missile is only half an hour from target now! We'll begin our landing in three hours or less! Out of the way!"

Calhoun said very bitter and extremely impolite words. But he faced an absolute emotional stalemate between enemies of whom both were in the wrong. The frantic anger of the adults of Phaedra, barred from the world to which they'd sent their children first so they could stay where doom awaited, was matched by the embittered revolt of the young people who had been worked past endurance and burdened past anyone's power to tolerate. There could be no compromise. It was not possible for either side to confess even partial defeat by the other. The quarrel had to be fought to a finish as between the opposing sides, and then hatred would remain no matter which side won. Such hatred could not be reasoned with.

It could only be replaced by a greater hatred.

Calhoun ground his teeth. The Med ship hurtled out from the sunlit Canis III. Somewhere—not many thousands of miles away—the fleet of Phaedra clustered. Its crews were raging, but they were sick with anxiety about the enemies they prepared to fight. Aground there was hatred among the older of the colonists—the young-warrior group in particular, because that is the group in which hate is appropriate—and there was no less a sickish disturbance because even in being right they were wrong. Every decent impulse that had been played upon to make them exhaust themselves, before their revolt, now protested the consequences of their revolt. Yet they believed that in revolting they were justified.

Murgatroyd did not like the continued roar of emergency-rockets. He climbed up on Calhoun's lap and protested.

"Chee!" he said urgently. "Chee-chee!"

Calhoun grunted.

"Murgatroyd," he said, "it is a Med service rule that a Med ship man is expendable in case of need. I'm very much afraid that we've got to be expended. Hang on, now! We try some action!"

He turned the Med ship end for end and fed full power to the rockets. The ship would decelerate even faster than it had gathered speed. He set the nearest-object indicator to high gain. It showed the now-retreating mass of stone and soil from Canis. Calhoun then set up a scanner to examine a particular part of the sky.

"Since fathers can be insulted," he observed, "they've made a missile to fight its way down through anything that's thrown 

 Prev. P 48/54 next