When the other patients woke I could put it to them. They knew more of Home. They might get answers different from mine. I waited. There was time. The Pak scouts were nine months away.
I worked out ways to destroy Home, using a Pak scout pair. I redesigned Protector, using what we’d learned of Pak scouts since Brennan built Protector.
In six days they started waking up. Twenty-four of us. Doctors Martin and Cowles had caught the infection from their patients; they were still changing.
It was a joyful thing, talking to men whose minds matched my own. Poor Brennan. I talked fast, knowing that that and my flatlander accent would make me incomprehensible to any breeder who might be listening. As I talked they moved about the room, testing their muscles and their new bodies; yet I could know that they were missing not a word. When I had finished we spent several hours discussing the situation.
We had to learn if Brennan could have faked the sightings of the Pak fleet and the Pak scouts. We were lucky. Len Bester was a fusion drive repairman; he was able to design an induced gravity generator. He said it would work, and gave us enough theory to convince us, and told us how it could be made to behave. We decided to accept Brennan’s gravity telescope, and the Pak fleet. Otherwise there were ways he could have faked what I had seen of the Pak scouts. We would get no more verification of Brennan’s story, aside from its internal consistency, which we also verified.
We made our plans accordingly.
We smashed our way through the plastic airlock and swarmed through the hospital. It was all over before the hospital personnel knew what had happened. We confined them until the tree-of-life virus should render them dormant. Many wanted to continue to care for their patients. This we let them do; but we had to destroy all of the medical supplies. There was danger that when people started collapsing with tree-of-life virus, others would screw up their physiology trying to treat them.
The Claytown police presently surrounded the hospital; but by then we could assume that everyone in the hospital was infected. In the night we scattered.
In the days that followed we attacked hospitals, drug stores, the single pharmaceutical plant. We destroyed television stations to slow the spread of news. People would panic if they learned of a new disease that took the minds of its victims and started spreading itself intelligently. They would find the truth no less horrible.
We found panic enough. Home’s populace fought us as they would have fought devils out of Hell. Ten of us died that way, trapped and bound not to kill potential protectors.
And six of us were caught trying to save their families, equipping them with pressure suits or pressure tents to keep out the virus, and hiding them where they could. It wasn’t necessary to kill them. We confined them until the breeders in question were dead or in transition.
In a week it was over.
In three weeks they started to wake up.
We began building our defenses.
It has seemed only reasonable to novelize this report. So much of it is conjecture. I never knew Lucas Garner, Nick Sohl, Phssthpok, Einar Nilsson et al. You may take Truesdale as true to life, on the theory that I wouldn’t lie without a reason. The rest are probably accurate enough.
Still, Brennan said it first: I’m not sure I’m still entitled to the name I was born with. Roy Truesdale was someone else. Roy Truesdale would have died, and expected to die, trying to prevent what I have done to Home.
We have good reason for not beaming this back to human space, not just yet. Brennan was right: the existence of protectors would alter the development of human civilization. Better you should think of Home as a failed colony, wiped out by disease. If the disease should catch more explorers, why, either they will die in transition or they will wake as protectors, look about them, and reach the same conclusions we did. There is little of free will for a protector.
But the Pak fleet remains ahead of us, though the Pak scouts are gone. (That was fun. We set up mock-cities all over Home, just city lights and lines of highways and fusion sources to stand for power plants. It never occurred to the Pak that we might consider Home expendable.) Almost certainly we can wipe out this fleet; but how many followed them? Were the ships of the second fleet redesigned, improved? if we survive that long, we’ll have to follow their trail right back into the Core explosion. If we lose one or another battle, why, some survivor will beam this back at every world in human space.
In which case:
Brennan must have hidden flasks of virus, labeled, where they could be found. Check the duplicate Stonehenge. Look for a package orbiting a blob of neutronium. Failing that, the cargo hold from Phssthpok’s ship is available on Mars. Check the walls for scrapings of root with dormant tree-of-life virus in them. Failing that, Home is in rotten shape for colonization, but the atmosphere is still thick with tree-of-life virus. Do not convert anyone to protector if he or she has children.
You’ll be smarter than they are. You can whip them. But don’t wait. If this reaches you, then a Pak fleet that was tough enough to destroy us is following just behind this laser pulse, at near lightspeed. Now move!
Goodbye and good luck. I love you.