First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “Because when the King heard of the device, he believed that he was about to communicate with someone who symbolized to him all truth and knowledge and assurance. He asked for prophecy. Everyone does. And the prophecy the King’s mind gave him was inevitably that of the strongest fear or strongest hope he possessed.

  “But the King could not hope anything. He was the King. He had nothing to hope for. The third level of his brain could contain only fear. And his fears were presented to him as certainty, in the voice and the appearance of the one person he would most implicitly believe.

  “It told him of widespread treason and imminent revolt. He believed it. Why not? Perhaps his father told him so! And—”

  The ground-car stopped before a small dwelling. Garr, getting out, saw the Palace silhouetted against the sky. Perhaps a fifth stood grand and menacing against the sky. The rest—was not.

  A woman appeared in the doorway of the dwelling. She cried out and ran toward Garr, stumbling in her eagerness.

  Garr held his wife very close. This was the moment he had longed for for more than two years. He would never leave his family again. To bring it about he had caused the death of the King and destroyed the government and killed two million people.

  And, to Garr, it was worth it.

  PLAGUE ON KRYDER II

  After Calhoun and Murgatroyd the tormal were established on board, the Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty allowed itself to be lifted off from Med Service Headquarters and thrust swiftly out to space. The Headquarters landing grid did the lifting. Some five planetary diameters out, the grid’s force fields let go and Calhoun busied himself with aiming the ship for his destination, which was a very long way off. Presently he pushed a button. The result was exactly the one to be expected. The Med Ship did something equivalent to making a hole, crawling into it, and then pulling the hole in after itself. In fact, it went into overdrive.

  There were the usual sensations of dizziness and nausea, and of a contracting spiral fall. Then there was no cosmos, there was no galaxy, and there were no stars. The Aesclipus Twenty had formed a cocoon of highly stressed space about itself which was practically a private sub-cosmos. So long as it existed the Med Ship was completely independent of all creation outside. But the cocoon was active. It went hurtling through emptiness at many times the speed of light. The Aesclipus Twenty rode inside it. And when the overdrive field—the cocoon—collapsed and the ship returned to normal space, it would find itself very far from its starting point. For every hour spent in overdrive, the ship should break out somewhat more than a light-year of distance farther away from Med Service Headquarters.

  On this occasion the Med Ship stayed in overdrive for three long weeks, while the overdrive field hurtled toward the planet Kryder II. Calhoun was supposed to make a special public-health visit there. Some cases of what the planetary government called a plague had turned up. The government was in a panic because plagues of similar type had appeared on two worlds previously and done great damage. In both other cases a Med Ship man had arrived in time to check and then stop the pestilence. In both cases the plague was not a new one, but a pestilence of familiar diseases. In both forerunners of this third plague, the arriving Med Ship’s tormal had succumbed to the infection. So the government of Kryder II had called for help, and Calhoun and Murgatroyd answered the call. They were on the way to take charge.

  Calhoun was singularly suspicious of this assignment. The report on the contagion was tricky. Typically, a patient was admitted to the hospital with a case of—say—typhoid fever. It was a sporadic case, untraceable to any previous clinical one. The proper antibiotic was administered. With suitable promptness, the patient ceased to have typhoid fever. But he was weakened, and immediately developed another infectious disease. It might be meningitis. That yielded to treatment, but something else followed, perhaps a virus infection. The series went on until he died. Sometimes a patient survived a dozen such contagions, to die of a thirteenth. Sometimes he remained alive, emaciated and weak. No amount of care could prevent a succession of totally unrelated illnesses. Exposure or non-exposure seemed to make no difference. And the cause of this plague of plagues was undetectable.

  It shouldn’t be impossible to work out such a problem, of course. Both previous plagues had been checked. Calhoun read and re-read the reports on them and wasn’t satisfied. The Med Ship man who’d handled both plagues was reported dead, not of sickness, but because his ship had blown itself to bits on the Castor IV spaceport. Such things didn’t happen. Tormals had died in each pestilence, and tormals did not die of infectious diseases.

