Maril stayed on Dara when the Med Ship left. Murgatroyd protested shrilly when he discovered her about to be closed out by the closing lock-door.
“Chee!” he said indignantly. “Chee! Chee!”
“No,” said Calhoun, “we’ll be crowded enough anyhow. We’ll see her later.”
He nodded to one of the first four student pilots, and he crisply made contact with the landing-grid office. He very efficiently supervised as the grid took the ship up. The other three of the four first-trained men explained every move to sub-classes assigned to each. Calhoun moved about, listening and making certain that the instruction was up to standard.
He felt queer, acting as the supervisor of an educational institution in space. He did not like it. There were twenty-four men beside himself crowded into the Med Ship’s small interior. They got in each other’s way. They trampled on each other. There was always somebody eating, and always somebody sleeping, and there was no need whatever for the background tape to keep the ship from being intolerably quiet. But the air-system worked well enough, except once when the reheater unit quit and the air inside the ship went down below freezing before the trouble could be found and corrected.
The journey to Weald, this time, took seven days because of the training program in effect. Calhoun bit his nails over the delay. But it was necessary for each of the students to make his own line-ups on Weald’s sun, and compute distances, and for each of them to practise maneuverings that would presently be called for. Calhoun hoped desperately that preparations for active warfare—or massacre—did not move fast on Weald. He believed, however, that in the absence of direct news from Dara, Wealdian officials would take the normal course of politicos. They had proclaimed the deathship from Orede an attack from Dara. Therefore they would specialize on defensive measures before plumping for offense. They’d get patrol-ships out to spot invasion ships long before they worked on a fleet to destroy the blueskins. It would meet the public demand for defense.
Calhoun was right. The Med Ship made its final approach to Weald under Calhoun’s own control. He’d made brightness-measurements on his previous journey and he used them again. They would not be strictly accurate, because a sunspot could knock all meaning out of any reading beyond two decimal places. But the first breakout was just far enough from the Wealdian system for Calhoun to be able to pick out its planets with electron telescope at maximum magnification. He could aim for Weald itself,—allowing, of course, for the lag in the apparent motion of its image because of the limited speed of light. He tried the briefest of overdrive hops, and came out within the solar system and well inside any watching patrol.
That was pure fortune. It continued. He’d broken through the screen of guard-ships in undetectable overdrive. He was within half an hour’s solar-system drive of the grain-fleet. There was no alarm, at first. Of course radars spotted the Med Ship as an object, but nobody paid attention. It was not headed for Weald. It was probably assumed to be a guard-boat itself. Such mistakes do happen. It reached the grain-fleet.
Again from the storage-space from which supplies had been removed, Calhoun produced vacuum suits. The four first students went out, each escorting a less-accustomed neophyte and all fastened firmly together with space-ropes. They warmed the interiors of four ships and went on to others. Presently there were eight ships making ready for an interstellar journey, each with a scared but resolute new pilot familiarizing himself with its controls. There were sixteen ships. Twenty. Twenty-three.
* * * *
A guard-ship came humming out from Weald. It would be armed, of course. It came droning, droning up the forty-odd thousand miles from the planet. Calhoun swore. He could not call his students and tell them what was happening. The guard-ship would overhear. He could not trust untried young men to act rationally if they were unwarned and the guard-ship arrived and matter-of-factly attempted to board one of them.
Then he was inspired. He called Murgatroyd, placed him before the communicator, and set it at voice-only transmission. This was familiar enough, to Murgatroyd. He’d often seen Calhoun use a communicator.
“Chee!” shrilled Murgatroyd. “Chee-chee!”
A startled voice came out of the speaker.
“What’s that?”
“Chee,” said Murgatroyd zestfully.
The communicator was talking to him. Murgatroyd adored three things in order. One was Calhoun. The second was coffee. The third was pretending to converse like a human being. The speaker said explosively;
“You there, identify yourself!”
