Spartan Planet

by A Bertram Chandler

  "There are some men—and he was one of them—to whom a world like yours would be the ultimate paradise. Men Only. There are some men to whom the stratified social system of yours—cribbed, with improvements, from the real Spartans—would seem the only possible way of running a planet.

  "But . . .

  "But, Doctor Heraklion, there are other men, such as you, who would find the monosexual, homosexual setup rather unsatisfying. And you, my good Doctor, were in a position to do something about it."

  Heraklion smiled faintly. "It's been going on for a very long time, Doctor Lazenby. It all started long before I was born."

  "All right. The doctors were able to do something about it. I still don't know how this birth machine of yours works, but I can guess. I suppose that all approved Spartans make contributions of sperm cells."

  "That is so."

  "And the most important contribution—correct me if I am wrong—will be the annual shipments made by the aptly named Latterhaven Venus and Latterhaven Hera. Venus and Hera were Greek goddesses, by the way, Brasidus. Women—like me, and like Terry and the other playmates. How did the ships get their names, Heraklion?"

  "We have always suspected the Latterhaveneers of a warped sense of humor."

  "I wonder what the mob is doing?" asked somebody anxiously.

  "We're safe enough here," said, Heraklion curtly.

  Are we? thought Brasidus, suddenly apprehensive. Are we? It seemed to him that the floor under his bare soles had become uncomfortably warm. He shifted his stance. Yes, the floor was heating up. He looked down, saw a crack in the polished surface. Surely it had not been there before. And, if it had been, there had not been a thin wisp of smoke trickling from it.

  He was about to tell Heraklion when a device on Peggy Lazenby's wrist—it looked like a watch but obviously was not—buzzed sharply. She raised her forearm to her face. "Doctor Lazenby here."

  "Captain here. What the hell are you doing? Where are you?"

  "Quite safe, John. I'm holed up in the crèche, in the birth-machine room."

  "The crèche is an inferno. Admiral Ajax requested my aid to evacuate the children and to restore order in the city. We're on the way now."

  The floor tilted, slightly but sharply. One of the vats shattered loudly and the piping dependent from it swung, clattering and tinkling, against the vessels in the tier below, breaking them. The smell of smoke was suddenly very strong.

  "Is there only one way out of this place?" demanded Peggy sharply.

  "No. There's a hatch in the roof. Through the records room." Heraklion told her.

  "Then that's the way that we have to go to escape from this alleged H-bombproof shelter of yours." Into her wrist transceiver she said, "You'll have to pick us off the roof, John. And while you're about it, you can send a squad of Marines down to save the firm's books. No, I'm not joking."

  Luckily the hatch was clear, and luckily the ladder was readily available. Through the little room they passed—the women, the surviving nurses and doctors, then, last of all, Heraklion, Peggy and Brasidus. Brasidus had almost to pull her away from the shelves of microfilmed records, and from the glass case in which was displayed the big, flat book on the cover of which, in tarnished gold, were the words, Log of Interstellar Colonization Ship DORIC. First Captain Deems Harris.

  They were on the roof then—the tilting, shuddering roof, swept by scorching eddies and black, billowing smoke. The night sky above them was alive with the noise of engines, and from below sounded, ever louder and more frightening, the roar of the fire. Cautiously Heraklion made his way down the listing surface to the low parapet. Brasidus followed him. The two men cautiously peered over, flinching back when a sudden gust of flame seared their faces, crisping their hair and eyebrows.

  Grimes had sent down a landing party. Disciplined, uniformed men and women were handling chemical fire extinguishers, others, in a chain, were passing the children out of the blazing building. And still others had set up weapons to protect the rescuers; the rattle of heavy automatic fire was loud and insistent above the other noises.

  Peggy Lazenby had joined the two men. "Intervention," she murmured. "Armed intervention. Poor John. He'll be in the soup over this. But what else could he do? He couldn't let those babies burn to death . . ."

