Jase was silent, listening to the sound of water lapping against the boat. “I just hate to tell Earth, that’s all,” he finally said in a low voice. “It’ll be like giving up. Even if we solve this thing, they’d never risk sending another ship.”
“But we’ve got to warn them.”
“Doc, what’s happening to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“How hard have you—no, never mind.” Jase pulled his line in, baited it and sent it whipping out again. Long silences are in order when men talk and fish.
“Jase, I’d give anything I have to know the answer. Some of the genes look different in the electron microscope. Maybe. Hell, it’s all really too fuzzy to tell, and I don’t really know what it means anyway. None of my training anticipated anything like this. You try to mink of something.”
“Alien invasion.”
Pause. “Oh, really?”
Jase’s line jumped. He wrestled in a deep sea bass and freed the hook. He said, “It’s the safest, most painless kind of invasion. They find a world they want, but there’s an intelligent species in control. So they design a virus that will keep us from bearing intelligent children. After we’re gone they move in at their leisure. If they like they can use a countervirus, so the children can bear human beings again for slaves.”
The bamboo pole seemed dead in Doc’s hands. He said, “That’s uglier than anything I’ve thought of.”
“Well?”
“Could be. Insufficient data. If it’s true, it’s all the more reason to warn Earth. But Ridgeback is doomed.”
Jerry had his mother’s hair, sunbleached auburn. He had too much of it. On his narrow forehead it merged with his brows…his shelf of brow, and the brown eyes watching from way back. He hardly needed the shorts he was wearing; the hair would have been almost enough. He was nearly three.
He seemed to sense something wrong between his parents. He would spend some minutes scampering through the grove of sapling fruit trees, agile as a child twice his age; then suddenly return to take their hands and try to tug them both into action.
Doc thought of the frozen fertilized eggs of dogs in storage. Jerry with a dog…the thought was repulsive. Why? Shouldn’t a child have a dog?
“Well, of course I guessed something,” Elise said bitterly. “You were always in the library. When you were home, the way that you looked at Jerry…and me, come to think of it. I see now why you haven’t taken me to bed much lately.” She’d been avoiding his eyes, but now she looked full at him. “I do see. But, Harry, couldn’t you have asked me for help? I have some medical knowledge, and, and I’m your wife, and Jerry’s mother, damn it Harry!”
“Would you believe I didn’t want you worrying?”
“Oh, really? How did it work?”
Her sarcasm cut deep. Bleeding, he said, “Nothing worked.”
Jerry came out of the trees at a tottering run. Doc stood up, caught him, swung him around, chased him through the trees…came back puffing, smiling, holding his hand. He almost lost the smile, but Elise was smiling back, with some effort. She hugged Jerry, then pulled fried chicken from the picnic basket and offered it around.
She said, “That alien invasion idea is stupid.”
“Granted. It’d be easy to think someone has ‘done’ it to us.”
“Haven’t you found anything? Isn’t there anything I can help with?”
“I’ve found a lot. All the kids have a lower body temperature, two point seven degrees. They’re healthy as horses, but hell, who would they catch measles from? Their brain capacity is too small, and not much of it is frontal lobe. They’re hard to toilet train and they should have started babbling, at least, long ago. What counts is the brain, of course.”
Elise took one of Jerry’s small hands. Jerry crawled into her lap and she rocked him. “His hands are okay. Human, His eyes…are brown, like yours. His cheekbones are like yours, too. High and a little rounded.”
Doc tried to smile. “His eyes look a little strange. They’re not really slanted enough to suspect mongolism, but I’ll bet there’s a gene change. But where do I go from there? I can see differences, and they’re even consistent, but there’s no precedent for the analysis equipment to extrapolate from.” Doc looked disgusted. Elise touched his cheek, understanding.
“Can you teach me to use an electron microscope?”
Doc sat at the computer console, watching over Jill’s shoulder as she brought out the Orion vehicle’s image of Ridgeback. The interstellar spacecraft doubled as a weather eye, and the picture, once drab with browns and grays, now showed strips of green beneath the fragmented cloud cover. If Ridgeback was dead, it certainly didn’t show on the screen.
“Well, we’ve done a fair old job.” Jill grinned and took off her headset. Her puffy natural had collected dust and seeds and vegetable fluff until she gave up and shaved it off. The tightly curled mat just covered her scalp now, framing her chocolate cameo features. “The cultivated strip has spread like weeds. All along the continent now I get CO2-oxygen exchange. It jumped the ridges last year, and now I get readings on the western side.”
“Are you happy?”
“No,” she said slowly. “I’ve done my job. Is it too much to want a child too? I wouldn’t care about the…problem. I just want…”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Doc said helplessly.
“I know, I know. But two miscarriages. Couldn’t they have known back on Earth? Wasn’t there any way to be sure? Why did I have to come all this way…” She caught herself and smiled thinly. “I guess I should count my blessings. I’m better off than poor Angie.”
“Poor Angie,” Doc echoed sadly. How could they have known about Chris? The night Doc announced his conclusions about the children, there had
