"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd indignantly.
It wasn't an answer, but it showed that Murgatroyd was vexed that he'd
been left behind. He and the girl were close friends, now. If she'd
left Murgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go with her, then she
wasn't coming back.
Calhoun swore. He made certain she was not in the ship. He flipped the
outside-speaker switch and said curtly into the microphone, "Coffee!
Murgatroyd and I are having coffee. Will you come back, please?"
He repeated the call, and repeated it again. Multiplied as his voice
was by the speakers, she should hear him within a mile. She did not
appear. He went to a small and inconspicuous closet and armed himself.
A Med Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but there were
blast-rifles available for extreme emergency.
When he'd slung a power-pack over his shoulder and reached the
airlock, there was still no sign of his late stowaway. He stood in the
airlock door for long minutes, staring angrily about. Almost certainly
she wouldn't be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here for
cattle. He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification to
search as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highest
power to search the most likely routes.
He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a faraway hill crest. It was
her head. It went down below the hilltop.
He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the _tormal_ was on the
ground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobody
but a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.
"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly. "Come along! We've got to
be idiots too!"
He set out in pursuit.
There was blue sky overhead, as was inevitable on any
oxygen-atmosphere planet of a Sol-type yellow sun. There were
mountains, as is universal in planets whose surface rises and falls
and folds and bends from the effects of weather or vulcanism. There
were plants, as has come about wherever microorganisms have broken
down rock to a state where it can nourish vegetation. And naturally
there were animals.
There were even trees of severely practical design, and underbrush and
ground-cover equivalent to grass. There was, in short, a perfectly
predictable ecological system on Orede. The organic molecules involved
in life here would be made up of the same elements in the same
combinations as elsewhere where the same conditions of temperature and
moisture and sunshine obtained.
It was a distinctly Earthlike world, as it could not help but be, and
it was reasonable for cattle to thrive and increase here. Only men's
minds kept it from being a place where humans would thrive, too.
But only Calhoun would have considered the splintered settlement a
proof of that last.
The girl had a long start. Twice Calhoun came to places where she
could have chosen either of two ways onward. Each time he had to
determine which she'd followed. That cost time. Then the mountains
abruptly ended and a vast undulating plain stretched away to the
horizon. There were at least two large masses and many smaller clumps
of what could only be animals gathered together. Cattle.
But here the girl was plainly in view. Calhoun increased his stride.
He began to gain on her. She did not look behind.
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a complaining tone.
"I should have left you behind," agreed Calhoun dourly, "but there was
and is a chance I won't get back. You'll have to keep on hiking."
He plodded on. His memory of the terrain around the mining settlement
told him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind.
But she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost.
She'd guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the
planet, they'd keep the landing-grid under observation.
If they saw her leave that area and could see that she was alone, they
should intercept her to find out the meaning of the Med Ship's
landing. Then she could identify herself as one of them and give them
the terribly necessary warning of Weald's suspicions.
"But," said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right, they'll have seen me
marching after her now, which spoils her scheme. And I'd like to help
it, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"
He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain. He saw a
clump of a dozen or so cattle a little distance away. The bull looked
up and snorted. The cows regarded him truculently. Their air was not
one of bovine tranquility.
He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull worked
himself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of the
items in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. He
felt himself grow pale.
"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay with
me if you can, but--" he was jog-trotting as he spoke--"even if you
get lost I have to hurry!"
He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walked
fifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a full
stop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung off the
safety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the ground
for her to hear.
Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. She
vanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'd
just left. Cattle appeared. Four, a dozen fifteen, twenty! They moved
ominously in her wake.
He saw her again, running frantically over another upward swell of
the prairie. He let off another blast to guide her. He ran on at top
speed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind. From time to time
Murgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_" in frightened pleading not to be
abandoned.
More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. They
came after the first clump. The first group of a bull and his harem
were moving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is the
instinct of beef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had learned it only
two days before--to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted man
to their dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but a
human on foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.
Those in the lead were definitely charging now, with heads bent low.
The bull charged furiously with shut eyes, as bulls do, but the cows,
many times more deadly, charged with their eyes wide open and wickedly
alert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girl could
manage.
She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hair
flying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuing
cattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yards
beyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck.
It went down and others crashed into it and swept over it, and more
came on. The girl saw Calhoun now, and ran toward him, panting. He
knelt very deliberately and began to check the charge by shooting the
leading animals.
He did not succeed. There were more cattle following the first, and
more and more behind them. It appeared that all the cattle on the
plain joined in the blind and senseless charge. The thudding of hoofs
became a mutter and then a rumble and then a growl.
Plunging, clumsy figures rushed past on either side. But horns and
heads heaved up over the mound of animals Calhoun had shot. He shot
them too. More and more cattle came pounding past the rampart of his
victims, but always, it seemed, some elected to climb the heap of
their dead and dying fellows, and Calhoun shot and shot....
But he split the herd. The foremost animals had been charging a
sighted human enemy. Others had followed because it is the instinct of
cattle to join their running fellows in whatever crazed urgency they
feel. There was a dense, pounding, wailing, grunting, puffing, raising
thick and impenetrable clouds of dust which hid everything but
galloping beasts going past on either side.
It lasted for minutes. Then the thunder of hoofs diminished. It ended
abruptly, and Calhoun and the girl were left alone with the gruesome
pile of animals which had divided the charging herd into two parts.
They could see the rears of innumerable running animals, stupidly
continuing the charge, hardly different, now, from a stampede, whose
original objective none now remembered.
Calhoun thoughtfully touched the barrel of his blast-rifle and winced
at its scorching heat.
