"The purpose of a contemplated human action is always the attainment
of a desired subjective experience. But a subjective experience
is desired both in terms of intensity, and in terms of duration.
For an individual the temptingness of different degrees of
intensity-of-experience is readily computed. However, the
temptingness of different durations is equally necessary for the
computation of the probability of a given individual performing
a given action. This modification of desirability by expectable
duration depends on the individual's time-sense: its acuity and its
accuracy. Measurements of time-sense--"
_Probability and Human Conduct_
Fitzgerald
Two days later Calhoun found a cultivated field and a dead man, but
before that he found only bewilderment. Before leaving the Med Ship, he
very carefully monitored all over again the entire radiation spectrum
for man-made signals. There were no communications in the air of Maris
III--which on the face of it was proof that the planet was uninhabited.
But the ship's external microphones picked up a rocket roar in
mid-morning of the day after Calhoun's landing. By the time the sound
reached the ground, of course, the rocket itself was far below the
horizon; but Calhoun saw the faint white trail of its passage against
the blue of the sky. The fact that he saw it, in daytime, was proof
that it was within the atmosphere. Which, in turn, said that the rocket
was taking photographs from high altitude for signs of the crater the
Med Ship should have made in an uncontrolled landing.
The fact of search proved that the planet was inhabited, and the
silence of the radio spectrum said that it wasn't. The absence of
traffic in the city said that it was dead or empty, but there were
people there because they'd answered Calhoun's hail, and tried to kill
him when he identified himself. But nobody would want to destroy a Med
Ship except to prevent a health inspection, and nobody would want to
prevent an inspection unless there was a situation aground that the Med
Service ought to know about. But there should not possibly be such a
situation.
There was no logical explanation for such a series of contradictions.
Civilized men acted this way or that. There could only be civilized men
here. They acted neither this way nor that. Therefore--the confusion
began all over again.
Calhoun dictated an account of events to date into the emergency
responder in the ship. If a search-call came from space, the responder
would broadcast this data and Calhoun's intended action. He carefully
shut off all other operating circuits so the ship couldn't be found by
their radiation. He equipped himself for travel, and he and Murgatroyd
left the ship. Obviously, he headed toward the city where whatever was
wrong was centered.
Travel on foot was unaccustomed, but not difficult. The vegetation
was semi-familiar. Maris III was an Earth-type planet and circled a
Sol-type sun, and given similar conditions of gravity, air, sunlight,
and temperature-range, similar organisms should develop. There would
be room, for example, for low-growing ground-cover plants and there
would also be advantages to height. There would be some equivalent of
grasses, and there would be the equivalent of trees, with intermediate
forms having in-between habits of growth. Similar reasoning would apply
to animal life. There would be parallel ecological niches for animals
to fill, and animals would adapt to fill them.
Maris III was not, then, an "unearthly" environment. It was much
more like an unfamiliar part of a known planet than a new world
altogether. But there were some oddities. An herbivorous creature
without legs which squirmed like a snake. It lived in holes. A
pigeon-sized creature whose wings were modified, gossamer-thin scales
with iridescent colorings. There were creatures which seemed to live
in lunatic association, and Calhoun was irritably curious to know if
they were really symbiotes or only unrecognizable forms of the same
organism, like the terrestrial male and female firefly-glowworm.
But he was heading for the city. He couldn't spare time to biologize.
On his first day's journey he looked for food to save the rations he
carried. Murgatroyd was handy, here. The little _tormal_ had his place
in human society. He was friendly, and he was passionately imitative
of human beings, and he had a definite psychology of his own. But he
was useful, too. When Calhoun strode through the forests which had
such curiously un-leaflike foliage, Murgatroyd strode grandly with
him, imitating his walk. From time to time he dropped to all four paws
to investigate something. He invariably caught up with Calhoun within
seconds.
Once Calhoun saw him interestedly bite a tiny bit out of a most
unpromising looking shrub-stalk. He savored its flavor, and then
swallowed it. Calhoun took note of the plant and cut off a section. He
bound it to the skin of his arm up near the elbow. Hours later there
was no allergic reaction, so he tasted it. It was almost familiar.
It had the flavor of a bracken-shoot, mingled with a fruity taste.
It would be a green bulk-food like spinach or asparagus, filling but
without much substance.
