First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  He left the control-room to go down into the storage compartments of the ship. It was in no sense a cargo-carrier, but it had to be prepared for highly varied situations its occupant might have to meet. Calhoun began to gather divers items. To gather them he had to put carefully away two objects he’d sealed quite airtight in plastic bags. One was a duplicate of the control-central device that had tried to get him out the air-lock. It was sealed up so no trace of odor could escape of slowly evaporating oils—such as make fingerprints—or of any of those infinitesimal traces of one’s identity every man leaves on anything he handles. The other was the spacesuit the prisoner had worn when he boarded the Med Ship. It was similarly sealed in. The technicians back at Headquarters could make an absolute, recorded analysis of such identifying items, and could prove who’d handled the one device or worn the other.

  He came back to the control-room. He carried bundles. He adjusted the lock so both inner and outer doors could be open at the same time. A cold and daunting wind came in as the doors spread wide. Calhoun went down to ground. His breath was like white smoke when he returned.

  “Tent and sleeping bag,” he commented. “It’s chilly!”

  He went down to the storage compartments again. He came up with another burden.

  “Food and a heater, of sorts,” he said.

  He went out. He came back. He went below again. He was definitely generous in the food supply he piled about the first two loads of equipment. When he’d finished, he checked on his fingers. Then he shook his head and went below for cold-climate garments. He brought them up and put them with the rest.

  “Anything you want to say?” he asked pleasantly when he returned. “Anything to help me survive and get back here to pick you up again?”

  The bound man ground his teeth.

  “You won’t get away with turning up in my place!”

  Calhoun raised his eyebrows.

  “How bad’s the plague?”

  “Go to the devil!” snapped the bound man.

  “You were going to land as a Med Ship man,” observed Calhoun. “Judging by two previous operations like this, you were going to check the plague. You did that on Castor IV.”

  The bound man cursed him.

  “I suspect,” said Calhoun, “that since you blamed the first plague on contaminated grain, and it did stop when all the grain on the planet was burned and fresh supplies brought in from elsewhere, and since the same thing happened with the blame on meats on Castor IV, my guess is also contaminated food on Kryder II. Criminals rarely change their method of operation as long as it works well. But there are two things wrong with this one. One is that no bacterium or virus was ever identified as the cause of the plagues. The other is that two tormals died. Tormals don’t die of plagues. They can’t catch them. It’s impossible. I’m confident that I can keep Murgatroyd from dying of the plague on Kryder II.”

  The bound man did not speak, this time.

  “And,” said Calhoun thoughtfully, “there’s the very curious coincidence that somebody stole the money to buy uncontaminated grain, in the first plague, and the money to buy meat for Castor IV was destroyed when your Med Ship blew up in the spaceport. It was your Med Ship, wasn’t it? And you were reported killed. Something had gone around—had, I said—which was about as lethal as the toxin made by clostridium botulinum. Only it wasn’t a germ-caused toxin, because there wasn’t any germ, or virus either. Are you sure you don’t want to talk?”

  The man on the floor spat at him. Then he cursed horribly. Calhoun shrugged. He picked up his prisoner and carried him to the lock door. He took him out. He laid him on the pile of stores and survival equipment. He carefully unknotted some of the cords that bound his prisoner’s hands.

  “You can get loose in five minutes or so,” he observed. “By the sunset line when we came in, night is due to fall before long. I’ll give you until dark to improve your chances of living by improving mine, then…”

  He went back to the Med Ship. He entered it and closed the lock doors. Murgatroyd looked inquisitively at him. He’d watched out the lock while Calhoun was aground. If he’d moved out of sight, the little tormal would have tried to follow him. Now he said reproachfully, “Chee! Chee!”

  “You’re probably right,” said Calhoun dourly. “I couldn’t get anywhere by arguing with him, and I wasn’t more successful with threats. I don’t think he’ll talk even now. He doesn’t believe I’ll leave him here. But I’ll have to!”

  Murgatroyd said, “Chee!”

  Calhoun did not answer. He looked at the vision screen. It was close to sunset outside. His captive writhed on top of the mass of cloth and stores. Calhoun grunted impatiently, “He’s not too good at loosening knots! The sun’s setting and he needs light to get the tent up and the heater going. He’d better hurry!”

