Calhoun said ironically, "Undoubtedly, Murgatroyd. Undoubtedly!
Whoever's on duty at the spaceport stepped out for a moment, or dropped
dead, or did something equally inconvenient. We have to wait until he
gets back or somebody else takes over."
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" again and began to lick his whiskers. He
knew that when Calhoun called on the communicator, another human voice
should reply. Then there should be conversation, and shortly the
force-fields of a landing-grid should take hold of the Med Ship and
draw it planet-ward. In time it ought to touch ground in a spaceport
with a gigantic, silvery landing-grid rising skyward all about it.
Then there should be people greeting Calhoun cordially and welcoming
Murgatroyd with smiles and petting.
"_Calling ground_," said the recorded voice yet again. "_Med Ship_
Esclipus Twenty--"
It went on through the formal notice of arrival. Murgatroyd waited
in pleasurable anticipation. When the Med Ship arrived at a port of
call humans gave him sweets and cakes, and they thought it charming
that he drank coffee just like a human, only with more gusto. Aground,
Murgatroyd moved zestfully in society while Calhoun worked. Calhoun's
work was conferences with planetary health officials, politely
receiving such information as they thought important, and tactfully
telling them about the most recent developments in medical science as
known to the Interstellar Medical Service.
"Somebody," said Calhoun darkly, "is going to catch the devil for this!"
The communicator loudspeaker spoke abruptly.
"Calling Med Ship," said a voice. "Calling Med Ship _Esclipus Twenty_!
Liner _Candida_ calling. Have you had an answer from ground?"
Calhoun blinked. Then he said curtly:
"Not yet. I've been calling all of half an hour, and never a word out
of them!"
"We've been in orbit twelve hours," said the voice from emptiness.
"Calling all the while. No answer. We don't like it."
Calhoun flipped a switch that threw a vision screen into circuit
with the ship's electron telescope. A starfield appeared and shifted
wildly. Then a bright dot centered itself. He raised the magnification.
The bright dot swelled and became a chubby commercial ship, with
the false ports that passengers like to believe they looked through
when in space. Two relatively large cargo ports on each side showed
that it carried heavy freight in addition to passengers. It was one
of those workhorse intra-cluster ships that distributed the freight
and passengers the long-haul liners dumped off only at established
transshipping ports.
Murgatroyd padded across the Med Ship's cabin and examined the image
with a fine air of wisdom. It did not mean anything to him, but
_tormals_ imitate human actions as parrots and parrakeets imitate human
speech. He said, "_Chee!_" as if making an observation of profound
significance, then went back to the cushion and again curled up.
"We don't see anything wrong aground," the liner's voice complained,
"but they don't answer calls! We don't get any scatter-signals either.
We went down to two diameters and couldn't pick up a thing. And we have
a passenger to land. He insists on it!"
* * * * *
By ordinary, communications between different places on a planet's
surface use frequencies the ion-layers of the atmosphere either reflect
or refract down past the horizon. But there is usually some small
leakage to space, and line-of-sight frequencies are generally abundant.
It is one of the annoyances of a ship coming in to port that space near
most planets is usually full of local signals.
"I'll check," said Calhoun curtly. "Stand by."
The _Candida_ would have arrived off Maya as the Med Ship had done, and
called down as Calhoun had been doing. It was very probably a ship on
schedule and the grid operator at the spaceport should have expected
it. Space commerce was important to any planet, comparing more or less
with the export-import business of an industrial nation in ancient
times on Earth. Planets had elaborate traffic-aid systems for the
cargo-carriers which moved between solar systems as they'd once moved
between continents on Earth. Such traffic aids were very carefully
maintained. Certainly for a spaceport landing-grid not to respond to
calls for twelve hours running seemed ominous.
"We've been wondering," said the _Candida_ querulously, "if there could
be something radically wrong below. Sickness, for example."
The word "sickness" was a substitute for a more alarming word. But a
plague had nearly wiped out the population of Dorset, once upon a time,
and the first ships to arrive after it had broken out most incautiously
went down to ground, and so carried the plague to their next two ports
of call. Nowadays quarantine regulations were enforced very strictly
indeed.
"I'll try to find out what's the matter," said Calhoun.