  "As we shall do," stated Heraklion grimly, "unless your captain does something about it, and fast." As he spoke the roof tilted another few degrees.

  But the peculiar, irregular throbbing of the inertial drive was louder now, was deafening. Directly overhead, the glare of the fire reflected from the burnished metal of her hull, Seeker dropped through the vortex of smoke and sparks. Lower she sagged, and lower, until men and women cried out in fear and ran in panic to escape from the inexorably descending pads of her vaned landing gear. Lower she sagged, and lower—and from her open main airlock the boarding ramp was suddenly extruded, the lower end of it scant millimeters only from the heaving, cracking surface of the roof. Even Brasidus knew that he was privileged to watch an exhibition of superb spacemanship.

  Down the extended ramp ran six men. Peggy Lazenby met them, cried, "This way!" and led them to the still open hatchway. And a vastly amplified voice was booming from the ship, "Board at once, please! Board at once!"

  Heraklion hustled his people into some sort of order, got them onto the gangway, the women first. He stayed with Brasidus, making sure that the evacuation proceeded in an orderly manner. Still the two men waited, although the loudspeaker was blaring, "Get a move on, there! Get a move on!"

  At last the six men and Peggy Lazenby were emerging from the hatch, she last of all. They were heavily burdened, all of them, and she, clasping it to her as tenderly as she had clasped the rescued child, carried the antique log book. "What are you waiting here for?" she demanded of Heraklion.

  He said, "We have no spaceships, but we have read books. We know of the traditions. This crèche is my ship, and I shall be the last to leave."

  "Have it your own way," she told him.

  She and Brasidus went up the ramp after the six marines. Heraklion followed them. Just as he reached the airlock, a geyser of flame erupted from the open hatch and the once flat surface of the roof cracked and billowed and, as Seeker hastily lifted, collapsed.

  "That was my ship," whispered the Doctor.

  "You can build another," Peggy told him.

  "No," he said. "No. No longer do we have any excuse not to revert to the old ways."

  "And your old ways," she said, "are not the old ways of Diomedes and his party. That is why he hated and feared you. But can you do it?"

  "With your help," he said.

  "That," she said, "is a matter for the politicians back home. But let's get out of this damned airlock and into the ship, before we fall out. It's a long way down."

  Brasidus, looking at the burning building far below, shuddered and drew back hastily. It was, as she had said, a long way down.

  Chapter 24

  THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES was over, the Night of the Long Knives and the four action packed days and nights that had followed it. The power had fallen into the streets, and Admiral Ajax, warned by his own intelligence service of the scheduled assassinations of himself and his senior captains, had swooped down from the sky to pick it up. The birth machine was destroyed, the caste system had crumbled, and only the patrolling airships of the Navy kept Sparta safe from the jealous attentions of the other city-states. Cresphontes—a mere figurehead—skulked in his palace, dared make no public appearances.

  Grimes and his Seeker had played little active part in quelling the disturbances, but always the spaceship had been there, hanging ominously in the clouds, always her pinnaces had darted from one trouble spot to another, her Marines acting as ambulance men and firemen—but ambulance men and firemen backed by threatening weaponry to ensure that they carried out their tasks unmolested.

  Brasidus had rejoined his own police unit, and, to his surprise, had found that greater and greater power and responsi
bilities were being thrust upon him. But it made sense. He knew the spacemen, had worked with them—and it was obvious to all that, in the final analysis, they and the great Federation that they represented were the most effective striking force on the planet. They did not strike, they were careful not to fire a single gun or loose a single missile, but they were there, and where they had come from there were more and bigger ships with even heavier armaments.

  The universe had come to Sparta, and the Spartans, in spite of centuries of isolationist indoctrination, had accepted the fact. Racial memory, Margaret Lazenby had said, long and deep-buried recollections of the home world, of the planet where men and women lived and worked together in amity, where the womb was part of the living female body and not a complex, inorganic machine.