  Murgatroyd was the tormal member of the Aesclipus Twenty’s crew. During three weeks of overdrive travel he was his normal self. He was a furry, companionable small animal who adored Calhoun, coffee, and pretending to be human, in that order. Calhoun traveled among the stars on professional errands, and Murgatroyd was perfectly happy to be with him. His tribe had been discovered on one of the Deneb planets; their charming personalities made them prized as pets. A long while ago it had been noticed that they were never sick. Then it developed that if they were exposed to any specific disease, they instantly manufactured overwhelming quantities of antibody for that infection. Now it was standard Med Service procedure to call on them for this special gift. When a new strain or a novel variety of disease-producing germ appeared, a tormal was exposed to it. They immediately made a suitable antibody, the Med Service isolated it, analyzed its molecular structure, and synthesized it. So far there hadn’t been a single failure. So tormals were highly valued members of Med Ship crews.

  Now two of them had died in epidemics of the kind now reported from Kryder II. Calhoun was suspicious and somehow resentful of the fact. The official reports didn’t explain it. They dodged it. Calhoun fumbled irritably with it. One report was from the Med Service man now dead. He should have explained! The other was from doctors on Castor II after the Med Ship blew up. Nothing explained the explosion of the ship and nothing explained how tormals could die of an infection.

  Perhaps Calhoun disliked the idea that Murgatroyd could be called on to give his life for Med Service. Murgatroyd worshipped him. Murgatroyd was a tormal, but he was also a friend.

  So Calhoun studied the reports and tried to make sense of them while the Aesclipus Twenty traveled at a very high multiple of the speed of light. Its cocoon made it utterly safe. It required no attention. There was a control-central unit below decks which competently ran it, which monitored all instruments and kept track of their functioning. It labored conscientiously for three full weeks and a few hours over. Then it notified Calhoun that breakout from overdrive was just one hour away.

  He doggedly continued his studies. He still had the reports of the earlier plagues on his desk when the control-central speaker said briskly, “When the gong sounds, breakout will be five seconds off.”

  There followed a solemn tick, tock, tick, tock like a slow-swaying metronome. Calhoun tucked the reports under a paperweight and went to the pilot’s chair. He strapped himself in. Murgatroyd recognized the action. He went padding under another chair and prepared to hold fast to its rungs with all four paws and prehensile tail. The gong sounded. The voice said, “Five—four—three—two—one.”

  The ship came out of overdrive. There was a sensation of intense dizziness, a desire to upchuck which vanished before one could act on it. Calhoun held onto his chair during that unhappy final sensation of falling in a narrowing spiral. Then the Med Ship was back in normal space. Its vision screens swirled.

  They should have cleared to picture ten thousand myriads of suns of every imaginable tint and degree of brilliance, from faint phosphorescence to glaring stars of first magnitude or greater. There should have been no familiar constellations, of course. The Milky Way should be recognizable though subtly changed. The Horses Head and Coalsack dark nebulas should have been visible with their outlines modified by the new angle from which they were seen. There should have been a Sol-type sun relatively near, probably with a p
erceptible disk. It ought to be the sun Kryder, from whose second planet had come a frightened demand for help. The Aesclipus Twenty ought to be near enough to pick out Kryder’s planets with an electron telescope. Normally well-conducted journeys in overdrive ended like that. Calhoun had made hundreds of such sun-falls. Murgatroyd had seen almost as many.

  But there was never a breakout like this!

  The Med Ship was back in normal space. Certainly. It was light-centuries from its starting point. Positively. Somehow, there were no stars. There was no Milky Way. There were no nebulas, dark or otherwise. There was absolutely nothing of any other kind to match up with reasonable expectations, considering what had led up to this moment.

  The screens showed the Med Ship surrounded by buildings on a planet’s surface, with a blue and sunlit sky overhead. The screens, in fact, showed the buildings of the Interstellar Medical Service as surrounding the Med Ship. They said that Calhoun had traveled three weeks in overdrive and landed exactly back at the spot from which he’d been lifted to begin his journey.

