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 given them
as a graduation ceremony--the ceremony which had consisted solely of
drinking coffee and passing out--allowed for waking-up processes.
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 surplus grain to keep the price up.
"To save storage costs, it's loaded the grain into out-of-date
spaceships 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
spacesuits 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 spacesuits, 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 high heroic action to be successful, it had to be
performed with the stealth of sneak-thieves.
What seemed a long time passed. The 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. No normal girl does."
"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 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. 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, into which no signal
could come, no danger could enter, and in which there could be no
sound except those minute ones made to prevent silence.
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. And one dreams such delicious
meals! But looking hungry is a social requirement, on Dara."
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 didn't get
much sleep on the way here, while running a seminar on astrogation. I
think I'll take a nap."
She rose and almost ostentatiously went into the other cabin, to leave
him alone. He shrugged. He settled down into the chair which, to let a
Med Ship man break the monotony of life in unchanging surroundings,
turned into a comfortable sleeping arrangement. He 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 semiskilled 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 safekeeping.
"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. It was another 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.
Any indulgence frequently repeated would become a habit, in the sense
that it would give no special pleasure when indulged in, but would
make for stress if it were omitted. 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 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 there are instincts...."
She waited. He did not finish.
"What do you do about the instincts that work and music and such
things can't satisfy?"