by Larry Niven
“And now?”
“See for yourself. Her face is too big and her skull is too small and too flat. And I don’t like the jaw, or the thin lips.” Doc rubbed his eyes wearily. “And there’s the hair. That much hair isn’t unheard of at that age, but taken with everything else…you can see why I was worried.”
“And all the kids look just like her. Even Jase Junior.”
“Even Jerry. And Jill’s stillbirth.”
In the ship’s library there was a silence as of mourning.
Jase said, “We’ll have to tell Earth. The colony is a failure.”
Doc shook his head. “We’d better see how it develops first.”
“We can’t have normal children, Doc.”
“I’m not ready to give up, Jase. And if it’s true, we can’t go back to Earth, either.”
“What? Why?”
“This thing isn’t a mutation. Not in us, it can’t be. What it could be is a virus replacing some of the genes. A virus is a lot like a free-floating chromosome anyway. If we’ve got a disease that keeps us from having normal children—”
“That’s stupid. A virus here, waiting for us, where there’s nothing for it to live on but plankton? You—”
“No, no, no. It had to come with us. Something like the common cold could have mutated aboard ship. There was enough radiation outside the shielding. Someone sneezes in the airlock before he puts his helmet on. A year later someone else inhales the mutant.”
Jase thought it through. “We can’t take it back to Earth.”
“Right. So what’s the hurry? It’d be twenty-four years before they could answer a cry for help. Let’s take our time and find out what we’ve really got.”
“Doc, in God’s name, what can we tell the others?”
“Nothing yet. When the time comes I’ll tell them.”
Those few months were a busy time for Ridgeback’s doctor. Then they were over. The children were growing, and most of the women were pregnant, including Angie and Jill, who had both had miscarriages. Never again would all the women of Ridgeback be having children in one ear-shattering population explosion.
Now there was little work for Doc. He spoke to Jase, who put him on the labor routines. Most of the work was agricultural, with the heavy jobs handled by machines. Robot trucks, trailing plows, scored rectangular patterns across the land.
The fenced bay was rich in Earthborn plankton, and now there were larger forms to eat the plankton. Occasionally Greg opened the filter to let discolored water spread out into the world, contaminating the ocean.
At night the colonists watched news from Earth, 11.9 years in transit, and up to a year older before Roy boarded the starship to beam it down. They strung the program out over the year in hour segments to make it last longer. There were no wars in progress, to speak of; the Procyon colony project had been abandoned; Macrostructures Inc. was still trying to build an interstellar ramjet. It all seemed very distant.
Jase came whistling into Doc’s lab, but backed out swiftly when he saw that he had interrupted a counseling session with Cynnie and Roy. Doc was the closest thing the colony had to a marriage therapist. Jase waited outside until the pair had left, then trotted in.
“Rough day?”
“Yeah. Jase, Roy and Cynnie don’t fight, do they?”
“They never did. They’re like twins. Married people do get to be like each other, but those two overdo it sometimes.”
“I knew it. There’s something wrong, but it’s not between them.” Doc rubbed his eyes on his sleeve. “They were sounding me out, trying to get me talking about the children without admitting they’re scared. Anyway…what’s up?”
Jase brought his hands from behind his back. He had two bamboo poles rigged for fishing. “What say we exercise our manly prerogatives?”
“Ye gods! In our private spawning ground?”
“Why not? It’s big enough. There are enough fish. And we can’t let the surplus go; they’d starve. It’s a big ocean.”
By now the cultivated strip of topsoil led tens of miles north and south along the continent. Jill claimed that life would spread faster that way, outward from the edges of the strip. The colony was raising its own chicken eggs and fruit and vegetables. On Landing Day they’d been the first in generations to taste moa meat, whose rich flavor had come that close to making the New Zealand bird extinct. Why shouldn’t they catch their own fish?
They made a full weekend of it. They hauled a prefab with them on the flyer and set it up on the barren shore. For three days they fished with the springy bamboo poles. The fish were eager and trusting. They ate some of their catch, and stored the rest for later.