"We've got a passenger," repeated the _Candida_ aggrievedly, "who
insists that we land him by space-boat if we don't make a ship landing.
He says he has important business aground."
Calhoun did not answer. The rights of passengers were extravagantly
protected, these days. To fail to deliver a passenger to his
destination entitled him to punitive damages which no spaceline could
afford. So the Med Ship would seem heaven-sent to the _Candida's_
skipper. Calhoun could relieve him of responsibility.
The telescope screen winked and showed the surface of the planet a
hundred thousand miles away. Calhoun glared at the image on the port
screen and guided the telescope to the spaceport city--Maya City. He
saw highways and blocks of buildings. He saw the spaceport and its
landing-grid. He could see no motion, of course.
He raised the magnification. He raised it again. Still no motion. He
upped the magnification until the lattice-pattern of the telescope's
amplifying crystal began to show. But at the ship's distance from the
planet, a ground-car would represent only the fortieth of a second of
arc. There was atmosphere, too, with thermals; anything the size of a
ground-car simply couldn't be seen.
But the city showed quite clearly. Nothing massive had happened to it.
No large-scale physical disaster had occurred. It simply did not answer
calls from space.
* * * * *
Calhoun flipped off the screen.
"I think," he said irritably into the communicator microphone, "I
suspect I'll have to make an emergency landing. It could be something
as trivial as a power failure--" but he knew that was wildly
improbable--"or it could be--anything. I'll land on rockets and tell
you what I find."
The voice from the _Candida_ said hopefully:
"Can you authorize us to refuse to land our passenger for his own
protection? He's raising the devil! He insists that his business
demands that he be landed."
A word from Calhoun as a Med Service man would protect the spaceliner
from a claim for damages. But Calhoun didn't like the look of things.
He realized, distastefully, that he might find practically anything
down below. He might find that he had to quarantine the planet and
himself with it. In such a case he'd need the _Candida_ to carry word
of the quarantine to other planets and thus to Med Service sector
headquarters.
"We've lost a lot of time," insisted the _Candida_. "Can you authorize
us--"
"Not yet," said Calhoun. "I'll tell you when I land."
"But--"
"I'm signing off for the moment," said Calhoun. "Stand by."
He headed the little ship downward, and as it gathered velocity he went
over the briefing sheets covering this particular world. He'd never
touched ground here before. His occupation, of course, was seeing to
the dissemination of medical science as it developed under the Med
Service. The Service itself was neither political nor administrative.
But it was important. Every human-occupied world was supposed to have
a Med Ship visit at least once in four years to verify the state of
public health.
Med Ship men like Calhoun offered advice on public-health problems.
When something out of the ordinary turned up, the Med Service had a
staff of researchers who hadn't been wholly baffled yet. There were
great ships which could carry the ultimate in laboratory equipment and
specialized personnel to any place where they were needed. Not less
than a dozen inhabited worlds in this sector alone owed the survival
of their populations to the Med Service, and the number of those which
couldn't have been colonized without Med Service help was legion.
Calhoun reread the briefing. Maya was one of four planets in this
general area whose life systems seemed to have had a common origin,
suggesting that the Arrhenius theory of space-traveling spores was true
in some limited sense. A genus of ground-cover plants with motile stems
and leaves and cannibalistic tendencies was considered strong evidence
of common origin.
The planet had been colonized for two centuries now, and produced
organic compounds of great value from indigenous plants, most of
which were used in textile manufacture. There were no local endemic
infections to which men were susceptible. A number of human-use crops
were grown. Cereals, grasses and grains, however, could not be grown
because of the native ground-cover motile-stem plants. All wheat and
cereal food had to be imported, which fact severely limited Maya's
population. There were about two million people on the planet, settled
on a peninsula in the Yucatan Sea and a small area of mainland.
Public-health surveys had shown a great many things about a great
many subjects ... but there was no mention of anything to account for
the failure of the spaceport to respond to arrival calls from space.
Naturally!
The Med Ship drove on down, and the planet revolved beneath it.
As Maya's sunlit hemisphere enlarged, Calhoun kept the telescope's
field wide. He saw cities, and vast areas of cleared land where native
plants were grown as raw materials for the organics' manufacturies. He
saw very little true chlorophyll green, though. Mayan foliage tended to
a dark olive color.
