First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  The communicator screen swirled suddenly and then presented a very clear picture of the grid-control office. It showed the operator. He gazed admiringly at Calhoun.

  “I’ve reported, sir,” he said warmly, “and Doctor Kelo’s coming right now! He was at the big hospital, where they’ve been working on what the plague can be. He’s coming by copter…won’t be long.”

  Calhoun reflected. According to his data, Doctor Kelo had been a prominent physician on Castor IV when the Med Ship man there had presumably been killed in the detonation of the ship. Doctor Kelo had made a report on that matter. The two men who’d come to take over the Med Ship at its breakout point, not an untold number of hours ago, had read his report with seeming amusement. They’d noted Doctor Kelo’s name. It was at least interesting that this same Doctor Kelo was here, where there also was a plague. However, the Med Ship man he expected wasn’t Calhoun. Calhoun was supposed to be floating somewhere in emptiness, light-hours away from here.

  The grid operator watched his dials. He said, pleased, “Got it, sir! Fifty tons, you said. I’ll lock on.”

  Calhoun felt the curious fumbling sensation the grid’s force fields produced when they touched and gathered around the ship, and then the cushiony thrustings and pushings when the fields focused and intensified. The Aesclipus Twenty began its descent.

  “I’ll bring you down now, sir,” said the operator of the grid, very happily. “I’ll make it as quick as I can, but you’re a long way out!”

  Landing was bound to be a lengthy process, much longer than lifting off. One could not snatch a ship from space. It had to be brought down with no more acceleration planetward than a ship’s company could endure. Eventually the downward speed had to be checked so the contact with the ground would be a gentle one. A grid could smash a ship to atoms by bringing it down on the spaceport tarmac with a velocity of miles per second. This was why interplanetary wars were impossible. A landing grid could smash any ship in space if it approached a planet with hostile intentions.

  “I suppose,” said Calhoun, “there’s a lot of concern about the—epidemic. The planetary health department asked for me.”

  “Yes, sir! It’s real bad! Started three months ago. There were half a dozen cases of pneumonia. Nobody thought much about it. They were treated, and stopped having pneumonia, but they weren’t well. They had something else, not the same thing, either. There was typhoid and meningitis and so on. This is what the newscasts say. Then other cases turned up. A child would have measles, and it would turn to tetanus, and that to pneumonia, and that to scarlet fever…It couldn’t happen, the doctors said, but it was happening! The hospitals filled up. More came in all the time, and none of them could leave. They could keep most of the cases alive, but they had to cure ’em of something else all the time. They had to turn schools and churches into hospitals. One person in ten is sick already. More are taken down every minute. Presently, there won’t be doctors enough to diagnose the diseases patients contract continually. They figure that a quarter of the whole population will be down inside of two weeks more, and then they’ll start dying faster than they do now, because there won’t be enough well people to take care of ’em. They figure there won’t be anybody on his feet in a month and a half from now and that’ll be the end for everybody.”

  Calhoun clamped his jaws together.

  “They’ve stopped giving it out,” said the grid operator. He added professionally, “I’ve got you coming down at four hundred feet a second, but I’m going to pull a lot harder! You’re needed down here in a hurry! I’ll put on the brakes at a thousand miles, and you’ll touch ground like a feather.”

  Calhoun ground his teeth. Strictly speaking, he should discuss the plague only with qualified medical men. But the public attitude toward a disease has to be considered in its treatment. This, however, was plainly not a disease. A given bacterium or virus can produce one disease only. Its activity may vary in virulence, but not in kind. Viruses do not change to bacteria. Cocci do not change to spirochetes. Each pathogenic organism that exists remains itself. It may change in viciousness, but never in form. The plague as described could not be a plague! It could not be!

  Immediately one ceased to think of it as a natural plague; immediately one considered it artificial, it made sense. It tended to spread toward a total, cent-per-cent matching of number of cases to the number of people on the planet. Normal pestilences do not. It was planned that a fake Med Ship man should arrive at a certain time and end it. This would be absurd if the plague were a natural one. It was the third of its kind, and the first two had killed tormals—which pestilences could not—and in each case large sums of money had disappeared.

  “Doctor Kelo, sir,” said the grid operator, “said he was sure that if a Med Ship man could get here with his—what’s that little creature? A tormal? Once a Med Ship man got here with his tormal, the plague was as good as licked.” He stopped and listened. “Doctor Kelo must be here now. There’s a copter landing outside.”

  Then the grid man said with a rather twisted grin, “I tell you, everybody’s glad you’re here! I’ve got a wife and kids. They haven’t got the plague yet, but…”

  He stood up. He said joyously, “Doctor Kelo! Here he is! Right here on the screen! We’ve been talkin’. He’s comin’ down fast, and I’ll have him aground in a hurry!”

  A voice said, “Ah, yes! I am most pleased. Thank you for notifying me.”

  Then a new figure appeared on the vision screen. It was dignified. It was bearded. It was imposing in the manner of the most calmly confident of medical men. One could not look at Doctor Kelo without feeling confidence in him. He seemed benign. He beamed at the grid man and turned to the vision screen.