On the last day Jase said, “I kept waiting to see you lose some of that uptight look. You finally have, a little, I think.”
“Yeah. I’m glad this happened, Jase.”
“Okay. What about the children?”
He didn’t need to elaborate. Doc said, “They’ll never be normal.”
“Then what are they?”
“I dunno. How do you tell people who came twelve light years to build a world that their heirs will be…” he groped for words. “Whatever. Changed. Animals.”
“Christ. What a mess.”
“Give me time to tell Elise…if she hasn’t guessed by now. Maybe she has.”
“How long?”
“A week, maybe. Give us time to be off with Jerry. Might make it easier if we’re with him.”
“Or harder.”
“Yeah, there’s that.” He cast his line out again. “Anyway, she’ll keep the secret, and she’d never forgive me if I didn’t tell her first. And you’d better tell June the night before I make the big announcement.” The words seemed to catch in his throat and he hung his head, miserable.
Tentatively Jase said, “It’s absolutely nobody’s fault.”
“Oh, sure. I was just thinking about the last really big announcement I helped to make. Years ago. Seems funny now, doesn’t it? ‘It’s safe, people. You can start dreaming now. Go ahead and have those babies, folks. It’s all right…’” His voice trailed off and he looked to Jase in guilty confusion. “What could I do, Jase? It’s like thalidomide. In the beginning, it all looked so wonderful.”
Jase was silent, listening to the sound of water lapping against the boat. “I just hate to tell Earth, that’s all,” he finally said in a low voice. “It’ll be like giving up. Even if we solve this thing, they’d never risk sending another ship.”
“But we’ve got to warn them.”
“Doc, what’s happening to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“How hard have you—no, never mind.” Jase pulled his line in, baited it and sent it whipping out again. Long silences are in order when men talk and fish.
“Jase, I’d give anything I have to know the answer. Some of the genes look different in the electron microscope. Maybe. Hell, it’s all really too fuzzy to tell, and I don’t really know what it means anyway. None of my training anticipated anything like this. You try to think of something.”
“Alien invasion.”
Pause. “Oh, really?”
Jase’s line jumped. He wrestled in a deep sea bass and freed the hook. He said, “It’s the safest, most painless kind of invasion. They find a world they want, but there’s an intelligent species in control. So they design a virus that will keep us from bearing intelligent children. After we’re gone they move in at their leisure. If they like they can use a countervirus, so the children can bear human beings again for slaves.”
The bamboo pole seemed dead in Doc’s hands. He said, “That’s uglier than anything I’ve thought of.”
“Well?”
“Could be. Insufficient data. If it’s true, it’s all the more reason to warn Earth. But Ridgeback is doomed.”
Jerry had his mother’s hair, sunbleached auburn. He had too much of it. On his narrow forehead it merged with his brows…his shelf of brow, and the brown eyes watching from way back. He hardly need
ed the shorts he was wearing; the hair would have been almost enough. He was nearly three.
He seemed to sense something wrong between his parents. He would spend some minutes scampering through the grove of sapling fruit trees, agile as a child twice his age; then suddenly return to take their hands and try to tug them both into action.
Doc thought of the frozen fertilized eggs of dogs in storage. Jerry with a dog…the thought was repulsive. Why? Shouldn’t a child have a dog?
“Well, of course I guessed something” Elise said bitterly. “You were always in the library. When you were home, the way that you looked at Jerry…and me, come to think of it. I see now why you haven’t taken me to bed much lately.” She’d been avoiding his eyes, but now she looked full at him. “I do see. But, Harry, couldn’t you have asked me for help? I have some medical knowledge, and, and I’m your wife, and Jerry’s mother, damn it Harry!”
“Would you believe I didn’t want you worrying?”
“Oh, really? How did it work?”
Her sarcasm cut deep. Bleeding, he said, “Nothing worked.”