  He paced up and down the control-room. There were small, unobtrusive sounds within the Med Ship. They were little, meaningless noises. Remote traffic sounds. Snatches of talk, which were only murmurings. Almost infinitely faint tinklings of music not loud enough to identify. In the utter soundlessness of empty space, a ship would be maddeningly silent except for such wisps of things to hear. They kept him from feeling maddeningly alone. They kept him reminded that there were worlds on which people moved and lived. They were links to the rest of humanity and they prevented the psychosis of solitude—with, of course, the help of a companionable small animal who adored being noticed by a man.

  He went back to the screens. The sun was actually setting, now, and the twilight would be brief, because despite the ice and snow about, this was the equator of this particular world. The prisoner outside still struggled to free himself. He had moved, in his writhing, until he was almost off the pile of dark stuff on the snow. Calhoun scowled. He needed information. This man, who’d shared in a trick designed to kill him, could give it to him. He’d tried to persuade the man to talk. He’d tried to trap him into it. He’d tried everything but physical torture to get a clear picture of what was going on, on Kryder II. A plague which had no bacterium or virus as its cause was unreasonable. The scheduling of a fake Med Ship man’s arrival—at the cost of a very neat trick to secure the death of the real one—and the coordination of a human scheme with the progress of a pestilence, this was not reasonable either. Though Calhoun had irritated his prisoner into fury after persuasion failed, the man had given no information. He’d cursed Calhoun. He’d raged foully. But he’d given no plausible information at all.

  It became dark outside. Calhoun adjusted the screens to a higher light-gain. There was only starlight and even with the screens turned up he could see only convulsive struggling movements of a dark figure upon a dark patch of equipment.

  He swore.

  “The clumsy idiot!” he snapped. “He ought to be able to get loose! Maybe he’ll think I mean just to scare him…”

  He took a hand lamp and opened the air-lock doors again. He cast the light ahead and down. His captive now lay face-down, struggling.

  Growling, Calhoun descended to the snow, leaving the air-lock doors open. He went over to his prisoner. Innumerable stars glittered in the sky, but he was accustomed to the sight of space itself. He was unimpressed by the firmament. He bent over the squirming, panting figure of the man he’d apparently not helped enough toward freedom.

  But at the last instant the hand lamp showed the former prisoner free and leaping from a crouched position with his hands plunging fiercely for Calhoun’s throat. Then the two bodies came together with an audible impact. Calhoun found himself raging at his own stupidity in being fooled like this. The man now grappling him had been full party to one attempt to kill him by a trick. Now he tried less cleverly but more desperately to kill him with his bare hands.

  He fought like a madman, which at that moment he very possibly was. Calhoun had been trained in unarmed combat, but so had his antagonist. Once Calhoun tripped, and the two of them rolled in powdery snow with uneven ice beneath it. In that wrenching struggle, Calhoun’s
foot hit against something solid. It was a landing-fin of the Aesclipus Twenty. He kicked violently against it, propelling himself and his antagonist away. The jerk should have given Calhoun a momentary advantage. It didn’t. It threw the two of them suddenly away from the ship, but onto a place where the stone under the snow slanted down. They rolled. They slid, and they went together over a stony ledge and fell, still battling, down into a crevasse.

  Murgatroyd peered anxiously from the air-lock door. There was no light save what poured out from behind him. He fairly danced in agitation, a small, spidery, furry creature silhouetted in the air-lock door. He was scared and solicitous. He was panicky. He made shrill cries for Calhoun to come back. “Chee!” he cried desperately. “Chee-chee! Chee-chee-chee-chee!…”

  He listened. There was the keening sound of wind. There was a vast, vast emptiness all around. This was a world of ice and dreariness, its continents were white and silent, and its beaches were lined with pack ice, and there was nothing to be heard anywhere except cold and senseless sounds of desolation. Murgatroyd wailed heart-brokenly.

  But after a long, long time there were scratching sounds. Still later, pantings. Then Calhoun’s head came up, snow-covered, over the edge of the crevasse into which he’d tumbled. He rested, panting. Then, desperately, he managed to crawl to where snow was waist-deep but the ground proven solid by his previous footprints. He staggered upright. He stumbled to the ship. Very, very wearily, he climbed to the lock door. Murgatroyd embraced his legs, making a clamor of reproachful rejoicing that after going away he had come back.