“Chee-chee-chee-chee!” observed Murgatroyd. He wriggled with pleasure and added, reasonably enough, “Chee!”
The communicator bawled;
“Calling ground! Calling ground! Listen to this! Something that ain’t human’s talking at me on a communicator! Listen in an’ tell me what to do!”
Murgatroyd interposed with another shrill;
“Chee!”
Then Calhoun pulled the Med Ship slowly away from the clump of still-lifeless grain-ships. It was highly improbable that the guard-boat would carry an electron telescope. Most likely it would have only an echo-radar, and so could determine only that an object of some sort moved of its own accord in space. Calhoun let the Med Ship accelerate. That would be final evidence. The grain-ships were between Weald and its sun. Even electron telescopes on the ground—and electron-telescopes were ultimately optical telescopes with electronic amplification—even electron telescopes on the ground could not get a good image of the ship through sunlit atmosphere.
“Chee?” asked Murgatroyd solicitously. “Chee-chee-chee?”
“Is it blueskins?” shakily demanded the voice from the guard-boat. “Ground! Ground! Is it blueskins?”
A heavy, authoritative voice came in with much greater volume.
“That’s no human voice,” it said harshly. “Approach its ship and send back an image. Don’t fire first unless it heads for ground.”
The guard-ship swerved and headed for the Med Ship. It was still a very long way off.
“Chee-chee,” said Murgatroyd encouragingly.
Calhoun changed the Med Ship’s course. The guard-ship changed course too. Calhoun let it draw nearer,—but only a little. He led it away from the fleet of grain-ships.
He swung his electron telescope on them. He saw a space-suited figure outside one,—safely roped, however. It was easy to guess that someone had meant to return to the Med Ship for orders or to make a report, and found the Med Ship gone. He’d go back inside and turn on a communicator.
“Chee!” said Murgatroyd.
The heavy voice boomed;
“You there! This is a human-occupied world! If you come in peace, cut your drive and let our guard-ship approach!”
Murgatroyd replied in an interested but doubtful tone. The booming voice bellowed. Another voice of higher authority took over. Murgatroyd was entranced that so many people wanted to talk to him. He made what for him was practically an oration. The last voice spoke persuasively and suavely.
“Chee-chee-chee-chee,” said Murgatroyd.
One of the grain-ships flickered and ceased to be. It had gone into overdrive. Another. And another. Suddenly they began to flick out of sight by twos and threes.
“Chee,” said Murgatroyd with a note of finality.
The last grain-ship vanished.
“Calling guard-ship,” said Calhoun drily. “This is Med ship Aesclipus Twenty. I called here a couple of weeks ago. You’ve been talking to my tormal, Murgatroyd.”
A pause. A blank pause. Then profanity of deep and savage intemperance.
“I’ve been on Dara,” said Calhoun.
Dead silence fell.
“There’s a famine there,” said Calhoun deliberately. “So the grain-ships you’ve had in orbit have been taken away by men from Dara—blueskins if you like—to feed themselves and their families. They’ve been dying of hunger and they don’t like it.”
There was a single burst of the unprinta
ble. Then the formerly suave voice said waspishly;
“Well? The Med Service will hear of your interference!”
“Yes,” said Calhoun. “I’ll report it myself. I have a message for you. Dara is ready to pay for every ounce of grain and for the ships it was stored in. They’ll pay in heavy metals,—iridium, uranium,—that sort of thing.”
The suave voice fairly curdled.
“As if we’d allow anything that was ever on Dara to touch ground here!”
“Ah! But there can be sterilization. To begin with metals, uranium melts at 1150° centigrade, and tungsten at 3370° and iridium at 2350°. You could load such things and melt them down in space and then tow them home. And you can actually sterilize a lot of other useful materials!”
The suave voice said infuriatedly;
“I’ll report this! You’ll suffer for this!”
Calhoun said pleasantly;
“I’m sure that what I say is being recorded, so that I’ll add that it’s perfectly practical for Wealdians to land on Dara, take whatever property they think wise,—to pay for damage done by blueskins, of course—and get back to Wealdian ships with absolutely no danger of carrying contagion. If you’ll make sure the recording’s clear.”