"I just realized," he said coldly, "that I don't know your name. What
is it?"
"Maril," said the girl. She swallowed. "Th--thank you."
"Maril," said Calhoun, "you are an idiot! It was half-witted at best
to go off by yourself! You could have been lost! You could have cost
me days of hunting for you, days badly needed for more important
matters!"
He stopped and took breath. "You may have spoiled what little chance
I've got to do something about the plans Weald's already making! You
have just acted with the most concentrated folly, and the most
magnificent imbecility that you or anybody else could manage!"
He said more bitterly still, "And I had to leave Murgatroyd behind to
get to you in time! He was right in the path of that charge!"
He turned away from her and said dourly, "All right! Come on back to
the ship. We'll go to Dara. We'd have to, anyhow. But Murgatroyd--"
Then he heard a very small sneeze. Out of a rolling wall of
still-roiling dust, Murgatroyd appeared forlornly. He was
dust-covered, and draggled, and his tail dropped, and he sneezed
again. He moved as if he could barely put one paw before another, but
at sight of Calhoun he sneezed yet again and said "_Chee!_" in a
disconsolate voice. Then he sat down and waited for Calhoun to come
and pick him up.
When Calhoun did so, Murgatroyd clung to him pathetically and said
"_Chee-chee!_" and again "_Chee-chee!_" with the intonation of one
telling of incredible horrors and disasters endured. And as a matter
of fact the escape of a small animal like Murgatroyd was remarkable.
He'd escaped the trampling hoofs of at least hundreds of charging
animals. Luck must have played a great part in it, but an hysterical
agility in dodging must have been required, too.
Calhoun headed back for the valley where the settlement had been, and
the Med Ship was. Murgatroyd clung to his neck. The girl Maril
followed discouragedly. She was at that age when girls--and men of
corresponding type--can grow most passionately devoted to ideals or
causes in default of a promising personal romance. When concerned with
such causes they become splendidly confident that whatever they decide
to do is sensible if only it is dramatic. But Maril was shaken, now.
Calhoun did not speak to her again. He led the way. A mile back toward
the mountains, they began to see stragglers from the now-vanished
herd. A little farther, those stragglers began to notice them. It
would have been a matter of no moment if they'd been domesticated
dairy cattle, but these were range cattle gone wild. Twice, Calhoun
had to use his blast-rifle to discourage incipient charges by
irritated bulls or even more irritated cows. Those with calves darkly
suspected Calhoun of designs upon their offspring.
It was a relief to enter the valley again. But it was two miles more
to the landing-grid with the Med Ship beside it and the reek of
carrion in the air.
They were perhaps two hundred feet from the ship when a blast-rifle
crashed and its bolt whined past Calhoun so close that he felt the
monstrous heat. There had been no challenge. There was no warning.
There was simply a shot which came horribly close to ending Calhoun's
career in a completely arbitrary fashion.
* * * * *
4
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, hoping
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 tensed. He felt extraordinary symptoms like an extreme of
agitation. He swore, but a Med Ship man would not react to such
symptoms as a non-medically-trained man would have done. 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 rat-tat-tat 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 blast-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 bloodstream and muscles, and to make
superhuman exertion possible if necessary.
Breathing ninety-five percent 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'd been affronted to see it shake uncontrollably when he pushed the
microphone button for Maril.
He turned to her. She hadn't spoken into the mike.
"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 from 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. An instant later his voice boomed in the
stillness outside the ship, cutting through the thin shrill whirring
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 still more scared! 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
outsmarted themselves! Hold hard, Murgatroyd!"
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 respecting 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 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! Being desperate jogs the brain
off-center. One doesn't think straight!"
"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, annoyed, "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.
"He wouldn't be sure of what he'd seen or heard before-hand. They
might try to verify the blueskin story later, but they wouldn't
believe anything with certainty. It should have worked!"
Again she waited.
"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. They
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 kept 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. "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 exasperated 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. Would you
mind taking a book or something and going into the other cabin?
Murgatroyd and I would like a little relaxation from reality. With
luck, if I go to sleep, I may only have a nightmare. It'll be a
terrific improvement on what I'm in now!"
Alone in the control compartment, he tried to relax, but it was not
possible. He flung himself into a comfortable chair and brooded. There
is brooding and brooding. It can be a form of wallowing in self-pity,
engaged in for emotional satisfaction. But it can be, also, a way of
bringing out unfavorable factors in a situation. A man in optimistic
mood can ignore them. But no awkward situation is likely to be
remedied while any of its elements are neglected.
Calhoun dourly considered the situation of the people of the planet
Dara, which it was his job as a Med Service man to remedy or at least
improve. Those people were marked by patches of blue pigment as an
inherited consequence of a plague of three generations past. Because
of the marking, which it was easy to believe a sign of continuing
infection, they were hated and dreaded by their neighbors. Dara was a
planet of pariahs--excluded from the human race by those who feared
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 prospered. Ironically, it had such
an excess of foodstuffs that it stored them in unneeded spaceships 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--if 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 that didn't hear. They'd been abandoned and betrayed
by all of humanity off their world. They'd been threatened and
oppressed by guardships in orbit about them, ready to shoot down any
spacecraft they might send aloft....
So Calhoun brooded, while Murgatroyd presently yawned and climbed to
his cubbyhole and curled up to sleep with his furry tail carefully
adjusted over his nose.
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. "Did I make a noise? I was having a bad dream."
"I wish," said Calhoun, "that you'd tell me the truth just
occasionally! Come out, please!"
There were stirrings. After a little it 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, 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.
Will you give them to me?"