Later, Murgatroyd carefully examined a luscious-seeming fruit which
grew low enough for him to pluck. He sniffed it closely and drew
back. Calhoun noted that plant, too. Murgatroyd's tribe was bred
at Headquarters for some highly valuable qualities. One was a very
sensitive stomach--but it was only one. Murgatroyd's metabolism was
very close to man's. If he ate something and it didn't disagree with
him, it was very likely safe for a man to eat it, too. If he rejected
something, it probably wasn't. But his real value was much more
important than the tasting of questionable foods.
When Calhoun camped the first night, he made a fire of a plant shaped
like a cactus-barrel and permeated with oil. By heaping dirt around it,
he confined its burning to a round space very much like the direct-heat
element of an electronic stove. It was an odd illustration of the fact
that human progress does not involve anything really new in kind,
but only increased convenience and availability of highly primitive
comforts. By the light of that circular bonfire, Calhoun actually read
a little. But the light was inadequate. Presently he yawned. One did
not get very far in the Med Service without knowing probability in
human conduct. It enabled one to check on the accuracy of statements
made, whether by patients or officials, to a Med Ship man. Today,
though, he'd traveled a long way on foot. He glanced at Murgatroyd, who
was gravely pretending to read from a singularly straight-edged leaf.
"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "it is likely that you will interpret any
strange sound as a possible undesirable subjective experience. Which
is to say, as dangerous. So if you hear anything sizable coming close
during the night, I hope you'll squeal. Thank you."
Murgatroyd said "_Chee_," and Calhoun rolled over and went to sleep.
* * * * *
It was mid-morning of the next day when he came upon a cultivated
field. It had been cleared and planted, of course, in preparation
for the colonists who'd been expected to occupy the city. Familiar
Earth-plants grew in it, ten feet high and more. And Calhoun examined
it carefully, in the hope of finding how long since it had received
attention. In his examination, he found the dead man.
As a corpse, the man was brand-new, and Calhoun very carefully put
himself into a strictly medical frame of mind before he bent over for
a technical estimate of what had happened, and when. The dead man
seemed to have died of hunger. He was terribly emaciated, and he didn't
belong in a cultivated field far from the city. By his garments he was
a city-dweller and a prosperous one. He wore the jewels which nowadays
indicated a man's profession and status in it much more than the
value of his possessions. There was money in his pockets, and writing
materials, a wallet with pictures and identification, and the normal
oddments a man would carry. He'd been a civil servant. And he shouldn't
have died of starvation.
He especially shouldn't have gone hungry here! The sweet-maize plants
were tall and green. Their ears were ripe. He hadn't gone hungry! There
were the inedible remains of at least two dozen sweet-maize ears.
They had been eaten some time--some days--ago, and one had been left
unfinished. If the dead man had eaten them but was unable to digest
them, his belly should have been swollen with undigested food. It
wasn't. He'd eaten and digested and still had died, at least largely of
inanition.
Calhoun scowled.
"How about this corn, Murgatroyd?" he demanded.
He reached up and broke off a half-yard-long ear. He stripped away
the protecting, stringy leaves. The soft grains underneath looked
appetizing. They smelled like good fresh food. Calhoun offered the ear
to Murgatroyd.
The little _tormal_ took it in his paws and on the instant was eating
it with gusto.
"If you keep it down, he didn't die of eating it," said Calhoun,
frowning, "and if he ate it--which he did--he didn't die of starvation.
Which he did."
He waited. Murgatroyd consumed every grain upon the oversized cob. His
furry belly distended a little. Calhoun offered him a second ear. He
set to work on that, too, with self-evident enjoyment.
"In all history," said Calhoun, "nobody's ever been able to
poison one of you _tormals_ because your digestive system has a
qualitative-analysis unit in it that yells bloody murder if anything's
likely to disagree with you. As a probability of _tormal_ reaction,
you'd have been nauseated before now if that stuff wasn't good to eat."
But Murgatroyd ate until he was distinctly pot-bellied. He left a few
grains on the second ear with obvious regret. He put it down carefully
on the ground. He shifted his left-hand whiskers with his paw and
elaborately licked them clean. He did the same to the whiskers on the
right-hand side of his mouth. He said comfortably:
"_Chee!_"
"Then that's that," Calhoun told him. "This man didn't die of
starvation. I'm getting queasy!"
He had his lab kit in his shoulder-pack, of course. It was an
absurdly small outfit, with almost microscopic instruments. But in
Med Ship field work the techniques of microanalysis were standard.
Distastefully, Calhoun took the tiny tissue-sample from which he could
gather necessary information. Standing, he ran through the analytic
process that seemed called for. When he finished, he buried the dead
man as well as he could and started off in the direction of the city
again. He scowled as he walked.