  Murgatroyd, also, saw the buildings on the vision screens. It is not likely that he recognized them, but when the Aesclipus Twenty landed, it was the custom for Calhoun to go about his business and for Murgatroyd to be admired, petted, and stuffed to repletion with sweets and coffee by the local population. He approved of the practice.

  Therefore when he saw buildings on the vision screens he said, “Chee!” in a tone of vast satisfaction. He waited for Calhoun to take him aground and introduce him to people who would spoil him.

  Calhoun sat perfectly still, staring. He gazed unbelievingly at the screens. They said, uncompromisingly, that the Med Ship was aground inside the Med Service Headquarters landing grid. The buildings were outside it. The screens showed the sky, with clouds. They showed trees. They showed everything that should be visible to a ship aground where ships receive their final checkover before being lifted out to space.

  Murgatroyd said, “Chee-chee!” with a pleased urgency in his tone. He was impatient for the social success that came to him on every land-on planet. Calhoun turned his eyes to the outside-pressure dial. It said there was seven hundred thirty millimeters of gas pressure—air pressure—outside. This was complete agreement with the screens.

  “The devil!” said Calhoun.

  The logical thing to do, of course, would be to go to the air-lock, enter it, and then open the outer door to demand hotly what the hell was going on. Calhoun stirred in the pilot’s chair to do exactly that. Then he clamped his jaws tightly.

  He checked the nearest-object meter. Its reading was what it should be if the Med Ship were aground at headquarters. He checked the hull temperature. Its reading was just what it should be if the ship had been aground for a long time. He checked the screens again. He checked the magnetometer, which gave rather unlikely indications in overdrive, but in normal empty space recorded only the Med Ship’s own magnetic field. It now registered a plausible Gauss-strength for a planet like the one on which headquarters was built.

  He swore. Absurdly enough, he flipped the switch for the electron telescope. It filled a screen with dazzle, as if there were too much light. He could not use it.

  Murgatroyd said impatiently, “Chee! Chee! Chee!”

  Calhoun snapped at him. This was completely impossible: It simply could not be! A little while ago, he’d known the sensations of breakout from overdrive. He’d been dizzy, he’d been nauseated, he’d felt the usual horrible sensation of falling in a tightening spiral. That experience was real. There could be no doubt about it.

  Instruments could be gimmicked to give false reports. In the course of a Med Ship man’s training, he went through training voyages in ships which never left ground, but whose instruments meticulously reacted as they would in a real voyage. In such training exercises, vision screens showed blackness when the mock-up ship was theoretically in overdrive, and star-systems when it theoretically came out. A student Med Ship man went through illusory “voyages” that included even contact with theoretic planets; everything that could happen in a spaceship, including emergencies, was included in such mock-up trips. No training unit could simulate the sensation of going into overdrive or coming out of it, and he’d felt them. This was no mock-up trip.

  Growling a little, Calhoun threw the communicator-switch. The speaker gave out the confused murmur of ground-level signals, like those a space-type communicator picks up in atmosphere. Through it, vaguely, he could hear the whispering, faintly crackling Jansky radiation which can be received absolutely anywhere. He stared again at the vision screens. Their images were infinitely convincing. Overwhelming evidence insisted that he should go to the air-lock and out of it and hunt up somebody to explain this absurdity. It was inconceivable that a ship should travel for three weeks vastly faster than light and then find itself peacefully aground in its home port. It couldn’t happen!

  Murgatroyd said impatiently, “Chee!”

  Calhoun slowly unbuckled the seat-belt intended to help him meet any possible emergency at breakout, but a seat-belt wouldn’t help him decide what was reality. He got cagily to his feet. He moved toward the air-lock’s inner door. Murgatroyd padded zestfully with him. Calhoun didn’t go into the lock. He checked the dials, and from inside the ship he opened the outside lock door. From inside the ship he closed it again. Then he opened the inner lock door.