* * * *
He described, clearly and specifically, exactly how a man could be outfitted to walk into any area of any conceivable contagion, do whatever seemed necessary in the way of looting—but Calhoun did not use the word—and then return to his fellows with no risk whatever of bringing back infection. He gave exact details. Then he said;
“My radar says you’ve four ships converging on me to blast me out of space. I sign off.”
The Med Ship disappeared from normal space, and entered that improbably stressed area of extension which it formed about itself and in which physical constants were wildly strange. For one thing, the speed of light in overdrive-stressed space had not been measured yet. It was too high. For another, a ship could travel very many times 186000 miles per second in overdrive.
The Med Ship did just that. There was nobody but Calhoun and Murgatroyd on board. There was companionable silence,—there were only the small threshold-of-perception sounds which one did not often notice, but which it would have been intolerable to have stop.
Calhoun luxuriated in regained privacy. For seven days he’d had twenty-four other human beings crowded into the two cabins of the ship, with never so much as one yard of space between himself and someone else. One need not be snobbish to wish to be alone sometimes!
Murgatroyd licked his whiskers thoughtfully.
“I hope,” said Calhoun, “that things work out right. But they may remember on Dara that I’m responsible for some ten million bushels of grain reaching them. Maybe—just possibly—they’ll listen to me and act sensibly. After all, there’s only one way to break a famine. Not with ten million bushels for a whole planet! And certainly not with bombs!”
Driving direct, without pausing for practisings, the Med Ship could arrive at Dara in little more than five days. Calhoun looked forward to relaxation. As a beginning he made ready to give himself an adequate meal for the first time since first landing on Dara. Then, presently, he sat down wrily to a double meal of Darian famine-rations, which were far from appetizing. But there wasn’t anything else on board.
* * * *
He had some pleasure later, though, envisioning what went elsewhere. On Weald, obviously, there would be purest panic. The vanishing of the grain fleet wouldn’t be charged against twenty-four men. A Darian fleet would be suspected, and with the suspicion terror, and with terror a governmental crisis. Then there’d be a frantic seizure of any craft that could take to space, and the agitated improvisation of a space-fleet.
But besides that, biological-warfare technicians would examine Calhoun’s instructions for equipment by which armed men could be landed on a plague-stricken planet and then safely taken off again. Military and governmental officials would come to the eminently sane conclusion that while Calhoun could not well take active measures against blueskins, as a sane and proper citizen of the galaxy he would be on the side of law and order and propriety and justice,—in short, of Weald. So they ordered sample anti-contagion suits made according to Calhoun’s directions, and they had them tested. They worked admirably.
On Dara, while Calhoun journeyed back to it, grain was distributed lavishly, and everybody on the planet had their cereal ration almost doubled. It was still not a comfortable ration, but the relief was great. There was considerable gratitude felt for Calhoun, which as usual included a lively anticipation of further favors to come. Maril was interviewed repeatedly, as the person best able to discuss him, and she did his reputation no harm. That was not all that happened on Dara…
There was something else. Very curious thing, too. There was a curious spread of mild symptoms which nobody could exactly call a disease. It lasted only a few hours. A person felt slightly feverish, and ran a temperature which peaked at 30.9° centigrade, and drank more water than usual. Then his temperature went back to normal and he forgot all about it. There have always been such trivial epidemics. They are rarely recorded, because few people think to go to a doctor. That was the case here.
Calhoun looked ahead a little, too. Presently the fleet of grain-ships would arrive and unload and lift again for Orede, and this time they would make an infinity of slaughter among wild cattle-herds, and bring back incredible quantities of fresh-slaughtered frozen beef. Almost everybody would get to taste meat again, which would be most gratifying.
