why had he been sent here? Was it to investigate the situation and try to devise a method of separating children and grandchildren from their Undesirable elders, and somehow influence them into induction centers for testing before they became so tainted by environmental and behavioral influences as to be unsalvageable?
Surely not, Martin thought, that would be a cruel and even more undesirable answer.
The Keidi had stopped talking and was waiting for more questions.
Beth, whose thought processes paralleled Martin’s to closely that he sometimes wondered if she was telepathic, said, “Judging by your friendly approach to us and the very laudable work you intend to do after what should have been a long, uncomfortable, and probably dangerous journey, I have difficulty in believing that you are an Undesirable or that…”
She broke off as the muscles around the Keidi’s horn tightened suddenly into spasm. Then they relaxed slightly and he said, “You will never use that word to any Keidi. You will not use it to me again.”
Red-faced with embarrassment, Beth was opening her mouth to apologize when the speaker came suddenly to life.
“Intruder, Camp Eleven,” the voice said briskly. “You may proceed. Your passenger will indicate the landing area on arrival. A vehicle will await him. No others will leave the ship, nor will they appear at an open exit port. Is this understood?”
“Understood,” Beth responded. “We’re on our way.”
When Camp Eleven was below them, Martin told the doctor that the hypership’s library included physiological and clinical data on all Federation World species, and that the Keida material was instantly available if needed. But the doctor did not respond other than to point out the landing area. Plainly he was still angry at being called an Undesirable, and it seemed that the First’s people did not want to speak to them either because the camp transmitter was also silent.
They were watching the vehicle carrying the doctor as it was heading toward the perimeter fence, when Beth said “I’m sorry. I had no intention of hurting his feelings. But he is old enough to have been one of the original Undesirables, and must be fully aware of the reasons why they were left behind, so I don’t understand his extreme sensitivity to the use of the word. Have I messed up your contact?”
Martin thought for a moment, then said, “Don’t worry about it. If you hadn’t used the word I would have, sooner or later, with the same result. But I’m pretty sure that our friend is not, in fact, one of the original Undesirables.”
He could well imagine the tiny minority of Keida’s rejects convincing themselves that they were superior rather than inferior beings. They had been left to survive as best they could on a virtually empty, scarred, and exhausted world, with only the unwanted scraps of their old technology and culture remaining to them, while their soft, comfort-loving fellows left for the Federation World. They had survived and adapted and reorganized, well enough for the supervisor to assign Beth and Martin to find out what was happening on Keida. So a certain pride in their inferiority, even an intense reverse snobbery and anger toward the soft outsiders who considered them to be inferior, was understandable.
But their Keidi doctor did not fit that neat psychological pigeonhole.
He had been the only person in his city to speak to diem, and give advice and information. He had not been over friendly, but neither had he been blindly hostile like the First’s people, and he had known about many other- species life forms. The mural depicting these life forms could only be seen inside the induction centers, from which Undesirables were automatically excluded.
“You’re thinking out loud again,” Beth said suddenly. “If he isn’t an Undesirable, what is he?”
“A potential Citizen who chose not to go through the induction procedure,” Martin replied. “Maybe he had an aversion to following the crowd, or the crowd going to the Federation World contained the usual proportion of medics while the Undesirables who remained had few, if Any. I’m beginning to like this Keidi.”
As they watched the doctor’s vehicle moving along the old, neatly repaired roadways between the rows of long, low buildings, Martin decided that Frontier Camp Eleven was what it had always been, a military base. Such establishments were not needed on the Federation World so they had been left on Keida, untouched and unoccupied except by the warrior Undesirables-as opposed to the civilians temporarily in uniform-who felt at home in them. The taller, windowless buildings grouped around the landing area would once have contained aircraft and surface vehicles, and possibly still did, although the people qualified to maintain them had a dying breed.
When the vehicle stopped at what was obviously the administration center, their Keidi entered quickly and without any hesitation moved deep inside the building- obviously he knew his way around-to stop finally in a large, long room containing a line of beds, only one of which was occupied. Excluding the doctor, there were eight other people in the ward.
They could follow his movements because the sensor display had the doctor tagged, but the others were just hazy, insubstantial shapes standing deep inside a structure whose corridors, rooms, and walls showed as ghostly transparencies. As the others were identified in conversation they, too, would be tagged.
“I’m getting something now,” Beth said.
They heard the doctor asking the patient how she felt and, interspersed with untranslatable sounds of pain, the female’s reply. Another Keidi, a medic judging by the language, joined the conversation with a fuller, more clinical description of the case history.
“She’s in very bad shape,” Beth said. Her concern for another female at a time like this, regardless of species, was reflected in her voice.
“That she is,” Martin said. “But I think our friend is talking to the First. He’s pointing his horn at that Keidi who is standing alone halfway down the ward. Listen!”
If it was the First he was addressing, then the doctor was sounding both insubordinate and very, very angry.
“This patient’s condition was described to me with minimum accuracy and maximum optimism,” he was saying. “Not only was such behavior professionally inexcusable, it means that had I come here by the usual method my journey would have been wasted, because the patient and unborn would have died long before my arrival. Distasteful as it is to all of us, the obligation to the Galactics is truly a major one. Now will all nonmedical personnel please withdraw.”
A bitter argument broke out among the people who had left the bedside to join the First during which, as is the way with all eavesdroppers, the listeners heard nothing good about themselves. They were hated, intensely and bitterly, by all Keidi for no other reason than their identity,
“The First shows some grandparental concern, at
least,” Beth said after one particularly vicious outburst. “I’m trying to tighten the sensor focus on him, but there’s some interference which… Oh, no.”
Figures and graphics chased each other across the sensor screen for a moment, then she looked up with the color draining from her face. Dully, she said, “The First has been in recent proximity to shielded fissionable material.”
“That’s impossible!” Martin burst out. “Are you tell-(.T ing me that there are nuclear weapons in the Camp? And
-· if so, why the blazes didn’t your sensors spot them at I… once?”
r “Three reasons,” Beth replied angrily. “I did not expect to find radiation, so the sensors were not instructed: to look for it, and they haven’t spotted it now because it “; isn’t here. The original source of contamination is some-f where beyond the range of the lander’s sensors. The hypership is scanning for it now.”
.. It was the Federation’s policy to forbid all nuclear power sources and weaponry to Undesirables and, long. before an Exodus was complete, die supporting technology and fissionable material were invariably dismantled and buried beyond all possibility of recovery by the limited technical resources of those left behind. This was done because of another inflexible rule, that a species which had developed such dreadful and long-acting mass- destruction weapons was required to keep them on-planet as a constant reminder to the Undesirables remaining of the principal reason why they had been rejected as Federation Citizens.
Atomic weapons in the hands of Undesirables was something which just could not happen. But it had somehow happened here.
“The radiation dosage is minimal,” Beth went on. ‘ “Not enough to have any but very long-term effects. Could that be the reason why the First stayed so far; away from the patient? Out of consideration for his unborn great- grandchild.”
