Chris, who had wanted a child more than any of them could have known. Who had suffered silently through Angie’s first miscarriage, who hoped and prayed for the safe delivery of their second effort.
It had been an easy birth.
And the morning after Doc’s speech, the three of them, Chris, Angie and the baby, were found in the quiet of their stone house, the life still ebbing from Chris’ eyes and the gaps in his wrists.
“I’m sorry,” he said over and over, shaking his head as if he were cold, his watery brown eyes dulling. “I just couldn’t take it. I just…I just…” and he died. The three of them were buried in the cemetery outside of town, without coffins.
The town was different after the deaths, a stifling quiet hanging in the streets. Few colonists ate at the communal meals, choosing to take their suppers at home.
In an effort to bring everyone together, Jase encouraged them to come to town hall for Movie Night.
The film was “The Sound of Music.” The screen erupted with sound and color, dazzling green Alps and snow-crested mountains, happy song and the smiling faces of normal, healthy children.
Half the colonists walked out.
Most of the women took contraceptives now, except those who chose not to tamper with their estrogen balance. For these, Doc performed painless menstrual extractions bimonthly.
Nat and Elise insisted on having more children. Maybe the problem only affected the firstborn, they argued. Doc fought the idea at first. He found himself combatting Brew’s sullen withdrawal, Nat’s frantic insistence, and a core of hot anger in his own wife.
Earth could find a cure. It was possible. Then their grandchildren would be normal again, the heirs to a world.
He gave in.
But all the children were the same. In the end, Nat alone had not given up. She had borne five children, and was carrying her sixth.
The message of failure was halfway to Earth, but any reply was still nineteen years away. Doc had adopted the habit of talking things over with Jase, hoping that he would catch some glimpse of a solution.
“I still think it’s a disease,” he told Jase, who had heard that before, but didn’t mention it. The bay was quiet and their lines were still. They talked only during fishing trips. They didn’t want the rest of the colony brooding any more than they already were. “A mutant virus. But I’ve been wondering, could the changes have screwed us up? A shorter day, a longer year, a little heavier gravity. Different air mixture. No common cold, no mosquito bites; even that could be the key.”
On a night like this, in air this clear, you could even see starglades casting streaks across the water. A fish jumped far across the bay, and phosphorescence lit that patch of water for a moment. The Orion vehicle, mace-shaped, rose out of the west, past the blaze of the Pleiades. Roy would be rendezvousing with it now, preparing for tomorrow’s Year Day celebration.
Jase seemed to need these trips even more than Doc. After the murders the life seemed to have gone out of him, only flashes of his personality coming through at tranquil times like these. He asked, “Are you going to have Jill breed mosquitoes?”
“…Yes.”
“I think you’re reaching. Weren’t you looking at the genes in the cytoplasm?”
“Yeah. Elise’s idea, and it was a good one. I’d forgotten there were genes outside the cell nucleus. They control the big things, you know: not the shape of your fingers, but how many you get, and where. But they’re hard to find, Jase. And maybe we found some differences between our genes and the children’s, but even the computer doesn’t know what the difference means.”
“Mosquitoes.” Jase shook his head. “We know there’s a fish down that way. Shall we go after him?”
“We’ve got enough. Have to be home by morning. Year Day.”
“What exactly are we celebrating this time?”
“Hell, you’re the mayor. You think of something.” Doc sulked, watching the water ripple around his float. “Jase, we can’t give up—”
Jase’s face was slack with horror, eyes cast up to the sky. Doc followed his gaze, to where a flaring light blossomed behind the Orion spacecraft.
“Oh my God,” Jase rasped, “Roy’s up there.”
Throwing his bamboo pole in the water, Jase started the engine and raced for shore.
Doc studied the readouts carefully. “Mother of God,” he whispered. “How many engines did he fire?”
“Six.” Jill’s eyes were glued to the screen, her voice flat. “If he was aboard, he…well, there isn’t much chance he survived the acceleration. Most of the equipment up there must be junk now.”
“But what if he did survive? Is there a chance?”
“I don’t know. Roy was getting set to beam the messages down, but said that he had an alarm to handle first. He went away for a while, and…” she seemed to search for words. She whispered, “Boom.”
“If he was outside the ship, in one of the little rocket sleds, he could get to the shuttle vehicle.”
Jase walked heavily into the lab.
“What about Cynnie? What did she say?” Doc asked quickly.
Jase’s face was blank of emotion. “She talked to him before the…accident.”
“And?”
“It’s all she would say. I’m afraid she took it pretty bad. This was sort of the final straw.” His eyes were hollow as he reminisced. “She was always a brave kid, you know? Anything I could do, she’d be right behind me, measuring up to big brother. There’s just a limit, that’s all. There’s just a limit.”
Doc’s voice was firm, only a slight edge of unease breaking through his control. “I think we had better face it. Roy is dead. The Orion’s ruined, and the shuttle-craft is gone anyway.”
“He could be alive…” Jill ventured.
Doc tried to take the sting out of his voice, and was not entirely successful. “Where? On the ship, crushed to a paste? Not on the shuttle. It’s tumbling further from the Orion every second. There’s no one on it. In one of