  He saw Calhoun. Calhoun regarded him grimly. Doctor Kelo stared at him. Calhoun was not the man who’d been put aboard the Med Ship at first-breakout point. He wasn’t the man who’d handled the Castor IV epidemic, or the one before that. He wasn’t the man who was supposed to have been killed when a Med Ship blew up in the Castor IV spaceport. He wasn’t…

  “How do you do?” said Calhoun evenly. “I gather we are to work together—again, Doctor Kelo.”

  Doctor Kelo’s mouth opened, and shut. His face went gray. He made an inarticulate sound. He stared at Calhoun in absolute stupefaction. Murgatroyd squirmed past Calhoun’s body to look into the communicator screen. He saw a man, and to Murgatroyd that meant that shortly he would be aground among people who admired him adoringly and would therefore stuff him with all the things he liked to eat and drink.

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

  The stark incredulity of the bearded face changed to shock. That expression became purest desperation. One of Doctor Kelo’s beautifully manicured hands disappeared. It appeared again. There was a tiny snapping sound and the grid operator became suddenly boneless. He seemed to bend limply in all his joints and almost to pour downward to the floor.

  Doctor Kelo turned swiftly to the dials of the landing-grid control-board. He surveyed them, panting suddenly. Of course, a landing grid can do its work in many different fashions. It can use the processes of normal space commerce to make space war impossible. Because it can be deadly.

  Doctor Kelo reached out. Calhoun could not see exactly what he did, but he could guess its purpose. Immediately, he felt a surging of the Med Ship which told him exactly what had been done. It was an increased downward velocity of the ship, which had to be brought down rapidly for most of its descent, or otherwise the grid would swing around to the night side of this world where, with a planet’s bulk between, it could not do anything with the Med Ship at all. However, high acceleration toward the ground could be used to a certain point only. Below a critical distance the ship couldn’t be stopped. It would be bound to crash to flaming destruction against the world it had meant to land on.

  The ship surged again. It plunged planetward with doubled acceleration. In the grip of the landing grid’s force fields, it built up to a vel
ocity far beyond any at which it could be slowed for a safe landing. It was building up toward the speed of shooting stars, which consume themselves when they touch atmosphere. It was still thousands of miles out in emptiness, still speeding crazily to inevitable destruction.

  * In June of 1630 (standard) one Guglielmo Piazza, who was commissioner of health of the city of Milan, was seen to wipe ink off his fingers against a building wall. He was immediately accused of wiping the walls with matter to produce bubonic plague. Put to the torture, he finally confessed; when pressed for confederates he despairingly named a barber named Mora. The barber, under torture, named a Don Juan de Padilla as another confederate in the dissemination of bubonic plague. They were not asked to name others, but were executed in the utterly barbarous methods of the period and a “column of infamy” erected to warn others against this crime. This is but one example. See Devils, Drugs and Doctors, Haggard, Harper and Bro., N.Y., 1929.

  V

  Calhoun said coldly, “I’ve got to learn how a murderer thinks, Murgatroyd. While I’m thinking there’s a situation they have to meet, these characters work out a way to kill me, as if that was bound to settle everything. I can’t anticipate the ideas they get automatically!”

  He placed his hands on the control-board where he could act in an infinitesimal fraction of a second. He waited. The Med Ship was in the grip of an immaterial field of force which was capable of handling a merchant ship of space, whereas the Aesclipus Twenty was as small as a ship could be and still perform a Med Ship’s functions.

  The fact that a field of force is not a solid object has its consequences. A solid object can exert a thrust in three dimensions. If it is rigid, it can resist or impose thrusts in any direction, up or down, right or left, and away from or toward itself. However, a field of force can only act in one: toward or away from, or up or down, or left or right. It cannot push in one direction while resisting a thrust from another. So a grid field could pull a ship downward with terrific force, but it could not pull the ship sidewise at the same moment, and that happened to be what was necessary.

  There is a certain principle known as the conservation of angular momentum. A ship approaching a planet has always some velocity relative to the planet’s surface. Within a wide range of speeds, that angular velocity will make a ship take up an orbit at a distance appropriate to its speed. The greater the speed, the lower the orbit. It is like a weight on a string, twirled around one’s finger. As the string winds up, the weight spins faster. It is like a figure skater spinning in one spot on the ice with arms outstretched, who spins more and more rapidly as he brings his arms closer to his body. The Aesclipus Twenty had such orbital, angular momentum. It could not descend vertically without losing its velocity. If it was to land safely, it would have to lose its velocity and at the moment it touched ground it must have exactly the motion of the ground it touched, for exactly the same reason that one stops a ground-car before stepping out of it.

  But a grid field could only push or pull in one direction at a time. To land a ship it must cease to pull planetward from time to time, and push the ship sidewise to match its speed to that of the ground. If it didn’t, the ship would go on beyond the horizon—or seem to.

  So Calhoun waited. Grimly. The ship, plunging vertically, still retained its lateral speed. That speed drove it toward the horizon. It was necessary to pull it back to pull it down. So the bearded man, cursing as the ship swung away from the vertical, fumbled to pull it back.