  “Quit it, Murgatroyd,” said Calhoun wearily. “I’m back, and I’m all right. He’s not. He was underneath when we landed, thirty feet down. I heard his skull crack when we hit. He’s dead. If he hadn’t been, how I’d have gotten him up again I don’t know, but he was dead. No question.”

  Murgatroyd said agitatedly, “Chee! Chee-chee!”

  Calhoun closed the lock doors. There was a nasty rock scrape across his forehead. He looked like a man of snow. Then he said heavily, “He could have told me what I need to know! He could have told me how they make the plagues work! He could have helped me finish the whole business in a hurry, when there are men dying of it. But he didn’t believe I’d actually do anything to him. Stupid! It’s insane!”

  He began to brush snow off of himself, with an expression of such sickish bitterness on his face as was normal for a Med Ship man—whose business it is to keep people from dying—when he realized that he had killed a man.

  Murgatroyd went padding across the control-room. He swarmed up to where Calhoun kept the crockery. He jumped down to the floor again. He pressed his private, tiny coffee cup upon Calhoun.

  “Chee!” said Murgatroyd agitatedly. “Chee-chee! Chee!”

  He seemed to feel that if Calhoun made coffee, that all matters would be returned to normal and distressing memories could be cast aside. Calhoun grimaced.

  “If I died you’d have no coffee, eh? All right, as soon as we’re on course for Kryder II I’ll make you some. But I think I’ve blundered. I tried to act like a detective instead of a medical man because it should have been quicker. I’ll make some coffee in a little while.”

  He seated himself in the pilot’s chair, glanced over the instrument readings, and presently pressed a button.

  The Aesclipus Twenty lifted from her landing place, her rockets lighting the icy stone spires of the island with an unearthly blue-white flame. The speed of her rising increased. A little later, there was only a dwindling streak of rocket fire ascending to the stars.

  IV

  The crescent which was the planet Kryder II enlarged gradually, with the sun many millions of miles beyond it. The Aesclipus Twenty swung in its course, pointing at a right angle to the line along which it had been moving. Its drive-baffles glowed faintly as the Lawlor interplanetary drive gave it a new impetus, changing its line of motion by adding velocity in a new direction to the sum of all the other velocities it had acquired. Then the ship swung back, not quite to its former bearing but along the line of its new course.

  Inside, Calhoun again aimed the ship. He used the sighting-circle at the very center of the dead-ahead vision screen. He centered a moderately bright star in that glowing circle. The star was a certain number of seconds of arc from the planet’s sunlit edge. Calhoun watched. All about, in every direction, multitudes of shining specks—actually suns—floated in space. Many or most of them warmed their families of planets with the solicitude of brooding hens. Some circled each other in stately, solemn sarabands. There were some, the Cepheids, which seemed to do neither but merely to lie in emptiness, thin and gaseous, pulsating slowly as if breathing.

  Calhoun relaxed, satisfied. The guide star remained at exactly the same distance from the crescent planet, while the Med Ship hurtled toward it. This arrangement was a standard astrogational process. If the moving planet and the sighting-star remained relatively motionless, the total motion of the Med Ship was exactly adjusted for approach. Of course, when close enough the relationship would change, but if the ship’s original line was accurate, the process remained a sound rule-of-thumb method for approaching a planet.

  The Med Ship sped on. Calhoun, watching, said over his shoulder to Murgatroyd, “We’re pretty much in the dark about what’s going on, Murgatroyd. Not in the matter of the plague, of course. That’s set up to be ended by somebody arriving in a Med Ship, as in two cases before this one. But if they can end it, they needn’t have started it. I don’t like the idea of anything like this being unpunished.”

  Murgatroyd scratched reflectively. He could see the vision screens. He could have recognized buildings as such, though probably not as individual ones. On the screens, save for the sun and one crescent planet, there were only dots of brightness of innumerable colorings. To Murgatroyd, who spent so much of his life in space travel, the stars had no meaning whatever.

