So Calhoun made coffee. He slipped a blaster into a pocket where it would be handy. He filled a small cup for Murgatroyd and a large one for himself, and then a second large one.
He tapped on the sleeping-cabin door, standing aside lest a blaster-bolt came through it.
“Coffee’s ready,” he said sardonically. “Come out and join us.”
There was a long pause. Calhoun rapped again.
“You’ve a seat at the captain’s table,” he said more sardonically still. “It’s not polite to keep me waiting!”
* * * *
He listened, alert for a rush which would be a fanatic’s desperate attempt to do murder despite premature discovery. He was prepared to shoot quite ruthlessly.
But there was no rush. Instead, there came hesitant foot-falls. The door of the cabin slid slowly aside. A girl appeared in the opening, desperately white and desperately composed.
“H-how did you know I was there?” she asked shakily. She moistened her lips. “You didn’t see me! I was in a closet, and you didn’t even enter the room!”
Calhoun said grimly;
“I’ve sources of information.” He pointed to Murgatroyd.
The girl did not move. Her eyes went from Murgatroyd to Calhoun.
“And now,” said Calhoun, “do you want to tell me your story? You have one ready, I’m sure.”
“There—there isn’t any,” said the girl unsteadily. “Just—I—I need to get to Orede, and you’re going there. There’s no other way to go—now.”
“To the contrary,” said Calhoun, “there’ll undoubtedly be a fleet heading for Orede as soon as it can be assembled and armed. But I’m afraid that’s not a very good story. Try another.”
She shivered a little.
“I’m—running away…”
“Ah!” said Calhoun. “In that case I’ll take you back.”
“No!” she said fiercely. “I’ll—I’ll die first! I’ll wreck this ship first!”
Her hand came from behind her. There was a tiny blaster in it. But it shook visibly as she tried to aim it.
“I’ll—shoot out the controls!”
Calhoun blinked. He’d had to make a drastic change in his estimate of the situation the instant he saw that the stowaway was a girl. Now he had to make another when her threat was not to kill him but to disable the ship. Women are rarely assassins, and when they are they don’t use energy weapons. Daggers and poisons are more typical.
“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” said Calhoun drily. “Besides, you’d get deadly bored if we were stuck in a derelict waiting for our air and food to give out.”
Murgatroyd, for no reason whatever, felt it necessary to enter the conversation. He said;
“Chee-chee-chee!”
“A very sensible suggestion,” observed Calhoun. “We’ll sit down and have a cup of coffee.” To the girl he said, “I’ll take you to Orede, since that’s where you say you want to go.”
“I—there’s a boy there—”
Calhoun shook his head.
“No,” he said reprovingly. “Nearly all the mining colony had packed itself into the ship that came into Weald with everybody dead. But not all. And there’s been no check of what men were in the ship and what men weren’t. You wouldn’t go to Orede if it were likely your fellow had died on the way to you. Here’s your coffee. Sugar or saccho, and do you take cream?”
She trembled a little, but she took the cup.
“I—don’t understand—.”
“Murgatroyd and I,” explained Calhoun—and he did not know whether he spoke out of anger or something else—”we are do-gooders. We go around trying to keep people from getting killed. It’s our profession. We practise it even on our own behalf. We want to stay alive. So since you make such drastic threats, we will take you where you want to go. Especially since we’re going there anyhow.”
“You—don’t believe anything I’ve said!” It was a statement.
“Not a word,” admitted Calhoun. “But you’ll probably tell us something more believable presently. When did you eat last?”
“Yesterday—.”
“Better have something now. We’ll talk more later.” Calhoun showed her how to punch the readier for such-and-such dishes, to be extracted from storage and warmed or chilled, as the case might be, and served at dialed-for intervals.
* * * *
Calhoun deliberately immersed himself in the Galactic Directory, looking up the planet Orede. He was headed there, but he’d had no reason to inform himself about it before. Now he read with every appearance of absorption.
The girl ate daintily. Murgatroyd watched with highly amiable interest. But she looked acutely uncomfortable.
Calhoun finished with the Directory. He got out the microfilm reels which contained more information. He was specifically after the Med Service history of all the planets in this sector. He went through the filmed record of every inspection ever made on Weald and on Dara. But Sector Twelve had not been well-run. There was no adequate account of a plague which had wiped out three-quarters of the population of an inhabited planet! It had happened shortly after one Med Ship visit, and was over before another Med Ship came by. But there should have been painstaking investigation, even after the fact. There should have been a collection of infective material and a reasonably complete identification and study of the infective agent. It hadn’t been made. There was probably some other emergency at the time, and it slipped by. But Calhoun—whose career was not to be spent in this sector—resolved on a blistering report about this negligence and its consequences.