  An extremely skilled operator might well have done so, even against Calhoun’s resistance. The shift of directional pull—or thrust—could have been made so swiftly that the ship would be actually free of all fields for less than the hundredth of a second. However, such fine work required practice.

  Calhoun felt the ship shiver for the fraction of an instant. For that minute portion of a heartbeat, the downward pull had to be cut off so the sidewise push could be applied. But in that instant Calhoun jammed down the emergency-rockets’ control to maximum possible thrust. He was flung back into the pilot’s chair. The weight of his chest forced air explosively out of his lungs. Murgatroyd went skittering across the floor. He caught an anchored chair leg with a wide sweep of his spidery arms and clung there desperately, gasping.

  Three. Four. Five seconds. Calhoun swung the ship’s nose and went on. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

  He cut the rocket-blast at the last instant before he would have blacked out. He panted. Murgatroyd said indignantly, “Chee! Chee! Chee!”

  Calhoun said with some difficulty, “Right! I did you a dirty trick, but it had to be done! Now if we can keep him from getting his field locked on us—again…”

  He sat alertly in the pilot’s chair, recovering from the strain of such violent acceleration for even so brief a period. A long time later there was a faint, fumbling sensation as if a force field, groping, touched the ship. He blasted off at an angle at high acceleration again.

  Then the ship was clear. It reached a spot where the landing grid, on the curved surface of Kryder II, was below the horizon. The Med Ship had orbital velocity. Calhoun made certain of it when he looked at the nearest-object indicator. He was then very close to atmosphere but the planet now below him curved downward and away from his line of flight. The ship was actually rising from the planetary surface. Calhoun had escaped a collision with Kryder II by speeding up across its face. One can sometimes avoid a collision in traffic by speeding up, but it is not the safest thing for either ground-cars or spaceships to do.

  Murgatroyd made querulous noises to himself. Calhoun got out the data on the planet Kryder II. There were continents and highways and mountain ranges and cities. He studied the maps and a view of the actual surface beneath him. The communicator screen was blank, and had been since the horizon rose between the grid and the fleeing ship. He flipped it off. At the sunset line there was a city. He located himself.

  Murgatroyd said “Chee!” in an apprehensive tone as the emergency rockets roared again.

  “No,” said Calhoun. “No more full-force rocketeering, Murgatroyd. And I’m not going to take the chance of being outwitted again. I’ve been fooled twice by not knowing how a murderer’s mind works. I’m going to operate out of contact with such characters for a while. I’m going to land and do a burglary and get back out to space again.”

  He checked on maps. He glanced frequently at the nearest-object dial. He swung the ship and blasted his rockets again, and watched the dial, and used the rockets still again. The Med Ship was slowing. It curved downward. Presently, the needle of the nearest-object dial quivered. The Med Ship, still out of atmosphere, was passing above mountains.

  “Now, if we can land beyond, here…” said Calhoun.

  Murgatroyd was not reassured. He watched. He grew uneasy as Calhoun went through the elaborate, tricky, and definitely dangerous operation of landing the Med Ship in the dark, on unknown terrain, and by instruments only except for the last few minutes. During those last few minutes the screens showed forests below the hovering Med Ship, lighted in unearthly fashion by the rocket flames. With that improbable light he finished the landing. He remained alert until sure that the ship was steady on her landing-fins. He cut off the rockets. He listened to the outside microphones’ report. There were only the night sounds of a long-colonized planet, where a Terran ecological system had been established and there were birds and insects of totally familiar varieties.

  He nodded to himself. He turned on the planetary communications receiver. He listened for a long time. He heard news broadcasts. There was no mention of the Med Ship reported as arriving. There was resolutely hopeful news of the plague. It had broken out in a new area, but there was great hope that it could be contained. The use of combined antibiotics seemed to promise much. The death rate was said to be down slightly. There was no mention of the fact that the real percentage of deaths might be obscured by a large increase of new patients who wouldn’t normally die just yet.

  Calhoun listened. At last, he
stirred. His eyes fell upon the small computer which had searched in the ship’s microfiles for data on compounds with boiling points below such-and-such, with absorption coefficients in certain ranges, which had an inhibitive effect upon the formation of certain other substances.

  Projecting from the answer slot there was a six-inch strip of newly printed paper, waiting to give him the information he’d asked for. He read it. He looked pleased.

  “Not bad,” he told Murgatroyd. “The broadcasts say the plague is prevalent in this area, and this says we want some groceries and ditch water. I’ve the crudes to make up these prescriptions.”

  He made ready to go aground. He was armed. He took a compass. He took certain highly odorous pellets. Murgatroyd zestfully made ready to accompany him.

  “No,” said Calhoun. “Not this time, Murgatroyd! You have many gifts, but burglary isn’t one of them. I couldn’t even depend on you to be a properly suspicious lookout.”

  Murgatroyd could not understand. He was bewildered when Calhoun left him in the Med Ship with water and food at hand. When Calhoun closed the inner air-lock door, he could still hear Murgatroyd arguing desperately, “Chee! Chee-chee!”