to me, during the–what the hell shall we call it? During the mass freakout? Yes; it occurred to me during the mass freakout that maybe it would be a good thing if the computer was nonfunctional, it would force you to stop pretending we could fix the ship–”
“I was not pretending,” said the Captain icily.
Moray shrugged. “Words don’t matter that much. Okay, force you to stop kidding yourself about it, and get down to the serious business of survival. But I didn’t do it. To be honest, I might have if it had ever occurred to me, but I don’t know one end of a computer from the other–I wouldn’t know how to go about putting it out of action. I suppose I could have blown it up–I know I heard the explosion–but as it happens, when I heard the explosion I was lying in the garden having–” suddenly he laughed, embarrassed, “having the time of my life talking to a cabbage sprout, or something like that.”
Leicester frowned at him. He said, “Nobody blew the computer up, or even put it out of action. The programs have simply been erased. Any literate person could do that.”
“Any literate person familiar with a starship, maybe,” Moray said. “Captain, I don’t know how to convince you, but I’m an ecologist, not a technician. I can’t even make up a computer program. But if it’s not out of commission, what’s all the fuss about? Can’t you re-program it, or whatever the word is? Are the tapes, or whatever they are, so irreplaceable?”
Leicester was abruptly convinced. Moray didn’t know. He said dryly, “For your information, the computer contained about half of the sum total of human knowledge about physics and astronomy. Even if my crew contained four dozen Fellows of the Royal College of Astronomy of Edinburgh, it would take them thirty years to re-program just the navigational data. That’s not even counting the medical programs–we haven’t checked those yet–or any of the material from the ship’s Library. All things considered, the sabotage of the computer is a worse piece of human vandalism than the burning of the Library at Alexandria.”
“Well, I can only repeat that I didn’t do it and I don’t know who did,” Moray said. “Look for someone on your crew with the technical know-how.” He gave a dry, unamused laugh. “And someone who could keep their head long enough. Have the Medics figured out what hit us?”
Leicester shrugged. “Me best guess I’ve heard so far is an airborne dust containing some violent hallucinogen. Still unidentified, and probably will be until things settle down at the hospital.”
Moray shook his head. He knew the Captain believed him now, and to tell the truth he was not entirely happy about the destruction of the computer. As long as Leicester’s whole efforts were taken up in attempting to manage the ship repairs he was unlikely to interfere with what Moray was doing to assure the Colony’s survival. Now, a Captain without a ship, he was likely to get seriously in the way of their assault on a strange world. For the first time Moray understood the old joke about the Space fleet:
“You can’t retire a starship Captain. You have to shoot him.”