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
reevaporated 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 deg.C. An hour later it was 30.9 deg.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.