PARIAH PLANET
By MURRAY LEINSTER
CHAPTER I
The little Med Ship came out of overdrive
and the stars were strange and
the Milky Way seemed unfamiliar.
Which, of course, was because the Milky
Way and the local Cepheid marker-stars were
seen from an unaccustomed
angle and a not-yet-commonplace pattern of
varying magnitudes.
But
Calhoun grunted in satisfaction.
There was a banded sun off to port,
which was good.
A breakout at no more than sixty light-hours
from
one's destination wasn't bad, in a strange
sector of the Galaxy and
after three light-years of journeying blind.
[Illustration]
"Arise and shine, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun.
"Comb your whiskers.
Get
set to astonish the natives!"
A sleepy, small, shrill voice said;
"_Chee!_"
Murgatroyd the _tormal_ came crawling out
of his small cubbyhole.
He
blinked at Calhoun.
"We're due to land shortly," Calhoun observed.
"You'll impress the local
inhabitants.
I'll be unpopular.
According to the records, there's been
no Med Ship inspection here for twelve standard
years.
And that was
practically no inspection, to judge by the
report."
Murgatroyd said;
"_Chee-chee!_"
He began to make his toilet, first licking
his right-hand whiskers and
then his left.
Then he stood up and shook himself and looked
interestedly at Calhoun.
_Tormals_ are companionable small animals.
They
are charmed when somebody speaks to them.
They find great, deep
satisfaction in imitating the actions of humans,
as parrots and mynahs
and parrokets imitate human speech.
But _tormals_ have certain useful,
genetically transmitted talents which make
them much more valuable than
mere companions or pets.
Calhoun got a light-reading for the banded
sun.
It could hardly be an
accurate measure of distance, but it was a
guide.
He said;
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd!"
Calhoun threw the overdrive switch and the
Med Ship flicked back into
that questionable state of being in which
velocities of some hundreds of
times that of light are possible.
The sensation of going into overdrive
was unpleasant.
A moment later, the sensation of coming out
was no less
so.
Calhoun had experienced it often enough, and
still didn't like it.
The sun Weald burned huge and terrible in
space.
It was close, now.
Its
disk covered half a degree of arc.
"Very neat," observed Calhoun.
"Weald Three is our port, Murgatroyd.
The
plane of the ecliptic would be--Hm...."
He swung the outside electron telescope, picked
up a nearby bright
object, enlarged its image to show details,
and checked it against the
local star-pilot.
He calculated a moment.
The distance was too short for
even the briefest of overdrive hops, but it
would take time to get there
on solar-system drive.
He thumbed down the communicator-button and
spoke into a microphone.
"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty reporting arrival
and asking coördinates for
landing.
Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection.
Our mass is
fifty tons standard.
We should arrive at a landing position in
something
under four hours.
Repeat.
Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty ..."
He finished the regular second transmission
and made coffee for himself
while he waited for an answer.
Murgatroyd wanted a cup of coffee too.
Murgatroyd adored coffee.
He held a tiny cup in a furry small paw and
sipped gingerly at the hot liquid.
* * * * *
A voice came out of the communicator;
"_Aesclipus Twenty, repeat your identification!_"
Calhoun went to the control-board.
"Aesclipus Twenty," he said patiently, "is
a Med Ship, sent by the
Interstellar Medical Service to make a planetary
health inspection on
Weald.
Check with your public health authorities.
This is the first Med
Ship visit in twelve standard years, I believe,
which is inexcusable.
But your health authorities will know all
about it.
Check with them."
The voice said truculently;
"_What was your last port?_"
Calhoun named it.
This was not his home sector, but Sector Twelve
had
gotten into a very bad situation.
Some of its planets had gone unvisited
for as long as twenty years, and twelve between
inspections was almost
common-place.
Other sectors had been called on to help it
catch up.
Calhoun was one of the loaned Med Ship men,
and because of the emergency
he'd been given a list of half a dozen planets
to be inspected one after
another, instead of reporting back to sector
headquarters after each
visit.
He'd had minor troubles before with landing-grid
operators in
Sector Twelve.
So he was very patient.
He named the planet last inspected, the one
from
which he'd set out for Weald Three.
The voice from the communicator said
sharply;
"_What port before that?_"
Calhoun named the one before the last.
"_Don't drive any closer,_" said the voice
harshly, "_or you'll be
destroyed!_"
Calhoun said coldly;
"Now you listen to me, friend!
I'm from the Interstellar Medical
Service!
You get in touch with planetary health services
immediately!
Remind them of the Interstellar Medical Inspection
Agreement, signed on
Tralee two hundred and forty standard years
ago.
Remind them that if
they do not cooperate in medical inspection
that I can put your planet
under quarantine and your space commerce will
be cut off like that!
No
ship will be cleared for Weald from any other
planet in the galaxy until
there has been a health inspection!
Things have pretty well gone to pot
so far as the Med Service in this sector is
concerned, but we're trying
to straighten it out.
You have twenty minutes to clear this and
then,
I'm coming in.
If I'm not landed, a quarantine goes on!
Tell your health
authorities that!"
Silence.
Calhoun clicked off and poured himself another
cup of coffee.
Murgatroyd held out his cup for a refill.
Calhoun gave it to him.
"I hate to put on an official hat, Murgatroyd,"
he said annoyedly, "but
there are some people who won't have any other
way."
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" and sipped at his
cup.
* * * * *
Calhoun checked the course of the Med Ship.
It bored on through space.
There were tiny noises from the communicator.
There were whisperings and
rustlings and the occasional strange and sometimes
beautiful musical
notes whose origin is yet obscure, but which,
since they are carried by
electromagnetic radiation of wildly varying
wave-lengths, are not likely
to be the fabled music of the spheres.
He waited.
* * * * *
In fifteen minutes a different voice came
from the speaker.
"_Med Ship Aesclipus!
Med Ship Aesclipus!_"
Calhoun answered and the voice said anxiously;
"_'Sorry about the challenge, but we have
the blueskin problem always
with us.
We have to be extremely careful!
Will you come in, please?_"
"I'm on my way," said Calhoun.
"_The planetary health authorities,_" said
the voice, more anxiously
still, "_are very anxious to be coöperative.
We need Med Service help!
We lose a lot of sleep over the blueskins!
Could you tell us the name of
the last Med Ship to land here, and its inspector,
and when that
inspection was made?
We want to look up the record of the event
to be
able to assist you in every possible way._"
"He's lying," Calhoun told Murgatroyd, "but
he's more scared than
hostile."
He picked up the order-folio on Weald Three.
He gave the information
about the last Med Ship visit.
He clicked off.
"What?" he asked, "is a blueskin?"
He'd read the folio on Weald, of course, but
as the ship swam onward
through emptiness he went through it again.
The last medical inspection
had been only perfunctory.
Twelve years earlier--instead of three--a
Med Ship had landed on Weald.
There had been official conferences with
health officials.
There was a report on the birth-rate, the
death-rate,
the anomaly-rate, and a breakdown of all reported
communicable diseases.
But that was all.
There were no special comments and no overall
picture.
Presently Calhoun found the word in a Sector
dictionary, where words of
only local usage were to be found.
"Blueskin; Colloquial term for a person recovered
from a plague which
left large patches of blue pigment irregularly
distributed over the
body.
Especially, inhabitants of Dara.
The condition is said to be
caused by a chronic, non-fatal form of Dara
plague and has been said to
be non-infectious, though this is not certain.
The etiology of Dara
plague has not fully been worked out.
The blueskin condition is
hereditary but not a genetic modification,
as markings appear in
non-Mendellian distributions...."
Calhoun puzzled over it.
Nobody could have read the entire Sector
directory, even with unlimited leisure during
travel between solar
systems.
Calhoun hadn't tried.
But now he went laboriously through
indices and cross-references while the ship
continued travel onward.
He
found no other reference to blueskins.
He looked up Dara.
It was listed
as an inhabited planet, some four hundred
years colonized, with a
landing-grid and at the time the main notice
was written out, a
flourishing interstellar commerce.
But there was a memo, evidently added
to the entry in some change of editions.
"Since plague, special license from Med Service
is required for
landing."
That was all.
Absolutely all.
The communicator said suavely;
"_Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty!
Come in on vision, please!_"
Calhoun went to the control-board and threw
on vision.
"Well, what now?"
he demanded.
His screen lighted.
A bland face looked out at him.
"_We have--ah--verified your statements,_"
said the third voice from
Weald.
"_Just one more item.
Are you alone in your ship?_"
"Of course," said Calhoun, frowning.
"_Quite alone?_" insisted the voice.
"Obviously!" said Calhoun.
"_No other living creature?_" insisted the
voice again.
"Of--Oh!" said Calhoun annoyedly.
He called over his shoulder.
"Murgatroyd!
Come here!"
Murgatroyd hopped to his lap and gazed interestedly
at the screen.
The
bland face changed remarkably.
The voice changed even more.
"_Very good!_" it said.
"_Very, very good!
Blueskins do not have_
tormals! _You are Med Service!
By all means come in.
Your coördinates
will be ..._"
Calhoun wrote them down.
He clicked off the communicator again and
growled to Murgatroyd;
"So I might have been a blueskin, eh?
And you're my passport, because
only Med Ships have members of your tribe
aboard!
What the hell's the
matter, Murgatroyd?
They act like they think somebody's trying
to get
down on their planet with a load of plague-germs!"
He grumbled to himself for minutes.
The life of a Med Ship man is not
exactly a sinecure, at best.
It means long periods in empty space in
overdrive, which is absolute and deadly tedium.
Then two or three days
aground, checking official documents and statistics,
and asking
questions to see how many of the newest medical
techniques have reached
this planet or that, and the supplying of
information about such as have
not arrived.
Then lifting out to space for long periods
of tedium, to
repeat the process somewhere else.
Med Ships carry only one man because
two could not stand the close contact without
quarreling with each
other.
But Med Ships do carry _tormals_, like Murgatroyd,
and a _tormal_
and a man can get along indefinitely, like
a man and a dog.
It is a
highly unequal friendship, but it seems to
be satisfactory to both.
Calhoun was very much annoyed with the way
the Med Service had been
operated in Sector Twelve.
He was one of many men at work to correct
the
results of incompetence in directing Med Service
in the twelfth sector.
But it is always disheartening to have to
labor at making up for
somebody else's blundering, when there is
so much new work that needs to
be done.
The condition shown by the landing-grid suspicions
was a case in point.
Blueskins were people who inherited a splotchy
skin-pigmentation from
other people who'd survived a plague.
Weald plainly maintained a
one-planet quarantine against them.
But a quarantine is normally an
emergency measure.
The Med Service should have taken over, wiped
out the
need for a quarantine, and then lifted it.
It hadn't been done.
Calhoun fumed to himself.
* * * * *
The world of Weald Three grew brighter and
brighter and became a disk.
The disk had ice-caps and a reasonable proportion
of land and water
surface.
The Med Ship decelerated, and voices notified
observation from
the surface, and the little craft came to
a stop some five planetary
diameters out from solidity.
The landing-field force-field locked on to
it, and its descent began.
The business of landing was all very familiar,
from the blue rim which
appeared at the limb of the planet from one
diameter out, to the
singular flowing-apart of the surface features
as the ship sank still
lower.
There was the circular landing-grid, rearing
skyward for nearly a
mile.
It could let down interstellar liners from
emptiness and lift them
out to emptiness again, with great convenience
and economy for everyone.
It landed the Med Ship in its center, and
there were officials to greet
Calhoun, and he knew in advance the routine
part of his visit.
There
would be an interview with the planet's chief
executive, by whatever
title he was called.
There would be a banquet.
Murgatroyd would be
petted by everybody.
There would be painful efforts to impress
Calhoun
with the splendid conduct of public health
matters on Weald.
He would be
told much scandal.
He might find one man, somewhere, who passionately
labored to advance the welfare of his fellow
humans by finding out how
to keep them well, or failing that how to
make them well when they got
sick.
And in two days, or three, Calhoun would be
escorted back to the
landing-grid, and lifted out to space, and
he'd spend long empty days in
overdrive and land somewhere else to do the
whole thing all over again.
It all happened exactly as he expected, with
one exception.
Every human
being he met on Weald wanted to talk about
blueskins.
Blueskins and the
idea of blueskins obsessed everyone.
Calhoun listened without asking
questions until he had the picture of what
blueskins meant to the people
who talked of them.
Then he knew there would be no use asking
questions
at random.
Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin.
Nobody
mentioned a specific event in which a blueskin
had at any named time
taken part.
But everybody was afraid of blueskins.
It was a patterned,
an inculcated, a stage-directed fixed idea.
And it found expression in
shocked references to the vileness, the depravity,
the monstrousness of
the blueskin inhabitants of Dara, from whom
Weald must at all costs be
protected.
It did not make sense.
So Calhoun listened politely until he found
an
undistinguished medical man who wanted some
special information about
gene-selection as practised halfway across
the galaxy.
He invited that
man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the
information not hitherto
available.
He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with
that joyous awe a
man feels when he finds out something he has
wanted long and badly to
know.
"Now," said Calhoun, "tell me something!
Why does everybody on this
planet hate the inhabitants of Dara?
It's light-years away.
Nobody
claims to have suffered in person from them.
Why make a point of hating
them?"
The Wealdian doctor grimaced.
"They've blue patches on their skins.
They're different from us.
So they
can be pictured as a danger and our political
parties can make an
election issue out of competing for the privilege
of defending us from
them.
They had a plague on Dara, once.
They're accused of still having
it ready for export."
"Hm," said Calhoun.
"The story is that they want to spread contagion
here, eh?
Doesn't anybody"--his tone was sardonic--"doesn't
anybody urge
that they be massacred as an act of piety?"
"Yes--s--s--s," admitted the doctor reluctantly.
"It's mentioned in
political speeches."
"But how's it rationalized?"
demanded Calhoun.
"What's the argument to
make pigment-patches involve moral and physical
degradation, as I'm
assured is the case?"
"In the public schools," said the doctor,
"the children are taught that
blueskins are now carriers of the disease
they survived three
generations ago!
That they hate everybody who isn't a blueskin.
That
they are constantly scheming to introduce
their plague here so most of
us will die and the rest become blueskins.
That's beyond rationalizing.
It can't be true, but it's not safe to doubt
it."
"Bad business," said Calhoun coldly.
"That sort of thing usually costs
lives, in the end.
It could lead to massacre!"
"Perhaps it has, in a way," said the doctor
unhappily.
"One doesn't like
to think about it."
He paused, and said; "Twenty years ago there
was a
famine on Dara.
There were crop-failures.
The situation must have been
very bad.
They built a space-ship.
They've no use for such things
normally, because no nearby planet will deal
with them or let them land.
But they built a space-ship and came here.
They went in orbit around
Weald.
They asked to trade for shiploads of food.
They offered any price
in heavy metals, gold, platinum, iridium,
and so on.
They talked from
orbit by vision communicators.
They could be seen to be blueskins.
You
can guess what happened!"
"Tell me," said Calhoun.
"We armed ships in a hurry," admitted the
doctor, "We chased their
space-ship back to Dara.
We hung in space off the planet.
We told them
we'd blast their world from pole to pole if
they ever dared take to
space again.
We made them destroy their one ship, and we
watched on
visionscreens as it was done."
"But you gave them food?"
"No," said the doctor ashamedly.
"They were blueskins."
"How bad was the famine?"
"Who knows?
Any number may have starved!
And we kept a squadron of armed
ships in their skies for years.
To keep them from spreading the plague,
we said.
And some of us believed it, probably!"
The doctor's tone was purest irony.
"Lately," he said, "there's been a move for
economy in our government.
Simultaneously, we began to have a series
of over-abundant crops.
The
government had to buy the excess grain to
keep the price up.
Retired
patrol-ships--built to watch over Dara--were
available for
storage-space.
We filled them up with grain and sent them
out into
orbit.
They're there now, hundreds of thousands or
millions of tons of
grain!"
"And Dara?"
The Doctor shrugged.
He stood up.
"Our hatred of Dara," he said, again ironically,
"has produced one
thing.
Roughly halfway between here and Dara there's
a two-planet solar
system, Orede.
There's a usable planet there.
It was proposed to build
an outpost of Weald there, against blueskins.
Cattle were landed to run
wild and multiply and make a reason for colonists
to settle there.
They
did, but nobody wants to move nearer to blueskins!
So Orede stayed
uninhabited until a hunting-party shooting
wild cattle found an
outcropping of heavy-metal ore.
So now there's a mine there.
And that's
all.
A few hundred men work the mine at fabulous
wages.
You may be asked
to check on their health.
But not Dara's!"
"I see," said Calhoun, frowning.
The doctor moved toward the Med Ship's exit-port.
"I answered your questions," he said grimly.
"But if I talked to anyone
else as I've done to you, I'd be lucky only
to be driven into exile!"
"I shan't give you away," said Calhoun.
He did not smile.
When the doctor had gone, Calhoun said deliberately;
"Murgatroyd, you should be grateful that you're
a _tormal_ and not a
man.
There's nothing about being a _tormal_ to
make you ashamed!"
Then he grimly changed his garments for the
full-dress uniform of the
Med Service.
There was to be a banquet at which he would
sit next to the
planet's chief executive and hear innumerable
speeches about the
splendor of Weald.
Calhoun had his own, strictly Med Service
opinion of
the planet's latest and most boasted-of achievement.
It was a domed city
in the polar regions, where nobody ever had
to go outdoors.
He was less
than professionally enthusiastic about the
moving streets, and much less
approving of the dream-broadcasts which supplied
hypnotic,
sleep-inducing rhythms to anybody who chose
to listen to them.
The price
was that while asleep one would hear high
praise of commercial products,
and one might believe them when awake.
But it was not Calhoun's function to criticize
when it could be avoided.
Med Service had been badly managed in Sector
Twelve.
So at the banquet
Calhoun made a brief and diplomatic address
in which he temperately
praised what could be praised, and did not
mention anything else.
The chief executive followed him.
As head of the government he paid some
tribute to the Med Service.
But then he reminded his hearers proudly of
the high culture, splendid health, and remarkable
prosperity of the
planet since his political party took office.
This, he said, was in
spite of the need to be perpetually on guard
against the greatest and
most immediate danger to which any world in
all the galaxy was exposed.
He referred to the blueskins, of course.
He did not need to tell the
people of Weald what vigilance, what constant
watchfulness was necessary
against that race of depraved and malevolent
deviants from the norm of
humanity.
But Weald, he said with emotion, held aloft
the torch of all
that humanity held most dear, and defended
not alone the lives of its
people against blueskin contagion, but their
noble heritage of ideals
against Blueskin pollution.
When he sat down, Calhoun said very politely;
"It looks like some day it should be practical
politics to urge the
massacre of all blueskins.
Have you thought of that?"
The chief executive said comfortably;
"The idea's been proposed.
It's good politics to urge it, but it would
be foolish to carry it out.
People vote against blueskins.
Wipe them
out, and where'd you be?"
Calhoun ground his teeth, quietly.
* * * * *
There were more speeches.
Then a messenger, white-faced, arrived with
a
written note for the chief executive.
He read it and passed it to
Calhoun.
It was from the Ministry of Health.
The space-port reported
that a ship had just broken out from overdrive
within the Wealdian
solar system.
Its tape-transmitter had automatically signalled
its
arrival from the mining-planet Orede.
But, having sent off its automatic
signal, the ship lay dead in space.
It did not drive toward Weald.
It
did not respond to signals.
It drifted like a derelict upon no course
at
all.
It seemed ominous, and since it came from
Orede--the planet nearest
to Dara of the blueskins--the health ministry
informed the planet's
chief executive.
"It'll be blueskins," said that astute person,
firmly.
"They're
next-door to Orede.
That's who's done this.
It wouldn't surprise me if
they'd seeded Orede with their plague, and
this ship came from there to
give us warning!"
"There's no evidence for anything of the sort,"
protested Calhoun.
"A
ship simply came out of overdrive and didn't
signal further.
That's
all."
"We'll see," said the chief executive ominously.
"We'll go directly to
the spaceport."
Calhoun retrieved Murgatroyd who had been
visiting with the wives of the
higher-up officials.
His small paunch distended with cakes and
coffee
and such delicacies as he'd been plied with.
He was half comatose from
over-feeding and over-petting, but he was
glad to see Calhoun.
At the
spaceport they discovered the situation remained
unchanged.
A ship from Orede had come out of overdrive
and lay dead in emptiness.
It did not answer calls.
It did not move in space.
It floated eerily in
no orbit around anything, going nowhere; doing
nothing.
And panic was
the consequence.
It seemed to Calhoun that the official handling
of the matter accounted
for the terror that he could feel building
up.
The so-far-unexplained
bit of news was on the air all over the planet
Weald.
There was nobody
awake of all the world's population who did
not believe that there was a
new danger in the sky.
Nobody doubted that it came from blueskins.
The
treatment of the news was precisely calculated
to keep alive the hatred
of Weald for the inhabitants of the world
Dara.
Calhoun put Murgatroyd into the Med Ship and
went back to the spaceport
office.
A small space-boat, designed to inspect the
circling grain-ships
from time, was already aloft.
The landing-grid had thrust it swiftly out
most of the way.
Now it droned and drove on sturdily toward
the
enigmatic ship.
Calhoun took no part in the agitated conferences
among the officials and
news reporters at the space-port.
But he listened to the talk about him.
As the investigating small ship drew nearer
and nearer to the
deathly-still cargo vessel, the guesses about
the meaning of its
breakout and following silence grew more and
more wild.
But, singularly,
there was not one suggestion that the mystery
might not be the work of
blueskins.
Blueskins were scapegoats for all the fears
and all the
uneasiness a perhaps over-civilized world
developed.
Presently the investigating space-boat reached
the mystery ship and
circled it, beaming queries.
No answer.
It reported the cargo-ship dark.
No lights shone anywhere on or in it.
There were no induction-surges
from even pulsing, idling engines.
Delicately, the messenger-craft
maneuvered until it touched the silent vessel.
