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?" asked the girl.
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!"
"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 picture
of a criminal they never mentioned it if he were pock-marked. 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 Med
Ship 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
left."
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--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 thing...."
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 wrung her hands. Then 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 ships' control board and sat down before it.
"Twenty minutes to breakhour," 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.
* * * * *
3
There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun
drove the Med Ship to a favourable position for a call. He patiently
repeated, over and over again, that the Med Ship _Aesclipus Twenty_
notified its arrival and requested coordinates for landing. He added
that its mass was fifty standard tons and that the purpose of its
visit was a planetary health inspection.
But there was no reply. 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 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 directly 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 make-up 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 make-up 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 seabottom, 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
could 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 manyfold. 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
mountaintops, 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 rockets cut off. Slender as the flames 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 vision screens 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 conveyer 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 in
fragments. Next to that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters of
the mine. They also were shattered practically to matchsticks.
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
shapelessness. 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. 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!"
"But what--"
"How," asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend to get in touch with
your friends here?"
"I--I don't know," she said, distressed. "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 but so 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
future 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 also 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
spaceship'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 were 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 or
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, tuned as broadly 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: 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 vexedly at the
exit port. The inner door of that small airlock was closed. The
telltale light said the outer door was not locked. Someone had gone
out quietly. The girl. Of course.