Jerry came out of the trees at a tottering run. Doc stood up, caught him, swung him around, chased him through the trees…came back puffing, smiling, holding his hand. He almost lost the smile, but Elise was smiling back, with some effort. She hugged Jerry, then pulled fried chicken from the picnic basket and offered it around.
She said, “That alien invasion idea is stupid.”
“Granted. It’d be easy to think someone has ‘done’ it to us.”
“Haven’t you found anything? Isn’t there anything I can help with?”
“I’ve found a lot. All the kids have a lower body temperature, two point seven degrees. They’re healthy as horses, but hell, who would they catch measles from? Their brain capacity is too small, and not much of it is frontal lobe. They’re hard to toilet train and they should have started babbling, at least, long ago. What counts is the brain, of course.”
Elise took one of Jerry’s small hands. Jerry crawled into her lap and she rocked him. “His hands are okay. Human. His eyes…are brown, like yours. His cheekbones are like yours, too. High and a little rounded.”
Doc tried to smile. “His eyes look a little strange. They’re not really slanted enough to suspect mongolism, but I’ll bet there’s a gene change. But where do I go from there? I can see differences, and they’re even consistent, but there’s no precedent for the analysis equipment to extrapolate from.” Doc looked disgusted. Elise touched his cheek, understanding.
“Can you teach me to use an electron microscope?”
Doc sat at the computer console, watching over Jill’s shoulder as she brought out the Orion vehicle’s image of Ridgeback. The interstellar spacecraft doubled as a weather eye, and the picture, once drab with browns and grays, now showed strips of green beneath the fragmented cloud cover. If Ridgeback was dead, it certainly didn’t show on the screen.
“Well, we’ve done a fair old job.” Jill grinned and took off her headset. Her puffy natural had collected dust and seeds and vegetable fluff until she gave up and shaved it off. The tightly curled mat just covered her scalp now, framing her chocolate cameo features. “The cultivated strip has spread like weeds. All along the continent now I get CO2-oxygen exchange. It jumped the ridges last year, and now I get readings on the western side.”
“Are you happy?”
“No,” she said slowly. “I’ve done my job. Is it too much to want a child too? I wouldn’t care about the…problem. I just want…”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Doc said helplessly.
“I know, I know. But two miscarriages. Couldn’t they have known back on Earth? Wasn’t there any way to be sure? Why did I have to come all this way…” She caught herself and smiled thinly. “I guess I should count my blessings. I’m better off than poor Angie.”
“Poor Angie,” Doc echoed sadly. How could they have known about Chris? The night Doc announced his conclusions about the children, there had been tears and harsh words, but no violence. But then there was Chris.
Chris, who had wanted a child more than any of them could have known. Who had suffered silently through Angie’s first miscarriage, who hoped and prayed for the safe delivery of their second effort.
It had been an easy birth.
And the morning after Doc’s speech, the three of them, Chris, Angie and the baby, were found in the quiet of their stone house, the life still ebbing from Chris’s eyes and the gaps in his wrists.
“I’m sorry,” he said over and over, shaking his head as if he were cold, his watery brown eyes dulling. “I just couldn’t take it. I just…I just…” and he died. The three of them were buried in the cemetery outside of town, without coffins.
The town was different after the deaths, a stifling quiet hanging in the streets. Few colonists ate at the communal meals, choosing to take their suppers at home.
In an effort to bring everyone together, Jase encouraged them to come to town hall for Movie Night.
The film was “The Sound of Music.” The screen erupted with sound and color, dazzling green Alps and snow-crested mountains, happy song and the smiling faces of normal, healthy children.
Half the colonists walked out.
Most of the women took contraceptives now, except those who chose not to tamper with their estrogen balance. For these, Doc performed painless menstrual extractions bimonthly.
Nat and Elise insisted on having more children. Maybe the problem only affected the firstborn, they argued. Doc fought the idea at first. He found himself combatting Brew’s sullen withdrawal, Nat’s frantic insistence, and a core of hot anger in his own wife.