  “Technically,” observed Calhoun, “since medicine has become a science, people no longer believe in plague-spreaders. Which makes spreading plagues a possible profession.”*

  Murgatroyd began to clean his whiskers, elaborately licking first the right-hand and then the left-hand ones.

  Calhoun again checked the relative position of the sighting star and Kryder II. He brought out a microfilm reel and ran it through. It was a resume of the history of toxicology. He hunted busily for items having to do with the simulation of bacterial toxins by inorganic compounds. He made notes, not many. He consulted another reel. It dealt with antigens and antibodies. He made more notes and consulted a third reel.

  He worked carefully with pencil and paper and then, with his memos at hand, he punched the keys of the very small computer which acted as a reference library. It was a very remarkable library. It was packed in a number of cubic feet of microfiles which stored tens of thousands of items of information in a cubic inch of substance. The little computer could search them all—all the millions of millions of facts—in a matter of minutes and make its discoveries into a report. Calhoun set it to find the known compounds with such-and-such properties, a boiling point above so-and-so, with an inhibitive effect upon the formation of certain other compounds.

  The little device accepted his command. It could do what Calhoun could not, in the speed and precision of its search. But he could take the information it provided and do what no computer could imaginably try. Calhoun could set up his own problem. No computer can do that. Calhoun could devise a way to solve it. No computer can do anything so original. Calhoun could think.

  He went back to the pilot’s chair. The crescent world was noticeably nearer and larger. Calhoun became absorbed in the delicate task of putting the Med Ship in suitable orbit around Kryder II. The ship obeyed him. It swung around to the green world’s sunlit hemisphere. He addressed the communicator microphone:

  “Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling ground to report arrival and ask coordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty standard tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landin
g…response to planetary health department request for services.”

  Behind him, the small computer stuttered and extruded a six-inch strip of paper tape, on which there was new printing. Calhoun heard, but did not heed it. He watched as more of the surface of the nearing planet came into view with the Med Ship’s swing around it There were bright green continents, showing irregular streaks of white glaciation where mountain ranges rose. There were seas and oceans and cloud masses and that filmy blue haze at the horizon which so much surprised the first explorers of space.

  “Med Ship Aesclipus—” Calhoun’s recorded voice repeated the call. Murgatroyd popped his head out of his personal cubbyhole. When Calhoun talked, but not to him, it meant that presently there would be other people around. And people did not long remain strangers to Murgatroyd. He made friends with ease and zest. Except for Calhoun, Murgatroyd defined friends as people who gave him sweet cakes and coffee.

  The communicator speaker said, “Calling Med Ship! Ground calling Med Ship! Coordinates are…” The voice named them. It sounded warm and even rejoicing through the speaker, as if the landing-grid operator had a personal interest in the arrival of a man sent by the Interstellar Medical Service. “We’re plenty glad you’ve come, sir! Plenty glad! Did you get the coordinates? They’re…”

  “Chee!” said Murgatroyd zestfully.

  He clambered down to the control-room floor and looked at the screen. When Calhoun spoke again to the grid operator, Murgatroyd strutted. He would land, and he would be the center of attention everywhere so long as the Med Ship was aground. He practically crooned his delight.

  “Yes, sir!” said the voice from the ground. “Things were looking pretty bad! There’s a Doctor Kelo here, sir. He was on Castor IV when they had a plague there. He says the Med Service man that came there got it licked right off. Excuse me, sir. I’m going to report you’re coming in.”

  The voice stopped. Calhoun glanced at the coordinates he’d written down and made adjustments for the Med Ship’s needed change of course. It was never necessary to be too precise in making a rendezvous with a landing grid. A ship had to be several planetary diameters out from ground to have even its interplanetary drive work. But a grid’s force fields at so many thousands of miles distance were at first widely spread and tenuous. They reported to ground when they first touched the incoming ship. Then they gathered together and focused on the spacecraft, and then they tightened and grew strong. After that they pulled the ship down gently out of emptiness to the center of that half-mile high circle of steel girders and copper cable which was the landing grid. It took time to pull a ship down some thousands of miles. Too violent a pull could be disastrous to the crew, but ordinarily it was marvelously effective and totally safe.