It reported that
microphones detected no motion whatever inside.
"Let a volunteer go aboard," commanded the
chief executive.
"Have him
report what he finds."
A pause.
Then the solemn announcement of an intrepid
volunteer's name,
from far, far away.
Calhoun listened, frowning darkly.
This pompous
heroism wouldn't be noticed in the Med Service.
It would be routine
behavior.
Suspenseful, second-by-second reports.
The volunteer had rocketed
himself across the emptiness between the two
again-separated ships.
He
had opened the airlock from outside.
He'd gone in.
He'd closed the outer
airlock door.
He'd opened the inner.
He reported.
The relayed report was almost incoherent,
what with horror and
incredulity and the feeling of doom that came
upon the volunteer.
The
ship was a bulk-cargo ore-carrier, designed
to run between Orede and
Weald with cargoes of heavy-metal ores and
a crew of no more than five
men.
There was no cargo in her holds now, though.
Instead, there were
men.
They packed the ship.
They filled the corridors.
They had crawled
into every cargo and other space where a man
could find room to push
himself.
There were hundreds of them.
It was insanity.
And it had been
greater insanity still for the ship to have
taken off with so
preposterous a load of living creatures.
But they weren't living any longer.
The air apparatus had been designed
for a crew of five.
It could purify the air for possibly twenty
or more.
But there were hundreds of men in hiding as
well as in plain view in the
cargo-ship from Orede.
There were many, many times more than her
air
apparatus and reserve tanks could possibly
have serviced.
They couldn't
even have been fed during the journey from
Orede to Weald!
But they hadn't starved.
Air-scarcity killed them before the ship came
out of overdrive.
A remarkable thing was that there was no written
message in the ship's
log which referred to its take-off.
There was no memorandum of the
taking on of such an impossible number of
passengers.
"The blueskins did it," said the chief executive
of Weald.
He was pale.
All about Calhoun men looked sick and shocked
and terrified.
"It was the
blueskins!
We'll have to teach them a lesson!"
Then he turned to
Calhoun.
"The volunteer who went on that ship ... He'll
have to stay
there, won't he?
He can't be brought back to Weald without
bringing
contagion ..."
Calhoun raged at him.
CHAPTER 2
There was a certain coldness in the manner
of those at the Weald
spaceport when the Med Ship left next morning.
Calhoun was not popular
because Weald was scared.
It had been conditioned to scare easily, where
blueskins might be involved.
Its children were trained to react
explosively when the word "blueskin" was uttered
in their hearing, and
its adults tended to say "blueskin" when anything
to cause uneasiness
entered their minds.
So a planet-wide habit of non-rational response
had
formed and was not seen to be irrational because
almost everybody had
it.
The volunteer who'd discovered the tragedy
on the ship from Orede was
safe, though.
He'd made a completely conscientious survey
of the ship
he'd volunteered to enter and examine.
For his courage, he'd have been
doomed but for Calhoun.
The reaction of his fellow-citizens was that
by
entering the ship he might have become contaminated
by blueskin
infective material if the plague still existed,
and if the men in the
ship had caught it--but they certainly hadn't
died of it--and if there
had been blueskins on Orede to communicate
it--for which there was no
evidence--and if blueskins were responsible
for the tragedy.
Which was
at the moment pure supposition.
But Weald feared he might bring death
back to Weald if he were allowed to return.
Calhoun saved his life.
He ordered that the guard-ship admit him to
its
airlock, which then was to be filled with
steam and chlorine.
The
combination would sterilize and partly even
eat away his space-suit,
after which the chlorine and steam should
be bled out to space, and air
from the ship let into the lock.
If he stripped off the space-suit
without touching its outer surface, and reëntered
the investigating ship
while the suit was flung outside by a man
in another space-suit,
handling it with a pole he'd fling after it,
there could be no possible
contamination brought back.
Calhoun was quite right, but Weald in general
considered that he'd
persuaded the government to take an unreasonable
risk.
There were other reasons for disapproving
of him.
Calhoun had been
unpleasantly frank.
The coming of the death-ship stirred to frenzy
those
people who believed that all blueskins should
be exterminated as a pious
act.
They'd appeared on every visionscreen, citing
not only the ship
from Orede but other incidents which they
interpreted as crimes against
Weald.
They demanded that all Wealdian atomic reactors
be modified to
turn out fusion-bomb materials while a space-fleet
was made ready for an
anti-blueskin crusade.
They confidently demanded such a rain of
fusion-bombs on Dara that no blueskin, no
animal, no shred of
vegetation, no fish in the deepest ocean,
not even a living
virus-particle of the blueskin plague could
remain alive on the blueskin
world!
One of these vehement orators even asserted
that Calhoun agreed that no
other course was possible, speaking for the
Interstellar Medical
Service.
And Calhoun furiously demanded a chance to
deny it by
broadcast, and he made a bitter and indiscreet
speech from which a
planet-wide audience inferred that he thought
them fools.
He did.
So he was definitely unpopular when his ship
lifted from Weald.
He'd
curtly given his destination as Orede, from
which the death-ship had
come.
The landing-grid locked on, raised the small
space-craft until
Weald was a great shining ball below it, and
then somehow scornfully
cast him off.
The Med Ship was free, in clear space where
there was not
enough of a gravitational field to hinder
overdrive.
He aimed for his destination, his face very
grim.
He said savagely;
"Get set, Murgatroyd!
Overdrive coming!"
* * * * *
He thumbed down the overdrive button.
The universe of stars went out,
while everything living in the ship felt the
customary sensations of
dizziness, of nausea, and of a spiralling
fall to nothingness.
Then
there was silence.
The Med Ship actually moved at a rate which
was a
preposterous number of times the speed of
light, but it felt absolutely
solid, absolutely firm and fixed.
A ship in overdrive feels exactly as
if it were buried deep in the core of a planet.
There is no vibration.
There is no sign of anything but solidity
and--if one looks out a
port--there is only utter blackness plus an
absence of sound fit to make
one's eardrums crack.
But within seconds random tiny noises began.
There was a reel and there
were sound-speakers to keep the ship from
sounding like a grave.
The
reel played and the speakers gave off minute
creakings, and meaningless
hums, and very tiny noises of every imaginable
sort, all of which were
just above the threshold of the inaudible.
Calhoun fretted.
Sector Twelve was in very bad shape.
A conscientious
Med Service man would never have let the anti-blueskin
obsession go
unmentioned in a report on Weald.
Health is not only a physical affair.
There is mental health, also.
When mental health goes a civilization can
be destroyed more surely and more terribly
than by any imaginable war or
plague-germ.
A plague kills off those who are susceptible
to it, leaving
immunes to build up a world again.
But immunes are the first to be
killed when a mass neurosis sweeps a population.
Weald was definitely a Med Service problem
world.
Dara was another.
And
when hundreds of men jammed themselves into
a cargo-boat which could not
furnish them with air to breathe, and took
off and went into overdrive
before the air could fail....
Orede called for no less of worry.
"I think," said Calhoun dourly, "that I'll
have some coffee."
"Coffee" was one of the words that Murgatroyd
recognized immediately.
He
would usually watch the coffee-maker with
bright, interested eyes.
He'd
even tried to imitate Calhoun's motions with
it, once, and had scorched
his paws in the attempt.
This time he did not move.
Calhoun turned his head.
Murgatroyd sat on the floor, his long tail
coiled reflectively about a chair-leg.
He watched the door of the Med
Ship's sleeping-cabin.
"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun.
"I mentioned coffee!"
"_Chee!_" shrilled Murgatroyd.
But he continued to look at the door.
The temperature was kept lower in
the other cabin, and the look of things was
different from the
control-compartment.
The difference was part of the means by which
a man
was able to be alone for weeks on end--alone
save for his
_tormal_--without becoming ship-happy.
There were other carefully
thought out items in the ship with the same
purpose.
But none of them
should cause Murgatroyd to stare fixedly and
fascinatedly at the
sleeping-cabin door.
Not when coffee was in the making!
Calhoun considered.
He became angry at the immediate suspicion
that
occurred to him.
As a Med Service man, he was duty-bound to
be
impartial.
To be impartial might mean not to side absolutely
with Weald
in its enmity to blueskins.
The people of Weald had refused to help Dara
in a time of famine; they'd blockaded that
pariah world for years
afterward; they had other reasons for hating
the people they'd treated
badly.
It was entirely reasonable for some fanatic
on Weald to consider
that Calhoun must be killed lest he be of
help to the blueskins Weald
abhorred.
In fact, it was quite possible that somebody
had stowed away on the Med
Ship to murder Calhoun, so that there would
be no danger of any report
favorable to Dara ever being presented anywhere.
If so, such a stowaway
would be in the sleeping-cabin now, waiting
for Calhoun to walk
unsuspiciously in to be shot dead.
So Calhoun made coffee.
He slipped a blaster into a pocket where it
would be handy.
He filled a small cup for Murgatroyd and a
large one for
himself, and then a second large one.
He tapped on the sleeping-cabin door, standing
aside lest a blaster-bolt
came through it.
"Coffee's ready," he said sardonically.
"Come out and join us."
There was a long pause.
Calhoun rapped again.
"You've a seat at the captain's table," he
said more sardonically still.
"It's not polite to keep me waiting!"
* * * * *
He listened, alert for a rush which would
be a fanatic's desperate
attempt to do murder despite premature discovery.
He was prepared to
shoot quite ruthlessly.
But there was no rush.
Instead, there came hesitant foot-falls.
The door
of the cabin slid slowly aside.
A girl appeared in the opening,
desperately white and desperately composed.
"H-how did you know I was there?" she asked
shakily.
She moistened her
lips.
"You didn't see me!
I was in a closet, and you didn't even enter
the room!"
Calhoun said grimly;
"I've sources of information."
He pointed to Murgatroyd.
The girl did not move.
Her eyes went from Murgatroyd to Calhoun.
"And now," said Calhoun, "do you want to tell
me your story?
You have
one ready, I'm sure."
"There--there isn't any," said the girl unsteadily.
"Just--I--I need to
get to Orede, and you're going there.
There's no other way to go--now."
"To the contrary," said Calhoun, "there'll
undoubtedly be a fleet
heading for Orede as soon as it can be assembled
and armed.
But I'm
afraid that's not a very good story.
Try another."
She shivered a little.
"I'm--running away ..."
"Ah!" said Calhoun.
"In that case I'll take you back."
"No!" she said fiercely.
"I'll--I'll die first!
I'll wreck this ship
first!"
Her hand came from behind her.
There was a tiny blaster in it.
But it
shook visibly as she tried to aim it.
"I'll--shoot out the controls!"
Calhoun blinked.
He'd had to make a drastic change in his estimate
of
the situation the instant he saw that the
stowaway was a girl.
Now he
had to make another when her threat was not
to kill him but to disable
the ship.
Women are rarely assassins, and when they
are they don't use
energy weapons.
Daggers and poisons are more typical.
"I'd rather you didn't do that," said Calhoun
drily.
"Besides, you'd get
deadly bored if we were stuck in a derelict
waiting for our air and food
to give out."
Murgatroyd, for no reason whatever, felt it
necessary to enter the
conversation.
He said;
"_Chee-chee-chee!_"
"A very sensible suggestion," observed Calhoun.
"We'll sit down and have
a cup of coffee."
To the girl he said, "I'll take you to Orede,
since
that's where you say you want to go."
"I--there's a boy there--"
Calhoun shook his head.
"No," he said reprovingly.
"Nearly all the mining colony had packed
itself into the ship that came into Weald
with everybody dead.
But not
all.
And there's been no check of what men were
in the ship and what men
weren't.
You wouldn't go to Orede if it were likely
your fellow had died
on the way to you.
Here's your coffee.
Sugar or saccho, and do you take
cream?"
She trembled a little, but she took the cup.
"I--don't understand--."
"Murgatroyd and I," explained Calhoun--and
he did not know whether he
spoke out of anger or something else--"we
are do-gooders.
We go around
trying to keep people from getting killed.
It's our profession.
We
practise it even on our own behalf.
We want to stay alive.
So since you
make such drastic threats, we will take you
where you want to go.
Especially since we're going there anyhow."
"You--don't believe anything I've said!"
It was a statement.
"Not a word," admitted Calhoun.
"But you'll probably tell us something
more believable presently.
When did you eat last?"
"Yesterday--."
"Better have something now.
We'll talk more later."
Calhoun showed her
how to punch the readier for such-and-such
dishes, to be extracted from
storage and warmed or chilled, as the case
might be, and served at
dialed-for intervals.
* * * * *
Calhoun deliberately immersed himself in the
Galactic Directory, looking
up the planet Orede.
He was headed there, but he'd had no reason
to
inform himself about it before.
Now he read with every appearance of
absorption.
The girl ate daintily.
Murgatroyd watched with highly amiable interest.
But she looked acutely uncomfortable.
Calhoun finished with the Directory.
He got out the microfilm reels
which contained more information.
He was specifically after the Med
Service history of all the planets in this
sector.
He went through the
filmed record of every inspection ever made
on Weald and on Dara.
But
Sector Twelve had not been well-run.
There was no adequate account of a
plague which had wiped out three-quarters
of the population of an
inhabited planet!
It had happened shortly after one Med Ship
visit, and
was over before another Med Ship came by.
But there should have been
painstaking investigation, even after the
fact.
There should have been a
collection of infective material and a reasonably
complete
identification and study of the infective
agent.
It hadn't been made.
There was probably some other emergency at
the time, and it slipped by.
But Calhoun--whose career was not to be spent
in this sector--resolved
on a blistering report about this negligence
and its consequences.
He kept himself casually busy, ignoring the
girl.
A Med Ship man has
resources of study and meditation with which
to occupy himself during
overdrive travel from one planet to another.
Calhoun made use of those
resources.
He acted as if he were completely unconscious
of the
stowaway.
But Murgatroyd watched her with charmed attention.
Hours after her discovery, she said uneasily;
"Please?"
Calhoun looked up.
"Yes?"
"I--don't know exactly how things stand."
"You are a stowaway," said Calhoun.
"Legally, I have the right to put
you out the airlock.
It doesn't seem necessary.
There's a cabin.
When
you're sleepy, use it.
Murgatroyd and I can make out quite well here.
When you're hungry, you now know how to get
something to eat.
When we
land on Orede, you'll probably go about whatever
business you have
there.
That's all."
She stared at him.
"But--you don't believe what I've told you!"
"No," agreed Calhoun.
But he didn't add to the statement.
"But--I will tell you," she offered.
"The police were after me.
I had to
get away from Weald!
I had to!
I'd stolen--"
He shook his head.
"No," he said.
"If you were a thief, you'd say anything in
the world
except that you were a thief.
You're not ready to tell the truth yet.
You don't have to, so why tell me anything?
I suggest that you get some
sleep."
She rose slowly.
Twice her lips parted as if to speak again,
but then
she went into the other cabin and closed herself
in.
Murgatroyd blinked at the place where she'd
disappeared and then climbed
up into Calhoun's lap, with complete assurance
of welcome.
He settled
himself and was silent for moments.
Then he said;
"_Chee!_"
"I believe you're right," said Calhoun.
"She doesn't belong on Weald, or
with the conditioning she'd have had, there'd
be only one place she'd
dread worse than Orede, and that would be
Dara.
But I doubt she'd be
afraid to land even on Dara."
Murgatroyd liked to be talked to.
He liked to pretend that he carried on
a conversation, like humans.
"_Chee-chee!_" he said with conviction.
"Definitely," agreed Calhoun.
"She's not doing this for her personal
advantage.
Whatever she thinks she's doing, it's more
important to her
than her own life.
Murgatroyd--"
"_Chee?_" said Murgatroyd in an inquiring
tone.
"There are wild cattle on Orede," said Calhoun.
"Herds and herds of
them.
I have a suspicion that somebody's been shooting
them.
Lots of
them.
Do you agree?
Don't you think that a lot of cattle have
been
slaughtered on Orede lately?"
Murgatroyd yawned.
He settled himself still more comfortably
in
Calhoun's lap.
"_Chee,_" he said drowsily.
He went to sleep, while Calhoun continued
the examination of highly
condensed information.
Presently he looked up the normal rate of
increase, with other data, among herds of
_bivis domesticus_ in a wild
state, on planets where they have no natural
enemies.
It wasn't
unheard-of for a world to be stocked with
useful types of Terran fauna
and flora before it was attempted to be colonized.
Terran life-forms
could play the devil with alien ecological
systems, very much to
humanity's benefit.
Familiar microörganisms and a standard vegetation
added to the practicality of human settlements
on otherwise alien
worlds.
But sometimes the results were strange.
They weren't often so strange, however, as
to cause some hundreds of men
to pack themselves frantically aboard a cargo-ship
which couldn't
possibly sustain them, so that every man must
die while the ship was in
overdrive.
Still, by the time Calhoun turned in on a
spare pneumatic mattress, he
had calculated that as few as a dozen head
of cattle, turned loose on a
suitable planet, would have increased to herds
of thousands or tens or
even hundreds of thousands in much less time
than had probably elapsed.
The Med Ship drove on in seemingly absolute
solidity, with no sound from
without, with no sight to be seen outside,
with no evidence at all that
it was not buried deep in the heart of a planet
instead of flashing
through emptiness at a speed so great as to
have no meaning.
* * * * *
Next ship-day the girl looked oddly at Calhoun
when she appeared in the
control-room.
"Shall I--have breakfast?" she asked uncertainly.
"Why not?"
Silently, she operated the food-readier.
She ate.
Calhoun gave the
impression that he would respond politely
when spoken to, but that he
was busy with activities that kept him remote
from stowaways.
About noon, ship-time, she asked;
"When will we get to Orede?"
Calhoun told her absently, as if he were thinking
of something else.
"What--what do you think happened there?
I mean, to make that tragedy in
the ship?"
"I don't know," said Calhoun.
"But I disagree with the authorities on
Weald.
I don't think it was a planned atrocity of
the blueskins."
"Wh-what are blueskins?"
Calhoun turned around and looked at her directly.
"When lying," he said mildly, "you tell as
much by what you pretend
isn't, as by what you pretend is.
You know what blueskins are!"
"B--but what do you think they are?" she asked.
"There used to be a human disease called smallpox,"
said Calhoun.
"When
people recovered from it, they were usually
marked.
Their skin had
little scar-pits here and there.
At one time, back on Earth, it was
expected that everybody would catch smallpox
sooner or later, and a
large percentage would die of it.
And it was so much a matter of course
that if they printed a description of a criminal,
they never mentioned
it if he were pock-marked--scarred.
It was no distinction.
But if he
didn't have the markings, they'd mention that!"
He paused.
"Those
pock-marks weren't hereditary, but otherwise
a blueskin is like a man
who had them.
He can't be anything else!"
"Then you think they're--human?"
"There's never yet been a case of reverse
evolution," said Calhoun.
"Maybe pithecanthropus had a monkey uncle,
but no pithecanthropus ever
went monkey."
She turned abruptly away.
But she glanced at him often during that day.
He continued to busy himself with those activities
which make a Med
Ship man's life consistent with retained sanity.
Next day she asked without preliminary;
"Don't you believe the blueskins planned for
the ship with the dead men
to arrive at Weald and spread plague there?"
"No," said Calhoun.
"Why?"
"It couldn't possibly work," Calhoun told
her.
"With only dead men on
board, the ship wouldn't arrive at a place
where the landing-grid could
bring it down.
So that would be no good.
And plague-stricken living men
wouldn't try to conceal that they had the
plague.
They might ask for
help, but they'd know they'd instantly be
killed on Weald if they were
found to be plague-victims.
So that would be no good, either!
No, the
ship wasn't intended to land plague on Weald."
"Are you--friendly to blueskins?" she asked
uncertainly.
"Within reason," said Calhoun, "I am a well-wisher
to all the human
race.
You're slipping, though.
When using the word 'blueskin' you should
say it uncomfortably, as if it were a word
no refined person liked to
pronounce.
You don't.
We'll land on Orede tomorrow, by the way.
If you
ever intend to tell me the truth, there's
not much time."
She bit her lips.
Twice, during the remainder of the day, she
faced him
and opened her mouth as if to speak, and then
turned away again.
Calhoun
shrugged.
He had fairly definite ideas about her, by
now.
He carefully
kept them tentative, but no girl born and
raised on Weald would
willingly go to Orede, with all of Weald believing
that a shipload of
miners preferred death to remaining there.
It tied in, like everything
else that was unpleasant, to blueskins.
Nobody from Weald would dream of
landing on Orede!
Not now!
* * * * *
A little before the Med Ship was due to break
out from overdrive, the
girl said very carefully;
"You've been--very kind.
I'd like to thank you.
I--didn't really believe
I would--live to get to Orede."
Calhoun raised his eyebrows.
"I--wish I could tell you everything you want
to know," she added
regretfully.
"I think you're--really decent.
But some things...."
Calhoun said caustically;
"You've told me a great deal.
You weren't born on Weald.
You weren't
raised there.
The people of Dara--notice that I don't say
blueskins,
though they are--the people of Dara have made
at least one space-ship
since Weald threatened them with extermination.
There is probably a new
food-shortage on Dara now, leading to pure
desperation.
Most likely it's
bad enough to make them risk landing on Orede
to kill cattle and freeze
beef to help.
They've worked out."
She gasped and sprang to her feet.
She snatched out the tiny blaster in
her pocket.
She pointed it waveringly at him.
"I--have to kill you!" she cried desperately.
"I--I have to!"
Calhoun reached out.
She tugged despairingly at the blaster's trigger.
Nothing happened.
Before she could realize that she hadn't turned
off
the safety, Calhoun twisted the weapon from
her fingers.
He stepped
back.
"Good girl!" he said approvingly.
"I'll give this back to you when we
land.
And thanks.
Thanks very much!"
She stared at him.
"Thanks?
When I tried to kill you?"
"Of course!" said Calhoun.
"I'd made guesses.
I couldn't know that they
were right.
When you tried to kill me, you confirmed every
one.
