Later on I bedded Mary down for a nap and sat with her until I was sure she was asleep. Then I looked up my father; he was in the office they had assigned to him. The green privacy light was already on. “Howdy,” I said.
He looked at me speculatively. “Well, Elihu, I hear that you hit the jackpot.”
“I prefer to be called ‘Sam’,” I answered.
“Very well, Sam. Success is its own excuse; nevertheless the jackpot appears to be disappointingly small. The situation seems to be almost as hopeless as before. Nine-day fever—no wonder the colony died out and the slugs as well. I don’t see how we can use it. We can’t expect everyone to have Mary’s indomitable will to live.”
I understood him; the fever carried a 98-percent plus death rate among unprotected Earthmen. With those who had taken the shots the rate was an effective zero—but that did not figure. We needed a bug that would just make a man sick—but would kill his slug. “I can’t see that it makes much difference,” I pointed out. “It’s odds-on that you will have typhus—or plague—or both—throughout the Mississippi Valley in the next six weeks.”
“Or the slugs may have learned a lesson from the setback they took in Asia and will start taking drastic sanitary measures,” he answered. I had not thought of that; the idea startled me so that I almost missed the next thing he said, which was: “No, Sam, you’ll have to devise a better plan than that.”
“I’ll have to? I just work here.”
“You did once—but now you’ve taken charge. I don’t mind; I was ready to retire anyhow.”
“Huh? What the devil are you talking about? I’m not in charge of anything—and don’t want to be. You are head of the Section.”
He shook his head. “A boss is the man who does the bossing. Titles and insignia usually come after the fact, not before. Tell me—do you think Oldfield could take over my job?”
I considered it and shook my head; Dad’s chief deputy was the executive officer type, a “carry-outer”, not a “think-upper”. “I’ve known that you would take over, some day,” he went on. “Now you’ve done it—by bucking my judgment on an important matter, forcing your own on me, and by being justified in the outcome.”
“Oh, rats! I got bull-headed and forced one issue. It never occurred to you big brains that you were failing to consult the one real Venus expert you had on tap—Mary, I mean. But I didn’t expect to find out anything; I had a lucky break.”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe in luck, Sam. Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.”
I placed my hands on the desk and leaned toward him. “Okay, so I’m a genius—just the same you are not going to get me to hold the sack. When this is over Mary and I are going up in the mountains and raise kittens and kids. We don’t intend to spend our time bossing screwball agents.”
He smiled gently as though he could see farther into the future than I could. I went on, “I don’t want your job—understand me?”
“That is what the Devil said to the Deity after he displaced him—but he found he could not help himself. Don’t take it so hard, Sam. I’ll keep the title for the present and give you all the help I can. In the meantime, what are your orders, sir?”
XXXI
The worst of it was, he meant it. I tried to correct matters by going limp on him, but it did not work. A top-level conference was called late that afternoon; I was notified but I stayed away. Shortly a very polite little WAC came to tell me that the commanding officer was waiting and would I please come at once?
So I went—and tried to stay out of the discussion. But my father has a way of conducting any meeting he is in, even if he is not in the chair, by looking expectantly at the one he wants to hear from. It’s a subtle trick, as the group does not know that it is being led.