He kept himself casually busy, ignoring the girl. A Med Ship man has resources of study and meditation with which to occupy himself during overdrive travel from one planet to another. Calhoun made use of those resources. He acted as if he were completely unconscious of the stowaway. But Murgatroyd watched her with charmed attention.
Hours after her discovery, she said uneasily;
“Please?”
Calhoun looked up.
“Yes?”
“I—don’t know exactly how things stand.”
“You are a stowaway,” said Calhoun. “Legally, I have the right to put you out the airlock. It doesn’t seem necessary. There’s a cabin. When you’re sleepy, use it. Murgatroyd and I can make out quite well here. When you’re hungry, you now know how to get something to eat. When we land on Orede, you’ll probably go about whatever business you have there. That’s all.”
She stared at him.
“But—you don’t believe what I’ve told you!”
“No,” agreed Calhoun. But he didn’t add to the statement.
“But—I will tell you,” she offered. “The police were after me. I had to get away from Weald! I had to! I’d stolen—”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “If you were a thief, you’d say anything in the world except that you were a thief. You’re not ready to tell the truth yet. You don’t have to, so why tell me anything? I suggest that you get some sleep.”
She rose slowly. Twice her lips parted as if to speak again, but then she went into the other cabin and closed herself in.
Murgatroyd blinked at the place where she’d disappeared and then climbed up into Calhoun’s lap, with complete assurance of welcome. He settled himself and was silent for moments. Then he said;
“Chee!”
“I believe you’re right,” said Calhoun. “She doesn’t belong on Weald, or with the conditioning she’d have had, there’d be only one place she’d dread worse than Orede, and that would be Dara. But I doubt she’d be afraid to land even on Dara.”
Murgatroyd liked to be talked to. He liked to pretend that he carried on a conversation, like humans.
“Chee-chee!” he said with conviction.
“Definitely,” agreed Calhoun. “She’s not doing this for her personal advantage. Whatever she thinks she’s doing, it’s more important to her than her own life. Murgatroyd—”
“Chee?” sa
id Murgatroyd in an inquiring tone.
“There are wild cattle on Orede,” said Calhoun. “Herds and herds of them. I have a suspicion that somebody’s been shooting them. Lots of them. Do you agree? Don’t you think that a lot of cattle have been slaughtered on Orede lately?”
Murgatroyd yawned. He settled himself still more comfortably in Calhoun’s lap.
“Chee,” he said drowsily.
He went to sleep, while Calhoun continued the examination of highly condensed information. Presently he looked up the normal rate of increase, with other data, among herds of bivis domesticusin a wild state, on planets where they have no natural enemies. It wasn’t unheard-of for a world to be stocked with useful types of Terran fauna and flora before it was attempted to be colonized. Terran life-forms could play the devil with alien ecological systems, very much to humanity’s benefit. Familiar microörganisms and a standard vegetation added to the practicality of human settlements on otherwise alien worlds. But sometimes the results were strange.
They weren’t often so strange, however, as to cause some hundreds of men to pack themselves frantically aboard a cargo-ship which couldn’t possibly sustain them, so that every man must die while the ship was in overdrive.
Still, by the time Calhoun turned in on a spare pneumatic mattress, he had calculated that as few as a dozen head of cattle, turned loose on a suitable planet, would have increased to herds of thousands or tens or even hundreds of thousands in much less time than had probably elapsed.
The Med Ship drove on in seemingly absolute solidity, with no sound from without, with no sight to be seen outside, with no evidence at all that it was not buried deep in the heart of a planet instead of flashing through emptiness at a speed so great as to have no meaning.
* * * *
Next ship-day the girl looked oddly at Calhoun when she appeared in the control-room. “Shall I—have breakfast?” she asked uncertainly.
“Why not?”
Silently, she operated the food-readier. She ate. Calhoun gave the impression that he would respond politely when spoken to, but that he was busy with activities that kept him remote from stowaways.
About noon, ship-time, she asked;
“When will we get to Orede?”
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?”
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!”
“B—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 description of a criminal, they never mentioned it if he were pock-marked—scarred. 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 a Med Ship man’s 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.”
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—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 things.…”
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 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 ship’s control-board and sat down before it.
“Twenty minutes to break-hour,” 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?” h
e 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.
CHAPTER 3
There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun drove the Med Ship to a favorable position for a call. He patiently repeated, over and over again, that Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty notified its arrival and requested coördinates for landing. 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 do 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 direct 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 makeup to cover the blue spots, but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never been heard of!”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 189