Now,
when we land on Orede I'm going to get you
to try to put me in touch
with your friends.
It's going to be tricky, because they must
be pretty
well scared about that ship.
But it's a highly desirable thing to get
done!"
He went to the ship's control-board and sat
down before it.
"Twenty minutes to break-hour," he observed.
Murgatroyd peered out of his little cubbyhole.
His eyes were anxious.
_Tormals_ are amiable little creatures.
During the days in overdrive,
Calhoun had paid less than the usual amount
of attention to Murgatroyd,
while the girl was fascinating.
They'd made friends, awkwardly on the
girl's part, very pleasantly on Murgatroyd's.
But only moments ago there
had been bitter emotion in the air.
Murgatroyd had fled to his cubbyhole
to escape it.
He was distressed.
Now that there was silence again, he
peered out unhappily.
"_Chee?_" he queried plaintively.
"_Chee-chee-chee?_"
Calhoun said matter-of-factly;
"It's all right, Murgatroyd.
If we aren't blasted as we try to land, we
should be able to make friends with everybody
and get something
accomplished."
The statement was hopelessly inaccurate.
CHAPTER 3
There was no answer from the ground when breakout
came and Calhoun drove
the Med Ship to a favorable position for a
call.
He patiently repeated,
over and over again, that Med Ship Aesclipus
Twenty notified its arrival
and requested coördinates for landing.
There should have been a crisp
description of the direction from the planet's
center at which, a
certain time so many hours or minutes later,
the force-fields of the
grid would find it convenient to lock onto
and lower the Med Ship.
But
the communicator remained silent.
"There is a landing-grid," said Calhoun, frowning,
"and if they're using
it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds
I'm told about, it should
be manned.
But they don't seem to intend to answer.
Maybe they think
that if they pretend I'm not here I'll go
away."
He reflected, and his frown deepened.
"If I didn't know what I do know, I might.
So if I land on
emergency-rockets the blueskins down below
may decide that I come from
Weald.
And in that case it would be reasonable to
blast me before I
could land and unload some fighting men.
On the other hand, no ship from
Weald would conceivably land without impassioned
assurance that it was
safe.
It would drop bombs."
He turned to the girl.
"How many Darians
down below?"
She shook her head.
"You don't know," said Calhoun, "or won't
tell, yet.
But they ought to
be told about the arrival of that ship at
Weald, and what Weald thinks
about it!
My guess is that you came to tell them.
It isn't likely that
Dara gets news direct from Weald.
Where were you put ashore from Dara,
when you set out to be a spy?"
Her lips parted to speak.
But she compressed them tightly.
She shook her
head again.
"It must have been plenty far away," said
Calhoun restlessly.
"Your
people would have built a ship, and made fine
forged papers for it, and
they'd travel so far from this part of space
that when they landed
nobody would think of Dara.
They'd use makeup to cover the blue spots,
but maybe it was so far away that blueskins
had never been heard of!"
Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply.
"Then they'd land half a dozen of you, with
a supply of makeup for the
blue patches.
And you'd separate, and take ships that went
various
roundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by
one, to see what could be
done there to...."
He stopped.
"When did you find out positively that
there wasn't any plague any more?"
She began to grow pale.
"I'm not a mind-reader," said Calhoun.
"But it adds up.
You're from
Dara.
You've been on Weald.
It's practically certain that there are
other, agents, if you like that word better,
on Weald.
And there hasn't
been a plague on Weald so you people aren't
carriers of it.
But you
knew it in advance, I think.
How'd you learn?
Did a ship in some sort of
trouble land there, on Dara?"
"Y-yes," said the girl.
"We wouldn't let it go again.
But the people
didn't catch--they didn't die--they lived--."
She stopped short.
"It's not fair to trap me!" she cried passionately,
"It's not fair!"
"I'll stop," said Calhoun.
He turned to the control-board.
The Med Ship was only planetary
diameters from Orede, now, and the electron
telescope showed shining
stars in leisurely motion across its screen.
Then a huge, gibbous
shining shape appeared, and there were irregular
patches of that muddy
color which is sea-bottom, and varicolored
areas which were plains and
forests.
Also there were mountains.
Calhoun steadied the image and
squinted at it.
"The mine," he observed, "was found by members
of a hunting-party,
killing wild cattle for sport."
* * * * *
Even a small planet has many millions of square
miles of surface, and a
single human installation on a whole world
will not be easy to find by
random search.
But there were clues to this one.
Men hunting for sport
would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate
to hunt in.
So if they
found a mineral deposit, it would have been
in a temperate zone.
Cattle
would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain.
The mine would not be
on a prairie.
The settlement on Orede, then, would be near
the edge of
mountains, not far from a prairie such as
wild cattle would frequent,
and it would be in a temperate climate.
Forested areas could be ruled
out.
And there would be a landing-grid.
Handling only one ship at a
time, it might be a very small grid.
It need be only hundreds of yards
across and less than half a mile high.
But its shadow would be
distinctive.
Calhoun searched among low mountains near
unforested prairie in a
temperate zone.
He found a speck.
He enlarged it many-fold, and it was
the mine on Orede.
There were heaps of tailings.
There was something
which cast a long, lacy shadow.
The landing-grid.
"But they don't answer our call," observed
Calhoun, "so we go down
unwelcomed."
He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency-rockets
boomed.
The ship
plunged planetward.
A long time later it was deep in the planet's
atmosphere.
The noise of
its rockets had become thunderous, with air
to carry and to reinforce
the sound.
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded
Calhoun.
"We may have to
dodge some ack."
But nothing came up from below.
The Med Ship again inverted itself, and
its rockets pointed toward the planet and
poured out pencil-thin,
blue-white, high-velocity flames.
It checked slightly, but continued to
descend.
It was not directly above the grid.
It swept downward until
almost level with the peaks of the mountains
in which the mine lay.
It
tilted again, and swept onward over the mountain-tops,
and then tilted
once more and went racing up the valley in
which the landing-grid was
plainly visible.
Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest
there be
opposition.
But there was no sign.
Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowed
its forward motion, hovered momentarily, and
settled to solidity outside
the framework of the grid.
The grid was small, as Calhoun reasoned.
But
it reached interminably toward the sky.
The rocket cut off.
Slender as the flame had been, they'd melted
and
bored thin drill-holes deep into the soil.
Molten rock boiled and
bubbled down below.
But there seemed no other sound.
There was no other
motion.
There was absolute stillness all around.
But when Calhoun
switched on the outside microphones a faint,
sweet melange of
high-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures
hidden under the
vegetation of the mountainsides.
Calhoun put a blaster in his pocket and stood
up.
"We'll see what it looks like outside," he
said with a certain grimness.
"I don't quite believe what the visionscreens
show."
* * * * *
Minutes later he stepped down to the ground
from the Med Ship's
exit-port.
The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet
from what once had
been a wooden building.
In it, ore from the mines was concentrated
and
the useless tailings carried away by a conveyor-belt
to make a monstrous
pile of broken stone.
But there was no longer a building.
Next to it
there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher.
The massive
machinery could still be seen, but the structure
was fragments.
Next to
that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters
of the mine.
They also
were shattered practically to match-sticks.
The look of the ground about the building-sites
was simply and purely
impossible.
It was a mass of hoofprints.
Cattle by thousands and tens of
thousands had trampled everything.
Cattle had burst in the wooden sides
of the buildings.
Cattle had piled themselves up against the
beams
upholding roofs until the buildings collapsed.
Then cattle had gone
plunging over the wrecked buildings until
there was nothing left but
indescribable chaos.
Many, many cattle had died in the crush.
There were
heaps of dead beasts about the metal girders
which were the foundation
of the landing-grid.
The air was tainted by the smell of carrion.
The settlement had been destroyed, positively,
by stampeded cattle in
tens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly
through and over and upon
it.
Senselessly, they'd trampled each other to
horrible shapelessnesses.
The mine-shaft was not choked, because enormously
strong timbers had
fallen across and blocked it.
But everything else was pure destruction.
Calhoun said evenly;
"Clever!
Very clever!
You can't blame men when beasts stampede!
We
should accept the evidence that some monstrous
herd, making its way
through a mountain pass, somehow went crazy
and bolted for the plains
and this settlement got in the way and it
was too bad for the
settlement.
Everything's explained, except the ship that
went to Weald.
A cattle stampede, yes.
Anybody can believe that!
But there was a
man-stampede!
Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as
the cattle
trampled down this little town.
The ship stampeded off into space as
insanely as the cattle.
But a stampede of men _and_ cattle, in the
same
place,--that's a little too much at one time!"
"How," asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend
to get in touch with your
friends here?"
"I--I don't know," she said distressedly.
"But if--the ship stays here,
they're bound to come and see why.
Won't they?
Or will they?"
"If they're sane, they won't," said Calhoun.
"The one undesirable thing,
here, would be human footprints on top of
cattle-tracks.
If your friends
are a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe,
they should cover up
their tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible,
and pray that no signs
of their former presence are ever discovered.
That would be their best
first move, certainly!"
"What should I do?" she asked helplessly.
"I'm far from sure.
At a guess, and for the moment, probably nothing.
I'll work something out ... I've got the devil
of a job before me,
though.
I can't spend too much time here."
"You can--leave me here...."
He grunted and turned away.
It was naturally unthinkable that he should
leave another human being on a supposedly
uninhabited planet, with the
knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited,
and the further
knowledge that any visitors would have the
strongest of possible reasons
to hide themselves away.
He believed that there were Darians here,
and the girl in the Med
ship--so he also believed--was a Darian.
But any who might be hiding had
so much to lose if they were discovered that
they might be hundreds or
even thousands of miles from anywhere a space-ship
would normally
land--if they hadn't fled after the incident
of the space-ship's
departure with its load of doomed passengers.
Considered detachedly, the odds were that
there was again a
food-shortage on Dara.
That blueskins, in desperation, had raided
or
were raiding or would raid the cattle-herds
of Orede for food to carry
back to their home planet.
That somehow the miners on Orede had found
that they had blueskin neighbors, and died
of the consequences of their
terror.
It was a risky guess to make on such evidence
as Calhoun
considered he had, but no other guess was
possible.
If his guess was right, he was under some
obligation to do exactly what
he believed the girl considered her mission,
to warn all blueskins that
Weald would presently try to find them on
Orede, when all hell must
break loose upon Dara for punishment.
But if there were men here, he
couldn't leave a written warning for them
in default of friendly
contact.
They might not find it, and a search-party
of Wealdians might.
All he could possibly do was try to make contact
and give warning by
such means as would leave no evidence behind
that he'd done so.
Weald
would consider a warning sure proof of blueskin
guilt.
It was not satisfactory to be limited to broadcasts
which might not be
picked up, and were unlikely to be acknowledged.
But he settled down
with the communicator to make the attempt.
* * * * *
He called first on a GC wave-length and form.
It was unlikely that
blueskins would use general-communication
bands to keep in touch with
each other, but it had to be tried.
He broadcast, as broadly tuned as
possible, and went up and down the GC spectrum,
repeating his warning
painstakingly and listening without hope for
a reply.
He did find one
spot on the dial where there was re-radiation
of his message, as if from
a tuned receiver.
But he could not get a fix on it, and nobody
might be
listening.
He exhausted the normal communication pattern.
Then he
broadcast on old-fashioned amplitude modulation
which a modern
communicator would not pick up at all, and
which therefore might be used
by men in hiding.
He worked for a long time.
Then he shrugged and gave it up.
He'd
repeated to absolute tedium the facts that
any Darians--blueskins--on
Orede ought to know.
There'd been no answer.
And it was all too likely
that if he'd been received, that those who
heard him took his message
for a trick to discover if there were any
hearers.
He clicked off at last and stood up, shaking
his head.
Suddenly the Med
Ship seemed empty.
Then he saw Murgatroyd staring at the exit-port.
The
inner door of that small airlock was closed.
The tell-tale said the
outer was not locked.
Someone had gone out, quietly.
The girl.
Of
course.
Calhoun said angrily;
"How long ago, Murgatroyd?"
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd indignantly.
It wasn't an answer, but it showed that Murgatroyd
was vexed that he'd
been left behind.
He and the girl were close friends, now.
If she'd left
Murgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go
with her, she wasn't coming
back.
Calhoun swore.
Then he made certain.
She was not in the ship.
He flipped
the outside-speaker switch and said curtly
into the microphone;
"Coffee!
Murgatroyd and I are having coffee.
Will you come back,
please?"
He repeated the call, and repeated it again.
Multiplied as his voice was
by the speakers, she should hear him within
a mile.
She did not appear.
He went to a small and inconspicuous closet
and armed himself.
A Med
Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but
there were blast-rifles
available for extreme emergency.
When he'd slung a power-pack over his shoulder
and reached the airlock,
there was still no sign of his late stowaway.
He stood in the airlock
door for long minutes, staring angrily about.
Almost certainly she
wouldn't be looking in the mountains for men
of Dara come here for
cattle.
He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification
to
search as wide an area down-valley as possible,
and then at highest
power to search the most likely routes.
He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a far-away
hillcrest.
It was her
head.
It went down below the hilltop.
He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when
the _tormal_ was on the
ground outside, he locked the port with that
combination that nobody but
a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover
or use.
"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly.
"Come along!
We've got to
be idiots too!"
He set out in pursuit.
The girl had a long start.
Twice Calhoun came to places where she could
have chosen either of two ways onward.
Each time he had to determine
which she'd followed.
That cost time.
Then the mountains ended,
abruptly, and a vast undulating plain stretched
away to the horizon.
There were at least two large masses and many
smaller clumps of what
could only be animals gathered together.
Cattle.
But here the girl was plainly in view.
Calhoun increased his stride.
He
began to gain on her.
She did not look behind.
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a complaining
tone.
"I should have left you behind," agreed Calhoun
dourly, "but there was
and is a chance I won't get back.
You'll have to keep on hiking."
He plodded on.
His memory of the terrain around the mining
settlement
told him that there was no definite destination
in the girl's mind.
But
she was in no such despair as to want deliberately
to be lost.
She'd
guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were
Darians on the planet,
they'd keep the landing-grid under observation.
If they saw her leave
that area and could see that she was alone,
they should intercept her to
find out the meaning of the Med Ship's landing.
Then she could identify
herself as one of them and give them the terribly
necessary warning of
Weald's suspicions.
"But," said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right,
they'll have seen me
marching after her now, which spoils her scheme.
And I'd like to help
it, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"
* * * * *
He went down into one of the hollows of the
uneven plain.
He saw a clump
of a dozen or so cattle a little distance
away.
The bull looked up and
snorted.
The cows regarded him truculently.
Their air was not one of
bovine tranquility.
He was up the farther hillside and out of
sight before the bull worked
himself up to a charge.
Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of the
items in the data about cattle he'd looked
into just the other day.
He
felt himself grow pale.
"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply.
"We've got to catch up!
Fast!
Stay with
me if you can, but ..." He was jog-trotting
as he spoke--"even if you
get lost I have to hurry!"
He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces.
He ran fifty and walked
fifty.
He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground.
She came to a full
stop.
He ran.
He saw her turn to retrace her steps.
He flung to the
safety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring
blast at the ground for
her to hear.
Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward
him.
He plunged on.
She
vanished down into a hollow.
Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'd
just left.
Cattle appeared.
Four--a dozen--fifteen--twenty.
They moved
ominously in her wake.
He saw her again, running frantically over
another upward swell of the prairie.
He let off another blast to guide
her.
He ran on at top speed with Murgatroyd trailing
anxiously behind.
From time to time Murgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_"
in frightened
pleading not to be abandoned.
More cattle appeared against the horizon.
Fifty or a hundred.
They came
after the first clump.
The first-seen group of a bull and his harem
were
moving faster, now.
The girl fled from them, but it is the instinct
of
beef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had
learned it only two days
before--to charge any human they find on foot.
A mounted man to their
dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or
fled from, but a human on
foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.
* * * * *
Those in the lead were definitely charging
now, with heads bent low.
The
bull charged furiously with shut eyes, as
bulls do, but the
many-times-more-deadly cows charged with their
eyes wide open and
wickedly alert, and with a lumbering speed
much greater than the girl
could manage.
She came up over the last rise, chalky-white
and gasping, her hair
flying, in the last extremity of terror.
The nearest of the pursuing
cattle were within ten yards when Calhoun
fired from twenty yards
beyond.
One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck.
It went down and
others crashed into it and swept over it,
and more came on.
The girl saw
Calhoun, now, and ran toward him, panting,
and he knelt very
deliberately and began to check the charge
by shooting the leading
animals.
He did not succeed.
There were more cattle following the first,
and more
and more behind them.
It appeared that all the cattle on the plain
joined in the blind and senseless charge.
The thudding of hooves became
a mutter and then a rumble and then a growl.
Plunging, clumsy figures
rushed past on either side.
But horns and heads heaved up over the mound
of animals Calhoun had shot.
He shot them too.
More and more cattle came
pounding past the rampart of his victims,
but always, it seemed, some
elected to climb the heap of their dead and
dying fellows, and Calhoun
shot and shot.
But he split the herd.
The foremost animals had been charging a sighted
human enemy.
Others had followed because it is the instinct
of cattle to
join their running fellows in whatever crazed
urgency they feel.
There
was a dense, pounding, horrible mass of running
bulls and cows and
calves; bellowing, wailing, grunting, puffing,
raising thick and
impenetrable clouds of dust which had everything
but galloping beasts
going past on either side.
It lasted for minutes.
Then the thunder of hooves diminished.
It ended
abruptly, and Calhoun and the girl were left
alone with the gruesome
pile of animals which had divided the charging
herd into two parts.
They
could see the rears of innumerable running
animals, stupidly continuing
the charge--hardly different, now, from a
stampede--whose original
objective none now remembered.
Calhoun thoughtfully touched the barrel of
his blast-rifle and winced at
its scorching heat.
* * * * *
"I just realized," he said coldly, "that I
don't know your name.
What is
it?"
"M-maril," said the girl.
She swallowed.
"Th-thank you--."
"Maril," said Calhoun, "you are an idiot!
It was half-witted at best to
go off by yourself!
You could have been lost!
You could have cost me
days of hunting for you, days badly needed
for more important matters!"
He stopped and took breath.
"You may have spoiled what little chance
I've got to do something about the plans Weald's
already making!"
He said more bitterly still;
"And I had to leave Murgatroyd behind to get
to you in time!
He was
right in the path of that charge!"
He turned away from her and said dourly;
"All right!
Come on back to the ship.
We'll go to Dara.
We'd have to,
anyhow.
But Murgatroyd--"
Then he heard a very small sneeze.
Out of a rolling wall of
still-roiling dust, Murgatroyd appeared forlornly.
He was dust-covered,
and draggled, and his tail drooped, and he
sneezed again.
He moved as if
he could barely put one paw before another,
but at the sight of Calhoun
he sneezed yet again and said, "_Chee!_" in
a disconsolate voice.
Then
he sat down and waited for Calhoun to pick
him up.
When Calhoun did so, Murgatroyd clung to him
pathetically and said,
"_Chee-chee!_" and again "_Chee-chee!_" with
the intonation of one
telling of incredible horrors and disasters
endured.
Calhoun headed back for the valley, the settlement
and the Med Ship.
Murgatroyd clung to his neck.
The girl Maril followed visibly shaken.
Calhoun did not speak to her again.
He led the way.
A mile back toward
the mountains, they began to see stragglers
from the now-vanished herd.
A little further, those stragglers began to
notice them.
And it would
have been a matter of no moment if they'd
been domesticated
dairy-cattle, but these were range-cattle
gone wild.
Twice, Calhoun had
to use his blast-rifle to discourage incipient
charges by irritated
bulls or even more irritated cows.
Those with calves darkly suspected
Calhoun of designs upon their offspring.
It was a relief to enter the valley again.
But it was two miles more to
the landing-grid with the Med Ship beside
it and the reek of carrion in
the air.
They were perhaps two hundred feet from the
ship when a blast-rifle
crashed and its bolt whined past Calhoun so
close that he felt the
monstrous heat.
There had been no challenge.
There was no warning.
There
was simply a shot which came horribly close
to ending Calhoun's career
in a completely arbitrary fashion.
CHAPTER 4
Five minutes later Calhoun had located one
would-be killer behind a mass
of splintered planking that once had been
a wall.
He set the wood afire
by a blaster-bolt and then viciously sent
other bolts all around the man
it had sheltered when he fled from the flames.
He could have killed him
ten times over, but it was more desirable
to open communication.
So he
missed, intentionally.
Maril had cried out that she came from Dara
and had word for them, but
they did not answer.
There were three men with heavy-duty blast-rifles.
One was the one Calhoun had burned out of
his hiding-place.
That man's
rifle exploded when the flames hit it.
Two remained.
One--so Calhoun
presently discovered--was working his way
behind underbrush to a shelf
from which he could shoot down at Calhoun.
Calhoun had dropped into a
hollow and pulled Maril to cover at the first
shot.
The second man
happily planned to get to a point where he
could shoot him like a fish
in a barrel.
The third man had fired half a dozen times
and then
disappeared.
Calhoun estimated that he intended to get
around to the
rear, in hope there was no protection from
that direction for Calhoun.
It would take some time for him to manage
it.
So Calhoun industriously concentrated his
fire on the man trying to get
above him.
He was behind a boulder, not too dissimilar
to Calhoun's
breastwork.
Calhoun set fire to the brush at the point
at which the
other man aimed.
That, then, made his effort useless.
Then Calhoun sent
a dozen bolts at the other man's rocky shield.
It heated up.
Steam rose
in a whitish mass and blew directly away from
Calhoun.
He saw that
antagonist flee.
He saw him so clearly that he was positive
that there
was a patch of blue pigment on the right-hand
side of the back of his
neck.
He grunted and swung to find the third.
That man moved through thick
undergrowth, and Calhoun set it on fire in
a neat pattern of spreading
flames.
Evidently, these men had had no training in
battle-tactics with
blast-rifles.
