Calhoun struck down the emergency rocket stud as it exploded. The roar of the rocket filled the interior of the ship. The spacephone speaker bellowed again:
"We've got a megaton bomb missile headed down! This is our last word! Permit landing or we come in fighting!"
The object from the crude cannon went off violently. With the emergency rocket flaming to help, it lifted the Med Ship, which jerked upward, settled back—and only two of its fins touched solidity. It began to topple because there was no support for the third.
Once toppled over, it would be helpless. It could be blasted with deliberately placed charges between its hull and the ground. A crater already existed where support for the third landing fin should have been.
Calhoun pushed the stud down full. The ship steadied and lifted. It went swinging across the level center of the landing grid. Its slender, ultra-high-velocity flame knifed down through the sod, leaving a smoking, incandescent slash behind. The figures about the bomb throwers scattered and fled. The Med Ship straightened to an upright position and began to rise.
Calhoun swore. The grid was the planet's defense against landings from space, because it could fling out missiles of any size with perfect aim at any target within some hundred thousand miles—a good twelve planetary diameters. Its operators meant to defy the fleet from Phaedra and had to get rid of the Med Ship before they dared energize its coils. Now they were rid of it. Now they could throw bombs, or boulders, or anything else its force-fields could handle.
The spacephone roared again:
"On the ground there! Our missile is aimed straight for your grid! It carries a megaton fission bomb! Evacuate the area!"
Calhoun swore again. The gang, the guard, the young-warrior group at the grid would be far too self-confident to heed such a threat. If there were wiser heads on Canis III, they could not enforce their commands. A human community has to be complete or it is not workable. The civilization which had existed on Phaedra II was shattered by the coming doom of its sun. The fragments—on Phaedra, in the fleet, in each small occupied community on Canis III—were incomplete and incapable of thinking or acting in concert with any other. Every small group on this planet, certainly, gave only lip-service to the rest. The young world was inherently incapable of organizing itself, save on a miniature scale. And one such miniature group had the grid and would fight with it regardless of the wishes of any other—because that group happened to be composed of instinct-driven members of the young-warrior group.
But he was still within the half-mile-high fence of the grid's steel structure. He strapped himself in his seat. The ship rose and rose. It came level with the top of the colony's one defense against space. The peculiar, corrugated copper lip of that structure, formed into the force-field guide which made it usable, swung toward him. He raised the rocket-thrust and shot skyward.
A deafening bellow came from the speakers:
"Yeah! Go on out and join the old folks! We'll get you!"
Obviously, the voice was from the ground below him. The ship flashed upward. Calhoun rasped into the spacephone mike, himself:
"Med Ship calling fleet! Call back that missile! I've got the antibody structure! This is no time for fighting! Call your missile back!"
Derisive laughter—again from the ground. Then the heavy, growling voice of an older man.
"Keep out of the way, Med Ship! These young fools are destroying themselves. Now they're destroying our grandchildren. If we hadn't been soft-hearted before—if we'd fought them from the beginning—the little ones wouldn't be dying now! Keep out of the way! If you can help us, it'll be after we've won the war."
The sky turned purple, at the height Calhoun had reached. It went black. The sun Canis flamed and flared against a background of ebony space, sprinkled with a thousand million colored stars. The Med Ship continued to rise.
Calhoun felt singularly and helplessly alone. Below him the sunlit surface of a world spread out, its edge already curving, cloud-masses and green-clad plains. There was the blue of ocean, creeping in. The city of the landing-grid was tiny, now. The brown of ploughed fields was no longer divided into rectangular shapes. It was a mere brownish haze between the colorings of as-yet-untouched virgin areas. The colonists of Canis III had so far made only a part of the new world their own. Many times more remained to be turned to human use.
The rear screen showed something coming upward. Masses of stuff, without shape but with terrific velocity. It was inchoate, indefinite stuff. It was plain dirt from the center of the landing-grid's floor, flung upward with the horrible power available for the landing and launching of ships. And, focused upon it, the force-fields of the grid could control it absolutely for a hundred thousand miles.
Calhoun swerved, ever so slightly. His own velocity had reached miles per second, but the formless mass following him was traveling at tens. It would not matter what such a hurtling missile was. At such a velocity it would not strike like a mass, but like a meteor-shower, flaring into incandescence when it touched and vaporizing the Med Ship with itself in the flame of impact.
But the grid would have to let go before it hit. There was monstrous stored power in the ship's Duhanne cells. If so much raw energy were released into anything on which a force-field was focused, it would destroy the source of the field. The grid could control its battering-ram until the very last fraction of a second, but then it must release—and its operator knew it.
Calhoun swung his ship frantically.
The mass of speeding planet-matter raced past no more than hundreds of yards away. It was released. It would go on through empty space for months or years—perhaps forever.
Calhoun swung back to his upward course. Now he sent raging commands before him:
"Pull back that missile! You can't land a bomb on Canis! There are people there! You can't drop a bomb on Canis!"
There was no answer. He raged again:
"Med Ship calling Phaedra fleet! There's disease on Canis! Your children and grandchildren are stricken! You can't fight your way to help them! You can't blast your way to sickbeds! You've got to negotiate! You've got to compromise! You've got to make a bargain or you and they together—"
A snarling voice from the ground said spitefully:
"Never mind little Med man! Let 'em try to land! Let 'em try to take over and boss us! We listened to them long enough! Let 'em try to land and see what happens! We've got their fleet spotted! We'll take care of them!"
Then the growling tones Calhoun had come to associate with Phaedra:
"You keep out of the way, Med Ship. If our young children are sick, we're going to them! We're just beyond the area in which no drive will work. When the grid has been blasted our landing ship will go down and we'll come in! Our 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.