Survivor by Laurence M. Janifer

Author:Laurence M. Janifer [Janifer, Laurence M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1977-08-07T23:00:00+00:00

XIV

Item: the Leones weren’t there any more.

A few smart boys and girls had come up with a home-made bomb. The Leone house was now a medium-sized hole in the ground.

“A few smart boys and girls”—the few who happened to get to work on it. When a telepathic network gets an idea, all of it gets the same idea. Those few just happened to be close enough to the supplies needed, so they were the ones who put the bomb together and erased the house and occupants.

Could have been anybody—anybody who’d been taken over.

And it could have been a lot more houses—except that it took time to make bombs; and except that there were comparatively few families like the Leones. Not . one of them had been taken over.

That was true for very, very few families of any size.

Two- and three-person families, sure. They might go all one way, or all the other. But a first-generation colony tends to large families. When I thought about it,

I realized that the group I’d collected was odd in more ways than one: of us all, only Jimmy had family ties on the planet. Raythorne’s husband had died—congestive heart disease—eight years before, and they’d been a sterile couple. Liz was single, and likely to stay that way; a good many men admire competence who wouldn’t have the sense, if that’s what it is, to marry it. Tom’s wife had died in one of those stupid accidents you hear about barely six months after they’d settled, a first baby on the way—somehow managed to switch on the ground-effects car by remote while she was in the garage. That look on Tom’s face had been there before; but before there’d been nobody to hate.

And me, I’m single. Always have been. Always likely to be.

Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. What I do know is that it makes a very sour joke out of that line on the application form.

A man without a family—a man without children—is the only man who is certain not to survive, in one very important sense. (And if I had children, I’d have a family. State-board upbringings don’t seem too helpful, if you judge by results. The survival mechanism for any given adult is that adult; the survival mechanism for any given child is a family.)

Maybe some day I would find me a gal—somebody like Liz, say—and settle down. Raise a family. Help my genes survive.

Maybe. But I doubted it then and I doubt it now Nobody’s perfect.

Every way but that one, I’m a survivor. And I like to work alone; in fact, the team I’d got together was beginning to get to me. I’d needed every one of them to set up the phone lines; some I was going to need again, and I knew it: maybe all of them. Raythorne’s medical experience, Harry’s electronics and molar-mechanics gifts, Tom and Jimmy for speed and strength (if Jimmy were going to be okay, and ready to move around, any time soon!), and Liz for plain sanity.

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