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 coordinates 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 coordinates 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!"