Earth could find a cure. It was possible. Then their grandchildren would be normal again, the heirs to a world.
He gave in.
But all the children were the same. In the end, Nat alone had not given up. She had borne five children, and was carrying her sixth.
The message of failure was halfway to Earth, but any reply was still nineteen years away. Doc had adapted the habit of talking things over with Jase, hoping that he would catch some glimpse of a solution.
“I still think it’s a disease,” he told Jase, who had heard that before, but didn’t mention it. The bay was quiet and their lines were still. They talked only during fishing trips. They didn’t want the rest of the colony brooding any more than they already were. “A mutant virus. But I’ve been wondering, could the changes have screwed us up? A shorter day, a longer year, a little heavier gravity. Different air mixture. No common cold, no mosquito bites; even that could be the key.”
On a night like this, in air this clear, you could even see starglades casting streaks across the water. A fish jumped far across the bay, and phosphorescence lit that patch of water for a moment. The Orion vehicle, mace-shaped, rose out of the west, past the blaze of the Pleiades. Roy would be rendezvousing with it now, preparing for tomorrow’s Year Day celebration.
Jase seemed to need these trips even more than Doc. After the murders the life seemed to have gone out of him, only flashes of his personality coming through at tranquil times like these. He asked, “Are you going to have Jill breed mosquitoes?”
“…Yes.”
“I think you’re reaching. Weren’t you looking at the genes in the cytoplasm?”
“Yeah. Elise’s idea, and it was a good one. I’d forgotten there were genes outside the cell nucleus. They control the big things, you know: not the shape of your fingers, but how many you get, and where. But they’re hard to find, Jase. And maybe we found some differences between our genes and the children’s, but even the computer doesn’t know what the difference means.”
“Mosquitoes.” Jase shook his head. “We know there’s a fish down that way. Shall we go after him?”
“We’ve got enough. Have to be home by morning. Year Day.”
“What exactly are we celebrating this time?”
“Hell, you’re the mayor. You think of something.” Doc sulked, watching t
he water ripple around his float. “Jase, we can’t give up—”
Jase’s face was slack with horror, eyes cast up to the sky. Doc followed his gaze, to where a flaring light blossomed behind the Orion spacecraft.
“Oh my God,” Jase rasped, “Roy’s up there.”
Throwing his bamboo pole in the water, Jase started the engine and raced for shore.
Doc studied the readouts carefully. “Mother of God,” he whispered. “How many engines did he fire?”
“Six.” Jill’s eyes were glued to the screen, her voice flat. “If he was aboard, he…well, there isn’t much chance he survived the acceleration. Most of the equipment up there must be junk now.”
“But what if he did survive? Is there a chance?”
“I don’t know. Roy was getting set to beam the messages down, but said that he had an alarm to handle first. He went away for a while, and…” she seemed to search for words. She whispered, “Boom.”
“If he was outside the ship, in one of the little rocket sleds, he could get to the shuttle vehicle.”
Jase walked heavily into the lab.
“What about Cynnie? What did she say?” Doc asked quickly.
Jase’s face was blank of emotion. “She talked to him before the…accident.”
“And?”
“It’s all she would say. I’m afraid she took it pretty bad. This was sort of the final straw.” His eyes were hollow as he reminisced. “She was always a brave kid, you know? Anything I could do, she’d be right behind me, measuring up to big brother. There’s just a limit, that’s all. There’s just a limit.”
Doc’s voice was firm, only a slight edge of unease breaking through his control. “I think we had better face it. Roy is dead. The Orion’s ruined, and the shuttle-craft is gone anyway.”
“He could be alive…” Jill ventured.
Doc tried to take the sting out of his voice, and was not entirely successful. “Where? On the ship, crushed to a paste? Not on the shuttle. It’s tumbling further from the Orion every second. There’s no one on it. In one of the rocket sleds?” His face softened, and they could see that he was afraid to have hope. “Yes. Maybe that. Maybe on one of the sleds.”