  And then there was the last conference in John Grimes' day cabin aboard Seeker. The Lieutenant Commander sat behind his paper-littered desk, making a major production of filling and lighting his pipe. Beside him was Margaret Lazenby, trim and severe in uniform. In chairs facing the desk were the rotund little Admiral Ajax, the tall, saturnine Heraklion, and Brasidus. A stewardess brought coffee, and the four men and the woman sipped it appreciatively.

  Then Grimes said, "I've received my orders, Admiral. Somewhat garbled, as messages by psionic radio too often are, but definite enough. I have to hand over to the civil authorities and then get the hell out." He smiled bleakly. "I've done enough damage already. I fear that I shall have to do plenty of explaining to my lords Commissioners."

  "No, Commander." Heraklion's voice was firm, definite. "You did not do the damage. The situation, thanks to Diomedes, was already highly explosive. You were only the . . . the . . ."

  "The detonator," supplied Ajax.

  "Just how explosive was it?" inquired Grimes. "I'd like to know. After all, I shall have a report to make." He switched on a small recorder that stood among the litter on his desk.

  "Very explosive. Some of us at the crèche had decided to make women, not only for ourselves but for every man on Sparta. We had decided to revert to the old ways. Diomedes knew of this. I still think that he was actuated by patriotism—a perverted patriotism, but patriotism nonetheless."

  Peggy Lazenby laughed scornfully. "Fine words, Doctor. But what about that female baby who was exposed, the one that Brasidus and I rescued?"

  "Yes, the Exposure. That was a custom that we intended to stamp out. But the unfortunate child, as well as being female, was mentally subnormal. She'd have been better off dead."

  "So you say. But you forget that the planets of the Federation have made great strides in medical science during the centuries that you have been stagnating."

  "Enough, Peggy. Enough," said Grimes tiredly. He put his pipe into a dirty ashtray, began to sort his papers. "As I told you, my orders are to hand over to the civil authorities. Who are they? The King? The Council?" The Spartans smiled scornfully. "All right. I suppose that you gentlemen will have to do. You, Doctor Heraklion, and you, Admiral Ajax, and you—just what rank do you hold these days? I've rather lost track, Brasidus. But before I hand over, I want to be sure that the Admiral and friend Brasidus know what it's all about. Heraklion knows, of course, but even the most honest of us is liable to bend the facts.

  "This ship, as you know, is a unit of the fleet of the Federation's Survey Service. As such she carries, on microfilm, a most comprehensive library. One large section of it is devoted to colonizing ships that are missing. We're still stumbling upon what are called the Lost Colonies, and it's helpful if we have more than a vague idea as to their origin. This Sparta of yours is, of course, a Lost Colony. We've been able to piece together your history both from our own reference library and from the records salvaged from the crèche.

  "So far, the history of colonization comes under three headings, the First Expansion, the Second Expansion and the Third Expansion. The First Expansion was initiated before there was a practicable FTL—faster than light—drive. The Second Expansion was carried out by vessels fitted with the rather unreliable Ehrenhaft Drive, the so-called gaussjammers. The Third Expansion made use of timejammers, ships with the almost foolproof Mannschenn Drive.

  "The vessels of the First Expansion, the deep-freeze ships, went a long way in a long time, a very long time. They carried at least three full crews—captains, watch-keeping officers, maintenance engineers and the like. The colonists, men and women, were in stasis, just refrigerated cargo, in effect. The crews spent their off-duty months in stasis. But there was, of course, always one full crew on duty.

  "As a result of some incredible stupidity on somebody's part, the crews of many of the early ships were all male. In the later ones, of course, the balance of the sexes was maintained. Doric—the ship from which this Lost Colony was founded—had an all male crew, under First Captain—he was the senior of the four masters—Deems Harris. This same Captain Harris was, probably, a misogynist, a woman hater, when the voyage started. If he were not, what happened probably turned him into one.