The third man also had to get away.
He did.
But something
from him arched through the smoke.
It fell to the ground directly upwind
from Calhoun.
White smoke puffed up violently.
It was instinct that made Calhoun react as
he did.
He jerked the girl
Maril to her feet and rushed her toward the
Med Ship.
Smoke from the
flung bomb upwind barely swirled around him
and missed Maril altogether.
Calhoun, though, got a whiff of something
strange, not scorched or
burning vegetation at all.
He ceased to breathe and plunged onward.
In
clear air he emptied his lungs and refilled
them.
They were then halfway
to the ship, with Murgatroyd prancing on ahead.
But then Calhoun's heart began to pound furiously.
His muscles twitched
and tense.
He felt extraordinary symptoms like an extreme
of agitation.
Calhoun was familiar enough with tear-gas,
used by police on some
planets.
But this was different and worse.
Even as he helped and urged
Maril onward, he automatically considered
his sensations, and had it.
Panic gas!
Police did not use it because panic is worse
than rioting.
Calhoun felt all the physical symptoms of
fear and of gibbering terror.
A man whose mind yields to terror experiences
certain physical
sensations, wildly beating heart, tensed and
twitching muscles, and a
frantic impulse to convulsive action.
A man in whom those physical
sensations are induced by other means will--ordinarily--find
his mind
yielding to terror.
Calhoun couldn't combat his feelings, but
his clinical attitude enabled
him to act despite them.
The three from Weald reached the base of the
Med Ship.
One of their enemies had lost his rifle and
need not be
counted.
Another had fled from flames and might be
ignored for some
moments, anyhow.
But a blast-bolt struck the ship's metal hull
only feet
from Calhoun, and he whipped around to the
other side and let loose a
staccato of fire which emptied the rifle of
all its charges.
Then he opened the airlock door, hating the
fact that he shook and
trembled.
He urged the girl and Murgatroyd in.
He slammed the outer
airlock door just as another blaster-bolt
hit.
"They--they don't realize," said Maril desperately.
"If they only
knew--."
"Talk to them, if you like," said Calhoun.
His teeth chattered and he
raged, because the symptom was of terror he
denied.
He pushed a button on the control-board.
He pointed to a microphone.
He
got at an oxygen-bottle and inhaled deeply.
Oxygen, obviously, should be
an antidote for panic, since the symptoms
of terror act to increase the
oxygenation of the blood-stream and muscles,
and to make superhuman
exertion possible if necessary.
Breathing ninety-five per cent oxygen
produced the effect the terror-inspiring gas
strove for, so his heart
slowed nearly to normal and his body relaxed.
He held out his hand and
it did not tremble.
* * * * *
He turned to Maril.
She hadn't spoken into the mike yet.
"They--may not be from Dara!" she said shakily.
"I just thought!
They
could be somebody else--maybe criminals who
planned to raid the mine for
a shipload of its ore ..."
"Nonsense!" said Calhoun.
"I saw one of them clearly enough to be sure.
But they're skeptical characters.
I'm afraid there may be more on the
way here wherever they keep themselves.
Anyhow, now we know some of them
are in hearing!
I'll take advantage of that and we'll go on."
He took the microphone.
Instants later his voice boomed in the stillness
outside the ship, cutting through the thin
shrill of invisible small
creatures.
"This is the Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty," said
Calhoun's voice, amplified
to a shout.
"I left Weald four days ago, one day after
the cargo-ship
from here arrived with everybody on board
dead.
On Weald they don't know
how it happened, but they suspect blueskins.
Sooner or later they'll
search here.
Get away!
Cover up your tracks!
Hide all signs that you've
ever been here!
Get the hell away, fast!
One more warning!
There's talk
of fusion-bombing Dara.
They're scared!
If they find your
traces, they'll be more scared still!
So cover up your tracks
and--get--away--from--here!"
The many-times-multiplied voice rolled and
echoed among the hills.
But
it was very clear.
Where it could be heard it could be understood,
and
it could be heard for miles.
But there was no response to it.
Calhoun waited a reasonable time.
Then
he shrugged and seated himself at the control-board.
"It isn't easy," he observed, "to persuade
desperate men that they've
out-smarted themselves!
Hold hard, Murgatroyd!"
[Illustration]
The rockets bellowed.
Then there was a tremendous noise to end all
noises, and the ship began to climb.
It sped up and up and up.
By the
time it was out of atmosphere it had velocity
enough to coast to clear
space and Calhoun cut the rockets altogether.
He busied himself with
those astrogational chores which began with
orienting oneself to
galactic directions after leaving a planet
which rotates at its own
individual speed.
Then one computes the overdrive course to
another
planet, from the respective coördinates of
the world one is leaving and
the one one aims for.
Then,--in this case at any rate--there was
the
very finicky task of picking out a fourth-magnitude
star of whose
planets one was his destination.
He aimed for it with ultra-fine
precision.
"Overdrive coming," he said presently.
"Hold on!"
Space reeled.
There was nausea and giddiness and a horrible
sensation of
falling in a wildly unlikely spiral.
Then stillness, and solidity, and
the blackness of the Pit outside the Med Ship.
The little craft was in
overdrive again.
After a long while, the girl Maril said uneasily.
"I don't know what you plan now--."
"I'm going to Dara," said Calhoun.
"On Orede I tried to get the
blueskins there to get going, fast.
Maybe I succeeded.
I don't know.
But
this thing's been mishandled!
Even if there's a famine, people shouldn't
do things out of desperation!"
"I know now that I was--very foolish--."
"Forget it," commanded Calhoun.
"I wasn't talking about you.
Here I run
into a situation that the Med Service should
have caught and cleaned up
generations ago!
But it's not only a Med Service obligation,
it's a
current mess!
Before I could begin to get at the basic problem,
those
idiots on Orede--.
It'd happened before I reached Weald!
An emotional
explosion triggered by a ship full of dead
men that nobody intended to
kill."
Maril shook her head.
* * * * *
"Those Darian characters," said Calhoun annoyedly,
"shouldn't have gone
to Orede in the first place.
If they went there, they should at least
have stayed on a continent where there were
no people from Weald digging
a mine and hunting cattle for sport on their
off days!
They could be
spotted!
I believe they were!
And again, if it had been a long way from
the mine installation, they could probably
have wiped out the people who
sighted them before they could get back with
the news!
But it looks like
miners saw men hunting, and got close enough
to see they were blueskins,
and then got back to the mine with the news!"
She waited for him to explain.
"I know I'm guessing, but it fits!" he said
distastefully.
"So something
had to be done.
Either the mining settlement had to be wiped
out or the
story that blueskins were on Orede had to
be discredited.
The blueskins
tried for both.
They used panic-gas on a herd of cattle and
it made them
crazy and they charged the settlement like
the four-footed lunatics they
are!
And the blueskins used panic-gas on the settlement
itself as the
cattle went through.
It should have settled the whole business
nicely.
After it was over every man in the settlement
would believe he'd been
out of his head for a while, and he'd have
the crazy state of the
settlement to think about, and he wouldn't
be sure of what he'd seen or
heard beforehand.
They might try to verify the blueskin story
later, but
they wouldn't believe anything certainly!
It should have worked!"
Again she waited.
So Calhoun said very wrily indeed;
"Unfortunately, when the miners panicked,
they stampeded into the ship.
Also unfortunately, panic-gas got into the
ship with them.
So they
stayed panicked while the astrogator--in panic!--took
off and headed for
Weald and threw on the overdrive--which would
be set for Weald
anyhow--because that would be the fastest
way to run away from whatever
he imagined he feared.
But he and all the men on the ship were still
crazy with panic from the gas they were re-breathing
until they died!"
Silence.
After a long interval, Maril asked;
"You don't think the--Darians intended to
kill?"
"I think they were stupid!" said Calhoun angrily.
"Somebody's always
urging the police to use panic-gas in case
of public tumult.
But it's
too dangerous.
Nobody knows what one man will do in a panic.
Take a
hundred or two or three and panic them all,
and there's no limit to
their craziness!
The whole thing was handled wrong!"
"But you don't blame them?"
"For being stupid, yes," said Calhoun fretfully.
"But if I'd been in
their place, perhaps ..."
"Where were you born?" asked Maril suddenly.
Calhoun jerked his head around.
He said;
"No!
Not where you're guessing--or hoping.
Not on Dara.
Just because I
act as if Darians were human doesn't mean
I have to be one!
I'm a Med
Service man, and I'm acting as I think I should."
His tone became
exasperated.
"Dammit, I'm supposed to deal with health
situations,
actual and possible causes of human deaths!
And if Weald thinks it finds
proof that blueskins are in space again and
caused the death of
Wealdians it won't be healthy!
They're halfway set anyhow to drop
fusion-bombs on Dara to wipe it out!"
Maril said fiercely;
"They might as well drop bombs.
It'll be quicker than starvation, at
least!"
Calhoun looked at her more exasperatedly than
before.
"It is a crop failure again?" he demanded.
When she nodded he said
bitterly; "Famine conditions already?"
When she nodded again he said
drearily; "And of course famine is the great-grandfather
of health
problems!
And that's right in my lap with all the rest!"
He stood up.
Then he sat down again.
"I'm tired!" he said flatly.
"I'd like to get some sleep."
Maril understood.
She picked up a book and went into the other
cabin.
* * * * *
Alone in the control compartment, he tried
to relax, but it was not
possible.
He flung himself into a comfortable chair
and considered the
situation of the people of the planet Dara.
Those people were marked by
patches of blue pigment as an inherited consequence
of a plague of three
generations past.
Dara was a planet of pariahs, excluded from
the human
race by those who had been conditioned to
fear them.
And now there was famine on Dara for the second
time, and they were of
no mind to starve quietly.
There was food on the planet Orede, monstrous
herds of cattle without owners.
It was natural enough for Darians to
build a ship or ships and try to bring food
back to its starving people.
But that desperately necessary enterprise
had now roused Weald to a
frenzy of apprehension.
Weald was if possible more hysterically afraid
of blueskins than ever before, and even more
implacably the enemy of the
starving planet's population.
Weald itself throve and prospered.
Ironically, it had such an excess of foodstuffs
that it stored them in
unneeded space-ships in orbits about itself.
Hundreds of thousands of
tons of grain circled Weald in sealed-tight
hulks, while the people of
Dara starved and only dared try to steal--it
could be called
stealing--some of the innumerable wild cattle
of Orede.
The blueskins on Orede could not trust Calhoun,
so they pretended not to
hear--or maybe they didn't hear.
They'd been abandoned and betrayed by
all of humanity beyond their world.
They'd been threatened and oppressed
by guardships in orbit about them, ready to
shoot down any space-craft
they might send aloft.
So Calhoun pondered ...
* * * * *
A long time later Calhoun heard small sounds
which were not normal on a
Med Ship in overdrive.
They were not part of the random noises carefully
generated to keep the silence of the ship
endurable.
Calhoun raised his
head.
He listened sharply.
No sound could come from outside.
He knocked on the door of the sleeping-cabin.
The noises stopped
instantly.
"Come out," he commanded through the door.
"I'm--I'm all right," said Maril's voice.
But it was not quite steady.
She paused.
"I was just having a bad dream."
"I wish," said Calhoun, "that you'd tell me
the truth occasionally!
Come
out, please!"
There were stirrings.
After a little the door opened and Maril appeared.
She looked as if she'd been crying.
She said quickly;
"I probably look queer, but it's because I
was asleep."
"To the contrary," said Calhoun, fuming, "you've
been lying awake
crying.
I don't know why.
I've been out here wishing I could sleep,
because I'm frustrated.
But since you aren't asleep maybe you can
help
me with my job.
I've figured some things out.
For some others I need
facts.
How about it?"
She swallowed.
"I'll try."
"Coffee?" he asked.
Murgatroyd popped his head out of his miniature
sleeping-cabin.
"_Chee?_" he asked interestedly.
"Go back to sleep!" snapped Calhoun.
He began to pace back and forth.
"I need to know something about the pigment
patches," he said jerkily.
"Maybe it sounds crazy to think of such things
now.
First things first,
you know.
But that is a first thing!
So long as Darians don't look like
the people of other worlds, they'll be considered
different.
If they
look repulsive, they'll be thought of as evil....
Tell me about those
patches.
They're different-sized and different-shaped
and they appear in
different places.
You've none on your face or hands, anyhow."
"I haven't any at all," said the girl reservedly.
"I thought--"
"Not everybody," she said defensively.
"Nearly, yes.
But not all.
Some
people don't have them.
Some people are born with bluish splotches
on
their skin, but they fade out while they're
children.
When they grow up
they're just like--the people of Weald or
any other world.
And their
children never have them."
Calhoun stared.
"You couldn't possibly be proved to be a Darian,
then?"
She shook her head.
Calhoun remembered, and started the coffee-maker.
"When you left Dara," he said, "You were carried
a long, long way, to
some planet where they'd practically never
heard of Dara, and where the
name meant nothing.
You could have settled there, or anywhere
else and
forgotten about Dara.
But you didn't.
Why not, since you're not a
blueskin?"
"But I am!" she said fiercely.
"My parents, my brothers and sisters, and
Korvan--."
Then she bit her lip.
Calhoun took note but did not comment on the
name
that she had mentioned.
"Then your parents had the splotches fade,
so you never had them," he
said absorbedly.
"Something like that happened on Tralee, once!
There's
a virus--a whole group of virus particles!
Normally we humans are immune
to them.
One has to be in terrifically bad physical
condition for them
to take hold and produce whatever effects
they do.
But once they're
established they're passed on from mother
to child....
And when they die
out it's during childhood, too!"
He poured coffee for the two of them.
As usual, Murgatroyd swung down to
the floor and said impatiently;
"_Chee!
Chee!
Chee!_"
Calhoun absently filled Murgatroyd's tiny
cup and handed it to him.
"But this is marvellous!" he said exuberantly.
"The blue patches
appeared after the plague, didn't they?
After people recovered--when
they recovered?"
* * * * *
Maril stared at him.
His mind was filled with strictly professional
considerations.
He was not talking to her as a person.
She was purely a
source of information.
"So I'm told," said Maril reservedly.
"Are there any more humiliating
questions you want to ask?"
He gaped at her.
Then he said ruefully;
"I'm stupid, Maril, but you're touchy.
There's nothing personal."
"There is to me!" she said fiercely.
"I was born among blueskins, and
they're of my blood, and they're hated and
I'd have been killed on Weald
if I'd been known as--what I am!
And there's Korvan, who arranged for me
to be sent away as a spy and advised me to
do just what you
said,--abandon my home world and everybody
I care about!
Including him!
It's personal to me!"
Calhoun wrinkled his forehead helplessly.
"I'm sorry," he repeated, "Drink your coffee!"
"I don't want it," she said bitterly.
"I'd like to die!"
"If you stay around where I am," Calhoun told
her, "you may get your
wish.
All right.
There'll be no more questions, I promise."
She turned and moved toward the door to the
sleeping-cabin.
Calhoun
looked after her.
"Maril," he called out to her.
"What?"
"Why were you crying?"
"You wouldn't understand," she said evenly.
Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to
his ears.
He was a
professional man.
In his profession he was not incompetent.
But there is
no profession in which a really competent
man tries to understand women.
Calhoun annoyedly had to let fate or chance
or disaster take care of
Maril's personal problems.
He had larger matters to cope with.
But he had something to work on, now.
He hunted busily in the reference
tapes.
He came up with an explicit collection of
information on exactly
the subject he needed.
He left the control-room to go down into the
storage areas of the Med Ship's hull.
He found an ultra-frigid storage
box, whose contents were kept at the temperature
of liquid air.
He
donned thick gloves, used a special set of
tongs, and extracted a tiny
block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial
of glass was embedded.
It
frosted instantly he took it out, and when
the storage-box was closed
again the block was covered with a thick and
opaque coating of frozen
moisture.
He went back to the control-room and pulled
down the panel which made
available a small-scale but surprisingly adequate
biological laboratory.
He set the plastic block in a container which
would raise it very, very
gradually to a specific temperature and hold
it there.
It was,
obviously, a living culture from which any
imaginable quantity of the
same culture could be bred.
Calhoun set the apparatus with great
exactitude.
"This," he told Murgatroyd, "may be a good
day's work.
Now I think I can
rest."
Then, for a long while, there was no sound
or movement in the Med Ship.
The girl Maril may have slept, or maybe not.
Calhoun lay relaxed in a
chair which at the touch of a button became
the most comfortable of
sleeping-places.
Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his
tail curled
over his nose.
There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable
murmurings now and again.
They kept the feeling of life alive in the
ship.
But for such infinitesimal stirrings of sound--carefully
recorded
for this exact purpose--the feel of the ship
would have been that of a
tomb.
But it was quite otherwise when another ship-day
began with the taped
sounds of morning activities as faint as echoes
but nevertheless
establishing an atmosphere of their own.
* * * * *
Calhoun examined the plastic block and its
contents.
He read the
instruments which had cared for it while he
slept.
He put the block--no
longer frosted--in the culture-microscope
and saw its enclosed,
infinitesimal particles of life in the process
of multiplying on the
food that had been frozen with them when they
were reduced to the spore
condition.
He beamed.
He replaced the block in the incubation oven
and
faced the day cheerfully.
Maril greeted him with great reserve.
They breakfasted.
"I've been thinking," said Maril evenly.
"I think I can get you a
hearing for--whatever ideas you may have to
help Dara."
"Kind of you," murmured Calhoun.
"May I ask whose influence you'll
exert?"
"There's a man," said Maril reservedly, "who--thinks
a great deal of me.
I don't know his present official position,
but he was certain to become
prominent.
I'll tell him how you've acted up to now,
and your attitude,
and of course that you're Med Service.
He'll be glad to help you, I'm
sure."
"Splendid!" said Calhoun, nodding.
"That will be Korvan."
She started.
"How did you know?"
"Intuition," said Calhoun drily.
"All right.
I'll count on him."
But he did not.
He worked in the tiny biological lab all that
ship-day
and all the next.
The girl remained quiet.
On the ship-day after, the time for breakfast
approached.
And while the
ship was practically a world all by itself,
it was easy to look forward
with confidence to the future.
But when contact and--in a
fashion--conflict with other and larger worlds
loomed nearer, prospects
seemed less bright.
Calhoun had definite plans, now, but there
were so
many ways in which they could be frustrated!
Weald's political leaders
could not oppose hysterical demands for action
against blueskins, after
a deathship arrived with no signs whatever
of blueskins as responsible
for its cargo of corpses.
It was certain that a starving Dara would
tend
to desperate and fatal measures against hereditary
enemies.
Calhoun sat down at the control-board and
watched the clock.
"I've got things lined up," he told Maril
wrily, "if only they work out.
_If_ I can make somebody on Dara listen and
follow my advice and _if_
Weald doesn't get ideas and isn't doing what
I suspect it is, maybe
something can be done."
"I'm sure you'll do your best," said Maril
politely.
Calhoun managed to grin.
He watched the ship-clock.
There was no
sensation attached to overdrive travel except
at the beginning and the
end.
It was now time for the end.
He might find that absolutely anything
had happened while he made plans which would
immediately be seen to be
hopeless.
Weald could have sent ships to Dara, or Dara
might be in such
a state of desperation that ...
As it turned out, Dara was desperate.
The Med Ship came out nearly a
light-month from the sun about which the planet
Dara revolved.
Calhoun
went into a short hop toward it.
Then Dara was on the other side of the
blazing yellow star.
It took time to reach it.
He called down,
identifying himself and the ship and asking
for coördinates so his ship
could be brought to ground.
There was confusion, as if the request were
so unusual that the answers were not ready.
The grid, too, was on the
planet's night side.
Presently the ship was locked onto by the
grid's
force-fields.
It went downward without incident.
Calhoun saw that Maril sat tensely, twisting
her fingers within each
other, until the ship actually touched ground.
Then he opened the exit-port, and faced armed
men in the darkness, with
blast-rifles trained on him.
There was a portable cannon trained on the
Med Ship itself.
"Come out!"
rasped a voice.
"If you try anything you get blasted!
Your
ship and its contents are seized by the planetary
government!"
CHAPTER 5
It seemed that the smell of hunger was in
the air.
The armed men were
cadaverous.
Lights came on, and stark, harsh shadows lay
black upon the
ground.
Calhoun's captors were uniformed, but the
uniforms hung loosely
upon them.
Where the lights struck upon their faces,
their cheeks were
hollow.
They were emaciated.
And there were the splotches of pigment of
which Calhoun had heard.
The leader of the truculent group was blue,
except for two fingers which in the glaring
illumination seemed whiter
than white.
"Out!" said that man savagely.
"We're taking over your stock of food.
You'll get your share of it, like everybody
else, but--out!"
Maril spoke over Calhoun's shoulder.
She uttered a cryptic sentence or
two.
It should have amounted to identification,
but there was skepticism
in the the armed party.
"Oh, you're one of us, eh?" said the guard-leader
sardonically.
"You'll
have a chance to prove that!
Come out of there!"
Calhoun spoke abruptly;
"This is a Med Ship," he said.
"There are medicines and bacterial
cultures, inside it.
They shouldn't be meddled with.
Here on Dara you've
had enough of plagues!"
The man with the blue hand said as sardonically
as before;
"I said the government was taking over your
ship!
It won't be looted.
But you're not taking a full cargo of food
away!
In fact, it's not
likely you're leaving!"
"I want to speak to someone in authority,"
snapped Calhoun.
"We've just
come from Weald."
He felt bristling hatred all about him as
he named
Weald.
"There's tumult there.
They're talking about dropping fusion
bombs here.
It's important that I talk to somebody with
the authority to
take a few sensible precautions!"
He descended to the ground.
There was a panicky "_Chee!
Chee!_" from
behind him, and Murgatroyd came dashing to
swarm up his body and cling
apprehensively to his neck.
"What's that?"
"A _tormal,_" said Calhoun.
"He's not a pet.
Your medical men will know
something about him.
This is a Med Ship and I'm a Med Ship man,
and he's
an important member of the crew.
