Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER IX

Hypatia had been right about what gravitational lensing plus that big mirror could do.

By the time the mirror was complete, we could make out plenty of detail. We were even able to see individual centaur-like Crabbers —the same build, four legs and upright torso, that they’d inherited from the primitives I’d seen, but no longer very primitive at all.

Well, what I mean is that sometimes we could see them, anyway. Not always. The conditions had to be right. We couldn’t see them when it was night on their part of the planet, of course, except in those ghosty-looking IR views, and we couldn’t see them at all when they were blanketed with clouds we couldn’t peer through. But we could see enough. More than enough, as far as I was concerned.

The PhoenixCorp crew was going crazy trying to keep up with the incoming data. Bill seemed to have decided to be patient with my unpredictable moods, so he paid me only absentminded attention. He kept busy working. He and Denys were ecstatically interrupting everyone in their jobs so that he could record their spot reactions, while the crew did their best to get on with their jobs anyway. June Terple stopped sleeping entirely, torn between watching the new images as they arrived and nagging her shipmind to make sure we would have warning in time to get the hell out of there before the star blew.

Only Mark Rohrbeck seemed to have time on his hands. Which was just the way I wanted it.

I found him in the otherwise empty sleep chamber, where Hans had obligingly set up a duplicate show of the incoming scenes for him. Mark’s main area of concern was the shipmind and the functions it controlled, but all those things were working smoothly without his attention. He was spending his time gazing morosely in the general direction of the pictures.

I hooked myself up nearby. “Nasty, isn’t it?” I said sociably, to cheer him up.

He didn’t want to be cheered. “You mean the Crabbers?” Although his eyes had been on the display, his mind evidently hadn’t. He thought it over for a moment, then gave his verdict. “Oh, I guess it’s nasty enough, all right. It isn’t exactly what we were all hoping for, that’s for sure. But it all happened a long time ago, though, didn’t it?”

“And you’ve got more immediate problems on your mind,” I offered helpfully.

He gave me a gloomy imitation of a smile. “I see the shipminds have been gossiping again. Well, it isn’t losing Doris that bothers me so much,” he said after a moment. “I mean, that hurt, too. I thought I loved her, but—Well, it didn’t work out, did it? Now she’s got this other guy, so what the hell? But” —he swal­lowed unhappily—”the thing is, she’s keeping the kids.”

He was not only a nice man, he was beginning to touch my heart. I said, sounding sympathetic and suddenly feeling that way, too, “And you miss them?”

“Hell! I’ve been missing them most of the time since they were born,” he said self-accusingly. “I guess that’s what went wrong. I’ve been away working so much, I suppose I can’t blame Doris for getting her lovemaking from somebody else.”

That triggered something in me that I hadn’t known was there. “No!” I said, surprising myself by my tone. “That’s wrong. Blame her.”

I startled Rohrbeck, too. He looked at me as though I had suddenly sprouted horns, but he didn’t get a chance to speak. June Terple came flying by the room and saw us. She stuck her nose in, grabbing a hold-on to yell at Mark in passing. “Rohrbeck! Get your ass in gear! I want you to make sure Hans is shifting focus as fast as possible. We could be losing all kinds of data!” And then she was gone again, to wherever she was gone to.

Mark gave me a peculiar look, but then he shrugged and waved his hands to show that when the boss gave orders, even orders to do what he had already done, he couldn’t just stay and talk anymore, and then he was gone as well.

I didn’t blame him for the peculiar look. I hadn’t realized I was so sensitive in the matter of two-timing partners. But apparently I was.

Even though I was the boss, I had no business keeping the PhoenixCorp people from doing their jobs. Anyway, there was more bustle and confusion going on there than I liked. I went back to my ship to stay out of everybody’s way, watching the pictures as they arrived with only Hypatia for company.

She started the projections up as soon as I arrived, without being asked, and I sat down to observe.

If you didn’t think of the Crabbers as people, what they were doing was certainly interesting. The Crabbers themselves were, for that matter. I could see traces of those primitive predators in the civilized —civilized!—versions before me. Now, of course, they had machines and wore, clothes and, if you didn’t mind the extra limbs, looked rather impressive in their gaudy tunics and spiked leggings, and the shawl things they wore on their heads that were ornamented with, I guessed, maybe insignia of rank. Or junk jewelry, maybe, but most of them were definitely in one or another kind of uniform. Most of the civilized ones, anyway. In the interior of the south continent, where it looked like rain forest and savanna, were lots of what looked like noncivilized ones. Those particular Crabbers didn’t have machines, or much in the way of clothing either. They lived off the land, and they seemed to spend a lot of time gaping up worriedly at the sky, where fleets of blimps and double-winged aircraft buzzed by now and then.

The civilized ones seemed to be losing some of their civilization. When Hans showed us close-ups of one of the bombed-out cities, I could see streams of peo­ple—mostly civilians, I guessed —making their way out of the ruins, carrying bun­dles, leading kids or holding them. A lot of them were limping, just dragging themselves along. Some were being pulled in wagons or sledlike things.

“They look like they’re all sick,” I said, and Hypatia nodded.

“Undoubtedly some of them are, dear,” she informed me. “It’s a war, after all. You shouldn’t be thinking just in terms of bombs and guns, you know. Did you never hear of biological warfare?”

I stared at her. “You mean they’re spreading disease? As a weapon?”

“I believe that is likely, and not at all without precedent,” she informed me, preparing to lecture. She started by reminding me of the way the first American colonists in New England gave smallpox-laden blankets to the Indians to get them out of the way—”The colonists were Christians, of course, and very religious” — and went on from there. I wasn’t listening. I was watching the pictures from the Crabber planet.

They didn’t get better. For one moment, in one brief scene, I saw something that touched me. It was an archipelago in the Crabber planet’s tropical zone. One bit looked a little like my island, reef and lagoon and sprawling vegetation over everything. Aboriginal Crabbers were there, too. But they weren’t alone. There was also a company of the ones in uniform, herding the locals into a village square, for what purpose I could not guess—to draft them? to shoot them dead?—but certainly not a good one. And, when I looked more closely, I saw all the plants were dying. More bioweapons, this time directed at crops? Defoliants? I didn’t know, but it looked as though someone had done something to that vegetation.

I had had enough. Without intending it, I came to a decision.

I interrupted my shipmind in the middle of her telling me about America’s old Camp Detrick. “Hypatia? How much spare capacity do you have?”

It didn’t faze her. She abandoned the history of human plague-spreading and responded promptly. “Quite a lot, Klara.”

“Enough to store all the data from the installation? And maybe take Hans aboard, too?”

She looked surprised. I think she actually was. “That’s a lot of data, Klara, but, yes, I can handle it. If necessary. What’ve you got in mind?”

“Oh,” I said, “I was just thinking. Let me see those refugees again.”