He journeyed for nearly half an hour before he spoke. Murgatroyd
accompanied him on all fours, now, because of his heavy meal. After a
mile and a half, Calhoun stopped and said grimly:
"Let's check you over, Murgatroyd."
He verified the _tormal's_ pulse and respiration and temperature. He
put a tiny breath-sample through the part of the lab kit which read off
a basic metabolism rate. The small animal was quite accustomed to the
process. He submitted blandly. The result of the checkover was that
Murgatroyd the _tormal_ was perfectly normal.
"But," said Calhoun angrily, "that man died of starvation! There was
practically no fat in that tissue-sample at all! He arrived where
we found him while he was strong enough to eat, and he stayed where
there was good food, and he ate it, and he digested it, and he died of
starvation! Why?"
Murgatroyd wriggled unhappily, because Calhoun's tone was accusing. He
said, "_Chee!_" in a subdued tone of voice. He looked pleadingly up at
Calhoun.
"I'm not angry with you," Calhoun told him, "but dammit--"
He packed the lab kit back into his pack, which contained food for the
two of them for about a week.
"Come along!" he said bitterly. He started off. Ten minutes later he
stopped. "What I said was impossible. But it happened, so it mustn't
have been what I said. I must have stated it wrongly. He could eat,
because he did. He did eat, because of the cobs left. He did digest it.
So why did he die of starvation? Did he stop eating?"
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd, with conviction.
* * * * *
Calhoun grunted and marched on once more. The man had not died of a
disease--not directly. The tissue analysis gave a picture of death
which denied that it came of any organ ceasing to function. Was it
the failure of the organism--the man--to take the action required for
living? Had he stopped eating?
Calhoun's mind skirted the notion warily. It was not plausible. The man
had been able to feed himself and had done so. Anything which came upon
him and made him unable to feed himself--
"He was a city man," growled Calhoun. "And this is a long way from the
city. What was he doing away out here, anyhow?"
He hesitated and tramped on again. A city man found starved in a remote
place might have become lost, somehow. But if this man was lost, he was
assuredly not without food.
"If there was a ground-car," Calhoun considered, "it wouldn't mean
anything. If he dared go back to the city he might have used it, but he
wouldn't have been where I found him if he hadn't wanted or needed to
leave the city. Hm-m-m--He walked out into the middle of the field. He
was hungry--why didn't he have food?--and he ate. He stayed there for
days, judging by the amount of food he ate _and_ digested. Why did he
do that? Then he stopped eating and died. Again why?"
He crossed over the top of a rounded hillock some three miles from the
shallow grave he'd made. He began to accept the idea that the dead man
had stopped eating, for some reason, as the only possible explanation.
But that didn't make it plausible. He saw another ridge of higher hills
ahead.
In another hour he came to the crest of that farther range. It was the
worn-down remnant of a very ancient mountain-range, now eroded to a
mere fifteen hundred or two thousand feet. He stopped at the very top.
Here was a time and place to look and take note of what he saw. The
ground stretched away in gently rolling fashion for very many miles,
and there was the blue blink of sea at the horizon. A little to the
left he saw shining white. He grunted.
That was the city of Maris III, which had been built to receive
colonists from Dettra and relieve the population-pressure there. It
had been planned as the nucleus of a splendid, spacious, civilized
world-nation to be added to the number of human-occupied worlds. From
its beginning it should hold a population in the hundreds of thousands.
It was surrounded by cultivated fields, and the air above it should be
a-shimmer with flying things belonging to its inhabitants.
Calhoun stared at it through his binoculars. They could not make an
image, even so near, to compare to that the electron telescope had
made from space, but he could see much. The city was perfect. It was
intact. It was new. But there was no sign of occupancy anywhere in it.
It did not look dead, so much as frozen. There were no fliers above it.
There was no motion on the highways. He saw one straight road which
ran directly away along his line of sight. Had there been vehicles on
it, he would have seen at least shifting patches of color as clots of
traffic moved together. There were none.
He pressed his lips together. He began to inspect the nearer terrain.
He saw foreshortened areas where square miles of ground had been
cleared and planted to Earth vegetation. The ground would have been
bulldozed clean, and then great sterilizers would have lumbered back
and forth, killing every native seed and root and even the native
soil-bacteria. Then there would have been spraying with cultures of
the nitrogen-fixing and phosphorous-releasing microscopic organisms
which normally lived in symbiosis with Earth-plants. They would have
been tested beforehand for their ability to compete with indigenous
bacterial life. And then Earth-plants would have been seeded.