  "Third Captain Flynn seems to have exercised little control over his officers—or, perhaps, he was the ringleader. Be that as it may, Flynn decided, or was persuaded, to alleviate the monotony of his tour of duty by reviving a dozen of the more attractive colonist girls. It seems to have been quite a party while it lasted—so much so that normal ship's routine went by the board, vitally important navigational instruments, such as the Very Long Range Radar, were untended, ignored. The odds against encountering a meteoric swarm in deep space are astronomical—but Doric encountered one. Whether or not she would have been able to take avoiding action is doubtful, but with some warning something could have been done to minimize the effects of the inevitable collision. A collision there was—and the sphere in which the female colonists were housed was badly damaged, so badly damaged that there were no survivors. I should have explained before that these deep-freeze ships didn't look anything like a vessel such as this one; they consisted of globes held together by light girders. They were assembled in orbit and were never intended to make a landing on any planetary surface.

  "Anyhow, Captain Flynn aroused Captain Harris and the other masters and their officers after the damage had been done. Captain Harris, understandably, took a somewhat dim view of his junior and formed the opinion that if Flynn had not awakened those women the collision would not have occurred. Oddly enough, as his private journal indicates, he blamed the unfortunate wenches even more than he blamed Flynn. He despised Flynn for his weakness and irresponsibility—but those poor girls he hated. They were thrown into some sort of improvised brig.

  "Meanwhile, Doric was far from spaceworthy. Apart from the slow leakage of precious atmosphere, much of her machinery was out of kilter, the automated 'farm,' upon which the crew depended for their food and their atmospheric regeneration, especially. Although the world that you know as Sparta was not the ship's original objective—oddly enough, long-range instrumental surveys had missed it—Doric's quite excellent equipment picked it up, made it plain to Captain Harris that he could reach it before air and food and water ran out. So, putting all hands save himself and one officer back into stasis, he adjusted his trajectory and ran for this only possible haven.

  "His troubles were far from over. The shuttles—relatively small rocket craft used as ferries between the big ship in orbit and the world below—had all been ruined by that meteoric shower. Nonetheless—it was a remarkable feat of spacemanship—he succeeded in getting that unhandy, unspaceworthy and unairworthy near wreck down through the atmosphere to a relatively soft landing.

  "At first glance, the survivors were not too badly off. The planet was habitable. The fertilized ova of various animals—sheep, pigs, cattle, dogs and cats, even—had all been destroyed by the crash landing, but the local fauna was quite edible. And the ship had carried a large stock of seed grain.

  There was a decided imbalance of the sexes—the only women were Captain Flynn's hapless ones, and there were all of five thousand men—but even that would right its
elf in time. The ship—as did all ships of that era—carried equipment that was the prototype of your birth machine, and there were supplies of deep-frozen sperm and ova sufficient to populate a dozen worlds.

  "But . . .

  "Twelve women, and five thousand and forty-eight men.

  "Rank, said Captain Flynn and some of the other officers, should have its privileges. It most certainly should not, said the colonists—among them, of course, the twelve men whose wives the women had been.

  "There was trouble, starting off with a few isolated murders, culminating in a full-scale revolt against the officers and those loyal to them. Somehow the twelve girls were . . . eliminated. Deems Harris doesn't say as much in his journal, but I gained the impression that he was behind it.

  "Now, this Deems Harris. It is hard for us in this day and age of quick passages to get inside the skins, the minds of those old-time space captains. Probably none of them was quite sane. Most of them were omnivorous, indiscriminating readers, although some of them specialized. This Deems Harris seems to have done so. In history. By this time, with his colony off to a disastrous beginning, he seems to have hankered after some sort of culture in which women played a very small part—or no part at all. One such culture was that of Sparta, one of the ancient Greek city-states back on Earth. Greek women were little more than childbearing, housekeeping machines—and the Spartan women suffered the lowest status of them all. Sparta was the state that specialized in all the so-called manly virtues—and little else. Sparta was the military power. Furthermore, the original Spartans were a wandering tribe called Dorians. Dorians—Doric—See the tie-up? And their first King was Aristodemus. Aristodemus—Deems Harris.