The thought stirred dangerous fears in him. Moray was not a violent man, but during the thirty-six hours of the strange wind, he had discovered painful and unsuspected depths in himself. Maybe someone else will think of that, next time–what makes me so sure there will be a next time? Or maybe I will, can I ever be sure now?
Turning away from the unwelcome thought, he said, “Have you a report on damages yet?”
“Nineteen dead–no medical reports, but at least four hospital patients died of neglect,” Leicester said shortly. ‘Two suicides. One girl cut herself and bled to death on broken glass, but probably accident rather than suicide. And–I suppose you heard about Father Valentine.”
Moray shut his eyes. “I heard about the murders. I don’t know all the details.”
Leicester said, “I doubt if anyone alive does. He doesn’t himself, and probably won’t unless Chief Di Asturien wants to give him narcosynthesis or something. All I know is somehow he got mixed up with a gang of the crewmen who were doing some messing around–sexual messing around–down by the edge of the river. Things got fairly wild. When the first wave subsided a little he realized what he’d been doing, and I gather he couldn’t face it, and started cutting throats.”
“I take it, then, that he was one of the suicides?”
Leicester shook his head. “No. I gather he came out of it just in time to realize that suicide, too, was a mortal sin. Funny. I guess I’m just getting hardened to horrors on this wonderful paradise planet of yours–all I can think about now is how much trouble he’d have saved if he’d gone ahead with it. Now I’ve got to try him for murder, and then decide, or make the people decide, whether or not we have capital punishment here.”
Moray smiled bleakly. “Why bother?” he said. “What verdict could you possibly get except temporary insanity?”
“My God, you’re right!” Leicester passed his hand over his forehead.
“In all seriousness, Captain. We may have to cope with this again, and again, and again. At least until we know the cause. I suggest that you immediately disarm your Security crew; the first sign happened when a Security man shot first a girl, then a fellow officer. I suggest that if we ever again have a rainless night, that all lethal weapons, kitchen knives, surgical instruments, and the like, be locked up. It probably won’t prevent all the trouble, we can’t lock up every rock and hunk of stovewood on the planet, and to look at you, somebody evidently forgot who you were and took a swing at you.”
Leicester rubbed his chin. “Would you believe a fight over a girl, at my age?”
For the first time the two men grinned at one another with the beginnings of a brief mutual human liking, then it receded. Leicester said, “I’ll think about it. It won’t be easy.”
Moray said grimly, “Nothing here’s going to be easy, Captain. But I have a feeling that unless we start up a serious campaign for an ethic of nonviolence–one that will hold even under stress like the mass freakout–none of us will live through the summer.”
Chapter ELEVEN
The days of the Wind had spared the garden, MacAran thought. Perhaps some deep survival-instinct had told the maddened colonists that this was their lifeline. Repairs to the hospital were underway, and work crews drafted for manual labor were doing salvage work on the ship–Moray had made it bitterly clear that for many years this would be their only stock of metal for tools and implements. Bit by bit, the interior fabric of the great starship was being cannibalized; furniture from the living quarters and recreation areas was being brought out and converted for use in the dormitory and community buildings, tools from the repair shops, kitchen areas and even the bridge decks were being inventoried by groups of clerical workers. MacAran knew that Camilla was busy checking the computer, trying to discover what programs had been salvaged. Down to the smallest implement, ball-point pens and women’s cosmetics in the canteen supplies, everything was being inventoried and rationed. When the supplies of a technologically oriented Earth culture ran out, there would be no more, and Moray made it clear that replacements were already being devised for an orderly transition.