They had been. Calhoun saw that inimitable green which a man somehow
always recognizes. It is the green of plants whose ancestors throve on
Earth and have followed that old planet's children halfway across the
galaxy.
"The population must be practically nothing," growled Calhoun,
"because it doesn't show. But the part of it in the city wants to keep
whatever's happened from the Med Service. Hm-m-m. They're not dying, or
they'd want help. But at least one dead man wasn't in the city where he
belonged, and he could have used some help! Maybe there are more like
him."
Murgatroyd said,
"_Chee!_"
"If there are two kinds of people here," added Calhoun darkly, "they
might be--antagonistic to each other."
He stared with knitted brows over the vast expanse toward the horizon.
Murgatroyd had halted a little behind him. He stood up on his hind legs
and stared intently off to one side. He shaded his eyes with a forepaw
in a singularly humanlike fashion and looked inquisitively at something
he saw. But Calhoun did not notice.
"Make a guess, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun. "There are at least a few
people in the city who don't want something known to the Med Service.
So whatever's the matter, it's not fatal to them. There may be people
wandering about like that poor devil we found. Something was fatal to
him! Where'd we find more of his type? Since they haven't tried to
kill me, we might make friends."
Murgatroyd did not answer. He stared absorbedly at a patch of
underbrush some fifty yards to the left.
* * * * *
Calhoun shrugged and started down the hillside. Murgatroyd remained
fixed in a pose of intensely curious attention to the patch of brush.
Calhoun went on down the farther hillside. His back was toward the
brush-thicket.
There was a deep-toned, musical twanging sound from the thicket.
Calhoun's body jerked violently as an impact sounded. He stumbled and
went down, with the shaft of a wooden projectile sticking out of his
pack. He lay still.
Murgatroyd whimpered. He rushed to where Calhoun lay upon the ground.
He danced in agitation, chattering shrilly. He wrung his paws in
humanlike distress. He whimpered and chattered together. He tugged at
Calhoun. Calhoun made no response.
A figure came out of the thicket. It was gaunt and thin, yet its
garments had once been of admirable quality. It carried a strange and
utterly primitive weapon. It moved toward Calhoun without lightness,
but with a dreary resolution.
It bent over him and laid a hand to the wooden projectile it had fired
into his back.
Calhoun moved suddenly. He grappled. The gaunt figure toppled, and he
swarmed upon it savagely as it struggled. But it was taken by surprise.
Pantings sounded, and Murgatroyd danced in a fever of anxiety.
Then Calhoun stood up quickly. He stared down at the emaciated figure
which had tried to murder him from ambush. That figure panted horribly,
now.
"Really," said Calhoun in a professional tone, "as a doctor I'd say
that you should be in bed instead of wandering around trying to murder
total strangers. When did this trouble begin? I'm going to take your
temperature and your pulse. Murgatroyd and I have been hoping to find
someone like you. The only other human being I've seen on this planet
wasn't able to talk."
He swung his shoulder-pack around and impatiently jerked a
sharp-pointed stick out of it. It was the missile, which had been
stopped by the pack. He brought out his lab kit. With absolute
absorption in the task, he prepared to make a swift check of his
would-be murderer's state of health.
It was not good. There was already marked emaciation. The desperately
panting young woman's eyes were deep-sunk: hollow. She gasped and
gasped. Still gasping, she lapsed into unconsciousness.
"Here," said Calhoun curtly, "you enter the picture, Murgatroyd! This
is the sort of thing you're designed to handle!"
He set to work briskly. But presently he said over his shoulder:
"Besides a delicate digestion and a hair-trigger antibody system,
Murgatroyd, you ought to have the instincts of a watchdog. I don't
like coming that close to being speared by my patients. See if there's
anybody else around, won't you?"
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd shrilly. But he didn't understand. He watched
as Calhoun deftly drew a small sample of blood from the unconscious
young woman and painstakingly put half the tiny quantity into an almost
microscopic ampule in the lab kit. Then he moved toward Murgatroyd.
The _tormal_ wriggled as Calhoun made the injection. But it did not
hurt. There was an insensitive spot on his flank where the pain-nerves
had been blocked off before he was a week old.
"As one medical man to another," said Calhoun, "what's a good treatment
for anoxia when you haven't got any oxygen? You don't know? Neither do
I. But we've found out why those chaps in the city tried to shake us to
bits, out in space."
He swore in a sudden, bitter anger. Then he looked quickly at the girl,
concerned lest she'd heard.
She hadn't. She was still unconscious.