The Rival Rigelians

“There’s another element,” Plekhanov muttered. He tossed his straight drink back, stiff wristed. “The more the natives progress, the more nearly they will equal our abilities. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to our overall plans. As it is now, their abilities taper off at sixty and they reach senility at seventy or eighty. I think until the end we should keep it this way.”

“A cold blooded view,” Kennedy said. “If we extend their life expectancy, their best men would live to be of additional use to planet development.”

“But they would not have our dreams,” Plekhanov rumbled. “Such men might try to subvert us, and, just possibly, might succeed.”

“I think Leonid is right,” Mayer admitted with reluctance.

It was obvious that the discussion was going to continue for at least a time. Barry Watson got Natalie Wieliczka’s eye and made a motion toward the ship’s library with his head. She looked about the others, then nodded very slightly. Barry drifted, unnoticed, from the lounge and waited for her behind some of the tape racks. She wasn’t long in coming.

He put his hands on her shoulders. “It’s been a long time, Polack,” he told her softly. “Ten years.”

Natalie looked up into his face. “Yes.”

He let his arms go down and around her. “I’ve come up here, oh a dozen times on research. Thought maybe I’d run into you.”

“I’ve spent quite a bit of time here in the library,” she said lowly. “We just didn’t coincide.”

He kissed her. For a moment, a briefest of moments, her lips were tense. Then they relaxed.

She said, “Oh, Barry. So long a time. So long.”

He held her away from him for a moment and looked into her face. “You haven’t changed your mind?”

She shook her head, mute.

He said, “Like you say, ten years is forever. You sure you haven’t found yourself a…a Genoese, to…to pass the hours?”

She shook her head.

There was a teasing element in his voice now. “Or Jerry Kennedy, or Mike Dean, one of our own group?”

She shook her head still once again and took a deep breath. “No. Nobody, Barry.”

He kissed her and let his right hand drift lower down her back. He pressed her closer. She stiffened slightly but didn’t resist.

Barry Watson looked at her questioningly. “You’re tired, Natalie.”

She gave a little snort of deprecation. “Isn’t Isobel Sanchez? What does an M.D. do when she is the sole competent doctor on a whole planet? One doctor, one billion patients.”

He laughed lowly. “What do you do? I have a sneaking suspicion not exactly what Isobel has come up with.”

She said, “Why, I’ve established three medical universities, one on each continent. I’m trying to teach teachers. I get one going and move on to the third. Then back to the first.” She paused and took a deep breath as though in frustration.

“And?”

“And by the time I’ve made the complete circuit, they’ve got back to powdering frogs for medicine, murmuring incantations and spells, and bleeding their patients. I have to start all over.” She shook her head. “Perhaps I’m using the wrong method. I wish Isobel Sanchez had come up. I’d like to confer with her. What is she doing? What can you do when you are one and you have a billion patients?”

He grinned at her. “You can let nine hundred million, nine hundred thousand of them go to pot and work on what’s left.”

She frowned at him.

He said, a shade of impatience at the trend of talk in his voice, “Isobel isn’t bothering with anybody except our Tulans. She’s had them build a swanky hospital. She’s training a handful of them, or, rather, letting them train themselves.” He chuckled sourly. “She has a knack for picking the best looking physical specimens to become her male nurses cum interns. Old Leonid must be blind. At any rate, she’s introduced antibiotics and so forth. Actually, her glamour boys learn fast. She’s letting them get into the Pedagogue’s tapes as fast as they can assimilate them.”

Natalie said thoughtfully, “I’ve got to get more basic medical books into print.”

He kissed her again. “Zen take this fling, Polack. Let those cloddies in the lounge talk shop. How about us?”

“How do you mean, Barry?”

“Just that. It’s been ten years, Polack. Are we going to let it be another ten?”

She frowned at him, lacking understanding. “But you’re on Texcoco and I’m on Genoa, Barry. What can we do?”

He was impatient. “Look, let’s not be a couple of flats. You have access to your team’s space lighter, I have access to ours. Fine. Let’s make a date. I’ll tell old Plekhanov I’ve got to check up on the differences between the Theban and Macedonian phalanxes, and why it was the Romans were able to take the Macedonians a couple of hundred years after Alexander. Meanwhile, you can tell Amschel that there’s a new epidemic or something, and you have to come up here for a few day’s study.”

“A few days?”

“Sure. We’ll have a real party. There’s still lots of Earth-side liquor on board and…”

She was shaking her head, hard. “No. Oh, no, Barry. That’s not what we want!”