He's a Med Ship _tormal_ and he stays
with me!"
The man with the blue hand said harshly;
"There's somebody waiting to ask you questions.
Here!"
A ground-car came rolling out from the side
of the landing-grid
enclosure.
The ground-car ran on wheels, and wheels were
not much used
on modern worlds.
Dara was behind the times in more ways than
one.
"This car will take you to Defense and you
can tell them anything you
want.
But don't try to sneak back in this ship!
It'll be guarded!"
The ground-car was enclosed, with room for
a driver and the three from
the Med Ship.
But armed men festooned themselves about its
exterior and
it went bumping and rolling to the massive
ground-layer girders of the
grid.
It rolled out under them and there was paved
highway.
It picked up
speed.
There were buildings on either side of the
road, but few showed lights.
This was night-time, and the men at the landing-grid
had set a pattern
of hunger, so that the silence and the dark
buildings did not seem a
sign of tranquility and sleep, but of exhaustion
and despair.
The
highway lamps were few, by comparison with
other inhabited worlds, and
the ground-car needed lights of its own to
guide its driver over a paved
surface that needed repair.
By those moving lights other depressing
things could be seen.
Untidiness.
Buildings not kept up to perfection.
Evidences of apathy.
The road hadn't been cleaned lately.
There was
litter here and there.
Even the fact that there were no stars added
to the feeling of
wretchedness and gloom and--ultimately--of
hunger.
Maril spoke nervously to the driver.
"The famine isn't any better?"
He moved his head in negation, but did not
speak.
"I left--two years ago," said Maril.
"It was just beginning then.
Rationing hadn't started then--."
The driver said evenly;
"There's rationing now!"
* * * * *
The car went on and on.
A vast open space appeared ahead.
Lights about
its perimeter seemed few and pale.
"E-everything seems--worse.
Even the lights."
"Using all the power," said the driver, "to
warm up ground to grow crops
where it ought to be winter.
Not doing too well, either."
Calhoun knew, somehow, that Maril moistened
her lips.
"I--was sent," she explained to the driver,
"to go ashore on Trent and
then make my way to Weald.
I--mailed reports of what I found out back
to
Trent.
Somebody got them back to here whenever--it
was possible."
The driver said;
"Everybody knows the man on Trent disappeared.
Maybe he got caught,
maybe somebody saw him without makeup.
Or maybe he just quit being one
of us.
What's the difference?
No use!"
Calhoun found himself wincing a little.
The driver was not angry.
He was
hopeless.
But men should not despair.
They shouldn't accept hostility
from those about them as a device of fate
for their destruction.
They
shouldn't ...
Maril said quickly to him;
"You understand?
Dara's a heavy-metals planet.
There aren't many light
elements in our soil.
Potassium is scarce.
So our ground isn't very
fertile.
Before the Plague we traded heavy metals and
manufactures for
imports of food and potash.
But since the Plague we've had no off-planet
commerce.
We've been--quarantined."
"I gathered as much," said Calhoun.
"It was up to Med Service to see
that that didn't happen.
It's up to Med Service now to see that it
stops."
"Too late now for anything," said the driver,
"whatever Med Service may
be!
They're talking about cutting down our population
so there'll be
food enough for some to live.
There are two questions about it: who's to
be kept alive and why."
The ground-car aimed now for a cluster of
faintly brighter lights on the
far side of the great open space.
They enlarged as they grew nearer.
Maril said hesitantly;
"There was someone--Korvan--" Calhoun didn't
catch the rest of the name,
Maril said hesitantly; "He was working on
food-plants.
I--thought he
might accomplish something ..."
The driver said caustically;
"Sure!
Everybody's heard about him!
He came up with a wonderful thing!
He and his outfit worked out a way to process
weeds so they can be
eaten.
And they can.
You can fill your belly and not feel hungry,
but
it's like eating hay.
You starve just the same.
He's still working.
Head
of a government division."
The ground-car passed through a gate.
It stopped before a lighted door.
The armed men hanging to its outside dropped
off.
They watched Calhoun
closely as he stepped out with Murgatroyd
riding on his shoulder.
Minutes later they faced a hastily-summoned
group of officials of the
Darian government.
For a ship to land on Dara was so remarkable
an event
that it called practically for a cabinet meeting.
And Calhoun noted that
they were no better fed than the guards at
the space-port.
They regarded Calhoun and Maril with oddly
burning eyes.
It was, of
course, because the two of them showed no
signs of hunger.
They
obviously had not been on short rations.
"My name is Calhoun," said Calhoun briskly.
"I've the usual Med Service
credentials.
Now ..."
He did not wait to be questioned.
He told them of the appalling state of
things in the Twelfth Sector of the Med Service,
so that men had been
borrowed from other sectors to remedy the
intolerable, and he was one of
them.
He told of his arrival at Weald and what had
happened there, from
the excessively cautious insistence that he
prove he was not a Darian,
to the arrival of the death-ship from Orede.
He was giving them the news
affecting them, as they had not heard it before.
He went on to tell of his stop at Orede and
his purpose, and his
encounter with the men he found there.
When he finished there was
silence.
He broke it.
"Now," he said, "Maril's an agent of yours.
She can add to what I've
told you.
I'm Med Service.
I have a job to do here to repair what wasn't
done before.
I should make a planetary health inspection
and make
recommendations for the improvement of the
state of things.
I'll be glad
if you'll arrange for me to talk to your health
officials.
Things look
bad, and something should be done."
Someone laughed without mirth.
"What will you recommend for long-continued
undernourishment?" he asked
derisively.
"That's our health problem!"
"I recommend food," said Calhoun.
"Where'll you fill the prescription?"
"I've the answer to that, too," said Calhoun
curtly.
"I'll want to talk
to any space-pilots you've got.
Get your astrogators together and I
think they'll approve my idea."
The silence was totally skeptical.
"Orede ..."
"Not Orede," said Calhoun.
"Weald will be hunting that planet over for
Darians.
If they find any, they'll drop bombs here."
"Our only space-pilots," said a tall man,
presently, "are on Orede now.
If you've told the truth, they'll probably
head back because of your
warning.
They should bring meat."
His mouth worked peculiarly, and Calhoun knew
that it was at the thought
of food.
"Which," said another man sharply, "goes to
the hospitals!
I haven't
tasted meat in two years!"
"Nobody has," growled another man still.
"But here's this man Calhoun.
I'm not convinced he can work magic, but we
can find out if he lies.
Put
a guard on his ship.
Otherwise let our health men give him his
head.
They'll find out if he's from this Medical
Service he tells of!
And this
Maril--"
"I--can be identified," said Maril.
"I was sent to gather information
and sent it in secret writing to one of us
on Trent.
I have a family
here.
They'll know me!
And I--there was someone who was working on
foods, and I believe he--made it possible
to use--all sorts of
vegetation for food.
He will identify me."
Someone laughed harshly.
"Oh, yes!" said a man with a blue forehead.
"He's a valuable man!
Within
the year he's come up with a way to make his
weeds taste like any food
one chooses.
If we decide to cut our population, we'll
simply give the
people to be eliminated all they want to eat
of his products.
They'll
not be hungry.
They'll be quite happy.
But they'll die for lack of
nourishment.
He's volunteered to prove it painless by going
through it
himself!"
Maril swallowed.
"I'd like to see him," she repeated.
"And my family."
Some of the blue-splotched men turned away.
A broad-shouldered man said
bluntly;
"Don't look for them to be glad to see you.
And you'd better not show
yourself in public.
You've been well fed.
You'll be hated for that."
Maril began to cry.
Murgatroyd said bewilderedly;
"_Chee!
Chee!_"
Calhoun held him close.
There was confusion.
And Calhoun found the
Minister of Health at hand--he looked most
harried of all the officials
gathered to question Calhoun--and proposed
that he get a look at the
hospital situation right away.
* * * * *
It wasn't practical.
With all the population on half rations or
less,
when night came people needed to sleep.
Most people, indeed, slept as
many hours out of the traditional twenty-four
as they could manage.
It
was much more pleasant to sleep than to be
awake and constantly nagged
at by continued hunger.
And there was the matter of simple decency.
Continuous gnawing hunger had an embittering
effect upon everyone.
Quarrelsomeness was a common experience.
And people who would normally
be the leaders of opinion felt shame because
they were obsessed by
thoughts of food.
It was best when people slept.
Still, Calhoun was in the hospitals by daybreak.
What he found moved him
to savage anger.
There were too many sick children.
In every case
undernourishment contributed to their sickness.
And there was not enough
food to make them well.
Doctors and nurses denied themselves food
to
spare it for their patients.
Calhoun brought out hormones and enzymes and
medicaments from the Med
Ship while the guard in the ship looked on.
He demonstrated the
processes of synthesis and autocatalysis that
enabled such small samples
to be multiplied indefinitely.
He was annoyed by a clamorous appetite.
There were some doctors who ignored the irony
of medical techniques
being taught to cure non-nutritional disease,
when everybody was
half-fed, or less.
They approved of Calhoun.
They even approved of
Murgatroyd when Calhoun explained his function.
He was, of course, a Med Service _tormal_,
and _tormals_ were creatures
of talent.
They'd originally been found on a planet in
the Deneb area,
and they were engaging and friendly small
animals, but the remarkable
fact about them was that they couldn't contract
any disease.
Not any.
They had a built-in, explosive reaction to
bacterial and viral toxins,
and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism
discovered to which a
_tormal_ could not more or less immediately
develop antibody-resistance.
So that in interstellar medicine _tormals_
were priceless.
Let
Murgatroyd be infected with however localized,
however specialized an
inimical organism, and presently some highly
valuable defensive
substance could be isolated from his blood
and he'd remain in his usual
exuberant good health.
When the antibody was analyzed by those
techniques of microanalysis the Service had
developed,--why--that was
that.
The antibody could be synthesized and one
could attack any
epidemic with confidence.
The tragedy for Dara was, of course, that
no Med Ship had come there,
three generations ago, when the Dara plague
raged.
Worse, after the
plague Weald was able to exert pressure which
only a criminally
incompetent Med Service director would have
permitted.
But criminal
incompetence and its consequences was what
Calhoun had been loaned to
Sector Twelve to help remedy.
He was not at ease, though.
No ship arrived from Orede to bear out his
account of an attempt to get that lonely world
evacuated before Weald
discovered it had blueskins on it.
Maril had vanished, to visit or
return to her family, or perhaps to consult
with the mysterious Korvan
who'd arranged for her to leave Dara to be
a spy, and had advised her
simply to make a new life somewhere else,
abandoning a famine-ridden,
despised, and outcast world.
Calhoun had learned of two achievements
the same Korvan had made for his world.
Neither was remarkably
constructive.
He'd offered to prove the value of the second
by dying of
it.
Which might make him a very admirable character,
or he could have a
passion for martyrdom,--which is much more
common than most people
think.
In two days Calhoun was irritable enough from
unaccustomed hunger
to suspect the worst of him.
And there was Weald to worry about.
Weald was hysterically resolved to
end what it considered the blueskin menace
for once and for all.
There
were parallels to such unreasoning frenzy
even in the ancient history of
Earth.
A word still remained in the dictionaries
referring to it.
Genocide.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Calhoun worked doggedly; in the
hospitals while the patients
were awake and in the Med Ship--under guard--afterward.
He had hunger
cramps now, but he tested a plastic cube with
a thriving biological
culture in it.
He worked at increasing his store of it.
He'd snipped
samples of pigmented skin from dead patients
in the hospitals, and
examined the pigmented areas, and very, very
painstakingly verified a
theory.
It took an electron microscope to do it, but
he found a virus in
the blue patches which matched the type discovered
on Tralee.
The Tralee
viruses had effects which were passed on from
mother to child, and
heredity had been charged with the observed
results of quasi-living
viral particles.
And then Calhoun very, very carefully introduced
into a
virus culture the material he had been growing
in a plastic cube.
He
watched what happened.
He was satisfied, so much so that immediately
afterward he barely
managed to stagger off to bed.
That night the ship from Orede came in, packed
with frozen bloody
carcasses of cattle.
Calhoun knew nothing of it.
But next morning Maril
came back.
There were shadows under her eyes and her
expression was of
someone who has lost everything that had meaning
in her life.
"I'm all right," she insisted, when Calhoun
commented.
"I've been
visiting my family.
I've seen--Korvan.
I'm quite all right."
"You haven't eaten any better than I have,"
Calhoun observed.
"I--couldn't!" admitted Maril.
"My sisters--my little sisters--so
thin....
There's rationing for everybody and it's all
efficiently
arranged.
They even had rations for me.
But I couldn't eat!
I--gave most
of my food to my sisters and they--squabbled
over it!"
Calhoun said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
Then she said in a no
less desolate tone;
"Korvan said I was foolish to come back."
"He could be right," said Calhoun.
"But I had to!" protested Maril.
"Because I--I've been eating all I
wanted to, on Weald and in the ship, and I'm
ashamed because they're
half-starved and I'm not.
And when you see what hunger does to them
...
It's terrible to be half-starved and not able
to think of anything but
food!"
"I hope," said Calhoun, "to do something about
that.
If I can get hold
of an astrogator or two."
"The--ship that was on Orede came in during
the night," Maril told him
shakily.
"It was loaded with frozen meat, but one ship-load's
not enough
to make a difference on a whole planet!
And if Weald hunts for us on
Orede, we daren't go back for more meat."
She said abruptly;
"There are some prisoners.
They were miners.
They were crowded out of
the ship.
The Darians who'd stampeded the cattle took
them prisoners.
They had to!"
"True," said Calhoun.
"It wouldn't have been wise to leave Wealdians
around on Orede with their throats cut.
Or living, either, to tell about
a rumor of blueskins.
Even if their throats will be cut now.
Is that the
program?"
Maril shivered.
"No ... They'll be put on short rations like
everybody else.
And people
will watch them.
The Wealdians expect to die of plague any
minute
because they've been with Darians.
So people look at them and laugh.
But it's not funny."
"It's natural," said Calhoun, "but perhaps
lacking in charity.
Look
here!
How about those astrogators?
I need them for a job I have in
mind."
Maril wrung her hands.
"C--come here," she said in a low tone.
* * * * *
There was an armed guard in the control-room
of the ship.
He'd watched
Calhoun a good part of the previous day as
Calhoun performed his
mysterious work.
He'd been off-duty and now was on duty again.
He was
bored.
So long as Calhoun did not touch the control-board,
though, he
was uninterested.
He didn't even turn his head when Maril led
the way
into the other cabin and slid the door shut.
"The astrogators are coming," she said swiftly.
"They'll bring some
boxes with them.
They'll ask you to instruct them so they can
handle our
ship better.
They lost themselves coming back from Orede,
no, they
didn't lose themselves, but they lost time--enough
time almost to make
an extra trip for meat.
They need to be experts.
I'm to come along, so
they can be sure that what you teach them
is what you've been doing
right along."
Calhoun said;
"Well?"
"They're crazy!" said Maril vehemently.
"They knew Weald would do
something monstrous sooner or later.
But they're going to try to stop it
by more monstrousness sooner!
Not everybody agrees, but there are
enough.
So they want to use your ship--it's faster
in overdrive and so
on.
And they'll go to Weald--in this ship--and--they
say they'll give
Weald something to keep it busy without bothering
us!"
Calhoun said drily;
"This pays me off for being too sympathetic
with blueskins!
But if I'd
been hungry for a couple of years, and was
despised to boot by the
people who kept me hungry, I suppose I might
react the same way.
No," he
said curtly as she opened her lips to speak
again.
"Don't tell me the
trick.
Considering everything, there's only one trick
it could be.
But I
doubt profoundly that it would work.
All right."
He slid the door back and returned to the
control-room.
Maril followed
him.
He said detachedly;
"I've been working on a problem outside of
the food one.
It isn't the
time to talk about it right now, but I think
I've solved it."
Maril turned her head, listening.
There were footsteps on the tarmac
outside the ship.
Both doors of the airlock were open.
Four men came in.
They were young men who did not look quite
as hungry as most Darians,
but there was a reason for that.
Their leader introduced himself and the
others.
They were the astrogators of the ship Dara
had built to try to
bring food from Orede.
They were not good enough, said their
self-appointed leader.
They overshot their destination.
They came out of
overdrive too far off line.
They needed instructions.
Calhoun nodded, and observed that he'd been
asking for them.
"We've got orders," said their leader, steadily,
"to come on board and
learn from you how to handle this ship.
It's better than the one we've
got."
"I asked for you," repeated Calhoun.
"I've an idea I'll explain as we go
along.
Those boxes?"
Someone was passing in iron boxes through
the airlock.
One of the four
very carefully brought them inside.
"They're rations," said a second young man.
"We don't go anywhere
without rations--except Orede."
"Orede, yes.
I think we were shooting at each other there,"
said Calhoun
pleasantly.
"Weren't we?"
"Yes," said the young man.
He was neither cordial nor antagonistic.
He was impassive.
Calhoun
shrugged.
"Then we can take off immediately.
Here's the communicator and there's
the button.
You might call the grid and arrange for us
to be lifted."
The young man seated himself at the control-board.
Very professionally,
he went through the routine of preparing to
lift by landing-grid, which
routine has not changed in two hundred years.
He went briskly ahead
until the order to lift.
Then Calhoun stopped him.
"Hold it!"
He pointed to the airlock.
Both doors were open.
The young man at the
control-board flushed vividly.
One of the others closed and dogged the
doors.
* * * * *
The ship lifted.
Calhoun watched with seeming negligence.
But he found
occasion for a dozen corrections of procedure.
This was presumably a
training voyage of his own suggestion.
Therefore when the blueskin pilot
would have flung the Med Ship into undirected
overdrive, Calhoun grew
stern.
He insisted on a destination.
He suggested Weald.
The young men
glanced at each other and accepted the suggestion.
He made the acting
pilot look up the intrinsic business of its
sun and measure its apparent
brightness from just off Dara.
He made him estimate the change in
brightness to be expected after so many hours
in overdrive, if one broke
out to measure.
The first blueskin student pilot ended a Calhoun-determined
tour of duty
with rather more of respect for Calhoun than
he'd had at the beginning.
The second was anxious to show up better than
the first.
Calhoun drilled
him in the use of brightness-charts, by which
the changes in apparent
brightness of stars between overdrive hops
could be correlated with
angular changes to give a three-dimensional
picture of the nearer
heavens.
It was a highly necessary art which had not
been worked out on
Dara, and the prospective astrogators became
absorbed in this and other
fine points of space-piloting.
They'd done enough, in a few trips to
Orede, to realize that they needed to know
more.
Calhoun showed them.
Calhoun did not try to make things easy for
them.
He was hungry and
easily annoyed.
It was sound training tactics to be severe,
and to
phrase all suggestions as commands.
He put the four young men in command
of the ship in turn, under his direction.
He continued to use Weald as a
destination, but he set up problems in which
the Med Ship came out of
overdrive pointing in an unknown direction
and with a precessory motion.
He made the third of his students identify
Weald in the celestial globe
containing hundreds of millions of stars,
and get on course in overdrive
toward it.
The fourth was suddenly required to compute
the distance to
Weald from such data as he could get from
observation, without reference
to any records.
By this time the first man was chafing to
take a second turn.
Calhoun
gave each of them a second gruelling lesson.
He gave them, in fact, a
highly condensed but very sound course in
the art of travel in space.
His young students took command in four-hour
watches, with at least one
breakout from overdrive in each watch.
He built up enthusiasm in them.
They ignored the discomfort of being hungry,
though there had been no
reason for them to stint on food in Orede--in
growing pride in what they
came to know.
When Weald was a first-magnitude star, the
four were not highly
qualified astrogators, to be sure, but they
were vastly better spacemen
than at the beginning.
Inevitably, their attitude toward Calhoun
was
respectful.
He'd been irritable and right.
To the young, the combination
is impressive.
Maril had served as passenger only.
In theory she was to compare
Calhoun's lessons with his practise when alone.
But he did nothing on
this journey which--teaching considered--was
different from the two
interstellar journeys Maril had made with
him.
She occupied the
sleeping-cabin during two of the six watches
of each ship-day.
She
operated the food-readier, which was almost
completely emptied of its
original store of food;--confiscated by the
government of Dara.
That
amount of food would make no difference to
the planet, but it was wise
for everyone on Dara to be equally ill-fed.
On the sixth day out from Dara, the sun of
Weald had a magnitude of
minus five-tenths.[A] The electron telescope
could detect its larger
planets, especially a gas-giant fifth-orbit
world of high albedo.
Calhoun had his four students estimate its
distance again, pointing out
the difference that could be made in breakout
position if the Med Ship
were mis-aimed by as much as one second of
arc.
[A] Earth's sun, from Earth, is of magnitude
roughly minus thirty-six.
"That does it," Calhoun announced cheerfully.
"That's the last order
I'll give you.
You're graduate pilots from here on!
Relax and have some
coffee."
* * * * *
"And now," said Calhoun, "I suppose you'll
tell me the truth about those
boxes you brought on board.
You said they were rations, but they haven't
been opened in six days.
I have an idea what they mean, but you tell
me."
The four looked uncomfortable.
There was a long pause.
"They could be," said Calhoun detachedly,
"cultures to be dumped on
Weald.
Weald is making plans to wipe out Dara.
So some fool has decided
to get Weald too busy fighting a plague of
its own to bother with you.
Is that right?"
The young men stirred uneasily.
"Well--l--l, sir," said one of them,
unhappily, "that's what we were ordered to
do."
"I object," said Calhoun.
"It wouldn't work.
I just left Weald a little
while back, remember.
They've been telling themselves that some
day Dara
would try that.
They've made preparations to fight any imaginable
contagion you could drop on them.
Every so often somebody claims it's
happening.
It wouldn't work."
"But--"
"In fact," said Calhoun, "I will not permit
you to do anything of the
kind."
One of the young men, staring at Calhoun,
nodded suddenly.
His eyes
closed.
He jerked his head erect and looked bewildered.