* * * * *
At fifty miles he was sure that the city streets were empty even
of ground-car traffic. There was no spaceship aground in the
landing-grid. There were no ground-cars in motion on the splendid,
multiple-lane highways.
At thirty miles altitude there were still no signals in the atmosphere,
though when he tried amplitude-modulation reception he picked up
static. But there was no normally modulated signal on the air at any
frequency. At twenty miles--no. At fifteen miles, broadcast power was
available, which proved that the landing-grid was working as usual,
tapping the upper atmosphere for electric charges to furnish power for
all the planet's needs.
From ten miles down to ground-touch, Calhoun was busy.
It is not too difficult to land a ship on rockets, with reasonably
level ground to land on. But landing at a specific spot is something
else. Calhoun juggled the ship to descend inside the grid itself. His
rockets burned out pencil-thin holes through the clay and stone beneath
the tarmac. He cut them off.
Silence. Stillness. The Med Ship's outside microphones picked up small
noises of wind blowing over the city. There was no other sound at all.
--No. There was a singularly deliberate clicking sound, not loud and
not fast. Perhaps a click--a double click--every two seconds. That was
all.
Calhoun went into the airlock, with Murgatroyd frisking a little in
the expectation of great social success among the people of this world.
When Calhoun cracked the outer airlock door he smelled something. It
was a faintly sour, astringent odor that had the quality of decay in
it. But it was no kind of decay he recognized. Again stillness and
silence. No traffic-noise; not even the almost inaudible murmur that
every city has in all its ways at all hours. The buildings looked as
buildings should look at daybreak, except that the doors and windows
were open. It was somehow shocking.
A ruined city is dramatic. An abandoned city is pathetic. This was
neither. It was something new. It felt as if everybody had walked away,
out of sight, within the past few minutes.
Calhoun headed for the spaceport building with Murgatroyd ambling
puzzledly at his side. Murgatroyd was disturbed. There should be people
here! They should welcome Calhoun and admire him--Murgatroyd--and he
should be a social lion with all the sweets he could eat and all the
coffee he could put into his expandable belly. But nothing happened!
Nothing at all.
"_Chee?_" he asked anxiously.
"They've gone away," growled Calhoun. "They probably left in
ground-cars. There's not one in sight."
There wasn't. Calhoun could look out through the grid foundations
and see long, sunlit and absolutely empty streets. He arrived at the
spaceport building. There was--there had been--a green area about the
base of the structure. There was not a living plant left. Leaves were
wilted and limp. The remains had become almost a jelly of collapsed
stems and blossoms of dark olive-green. The plants were dead; but not
long enough to have dried up. They might have wilted two or three days
before.
Calhoun went in the building. The spaceport log lay open on a desk. It
recorded the arrival of freight to be shipped away--undoubtedly--on the
_Candida_ now uneasily in orbit somewhere aloft. There was no sign of
disorder. It was exactly as if the people here had walked out to look
at something interesting, and hadn't come back.
Calhoun trudged out of the spaceport and to the streets and buildings
of the city proper. It was incredible! Doors were opened or unlocked.
Merchandise in the shops lay on display, exactly as it had been spread
out to interest customers. There was no sign of confusion anywhere.
Even in a restaurant there were dishes and flatware on the tables. The
food in the plates was stale, as if three days old, but it hadn't yet
begun to spoil. The appearance of everything was as if people at their
meals had simply, at some signal, gotten up and walked out without any
panic or disturbance.
Calhoun made a wry face. He'd remembered something. Among the tales
that had been carried from Earth to the other worlds of the galaxy
there was a completely unimportant mystery story which people still
sometimes tried to write an ending to. It was the story of an ancient
sailing ship called the _Marie Celeste_, which was found drifting
aimlessly in the middle of the ocean. There was food on the cabin
table, and the galley stove was still warm. There was no sign of any
trouble, or terror, or disturbance which might cause the ship to be
abandoned. But there was not a living soul on board. Nobody had ever
been able to contrive a believable explanation.
"Only," said Calhoun to Murgatroyd, "this is on a larger scale. The
people of this city walked out about three days ago, and didn't come
back. Maybe all the people on the planet did the same, since there's
not a communicator in operation anywhere. To make the understatement
of the century, Murgatroyd, I don't like this. I don't like it a bit!"