Then, the industries of Dara would labor at government-required tasks. An astonishing amount of fissionable material would be fashioned into bombs—a concession by Calhoun—and plastic factories make an astonishing number of plastic sag-suits. And large shipments of heavy metals in ingots would be made to the planet’s capital city and there would be some guns and minor items.…
Perhaps somebody could have found out any of these items in advance, but it was unlikely that anybody did. Nobody but Calhoun, however, would ever have put them together and hoped very urgently that that was the way things would work out. He could see a promising total result. In fact, in the Med ship hurtling through space, on the fourth day of his journey he thought of an improvement that could be made in the sum of all those happenings when they were put together.
* * * *
He landed on Dara. Maril came to the Med Ship. Murgatroyd greeted her with enthusiasm.
“Something unusual has happened,” said Maril, very much subdued. “I told you that—sometimes blueskin markings fade out on children, and then neither they nor their children ever have blueskin markings again.”
“Yes,” said Calhoun. “I remember.”
“And you were reminded of a group of viruses on Tralee. You said they only took hold of people in terribly bad physical condition, but then they could be passed on from mother to child. Until—sometimes—they died out.”
Calhoun blinked.
“Yes.…”
“Korvan,” said Maril very carefully, “Has worked out an idea that that’s what happens to the blueskin markings on—us Darians. He thinks that people almost dead of the plague could get the—virus, and if they recovered from the plague pass the virus on and—be blueskins.”
“Interesting,” said Calhoun, noncommittally.
“And when we went to Weald,” said Maril very carefully indeed, “you were working with some culture-material. You wrote quite a lot about it in the ship’s log. You gave yourself an injection. Remember? And Murgatroyd? You wrote down your temperature, and Murgatroyd’s?” She moistened her lips. “You said that if infection passed between us, something would be very infectious indeed?”
“What are you driving at?”
Maril continued slowly. “Th—thousands of people are having their pigment-spots fade away. Not only children but grownups. And—Korvan has found out that it always seems to happen after a day when they felt feverish and very thirsty—and then felt all right again.
You tried out something that made you feverish and thirsty. I had it too, in the ship. Korvan thinks there’s been an epidemic of something that—is obliterating the blue spots on everybody that catches it. There are always trivial epidemics that nobody notices. Korvan’s found evidence of one that’s making ‘blueskin’ no longer a word with any meaning.”
“Remarkable!” said Calhoun.
“Did you—do it?” asked Maril. “Did you start a harmless epidemic that—wipes out the virus that makes blueskins?”
Calhoun said in feigned astonishment;
“How can you think such a thing, Maril?”
“Because I was there,” said Maril. She said somehow desperately; “I know you did it! But the question is—are you going to tell? When people find they’re not blueskins any longer—when there’s no such thing as a blueskin any longer—will you tell them why?”
“Naturally not,” said Calhoun. “Why?” Then he guessed. “Has Korvan—.”
“He thinks,” said Maril, “that he thought it up all by himself. He’s found the proof. He’s—very proud. I’d have to tell him the truth if you were going to tell. And he’d be ashamed and—angry.”
Calhoun considered, staring at her.
“How it happened doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “The idea of anybody doing it deliberately would be disturbing, too. It shouldn’t get about. So it seems much the best thing for Korvan to discover what’s happened to the blueskin pigment, and how it happened, but not why.”
She read his face carefully.
“You aren’t doing it as a favor to me,” she decided. “You’d rather it was that way.”
She looked at him for a long time, until he squirmed. Then she nodded and went away.
An hour later the Wealdian space-fleet was reported, massed in space and driving for Dara.
CHAPTER 8
There were small scout-ships which came on ahead of the main fleet. They’d originally been guard-boats, intended for solar-system duty only and quite incapable of overdrive. They’d come from Weald in the cargo-holds of the liners now transformed into fighting ships. The scouts swept low, transmitting fine-screen images back to the fleet, of all that they might see before they were shot down. They found the landing-grid. It contained nothing larger than Calhoun’s Med Ship, Aesclipus Twenty.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 196
