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 parakeets imitate human speech. But _tormals_ have certain
valuable, 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.
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd!" he said.
Murgatroyd watched. He saw Calhoun make certain gestures which
presaged discomfort. He popped back into his cubbyhole. Calhoun threw
the overdrive switch and the Med Ship flicked back into that
questionable state of being in which velocities of 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 coordinates
for landing," he said matter-of-factly. "Purpose of landing is
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 came out for a cup
of coffee for himself. Murgatroyd adored coffee. In minutes 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 commonplace. 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, "Listen, my fine feathered 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 it's
being straightened up. I'm helping straighten it! I give you twenty
minutes to clear this! Then I am coming in, and 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, annoyed, "but
there are some people who demand it. The rule is, never get official
if you can help it, but when you must, out-official the official who's
officialing you."
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" and sipped at his cup.
Calhoun checked the course of the Med Ship. It bore 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.
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 cooperative. We need Med Service help!
We lose a lot of sleep over the blueskin! 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.
"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, nonfatal form of Dara plague and
has been said to be noninfectious, though this is not certain. The
etiology of Dara plague has not been worked out. The blueskin
condition is hereditary but not a genetic modification, as markings
appear in non-Mendelian 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 to 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, annoyed. 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 coordinates
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 the 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 this 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 icecaps and a reasonable proportion of land and water
surface. The ship decelerated, voices notifying observation from the
surface, and the little ship came to a stop some five planetary
diameters out from solidity. The landing field's 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 will 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. "Twenty years ago there was a
famine on Dara. There were crop failures. The situation must have been
very bad: They built a spaceship.
"They've no use for such things normally, because no nearby planet
will deal with them or let them land. But they built a spaceship 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, irridium, 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
spaceship 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!"
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 overabundant 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 near 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 than 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 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, despite 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 deprived 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 as if 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 spaceport reported
that a ship had just broken out from overdrive within the Wealdian
solar system. Its tape-transmitter had automatically signaled 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 to the
spaceport. There we'll get the news as it comes in, and can frame
orders on the latest information."