Spartan Planet - A. Bertram Chandler [53]
Then Heraklion cried out. Under his hands the wheel had moved, was moving of its own accord. The enormously thick door was opening. The Doctor grabbed his companions, pulled them through the slowly widening gap, pushed them clear of the narrow entrance as a deadly hail of bullets splattered around it. Then he turned on the colleague who had, at last, admitted them. "Shut it! At once!" And, as the man obeyed, he demanded coldly. "You were a long time opening up. Why?"
"We had to be sure that it was you. We couldn't get the closed-circuit TV working."
"Even on this primitive planet," commented Peggy Lazenby, "one can find oneself at the mercy of a single fuse."
The little crowd of refugees, with their nervous chatter, seemed out of place in these surroundings. There was an air of mystery—of holy mystery, even—that could not be dispelled by the intrusion. Tier upon tier towered the vats, empty now, but spotlessly clean and gleaming. Mile after convoluted mile ran the piping—glittering glass, glowing plastic, bright-shining metal. Bank upon bank stood the pumps, silent now, but ready, in perfect order, awaiting the touch of a switch to carry out their functions as mechanical hearts and lungs and excretory organs.
"There's no place like womb," remarked Margaret Lazenby.
"What was that, Peggy?
"Never mind. You're too young to understand." Then, crisply official, "Doctor Heraklion, what now?"
"I . . . I don't know, Doctor Lazenby."
"You're in charge. Or are you?"
"I . . . I suppose that I am. I'm the senior doctor present."
"And Brasidus is the senior Security officer present, and I'm the senior Interstellar Federation's Survey Service officer present. And what about you, Terry? Are you the senior anything?"
"I don't know. But the other girls usually do what I tell them to."
"So we're getting some place. But where? Where? That's the sixty-four-dollar question." She took two nervous strides forward, two nervous strides back. "I suppose that this glorified incubator is on the phone, Doctor Heraklion?"
"It is, Doctor Lazenby. Unluckily the main switchboard for the crèche is just off the vestibule."
"A pity. I was thinking that you might get through to the military. Or even to the palace itself."
"We tried that as soon as we were warned that the mob was heading our way. But we got no satisfaction. In fact, we gained the impression that the top military brass was having its own troubles."
"They could be, at that," contributed Brasidus. "That sergeant who was leading the rioters, the one with the pistol—it was Diomedes."
"What!"
Heraklion was incredulous. Margaret Lazenby was not. She said, "It makes sense, of a kind. This wouldn't be the first time that an ambitious, comparatively junior officer has organized a coup. And I think I know what makes him tick—or made him tick. There was the lust for power, of course. But, with it, there was a very deep and very real patriotism. I'm a woman, and I had to talk to him officially. I could tell, each time, how much he hated me and feared me. No, not personally, but as a member of the opposite sex.
"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