A second sank
heavily into a chair.
He said remotely, "Thish sfunny!" and abruptly
went to sleep.
The third found his knees giving away.
He paid elaborate
attention to them, stiffening them.
But they yielded like rubber and he
went slowly down to the floor.
The fourth said thickly with difficulty,
yet reproachfully;
"'Thought y'were our frien'!"
He collapsed.
Calhoun very soberly tied them hand and foot
and laid them out
comfortably on the floor.
Maril watched, white-faced, her hand to her
throat.
"What have you done to them?
Are they dead?"
"No," said Calhoun, "just drugged.
They'll wake up presently."
Maril said in a tense and desperate whisper;
"You're--betraying us!
You're going to take us to Weald."
"No," said Calhoun.
"We'll only orbit around it.
First, though, I want
to get rid of those damned packed-up cultures.
They're dead, by the way.
I killed them with supersonics a couple of
days ago, while a fine
argument was going on about distance-measurements
by variable Cepheids
of known period."
He put the four boxes carefully in the waste-disposal
unit.
He operated
it.
The boxes and their contents streamed out
to space in the form of
metallic and other vapors.
Calhoun sat at the control-desk.
"I'm a Med Service man," he said detachedly.
"I couldn't cooperate in
the spread of plague, anyhow, though a useful
epidemic might be another
matter.
But the important thing right now is not keeping
Weald busy with
troubles to increase their hatred of Dara.
It's getting some food for
Dara.
And driblets won't help.
What's needed is in thousands of
tons,--or tens of thousands."
Then he said; "Overdrive coming,
Murgatroyd!
Hold fast!"
The universe vanished.
The customary unpleasant sensations accompanied
the change.
Murgatroyd burped.
CHAPTER 6
A large part of the firmament was blotted
out by the blindingly bright
half-disk of Weald, as it shone in the sunshine.
It had ice-caps at its
poles, and there were seas, and the mottled
look of land which had that
carefully maintained balance of woodland and
cultivated areas which was
so effective in climate control.
The Med Ship floated free, and Calhoun
fretfully monitored all the beacon frequencies
known to man.
There was relative silence inside the ship.
Maril watched Calhoun in a
sort of despairing indecision.
The four young blueskins still slept,
still bound hand and foot upon the control-room
floor.
Murgatroyd
regarded them, and Maril, and Calhoun in turn,
and his small and furry
forehead wrinkled helplessly.
"They can't have landed what I'm looking for!"
protested Calhoun as his
search had no result.
"They can't.
It would be too sensible for them to
have done it!"
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a subdued voice.
"But where the devil did they put them?"
demanded Calhoun.
"A polar
orbit would be ridiculous!
They--" Then he grunted in disgust.
"Oh!
Of
course!
Now, where's the landing-grid?"
He worked busily for minutes, checking the
position of the Wealdian
landing-grid--mapped in the Sector Directory--against
the look of
continents and seas on the half-disk so plainly
visible outside.
He
found what he wanted.
He put on the ship's solar-system drive.
"I wish," he complained to Maril, "I wish
I could think straight the
first time!
And it's so obvious!
If you want to put something out in
space, and not have it interfere with traffic,
in what sort of orbit and
at what distance will you put it?"
Maril did not answer.
"Obviously," said Calhoun, "you'll put it
as far as possible from the
landing-pattern of ships coming in to the
space-port.
You'll put it on
the opposite side of the planet.
And you'll want it to stay out of the
way, where anybody can know it is at any time
of the day or night
without having to calculate anything.
So you'll put it out in orbit so
it will revolve around Weald in exactly one
day, neither more or less,
and you'll put it above the equator.
And then it will remain quite
stationary above one spot on the planet, a
hundred and eighty degrees
longitude away from the landing-grid and directly
over the equator."
He scribbled for a moment.
"Which means forty-two thousand miles high,
give or take a few hundred,
and--here!
And I was hunting for it in a close-in orbit!"
He grumbled to himself.
He waited while the solar-system drive pushed
the Med Ship a quarter of the way around the
bright planet below.
The
sunset line vanished and the planet's disk
became a complete circle.
Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones
again, and grunted once
more, and changed course, and presently made
a noise indicating
satisfaction.
Again presently he abandoned instrument-control
and peered directly out
of a port, handling the solar-system drive
with great care.
Murgatroyd
said depressedly;
"_Chee!_"
"Stop worrying," commanded Calhoun.
"We haven't been challenged, and
there is a beacon transmitter at work, just
to make sure that nobody
bumps into what we're looking for.
It's a great help, because we do want
to bump,--gently."
Stars swung across the port out of which he
looked.
Something dark
appeared,--and then straight lines and exact
curvings.
Even Maril,
despairing and bewildered as she was, caught
sight of something vastly
larger than the Med Ship, floating in space.
She stared.
The Med Ship
maneuvered very cautiously.
She saw another large object.
A third.
A
fourth.
There seemed to be dozens of them.
They were space-ships, huge by comparison
with Aesclipus Twenty.
They
floated as the Med Ship did.
They did not drive.
They were not in
formation.
They were not at even distances from each
other.
They did not
point in the same direction.
They swung in emptiness like derelicts.
Calhoun jockeyed his small ship with infinite
care.
Presently there came
the gentlest of impacts and then a clanking
sound.
The appearance out
the vision-port became stationary, but still
unbelievable.
The Med Ship
was grappled magnetically to a vast surface
of welded metal.
Calhoun relaxed.
He opened a wall-panel and brought out a vacuum
suit.
He began briskly to get it on.
"Things move smoothly," he commented.
"We weren't challenged.
So it's
extremely unlikely that we were spotted.
Our friends on the floor ought
to begin to come to shortly.
And I'm going to find out now whether I'm
a
hero or in sure-enough trouble!"
Maril said drearily;
"I don't know what you've done, except--"
Calhoun blinked at her, in the act of hauling
the vacuum suit over his
shoulders.
"Isn't it self-evident?" he demanded.
"I've been giving astrogation
lessons to these characters.
I certainly didn't do it to help them dump
germ-cultures on Weald!
I brought them here!
Don't you see the point?
These are space-ships.
They're in orbit around Weald.
They're not manned
and they're not controlled.
In fact, they're nothing but sky-riding
storage bins!"
He seemed to consider the explanation complete.
He wriggled his arms
into the sleeves and gloves of the suit.
He slung the air-tanks over his
shoulder and hooked them to the suit.
"I'll be back," he said.
"I hope with good news.
I've reason to be
hopeful, though, because these Wealdians are
very practical men.
They
have things all prepared and tidy.
I suspect I'll find these ships with
stores of air and fuel--maybe even food--so
that if Weald should manage
to make a deal for the stuff stored out here
in them, they'd only have
to bring out crews."
* * * * *
He lifted the space-helmet down from its rack
and put it on.
He tested
it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage,
and other data from
the lighted miniature instruments visible
through pinholes above his
eye-level.
He fastened a space-rope about himself, speaking
through the
helmet's opened face-plate.
"If our friends should wake up before I get
back," he added, "please
restrain them.
I'd hate to be marooned."
He went waddling into the airlock with the
coil of space-rope over one
vacuum-suited arm.
The inner lock door closed behind him A little
later
Maril heard the outer lock open.
Then soundlessness.
Murgatroyd whimpered a little.
Maril shivered.
Calhoun had gone out of
the ship to nothingness.
He'd said that what he was looking for--and
what he'd found--was forty-two thousand miles
from Weald.
One could
imagine falling forty-two thousand miles,
where one couldn't imagine
falling a light-year.
Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of
a
gigantic space-ship which floated among dozens
of its fellows, all
seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned.
He was able to walk on the
nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes.
He trusted his life to them and
to a flimsy space-rope which trailed after
him out the Med Ship's
airlock.
Time passed.
A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five
ticks to the
second which has been the habit of clocks
since time immemorial.
Very
small and trivial noises came from the background
tape, preventing utter
silence from hanging intolerably in the ship.
They were traffic-sounds,
recorded on a world no one knew how many light-years
distant, and nobody
knew when.
There were sounds as of voices, too faint
to suggest words,
but imparting a feel of life and activity
to a soundless ship.
Maril found herself listening tensely for
something else.
One of the
four bound blueskins snored, and stirred,
and slept again.
Murgatroyd
gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the
control-room floor, and
then paused for lack of any place to go or
thing to do.
He sat down and
began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers.
Maril stirred.
Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.
"_Chee?_" he asked shrilly.
She shook her head.
It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd
were a
human being.
"N-no," she said unsteadily.
"Not yet."
More time passed.
An unbearably long time.
Then there was the faintest
of clankings.
It repeated.
Then, abruptly, there were noises in the
airlock.
They continued.
They were fumbling noises.
The outer airlock door closed.
The inner door opened.
Dense white fog
came out of it.
There was motion.
Calhoun followed the fog out of the
lock.
He carried objects which had been weightless,
but were suddenly
heavy in the ship's gravity-field.
There were two space-suits and a
curious assortment of parcels.
He spread them out, flipped aside the
face-plate, and said briskly;
"This stuff is cold!
Turn a heater on it, will you Maril?"
He began to work his way out of his vacuum-suit.
"Item," he said.
"The ships are fuelled _and_ provisioned.
A practical
tribe, the Wealdians!
The ships are ready to take off as soon as
they're
warmed up inside.
A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heat enough
to keep
a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is
effectively near zero
Kelvin.
Here, point the heaters like this."
He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers.
The fog disappeared where their
beams played.
But the metal space-suits glistened and steamed,--and
the
steam disappeared within inches.
They were so completely and utterly
cold that they condensed the air about them
as a liquid, which
reëvaporated to make fog, which warmed up
and disappeared and was
immediately replaced.
"Item," said Calhoun again, getting his arms
out of the vacuum-suit
sleeves.
"The controls are pretty nearly standard.
Our sleeping friends
will be able to astrogate them back to Dara
without trouble, provided
only that nobody comes out here to bother
us before they leave."
He shed the last of the space-suit, stepping
out of its legs.
"And," he finished wrily, "I brought back
an emergency supply of
ship-provisions for everybody concerned, but
find that I'm idiot enough
to feel that they'll choke me if I eat them
while Dara's still
starving."
Maril said;
"But--there isn't any hope for Dara!
No real hope!"
He gaped at her.
"What do you think we're here for?"
* * * * *
He set to work to restore his four recent
students to consciousness.
It
was not a difficult task.
The dosage, mixed in the coffee he had given
them earlier, was a light one.
Calhoun took the precaution of disarming
them first, but presently four hot-eyed young
men glared at him.
"I'm calling," said Calhoun, holding a blaster
negligently in his hand,
"I'm calling for volunteers.
There's a famine on Dara.
There've been
unmanageable crop-surpluses on Weald.
On Dara, the government grimly
rations every ounce of food.
On Weald, the government has been buying up
surplus grain to keep the price up.
To save storage costs, it's loaded
the grain into out-of-date space-ships it
once used to stand sentry
over Dara to keep it out of space when there
was another famine there.
Those ships have been put out in orbit, where
we're hooked on to one of
them.
It's loaded with half a million bushels of
grain.
I've brought
space-suits from it, I've turned on the heaters
in its interior, and
I've set its overdrive unit for a hop to Dara.
Now I'm calling for
volunteers to take half a million bushels
of grain to where it's needed.
Do I get any volunteers?"
He got four.
Not immediately, because they were ashamed
that he'd made
it impossible to carry out their original
fanatic plan, and now offered
something much better to make up for it.
They raged.
But half a million
bushels of grain meant that people who must
otherwise die might live.
Ultimately, truculently, first one and then
another angrily agreed.
"Good!" said Calhoun.
"Now, how many of you dare risk the trip alone?
I've got one grain-ship warming up.
There are plenty of others around
us.
Every one of you can take a ship and half
a million bushels to Dara,
if you have the nerve?"
The atmosphere changed.
Suddenly they clamored for the task he offered
them.
They were still acutely uncomfortable.
He'd bossed them and taught
them until they felt capable and glamorous
and proud.
Then he'd pinned
their ears back.
But if they returned to Dara with four enemy
ships and
unimaginable quantities of food with which
to break the famine....
There was work to be done first, of course.
Only one ship was so far
warming up.
Three more had to be entered, in space-suits,
and each had
to have its interior warmed so breathable
air could exist inside it, and
at least part of the stored provisions had
to be brought up to
reasonable temperature for use on the journey.
Then the overdrive unit
had to be inspected and set for the length
of journey that a direct
overdrive hop to Dara would mean, and Calhoun
had to make sure again
that each of the four could identify Dara's
sun under all circumstances
and aim for it with the requisite high precision,
both before going into
overdrive and after breakout.
When all that was accomplished, Calhoun
might reasonably hope that they'd arrive.
But it wasn't a certainty.
Still, presently his four students shook hands
with him, with the fine
tolerance of young men intending much greater
achievements than their
teacher.
They wouldn't speak on communicator again,
because their
messages might be picked up on Weald.
Of course for this action to be successful,
it had to be performed with
the stealth of sneak-thieves.
* * * * *
What seemed a long time passed.
Then one ship turned slowly upon some
unseen axis.
It wavered back and forth, seeking a point
of aim.
A second
twisted in its place.
A third put on the barest trace of solar-system
drive to get clear of the rest.
The fourth ...
One ship vanished.
It had gone into overdrive, heading for Dara
at many
times the speed of light.
Another.
Two more.
That was all.
The remainder of the fleet hung clumsily in
emptiness.
And
Calhoun worriedly went over in his mind the
lessons he'd given in such a
pathetically small number of days.
If the four ships reached Dara, their
pilots would be heroes.
Calhoun had presented them with that estate
over
their bitter objection.
But they would glory in it, if they reached
Dara.
Maril looked at him with very strange eyes.
"Now what?" she asked.
"We hang around," said Calhoun, "to see if
anybody comes up from Weald
to find out what's happened.
It's always possible to pick up a sort of
signal when a ship goes into overdrive.
Usually it doesn't mean a thing.
Nobody pays any attention.
But if somebody comes out here--"
"What?"
"It'll be regrettable," said Calhoun.
He was suddenly very tired.
"It'll
spoil any chance of our coming back and stealing
some more food--like
interstellar mice.
If they find out what we've done they'll expect
us to
try it again.
They might get set to fight.
Or they might simply land the
rest of these ships."
"If I'd realized what you were about," said
Maril, "I'd have joined in
the lessons.
I could have piloted a ship."
"You wouldn't have wanted to," said Calhoun.
He yawned.
"You wouldn't
want to be a heroine."
"Why?"
"Korvan," said Calhoun.
He yawned again.
"I've asked about him.
He's
been trying very desperately to deserve well
of his fellow blueskins.
All he's accomplished is develop a way to
starve painlessly.
He wouldn't
feel comfortable with a girl who'd helped
make starving unnecessary.
He'd admire you politely, but he'd never marry
you.
And you know it."
She shook her head, but it was not easy to
tell whether she denied the
reaction of Korvan--whom Calhoun had never
met--or denied that he was
more important to her than anything else.
The last was what Calhoun
plainly implied.
"You don't seem to be trying to be a hero!"
she protested.
"I'd enjoy it," admitted Calhoun, "but I have
a job to do.
It's got to
be done.
It's much more important than being admired."
"You could take another ship back," she told
him.
"It would be worth
more to Dara than the Med Ship is!
And then everybody would realize that
you'd planned everything."
"Ah!" said Calhoun.
"But you've no idea how much this ship matters
to
Dara!"
He seated himself at the controls.
He slipped headphones over his ears.
He listened.
Very, very carefully, he monitored all the
wave-lengths and
wave-forms he could discover in use on Weald.
There was no mention of
the oddity of behavior of shiploads of surplus
grain aloft.
There was no
mention of the ships at all.
But there was plenty of mention of Dara,
and blueskins, and of the vicious political
fight now going on to see
which political party could promise the most
complete protection against
blueskins.
After a full hour of it, Calhoun flipped off
his receptor and swung the
Med Ship to an exact, painstakingly precise
aim at the sun around which
Dara rolled.
He said;
"Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"
Murgatroyd grabbed.
The stars went out and the universe reeled
and the
Med Ship became a sort of cosmos all its own.
Calhoun yawned again.
"Now there's nothing to be done for a day
or two," he said wearily, "and
I'm beginning to understand why people sleep
all they can, on Dara.
It's
one way not to feel hungry."
Maril said tensely;
"You're going back?
After they took the ship from you?"
"The job's not finished," he explained.
"Not even the famine's ended,
and the famine's a second-order effect.
If there were no such thing as a
blueskin, there'd be no famine.
Food could be traded for.
We've got to
do something to make sure there are no more
famines."
She looked at him oddly.
"It would be desirable," she said with irony.
"But you can't do it."
"Not today, no," he admitted.
Then he said longingly, "I'm about to
catch up on some sleep."
Maril rose and went into the other cabin.
He settled down into the chair
and fell instantly asleep.
* * * * *
For very many ship-hours, then, there was
no action or activity or
happening of any imaginable consequence in
the Med Ship.
Very, very far
away, light-years distant and light years
apart, four shiploads of grain
hurtled toward the famine-stricken planet
of blueskins.
Each great ship
had a single semi-skilled blueskin for pilot
and crew.
Thousands of
millions of suns blazed with violence appropriate
to their stellar types
in a galaxy of which a very small proportion
had been explored and
colonized by humanity.
The human race was now to be counted in
quadrillions on scores of hundreds of inhabited
worlds, but the tiny Med
Ship seemed the least significant of all possible
created things.
It
could travel between star-systems and even
star-clusters, but it was not
yet capable of crossing the continent of suns
on which the human race
arose.
And between any two solar systems the journeying
of the Med Ship
consumed much time.
Which would be maddening for someone with
no work to
do or no resources in himself, or herself.
On the second ship-day Calhoun labored painstakingly
and somewhat
distastefully at the little biological laboratory.
Maril watched him in
a sort of brooding silence.
Murgatroyd slept much of the time, with his
furry tail wrapped meticulously across his
nose.
Toward the end of the day Calhoun finished
his task.
He had a matter of
six or seven cubic centimeters of clear liquid
as the conclusion of a
long process of culturing, and examination
by microscope, and again
culturing plus final filtration.
He looked at a clock and calculated
time.
"Better wait until tomorrow," he observed,
and put the bit of clear
liquid in a temperature-controlled place of
safe-keeping.
"What is it?" asked Maril.
"What's it for?"
"It's part of a job I have on hand," said
Calhoun.
He considered.
"How
about some music?"
She looked astonished.
But he set up an instrument and fed microtape
into it and settled back to listen.
Then there was music such as she had
never heard before.
Again it was a device to counteract isolation
and
monotonous between-planet voyages.
To keep it from losing its
effectiveness, Calhoun rationed himself on
music, as on other things.
Calhoun deliberately went for weeks between
uses of his recordings, so
that music was an event to be looked forward
to and cherished.
When he tapered off the stirring symphonies
of Kun Gee with
tranquilizing, soothing melodies from the
Rim School of composers, Maril
regarded him with a very peculiar gaze indeed.
"I think I understand now," she said slowly,
"why you don't act like
other people.
Toward me, for example.
The way you live gives you what
other people have to try to get in crazy ways,--making
their work feed
their vanity, and justify pride, and make
them feel significant.
But you
can put your whole mind on your work."
He thought it over.
"Med Ship routine is designed to keep one
healthy in his mind," he
admitted.
"It works pretty well.
It satisfies all my mental appetites.
But naturally there are instincts--"
[Illustration]
She waited.
He did not finish.
"What do you do about instincts that work
and music and such things
can't satisfy?"
Calhoun grinned wrily;
"I'm stern with them.
I have to be."
He stood up and plainly expected her to go
into the other cabin for the
night.
She did.
* * * * *
It was after breakfast-time of the next ship-day
when he got out the
sample of clear liquid he'd worked so long
to produce.
"We'll see how it
works," he observed.
"Murgatroyd's handy in case of a slip-up.
It's
perfectly safe so long as he's aboard and
there are only the two of us."
She watched as he injected half a cc under
his own skin.
Then she
shivered a little.
"What will it do?"
"That remains to be seen."
He paused a moment.
"You and I," he said with
some dryness, "make a perfect test for anything.
If you catch something
from me, it will be infective indeed!"
She gazed at him utterly without comprehension.
He took his own temperature.
He brought out the folios which were his
orders, covering each of the planets he should
give a standard Medical
Service inspection.
Weald was there.
Dara wasn't.
But a Med Service man
has much freedom of action, even when only
keeping up the routine of
normal Med Service.
When catching up on badly neglected operations,
he
necessarily has much more.
Calhoun went over the folios.
Two hours later he took his temperature again.
He looked pleased.
He
made an entry in the ship's log.
Two hours later yet he found himself
drinking thirstily and looked more pleased
still.
He made another entry
in the log and matter-of-factly drew a small
quantity of blood from his
own vein and called to Murgatroyd.
Murgatroyd submitted amiably to the
very trivial operation Calhoun carried out.
Calhoun put away the
equipment and saw Maril staring at him with
a certain look of shock.
"It doesn't hurt him," Calhoun explained.
"Right after he's born there's
a tiny spot on his flank that has the pain-nerves
desensitized.
Murgatroyd's all right.
That's what he's for!"
"But he's--your friend!"
"He's my assistant.
I don't ask anything of him that I can do
myself.
But we're both Med Service.
And I do things for him that he can't do for
himself.
For example, I make coffee for him."
Murgatroyd heard the familiar word.
He said;
"_Chee!_"
"Very well," agreed Calhoun.
"We'll all have some."
He made coffee.
Murgatroyd sipped at the cup especially made
for his
little paws.
Once he scratched at the place on his flank
which had no
pain-nerves.
It itched.
But he was perfectly content.
Murgatroyd would
always be contented when he was somewhere
near Calhoun.
Another hour went by.
Murgatroyd climbed up into Calhoun's lap and
with
a determined air went to sleep there.
Calhoun disturbed him long enough
to get an instrument out of his pocket.