  He heard a hissing that rose to a shout, and stopped.

  He swore violently. Every instrument said the ship was aground, in atmosphere, at Interstellar Medical Service Headquarters, but he’d opened the outer lock door. If there was air there, nothing would happen. If there was no air outside, the air in the lock would escape and leave a vacuum behind it. He’d closed the outer door and opened the inner one. If there was air inside the lock, nothing could happen, but air had rushed into it with a noise like a shout.

  So there’d been a vacuum inside the air-lock; so there was emptiness outside. So the Aesclipus Twenty was not back at home. It was not aground. Hence, the appearance of Med Service Headquarters outside was illusion and the sound of ground-level communication signals was deception.

  The Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty was lying to the man it had been built to serve. It had tried to lure him into walking out of an air-lock to empty space. It was trying to kill him.

  II

  Actually, outside the ship there was nothing even faintly corresponding to the look of things from within. The small vessel of space actually floated in nothingness. Its hull glittered with that total reflection coating which was so nearly a non-radiating surface and was therefore so effective in conserving the heat supply of the ship. There was a glaring yellow star before the ship’s nose. There were other white-hot stars off to port and starboard. There were blue and pink and greenish flecks of light elsewhere, and all the universe was specked with uncountable suns of every conceivable shade. Askew against the firmament, the Milky Way seemed to meander across a strictly spherical sky. From outside the Med Ship, its nature was self-evident. Everywhere, suns shone steadily, becoming more and more remote until they were no longer resolvable into stars but were only luminosity. That luminosity was many times brighter where the Milky Way shone. It was the Milky Way.

  Minutes went by. The Aesclipus Twenty continued to float in emptiness. Then, after a certain interval, the outside air-lock door swung open again and remained that way. Then a radiated signal spread again through the vacancy all about. It had begun before, when the outer door was opened, and cut off when it shut. Now it began to fill a vast spherical space with a message. It traveled, of course, no faster than the speed of light, but in one minute its outermost parts were eleven million miles away. In an hour, they would fill a globe two light-hours in diameter—sixty times as big. In four or five hours, it should be detectable on the planets of that nearby yellow star.

  Calhoun regarded the light on the ship’s control-board which said that a signal was being transmitted. He hadn’t sent it. He hadn’t ordered it. The ship
had sent it of itself, as of itself it had tried to lure him out to the vacuum beyond the air-lock.

  But the ship was not alive. It could not plan anything. It could not want anything. It had been given orders to lie to him, and the lies should have caused his death. But a man would have had to invent the lies. Calhoun could even estimate exactly how the orders had been given—but not by whom—and where they’d been stored until this instant and how they’d been brought into action. He had no idea why.

  The Med Ship was inevitably a highly complex assemblage of devices. It was impractical for one man to monitor all of them, so that task was given to another device to carry out. It was the control-central unit, in substance a specialized computer to which innumerable reports were routed, and from which routine orders issued.

  Calhoun did not need, for example, to read off the CO2 content in the ship’s air, the rate of air-renewal, the ionization constant, the barometric pressure and the humidity and temperature to know that the air of the ship was right. The control-central unit issued orders to keep it right, and informed him when it was, and would order a warning if it went wrong. Then he could check the different instruments and find out what was the trouble. However, the control-central made no decisions. It only observed and gave routine orders. The orders that were routine could be changed.

  Somebody had changed them; very probably a new and extra control-central unit had been plugged into the ship and the original one cut off. The extra one had orders that when the ship came out of overdrive it was to present pictures of Med Service Headquarters and report other data to match. It could not question these orders. It was only a machine, and it would carry them out blindly and without evaluation.

  So now Calhoun ought to be floating in emptiness, his body an unrecognizable object whose outer surface had exploded and whose inner parts were ice. The ship had carried out its orders. Now, undoubtedly, there was something scheduled to happen next. Calhoun hadn’t started the signal. It would not be transmitted—it would not have been planned—unless there would be something listening for it, another ship, almost certainly.