The Martian Way and Other Stories

Sucker Bait Chapter Seventeen

Mark Annuncio sat on his bunk, hands clasped about his knee, chin sunken and touching his chest. He was dry-eyed now, but his voice was heady with frustration.
"They're not taking me," he said. "They won't let me go with them."
Sheffield was in the chair opposite the boy, bathed in an agony of perplexity. He said, "They may take you later on."
"No," said Mark fiercely, "they won't. They hate me. Besides, I want to go now. I've never been on another planet before. There's so much to see and find out. They've got no right to hold me back if I want to go."
Sheffield shook his head. Mnemonics were so firmly trained into this belief that they must collect facts and that no one or nothing could or ought to stop them. Perhaps when they returned, he might recommend a certain degree of counterindoctrination. After all, Mnemonics had to live in the real world occasionally. More and more with each generation, perhaps, as they grew to play an increasing role in the Galaxy.
He tried an experiment. He said, "It may be dangerous, you know."
"I don't care. I've got to know. I've got to find out about this planet. Dr. Sheffield, you go to Dr. Cimon and tell him I'm going along."
"Now, Mark."
"If you don't, I will." He raised his small body from the bed in earnest of leaving that moment.
"Look, you're excited."
Mark's fists clenched. "It's not fair, Dr. Sheffield. I found this planet. It's my planet."
Sheffield's conscience hit him badly. What Mark said was true in a way. No one, except Mark, knew that better than Sheffield. And no one, again except Mark, knew the history of Junior better than Sheffield.
It was only in the last twenty years that, faced with the rising tide of population pressure in the older planets and the recession of the Galactic frontier from those same older planets, the Confederation of Worlds began exploring the Galaxy systematically. Before that, human expansion went on hit or miss. Men and women in search of new land and a better life followed rumor as to the existence of habitable planets or sent out amateur groups to find something promising.
A hundred ten years before, one such group found Junior. They didn't report their find officially because they didn't want a crowd of land speculators, promotion men, exploiters and general riffraff following. In the next months, some of the unattached men arranged to have women brought in, so the settlement must have flourished for a while.
It was a year later, when some had died and most or all the rest were sick and dying, that they beamed a cry of help to Pretoria, the nearest inhabited planet. The Pretorian government was in some sort of crisis at the time and relayed the message to the Sector government at Altmark. Pretoria then felt justified in forgetting the matter.
The Altmark government, acting in reflex fashion, sent out a medical ship to Junior. It dropped anti-sera and various other supplies. The ship did not land because the medical officer diagnosed the matter from a distance as influenza and minimized the danger. The medical supplies, his report said, would handle the matter perfectly. It was quite possible that the crew of the ship, fearing contagion, had prevented a landing, but nothing in the official report indicated that.
There was a final report from Junior three months later to the effect that only ten people were left alive and that they were dying. They begged for help. This report was forwarded to Earth itself along with the previous medical report. The Central government, however, was a maze in which reports regularly were forgotten unless someone had sufficient personal interest, and influence, to keep them alive. No one had much interest in a far-off, unknown planet with ten dying men and women on it.
Filed and forgotten-and for a century, no human foot was felt on Junior.
Then, with the new furor over Galactic exploration, hundreds of ships began darting through the empty vastness, probing here and there. Reports trickled in, then flooded in. Some came from Hidosheki Mikoyama, who passed through the Hercules cluster twice (dying in a crash landing the second time, with his tight and despairing voice coming over the subether in a final message: "Surface coming up fast now; ship walls frictioning into red he-" and no more.)
Last year the accumulation of reports, grown past any reasonable human handling, was fed into the overworked Washington computer on a priority so high that there was only a five-month wait. The operators checked out the data for planetary habitability and lo, Abou ben Junior led all the rest.
Sheffield remembered the wild hoorah over it. The stellar system was enthusiastically proclaimed to the Galaxy and the name Junior was thought up by a bright young man in the Bureau of Outer Provinces who felt the need for personal friendliness between man and world. Junior's virtues were magnified. Its fertility, its climate ("a New England perpetual spring"), and most of all, its vast future, were put across without any feeling of need for discretion. "For the next million years," propagandists declared, "Junior will grow richer. While other planets age, Junior will grow younger as the ice recedes and fresh soil is exposed. Always a new frontier; always untapped resources."
For a million years!
It was the Bureau's masterpiece. It was to be the tremendously successful start of a program of government-sponsored colonization. It was to be the beginning, at long last, of the scientific exploitation of the Galaxy for the good of humanity.
And then came Mark Annuncio, who heard much of all this and was as thrilled at the prospect as any Joe Earthman, but who one day thought of something he had seen while sniffing idly through the "dead matter" files of the Bureau of Outer Provinces. He had seen a medical report about a colony on a planet of a system whose description and position in space tallied with that of the Lagrange group.
Sheffield remembered the day Mark came to him with that news.
He also remembered the face of the Secretary for the Outer Provinces when the news was passed on to him. He saw the Secretary's square jaw slowly go slack and a look of infinite trouble come into his eyes.
The government was committed! It was going to ship millions of people to Junior. It was going to grant farmland and subsidize the first seed supplies, farm machinery, factories. Junior was going to be a paradise for numerous voters and a promise of more paradise for a myriad others.
If Junior turned out to be a killer planet for some reason or other, it would mean political suicide for all government figures concerned in the project. That meant some pretty big men, not least the Secretary for the Outer Provinces.
After days of checking and indecision, the Secretary had said to Sheffield, "It looks as though we've got to find out what happened and weave it into the propaganda somehow. Don't you think we could neutralize it that way?"
"If what happened isn't too horrible to neutralize."
"But it can't be, can it? I mean what can it be?" The man was miserably unhappy.
Sheffield shrugged.
The Secretary said, "See here. We can send a ship of specialists to the planet. Volunteers only and good reliable men, of course. We can give it the highest priority rating we can move, and Project Junior carries considerable weight, you know. We'll slow things up here, and hold on till they get back. That might work, don't you think?"
Sheffield wasn't sure, but he got the sudden dream of going on that expedition, of taking Mark with him. He could study a Mnemonic in an off-trail environment, and if Mark should be the means of working out the mystery-
From the beginning, a mystery was assumed. After all, people don't die of influenza. And the medical ship hadn't landed; they hadn't really observed what was going on. It was fortunate, indeed, that that medical man was now dead thirty-seven years, or he would be slated for court-martial now.
If Mark should help solve the matter, the Mnemonic Service would be enormously strengthened. The government had to be grateful.
But now-
Sheffield wondered if Cimon knew the story of how the matter of the first settlement had been brought to light. He was fairly certain that the rest of the crew did not. It was not something the Bureau would willingly speak about.
Nor would it be politic to use the story as a lever to pry concessions out of Cimon. If Mark's correction of Bureau "stupidity" (that would undoubtedly be the opposition's phrasing) were overpublicized, the Bureau would look bad. If they could be grateful, they could be vengeful, too. Retaliation against the Mnemonic Service would not be too pretty a thing to expect.
Still-
Sheffield stood up with quick decision. "All right, Mark. I'll get you out to the settlement site. I"ll get us both out there. Now you sit down and wait for me. Promise you'll try nothing on your own."
"All right," said Mark. He sat down on his bunk again.