He listened to Murgatroyd's
heartbeat with it while Murgatroyd dozed.
"Maril," he said.
"Write down something for me.
The time, and
ninety-six, and one-twenty over ninety-four."
She obeyed, not comprehending.
Half an hour later--still not stirring to
disturb Murgatroyd--he had her write down
another time and sequence of
figures, only slightly different from the
first.
Half an hour later
still, a third set.
But then he put Murgatroyd down, well satisfied.
He took his own temperature.
He nodded.
"Murgatroyd and I have one more chore to do,"
he told her.
"Would you go
in the other cabin for a moment?"
She went disturbedly into the other cabin.
Calhoun drew a sample of
blood from the insensitive area on Murgatroyd's
flank.
Murgatroyd
submitted with complete confidence in the
man.
In ten minutes Calhoun
had diluted the sample, added an anticoagulant,
shaken it up thoroughly,
and filtered it to clarity with all red and
white corpuscles removed.
Another Med Ship man would have considered
that Calhoun had had
Murgatroyd prepare a splendid small sample
of antibody-containing serum,
in case something got out of hand.
It would assuredly take care of two
patients.
But a Med Ship man would also have known that
it was simply one of those
scrupulous precautions a Med Ship man takes
when using cultures from
store.
Calhoun put the sample away and called Maril
back and offered no
explanation.
She said;
"I'll fix lunch."
She hesitated.
"You brought some food from the first
Weald ship.
Do you want it?"
He shook his head.
"I'm squeamish," he admitted.
"The trouble on Dara is Med Service fault.
Before my time, but still--I'll stick to rations
until everybody eats."
* * * * *
He watched her unobtrusively as the day went
on.
Presently he considered
that she was slightly flushed.
Shortly after the evening meal of
singularly unappetizing Darian rations, she
drank thirstily.
He did not
comment.
He brought out cards and showed her a complicated
game of
solitaire in which mental arithmetic and expert
use of probability
increased one's chance of winning.
By midnight, ship-time, she'd learned the
game and played it absorbedly.
Calhoun was able to scrutinize her without
appearing to do so, and he
was satisfied again.
When he mentioned that the Med Ship should
arrive
off Dara in eight hours more, she put the
cards away and went into the
other cabin.
Calhoun wrote up the log.
He added the notes that Maril had made for
him, of Murgatroyd's pulse and blood-pressure
after the injection of the
same culture that produced fever and thirstiness
in himself and
later--without contact with him or the culture--in
Maril.
He put a
professional comment at the end.
"The culture seems to have retained its normal
characteristics during
long storage in the spore state.
It revived and reproduced rapidly.
I
injected .5 cc under my skin and in less than
one hour my temperature
was 30.8°C. An hour later it was 30.9°C.
This was its peak.
It
immediately returned to normal.
The only other observable symptom was
slightly increased thirst.
Blood-pressure and pulse remained normal.
The
other person in the Med Ship displayed the
same symptoms, in prompt and
complete repetition, without physical contact."
He went to sleep, with Murgatroyd curled up
in his cubbyhole.
The Med Ship broke out of overdrive at 1300
hours, ship time.
Calhoun
made contact with the grid and was promptly
lowered to the ground.
It was almost two hours later--1500 hours
ship-time--when the people of
Dara were informed by broadcast that Calhoun
was publicly to be
executed; immediately.
CHAPTER 7
From the viewpoint of Darians, the decision
of Calhoun's guilt and the
decision to execute him were reasonable enough.
Maril protested
fiercely, and her testimony agreed with Calhoun's
in every respect, but
from a blueskin viewpoint their own statements
were damning.
Calhoun had taken four young astrogators to
space.
They were the only
semi-skilled space-pilots Dara had.
There were no fully qualified men.
Calhoun had asked for them, and taken them
out to emptiness, and there
he had instructed them in modern guidance-methods
for ships of space.
So
far there was no disagreement.
He'd proposed to make them more competent
pilots; more capable of driving a ship to
Orede, for example, to raid
the enormous cattle-herds there.
And he'd had them drive the Med Ship to
Weald, against which there could be no objection.
But just before arrival he had tricked all
four of them by giving them
drugged coffee.
He'd destroyed the lethal bacterial cultures
they'd been
ordered to dump on Weald.
Then he'd sent the four student pilots off
separately--so he and Maril claimed--in huge
ships crammed with grain.
But those ships were not to be believed in,
anyhow.
Nobody on Dara could
imagine stores of food bought up and stored
away because it was useless;
to keep up prices.
Nobody believed in shiploads of grain to be
had for
the taking.
They did know that the only four partially
experienced
space-pilots on Dara had been taken away and
by Calhoun's own story sent
out of the ship after they'd been drugged.
Had they been trained, and
had they been helped or even permitted to
sow the seeds of plague on
Weald, and had they come back prepared to
pass on training to other men
to handle other space-ships now feverishly
being built in hidden places
on Dara,--why--then Dara might have a chance
of survival.
But a
space-battle with only partly trained pilots
would be hazardous at best.
With no trained pilots at all, it would be
hopeless.
So Calhoun, by his
own story, appeared to have doomed every living
being on Dara to
massacre from the bombs of Weald.
It was this last angle which destroyed any
chance of anybody believing
in such fairy-tale objects as ships loaded
down with grain.
Calhoun had
shattered Dara's feeble hope of resistance.
Weald had some ships and
could build or buy others faster than Dara
could hope to construct them.
Equally important, Weald had a plenitude of
experienced spacemen to man
some ships fully and train the crews of others.
If it had become
desperately busy fighting plague, then a fleet
to exterminate life on
Dara would be delayed.
Dara might have gained time at least to build
ships which could ram their enemies and destroy
them that way.
But Calhoun had made it impossible.
If he told the truth and Weald
already had a fleet of huge ships which only
needed to be emptied of
grain and filled with guns and men--why--Dara
was doomed.
But if he did
not tell the truth it was equally doomed by
his actions.
So Calhoun
would be killed.
His execution was to take place in the open
space of the landing-grid,
with vision-cameras transmitting the sight
over all the blueskin planet.
Half-starved men, with grisly blue blotches
on their skins, marched him
to the center of the largest level space on
the planet which was not
desperately being cultivated.
Their hatred showed in their expressions.
Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhoun like
a wall.
Most of Dara would
have liked to see him killed in a manner as
atrocious as his crime, but
no conceivable death would be satisfying.
So the affair was coldly businesslike, with
not even insults offered to
him.
He was left to stand alone in the very center
of the landing-grid
floor.
There were a hundred blasters which would
fire upon him at the
same instant.
He would not only be killed; he would be destroyed.
He
would be vaporized by the blue-white flames
poured upon him.
* * * * *
His death was remarkably close.
Nothing remained but the order to fire,
when loudspeakers from the landing-grid office
froze everything.
One of
the grain-ships from Weald had broken out
of overdrive and its pilot was
triumphantly calling for landing-coördinates.
The grid office relayed
his call to loudspeaker circuits as the quickest
way to get it on the
communication system of the whole planet.
"_Calling ground_," boomed the triumphant
voice of the first of the
student pilots Calhoun had trained.
"_Calling ground!
Pilot Franz in
captured ship requests coördinates for landing!
Purpose of landing, to
deliver half a million bushels of grain captured
from the enemy!_"
At first, nobody dared believe it.
But the pilot could be seen on
vision.
He was known.
No blueskin would be left alive long enough
to be
used as a decoy by the men of Weald!
Presently the giant ship on its
second voyage to Dara--the first had been
a generation ago, when it
threatened death and destruction--appeared
as a dark pinpoint in the
sky.
It came down and down, and presently it hovered
over the center of
the tarmac, where Calhoun composedly stood
on the spot where he was to
have been executed.
The landing-grid crew shifted the ship to
one side, and only then did
Calhoun stroll in a leisurely fashion toward
the Med Ship by the grid's
metal-lace wall.
The big ship touched ground, and its exit-port
revolved and opened, and
the student pilot stood there grinning and
heaving out handsful of
grain.
There was a swarming, yelling, deliriously
triumphant crowd,
then, where only minutes before there'd been
a mob waiting to rejoice
when Calhoun's living body exploded into flame.
They no longer hated Calhoun, but he had to
fight his way to the Med
Ship, nevertheless.
He was surrounded by now-ecstatically admiring
citizens of Dara, only minutes since they'd
thirsted for his blood.
Two hours after the first ship, a second landed.
Dara went wild again.
Four hours later still, the third arrived.
The fourth came down on the
following day.
Then Calhoun faced the executive and cabinet
of Dara for the second
time.
His tone and manner were very dry.
"Now," he said curtly, "I would like a few
more astrogators to train.
I
think it likely that we can raid the Wealdian
grain-fleet one time more,
and in so doing get the beginning of a fleet
for defense.
I insist,
however, that it must not be used in combat!
We might as well be
sensible about this situation!
After all, four shiploads of grain won't
break the famine!
They'll help a lot, but they're only the beginning
of
what's needed for a planetary population!"
"How much grain can we hope for?"
demanded a man with a blue mark
covering all his chin.
Calhoun told him.
"How long before Weald can have a fleet overhead,
dropping fusion
bombs?"
demanded another, grimly.
Calhoun named a time.
But then he said;
"I think we can keep them from dropping bombs
if we can get the
grain-fleet and some capable astrogators."
"What do you have in mind?"
He told them.
It was not possible to tell the whole story
of what he
considered sensible behavior.
An emotional program can be presented and
accepted immediately.
A plan of action which is actually intelligent,
considering all elements of a situation, has
to be accepted piecemeal.
Even so, the military men growled.
"We've plenty of heavy elements," said one,
with one eye and half his
forehead colored blue.
"If we'd used our brains, we'd have more bombs
than Weald can hope for!
We could turn that whole planet into a smoking
cinder!"
"Which," said Calhoun acidly, "would give
you some satisfaction but not
an ounce of food!
And food's more important than satisfaction.
Now, I'm
going to take off for Weald again.
I'll want somebody to build an
emergency device for my ship, and I'll want
the four pilots I've trained
and twenty more candidates.
And I'd like to have some decent rations!
When the last trip brought back two million
bushels of grain, you can
spare adequate food for twenty men for a few
days!"
* * * * *
It took some time to get the special device
constructed, but the Med
Ship lifted in two days more.
The device for which it had waited was
simply a preventive of the disaster overtaking
the ship from the mine on
Orede.
It was essentially a tank of liquid oxygen,
packed in the space
from which stores had been taken away.
When the ship's air-supply was
pumped past it, first moisture and then CO2
froze out.
Then the air
flowed over the liquefied oxygen at a rate
to replace the CO2 with more
useful breathing material.
Then the moisture was restored to the air
as
it warmed again.
For so long as the oxygen lasted, fresh air
for any
number of men could be kept purified and breathable.
The Med Ship's
normal equipment could take care of no more
than ten.
But with this it
could journey to Weald with almost any complement
on board.
Maril stayed on Dara when the Med Ship left.
Murgatroyd protested
shrilly when he discovered her about to be
closed out by the closing
lock-door.
"_Chee!_" he said indignantly.
"_Chee!
Chee!_"
"No," said Calhoun, "we'll be crowded enough
anyhow.
We'll see her
later."
He nodded to one of the first four student
pilots, and he crisply made
contact with the landing-grid office.
He very efficiently supervised as
the grid took the ship up.
The other three of the four first-trained
men
explained every move to sub-classes assigned
to each.
Calhoun moved
about, listening and making certain that the
instruction was up to
standard.
He felt queer, acting as the supervisor of
an educational institution in
space.
He did not like it.
There were twenty-four men beside himself
crowded into the Med Ship's small interior.
They got in each other's
way.
They trampled on each other.
There was always somebody eating, and
always somebody sleeping, and there was no
need whatever for the
background tape to keep the ship from being
intolerably quiet.
But the
air-system worked well enough, except once
when the reheater unit quit
and the air inside the ship went down below
freezing before the trouble
could be found and corrected.
The journey to Weald, this time, took seven
days because of the training
program in effect.
Calhoun bit his nails over the delay.
But it was
necessary for each of the students to make
his own line-ups on Weald's
sun, and compute distances, and for each of
them to practise
maneuverings that would presently be called
for.
Calhoun hoped
desperately that preparations for active warfare--or
massacre--did not
move fast on Weald.
He believed, however, that in the absence
of direct
news from Dara, Wealdian officials would take
the normal course of
politicos.
They had proclaimed the deathship from Orede
an attack from
Dara.
Therefore they would specialize on defensive
measures before
plumping for offense.
They'd get patrol-ships out to spot invasion
ships
long before they worked on a fleet to destroy
the blueskins.
It would
meet the public demand for defense.
Calhoun was right.
The Med Ship made its final approach to Weald
under
Calhoun's own control.
He'd made brightness-measurements on his previous
journey and he used them again.
They would not be strictly accurate,
because a sunspot could knock all meaning
out of any reading beyond two
decimal places.
But the first breakout was just far enough
from the
Wealdian system for Calhoun to be able to
pick out its planets with
electron telescope at maximum magnification.
He could aim for Weald
itself,--allowing, of course, for the lag
in the apparent motion of its
image because of the limited speed of light.
He tried the briefest of
overdrive hops, and came out within the solar
system and well inside any
watching patrol.
That was pure fortune.
It continued.
He'd broken through the screen of
guard-ships in undetectable overdrive.
He was within half an hour's
solar-system drive of the grain-fleet.
There was no alarm, at first.
Of
course radars spotted the Med Ship as an object,
but nobody paid
attention.
It was not headed for Weald.
It was probably assumed to be a
guard-boat itself.
Such mistakes do happen.
It reached the grain-fleet.
Again from the storage-space from which supplies
had been removed,
Calhoun produced vacuum suits.
The four first students went out, each
escorting a less-accustomed neophyte and all
fastened firmly together
with space-ropes.
They warmed the interiors of four ships and
went on to
others.
Presently there were eight ships making ready
for an
interstellar journey, each with a scared but
resolute new pilot
familiarizing himself with its controls.
There were sixteen ships.
Twenty.
Twenty-three.
* * * * *
A guard-ship came humming out from Weald.
It would be armed, of course.
It came droning, droning up the forty-odd
thousand miles from the
planet.
Calhoun swore.
He could not call his students and tell them
what
was happening.
The guard-ship would overhear.
He could not trust untried
young men to act rationally if they were unwarned
and the guard-ship
arrived and matter-of-factly attempted to
board one of them.
Then he was inspired.
He called Murgatroyd, placed him before the
communicator, and set it at voice-only transmission.
This was familiar
enough, to Murgatroyd.
He'd often seen Calhoun use a communicator.
"_Chee!_" shrilled Murgatroyd.
"_Chee-chee!_"
A startled voice came out of the speaker.
"_What's that?_"
"_Chee_," said Murgatroyd zestfully.
The communicator was talking to him.
Murgatroyd adored three things in
order.
One was Calhoun.
The second was coffee.
The third was pretending
to converse like a human being.
The speaker said explosively;
"_You there, identify yourself!_"
"_Chee-chee-chee-chee!_" observed Murgatroyd.
He wriggled with pleasure
and added, reasonably enough, "_Chee!_"
The communicator bawled;
"_Calling ground!
Calling ground!
Listen to this!
Something that ain't
human's talking at me on a communicator!
Listen in an' tell me what to
do!_"
Murgatroyd interposed with another shrill;
"_Chee!_"
Then Calhoun pulled the Med Ship slowly away
from the clump of
still-lifeless grain-ships.
It was highly improbable that the guard-boat
would carry an electron telescope.
Most likely it would have only an
echo-radar, and so could determine only that
an object of some sort
moved of its own accord in space.
Calhoun let the Med Ship accelerate.
That would be final evidence.
The grain-ships were between Weald and its
sun.
Even electron telescopes on the ground--and
electron-telescopes
were ultimately optical telescopes with electronic
amplification--even
electron telescopes on the ground could not
get a good image of the ship
through sunlit atmosphere.
"_Chee?_" asked Murgatroyd solicitously.
"_Chee-chee-chee?_"
"_Is it blueskins?_" shakily demanded the
voice from the guard-boat.
"_Ground!
Ground!
Is it blueskins?_"
A heavy, authoritative voice came in with
much greater volume.
"_That's no human voice_," it said harshly.
"_Approach its ship and send
back an image.
Don't fire first unless it heads for ground._"
The guard-ship swerved and headed for the
Med Ship.
It was still a very
long way off.
"_Chee-chee_," said Murgatroyd encouragingly.
Calhoun changed the Med Ship's course.
The guard-ship changed course
too.
Calhoun let it draw nearer,--but only a little.
He led it away from
the fleet of grain-ships.
He swung his electron telescope on them.
He saw a space-suited figure
outside one,--safely roped, however.
It was easy to guess that someone
had meant to return to the Med Ship for orders
or to make a report, and
found the Med Ship gone.
He'd go back inside and turn on a communicator.
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd.
The heavy voice boomed;
"_You there!
This is a human-occupied world!
If you come in peace, cut
your drive and let our guard-ship approach!_"
Murgatroyd replied in an interested but doubtful
tone.
The booming voice
bellowed.
Another voice of higher authority took over.
Murgatroyd was
entranced that so many people wanted to talk
to him.
He made what for
him was practically an oration.
The last voice spoke persuasively and
suavely.
"_Chee-chee-chee-chee_," said Murgatroyd.
One of the grain-ships flickered and ceased
to be.
It had gone into
overdrive.
Another.
And another.
Suddenly they began to flick out of
sight by twos and threes.
"_Chee_," said Murgatroyd with a note of finality.
The last grain-ship vanished.
"Calling guard-ship," said Calhoun drily.
"This is Med ship Aesclipus
Twenty.
I called here a couple of weeks ago.
You've been talking to my
_tormal_, Murgatroyd."
A pause.
A blank pause.
Then profanity of deep and savage intemperance.
"I've been on Dara," said Calhoun.
Dead silence fell.
"There's a famine there," said Calhoun deliberately.
"So the grain-ships
you've had in orbit have been taken away by
men from Dara--blueskins if
you like--to feed themselves and their families.
They've been dying of
hunger and they don't like it."
There was a single burst of the unprintable.
Then the formerly suave
voice said waspishly;
"_Well?
The Med Service will hear of your interference!_"
"Yes," said Calhoun.
"I'll report it myself.
I have a message for you.
Dara is ready to pay for every ounce of grain
and for the ships it was
stored in.
They'll pay in heavy metals,--iridium, uranium,--that
sort of
thing."
The suave voice fairly curdled.
"_As if we'd allow anything that was ever
on Dara to touch ground
here!_"
"Ah!
But there can be sterilization.
To begin with metals, uranium melts
at 1150° centigrade, and tungsten at 3370°
and iridium at 2350°.
You
could load such things and melt them down
in space and then tow them
home.
And you can actually sterilize a lot of other
useful materials!"
The suave voice said infuriatedly;
"_I'll report this!
You'll suffer for this!_"
Calhoun said pleasantly;
"I'm sure that what I say is being recorded,
so that I'll add that it's
perfectly practical for Wealdians to land
on Dara, take whatever
property they think wise,--to pay for damage
done by blueskins, of
course--and get back to Wealdian ships with
absolutely no danger of
carrying contagion.
If you'll make sure the recording's clear."
* * * * *
He described, clearly and specifically, exactly
how a man could be
outfitted to walk into any area of any conceivable
contagion, do
whatever seemed necessary in the way of looting--but
Calhoun did not use
the word--and then return to his fellows with
no risk whatever of
bringing back infection.
He gave exact details.
Then he said;
"My radar says you've four ships converging
on me to blast me out of
space.
I sign off."
The Med Ship disappeared from normal space,
and entered that improbably
stressed area of extension which it formed
about itself and in which
physical constants were wildly strange.
For one thing, the speed of
light in overdrive-stressed space had not
been measured yet.
It was too
high.
For another, a ship could travel very many
times 186000 miles per
second in overdrive.
The Med Ship did just that.
There was nobody but Calhoun and Murgatroyd
on board.
There was companionable silence,--there were
only the small
threshold-of-perception sounds which one did
not often notice, but which
it would have been intolerable to have stop.
Calhoun luxuriated in regained privacy.
For seven days he'd had
twenty-four other human beings crowded into
the two cabins of the ship,
with never so much as one yard of space between
himself and someone
else.
One need not be snobbish to wish to be alone
sometimes!
Murgatroyd licked his whiskers thoughtfully.
"I hope," said Calhoun, "that things work
out right.
But they may
remember on Dara that I'm responsible for
some ten million bushels of
grain reaching them.
Maybe--just possibly--they'll listen to me
and act
sensibly.
After all, there's only one way to break a
famine.
Not with
ten million bushels for a whole planet!
And certainly not with bombs!"
Driving direct, without pausing for practisings,
the Med Ship could
arrive at Dara in little more than five days.
Calhoun looked forward to
relaxation.
As a beginning he made ready to give himself
an adequate
meal for the first time since first landing
on Dara.
Then, presently, he
sat down wrily to a double meal of Darian
famine-rations, which were far
from appetizing.
But there wasn't anything else on board.
* * * * *
He had some pleasure later, though, envisioning
what went elsewhere.
On
Weald, obviously, there would be purest panic.
The vanishing of the
grain fleet wouldn't be charged against twenty-four
men.
A Darian fleet
would be suspected, and with the suspicion
terror, and with terror a
governmental crisis.
Then there'd be a frantic seizure of any craft
that
could take to space, and the agitated improvisation
of a space-fleet.
But besides that, biological-warfare technicians
would examine Calhoun's
instructions for equipment by which armed
men could be landed on a
plague-stricken planet and then safely taken
off again.
Military and
governmental officials would come to the eminently
sane conclusion that
while Calhoun could not well take active measures
against blueskins, as
a sane and proper citizen of the galaxy he
would be on the side of law
and order and propriety and justice,--in short,
of Weald.
So they
ordered sample anti-contagion suits made according
to Calhoun's
directions, and they had them tested.
They worked admirably.
On Dara, while Calhoun journeyed back to it,
grain was distributed
lavishly, and everybody on the planet had
their cereal ration almost
doubled.
It was still not a comfortable ration, but
the relief was
great.
There was considerable gratitude felt for
Calhoun, which as usual
included a lively anticipation of further
favors to come.
Maril was
interviewed repeatedly, as the person best
able to discuss him, and she
did his reputation no harm.
That was not all that happened on Dara ...
There was something else.
Very curious thing, too.
There was a curious
spread of mild symptoms which nobody could
exactly call a disease.
It
lasted only a few hours.
A person felt slightly feverish, and ran a
temperature which peaked at 30.9° centigrade,
and drank more water than
usual.
Then his temperature went back to normal and
he forgot all about
it.
There have always been such trivial epidemics.
They are rarely
recorded, because few people think to go to
a doctor.
That was the case
here.
Calhoun looked ahead a little, too.
Presently the fleet of grain-ships
would arrive and unload and lift again for
Orede, and this time they
would make an infinity of slaughter among
wild cattle-herds, and bring
back incredible quantities of fresh-slaughtered
frozen beef.
Almost
everybody would get to taste meat again, which
would be most gratifying.
Then, the industries of Dara would labor at
government-required tasks.
An astonishing amount of fissionable material
would be fashioned into
bombs--a concession by Calhoun--and plastic
factories make an
astonishing number of plastic sag-suits.
And large shipments of heavy
metals in ingots would be made to the planet's
capital city and there
would be some guns and minor items....
Perhaps somebody could have found out any
of these items in advance, but
it was unlikely that anybody did.
Nobody but Calhoun, however, would
ever have put them together and hoped very
urgently that that was the
way things would work out.
He could see a promising total result.
In
fact, in the Med ship hurtling through space,
on the fourth day of his
journey he thought of an improvement that
could be made in the sum of
all those happenings when they were put together.
* * * * *
He landed on Dara.
Maril came to the Med Ship.
Murgatroyd greeted her
with enthusiasm.
"Something unusual has happened," said Maril,
very much subdued.
"I told
you that--sometimes blueskin markings fade
out on children, and then
neither they nor their children ever have
blueskin markings again."
"Yes," said Calhoun.
"I remember."
"And you were reminded of a group of viruses
on Tralee.
You said they
only took hold of people in terribly bad physical
condition, but then
they could be passed on from mother to child.
Until--sometimes--they
died out."
Calhoun blinked.
"Yes...."
"Korvan," said Maril very carefully, "Has
worked out an idea that that's
what happens to the blueskin markings on--us
Darians.
He thinks that
people almost dead of the plague could get
the--virus, and if they
recovered from the plague pass the virus on
and--be blueskins."
"Interesting," said Calhoun, noncommittally.
"And when we went to Weald," said Maril very
carefully indeed, "you were
working with some culture-material.
You wrote quite a lot about it in
the ship's log.
You gave yourself an injection.
Remember?
And
Murgatroyd?
You wrote down your temperature, and Murgatroyd's?"
She
moistened her lips.
"You said that if infection passed between
us,
something would be very infectious indeed?"
"What are you driving at?"
Maril continued slowly.
"Th--thousands of people are having their
pigment-spots fade away.
Not only children but grownups.
And--Korvan has
found out that it always seems to happen after
a day when they felt
feverish and very thirsty--and then felt all
right again.
You tried out
something that made you feverish and thirsty.
I had it too, in the ship.
Korvan thinks there's been an epidemic of
something that--is
obliterating the blue spots on everybody that
catches it.
There are
always trivial epidemics that nobody notices.
Korvan's found evidence of
one that's making 'blueskin' no longer a word
with any meaning."
"Remarkable!" said Calhoun.
"Did you--do it?" asked Maril.
"Did you start a harmless epidemic
that--wipes out the virus that makes blueskins?"
Calhoun said in feigned astonishment;
"How can you think such a thing, Maril?"
"Because I was there," said Maril.
She said somehow desperately; "I know
you did it!
But the question is--are you going to tell?
When people find
they're not blueskins any longer--when there's
no such thing as a
blueskin any longer--will you tell them why?"
"Naturally not," said Calhoun.
"Why?"
Then he guessed.
"Has Korvan--."
"He thinks," said Maril, "that he thought
it up all by himself.
He's
found the proof.
He's--very proud.
I'd have to tell him the truth if you
were going to tell.
And he'd be ashamed and--angry."
Calhoun considered, staring at her.
"How it happened doesn't matter," he said
at last.
"The idea of anybody
doing it deliberately would be disturbing,
too.
It shouldn't get about.
So it seems much the best thing for Korvan
to discover what's happened
to the blueskin pigment, and how it happened,
but not why."
She read his face carefully.
"You aren't doing it as a favor to me," she
decided.
"You'd rather it
was that way."
She looked at him for a long time, until he
squirmed.
Then she nodded
and went away.
An hour later the Wealdian space-fleet was
reported, massed in space and
driving for Dara.
CHAPTER 8
There were small scout-ships which came on
ahead of the main fleet.
They'd originally been guard-boats, intended
for solar-system duty only
and quite incapable of overdrive.
They'd come from Weald in the
cargo-holds of the liners now transformed
into fighting ships.
The
scouts swept low, transmitting fine-screen
images back to the fleet, of
all that they might see before they were shot
down.
They found the
landing-grid.
It contained nothing larger than Calhoun's
Med Ship,
Aesclipus Twenty.
They searched here and there.
They flitted to and fro, scanning wide
bands of the surface of Dara.
The planet's cities and highways and
industrial centers were wholly open to inspection
from the sky.
It
looked as if the scouts hunted most busily
for the fleet of former
grain-ships which Calhoun had said blueskins
had seized and rushed away.
If the scouts looked for them, they did not
find them.
Dara offered no opposition to the scout-ships.
Nothing rose to space to
oppose or to resist their search.
They went darting over every portion
of the hungry planet, land and seas alike,
and there was no sign of
military preparedness against their coming.
The huge ships of the main
fleet waited while they reported monotonously
that they saw no sign of
the stolen fleet.
But the stolen fleet was the only means by
which the
planet could be defended.
There could be no point in a pitched battle
in
emptiness.
But a fleet with a planet to back it might
be dangerous.
Hours passed.
The Wealdian main fleet waited.
There was no offensive
movement by the fleet.
There was no defensive action from the ground,
With fusion-bombs certain to be involved in
any actual conflict, there
was something like an embarrassed pause.
The Wealdian ships were ready
to bomb.
They were less anxious to be vaporized by
possible
suicide-dashes of defending ships who might
blow themselves up near
contact with their enemies.
But a fleet cannot travel some light-years
through space to make a mere
threat.
And the Wealdian fleet was furnished with
the material for total
devastation.
It could drop bombs from hundreds, or thousands,
or even
tens of thousands of miles away.
It could cover the world of Dara with
mushroom clouds springing up and spreading
to make a continuous pall of
atomic-fusion products.
And they could settle down and kill every
living
thing not destroyed by the explosions themselves.
Even the creatures of
the deepest oceans would die of deadly, purposely-contrived
fallout
particles.
The Wealdian fleet contemplated its own destructiveness.
It found no
capacity for defense on Dara.
It moved forward.
But then a message went out from the capital
city of Dara.
It said that
a ship in overdrive had carried word to a
Darian fleet in space.
The
Darian fleet now hurtled toward Weald.
It was a fleet of thirty-seven
giant ships.
They carried such-and-such bombs in such-and-such
quantities.
Unless its orders were countermanded, it would
deliver those
bombs on Weald--set to explode.
If Weald bombed Dara, the orders could
not be withdrawn.
So Weald could bomb Dara.
It could destroy all life on
the pariah planet.
But Weald would die with it.
The fleet ceased its advance.
The situation was a stalemate with pure
desperation on one side and pure frustration
on the other.
This was no
way to end the war.
Neither planet could trust the other, even
for
minutes.
If they did not destroy each other simultaneously,
as now was
possible, each would expect the other to launch
an unwarned attack at
some other moment.
Ultimately one or the other must perish, and
the
survivor would be the one most skilled in
treachery.
But then the pariah planet made a new proposal.
It would send a
messenger-ship to stop its own fleet's bombardment
if Weald would accept
payment for the grain-ships and their cargoes.
It would pay in ingots of
iridium and uranium and tungsten--and gold
if Weald wished it--for all
damages Weald might claim.
It would even pay indemnity for the miners
of
Orede, who had died by accident but perhaps
in some sense through its
fault.
It would pay....
But if it were bombed, Weald must spout atomic
fire and the fleet of Weald would have no
home planet to return to.
* * * * *
This proposal seemed both craven and foolish.
It would allow the fleet
of Weald to loot and then betray Dara.
But it was Calhoun's idea.
It
seemed plausible to the admirals of Weald.
They felt only contempt for
blueskins.
Contemptuously, they accepted the semi-surrender.
The broadcast waves of Dara told of agreement,
and wild and fierce
resentment filled the pariah planet's people.
There was
almost--almost!--revolution to insist upon
resistance, however hopeless
and however fatal.
But not all of Dara realized that a vital
change had
come about in the state of things on Dara.
The enemy fleet had not a
hint of it.
And therefore--
In menacing array, the invading fleet spread
itself about the skies of
Dara, well beyond the atmosphere.
Harsh voices talked with increasing
arrogance to the landing-grid staff.
A monster ship of Weald came
heavily down, riding the landing-grid's force-fields.
It touched gently.
Its occupants were apprehensive, but hungry
for the loot they had been
assured was theirs.
The ship's outer hull would be sterilized
before it
returned to Weald, of course.
And there was adequate protection for the
landing-party.
Men came out of the ship's ports.
They wore the double, transparent
sag-suits Calhoun had suggested, which had
been painstakingly tested,
and which were perfect protection against
contagion.
They could loot
with impunity, and all contamination would
remain outside the suits.
What loot they gathered, obviously, could
be decontaminated before it
was returned to Weald.
It was a most satisfactory discovery, to realize
that blueskins could be not only scorned but
robbed.
There was only one
bit of relevant information the space-fleet
of Weald did not have.
That information was that the people of Dara
weren't blueskins any
longer.
There'd been a trivial epidemic.
The sag-suited men of Weald went zestfully
about their business.
They
took over the landing-grid's operation, driving
the Darian operators
away.
For the first time in history the operators
of a landing-grid wore
makeup to look like they did have blue pigment
in their skins.
The
Wealdian landing-party tested the grid's operation.
They brought down
another giant ship.
Then another.
And another.
Parties in the shiny sag-suits spread through
the city.
There were the
huge stock-piles of precious metals, brought
in readiness to be
surrendered and carried away.
Some men set to work to load these into
the holds--to be sterilized later.
Some went forthrightly after personal
loot.
They came upon very few Darians.
Those they saw kept sullenly away from
them.
They entered shops and took what they fancied.
They zestfully
removed the treasure of banks.
Triumphal and scornful reports went up to
the hovering great ships.
The
blueskins, said the reports were spiritless
and cowardly.
They permitted
themselves to be robbed.
They kept out of the way.
It had been observed
that the population was streaming out of the
city, fleeing because they
feared the ships' landing-parties.
The blueskins had abjectly produced
all they'd promised of precious metals, but
there was more to be taken.
More ships came down, and more.
Some of the first, heavily loaded, were
lifted to emptiness again and the process
of decontamination of their
hulls began.
There was jealousy among the ships in space
for those upon
the ground.
The first-landed ships had had their choice
of loot.
There
were squabblings about priorities, now that
the navy of Weald plainly
had a license to steal.
There was confusion among the members of the
landing-parties.
Discipline disappeared.
Men in plastic sag-suits roved
about as individuals, seeking what they might
loot.
* * * * *
There were armed and alerted landing-parties
around the grid itself, of
course, but the capital city of Dara lay open.
Men coming back with loot
found their ships already lifted off to make
room for others.
They were
pushed into reëmbarking-parties of other
ships.
There were more and more
men to be found on ships where they did not
belong, and more and more
not to be found where they did.
By the time half the fleet had been
aground, there was no longer any pretense
of holding a ship down until
all its crew returned.
There were too many other ships' companies
clamoring for their turn to loot.
The rosters of many ships, indeed,
bore no particular relationship to the men
actually on board.
There were less than fifteen ships whose to-be-fumigated
holds were
still empty, when the watchful government
of Dara broadcast a new
message to the invaders.
It requested that the looting stop.
No matter
what payment Weald claimed, it had taken payment
five times over.
Now
was time to stop.
It was amusing.
The space-admiral of Weald ordered his ships
alerted for
action.
The message-ship, ordering the Darian fleet
away from Weald,
had been sent off long since.
No other ship could get away now!
The
Darians could take their choice; accept the
consequences of surrender,
or the fleet would rise to throw down bombs.
Calhoun was asking politely to be taken to
the Wealdian admiral when the
trouble began.
It wasn't on the ground, at all.
Everything was under
splendid control where a landing-force occupied
the grid and all the
ground immediately about it.
The space admiral had headquarters in the
landing-grid office.
Reports came in, orders were issued, admirably
crisp salutes were exchanged among sag-suited
men....
Everything was in
perfect shape there.
But there was panic among the ships in space.
Communicators gave off
horrified, panic-stricken yells.
There were screamings.
Intelligible
communications ceased.
Ships plunged crazily this way and that.
Some
vanished in overdrive.
At least one plunged at full power into a
Darian
ocean.
The space-admiral found himself in command
of fifteen ships only, out of
all his former force.
The rest of the fleet went through a period
of
hysterical madness.
In some ships it lasted for minutes only.
In others
it went on for half an hour or more.
Then they hung overhead, but did
not reply to calls.
Calhoun arrived at the space-port with Murgatroyd
riding on his
shoulder.
A bewildered officer in a sag-suit halted
him.
"I've come," said Calhoun, "to speak to the
admiral.
My name is Calhoun
and I'm Med Service, and I think I met the
Admiral at a banquet a few
weeks ago.
He'll remember me."
"You'll have to wait," protested the officer.
"There's some trouble--"
"Yes," said Calhoun.
"I know about it.
I helped design it.
I want to
explain it to the admiral.
He needs to know what's happened, if he's
to
take appropriate measures."
There were jitterings.
Many men in sag-suits had still no idea that
anything had gone wrong.
Some appeared, brightly carrying loot.
Some
hung eagerly around the airlocks of ships
on the grid tarmac, waiting
their turns to stand in corrosive gases for
the decontamination of their
suits, when they would burn the outer layers
and step, aseptic and
happy, into a Wealdian ship again.
There they could think how rich they
were going to be back on Weald.
But the situation aloft was bewildering and
very, very ominous.
There
was strident argument.
Presently Calhoun stood before the Wealdian
admiral.
"I came to explain something," said Calhoun
pleasantly.
"The situation
has changed.
You've noticed it, I'm sure."
The admiral glared at him through two layers
of plastic, which covered
him almost like a gift-wrapped parcel.
"Be quick!" he rasped.
"First," said Calhoun, "there are no more
blueskins.
An epidemic of
something or other has made the blue patches
on the skins of Darians
fade out.
There have always been some who didn't have
blue patches.
Now
nobody has them."
"Nonsense!" rasped the admiral.
"And what has that got to do with this
situation?"
"Why, everything," said Calhoun mildly.
"It means that Darians can pass
for Wealdians whenever they please.
That they are passing for Wealdians.
That they've been mixing with your men, wearing
sag-suits exactly like
the one you're wearing now.
They've been going aboard your ships in the
confusion of returning looters.
There's not a ship now aloft, that has
been aground today, that hasn't from one to
fifteen Darians--no longer
blueskins--on board."
The admiral roared.
Then his face turned gray.
"You can't take your fleet back to Weald,"
said Calhoun gently, "if you
believe its crews have been exposed to carriers
of the Dara plague.
You
wouldn't be allowed to land, anyhow."
The admiral said through stiff lips;
"I'll blast--"
"No," said Calhoun, again gently.
"When you ordered all ships alerted
for action, the Darians on each ship released
panic-gas.
They only
needed tiny, pocket-sized containers of the
gas for the job.
They had
them.
They only needed to use air-tanks from their
sag-suits to protect
themselves against the gas.
They kept them handy.
On nearly all your
ships aloft your crews are crazy from panic-gas.
They'll stay that way
until the air is changed.
Darians have barricaded themselves in the
control-rooms of most if not all your ships.
You haven't got a fleet.
If
the few ships that will obey your orders,
drop one bomb, our fleet off
Weald will drop fifty.
I don't think you'd better order offensive
action.
Instead, I think you'd better have your fleet
medical officers
come and learn some of the facts of life.
There's no need for war
between Dara and Weald, but if you insist...."
The Admiral made a choking noise.
He could have ordered Calhoun killed,
but there was a certain appalling fact.
The men aground from the fleet
were breathing Wealdian air from tanks.
It would last so long only.
If
they were taken on board the still obedient
ships overhead, Darians
would unquestionably be mixed with them.
There was no way to take off
the parties now aground without exposing them
to contact with Darians,
on the ground or in the ships.
There was no way to sort out the Darians.
"I--I will give the orders," said the admiral
thickly.
"I--do not know
what you devils plan, but--I don't know how
to stop you."
"All that's necessary," said Calhoun warmly,
"is an open mind.
There's a
misunderstanding to be cleared up, and some
principles of planetary
health practises to be explained, and a certain
amount of prejudice that
has to be thrown away.
But nobody need die of changing their minds.
The
Interstellar Medical service has proved that
over and over!"
Murgatroyd, perched on his shoulder, felt
that it was time to take part
in the conversation.
He said;
"_Chee-chee!_"
"Yes," agreed Calhoun.
"We do want to get the job done.
We're behind
schedule now."
* * * * *
It was not, of course, possible for Calhoun
to leave immediately.
He had
to preside at various meetings of the medical
officers of the fleet with
the health officials of Dara.
He had to make explanations, and correct
misapprehensions, and delicately suggest such
biological experiments as
would prove to the doctors of Weald that there
was no longer a plague on
Dara, whatever had been the case three generations
before.
He had to sit
by while an extremely self-confident young
Darian doctor named Korvan
rather condescendingly demonstrated that the
former blue pigmentation
was a viral product quite unconnected with
the plague, and that it had
been wiped out by a very trivial epidemic
of--such and such.
Calhoun
regarded that young man with a detached interest.
Maril thought him
wonderful, even if she had to give him the
material for his work.
Calhoun shrugged and went on with his work.
The return of loot.
Mutual, full, and complete agreement that
Darians
were no longer carriers of plague, if they
had ever been.
Unless Weald
convinced other worlds of this, Weald itself
would join Dara in
isolation from neighboring worlds.
A messenger ship to recall the
twenty-seven ships once floating in orbit
about Weald.
Most of them
would be used for some time, now, to bring
beef from Orede.
Some would
haul more grain from Weald.
It would be paid for.
There would be a need
for commercial missions to be exchanged between
Weald and Dara.
It was a full week before he could go to the
little Med Ship and prepare
for departure.
Even then there were matters to be attended
to.
All the
food-supplies that had been removed could
not be replaced.
There were
biological samples to be replaced and some
to be destroyed....
The
air-tanks....
Maril came to the Med Ship again when he was
almost ready to leave.
She
did not seem comfortable.
"I wish you could like Korvan," she said regretfully.
"I don't dislike him," said Calhoun.
"I think he will be a most
prominent citizen, in time.
He has all the talents for it."
Maril smiled very faintly.
"But you don't admire him."
"I wouldn't say that," protested Calhoun.
"After all, he is attractive
to you, which is something I couldn't manage."
"You didn't try," said Maril.
"Just as I didn't try to be fascinating to
you.
Why?"
Calhoun spread out his hands.
But he looked at Maril with respect.
Not
every woman could have faced the fact that
a man did not feel impelled
to make passes at her.
It is simply a fact that has nothing to do
with
desirability or charm or anything else.
"You're going to marry him," he said.
"I hope you'll be very happy."
"He's the man I want," said Maril frankly.
"He looks forward to splendid
discoveries.
I'm sorry it's so important to him."
Calhoun did not ask the obvious question.
Instead, he said thoughtfully;
"There's something you could do....
It needs to be done.
The Med Service
in this sector has been badly handled.
There are a number
of--discoveries that need to be made.
I don't think your Korvan would
relish having things handed to him on a visible
silver platter.
But they
should be known...."
Maril said wrily;
"I can guess what you mean.
I never went into detail about how the
blueskin markings disappeared, but a few hints--You've
got books for
me?"
Calhoun nodded.
He brought them to her.
"If we only fell in love with each other,
Maril, we'd be a team!
Too
bad!
These are a wedding present you'll do well
to hide."
She put her hands in his.
"I like you--almost as much as I like Murgatroyd!
Yes!
Korvan will never
know, and he'll be a great man."
Then she added defensively, "And not
just from these books!
He'll make his own wonderful discoveries."
"Of which," said Calhoun, "the most remarkable
is you.
Good luck
Maril!"
* * * * *
Presently the Med Ship lifted.
Calhoun aimed it for the next planet on
the list of those he was to visit.
After this one more he'd return to
sector headquarters with a biting report to
make on the way things had
been handled before him.
He said;
"Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"
Then the stars went out and there was silence,
and privacy, and a faint,
faint, almost unhearable series of background
sounds which kept the Med
Ship from being totally unendurable.
Long, long days later the ship broke out of
overdrive and Calhoun guided
it to a round and sunlit world.
In due time he thumped the
communicator-button.
"Calling ground," he said crisply.
"Calling ground!
Med Ship Aesclipus
Twenty reporting arrival and asking coördinates
for landing.
Purpose of
landing, planetary health inspection.
Our mass is fifty standard tons."
There was a pause while the beamed message
went many, many thousands of
miles.
Then the speaker said;
"_Aesclipus Twenty, repeat your identification!_"
Murgatroyd said;
"_Chee-chee?
Chee?_"
Calhoun sighed.
"That's right, Murgatroyd!
Here we go again!"
THE END
